Donovan’s World

The Hampden Super Store occupies a charming spot in a village that, although it straddles State Highway One, still manages to tranquilise the senses. The trees, grand and mature, are very English, and that’s as it should be, for Hampden takes its name from a wealthy Buckinghamshire landowner and lover of fair play who took arms against Charles I and died for his ideals on Chalgrove Field, near Oxford, in 1643.

It’s been a general store since 1890, and at the rear there are the remains of an old bakehouse. The business has been in the Long family since 1975. Joy and her husband, Steve, took it over from her parents. Since Steve died, Joy has run it with the aid of her children, Mark and Vicki. They all enjoy serving and chatting to the customers, who comprise residents and the seasonal holidaymakers who come to this restful seaside village.

Joy says the shop is, ‘a meeting place where people may catch up on local news … a general store with most things available that you could get in town. We still run monthly accounts, as it’s a farming and fishing area … they always pay’.

The welcomed appointment of Hampden Super Store as an agency of NZ Post followed the complete restructuring of postal services in 1988. When I visited, the appointment was so recent that its impact could still be seen on the ‘A1′ sign under the tiger!

© DON DONOVAN

One doesn’t have to search hard for the origins of this store - James Loudon clearly had a sense of history and proudly dated the commencement of an establishment that he, correctly, expected to last many years. As at 1990 he is not forgotten, and that’s more than may be said about most people who were around in AD1881!

Alan Deuchrass says that Loudon ran it as a general store and post office, making deliveries as far afield as Taieri Mouth by horse and cart - a round trip that could take two days. Loudon might have relished the odd night away - he shared the house next door with his wife and twelve daughters!

Loudon fades from the scene about 1916, after which there were numerous owners until Alan and Joy (who, incidentally, was a member of the national champion women’s bowling pair in 1990) took over in 1982. There their three children grew up and, until they left home, played their part in running this typical neighbourhood family store.

Inevitably the buildings have been modified over the years; a hay loft at the back became living quarters. A bacon-curing business was carried on at one stage, and Alan thinks the sides may have been hung in a large room he found under a trap door in the kitchen floor. Although there was extensive mining in the surrounding area, James Loudon would not permit it under the store, which has therefore never been affected by subsidence; clearly he was a man of considerable influence and foresight.

© DON DONOVAN

From a dreary world Bill Freeman’s dairy shines out like an artist’s palette! I couldn’t resist it, especially when I could see that so much trouble had been taken to cover up the old house next door (now used as a store room) and that one of the world’s classic motorbikes had, fortuitously, been parked outside.

The store (once two tiny stores - as evidenced by the two front doors) dates back to about 1930 and replaced another that had been there since the turn of the century. Bill Freeman runs it as a typical seven-day dairy, with a small garden centre selling flowers, shrubs and vegetable plants. (The faded sign on the rough wooden door had me imagining animated tomato plants coming and going like Chicago gangsters at a speakeasy!)

Milton may have been named after the poet. Whether that’s true or not, the name is appropriate, for since 1857 it has been a mill town on the Tokomairiro River. It has been famous for many years for wool spinning and scouring, although the oldest part of the mill complex started life grinding flour.

The town sprang to importance when Gabriel Read discovered gold at Tuapeka. Milton lay neatly placed between Dunedin and the diggings, a good spot to rest up, stock up and saddle up before taking on the heartless rocks of Central Otago.

© DON DONOVAN

Louis Faigan opened his first store in Millers Flat in 1896 in a one-roomed shop leased from a watchmaker. Three years later he bought the boarding house on today’s site, turned the front into a store and the back into living quarters, and that’s the way it stayed until fire destroyed it in 1936 and the ‘moderne’ store was erected.

In gold-mining days Faigan’s supplied goods by pack horse to remote diggers, and by horse and cart to the dredge workers on the Clutha as well as to local farmers and residents. Sensitive always to customers’ needs, Faigan even imported ginger and rice for the Chinese miners, and this service philosophy was exemplified in his slogan, ‘Everything from a needle to an anchor’.

