High Country Lark Read online

  Not shy of community affairs, he chaired the Glenorchy Community Association through the years it was developing a plan for the Head of the Lake community. The plan’s overarching conclusion was clear enough: retain the end-destination status of Glenorchy and the Head of the Lake. Both Mark and Amanda have long been involved with local organisations, especially the school, although Mark still wonders, after thirty years in the district, whether he has become a ‘local’ yet.

  Amanda has been at the school on the morning I visit the woolshed, working on property issues for the board of trustees. Glenorchy School has a smaller roll than in the past. Rural schools with reducing rolls worry about their future, but in Glenorchy’s case the glitzy subdivision development in the vicinity of the township is lighting its horizons. All four Hasselman children attended school in Glenorchy before leaving the district for secondary and higher education.

  Around by the woolshed entrance, Amanda, back from her meeting at the school, is having a bite of lunch in the sun. Besides being a farmer alongside Mark and a director of their business, she is an artist and doing creative things with merino wool felting. Through the afternoon she will manage the stockhandling at the woolshed and yards.

  I am due soon at the Rees Valley Station woolshed, up the road a few kilometres, to talk to Iris Scott. Mark Hasselman’s first experience of the Head of the Lake was as a young musterer in the Rees Valley mountains in the late 1970s. Originally from rural South Canterbury, he was hired by Iris’s late husband, Graeme Scott, and Graeme’s father, Doug. I know the Scotts have been here a long time, and that Rees Valley sets a record in Head of the Lake farming circles — the station that has been in the hands of one family the longest.

  Her friendly face framed in long white hair, Iris Scott greets me as I drive up to the woolshed. It’s a bright afternoon, made all the more colourful by the sheep in a nearby paddock. They are various shades of brown.

  ‘They don’t look like your average merino,’ I say, trying to sound knowledgeable.

  ‘You’re right,’ says Iris, with a half-smile that looks habitual. ‘They’re a small flock of crossbred coloured sheep which are kept round the woolshed for shearing demonstrations.’

  ‘Demonstrations?’

  ‘For visitors. It’s a tourism development. We don’t run it. We host it.’

  When I suggest that tourists might prefer to watch shearing of merinos because they’re characteristic of high-country sheep runs, Iris is quick with a response: ‘Merinos are easily scratched — the wrinkly skin, you see. Blood dribbles from the scratches. Liable to upset visitors. No, the crossbreds are a better option. Want to look inside?’

  Like Temple Peak’s, the woolshed is a relatively well-lit modern shed, with walls clad in corrugated iron and plenty of room for an eight-strong gang of blade shearers, the rouseabouts and disco music crowding the rafters and everyone’s ears. There is also space for a large standing display of the history of Rees Valley Station, its production, tourism, nature conservation and recreation values.

  Of course, Rees Valley Station does have merinos — 3,000 of them. There used to be 7,000 sheep spread across the station’s 18,600 hectares of pastoral-lease backcountry valleys, spurs and range tops. During an autumn muster the faces streamed with sheep, which eventually turned the yards and river flats around the Arthur’s Creek woolshed up the Rees Valley into a swirling, ruffled lake of wool. Sheep numbers are lower now but the Scotts plan to get the flock back to something like 7,000 again.

  Iris arrived in the district before ‘Huss’. A veterinary science student from Massey University, although originally from the Waikato, she took a summer holiday job as a ‘land girl’ on Rees Valley Station in the late 1960s. The Scotts, father and son, knew they were getting help from a vet student over the summer but didn’t reckon on a female one. Clearly, Iris made an impression despite her slight build and self-effacing manner. After returning to her Massey studies and graduating in vet science she ‘came south’ in February 1971 to marry Graeme and begin a life on a high-country station, one of the Otago region’s most famous.

  Welshman William Gilbert Rees, founder of Queenstown, established sheep farming at the Head of the Lake with a couple of partners and the blessing of the Waste Land Board, an ironically named agency in light of current land values. Rees engaged shepherds to drive flocks to the district by way of rough and sometimes troublesome trails through bracken fern and scrub, some of which had to be burnt to clear the way for the sheep. The shepherds relied on provisions from Queenstown and at one stage, when their supply of flour turned musty, they were beside themselves with hunger. Rees arrived from Queenstown by boat just in time, with a stock of pies baked by his wife.

