High Country Lark Read online

  Although the summer solstice sun is still high, the afternoon is wearing on. I fancy a drink and a bite to eat in a pub. Glenorchy has been a pub town for 120 years. Three hotels launched the town’s reputation for hospitality in the late 1880s. There are two today. Hotels and lodges are still downtown Glenorchy’s largest buildings, but take note: the tallest built things in town are the rugby goal-posts in the Recreation Ground. That piece of information I get from the barman as I order a beer.

  ‘See you’ve got a roundabout now.’

  ‘That’s for visitors,’ says the barman. ‘Locals don’t take much notice. Drive over the top of it. It’s designed for dinky little rental cars. Turning’s too blinken tight for a decent four-wheel drive. Where you off to?’

  ‘Paradise.’

  ‘Could do worse.’

  And with that ambiguous statement my conversation with the barman concludes. He has more glasses to fill.

  I retreat to a bar stool and high table, the kind that used to have a sunken, water-filled jam jar in the middle for receiving cigarette butts. In one corner the racing channel is blaring on television and it’s not even Saturday. No one is watching. Australian horse racing, I guess. There are two communities present: visitors and locals. Lined up at the bar with a shot glass in front of each of them are three women who look like they might be having a gap year Down Under. They speak an enlivened sort of English with European accents. Their banter suggests they are city people who’ve recently survived a challenge in the wilds — tramping, horse-trekking or jet-boating, perhaps all three. The wedges of lemon and little saucer of salt indicate tequila is their tipple. The next round goes down the hatch with the drinkers’ eyes squinting from the squeeze of lemon.

  ‘Cheers! I love you!’ one of the women says to a companion.

  An entirely different kind of socialising is going on in another part of the bar, around high tables pulled together. They’re local men, talking rough in a huddle that says they are well used to each other’s company. Dressed for outdoors work, these Southern Men are drinking — what else? — Speight’s three-star, gold-medal beer out of large brown bottles, as their fathers might have done, and their grandfathers, too.

  I leave town for Paradise, fed and watered, before the sun goes down behind the Humboldt Mountains. Fluffy slow-moving scraps of cumulus over Bold Peak, happy-go-lucky clouds, promise fine weather tomorrow for the Sugarloaf Pass experience. Trust the Lark to sort that out.

  For an idea of weather coming up, Head of the Lake people tend to look to the Fiordland forecast. Their area lies in the transition zone between awesomely wet Fiordland/SouthWestland and semi-arid Central Otago. The Main Divide mountains create a rainshadow. It might be bucketing down for hours at the Main Divide and the valley heads facing Glenorchy, yet blowing dust off the Dart River delta all day. So fine is the dust, Glenorchy people say it gets into their houses even with all windows and doors shut.

  Paradise named

  Paradise shelducks inhabit the Diamond Lake shoreline and paddocks in the vicinity, and it’s been suggested this is how the area got its name. But then, ‘parries’ are common throughout the Head of the Lake and no more distinctive around Diamond Lake than anywhere else. Thankfully, there is another, more colourful story about the naming. Alfred Duncan, pioneer shepherd, wrote of a chance meeting with a young Māori woman called Ruahine, the daughter of a Māori chief, at Diamond Lake in the early 1860s. She had to leave in haste, possibly as a result of invasion by another tribe. ‘My heart is with you,’ she wrote in a farewell note to Duncan, ‘and when I die … my spirit will return to our paradise.’ Duncan wrote a journal of his time at the Head of the Lake, and had his story published. Later he would write with less certainty about a romance with a Māori maiden, suggesting it might have been a dream. Still, Paradise inspired a few romantic novels, and Duncan’s story, fiction or not, is a worthy precursor.

  The area around Diamond Lake was soon mapped as Paradise. By the time Joseph Fenn arrived to buy up land, twenty years after Duncan, he was listed as ‘Farmer of Paradise’ on the titles. Incidentally, Duncan’s boss, the Rees Valley runholder and first settler of Queenstown, William Gilbert Rees, named Diamond Lake, saying it looked ‘like a diamond set in emeralds’.

