Here's a sample of my recent articles
Mitchell's Cottage
Think about the life and times of Andrew Mitchell.
Few luxuries - few enough creature comforts, let alone luxuries. Ten kids - raised, fed and educated in a cottage small enough to fit into many modern living rooms. No electricity. No running water, radio, or television, and hardly any printed material. At least two days to get to Dunedin.
A Shetland Islander, Andrew arrived in Central Otago via the Victorian goldfields about 120 years ago, having also spent some time mining in the Wakatipu. Following his cousins and brother to Tuapeka, he stopped and did some prospecting at Bald Hill, found gold, and stayed to mine.
Tens of thousands of people followed similar paths to this district in the sixty years from 1840, lured by the romance of successive gold rushes and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to dig their way out of hardship and penury.
What was different about Andrew Mitchell was his remarkable skill with stone.
We know he had a unique gift, because the drystone cottage at Bald Hill (now Fruitlands), that he took almost 20 years to build, still stands in almost perfect condition.
Cared for by DOC, part of the Otago Goldfields Park, Mitchell's Cottage is a work of art, meticulously constructed, built by a man who clearly valued high craftsmanship.
Andrew Mitchell's mining business was successful. With his brother John and his cousins George and James White, he operated the Whites Reef Gold Mining Company, with up to 20 men on the payroll - my great grandfather probably among them. Later, Andrew and John sluiced gold from Bald Hill Flat, also making good money. He could have paid someone to build a house.
The Mitchell's world was pretty unsettled. People made and lost fortunes. Land was washed away, changed for ever, in the search for gold. Miners and their families came and went. It was a lawless world of insecurity and uncertainty.
I think Andrew Mitchell spent 20 years building his cottage, stone by hand-carried stone - while his increasingly large family lived in a tin shack nearby - as both a personal monument and a statement.
He was a Scotsman, so it probably went unsaid, but I like to think that he knew his cottage would live on long after he was dead. It wasn't built only for his family. It was an anchor in an uncertain world, an act of faith, built to preserve and pass on the unique skill of a master craftsman.
Thursday, November 19, 1998
Floods and droughts excepted, we make our own good fortune
A long-established local tradesman called me last weekend. He's taking his household to Dunedin because there's no longer anything for him in Alexandra. It's a story many of us are familiar with, the steady trickle of people moving on to better jobs, better prospects, the diverse attractions of city life.
It's also the story of most of Central Otago since the end of the Clyde Dam project. Slowly, steadily, and without much of an attempt to stop it, the vitality has been leaching out of our communities.
There's nothing new in this, of course. Communities have always risen and fallen, succeeded and failed. It's one of the defining features of all man-made organisations, from individual marriages to the fortunes of the largest commercial firms. Some succeed while others fail. There's no standing still.
And as you'd expect, lots of heavy-duty thought has gone into this subject over the years. One of the main conclusions - success or failure is hardly ever an accident. Droughts, floods, and other acts of God notwithstanding, we mostly make our own good fortune, individually and collectively.
It's also clear from the large literature on this subject that one thing characterises organisations that succeed. There's one diagnostic feature they all share - a strategy.
Successful organisations have a clear view of why they exist, what their strengths are, and where they are going - they have a strategy. Often, they have put considerable work into thinking it through, and they often make a few mistakes getting their strategy right, but it's always deliberate, thoughtful, structured and unique to them.
That's why firms like Honda (and a few others in their region) have continued to thrive while most of Pacific Asia is caught in economic meltdown. It's also why Tupelo, Mississippi, once among the poorest communities in the poorest state in the USA has seen a job growth of 1,500 per year since 1985, and now has only 7% of its residents below the official poverty line, and only 3% unemployment.
By many measures, most of Central's communities are failing. If you believe the experts, and the world-wide evidence, the answer to this is in our hands. If we continue to go down-hill, it'll be our fault.
And if you take the next step and accept that turning things around requires a strategy - a clear vision of our strengths and abilities, where we want to go as a community, and how we are going to get there - then I've got a question for you.