The old man died in 1910, and Leopold Faigan, who had started work in his father’s shop in 1899, carried on the business until shortly before his death in 1976. The store stayed in the Faigan family until 1980.

Malcolm and Lesley James closed the store in 1989, but within forty-eight hours, $30,000 was raised from about a hundred households to buy the stock and plant. The enterprise has been owned by community shareholders ever since, with Judith Omond as manager.

© DON DONOVAN

Drummond, of Scottish flavour, serves an area which, after systematic draining of its swamps, started its pastoral life in the 1880s cropping oats, wheat and lighter grasses. Dairying came and went, as did Drummond’s dairy factory, and these days sheep safely graze the quiet acres.

Mel Hall’s Four Square store is as neat and tidy as the village it serves. It’s a smaller, tighter village than it once was, and Mel’s store is the survivor of two that were once able to compete and stay in business.

Mel is a ‘foreigner’ from Invercargill but, for all that, still a Southlander. He took over the store in 1983, the latest of a line of owners going back to around 1880, when it was set up by Ezekiel Roberts, one of the original townsmen. Roberts, whose descendants still live in the district, developed an efficient weekly horse-and-cart delivery service to outlying farmers and needy itinerants. As with most country storekeepers in those days, he lived with the reality of long-range credit and payments in line with farmers’ receipts.

When I visited in 1990, the Drummond Store supplied groceries, petrol, fruit, vegetables and ice creams to the people of the town and passers-by travelling the long, straight roads of this tranquil district.

© DON DONOVAN

Nightcaps is still full of character, but the town’s not what it was. The main street says it all: a line of tired old buildings typified by one, dilapidated and deserted, with a scarcely decipherable sign over rusted iron columns with cast Corinthian capitals, ‘RUSHTONS - BREAD, CAKES FRUIT, SWEETS’.

Another, the old GHB store, is empty, held up temporarily by tanalized poles, all its colour gone. The Bauhaus-style town hall is redolent of a time when hopes were high and prosperity breathed through the community.

It was a coal-mining town, sustained by the Nightcaps Coal Company from 1880 until the mines petered out in the 1920s and yielded to the nearby Ohai mines. Now there’s little of commerce left because there are fewer people and therefore less demand. Enough, though, to support an undistinguished grocery shop and the bright little Nightcaps Dairy, which manages to give off an air of optimism.

Karen and Jimmy Forde have lived in Nightcaps all their lives. Jimmy still works in the mines at Ohai, as do his and Karen’s fathers. The store dates back to about 1925 and had numerous owners until the Fordes took it on in 1989. Now they supply groceries, bread, cakes, milk, fresh meats and takeaways; and are agents for the Southland Times, Taylors Drycleaning, and a three-day photo processing service. Up with the latest, they also have video-tapes for hire.

© DON DONOVAN

According to the histories, Arrowtown came into being in 1862, which is also the date of claimed establishment of the store. But Robert Pritchard was not the first storekeeper, and the shops were not set up in Buckingham Street until after the flood of 1863.

John Hamilton, who now runs the store, believes that Pritchard probably ‘established’ his first store in a tent on the river beach. I surmise that the store you see today was built a little later, when the future of the town had become more assured.

John’s father, Alexander, still takes great interest in the affairs of the store, and they both insist on operating it in the spirit of the traditional general store.

Within the two-foot-thick walls of this solid old building a lot of memorabilia have accumulated, including a magnificent set of brass scales that tourists regularly try to buy. Tourism is now the heart of Arrowtown’s economy and is the major reason why the store will never suffer the depredations of overt ‘modernisation’.

Alexander Hamilton worked in the store for Rattray & Son from 1952 and bought the business from them in 1965, but the Hamilton family is as old as Arrowtown. They intermarried with the Cotters, one of the first three families in the district, and John’s grandmother, Mrs Alex. Hamilton, a Cotter by birth, wrote an often quoted historical monograph titled ‘Notes on Early Arrowtown’.

‘We’ve still got that at home’ says John. ‘We call it “The Black Book”’.

© DON DONOVAN

Wanaka is the lake: a magnificent glacial aqua-sculpture that thrusts deep into the heart of the Southern Alps and points the way to the grandeur of the Haast Pass and southern Westland beyond.

