Giveaways
FROM Oamaru, I drove roughly 80 km (50 miles) northward, to the similarly-named town of Timaru.
Both towns are local ports, with plenty of colonial architecture. Their names seem to come from the Māori word maru, which means a good place to camp or haul boats ashore and is also the proper name of an ancestral hero of the region.
Timaru sits toward the southern end of the great sweep of the Canterbury Bight, which starts just south of Christchurch. The harbour of the town has the lovely name of Caroline Bay.
In the days before international travel and jet flights to the Pacific Islands became common, Timaru was an important local holiday resort for New Zealanders. A few years ago, I photographed the following posters, which look like they date back to the 1930s.
You can buy them to stick on your wall at Timaru’s South Canterbury Museum, which I have to say is one of the best small museums I’ve seen.
Timaru lies on undulating terrain, made from lava flows that once cascaded from a nearby extinct volcano called Mount Horrible. The basalt lava of Mount Horrible is called ‘bluestone’.
Along with smaller quantities of granite from the same volcano, Mount Horrible bluestone was used to build the colonial town in just the same way that Oamaru was built out of local ‘whitestone’.
So, what is the journey like? Departing Oamaru, which I always do with regrets, you came very shortly to Glenavy, a town 5 km from the mouth of the Waitaki River, which divides Canterbury from Otago.
Waitaki means ‘water of tears’; the river was massively developed for hydroelectricity during the twentieth century. I did a post about the Waitaki a while back called ‘Up to the Place of Light, down the Water of Tears’.
Just lately, my editor Chris explored a little historic park in Glenavy which is quite interesting, including the colonial mini-jail, which doesn’t look like it would have stopped anyone intent on breaking out, as opposed to sleeping off a night’s drunkenness.
Everything looked really nice in the low winter sunshine.
A display about a tree trunk fished out of the Waitaki reminds me how strange it is that many New Zealand plants are closely related to Chilean ones, even though we are on the the opposite sides of the Pacific. Thus, the closest relative of a New Zealand tree called the Matai or Plum Pine, Prumnopytis taxifolia, is the Chilean Plum Pine, Prumnopytis andina.
From Glenavy, you can take a short detour through Waimate (this adds about 20 km to the distance between Oamaru and Timaru). Waimate means ‘Deadwater’, like somewhere in the Wild West. It is the birthplace of the fondly-remembered New Zealand Prime Minister Norman Kirk, who assumed that office in 1972 and died, unexpectedly, in 1974.
Kirk is interviewed in the first part of this clip:
Waimate was a nice town, unassuming but with a ton of history behind it.
There is an old and very traditional-looking wooden church, which dates back to the 1870s.
And a stone basilica.
A hundred years ago, there weren’t as yet very many female medical graduates in New Zealand. Their ranks were diminished further when local GP Dr Margaret Cruikshank was fatally infected while caring for patients during the 1918 influenza pandemic.
I wonder whether this statue inspired Kirk to his life of public service? He’d have gone past it every day as a boy.
There is also said to be a very good local museum in Waimate as well.
There are lots of wallabies in this part of New Zealand. They were brought over from Australia for the fur trade in colonial times, but soon hopped away and started eating the farmers’ crops. You’re supposed to report them dead or alive on a government website called ReportWallabies. But at the same time, the locals seem quite proud of the officially unwanted Australian import, and there is a legitimate wallaby park.
For more on things to see and do in the Waimate District, check out the local tourism website, waimate.org.nz.
Past the point where the road from Waimate rejoins the main coast road, there is a turnoff to a bleak spot called Hook Beach, a steep gravel beach favoured by surfcasters, where there is also a monument that reads as follows: “Hereabouts Bishop Selwyn and Edward Shortland met 16th January 1844.” Both men were on separate journeys of exploration at the time: so, it must have been a sort of Dr Livingstone moment, judged worthy of commemoration by whoever it was that erected the monument.
Further north, a traveller on the main road comes to St Andrews, which has a sizable campsite.
Just before Timaru, there is a road leading to Jacks Point, where there is a further coastal clifftop walkway leading to the Jacks Point Lighthouse. In this region, the state highway is called the Strawberry Trail; which sounds like a curious name for a main road and reflects the fact that strawberries are grown in the region. It probably was more of a trail 100 years ago.
The name Jacks Point commemorates the famous Ngāi Tahu chief Hone Tūhawaiki, a contemporary of Edward Shortland and Bishop Selwyn who was nicknamed ‘Bloody Jack’ by some of the early settlers.
There is a Māori-language monument on the local road to Jacks Point, also known as Tūhawaiki Point, which reads ‘Tuhawaiki he tohu Maumahara tenei mo Tuhawaiki kura rau i toremi ai ki kone i te tau 1844’. These words mean that it was erected in remembrance of the fact that Tūhawaiki was drowned near this spot in 1844.
The drowning of Tūhawaiki was deemed especially unfortunate by many, since Tūhawaiki, who seemed at home in both worlds, had become an important go-between among the South Island Māori and the settlers who were just then starting to flood into the island in numbers, founding Dunedin in 1848 and Christchurch in 1850.
Here is a view from the start of the trail that leads to the Jacks Point Lighthouse. Timaru, and the mountains behind it, are in the background.
The trail to the lighthouse also joins up to Timaru’s urban waterfront trail, the Hectors’ Coastal Track, so you can walk the whole thing from the Timaru waterfront to the Jacks Point Lighthouse.
As Oamaru is whitestone, so Timaru is bluestone, though in practice there is often a mixture, as with St Mary’s Anglican Church, one of several magnificent churches that still dominate Timaru’s skyline.
Some of the bluest bluestone I saw was the bluestone used to construct the old waterfront building that now houses the Timaru iSite, or tourist information centre, and the Speight’s Alehouse.
Inside the iSite, you can visit the amazing Te Ana Rock Art Centre, run by the biggest South Island iwi, Ngāi Tahu. Te Ana means ‘The Cave’. It displays rock art done by some of the earliest Māori to settle in the region, basically the local equivalent of European ice-age cave-paintings or Aboriginal rock art in Australia. Such ‘primitive’ art is often amazingly polished and dynamic, as in this European museum replica of French cave-paintings of lions . . .
. . . and the New Zealand version is no exception. At Te Ana, the local Māori seem to have anticipated Pablo Picasso. As do the Chauvet Cave paintings, come to think of it.
Te Ana is conveniently located in downtown Timaru, in George Street. The museum also runs guided tours into the countryside, to investigate the actual honest-to-goodness caves.
This is what I mean about Picasso:
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a sharper photo! To make up for it, here’s a video of a projected display showing many of the same designs.
Māori rock art has sometimes appeared on New Zealand postage stamps. There are some images of a 2012 series, here.
Many of the rock drawings at Te Ana are a bit different in appearance to what most people would think of as traditional Māori art, works such as this, which scholars describe as being in ‘classic’ style:
The differences arise partly because the rock art at Te Ana is a few hundred years older than the ‘classic’ style. Its origins and significance are also much more obscure.
A lot of classic Māori art, like the carving described just above, has a detailed provenance. On other hand, as the first of the following Te Ana displays says, “We don’t know exactly who made the rock art.”
This post updates an earlier one of the same title, now unpublished. In my next post, I will go for a wider ramble around Timaru …
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