Donovan’s World

Among Ahuriri’s jumble of warehouse buildings, wharves and snaking railway lines examples of art deco architecture stand out like gemstones. One such, hiding its charms in narrow Waghorne Street, is the Crown Hotel. It’s basically a box, but well-considered details - steel-framed windows, balustradcd balconies, and a curvacious gable with ‘Stencil’ lettering - set it apart.

Most projects that are modified before completion exhibit the inadequacies of compromise but in the case of the Crown, it finished well-proportioned and with the design benefits of the art deco style that was adopted by Napier’s architects for the city’s reconstruction after the earthquake. [One of the best known examples is the Hotel Central whose balcony I quickly sketched in 1988).

The Crown has won awards as a classic example of art deco, and has been recorded in a Melbourne University thesis as having a foyer and entrance unique in Australasia.

© DON DONOVAN

John Hastie, a man known widely for his kindness, opened the ‘Hurunui Accommodation House, South Bank’ with a licence issued in Christchurch by J.W Hamilton, Resident Magistrate, on 1 June 1860.

The hotel was a meeting place for North Canterbury farmers who would ride in for their mail and to catch up with gossip, maybe pausing for a pint while they watched drovers from the north dipping their sheep to keep Canterbury clear of ‘the dreaded scab’. Through the years the pub experienced varying fortunes and there came a period, as with so many architectural gems, when the worth of its heritage was misunderstood and it fell into disrepair. It had reached its nadir in 1980, patronless, beerless and on the point of closure when, at the eleventh hour, a group of locals, after surprisingly little discussion, pledged over $100 000 and set up a trust to save it.

And so it continues its tradition of welcoming travellers on the Lewis Pass and Hanmer road to its shade and hospitality; and is it too much to fancy that in some cool corner of its restful bar the spirit of John Hastie smiles and nods approvingly?

I have a confession to make: back in 1961, long before the present proprietors owned Revingtons, my wife and I stayed there one freezing winter weekend, having foolhardily crossed the mountains from Christchurch in deteriorating weather. We were dismayed to find that the tap on the gas fire in our bedroom was padlocked. A notice advised that the lock would be undone upon payment of half-a-crown (25 cents). I was affronted at such parsimony and promptly picked the lock with a hairpin. I have felt vaguely guilty ever since; but I feel better now that I have told you.

But ‘Revington’s Post Office Hotel’ must have been such a mouthful, and West Coasters are generally people of few words (well chosen, usually) inevitably it became ‘Revington’s’ which, I think, has quite a ring to it. I’m told that the locals shorten it even further, to ‘Revvies’, which tends to knock the top off any attempt at grandeur.

The first Revingtons was a fine looking hotel but it was replaced in 1938 by this art deco style building with its Spanish tiles, built by the owners of the day, Allan and Margaret Marshall. They must have had a presentiment that, one day, Royalty would grace the pub for they incorporated that fine balcony. From its double doors, below the flagstaff, Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh waved to the loyal Greymouth crowd when they paid a visit on 18 January 1954.

It’s worth reflecting that in 1847-48 Thomas Brunner took 550 days to explore, with his Maori guides, the return journey from Nelson to the West Coast glaciers by way of the Buller Gorge. They suffered dreadfully and risked, among many others, the threats of drowning and exposure. They came so close to starvation that they were forced to kill and eat Brunner’s beloved dog, Rover. The explorer was enough of a detached scientist to record ‘The flesh… is very palatable, tasting something between mutton and pork . . .’

In the valley of Brunner’s Buller River, on the Nelson to Murchison road, lies Owen River, named for a small stream draining the Lookout Hills and Marino Mountains to the north. Dating to the 1880s, it was once a small town founded when rich quartz reefs were discovered in the area. Nowadays the shouts of both gold and coal miners are faint echoes of the past while the solitary tavern refreshes tourists, fishers, hunters, Buller River rafters and cave explorers, and the local farming community.

Mt. Owen, 1875m, is a pleasant prospect from the beer garden on a summer’s day, the sort of day that poor Thomas Brunner might have welcomed for drying clothes and equipment and mourning his loyal and, in the end, sacrificial Rover…

Solitary, it stands where the winding road that follows the pretty Motueka River joins the highway from Nelson. It’s at a point where the mind of the southbound traveller prepares tor the rugged bluffs of the Buller Gorge, leaving the gentle orchards ofTasman Bay behind.

It was from outside Bromell’s, too, that Nelson sheep were taken by drovers for sale in Canterbury - a journey that could take almost a month via Tophouse and Hanmer. Drovers like legendary Ern Robinson (coincidentally a kinsman of my mate, Mac Fairweather) would have known both the old and new Bromell’s Hotels and would have witnessed the coming of the railway and Newmans transition from horse drawn transport to motor vehicles.

The railway failed to survive and you’d have to look hard to find any traces of it now, although the old Glenhope Station still stands, twenty-five kilometres south of the Kohatu Hotel. Or, by chance, you might find someone in the bar with a long memory!