  In keeping with the mythical nature of the names Paradise and Arcadia, Biblical terms abound in the area. Heaven’s Gate used to stop horse-and-buggy traffic on the forest-clad road beside Diamond Lake, and not far away was a tapered, coffin-shaped rock called Peter’s Tomb, complete with a natural headstone. The River Jordan is the creek crossing the road just before Arcadia comes into view. The Garden of Eden is a small woodland clearing close to Paradise House. On the hill above it are the Rock of Ages — sheer-sided and the size of a two-storey house — and Adam’s Armchair, a seat on the stump of a giant wind-thrown red beech tree, with curving buttresses for arms.

  I’m booked into Paradise for the night. It’s a good twenty minutes’ drive due north of Glenorchy, deeper into the mountains, closer to the daddy of them all, Earnslaw. I cross the concrete bridge over the Rees River, still on tarseal. The Rees and Dart/Te Awa Whakatipu Rivers, the lake’s major tributaries, pour water into adjacent deltas and are slowly pushing the Head of the Lake southwards as floods transport gravel en masse out of their catchments. To keep Routeburn Track patrons happy, not to mention safer, the tarseal extends all the way to the Dart Bridge these days. The road network splits three ways. Left for the Dart and Routeburn, right for the Rees, and straight up the middle for Paradise. It’s a no-exit outcome whichever way you go, and the Paradise road, beyond the little settlement, turns into a rutted farm track and eventually a trampers’ track.

  The approaches to Paradise are something out of Romantic art. Picture the rushing glacier-fed waters of the Earnslaw Burn emerging from a forested gorge, Diamond Lake glittering at the foot of Mt Alfred, and a red beech forest of enchanting character with the narrow gravel road zig-zagging around trees and a small section of lake shore. Over a stony ford in a creek, more sheep and cattle graze. Now the Arcadia homestead demands your attention, and not for the first time you wonder how the area came to be so delectably named.

  Arcadia was an idyllic land of ancient Greece where mountains, forests and cultivated fields were happily juxtaposed, where shepherds tended sheep and brindle cattle, and nymphs inhabited shady groves. Arcadia Station, near the Head of Lake Wakatipu, is, well, with the exception of the nymphs maybe, a similar sort of environment. Brindle cattle graze contentedly on well-watered pastures bordered by national park forest and neck-stretching peaks. The Simmental cattle, a Swiss breed with cream patches on cuddly reddish-brown coats, belong to Arcadia Station. But it is not the cattle that cause travellers on the Paradise road to pull over; it is the two-storey homestead, which occupies a sylvan setting a couple of hundred metres off the road. It has ‘stately home’ and ‘history’ written all over it. Conical turrets, balconies and tall windows underscore its elegance. This is the home of Jim Veint and his partner, Ros Angelo, who own Arcadia Station and its renowned Simmentals. The farm comprises 276 hectares of freehold land stretching north of Diamond Lake to meet the Dart River.

  The founder of Arcadia Station, Joseph Cyprian Fenn, named the place. A young Englishman of means, Fenn settled here in 1881, initially acquiring 800 acres to run cattle, and building a cottage for himself above the road, at the edge of the beech forest. Fenn was in his mid-twenties, a graduate of Cambridge University, a classics scholar and champion oarsman. He was not only alone, he was reclusive, and Glenorchy gossip cast long shadows. It was said he came to New Zealand because he’d been thwarted in love — his father had stolen his fiancée. Here was a legend in the making.

  Presumably hurt and embarrassed, Fenn looked around for a place to live as far away from friends and family as he could get. He chose to make his home in a country at the ends of the earth from Europe, and once there, ensconced himself in one of its most isolated places. He ended up with 1,314 acres of freehold l
and. Imagine the reaction of the locals … Could this be a ‘remittance man’ with a significant inheritance come amongst us? And why was he so keen on seclusion? It was said he never opened the many letters that arrived for him from England.

  In 1906–07, Fenn had the Arcadia Guest House built in red beech timber from the area, with little expense spared. It contained a smoking room and library, sitting and dining rooms, a handsome staircase to the upper storey where most of the thirteen bedrooms were located, tiled bathrooms, fireplaces with metal backs decorated with cherubs at work, ornate oriental wallpaper and Japanese friezes. An annexe built four years later expanded the accommodation.

