Barrytown pub — forum for past and future

Press, 12 August 1989, Page 24

Barrytown pub — forum for past and future

NANCY CAWLEY

checks out a renovated Westland pub, a traditional community focal point, and hears anecdotes of the district’s history and its personalities

WHEN THE,ALL NATIONS Tavern at Barrytown, 27km north of Greymouth, was taken over by enterprising new owners a year ago, district residents and travellers heaved a sigh of relief.

West Coast hotels have always been important focal points for communal conviviality, and their lack can be keenly felt, especially in isolated areas. Jillene and Martin Faherty have upgraded the historic All Nations roadside pub which has had a change of proprietors, on average, every three years. “It’s about time,” was the comment from a patron about the new look during the rowdy openingnight celebrations on Saturday, May 1, last year. Like many of today's small Westland settlements, Barrytown began as a gold-mining town, in its hey-day boasting II hotels and a population of 2000. (There were shops and a school, but pubs and people are what seems to matter in most gold-mining statistics). Early names for the town were Seventeen Mile, Fosberry and Barryville. Today, the road between Greymouth and Punakaiki, and further north to Westport takes a roller-coaster route along a shore-line of savage beauty, contained on one side by the steep bush slopes of the Paparoa Range, and on the other by flaxclumpy crescent beaches and half-hidden cottages. Off-shore, rocky islands float, laced with spray. Twenty-seven kilometres north of Greymouth, the road tops a headland, before dropping down on to the 16-kilometre Barrytown Flats. Few early diggers would have bothered to notice the beauty around them, as they swagged in over pack-tracks and along the beaches. Other matters occupied their minds. In 1866, a strike of fine gold in the coastal sands of the Barrytown beach attracted only a small number of miners. But discovery of richer deposits in 1879, along the foot of the mountains, started a rush. An 1880 report on the Barrytown diggings, in the Appendices to the Journal of the House of Representatives, read, “The wash-dirt is not deep, but narrow and rich... recently four men obtained by 16 days labour 248 oz. 2dwt. 4gr. out of a space about 6 feet square.” Life for the men was expensive as well as energetic. The appendices note, “... the population has continued to steadily Increase, notwithstanding the difficulties of transit of goods, and that all articles required for building (except timber) and all the necessities of life (except meat) have to be carried on pack-horses at a cost of 2d. per pound.” A track to link Barrytown with the Grey Valley diggings was established in 1883. (This was the Croesus Track, now a popular tramping route over the Paparoas, which goes into the bush directly opposite the Barrytown hotel). Towards the end of the century, when the diggers had worked out the richer ground, commercial dredges took over, screening the whole of the flats. There was a resurgence of interest in the Barrytown goldfields in the 1930 s Depression, but by 1948 it was all over. Although a recent tourist publication on Westland points out that, “Most of these tailings are now under farmland and little trace remains of the mining town,” a vestige of that old goldfever lingers on today, in the nine or so private claims along the black sands of the Barrytown Beach. The first All Nations Hotel was

built on the site of the present one in 1879. Mine host was Thomas Burns, a veteran of the Crimean War. Not only the name of the hotel, but also the names of the many private gold claims, underlined the international flavour of the small settlement — Scotchman’s, Tipperary, Von Moltke, Parnell, Geordie’s, Inverness. After the first hotel was burnt down, the existing one was built in 1927. It is only four or five years ago, according to a district prospector and cottage-owner Lindsay Mathias, that the ruins of another hotel, down by the beach, were swept away by the sea. It was a relic, he surmises, of the days when much of the coastal route lay along the beaches. The new young proprietors of the All Nations Tavern have had the help of experts in their repairs and refurbishing. Jillene’s parents, Jean and Damian Briggs, are seasoned Greymouth hotel-owners now living 200 metres down the road on a hobby farm. Jean Briggs is everywhere at once, but mainly surpervises operations in the kitchen. Her husband is manager of Westfleet Fishermen’s Co-operative in Greymouth, and among other things ensures there is a good choice of sea food in the 40-seat hotel restaurant. Outwardly the building is freshly painted and sports a new sign; otherwise, it is little changed. The big changes have happened inside. Four small rooms have been knocked into one to form the bar, and a new bar-counter of diagonal rimu has been crafted by Bruce Knight, of Punakaiki. ■ - ■ Accommodation in the hotel, as well as the motel rooms at the back, have had a facelift. The family of four and their staff have worked hard to upgrade the pub. Jean Briggs gives much of the credit to her daughter and son-in-law. "They’re a couple of goers,” she says. West Coasters have always been strong on home-grown entertainment, especially when they can mix bands and beer. So Barrytown hotel patrons have lately enjoyed everything from an American blues group, the Ebling Brothers, to the Greymouth group, Country River. "New Year’s Eve was a big night,” says Martin Faherty. “Five deep at the bar... all the doors open it was such a summery night, and the outside tables full.” There are regular visitors — “mystery” bus tours from Grey-

mouth, and by groups such as the Westport Darts Team and Runanga-Dunollie Women’s Pool Team. But numbers are never predictable. “On a recent week-end,” says Jillene Faherty, “32 motorcyclists arrived at the same time as 20 trampers off the track (the Croesus).” (Walkers on the eighthour trip over the Paparoas, now have the option of being flown back to their cars by Barrytown helicopter pilot, Chris Cowan). Saturday is traditionally kneesup night at the All Nations Tavern. “We’ve had a few fights,

