Nelson — a city of many sunny faces

Press, 23 February 1978, Page 23

Nelson — a city of many sunny faces

It is hard to say exactly what it is that endears Nelson so surely to visitors. But a glance at its geography, and at its shop window, can help. Nature favours Nelson. A series of lofty bush ranges tempers the occasionally boisterous moods of a westerly maritime climate. In the north the great kiwi beak of Fare-

well Spit extends its grip upon Golden Bay.

Nelson shares with Marlborough, its neighbour in the so-called “Sunshine Belt,” a wealth of sunny hours, an excusable source of pride. Nelson lives, and lives well, by its topsoils. From a relatively small area devoted to agriculture comes eloquent proof of its happy situation — apples and pears for export by the millions of cases, lush berries and stone fruit, all New Zealand’s hops and tobacco.

Add to that forest products, chiefly of the alien pipe, radiata, which thrives more abundantly on- some of the poorer Nelson soils than ever it did back home in old Monterey.

Born in the days of early colonisation, Nelson takes modest pride in its pedigree. Besides honouring the name of England’s sailor-hero, it commemorates his victories, ships, and captains in its parks and streets, and most recently in a big indoor Trafalgar Centre.

Into the sheltered waters of Golden Bay in 1642 sailed two little ships of the Dutch East India Company.

But if Abel Tasman had high hopes of the “large.

high-lying land” he had sighted earlier off the west coast it proved a tragic introduction to the Staten Landt of his discovery. Several of his crewmen died in a clash with Maoris who came off in canoes to inspect the intruders’ strange craft.

Nearly 200 years passed before expedition ships of the New Zealand Company, under Captain Arthur Wakefield, arrived to establish its first South Island colony. From this viable ' Old Country seed grew Nelson, its spiritual heart the eminence upon which today Nelson Cathedral (pictured exerts dominance.

Nelson’s elevation to city status was not achieved on the basis of its population but by royal ordination of Queen Victoria in 1858 that Nelson be a Bishop’s See and the small town constituted a city by letters patent. Rural Nelson has many faces. There is Richmond out on the patchwork of the Waimea Plains, itself a pioneer transplant of Old England, today among the fastest growing boroughs in the iand.

Skirt Tasman Bay to Motueka, heart of Nelson’s garden, and its fertile riverland; and other faces appear. Gleaming apples

’limpsed in well-tended orchards. Or hustling with controlled speed through sophisticated packhouses.

There are distinctive rectangles of poles, twine, and wire — the hop gardens, with their profusion of miniature Chinese lanterns dancing on slender bines. The regular patterns of the tobacco plants, growing strongly within the predictable span of frost-tree days and nights.

Of course, it is not what Nelson has to sell that brings year-round visitors and fills the numerous camping grounds all summer. They are seeking what it has to give. Ask a knowledgeable tourist to put a name to this and the chances are it will begin with S, for sea, sand, sunshine and serenity are to be found here in a wide variety of natural settings. For many, the shores of Tasman Bay are enough. The excellent bathing beach of Tahunanui lies within city limits — not that it is far to the expanse of Rabbit Island’s beach with its pine forest glades behind the dunes, or to Kaiteriteri’s vivid colourings. Others find what they are seeking beyond the marble-topped range, in Golden Bay. with its flair for the unusual — its

!u m b o-size freshwater spring, labyrinthian limestone caves, tame eels with table manners; and mile after mile of beaches, like that at Pohara with its sculpturesque intrusions of weathered rock. Along the western seaboard of Tasman Bay is the Abel Tasman National Park where, through splendid isolation, pockets of primeval New Zealand can have changed little since the summer of 1827 when the French navigator Dumont d’Urville delighted in the green wilderness after a turbulent Tasman crossing and encountered his “excessively familiar” bush robin. Another national park, the 57 ha Nelson Lakes, lies in the mountainous south-east. Here survives the evergreen beech forest that once covered most of the district. Within the park bounds. Lake Rotoiti, placid mother of the vigorous Buller River, and Lake Rotoroa mirror the high screes and snowtops of the Spenser Range, a magestic region in whose bushland creeks linger memories of the legendary prospector Georse Fairweather Moonlight and countless others of the restless fraternity that passed this way in the golden era of last century.