by Bruce Ansley
The church is the loftiest in the land: that is, it stands at the highest altitude. Churchgoers elsewhere raise their eyes to heaven from much lower levels. Altitude being one prime aspect of godliness, I determined to reach this minster.
My first attempt failed. I set out from Outram in the dawn mist of an early December day, taking the road that runs through country looking from above like the creased grey matter of a human brain. The road goes to Middlemarch then to the Maniototo. At the old, pink Clarks Junction Hotel, I turned left and headed for the Old Dunstan Road.
It was built by gold miners. They had no time to waste. They were in a gold rush. Two miners from California, Horatio Hartley and Christopher Reilly, had struck gold near what is now Clyde, in an area called the Dunstan in Central Otago. Fabulous quantities of the precious metal lay there for the taking, and 40,000 gold miners rushed in. They wanted the most direct route between Dunedin and the Dunstan goldfields. In the summer of 1862–63 they followed a faint dray track from Clarks Junction, found a place on the Rock and Pillar Range to cross into the Taieri River valley above Patearoa, then headed for Rough Ridge on the other side. Rock and Pillar? Rough Ridge? These men didn’t muck around. They called the country as they saw it, although they showed a little style with the Serpentine.
They carved a road crossing four mountain ranges. It was sometimes called the Mountain Track. The route was so tough it took five days to traverse its forty-six kilometres, if the weather was good. Much of it was covered by snow and ice in winter, when it became dangerous and desperate and often impassable. Some of those early miners simply disappeared, snap-frozen somewhere in the rocks.
The track was used for only a few years before a route from Palmerston through the Maniototo became the main road. Miners called the new road the Pigroot, the name it carries to this day. Its only explanation comes from A.W. Reed’s Place Names of New Zealand, which reports an incident during John Turnbull Thomson’s survey of the area (Thomson also named the Dunstan). Wild pigs were so common that Thomson watched a huge boar approach and rub noses with his horse.
The Pigroot was longer, but easier. The Old Dunstan Road became much less used but, surprisingly, it survived the next century and a half.
Today the drive over the Old Dunstan Road isn’t as long as it used to be, but it still takes a few hours in a tough vehicle. The track is as raw, the rocks as hard, the mountains as high — and the weather just as vicious. The road is still closed in winter.
Those early miners would have no trouble finding their way, even now. The country they traversed remains pretty much unchanged.
The road is a registered historic place. It was recognised by Heritage New Zealand ‘by virtue of its historic importance and association with the very early days of Central Otago gold mining, its rarity as one of the country’s oldest extant roads, and its length, which is far in excess of any other recognised heritage road in the country’.
The local guidebook told me that I would ‘experience solitude and beauty on this desolate but ethereal route’. Solitude, beauty, desolation, yes, but ethereal? Mmm.
Rocks, and pillars, and temples and statues and stacks adorn the landscape: no one lives outside the valleys. It comes to life once a year when a cavalcade of horses, wagons and people on foot retrace the miners’ track. Otherwise it is far too cold, too windy, too lonely, too remote. Big mountain hares lope between the rocks.
I bumped and ground across this unyielding land until I descended into the wide green Upper Maniototo Valley of the upper Taieri and travelled past the old stone Styx Hotel, once an overnight coach stop. A gaol house beside it was used for storing gold, and stables still stand alongside.
In this green settled country my brother once worked on a farm. He lived in a stone house that soon made you forget quaint notions of charm: its most outstanding feature was an ambient temperature that would have even a hardy Dunstan goldminer reaching for his blanket.
The Dunstan Road climbs back into character on the other side of the valley. My map showed two routes to the Serpentine: one was the Old Dunstan Road, the other a track that took a more direct line to the old goldmining town. Both climbed Rough Ridge.
One of them followed Waimonga Creek. The creek wound in such a way that the miners decided a better name for their settlement would be Serpentine. Besides, they were not much given to Maori names. Maori may have passed through this place, but they left no sign. Archaeologists have found moa-hunters’ sites a little further south, but they seem to have given the Serpentine a miss, probably wisely. That was the way I wanted to go, and I was searching for the way into it when a local farmer bent a steely eye on my rented Toyota Surf. I wasn’t going to make it in that, he said.
