Giveaways
QUEENSTOWN is nearly two hours south of Auckland by jet, two hours that make a difference. Auckland has palm trees and looks like Fiji. Surrounded by mountains that are often snowy on top, Queenstown looks more like somewhere in Norway or Switzerland. Check out this amazing video of what it's like to arrive in Queenstown by plane when the weather is fine!
The town is on a long lake called Lake Wakatipu, which stretches 80 km or 50 miles from Kingston at one end to Glenorchy and Kinloch at the other. Queenstown is part-way between, and is in a large mountain basin which it shares with the smaller but more picturesque town of Arrowtown.
As the map above suggests, Queenstown lies at the heart of what has been for perhaps a hundred years and more the most touristy part of New Zealand: a landscape of skifields, tramping tracks and amazing mountain scenery. Here's a documentary from 1954, which goes into quite a lot of the historical details of the region as well.
In spite of its remoteness, Queenstown now boasts an international airport, receiving planes from Australia as well as other parts of New Zealand. As you can see from the flight video above, the views coming in are magnificent on a fine day.
(On a grey day, you just know the mountains are out there, and reflect on how miraculous modern instrument flying has become!)
Since people arrived in New Zealand, the area has always been something of a gateway to an important hinterland. For old-time Māori, Lake Wakatipu was an accessway between the West Coast, with its waters of pounamu, and communities further east. There were also permanent pā, or villages (strictly, fortified or gated villages), in what’s now the Queenstown area.
The main pā were Tāhuna on the location of what's now central Queenstown and Te Kirikiri on what is now the site of the Queenstown Gardens, the great park on a finger of land that extends into the lake from the centre of the town and forms a sort of breakwater on the Queenstown’s lakeshore harbour. Tāhuna means shallow bay or cove, and Te Kirikiri means the sandy or gravelly area.
A Māori legend has it that the lake is the impression in which the body of a giant was burned. A rhythmic rising and falling of the lake’s level over several minutes, which is actually a very slow swell triggered by the wind, was attributed to the slow beating of the giant’s heart.
I have much more to say about the Maori history of the future Queenstown area in a blog post about Arrowtown, at the end of this post. That's ultimately because Arrowtown is where the local museum is to be found, even though it's a much smaller town than Queenstown. The Lakes District Museum and Art Gallery at Arrowtown, to give it its full title, is where the preceding information panel was photographed.
After nearly all of the South Island was purchased by British agents in the 1840s, the local Māori no longer had firm title to the site of present-day Queenstown. Much of the mountain basin around Queenstown fell into the possession of an English explorer and surveyor named William Gilbert Rees, who was one of the first Europeans to set eyes on Lake Wakatipu along with fellow-explorer, the Baltic German Nicholas von Tunzelmann. Rees set about turning the sites of Tāhuna and Te Kirikiri and their surroundings into a sheep farm, a fact commemorated by his statue in downtown Queenstown. Strictly speaking the land probably belonged to the state at that stage; according to a page on the local website Spinnaker Bay, what Rees and von Tunzelmann had acquired were grazing rights.
After gold was discovered in the area, Rees's grazing rights over the site of the future town were revoked by the authorities, though it seems that Rees was handsomely compensated. This is recorded in a plaque at the base of the statue.
Ultimately, Rees lost all his grazing rights. Von Tunzelmann retained his, on the far side of the lake, but was not very successful.
As for the local Māori, it seems that they became labourers. Ironically, one Māori working for Rees, Jack Tewa, was the first to discover gold in the area: a discovery which turbocharged the development of the town and the government purchase of its site, presumably in the hopes of bringing some order to a site onto which hundreds of hopefuls soon poured willy-nilly. The modern day suburb of Jacks Point is named after Tewa.
You can read more about these early days not only on Spinnaker Bay but also on the website of Discover Queenstown, in a page called 'Queenstown's Pioneer Beginnings'; though I'm still trying to find out a bit more about what happened to the original Māori villages and how come their inhabitants apparently missed out on the ten thousand pounds paid by the Government for the site of the town, equivalent to about two and a half million New Zealand dollars today.
Anyhow, people have been accidentally making money out of soaring Queenstown real estate values ever since, given that two and a half million might only get you one fairly good house in Queenstown and not the whole town, today.
Since the 1860s, when the town first got going, four significant steam-powered vessels have plied the lake: the Antrim (in service from 1868 until 1905), the Ben Lomond (1872-1951, known as the Jane Williams until 1886), the Mountaineer (1879-1932) and the Earnslaw (1912 to the present).
In 1969, the Earnslaw was acquired from the Railways Department by a company called Fiordland Travel, operated by the noted conservationists Les and Olive Hutchins, who saw the tourism business mainly as a way of bringing people to south-western New Zealand, today's World Heritage area of Te Wahipounamu, and thus raising consciousness nationwide about the need to protect this area from over-development (ironically enough).
The Hutchins proposed to save the historic steamer from being scuttled by operating it as a tourist cruise vessel, criss-crossing the lake between Queenstown and Walter Peak Station where meals and something of a farm experience would be laid on. Previously, the Earnslaw had plied the length of the lake: a trade that had succumbed to competition from trucks, cars and buses running on the road up the southern half of the lake to Queenstown (a section of road that was completed in the 1930s) and from Queenstown to Glenorchy at the head of the lake (put through in the 1960s).