Wanaka is one of those fortunate resorts that works as well in winter as in summer, with the consequence that there are always visitors as well as residents to make life busy at the store.

It was started in the 1870s by Robert McDougall (a legendary figure who had a kind heart as well as being postmaster, justice of the peace and registrar of birth, deaths and marriages) to supply the diggers at the Cardrona goldfields. It was taken up later and rebuilt by D.W.Jolly.

A storekeeper had to stock everything imaginable then, and Jolly’s carried men’s and women’s clothing, horseshoes, nails, picks, spades, pans, basic foods and patent medicines. They baked bread, too, and delivered to Luggate, Albert Town, Hawea Flat and Makarora. Right up to the 1950s, Wilson Bros., the then owners, were still carrying on in the same way.

The Gillespies bought the store in 1981 and started a self-service and check-out system. But tradition dies hard and the Wanaka Store, whose Four Square paint can’t hide its sturdy lines, still serves as a meeting place and information exchange for the townsfolk.

The tourist launch Ena De is pink by design, and the question I heard a local wit call out is obviously a standing joke: ‘When’re you going to give it its top coat?’

© DON DONOVAN

I first saw this store in November 1987 on the day that two sign writers were painting it red. I had the impression that if someone didn’t stop them they’d paint the whole town red! It wouldn’t have been the first time; the toughest gold miners in the world have been through Reefton!

Just before the Brewertons took over the store in September 1989, the previous owners won a bit back from Coca-Cola by adding two remarkable murals, one depicting a red-shirted miner resting on his spade, and the other the pioneer goldfields landscape all set about with flying ingots.

It’s a large, rambling building that has been extended over the years, but the shop itself is quite small. The range of goods for sale includes frozen and chilled foods, milk, bread, soft drinks and dry groceries, augmented at the weekends with fresh fruit and vegetables. A large range of videotapes is available for hire.

This surprisingly old building was established as a butcher’s shop in 1870 by John Charles Heslop. It later traded as ‘The City Butchery’ and continued thus with various owners until it closed down in the Depression. The owner at that time was a Thomas Lamberton, and he continued to live here with his mother, who ran a maternity home then later turned to making confectionery on the premises; jelly babies perhaps?

Old trolley from a Reefton gold mine

A photograph of the store taken in 1948 shows it much smaller, trading as a milk bar (all the rage in those days) and book club, but by 1960 it had been extended, and was trading as a general store.

© DON DONOVAN

It’s a tough coast hereabouts, a narrow strip of sand and shingle, the restless Tasman Sea on one side and the steep, largely trackless bush behind.

In the hills that block the rising sun from the store there’s a treasure of coal. While it maintains Granity’s economy now, it could, in Daryll’s opinion (and no doubt many of his neighbours) lead to real prosperity if, ‘some large conglomerate could get stuck in and mine the coal on a serious basis’.

The majority of the people of working age who live in Granity are employed in the few privately owned mines or the vast open-cast state mine at Stockton. The Granity Store supplies them with milk, bread, postal services and all general household needs including the weekly Four Square specials. There are also tearooms, which Daryll, a carpenter by trade, built himself and he and Roz are currently establishing a fish-and-chips takeaway.

Roz says the visitors’ talk in the tearooms is usually about the beautiful scenery of the Heaphy Track or nearby Charming Creek, with its spectacular waterfall, bridge and tunnels. The locals, on the other hand, deplore the ‘pounds’ of whitebait that leave the coast! Well, they can’t eat them all, can they?

Granity was named by gold miners from the large granite rocks in the area. A short distance north of the town is the mouth of the Mokihinui River, where once stood Kynnersley, site of the last of the big West Coast gold rushes of the 1860s. The town was washed away in 1867 and nothing is left except ghosts.

If you can stand the sandflies and the weather, you can still do a bit of gold prospecting around Granity. Daryll or Roz will sell you sandfly repellent before you go and fish and chips and a cup of tea afterwards if you feel you’ve had enough!

© DON DONOVAN