  Fenn, however, opted to stay in his cottage, about 500 metres away. He employed managers to run the guest house. Paradise House, just down the road, was also in the business of offering hospitality to visitors from afar; indeed, was better known than Arcadia, though smaller. The Aitken family ran it. David Aitken was a tall Scots goldminer who had worked in the Shotover fields before moving to Paradise. Fenn is said to have taken a shine to his daughter, Isabella,also known as Poppy. But she had other ideas. The spurned suitor, according to rumour, built the mansion at Arcadia to show Poppy what she had missed out on.

  Fenn left scant written record of his endeavours at Arcadia, and all that remains of his cottage is a broken-down chimney. But there are mementoes, handed on to the Veints from the previous owners. The most striking item is a medal won by Fenn in 1877 as a member of the Cambridge rowing eight in the traditional river race against Oxford University. There was a dead heat that year. A collar-and-tie portrait of Fenn, who is wearing a sports jacket and what looks like a boating cap, reveals a smooth-faced, sharp-eyed young man with sensitive lips — a face full of promise, innocent of the love-tortured times ahead. Also in the Veints’ keeping is a flyer advertising the guest house (‘9s per day, 45s per week … conveyance meets every steamer at Glenorchy … Diamond Lake trout a speciality’), and a three-handled, glass-bottomed pewter tankard, with the words, ‘Champion of the Cam’, engraved on it. Also engraved are the names of rivers rowed. I try to imagine Fenn packing it in his suitcase or valise with his other mementoes of a heartbreaking home. A previous owner of Arcadia carried fence staples around in it.

  The Veints themselves have added lustre to the Arcadia story. A Simmental cattle breeder of national standing, Jim Veint won the Sydney Royal Show Supreme Award two years running with his stud animals — the cattle-breeding equivalent of winning the Melbourne Cup. His father, Lloyd, became the third owner of Arcadia in 1951 following four years on the Paradise property. Lloyd was manpowered into scheelite mining at Glenorchy during the war then turned to working the land. At the time, Arcadia leased Crown land a long way up the Dart River, including all the flats on the true left side north of Dan’s Paddock. Jim, his only son, has owned the property fully since 1978. He grew up here, ‘the luckiest kid on earth’.

  The Veints have occupied Arcadia longer than Joseph Fenn but Fenn’s name will forever hover enigmatically over the farm and fetching homestead.

  It is amusing to compare Fenn with another solitary nineteenth-century character, the American writer, philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau, a Harvard graduate, withdrew from society (Concord, Massachusetts) and for a while, in the 1840s, lived in a simple hut by Walden Pond, a small wooded lake. He read Greek and Latin. He never married. But unlike Fenn, Thoreau wrote plenty about nature and the human condition. Head of the Lake history is the poorer for what Fenn never wrote down.

  Paradise is another story, albeit intertwined with Arcadia’s, and I am about to be introduced to it by Geoff and Grace Ockwell, managers of the property. Geoff, a Master’s student in physical education at the University of Otago, is exploring local history and the way people relate to the land. He is clearly fascinated by how people develop a sense of place. The Ockwells occupy a cottage adjacent to the original Paradise House, which at a quick glance looks sorely in need of renovation. They have three young daughters, who go to school at Glenorchy each week day.

  Paradise has been run by a charitable trust since the death in 1998 of David Miller, the last owner, who wanted it to remain open for people to enjoy the forest and wildlife. Visitors rent the wooden huts and small cottages dotted about leafy parts of the property, the smaller ones looking like public works single men’s quarters. All rentable units have a backblocks summer-holiday character, BYO everything.

  Before being shown my hut for the night, I chat with Geoff about Paradise. Yes, there are plans not only to do up the old house and its annexe of guest rooms but also to expand the educational horizons of Paradise. Phys-ed students from Otago have come here for camps since the early 1970s. So have students from the University of South Australia, Adelaide. Geoff is engaged as an instructor for these camps, which teach outdoor pursuits skills. It’s a haven for the young and the restless — and many other things besides.