but nothing we couldn’t handle, usually, one punch and it’s all over,” Jillene says. When she is running the bar, local patrons help quell any disturbances. “It’s their pub, and they like to look after it...” * • » Seventy-one-year-old Lindsay Mathias is modest about his reputation as a local historian. "I don’t know much about early Barrytown, I’ve only been here since 1922,” he says with a twinkle in his eye. In that year his mother died in Geraldine, and his father took four-year-old Lindsay, with his

brother and sister to live at Punakaiki. There Herbert Mathias set up the Punakaiki Motor Service. “My father pioneered motor transport in that part of the Coast. In 1924, he started a daily run from Punakaiki to Greymouth in an old Model T Ford truck, carting the cream from 25 farms into Greymouth and bringing back the mail.” He laughed at a report he saw recently, that the first servicecar trip from Westport to Greymouth in 1930, was “unaided.” He knows better. He and his

brother, Vincent, towed it through the Punakaiki River with Duke the draught horse. Lindsay was 12, and his brother 14. Young Lindsay often travelled on the mail-run with his father, and remembers spending their first night in Westland at the Barrytown hotel, where Mrs Dunn, part-owner with her husband, “made a great fuss” of the motherless children. In those days there was a store (Ryall’s), a post office, and a butcher shop. “Also,” says Lindsay. “opposite the pub were the remains of two old buildings — one had been a smithy shop, the other a bakehouse.” When he was 17 years old, Lindsay left the family home at Punakaiki to work on the gold tables of two Barrytown gold dredges — White’s Electric and the Barrytown Dredge. In 1937, an accident put him in the Grey Hospital for several months. “The wire rope that took the weight of the dredge broke and hit me across the back.” The only “compo” was a month’s wages, and when he returned he was given lighter work in the assay shop, retorting and smelting the gold. Gold prices were booming, but only the bosses benefited. Wages stayed the same for the 15 or so workers on each dredge. In one year Lindsay smelted 8600 ounces of gold, but continued to receive 21 shillings and eight pence per day. “This was the same as a winch-man who was in charge of the shifts. Labourers, the matmen and greasers, got 18 shillings and eight pence per day,” he says. All workers provided their own clothing, wet-weather gear and gumboots. His board at the Barrytown hotel cost Lindsay 35 shillings a week. “We considered ourselves lucky to have a job,” he says, “although it didn’t suit everybody...” But life wasn’t all work, Lindsay remembers. “Every small settlement had their own annual sports meetings — Blackball, Ngahere, Charleston... and of course, Barrytown. My specialities were the 100-yard run and the high-jump. I even won a few prizes. The main events were chopping, sawing and naildriving ... it was a real red-letter day for everyone.” Lindsay Mathias celebrated his twenty-first birthday at the Barrytown hotel in 1939. He doesn’t remember too much about it. “Just a good hooley, you know. The hotel was full, and Amelia O’Brien played the piano in the back-bar parlour.” In the same year, he bought

himmself a new Vauxhall Ten motor-car, from Jimmy Haines Motors in Greymouth, with £295 given him by his grandmother. Perhaps Lindsay Mathias has inherited a passion for motorcars from his pioneering father. In the garage of his present home, at Lincoln, near Christchurch, there is a 1976 Rolls Royce in pristine condition. “The last of the Silver Shadows widetrack,” he says with reverence. These days, Lindsay and his wife, Gladys, get over to the Barrytown bach every month or so. He doesn’t worry too much about working his claim. “I get just as much pleasure from walking up and down the beach looking for a piece of greenstone And there are several old friends he must make time to yarn with. Then he makes his regular, macabre joke. “But most of my friends don’t talk to me any more — they’re six foot under.” • * * Barrytown is notable not only

for a gold-mining past and a first-rate pub. Two other things have put it on the map — black petrels and ilmenite. Every southern winter, for an estimated 150,000 years, swarms of Procellaria westlandlca (the Westland black petrel) have been breeding in one place in the world — the foothills above the Barrytown Flats,, feeding at sea during the day, and darkening the sky as they fly in each evening. “You’re missing something special if you don’’t see it,” says Lindsay Mathias. “Every evening at dusk, the sky is full of them... funny-lboking birds. They come crashing in with a great swishing noise of wings, quite low.” The seabirds nest in burrows, and until 1946 were thought to be muttonbirds. Sandy Bartie, of the National Museum in Wellington, has been studying them since 1969. he says the Westland petrel belongs to an ancient group of seabirds, “so well modified for life at sea, that they need come ashore only to breed.” He also points out that “the Westland black petrel has survived because it is big enough (wing-span 1.4 m, weight I.2kg) and savage enough to defend itself.” But in the pre-conserva-tion days of Lindsay’s youth, the birds were considered “nice eating,” he says. Part of the petrel colony is on land owned by Fletcher Titanium Products, Ltd, a Fletcher Challenge subsidary. They bought the land some years ago to mine for ilmenite on the well-endowed Barrytown Flats. (Ilmenite sand is used in the production of titanium dioxide). Recently, however, Fletchers decided to quit the operation, and the land is now on the market