May 2, 2002

Plains Folk: The Omaku Hotel

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

What I like about these people, the proprietors of the Omakau Hotel, is the way their eyes crinkle up. They smile a great deal. I'm looking at my photo of Cheryl Hall at the front door, and another of Murray Hall behind the bar. Outside my window in West Fargo it's May, and it's snowing. I know it's only May 1, and it's only barely snowing, but I'm thinking maybe I should have lingered longer in Omakau.

Every year about this time I try to get back to the South Island of New Zealand, specifically to the semiarid grasslands of Central Otago, following a line of research in grassland history I have been pursuing since 1991. If I'm lucky I'll never finish.

Seeking a place to think and write, I landed in the arms of Omakau over Easter weekend. You need to understand that New Zealand is a thoroughly secularized society. Two towns near Omakau are Wanaka and Alexandria. In Wanaka they celebrate Easter with an exhibition called Warbirds Over Wanaka, which consists of guys flying vintage aircraft and bombing things. In Alexandria they have the annual Easter Bunny Shoot-Out, a contest wherein teams compete to see who can kill the most rabbits (a serious agricultural pest in this country) on Easter Sunday.

Here in Omakau are peace and amenities. "Speight's, Pride of the South" is the blue and orange beer sign out front; the company filmed its most recent TV commercial in the shed out back. (There is no bad beer in New Zealand.) My single room (bath up the hall) costs me $13 U.S. The roast of the day in the pub (lovely lamb, with a big platter of vegetables) is $5 U.S. Can I afford to go home?

Across the street is Rose's Tea Room, a red concrete place, candy in glass cases, Jimmy's Pies (meat pies, that is) noticed on the sidewalk sign. Up the street is the neo-classical Bank of New Zealand, now a residence, bikes splayed on the sidewalk, and inside, the kids are playing badminton in the lobby.

Walk a little farther and you intersect the Rail Trail, the old Otago Central Railway converted for the use of hikers and bikers, many of whom you meet in the pub.

The hotel was built of local stone in 1898 by one William Leask. The Duke of York stayed here in 1926, but he hasn't been back since.

Others keep coming back, such as the farmers and workers crowding in for Footie Night (watching Super 12 Rugby Football) on the big screen.

Murray says the noisiest night ever in the pub was the one when the evening news announced that local sheep farmers, by means of an elaborate and illegal conspiracy, had smuggled a rabbit disease (the rabbit calicivirus disease, or RCD) into the country and successfully loosed it on the country's voracious bunnies. "It must have been Cockie Night, because the place was full of farmers," Murray recalls. Footie Night never heard such cheers.

Not many publicans of any country offer the sort of homely hospitality you can find in Omakau, and for obvious reasons it eats up your life. Cheryl says, "It's a good life, a hard life, but you're never lonely."

Far along the Rail Trail I hike across this grassy basin known as the Maniototo, or the Plain of Blood. The first white surveyor here was the Scot, John Turnbull Thomson, in 1858. That little slot in the purple Dunstan Range rising to the north, that's Thomson Gorge. Tomorrow I'm going to make that passage along a dirt track transected, I am told, by more than 30 gates. Care to come along? (You get the gates.)

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Tom Jirik, (701) 231-9629, tjirik@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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