How is it going to happen?
Sunday, February 14, 1999
Waitangi Day
January 26th is Australia Day, and the whole country celebrates.
In public parks and town centres mayors conduct citizenship ceremonies, bands play, local artists sing 'Advance Australia Fair', banks of barbies sizzle and smoke, service clubs discover yet more innovative ways to raise money, and many museums and galleries are open free. It's party time, and the whole country parties.
The Prime Minister announces the Australian of the Year ¾ top item on the six o'clock news, and in Sydney, for just $10, you can ride all day on all the buses, trains and harbour ferries.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, more than 2 million citizens of New South Wales participate in the celebrations each year. If you're anywhere near Sydney Harbour on Australia Day, you'll believe them.
There's a national Australia Day Commission, and the NSW government sends official ambassadors to more than 100 celebrations in city and country communities throughout the state.
In Oamaru-sized Bega, NSW, a few days before the big event, shop keepers were putting up posters announcing a full day of celebrations, and the state's ambassador, sharing top billing with the mayor, was Sir Jack Brabham.
In Berrima, a picture-postcard township in the Southern Highlands an hour and a half from Sydney, tents and stalls were going up on the village square, and in the nearby Surveyor General's Inn (“The oldest continuously-licensed hotel in Australia”) there was a holiday-mood, Wanaka-on-New-Year's-eve buzz.
The contrast with New Zealand's national day couldn't be greater.
Here in Central Otago, and throughout most of New Zealand, Waitangi Day is just another holiday. When it falls on a Saturday or Sunday, it's not even that. If it weren't for whatever happens at Waitangi itself, and for events at Otakou and Okains Bay, it would pass almost completely unmarked.
Sure, it's not a day that everyone feels inclined to celebrate. Even in Australia, where the indigenous culture has all but disappeared under a tide of European and recent Asian immigration, there are Aboriginal protests. As the Sydney Morning Herald's Sebastian Smee rather delicately wrote (in one paragraph of a half-page story) “Australia Day, it needs to be said, is an ambivalent sort of day (to put it mildly) for Australia's Aboriginal population …”.
Perhaps we ignore our national day because we're also, most of us, ambivalent about our colonial history. My guess is that we won't happily and whole-heartedly celebrate our day, the way the Aussies do theirs, until we are all more at ease, more comfortable, and more certain about what it actually means.
Monday, February 08, 1999
'Undiscovered' Otago
Kate Wilson, newly elected Strath Taieri community board chairperson, is passionate about undiscovered Otago. And also about “Undiscovered Otago”, her tourist promotion idea that takes an ordinary bit of Otago - highway 87 - and turns it into a tourist destination, with its own brand, promotional material, participating businesses, the works.
Those of us who live here, and pay a bit of attention to our surroundings, know that almost everywhere you care to look in Central there are stories. Small fragments of undiscovered Otago. Some attract the attention of professional story-tellers and become well known. Some were known to our parents and grandparents, but over the years have slipped from our memories.
Our history didn't begin when the first settlers arrived, but even if it had, there's plenty of it that we know too little about.
How many people know the story of the miners killed in a snowstorm at Gorge Creek and commemorated by a white cross on the hillside? Or can explain why there are gravestones in a St Bathans cemetery with inscriptions in Welsh. Who knows how to find Lion Rock or Tiger Hill?
My 85-year-old aunt has childhood memories of her parents pointing out the Judge's Head near Millers Flat when driving to and from Dunedin. Do families still do that?
The story of the lonely graves and The Man Who Buried Somebody's Darling attracted national attention in the TV1 series Epitaph, and in the book of the same name. A good story, all the more interesting for being quite different in fact than in the mythology. A few people go out of their way to visit them, but the lonely graves are not a tourist Mecca. Put together with a day's worth of other local stories, ancient and modern, and maybe there's a marketable package - another 'undiscovered' Otago.
Visitors to our region, especially from other cultures and far away places, find those stories fascinating. More than just scenery and a succession of similar hotel rooms, free independent travellers, frequently well-educated baby boomers with plenty of time, and money, seek the texture, taste and smell of the places they visit.