  In 1905, some forty years later, with the main means of communication still by boat, Henry Scott rode up a bridle track from Queenstown to take possession of Rees Valley Station. The Scott name appears in a list of local names on the war memorial in Mull Street that commemorates sacrifice in the Great War. Through the 1930s Great Depression and rabbit plague years, son Doug Scott and his wife Jean, fought hard to stay on the property.

  Kea on sheep

  The first filmed evidence of kea attacking sheep came from Rees Valley Station in the mid-1990s. In an hour-long documentary about the life of kea in the high country, the TNVZ Natural History Unit included night-time shots of the alpine parrots riding on the backs of ewes and digging into the flesh with their bills. It was said they were targeting the fat layer around the kidneys. Winter, when normal kea food items are under snow, is a risky time of year but attacks can also occur in summer. Although attacked sheep do not usually die immediately, the blood poisoning or fly strike that follows days later may be fatal. Iris Scott says kea still attack her sheep, even if they have been brought to lower altitude country in autumn. Rees Valley can lose at least ten sheep a year to kea attacks. In a very bad year, the toll may be more than 150. Rees Valley sheep are vaccinated against blood poisoning and tetanus. It is administered at the time the sheep receive lice and worm drenches.

  ‘Ten years without wages,’ is how daughter-in-law Iris describes their experience. ‘They worked for their keep, that’s all.’ She says that period of hardship is revisiting the high country now, with meat and wool prices depressed and steep rent increases in the wind for lessees of pastoral land. The only way to survive on the property, says Iris, is to diversify, develop alternative ways of generating income and work for wages off it. Iris has the support of her three children. In 1992, when the oldest was only sixteen, Iris’s husband, Graeme died. She then had three school-age children to bring up and a huge farm to run.

  After the tour of the woolshed, Iris and I make our way to the homestead down on the flats, which, like the house on Mount Earnslaw Station, has no pretension to material wealth but is continuously lived in. Over a cuppa I discuss the challenges facing the Scott family.

  Iris speaks in a quiet, measured way borne of self-belief sharpened at many a high-country forum. There is a sparkle in her eye, too, not diminished by the pressures of managing a large property. Few women run sheep farms this big. Iris Scott is a well-known name among the ‘Feds’ — Federated Farmers Inc. — and the Landcare Group movement. She not only asserts the right of high-country farming to exist but is also clear about its benefits to nation and society. The information panels back at the woolshed — a busy mosaic of photographs and text, assembled by Amanda Hasselman — express a determination to get the message across. Pastoral runs are not just about the meat and wool export trade; they embody significant landscapes, water quality, recreational opportunity, tourism activity. And they are the backdrop for cultural symbols such as Speight’s beer, sheep dogs and drover raincoats.

  But times are tough.

  ‘Right now this property won’t support one income let alone four. We’ve all got other jobs, and it’s going to be like that for a while.’

  Kate, the eldest daughter, named for her industrious great-grandmother, Henry’s wife, works
part-time in the Glenorchy School office and public library and helps Iris with much of the farm work; Diane has had café and bus-driving jobs; and the youngest member of the family, Eric, is based in Queenstown and has his sights set on flying helicopters. All three are keen to see Rees Valley Station remain in Scott family ownership. Even their mother has to supplement farm income with jobs off-property. She washes dishes part-time at the exclusive luxury lodge just south of Glenorchy, Blanket Bay, and does occasional veterinary jobs around the district, although more often as a favour than for income.

  The Scotts initiated tourism on the station a while back. Ventures have to be small-scale, on the family’s terms and compatible with pastoral lease farming. Besides shearing demonstrations, there is a horse-trekking business operating from the homestead area. A skifield is available in winter (helicopter access, rope tow and a hut at 1,650 metres, accommodating ten people at a time) high up in the Richardson Mountains near the Invincible Creek headwaters. There are eco-tours, also with helicopter access, for botanists and entomologists keen to explore the alpine zone, and four-wheel-drive Landrover trips along the valley floor, offered to visitors by Glenorchy identity Dick Watson.

