Donovan’s World

In 1987 the century-old Patearoa Store and its post office were on the point of closing down. However, the locals wouldn’t hear of it, so they clubbed together (as did the people of Millers Flat) to buy the land and buildings, which they now lease to the Warrens.

Bill, a retired Christchurch policeman, and Mal, an unretired sign-writer, own the Pateroa Hotel across the road. It dates from 1928 and is on the site of one built by Thomas Newton in 1887. It was called the Sowburn Hotel then, and the first store was next door, on land owned by the publican. That hotel, like so many others in New Zealand over the years, burned down in 1927.

In the 1940s the publican, Arthur Keegan, tried to raise the rent and this incensed Mr Robertson, the storekeeper, so much that he bought the abandoned Upper Kyeburn schoolhouse, moved it from near Dansey Pass and set it up on the other side of the hotel. The resultant ill-feeling was sorted out by the parish priest. What now constitutes the Patearoa Store is the old store and the schoolhouse butted together.

Patearoa was part of the Central Otago goldfields, and remains of the nearby Sowburn diggings are evident in buildings and abandoned machinery. Now a farming area, it’s a vibrant community, its residents competing actively around the Maniototo Plain at rugby, cricket, tennis, golf and bowls. The store, besides being a postal agency, supplies general groceries, milk, bread, newspapers and the friendliest of welcomes.

© DON DONOVAN

MITCHELLS’ COTTAGE, FRUITLANDS

Central Otago is one big builder’s yard, a colossal litter of a remarkable construction material from which every conceivable type of building has been erected since European immigrants moved across the face of the land.

It’s that fine-grained, metamorphic rock called schist, in whose lasagne-layers wink and sparkle promises of Central Otago’s mineral wealth. It’s a stone that will split but not break across its grain, wonderfully suitable, in a variety of lengths and thicknesses, for horizontally-raised cottage walls, door and window lintels, quoins, chimney breasts and stacks, and even the odd roof, it makes walls and fence posts, bridges and cattle troughs, and even in its unquarried state it provided overhangs and cave-like niches for itinerant gold seekers stranded in winter’s fury. Artistically it’s a gemstone, providing texture and form to tempt the pen, and offering to the palette the rich ochres, browns and greys of the lichened landscape from which it springs.

Completed in 1904, Mitchells’ Cottage at Fruitlands, above the winding highway from Alexandra to Roxburgh, is an outstanding example of the drystone mason’s craft. It was built with painstaking skill, each stone carefully considered and cut so precisely that no mortar was used or needed. It was made by men who knew of no other way to work - no short cuts, no shoddiness - simply the best.

From the Shetland Islands by way of the Australian goldfields Andrew Mitchell arrived in New Zealand in 1866, followed by his brother John in 1872. They worked around the Otago goldfields until, in the 1880s, Andrew discovered a quartz reef on the hills of the Old Man Range above the Clutha Valley. Unlike most gold mining ventures it prospered over a long period and John and Andrew, using skills they’d learned from their father, started to build the cottage below the mine. What is now the foundation was quarried for the building’s schist and as they worked meticulously they yet found time to carve, in situ, a solid sundial platform from rock in the garden.

John and his wife Jessie brought up ten children in Mitchells’ Cottage (while Andrew lived nearby, alternating between a small stone cottage close to the mine shaft and a smaller iron hut next to John and Jessies’) and although the mine was sold in 1890 and John died in 1922, the cottage stayed in Jessie’s ownership until 1929. It is now in the care of the Department of Conservation.

Schist stone fenceposts are a common sight in Central Otago; this one is in the garden of Mitchells’ Cottage.

