“Due to time wasters” the town of Otira is still for sale. I’m picturing the timewasters – including a ‘businessman from China’ who, bedevilled with romance, set out to rescue a small historic town. I’d do the same, if I had the “1 million plus” but – having been there – I know that the plus in ‘1 million plus’ is a big number. She reeks of mould, the old township, and the damp that comes up from below and cascades down from above in fairly equal measure. In fact it’s minging. There’s a lot of renovating to be done.

Otira sits right under the Alps on which clouds lodge and disgorge their moisture before hurtling on light nor’westers across the Canterbury plains to the sea. And unlike Arthur’s Pass township, just on the other side of the pass, with its promise of warm brown sunscraped tussock just over the wide gravel beds of the Waimakariri, Otira is like a shade caught beneath a relentless waterfall. Its walls are towering pinnacles of wet shale, its vision of sky when it is free from lowering cloud, is as a distant smudge of blue. It’s on the main earthquake fault line. It’s flood prone. And its atmosphere is as intense, moody and energetic as a German opera.

Potted history: the hotel, or one like it, was one of 11 Cobb & Co staging posts between Christchurch and Greymouth (others being at Jackson - which still exists as a pub - and Castle Hill). Later when the railway line was put through the mountains, it filled with railway houses. In the 1960s, about 600 people lived in the settlement, dwindling down to 87 in the last Census and an estimated 30 now.

In the late ‘90s a couple travelling across the divide on the Christchurch – Greymouth Tranzalpine journey found out the whole township was for sale and bought it for around $80,000. They set about doing repairs, and trying to attract artisans, artists, and families to the area with reduced rent – for – renovation work arrangements. They met with some initial success, with a fairly well attended arts festival being held there and the old school used as a community gallery, but expected renovations were not done by all the residents, and interest has slowly dwindled while people drifted away.

They’ve said that their decision to sell is based on the continual hurdles they encounter in trying to develop the town, due to flooding and earthquake risks as well as being sited in a national park.
They’ll never sell the town for the million they want – but at half the price, they’ll still have made a good deal, and a buyer might have enough change to actually make something of the place.

the town with one garage

Reefton 1976

A six-pub two-dog town. Not even a town. An extrusion of dwellings that had coalesced over the years into permanence when the miners began to stay on. The week before, the town’s second petrol station was razed to the ground. Rumours abounded. Amongst the older generation, fingers pointed to the brash young (under 60) owner of the newly built station across the way. Amongst the young – well, let’s just say, there was an above-average number of bored teenagers in Reefton in 1976.

“You’ll like it here” said my kindly elderly hosts, “we’ve got a new petrol station. And someone from the city [ie Christchurch] has opened a record store. We’re a young person’s town.”
My hosts worked all day in their little store and they were fairly easy going, their only concern was about the threat I posed to their local reputation as upstanding small business owners:
“Don’t go into the pub! This is a small town – everyone will know!” At the age of 12, it wasn’t much on my To Do on Holiday list.

I stayed in a house of books. There was no reason to venture out. But even so I spent an inordinate amount of time wandering the five or so streets. From my wanderings I got that: the town contained twenty people under the age of 20 (twice the usual number); that they had 3 cars between them all; that the American muscle car group were the dangerous outsiders. Was it them (with the petrol station)? They were always going somewhere. There was a lot of driving around to be done. Lots of revving of engines in the forecourt of the remaining petrol station and one by one, they’d go. Then, for hours at a time, the township would be encased in a chugging near-silence until, all of a sudden, two cars, then one more, shot back down the main street. And at nights the wail of a lone piper practising bagpiped dirges kept all right thinking people inside their homes.

Reefton in summer, in 1976, with deeply plunging bush clad hills sheeted in white daubs of steamy cloud; eerie greenish light from a sun shot through with bush-fog; buzzing cicadas; older people with sleeves rolled up over plump elbows; coal ranges always lit – in both the first New Zealand town to be lit by electricity, and the last to let go.

My hosts found it creepy that their guest read books and walked the streets spying on everyone. The month they’d arranged with my parents dropped to a fortnight.