  A few years back the Scotts entered into a tenure review process with the government agency, Land Information New Zealand (LINZ). With only 250 hectares of freehold in the homestead area, the station is almost entirely pastoral lease. It takes in the northern end of the Richardson Mountains, its parallel valleys and intervening spurs, almost all the way to the Rees Saddle. The largest paddocks run for kilometres from the valley floor to the range tops.

  Iris was keen to see whether the tenure review process was flexible and innovative, whether it would accept a new way of looking at managing the high country. Financial security was not a motive. In the mid-1990s she turned down an offer of $12 million for Rees Valley Station. It wasn’t for sale.

  Iris, backed up by her children, proposed to LINZ that the entire station be placed under a covenant that would limit grazing, burn-offs and fertiliser applications and protect natural values. ‘We put the stewardship case, where profit is secondary to caring for the land,’ says Iris. ‘Maintaining water quality, biodiversity, that sort of thing. At the same time, allowing for appropriate forms of recreation and tourism — pretty much what we do now. Grazing at high altitude would be at very low stocking rates, and we’d put no pressure on the dark faces and the patches of forest. There’d be no subdivision for lifestyle houses. As far as the DOC interest goes, there’s nothing on Rees Valley that is not already well represented in the national park and adjacent conservation land. Rees Valley is like a buffer zone for Mount Aspiring National Park, a line of defence against invasion by weeds and pests.’

  The government negotiators saw things differently. They wanted most of the pastoral lease to be managed by the Department of Conservation. A letter arrived from LINZ in December 2007, a couple of days before my visit. It stated: ‘… the parties are at an impasse’. There would be no deal. LINZ had decided to discontinue the tenure review of Rees Valley Station.

  Iris is philosophical. It is what she expects from an official process unable to deal creatively in what is best for the high country. I tell her the Lark would sympathise with her thoughts about treading lightly on the high country … about not putting lines on maps and separating areas of production from areas of conservation (except in the case of rare habitats or plant life requiring full protection) … about integrating human pursuits sustainably with nature … about renewal. Iris will try other avenues. Giving up is not in her nature. She will continue politicking and continue to air her views publicly. Her recent reappointment to the Otago Conservation Board by the Minister of Conservation says a lot about her interest in bridging the production/conservation arguments.

  The no-deal letter from LINZ and the threat of rent increases confirm for her a pattern of government antipathy towards high-country farming that she says goes back to the late 1980s, when a government agency accused high-country farmers of polluting waterways. ‘You have to remember this was a time when cities all over New Zealand were pumping raw sewage directly into estuaries and the ocean.’

  Scottish pioneers in Otago, including my own, knew all about the Highland Clearances back home. ‘High-Country Clearances’ is what the tenure review process is being labelled in the twenty-first century by some leaders of the farming community.

  Dick Watson, owner-operator of a four-wheel drive tour business, Mountainland Rovers, can talk with some authority about the nature of the rocks and minerals at the Head of the Lake. He has moved plenty of them. As a bulldozer driver, he put in the Kinloch-Greenstone Road in the early 1980s and realigned sections of the Queenstown-Glenorchy Road. He also pushed rocks and rubble around at the scheelite mines above Glenorchy, and rattled countless tonnes of river gravels through a floating dredge in the Buckler Burn and Precipice Creek while gold mining in the late ’eighties: best strike, half an ounce of gold in one hour.

  Dick’s family connections go back a long way here. He is a fifth-generation descendant of the first proprietor of the Glenorchy Hotel, Thomas Wilson. Thomas ran tours into the Rees Valley from Glenorchy. Ditto Dick. But instead of horse and buggy, his mode of transport is a Landrover. It’s no ordinary four-wheel drive, certainly not in the same mould as the shiny SUVs that inhabit supermarket carparks and hardly get off tarseal. Dick’s vehicle is a long-wheelbase 1997 Landrover Defender, a chunky, no-frills model.

  I was in the Rees Valley some years back, tramping the Rees-Dart, and look forward to an opportunity to experience it through Dick’s eyes. I’m pleased no one else is booked on my tour. I plan on asking questions no Asian backpacker would dream of asking. Dick picks me up at 9 a.m. from my motel with a solid handshake and a characteristic southern New Zealand rolling of the Rs, even in words that don’t contain the letter.