© DON DONOVAN

St Bathans was born of a gold boom in 1863. A year later it had ten hotels, forty businesses and a population of up to 2000 in the surrounding hills and gullies. Across the road from the pub you can look down into ‘The Glory Hole’, a blue lake that was once a hill 120 metres high! Gold fever hit St Bathans in a big way and, blinded by the urge to win metal above everything else, the early citizens tolerated a mushroom shanty-town of ‘corrugated iron, red iron, tin, gin cases, staves and canvas’. But there seems to have been born into gold miners a need for dignity and a prayer for permanence and so, as the town survived into and beyond the 1870s, more substantial buildings appeared, some of them with sufficient stamina to have lasted into modern times.

St Bathans today is like a time capsule from which it’s possible, in just a couple of hours, to get an appreciation of the composition of a goldfields town: a public hall that was the miners’ billiards saloon, the Bank of New South Wales Gold Office of the late 1860s, the stately old Post Office and postmaster’s residence, the ruins of the 1866 public school, damaged irreparably by earthquake in 1948, the church of St Alban the Martyr given to the town by Captain Dalgety and shipped out, pre-fabricated from England in 1883, and the stone cottage, one of the earliest permanent buildings in the town, first occupied by Sam Hanger who owned the first Vulcan Hotel.

Bank of New South Wales Gold Office

There’s been a Vulcan in St Bathans since 1869. Sam Hanger’s first one was a little farther north than is today’s, an impermanent affair thrown up to cater for thirsts rather than architectural appreciation. Twelve years later, they replaced corrugated iron with a structure of sun-dried bricks that became the new Vulcan: it stood until early 1914 when it was burned down. In its turn it was replaced by red brick which was also destroyed by fire. The Vulcan’s licence was transferred at this time to the Ballarat Hotel, which was not in use. It had been built in 1882 and is the uniquely handsome little Vulcan Hotel in my illustration.

Through the left hand door is a narrow, intimate public bar and beyond that, the lounge bar. There are four accommodation rooms, one of which is said to be haunted. The hotel is owned by a company mainly consisting of local shareholders. I can’t think of a nicer place to hold a shareholders meeting.

© DON DONOVAN

This story was broadcast on New Zealand Radio in 1978. The Lammermoor Range, where it all happened, has recently come into the news because there’s a plan afoot to install on its remote hilltops one of those abominations: a wind farm.

***

The Old Dunstan Road connects the Taeri Plain and Dunedin with the old goldfields of Central Otago. It traverses the grain of a hard landscape, rising to over a thousand metres across old, weatherworn hills pocked with rocky outcrops and carpeted with rustling tussock and prickly ’spaniard’.

The road was travelled by the goldminers of the early days on foot or horseback. They humped their swags in search of the gold that most never found. But the road is tempting to the modern traveller and, surely, easy going in a six-cylinder saloon - especially in summer?

I persuaded my wife and two young daughters (10 and that our approach to Central Otago must be by way of the Old Dunstan Road. The map said ‘fair weather road only’. This was summer so that should be all right.

Leaving Dunedin at nine in the morning, we wove through the foothills
of the Lammermoor Range, the car purring, camper trailer following
faithfully behind. The sky, was grey and lowering, but looked better
over Central, better weather, after all, was what we had searched for since we had left humid Auckland in the far north. Soon the road divided; smooth, tar seal one way, shingle the other. We turned towards the Old Dunstan Road, and as we climbed though the wet, dun coloured hills sheep scampered across our track as if they’d never seen a car before.

Soon, miles in, the road developed a surface that resembled flowing caramel. The drizzle at times intensified and then relented. The car, equipped with tyres that grip the macadam so well, slipped and slewed through the mush. At one point, through the haze of sleety rain, we caught sight of a tent and car beside a stream whose waters lapped the narrow bridge we crossed. As we progressed higher on to the old road we encountered deep puddles - miniature lakes almost - through which I pushed stupidly at full power, thrusting up bow waves that temporarily blotted out our vision but were quickly cleared by our washer-wipers.

But soon a silence fell among us. The humour of a light-hearted adventure
was slowly turning into a realization that this was no easy journey. We were being led on by a mischievous spirit that roamed these wanton
hills. We believed that we’d less distance to go than we’d come and
that we had passed the worst of it. The map, on such a small scale, misled us. There were traps we’d not foreseen. We had mistaken summer for ‘fair weather’. We had not realized that while summer might exist elsewhere in this green and pleasant land the Old Dunstan Road and the Lammermoor Range determined their own seasons.