A week after, newspapers carried the story of a drug bust gone wrong, shooting deaths in a nearby quarry, two cars of people involved – and they were looking for a third.

It was a good summer, that, the last time I was left to myself.

Returning to Reefton recently for the first time, there’s still only the one garage. Frozen into 1976, it didn’t have eftpos. As for teenagers – all gone.

The Dark Portal Opens

Richard Hill – the is-land’s first documented mass killer – arrived in Dunedin in 1862. He’d taken the surname Burgess, from a runholder he’d ripped off back in Victoria. According to his memoir, as edited by David Burton, he came for just one reason:
“to see what I could do on the diggings” He had spent 11 out of his 14 years in Victoria in prison, the last five in a floating prison hulk on Hobson Bay largely in solitary confinement and below deck. “For four and a half years I never saw the sun rise or set”. This sort of hell might have scared a man straight, but not Hill.

At the Weatherstones (one valley over from Gabriel’s Gully, near Lawrence) Hill and buddy, Thomas Noon, specialised in holding up lone miners and divesting them of gold and goods, leading to a 3 year spell in Dunedin Gaol (not the red brick one there currently but an intermediary location after the lone gaoler accidentally set the original on fire) after a wild-westesque shootout with constabulary.

After a thwarted escape attempt, Hill and Noon were released at the Waitaki River – the border between Canterbury and Otago – and set off for the West Coast; making their way up the Rakaia Gorge and down the Arahura River, both nearly losing their lives to a series of watery mishaps. There Noon (now calling himself Kelly) and Hill (Burgess) hooked up with William Levy (gold buyer and fence), and Joseph Sullivan (publican and transportee), and robberies became killings without compunction. Burgess reserves for Sullivan his most extreme invective, describing him as worse than the worst dross and scum of society, of having out-judassed Judas, and accusing him of being a lone operative in the killing of surveyor George Dobson. In his protests are howls of innocence, and it seems a genuinely held outrage on his part, even as much as his memoir is a calculated plea for mercy.

He’d become quite the fan of bank robberies, but couldn’t carry them out because banks and bakers were well protected. Instead, the gang of four decided to revert to that old successful tactic – robbing gold miners in an isolated spot. This time there’d be no prison stint as there’d be no survivors to dob them in. There’s no doubt Sullivan played a leading part in the finding of four gold-carrying dupes who would be traipsing the Maungatapu track from Canvastown to Nelson, that he lay in wait, and that he helped with the murders – even if he didn’t play the leading part Burgess claimed. Burgess wanted history to know he was the better man.
David Burton has this exchange taking place between Burgess and Sullivan on the Maungatapu Road:

“The day was now advancing when he left his covert, and came to me and told me there was a young man and a fellow carrying a swag, and he should put them up. I said, “No, let them pass.” He observed, “I shall.”
And had he carried out his intention, I should have shot him like a dog. For when he persisted, I raised my gun; then Anne Fulton (for it was she) came into sight…”

The account of the main killings- those at Maungatapu - is documented here

Few of the places involved in the story are readily accessible today. It’s still theoretically possible to tramp up the Rakaia Gorge and over the hill – hunters must do it – but it’s quite a hard task. There’s a four hour (return) walk from the Rakaia Bridge that’s described as ‘easy’ by trampers.
Weatherstones – now called Wetherstone – is along from Gabriel’s Gully, right turn from Lawrence – there’s a golf course there. And probably a fair few undiscovered dead gold miners…
Maungatapu was displaced by a main highway through the Rai Valley, and for many years remained a popular four wheel drive track that came out at Nelson’s Maitai Valley. A four wheel drive club put up a plaque on ‘murderers rock’ behind which the gang of four hid. Nowadays, we understand, the track’s been blocked off completely.


If you want to enter the South Island through its dark portal, you might want to carry a gun in self-defence – just in case.

the is-land

About us:
We specialise in off the wall writing from an experiential perspective - particularly travel, the arts, the guts of living a South Island life.
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