Countryside Wanderings 1911...1979

Press, 27 December 1979, Page 8

Countryside Wanderings 1911...1979

John Wil son’s second stop in the footsteps of “Countryside Wander-

ings, 1911” is the

MACKENZIE

COUNTRY:

The account of the Mackenzie Country written in 1911 began, like countless later accounts, with the story of the man “whose ideas of ‘meum et tuum’ (mine and yours) were, to say the least of it, unorthodox.” What made the 1911 account Of Mackenzie’s exploits different from any that a reporter of today could write was that in 1911 one of McKenzie’s captors, Sergeant E. W. Seager, was “now retired into private life in Christchurch” and could give the reporter a first-hand account of finding McKenzie in a shanty in Lyttelton and of locking the landlady in a room because there was likely to be a “scrimmage.” He also told the reporter, from his own experience, about McKenzie’s sobbing in court when his dog was produced and about McKenzie being recaptured after escaping from the Lyttelton jail by the Rapaki Maoris, who brought him in (for money, Seager claimed) trussed like a

fowl and lashed to a pole with flax. By the early years of this century the basic shift in Canterbury farming was already far advanced — the great pastoral runs had long given way to the smaller farms of the agricultural settler. The Mackenzie Country was already notable as the great remaining stronghold of old pastoral Canterbury.

*‘While the lower levels,” the reporter of 1911 wrote, “have been annexed by a superior industrial force bearing the plough as their standard,” the hills remained to the original selectors of the runs and their succes, sors.

The point was important enough to make again, later in the article: “The keeper of the sheep has withstood the tiller of the earth,” he wrote, “only where his feet have been planted on the everlasting hills.”

Within the bounds of the Mackenzie County there were areas on the fringes which had only

recently seen the break-up of the great pastoral runs. In the downlands below Burke’s Pass and the lower hill country were the recent Government settlements of Three Springs, Punaroa, Albury, Rosewill, and Chamberlain. There, where the merino had grazed, the reporter of 1911 found the Half-breeds and cross-breeds rearing their lambs; and he watched the reaper and binders at work on crops of wheat in the more favoured spots, and on oats elsewhere. Albury, in that year, was a “thriving town” with a population of 200, three churches, and the inevitable hotel.

Seventy years later, the Mackenzie Country would present a strange paradox to the visitor from 1911. Out of the sight of power lines, dams, powerhouses, and construction towns, it would not look very different. The region is still farmed, much as it was when land in Canterbury was first taken up.

Now, as in 1911, the classification of the Mackenzie Country, from a farming point of view, is a comparatively straightforward matter — “almost purely pastoral” — and the prospect of a vast expanse of hummocky and morainic, stony plain,

backed by high rugged country, and grazed by the merinos and Halfbreds whose hardy constitutions and foraging abilities suited the country perfectly, has changed little. What would surprise the visitor from 1911 would be that an area which, over most of its expanse, has seen less change from the earliest days of the province than any other part of Canterbury, has also seen bigger changes than anywhere else with the construction of the enormous power schemes that are only now being brought to completion.

Twizei, indeed, is surprise enough to visitors from much more recent times who remember the open tussock plain where there is now (if not forever) a town of 6000 people. The only hint that the reporter of 1911 might have anticipated these grandiose changes in the fugure of the Mackenzie Country is a remark about the region having “an intricate and colossal system of rivers and lakes.’’"

In 1911, the reporter remarked on a climatic change which has continued until present times. Among the many things the first occupiers of the hill runs had had to contend with, he noted, (be-

sides the "rabbit menace"), was weather colder than it had become by 1911. There were, however. still plenty of “old residents” about who could tell stirring tales of the great snow storms, of snow to the roof level, of nightmare rides to get the mails through, and of tracking to get sheep out.

The last of the great snowfalls, the reporter recalled. when the plains had become a ‘‘vast, white sheet,” had been in 1904, That a milder trend did set in in the early years of this century is confirmed by the behaviour of the glaciers in the mountains at the head of the Mackenzie Country. In 1911, the Mackenzie County, as an independent administrative unit, was still young enough for its first chairman still to be living just outside Fairlie. As the Mount Cook Road District, it had broken away from the Geraldine County in 1883, so that today the child, in its name at least, has outlived the parent. The first headquarters of the Mackenzie County after its “secession” had been Burkes Pass. There, in its “balmy and immature days,” the council had built a palatial office which was, by 1911, “very much of a white elephant” because the “capital” of

the county had since been shifted to Fairlie on the upper Opihi. Fairlie, in 1911, was a rapidly growing town, with a population of about 600 when rhe population of the whole county W’as about 2000. The town boasted in 1911 lodge halls, three churches, two hotels, a domain and athletic grounds, a railway station, and the headquarters of the motor service to the Hermitage, It was illuminated by an acetylene gas plant. All this was considered remarkable for "a place that a few years ago contained only one small accommodation house." The momentum of Fairlie's growth has slowed somewhat from the burst it enjoyed in the two decades each side of the new century. Its population today is only a few hundred more than it was in 1911. It has lost its railway station but gained a horse-drawn vehicle museum. It still has its three churches. school, post office, and hall. Like many other country towns which have neithes declined nor grown beyond recognition. Fairlie today would probably, like the greater part of the Mackenzie Country, seem not unfamiliar to the reporter who visited them in 1911.