Our stories are unique to us. Sharing them with other people enriches both parties. Making a business out of that, especially a business that helps keep rural communities alive, is the best sort of local enterprise.
Wilding pines
Pines seem to like the Knobbies.
From Tucker Hill to Graveyard Gully, and down the Clutha almost to Shellbacks Beach, individual trees, some with a spreading family of seedlings, appear to be doing surprisingly well.
There are more of them every time I glance out of our kitchen widow, and the skyline around the top of Graveyard Gully is beginning to look distinctly forested.
Perhaps it's got something to do with the increasing numbers and maturity of pines on the Alexandra-Clyde flat, with strong nor-west winds carrying seed up onto the west-facing slopes of the Knobby Range. Perhaps those slopes are a bit more pine-friendly than they once were. A few wet springs must help.
Whatever the reason, the trees raise interesting questions. Are they a good thing? Is that landscape, so much a part of Alexandra's visual identity, enhanced or spoiled by the steady encroachment of wilding pines? Is it any of our business (the landowner or leaseholder may also have an opinion)?
Some were poisoned a few years ago, and DOC occasionally raises posses to eradicate wilding pines on conservation land, so we can assume a good case exists to do away with them. I guess the core of the argument is that because they're not natives, wilding pines spoil a natural landscape.
The Knobbies covered in pines would certainly be different. But the hillsides and their surrounds are hardly 'natural'. The Alexandra-Springvale-Clyde area would be unrecognisable to a pioneer of 100 years ago. Early photographs show just tussock and matagourie, with not a tree to be seen.
Since then the Clutha has been dammed, above and below, and filled with silt. Gold mining and sluicing has scalped Tucker Hill, scarred many hillsides, and completely removed Frenchman's Point, once opposite the mouth of the Manuherikia. The signs of human habitation are everywhere you look.
If the wilding pines on the Knobby Range are left alone, to strike their own ecological balance, we may end up (and who knows how long it will take) with something like a Texas piney wood. Thinly forested slopes with lots of bare rock showing through. Hardly 'natural', but it's far from natural now.
I quite like the thought of that.
Friday, November 06, 1998
Memorials
First-time visitors to this country, especially those who spend more than a day or two in small towns and country areas, often comment on the number of war memorials. Central Otago is a good example – nearly every locality has a memorial. Some have two, one for each great war.
What does that tell us about New Zealand, and particularly about Central Otago – as it was then, and maybe still is?
First, we tend to think locally – now, and even more so then. The young men whose names are on all those memorials were from small communities, and the people who knew them wanted their sacrifice to be permanently marked, in their own community.
And the names are important. These are not abstract memorials about far off national events. They are most of all lists of the names of those who fell. They were ours, and we wanted them to be remembered here, where we could see their names every day.
That, by the way, is why Americans find the Vietnam Memorial in Washington so riveting. Acres of polished black granite, every inch covered with names, each a fallen soldier, each representing a real story; a whole life snuffed out before its time, listed in the order in which they died. Thousand upon thousand upon thousand. Sure, it's a national monument, but it's the individual names that make it so compelling, and so memorable.
Second, we think tribally – or we did then. Boarder disputes and territorial battles were the order of the day. Reports of turn-of-the-century rugby matches – between Clyde and Cromwell, say – read like dispatches from the Boer War. It was a serious business. So when it came to war memorials, we wanted our own.
The district council is currently reviewing community board boundaries, and the idea of 'community of interest' is being talked about. If you live in Roxburgh, do you have much interest in what happens in Tarras or Pateoroa? In 1919, when we moved around a lot less, and even in 1946, the answer would certainly have been no. Would a memorial in Alexandra have satisfied the citizens of Clyde? The answer, then, was no. It probably still is.
The question now, half a century after we built the last of those memorials, is do we still think that way? And does it matter if we do? I think we do, and I think it does, because what we've got is what people in cities all over the world yearn for – real communities.
Sunday, June 11, 2000