These days the company that was called Fiordland Travel in 1969 is called Real Journeys, and it’s huge.
As for downtown Queenstown, it provides the heritage experience, too. The section of street now known as the Queenstown Mall has not changed very much since the days when people held long poses for Victorian-era photos, though it’s not so muddy these days.
Visible in the photograph above, Eichardt’s Private Hotel, occupying the site of Rees's former wooshed, is still there at the waterfront end of the left side of the street, and so is the building on the far left of the photo, although most of itsfaçade is now hidden by modern cafe clutter. But you can still see the ‘1872’ date at the top.
According to the hotel’s website, Eichardt’s was the first building to have electricity in Queenstown, a system installed under the tenure of Julia Eichardt, who managed it as a sole female proprietor between the death of her husband Albert in 1882 and her own death ten years later.
Not too far away from Queenstown is the even more historic gold-mining settlement of Arrowtown where the Lakes District Museum and Art Gallery is located, along with many old cottages and an old-timey streetscape. I'vegot a link to a post on Arrowtown, at the end of this post.
Before the area became as dependent on tourism as it is now, sheep and gold were the mainstays of the colonial economy, along with the extraction of a tungsten ore called scheelite. But even in those days, as the 1946 map above attests, there was enough visitor traffic to make Queenstown New Zealand’s tourism capital. Along with nearby Milford Sound and lakes Wānaka and Te Anau, the townships of Glenorchy, Kinloch and Arrowtown, and the aptly named Paradise Valley, were all popular destinations with old-time visitors along with Lake Wakatipu itself and “the grandeur of its scenery, which some travelers assert is equal to that of Switzerland” (Israel C. Russell in The American Naturalist, July 1876).
But in the present age of international jet travel, which has been crimped by Covid but will surely bounce back, Queenstown is nonetheless far busier than it was in earlier times, about three million visitors a year pre-Covid. Queenstown is, in some ways, now a case study for mass tourism’s more negative impacts. For instance, even as far back as 1972, housing was short.
And yet these shortages seem surprising, given that the permanent urban population of Queenstown is still not yet 20,000 and the total population of the district not yet 50,000. Or perhaps that is the issue, with tourists and hotel workers catering for three million tourists putting pressure on what is still, basically, a small-town housing stock. And small-town everything-else.
Which is not to detract from the argument that you should still go there when it becomes possible again, as it already is for other New Zealanders of course! For ironically, Queenstown now suffers from the opposite problem, a lack of tourism demand in a local economy that's almost uniquely dependent on the tourism dollar.
And by the way, if you should find yourself in Queenstown or a town nearby, there are a ton of books about their history in the public libraries. Along with general histories I'd recommend a couple of autobiographies, former Queenstown mayor and district-wide GP William Anderson's Doctor in the Mountains, and the aforementioned Les Hutchins's aptly-titled Making Waves.
I have a heap of blog posts about Queenstown and its environs on my website! Namely:
Ten things to do in Queenstown, and around: a-maverick.com/blog/queenstown-10-things-to-do-town-around
Christmas in New Zealand, including a late snowstorm that very nearly made it white: a-maverick.com/blog/xmas-in-new-zealand
Travelling back in time on Queenstown’s twin-screw lake steamer, the TSS Earnslaw: a-maverick.com/blog/history-travelling-time-tss-earnslaw
Paradise: The Real Top of the Lake: a-maverick.com/blog/paradise-the-real-top-of-the-lake
Lockdown in Queenstown: a-maverick.com/blog/lockdown-in-queenstown
A blog postthat describes the suburban Arawata Track in its second half: a-maverick.com/blog/leper-colonies-or-lockdown-for-covid-19
A blog post about Otago history: a-maverick.com/blog/looking-behind-the-scenery-striking-historical-gold-in-new-zealand
Bobs Cove: A scenic and historic bay, and environs, close to Queenstown: a-maverick.com/blog/bobs-cove-sacred-pool-maori-mine-pakeha-instagrammable-today
Amazing Arrowtown: A colonial time capsule: a-maverick.com/blog/amazing-arrowtown-new-zealands-colonial-time-capsule
The history of the Coronet Peak skifield from the 1950s to now: a-maverick.com/blog/changing-times-at-coronet-peak-cosy-ski-club-commercialism-snow-making
A misty day out in the Remarkables mountain range: a-maverick.com/blog/misty-day-remarkables-matchstalk-figures-amidst-the-snow-july-2023
Cross-country Skiing at Snow Farm, Part One: a-maverick.com/blog/adventures-at-snow-farm-nordic-skiing-downunder-part-1
Cross-country Skiing at Snow Farm, Part Two: a-maverick.com/blog/adventures-at-snow-farm-nordic-skiing-downunder-part-2
Queenstown on the Quiet: a-maverick.com/blog/queenstown-on-the-quiet
If you liked the post above, check out my book about the South Island! It's available for purchase from this website.
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