Well, I quite liked the truck. It felt rough and ready, compared with my more urban Subaru Outback.
‘Nope,’ the farmer said. ‘Take the Old Dunstan Road.’ That wasn’t too good either, but if I turned off at the top and headed for the Serpentine by that route, I might make it. He surveyed my truck again and rubbed his chin in a doubtful sort of way. Authorities here recommend that if you’re fool enough to try for the Serpentine, a much rougher route than the Old Dunstan Trail, you should travel in convoy with another vehicle. Passengers would be good too. If you got stuck, somebody would need to get out and push. I was a bloke on his own, in a townie tractor, and the farmer wasn’t keen on any part of it.
Rough Ridge was certainly rough. The rocks were sharp and numerous. The road curled through them and, as often, over them. The truck bounced and grizzled. I bounced and grizzled.
An intersection lay at the top. Not the kind of intersection townies are used to, where two roads cross and conduct traffic in an orderly fashion. It didn’t even seem like the top, more a flattish sort of place which might go back downhill, eventually. A pub called the Black Ball Hotel once stood there, but it was long gone and you had to guess this was the right place to turn, open a gate, and head along a track grandly called the Long Valley Ridge Road. It didn’t look like a road, more a confusion of ruts. It didn’t really seem like a ridge either, just another bump in a ridgy landscape.
Long Valley Ridge Road soon came clean. Yes, it was not so much a road, it announced, as a track. Well, not so much a track as grooves in the ground, where the ground could find a place for them between rocks.
The round trip was some twenty-five kilometres from the Black Ball Hotel site. I ground along it, kilometre after kilometre, through tussock and spaniard. The road is covered in snow in the winter, and even in spring patches of snow still lay around. I was headed for sites said to be rich in gold-mining history. The remnants of the old Serpentine village, mine shafts, stamping battery, water wheel and ruins were reputed to lie around.
I missed them all, only partly because I was never still enough to see anything clearly. Eventually, I stopped. Did I imagine I saw the church far ahead? Oh, the hell with this heavenly pursuit. I felt lonely. Did the AA come this far? If something went wrong, it might be a very long time before anyone came along. I’d be frozen solid: they’d have to chip me out of the driver’s seat.
I turned the truck around, with difficulty because the difference between being on the track and off it was that while the track was rocky and rutted, the ground beside it made up for its lack of ruts with many more rocks. And that was that.
But the church preyed on my mind. Why go to all that trouble, all that distance, and give up? So here I am, a couple of years later, having another crack at it.
I hire a Toyota Hilux. It is more brutal than the previous Surf, but also more refined. It gives out a kind of purring growly chatter. I don’t get into its black-leather interior, I ascend. I am truly king of the road! I look down on other cars. Oh, confined creatures of tarmac, out of my way! For I am now lord of the back roads, the Toad of the South:
All those wasted years that lie behind me, I never knew, never even dreamt! But now — but now that I know, now that I fully realise! O what a flowery track lies spread before me
, henceforth! What dust-clouds shall spring up behind me as I speed on my reckless way!
Perhaps not so much reckless as fifty kilometres per hour for a start, and not so many dust-clouds in those refined reaches of the South. I am in a truck once driven (by Jeremy Clarkson, but nevertheless) to the North Pole. The Serpentine should be a pushover. Poop poop!
This time I go in from the other end, past the old Moa Creek Hotel. Nor am I alone. My wife Sally is in the passenger’s seat. Of course, this may mean only that two of us might need to be rescued rather than one. But it feels better.
Moa Creek was a village once, sheltering in its little valley under the Raggedy Range. The old school closed down in 1991, but the teacher’s house is still there, and the old grocery store. Everything here is prefixed by the word ‘old’.