I’m always amused by tenuous claims to greatness. One such was made for Okaramio’s post office (in the days when such institutions were still fashionable) which was described as ‘the smallest in New Zealand.’ I can’t imagine that many people would have come from far and wide to see it, but the Okaramio Tavern is a welcome sight as it comes into view on the Blenheim to Nelson road. It has a jolly look about it which is enhanced by the plump, red lettering of its name which stretches the length of the pub. (For the typographically minded, the lettering style is derived from ‘Cooper Black’; I’ve used it for the cover of this book).

An Irish woman, Teresa Briggs, widowed in Wellington in 1891 by her boot merchant husband, bought the hotel from Johnston in 1902. It burned to the ground one year later. To keep the licence alive, the widow Briggs sold liquor from a ‘tin shed’ (see The Tin Hut at Tauherenikau) until the present pub was built in 1905. Mine-hostess also owned a public hall over the road, which she would hire out for functions; and she ran that small post office, too - clearly a capable woman.

The place thrived under the Woosters during the First World War until they sold out in 1920 to an engineer, John Watson, whose widow Margaret ran the pub after his death in 1931 for fifteen years ‘with the help of an old Scottish sailor.’

The Rat Trap, built in 1903, guarded the only road exit from the Takaka Valley to Riwaka, Motueka and the market gardens ofTasman Bay. I painted it on a number of occasions because it offered such a welcoming prospect after the breathtaking descent into the valley from the limestone heights of Takaka Hill-the ‘Marble Mountain’.

They solved the problem by buying truckloads of beer from the pub and selling it in the works canteen. They bought so much that the Rat Trap’s beer sales were greater than any other pub in Nelson Province.

It’s still possible to get trapped in Golden Bay if the hill is closed by snow and ice but, sadly, you won’t find comfort at the Rat Trap; it burned to the ground on 19 May 1994. It’s a tragic story; a husband and wife were proprietors and she, with tortured mind, fired the place which had trapped her and turned her into what her defence counsel at her arson trial described as ‘a lonely and terrified woman’. With heartening compassion the jury found her not guilty.

This is the second Thistle on its site. It was built in 1866 and used to be dated from that year but in 1967, when renovations were under way, they discovered parts of a structure that were declared to be those of the first Thistle Inn, built in 1840. So, rightly, it may be described as the oldest pub in New Zealand on its original site and shares with that historic year the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi (although the Thistle may be a little less controversial than that founding document).

Just a beer bottle’s throw from the House of Representatives, the pub is almost marooned on a promontory of land bordered by the chariot race of Mulgrave Street and quiet Sydney Street. It now overlooks an extensive area of reclaimed land carrying wharves and railway marshalling yards; but at its beginning, the Thistle was on the waterfront. It is said to have been popular with mid-nineteenth century sea captains who, having come to safe haven after the caprices of Cook Strait, could drop anchor in the wonderfully sheltered waters of Port Nicholson, row ashore and wash the salt out of their throats in the bar while keeping an eye on their ships and restless crews.

It’s also said that Te Rauparaha, that notorious Maori general, coming home in triumph to his headquarters at Kapiti Island or going marauding with the gleam of conquest in his eye, sometimes beached his waka below the Thistle and dropped in for a pint.

Upon entering Featherston after negotiating the numbing loops of the Rimutaka Highway one of the first things you notice is the Royal Tavern squatting solid and grey like a land-based battleship on the southern side of Revans Street. Impressive and reassuring, it seems to exemplify the essence of the town.

The first pub burned down and was replaced by the present building in 1893. A photograph in the ‘New Zealand Cyclopaedia’ of 1906 proves that it has hardly altered in nearly a century. It was then described as having thirty-five well furnished rooms, the best liquors and accommodation, a good table, being lighted by ‘a private installation of acetylene gas’ and having ‘up-to-date fire escape appliances.’ In an age of motels it’s now a tavern and most of the upstairs rooms are empty.

When I first saw the Taheke Tavern it seemed far too large for its surrounding population, but in the context of the settlement’s nineteenth century existence the old hotel had quite a job to do and so, as the town grew the pub grew, too. Looking down on the tavern it’s easy to identify the old core of the pub, it’s the two storeyed portion with the dormer windows, finials and pretty barge boards. That section apparently constituted the Taheke Terminal Hotel, which one source dates to the 1840s. A clue to the town’s beginnings lies in the name; the hotel’s proprietors owned and operated a launch passenger service and steam vessels came up the Waima and Punakitere Rivers from Hokianga Harbour to deposit their cargoes or pick up back-loads at the terminus at Taheke.

The dormer windows of the old pub.

The waterway played the usual important part of navigable rivers in the earliest days of European settlement, before the hotel was established. Missionaries, Anglican, Wesleyan and Roman Catholic - often at odds with the traders and loggers - came first, opening their stations all around the Hokianga. Indeed, it’s on record that the indefatigable Anglican, the Rev. Samuel Marsden, came upstream to Taheke from the Hokianga with two other Europeans, three Maori chiefs and six ‘native bearers’ in 1819. The river was later used to float rafts of kauri logs, cut from the vast forests, of which only the Waipoua section is left today, down to the Union Box and Packing Case Company’s mill at Rawene.