  William Mason, pioneer architect in New Zealand and first Mayor of Dunedin (1865–66), clearly saw its potential. He was seventy-three when he bought the property in 1883, a couple of years after Fenn acquired Arcadia. In fact, Fenn sold the 317 acres to William Mason. Herein lies an interesting personal link. Mason’s second wife, Kate, had been married to an uncle of Fenn’s, who died at the age of thirty-three. The Masons lived at Queenstown for six years before they developed Paradise, and during those years Kate must have mentioned the Head of the Lake, its farming and natural charms, to her nephew in England. Fenn beat the Masons to the Paradise area but the Masons quickly made it their place, too, building a fine homestead in the first year, with rooms for guests. There was a smoking room near the front of the house for the gentlemen, a sitting room opposite and a little room farther in that served as a post office, complete with its own Paradise postage stamp. In the entrance hallway were two glass cases containing mounted specimens of rare New Zealand birds, a kākāpō and a crested grebe.

  The Masons soon established the property as a farm, introducing sheep, cattle, pigs, poultry and crops of oats and barley. They called their bucolic bolt-hole Eden Grove, after William’s first home in Auckland. Conveniently, the name was a play on the Paradise theme. William Mason, born in England, achieved eminence as an architect after emigrating to New Zealand, a brand-new colony, from New South Wales in 1840.

  At Paradise, his hiring of David and Jane Aitken as farm assistants boosted the guest-house reputation of the place. The Aitkens became lessees in 1891 then outright owners of the property in 1893, changing the name to Paradise House. For the next forty years they established it as a landmark of hospitality. Visitors came from far and wide. They took the steamer to Glenorchy and horse-drawn buggy up the road to the Rees Valley, across the chilly and not-always-safe river and on to the forest by Diamond Lake, where they passed through Heaven’s Gate. At Paradise House, Jane Aitken might welcome visitors, depending on the time of day, with home-grown raspberries and Devonshire cream (which she made by setting pans of milk in a warm oven overnight), or hot scones with jam made from red currants, black currants or gooseberries, again all from the garden. Espaliered pear and apple trees bordered the pathway to the front door, and around the garden were drifts of columbines, lilies and pansies. Paradise had its own little school (now in use as a holiday hut), and a scheelite mine around the corner.

  Guests came for the scenery and wildlife in this proverbial back of beyond. A stirring dawn chorus would be filled with the voices of many birds — the trilling sweet song of flocking yellowheads or mohua, which the British settlers called bush canaries; melodies from tūī and bellbird, the liquid calls and screeches of the forest parrot, kākā, and the undulating, wistful song, in a minor key, of the ‘rain bird’, the grey warbler or riroriro.

  Perhaps, too, a guest with an uncommon interest in birdlife might recognise the ‘bong’ call of the South Island kōkako, the orange-wattled crow, and arrive at the breakfast table with terribly exciting news — how rare it was, the guest might say, to hear a
native crow in southern districts; rarer still to see one. Of all the song birds of the New Zealand forest, the South Island kōkako was considered the most secretive. Predominantly lilac-grey, with conspicuous orange, fleshy lobes or wattles appended at the base of the beak on each side of the gape, it is more like the Australian apostlebird than a crow, and close to the dimensions of a magpie, although not as heavy. A black mask across the kōkako’s face spans the eyes above the bill. It could be the avian equivalent of a ‘Venetian’ mask, such is the mystery and intrigue surrounding the bird today. The Austrian naturalist and collector, Andreas Reischek, who spent several months in Fiordland in the 1880s, called it ‘a master of hiding’.

  Across the Main Divide, in South Westland, a kōkako population almost certainly lurked when Paradise House and Arcadia were in their heyday. The Head of the Lake, the forested arc from the Greenstone Valley around to the Rees, was an eastern frontier for the bird, with large tracts of forest giving way to tussock rangeland east of here, where the weak-flighted kōkako could not go.

  Art, however, might have engrossed visitors to Paradise more than ornithology. Some guests were well-known painters, among them the Auckland-based landscape specialist, Charles Blomfield, who wrote about the coach ride from Glenorchy: ‘… caught in a thunderstorm, made for a house in the distance’. This was Paradise House, which he found to be ‘furnished with grace and comfort’. The Masons imported walnut veneer furniture from England for the house in the wilds. Some photographers brought cumbersome glass-plate cameras, housed in large wooden boxes with black skirts attached, to capture the scenery, and writers kept journals that might one day form the basis of a novel.