Soon we were bogged down. Our wheels threw up a filthy spume as we tried, first forward then back, to extricate ourselves, but only going deeper into the devil’s borsch of icy clayey water. Believing us to be near the end of the road, I told the family to wait while I walked on to get help.  There must be a tractor just over the next ridge. So, dressed for a jaunt in jandals, shorts and short sleeved shirt I walked onwards slipping and sliding, drenched by the icy rain. Over one rise, then another, and another, I shivered and then found my body shaking uncontrollably with apprehension and chill. Before me was the final, cynical barrier; a river into which I waded to my waist but which grew deeper.

My car could not possibly cross that torrent.

I turned, with sagging spirits, and headed back for the only comfort in this dripping desert - my family. I felt near to exhaustion. The only way to help was through the many miles we had already come - miles that I must yet cover.

After an interminable age I saw our car and staggering to it I leaned against it sobbing with cold and desperation and the awful responsibility of having taken my loved ones into this frightful place.

My wife, with that sobering authority that so comforts the ‘head of the household’ dried me out and, in that incredibly confined space, helped me into dry clothes. Our only food was a box of chocolates given to us by our hosts of the night before. They sustained us marvellously as did a heart-warming gulp of whisky. And so, better clad in gum boots, sweater and parka, my pockets filled with after dinner mints, I forced my way into the sleet.

Soon, I was soaked through again. The rain, attacking me as so many
darts of icy fury, burst upon my ancient parka and ran down the thin trousers into my gumboots.  How many times I emptied them I can’t
recall. Oscillating between self-uplifted spirits and a ‘lay-down-and-die’ depression, I fooled myself into counting up to one hundred in tens, fives and ones; I measured each splashing footfall as a metre and then counted off the kilometres; I recited in my weakened brain ‘The Daffodils’, ‘The Quality of Mercy’ and I saw myself a pitiful black bundle dying of exposure beside the road mourned only by those who loved me.

I was very sorry for myself. I with the soft hands and slack belly of sedentary comfort, was in a survival situation. And then, after so many badly remembered valleys and hills, I saw that white tent beside the swollen stream, and that stream was but one of so many that had swollen behind our car as we had optimistically challenged the Old Dunstan Road.

A tall, lean man walked towards me out of the rain his arms full of wet wood. He looked me up and down and then, smiling, he said, ‘Gidday, yer gumboots are full of water’.

I croaked my misfortune to him but he seemed unimpressed. Perhaps he was made of steelier stuff than I. But he, with his two companions, cranked his ageing car to life and we slithered - onwards - backwards, to help.  His car, of course, could never have reached mine.

Eventually, me shivering with an energy that might have generated electric power, we reached a homestead and I stumbled to the back door.

The farmer, ruddy, monosyllabic, appearing hostile, came, reluctantly it seemed, to my aid.  He brought out an old Austin Gipsy four-wheel drive and a heavy hempen rope and we headed once again for the hostile hinterland - a land which, my saviour told me, he hadn’t visited for twenty years.

That is the end of the nightmare really. For, after miles of moisturized misery we came to them, my wife and my children. They had sat for six hours keeping their spirits up and emptying the chocolate box. We were towed back across the Old Dunstan Road - that romantic, horrible road - and sometime after midnight we limped our once magnificent roadster into Dunedin. The radiator was smashed, the head gasket blown, one piston damaged.

That night we slept in the very beds we had left the morning before. We had been to the fringes of life where comfort’s confidence changes into despair and fear becomes a companion.

I slept a dreamful sleep in my exhaustion. Dreams of unknown shapes and staggering ogres - visions of miners lifting their arms to heaven and cursing the Old Dunstan Road.

I shall never go that way again.

© DON DONOVAN