OUR "MYSTERY LAND."

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 94, 21 April 1928, Page 1 (Supplement)

OUR "MYSTERY LAND."

MAPPING THE FIORD COUNTRY.

SURVEYS FROM THE AIR. WHAT MAY BE REVEALED. (By TANGIWAL) A year or more back a suggestion that aeroplanes should be used for a reconnaissance and complete surveys of the great Southern Fiordland region was supported in the colums of the "Star." Now the news comes thai the Government has taken the idea favourably, and that a start is to be made with an aerial survey of Lake Manapouri and the mountain country between its shores] and the West Coast. The use of aircraft for survey is now so well established in other countries that it is fully time New Zealand adopted this means of exploration in our one imperfectly known large area of forest, mountain, lako and canyon.

A great deal of careful work has been done by explorers and surveyors in the Fiordland National Park, that huge territory that extends from Milford Sound and the head of Lake Wakatipu southward for a hundred miles. Much of this work has been pat blinding, the search for convenient routes between the great lakes and the sounds. Parts of the rugged region around Lake Manapouri are well known to surveyors and sportsmen, and there is a rough foot route from the head of the lake to the head of Doubtful Sound. There is a rougher route from Lake Te Anau to the head of George Sound, and there is the famous walking track from the north end of Te Anau to Milford Sound, besides some tracks from the head of Wakatipu. But for all else; Fiordland's interior is unknown to the ordinary traveller, and there are many areas which a surveyor has never seen, because of their savage inaccessibility. Very few of the peaks have been scaled; there are innumerable ranges and valleys still to be traversed. A seaplane probably will be found the most suitable craft for the new exploration, because of the many lakes and the difficulty of finding clear landing-places on the ranges. In fact, it would probably be found impossible to land anywhere on the ground between the great lakes and the coast fiords.

A study of the Fiordland map impresses one with the need for a complete survey of the country between Dusky and Doubtful Sounds and Manapouri; the vastly-broken territory between Te Anau and the coast, and especially of the area sea-bounded by Milford Sound on the north and George Sound on the South, and extending inland thence to the Clinton Valley through which the present route goes from Te Anau's head to the wild country about McKinnon's Pass. This is the mystery-land of New Zealand. Numerous explorers have trudged its densely forested gullies, forded its swift rivers, and climbed its minor ranges. But the great precipitous peaks, hundreds of them, remain untrodden, and there are canyons and streams that no human eye has yet beheld. Wonderful scenes may be revealed; strange valleys hemmed in by the unclimable granite heights, sighted only from a distance by the path-finding pioneers. The areas are not large by comparison with those of other unexplored lands; the obstacle is the tremendously formidable character of the country. J

Fiordland is not likely to hold any secrets in the form of strange animals or birds. The early-days romantic belief in the existence of the "Lost Tribe," a fugitive section of the Ngati-Mamoe, in the country between Te Atih.ii and the coast was quite well founded. It was established as a fact that a remnant of this harried clan of the mists inhabited the secluded shores south of Milford, up to within the memory of old Maori sealhunters whom I met in Southland. Nowadays our interest lies in the possibility of discovering new and wonderful landscape features, perhaps waterfalls greater than even the Sutherland Falls. It may be hoped that in soine of these deep-hidden forest valleys the native bird life .will be abundant, undisturbed by predatory alien creatures. That rare bird the takahea, the Notornis of scientists, a large blue turkey in appearance, may still be found surviving in some secret solitude. But the probabilities are that scarcely any part of Fiordland remains free from those horrible birdmurdering creatures introduced by the misguided white man, the stoat and the weasel.