Moa Creek once stood a day’s travel away from Alexandra, and from the other direction it must have been a wonderful sight for diggers nearing the end of their long trek over the Dunstan trail. An advertisement in the Dunstan Times proclaimed the hotel a ‘popular and well-appointed house’ offering superior accommodation to travellers; also, ‘A new and commodious hall to let for meetings, pictures, socials etc.’
I stop at a farm to ask directions. The farmer is civil but distant. I call it the Old Dunstan Road. He corrects me. ‘Track.’ Perhaps he is thinking about something that happened many years before, for this is a small place, where stories about strangers never go away.
They still talk about one of New Zealand’s most mysterious unsolved murders here. William Peter McIntosh, aged sixty-two, was found dead in his woolshed at Moa Creek on 28 September 1949. He’d gone out to work on his farm, telling his wife he’d be back mid-afternoon to listen to the rugby on the radio. He never returned. A search party found his body that night. He had been bashed to death, probably with an axe. Suspicion centred on a stranger who’d called at the McIntosh house to ask directions and then disappeared. The murderer was never found.
At the old Moa Creek Hotel two women are sitting on the veranda in the sun, sipping from mugs. For one brief, delighted moment I imagine the pub might once more be open for business and I pull alongside. No, they say, just catching up, having a chat. Oh well.
I leave the green valley and take to the tawny track.
The Dunstan Trail with its warning signs ends, or begins, not far from the pub. It runs past the Poolburn Reservoir, a rather dull name for a lake with inlets and islands and points and peninsulas. Peter Jackson loved it.
The Poolburn Dam was built by Depression labour and finished in 1931. The plan was both to irrigate the Ida Valley, the valley running beside the Raggedy Range where Moa Creek sits, and to give jobs to some of the men thrown out of work by the Depression. Work started late in 1929 and finished in 1931: even by today’s standards a nippy project, especially for men with picks and shovels. Seven of them were hurt, some badly, when scaffolding collapsed. One man died in a fall. Apart from that, their main problem was the cold. The winter snow was bad enough, but the wind brawls through here with cudgels. Yet the result, unusually for an irrigation project, was a thing of beauty. A lake formed behind the new dam, its archipelagos making it intricate and mysterious.
Once, five hotels lined the road here. The one most often remembered is the Drunken Woman Inn. The pubs have all gone now, but the Drunken Woman lives on: a bay on the reservoir is named after it.
A new civilisation has grown up around the lake edge. Baches sit on flats among the rocks and tussock, or wedged into the rocky towers. They are highly individual, eccentric even, but they have one common feature: they’re very pretty. Jackson thought so too. He used some of them for the Rohan Village in Lord of the Rings.
Most of them are well kept, but there are a few doer-uppers. I head for one of them, almost hidden behind sculpted rock. Why, some new weatherboards there, fix that window here, maybe a porch . . . I can feel the hammer in my soul, see myself sitting on the new deck looking over the water to those superb ranges beyond.
Alas. The authorities know a thing or two about blokes with ladders. Signs forbid resurrecting old baches. A few years previously an Aucklander was so entranced by the serenity of the place that he proposed improving it with a subdivision. He wanted to carve up 902 hectares for houses. Hundreds opposed the plan. So did the Central Otago District Council. A hearing was scheduled, but just before it began the budding developer withdrew his application. Tranquillity again descended.
I stop at a handsome hut where a couple of utes and a car are parked. A man is outside, putting away fishing gear. He hasn’t had a good day. In fact, he says, he isn’t much of a fisherman but — an arm curves over the still water, the tussock, the last of the snow on the tops — who cares?
Trout, rainbow and brown, have been released into the reservoir, but they fish for only brown trout now: the last rainbow has faded into history. When the weather warms up the fish rise too, but this is early spring and it’s cold. The men inside the bach don’t care much. It’s only the second day of the season and they’ve caught a few but no keepers, yet. They’re having some beers and frying up lunch and talking about old times. The table is covered in bottles. They’re old friends and this, they reckon, is as good as it gets. ‘It’ll blow you away up there,’ one of them says. He’s dead right, if in a more literal sense.
