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Woman dies in Catlins quad-bike crash
Trees For information about distances, responsibilities and trimming. An outside door allowed access to the porch, where he would hatch more plans for a better world. Locals remember the 'thump, thump, thump' of King pacing at night as he grappled with another scheme. Not even King's Seacliff patients were free from servitude at the Catlins. How he managed to construe this as occupational therapy we'll never know, but locals remember with amusement the stories of mental patients shovelling lime onto his paddocks.
The unofficial record was tons of lime spread fifteen centimetres deep on a small paddock. At its peak Tahakopa thrived as a mill town at the end of the Catlins railway line. Population peaked at over people but the end was not far away. King realised that his extravagant investments were not going to pay off and saw the timber running out.
The depression was not far off, and he was moving to Wellington. He page 73 sold his farms in For the grand sale, a special train was commissioned to bring buyers from Dunedin to Tahakopa, with over people attending. The stock sold well above expectation: head of cattle averaged 21 pounds 18 shillings, high prices for the time; lambs averaged 23 shillings, fat sheep 34 shillings. The farms were sold, but collection of the money proved less simple.
King's terms of payment were kind, if unwise. Interest payments fell into arrears and yet another King venture failed to deliver financially. By five of his farms had come back into his ownership with the default of the tenants. King wrote to Andrew Sutherland, his trusted farm manager, 'There is with me something more than the mere matter of money.
I want to be able to feel for the rest of my life which may not be a very long time that I have left my old property in a creditable state. Today, Truby King's ghost has all but departed the Catlins.
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The mill closed in and the mill houses were moved to other places. The mill manager's house remains as a comfortable farmhouse on Lauriston farm, which like most Catlins farms struggles to make sense of the 'new' realities of farming in the twenty-first century. Many Catlins farms are now foreign-owned, growing exotic gums. Only the railway bridge stands proud but bemused, bereft of railway line and shrouded by willows.
A solitary rhododendron struggles valiantly in the overgrown front garden of a deserted worker's cottage while the Tahakopa school faces dwindling rolls and threats of closure. Why did he do it? We'll never know, although there is a handwritten reference in Mary's files to 'mad gold speculators Sir L and Lady B, who took dad and mum for a fortnight's tour of the goldfields in a wagonette'. He wouldn't have been the first to be seduced by a speculative gold proposition, especially if suggested by 'someone smart'. He was involved in at least three gold-dredging ventures on or near the Waikaka River, not far from the Catlins.
These were: Sheddon's Freehold , on the Sheddon property, in partnership with the landowners King commissioned the dredge and largely financed the venture ; Rex , again in partnership with the Sheddon family this venture ended acrimoniously, in the courts ; and Argyle Monthly meetings took place at Seacliff, with Truby in the chair.
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In cavalier King fashion, no expense was spared. He set up the headquarters office on site, with electric light and floor coverings to counter the winter cold. The dredge was regarded as one of the best constructed and equipped in the district. The dredge eventually met an untimely end in flames.
The lambing season, the harshest in more than a decade, is nearing its end, and the soggy paddocks are otted with cutesy youngsters, some prancing, others using their mothers as wind breaks. They would divide the farm among all the able-bodied men, and each would patrol his beat, an ovine midwife on a farm-bike. From the car we watch a farmer on a quad bike shepherding his flock along the road verge.
Hail bounces off his ruddy cheeks like peppercorns, his eyes squint under the hood of a black anorak and his dogs hunker behind the muddy vehicle, out of the bitter wind. The crates filled up the whole garage.
A decade ago, a consortium involving a number of large Japanese companies began buying up land and planting it in eucalypts for pulp. Grassy valleys are now blue-grey with the leaves of legions of gum trees. In the past five years alone, 21 farms have been bought up for forestry. Fortunately, Nick says, in the past two years rising land prices and an increased demand for New Zealand farm products have halted the trend. Farming the land is once again more lucrative than planting trees on it.
Another development on the coast has been tourism. In Papatowai, roughly the mid-point of the Catlins coast, I meet long-time resident Fergus Sutherland. It was no lofty mission statement, more a kitchen-table agreement on a set of personal guidelines they both wished to follow. To start with, the Sutherlands offered a Catlins highlights tour: Purakaunui waterfall, Cathedral Caves, Curio Bay and a handful of other beauty spots.
Then it dawned on us that the Catlins was not about bagging trophy sights but about experiencing life on the coast, with its own pace. We relaxed, and so did our guests. Everyone seemed to have a better-quality time. My own taste of that quality comes the following morning, when Fergus takes me to see the yellow-eyed penguins.
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We leave before dawn, driving along a farm road and then walking across paddocks towards a break in cliffs that rise some 80 metres out of the rumbling ocean. We sit down on our packs and wrap up for a frigid wait until the grey day awakens, and with it the penguins. From among the flax and Muehlenbeckia vine the Chaplinesque figure emerges, tripping and slip-sliding down the uneven path. The bird turns its back to the sea, waiting for its mate, while wind gusts pick up water from the breaking sea and whip it against the shelf like blasts from a fire hose.
A second penguin comes down the trail, then another. They groom and stretch, flap their flippers, splay and refold the short, stubby fans of their tails, glancing frequently at the roaring sea.
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They shuffle a few steps closer to the edge and look again. Suddenly a big wave breaks and slams against the shelf, sending them sprint-waddling back. Theirs, I decide, is an unenviable way to start the day. Today, however, all is well. The penguins approach closer and closer to the edge, run out of room to procrastinate any further and take the plunge.
Once in the water, they are transformed, liberated from landlubberly clumsiness. They porpoise about the kelp for a moment, then dive out of sight. But he also has his worries. The road south of Papatowai is one of the last unsealed highways in New Zealand—a classic rural road, pot-holed and corrugated, where you can see farm utes fishtailing around the corners. In a year or so we should have a nice smooth road all the way through the Catlins. The tooth-rattling drive, the relative remoteness of the region and the lack of services have acted as a natural tourist filter.