“Not all pay dirt and history”

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32702, 3 September 1971, Page 9

“Not all pay dirt and history”

The first white visitors to the West Coast were not impressed. They found fewer than a hundred Maoris living there; its main attraction was as the sole source of greenstone, a type of jade invaluable to a Stone Age people and still the Coast's most wanted souvenir. Thomas Brunner, on a lonely 550day journey as far south as the glaciers (which he missed seeing), begun in 1846, had to eat his dog to escape starvation. The general opinion was that the country was unsuitable for sheep and so of no interest.

Gold changed all that. In the three years after 1864 the population of the coast climbed to 30,000; towns, tracks and tramways appeared like magic; Hokitika became the busiest (and most risky) port in the colony; and annual gold exports averaged over half a million ounces.

Those were great days, and the Coasters have never forgotten them, or the long years of industrial mining that followed. They can still show you the

sites of ghost towns among the blackberry, rusting iron that once stamped to the tread of quartz batteries, trails of patterned tailings left by the dredges, hillsides gnawed by the giant nozzles of the hydraulickers. But the-Coast Is not all paydirt and history. People have been going there for pleasure as well as profit since the times when they had to chance the barbound river-ports in tiny steamers; ride Cobb’s coaches over the scary trans-alpine road from Canterbury; or endure vintage car-sickness round the dusty bends of the Buller Gorge from Nelson. The opening of the fivemile Otira rail tunnel in 1918 was a help but the breakthrough really came in 1965, when the Haast Pass road in the south was finished after 30 years in the making. This ended the need for back-tracking—a manoeuvre traditionally abhorrent to travellers—moved the celebrated lakes and fiords of Otago-South-land to within short distance of the celebrated glaciers of South Westland, and opened a scenery circuit that brought a dreamy look to the eyes of travel, agents.