  ‘Good to meet yer,’ he says in a gravely voice. He has tousled hair, white enough to suggest middle age, and a square-jawed, no-nonsense look about him — like his vehicle.

  ‘Likewise,’ I return. ‘Rain on the way?’

  ‘We’ll be jake for a couple of hours.’ Dick starts up the ten-year-old diesel motor. I continue conversation on the weather theme: ‘Creeks and river okay?’

  ‘Yeah, no problem. The new snow’s stored most of the rain.’

  I lever myself into the passenger seat in the front and we drive off towards the intersection by the town’s Recreation Ground, which hosts rugby, golf and horse racing, but only one code at a time. Dick drives straight over the top of the roundabout with a terse comment echoing the local barman’s: ‘That’s been put in for visitors.’

  Instead of following the road towards the Rees Valley he swings through the monumental gates of the Glenorchy Recreation Ground and leans forward over the wheel, his right arm cuddling it.

  ‘Need to check something.’ He looks towards the near corner of the ground. I know it’ll be pounded by horses’ hooves on the first Saturday in January — the Glenorchy Races. ‘We put down new grass seed here for the next races. Then hundreds of chaffinches arrived and ate the seed, so we had to re-sow it. Just checking the strike. Looks promising.’

  Dick was one of the instigators of the community-run Glenorchy races back in the early 1960s and he hasn’t missed a race day since. He does his bit for the local community, most recently signing up as a volunteer fireman — ‘A younger man’s game, but the brigade was short.’

  Dick is the epitome of a Head of the Lake all-rounder. He has been a musterer, bulldozer driver, gold dredge operator, jetboat driver, shearer, eeler, venison hunter, possum hunter, hotel proprietor (four years running his great-great-grandfather’s hotel) and, most recently, through the Mountainland Rovers business he set up in 2003, a four-wheel drive tour guide and stoat-trapping nature conservationist, about which I figure I’ll be learning a good deal today.

  It’s not long before he is hitting his stride as a tour guide with his lone passenger. Beyond Twelve Mile
Creek and the powerhouse serving Glenorchy by the bridge, Rees Valley Road travels along a raised bench through regenerating shrubland. Dick stops to describe the scene: in the foreground, the Rees River split into several channels across its gravel bed, and the flat paddocks of Mount Earnslaw Station surrounding knobbly, glacier-smoothed Camp Hill; in the distance, mountains under masses of dark-grey cloud.

  ‘After the last ice age all this flat land in front of us was a lake,’ says Dick. ‘These terraces, they hark back to a time when Lake Wakatipu was a lot higher and extended a fair way up the Rees and Dart Valleys.’

  He talks of the Rees men who introduced sheep, the surveyors under McKerrow who added more names to the landscape, and the ‘banker’ floods. In a big flood the rivers form a sheet of water bank to bank. Volumes in the Dart River average less than one hundred cubic metres per second but on the day of the Glenorchy Races in January, 1994, the Dart hit an estimated 2,200 cumecs.

  Camp Hill was the site of a moa-hunter encampment a long time ago. There is talk of human occupation taking a new turn through a subdivision development for about thirty houses. Dick is upset.

  ‘I’m not a big fan of subdivisions and definitely against this one. Imagine stopping here in the future and having a bunch of houses in the middle of this glorious view of the mountains.’

  Neither is he a fan of the Milford-Dart tunnel project. He calls it ‘a crazy thing’, and an example of Queenstown ‘putting its big foot on us’.

  Invincible Creek is the next stop. Here, tour guide becomes stoat-trapper. Dick dives into the fern beside the bridge to check one of the one hundred-odd traps deployed at intervals a long way into the Rees Valley. A wooden box the size of a large shoe box, but longer, is baited with hen’s eggs. Neck-breaking steel kill-traps are set on either side of the eggs. The project, titled ‘Bring Back Our Birds’, began in 2004 after Dick realised that stoats were decimating birdlife in the area, especially the banded dotterels, black-fronted terns, wrybills and South Island pied oystercatchers that nest on the open gravel islands in the riverbed. Besides the traps up the Rees Valley his project is setting them in downstream areas, too. He’s got a new trap going into a creek at Paradise tomorrow.