The Old Dunstan Road is closed from June until the end of September, and it has only just reopened after the winter. It feels lonely. It is lonely. But as you climb, it becomes peopled by stony figures. Here are two trolls playing chess. There’s a tin can with the lid half off. A motorhome is parked beside the road. It turns out to be a real one, not a rock. The couple inside are going to have a crack at Rough Ridge. They’ve heard the stories but still, the driver says, ‘It costs nothing to have a look, does it?’
Perhaps they’re up there still and people like me are driving past the rock formations and saying, ‘Look, there’s a seal on a rock, and a dancing whale, and a tyrannosaurus, and a crowd of people, and doesn’t that one over there look just like a motorhome?’
We reach the site of the old hotel. I get out and open the gate. The wind is slight, more of a breeze, but it has the strength and stamina of a scimitar. Only remotely ethereal. I have leather seats and air-conditioning. Surreal.
The truck sinks hub-deep into ruts. It kicks up skirls of dust which dance wraith-like around us. Struggling vehicles have created canyons, gulches, ditches, valleys in the mud. The truck bounces. I bounce too. The tussock doesn’t so much wave as applaud.
So we make our cheery way along Rough Ridge and soon reach an outpost of civilisation. It is called the Oliverburn Hut, and it is the size and colour of a fridge. It is roughcast white and so perfectly arranged inside it would entrance those architects pursuing the craze for small houses. Rabbiters and musterers use it.
Inside this hut, which is about the length of a tall man, are two bunks, a kitchen and a cunning little table, as welcome a refuge up here as anyone could hope for. I’m tempted to stay for a while, reluctant to leave this unlikely oasis, but I hear the siren call of the Serpentine.
We clunk and bump along the track, skirting bogs, trying not to damage the tussock, splashing through the occasional stream. Much of this was once a dray track used by miners. Now it has the sinuous, blasted quality of a World War I trench. It winds along ridges and into gullies and every time you think you must see where you’re going when you’re around the next bend, you can’t. We reach the point where I turned back the last time I was here. A little further on a sign points down another track to the old stamper battery and water wheel, both of them restored.
The battery was built to crush ore from the mines. It was first set up at German Jacks fifteen kilometres to the north, then moved to another mining area 7.5 kilometres to the south, doubled in size, and shifted again in 1890 to its final resting place at Serpentine. Easy to say, or to write. But look at the thing! It is huge, and very, very heavy. After all, it was built to smash rocks. Look at the
terrain it was commuting over. This is a mountain range. Oh, the work, the effort! And all for nothing. It was used for only a year or so before it was abandoned as a bad job. Now both it and the water wheel look ready to go again. All they need are a few desperate miners and a sniff of gold.
When you look closely you can see a working mine: the water wheel race, traces of the railway which carted rock to the stamper battery, the main mine tunnel. Then, piles of rock move into focus. It is like waking up in a dark room and from the confusion picking out furniture, chairs, a table in the corner.
Why, they’re not just eccentric rock stacks. They have walls. They’re old miners’ huts and over there is something said to have once been a store.
Gold was found in the Waimonga Creek in 1863 and Serpentine sprang into being, the highest goldfields township in the land, an instant town of 500 people with two stores that doubled as hotels, a blacksmith, huts for the miners. Somewhere in the tussock is a cemetery and a racecourse. The town reached its peak ten years later in 1873.
The Millers Flat Correspondent of the Tuapeka Times came the same way as we did but more than a century before, in 1898. He described his first view of the Serpentine like this:
. . . a scene of oppressive desolation . . . Never did I witness a more forbidding habitation . . . Lindburn Township [Serpentine] is a combination of store, butcher’s shop, post office and hotel, all amalgamated into one business, but which was which I could not say . . . Behind the store was a rickety billiard room and table with a mixture of European and Chinese players and lookers-on. They were an unwashed and uncombed lot; the debris of ages seemed to have accumulated on their hands, faces and clothes.
A little further along the track I see it. The survivor. The church! We bounce over a last bump or two, splash through a muddy little creek. Unlikely as it may seem, this town was built on swampy ground, but the church is high and dry, for the wise man builds his house on rock.
