April 12, 2001

Plains Folk: Settling the Grasslands of New Zealand

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Hanging in my office is a color poster of a striking landscape–the tussock grasslands of Lindis Pass, in the high country on the South Island of New Zealand. North from this wavy divide flow the waters of the Ahuriri, through the Mackenzie country and down to the Canterbury coast. South flow those of the Lindis, into Central Otago, joining the Clutha to make their way to the Otago coast. Lindis Pass is a breathing place.

Through the Lindis in 1857 rode the Scottish surveyor-general of Otago, John Turnbull Thomson. He is the reason so many peaks and burns (creeks) here bear Scots names. Following him in 1858 came John "Big" McLean, another Scot, come by way of Australia, a sheep man, a keeper of Merinos, an ambitious capitalist.

McLean dismounted on one of the knobs of the Grandview ranges, opposite Mount Aspiring and overlooking lakes Wanaka and Hawea, the Upper Clutha, and the Hawea Flat, and he made some notes. The first sheep man in the territory, he had his pick of lands, and as he sketched out boundaries, he picked 400,000 acres. Beating his way back to the capital, Dunedin, he got all this land leased to himself and his family members, composing the great Morven Hills station.

Coming from the Great Plains of North America, I feel, as I explained in my last column, comfortable in the semiarid grasslands of Central Otago. As a historian of my own country, too, I feel as though I'm tracking a familiar story–European explorers acting like God in the garden, naming everything, and hardy pastoralists (what we call ranchers) investing the land with their flocks and herds.

Over the next few years I'm going to spend considerable time following up on the story of the Lindis country, or Morven Hills. Admittedly, I do this partly because it's a wonderful place to be and to work. Beyond that, it's a place similar enough to, and yet different enough from, my home country to teach me many things.

I'm just home from the Lindis, where I sought first to get a good feel for the lay of the land. So I drove up the Lindis to Forest Range Station, which comprises much of what was Morven Hills, and met the proprietors, Jeanette and Russell Emmerson, old friends. Russell pulled the station helicopter out of the shed, removed the left door so I could hang out to shoot photos, and away we buzzed.

Upriver and then up the Pass Burn we flew, first to view the country where Thomson and McLean entered it. Then across to Camp Hill, setting down next to the surveyor's cairn. There to the northwest, on the Breast Burn, is the only bush (forest) in the territory, dark slopes right where Thomson mapped them in 1857.

Now over the Grandviews, skimming the rocky tors of their level tops, searching for a particular knob where in 1857 Thomson set his surveyor's tripod and also made pencil sketches, the basis of a grand watercolor he later painted. I wanted to stand just were he stood that day. By holding a print of the painting before me and figuring angles, we were able to set the chopper on the spot; I took a GPS reading and photographed the panorama depicted in the watercolor.

Thence down the turquoise Clutha to the Cromwell pub for lunch, and then up the Dunstans to Leaning Rock (southern boundary of Morven Hills) for a look down on the brilliant clouds shrouding the Manuherikia valley. Today, it seems far away, and I guess it is. It's real, though–computer users, go to www.plainsfolk.com/gravel.htm .

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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