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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 12, Issue 10 (January 1, 1938.)
Nature's Colour Pranks … — Waikaremona's Lighting Changes
Nature's Colour Pranks …
Waikaremona's Lighting Changes
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(Rly. Publicity photo.) A picturesque spot on Lake Waikaremoana, North Island, New Zealand.
The most rapid change I have ever noticed in Nature's colour schemes was at Waikaremoana. It was with almost lightning rapidity, or so it seemed.
I shall always remember Waikaremoana as a study in blues—blue water, bluer even than Blue Lake, Rotorua, blue hills and blue sky.
Waikaremoana is a lake of many moods, and visitors come away with one or another uppermost in their minds. I must have struck its blue day.
Guide books tell us that Waikaremoana is the “sea of rippling waters,” and many travellers agree. Others have seen the lake flying with spume in a howling gale, or silent and sullen through a curtain of rain. Others remember it for the tuis and bellbirds, or for its unspoiled virgin bush, or its waterfalls, or its delicious trout, or, in season, its red and juicy cherries.
A lot may depend on the mood of the visitor as well as the mood of the lake, or, perhaps, like the cherries at Lake House Inlet, the blues are only seasonal—the entire blues, I mean.
What I saw when Waikaremoana flashed into my vision was a whole landscape of blues, and nothing else but blue, except a few flecks of white on the choppy water and a small white cloud or two overhead. The scene was so striking that now, a year later, it is just as vivid to me as it was then.
For a long time I was puzzled how any landscape could have been so extra-one colour. I had no thought at first of an illusion. It was not until I was leaving the lake on my return home that I discovered the solution.
Nature had played me a strange prank, demonstrating how quickly she could change her colour schemes. The change was just as rapid as scenes flash off and on the motion picture screen, and it was this rapidity which caused the illusion.
I approached the lake from the Wairoa end. It was mid-summer, and the hill pastures everywhere had turned to gold and brown. The eyes of man become quickly accustomed to the one colour tone, and, unless we speed from a valley of luscious green to parched ridges in a very short space of time, we accept it as the general colour scheme.
So it was with me. Everything, except the red roofs of the homesteads, was tinged with gold or brown, even in the shaded valleys, for the summer had been dry and hot in that part of the East Coast.
The golden browney tinge became more apparent as we began to rise on nearing the Tuai power house, with its attendant village which lives as far as possible on community lines, with its community garden, its community cow and community amusement. The inhabitants pay no rates and no taxes, for they live in Government houses on Government property.
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(Rly. Publicity photo.) At the head of Lake Waikaremmoana, North Island, New Zealand.
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(Sketch by J. H. Graham, Rlys. Dept., Dunedin). The first of the six new “G” class 4–6–2 locomotives constructed at Hillside Workshops, South Island, New Zealand.
As the car rose from Tuai to wind about, we looked down on top of the power house and community village, a bright patch on the landscape of gold and brown. Higher, we saw more of the Tuai power works, the surge chamber at the top of the power lines, the stream that provided the water, the man-made channels through which it had been diverted to fit in with the scheme, and here and there a deep-blue lakelet, mere puddles compared with the big lake above. The shimmering blue of these ponds was the only vivid contrast to the golds and the browns.
Two thousand feet up, we stopped to look back. Nothing but hills stretched away and below, and deep down in the valley past the community village was the ribbon of road we had just traversed.
Everywhere, gold and brown.
The last, short climb took but a minute. Turning a wide bend, we began to descend a little. A second bend, a short row of trees, then ….
Suddenly, rounding a third bend, there flashed before us the vision of blue. It was all the more remarkable because of its sudden appearance so soon after looking at nothing but golds and browns.
Everything in, on, about and above the lake was blue. Only one other colour obtruded, if white is a colour, and that most insignificantly.
A stiff breeze was blowing across the lake from the direction of Hopuruahine Inlet. The broad expanse of water was as blue as that in the blue tub at home on Mondays. The wind whipped the lake into white horses, and made foaming spray on the rocky shore, providing the only sharp conflict among the universal blues. The thickly wooded slopes round the lake were a deep blue in the distance, melting into lighter shades in the hills behind, a bluish hue even extending to the cliffs close at hand and the saw-tooth rocks of the nearest reef, although in reality these were a dark grey, as we saw after our eyes became used to the scene. The sky above was a vivid blue, with only a stray white cloud or two to relieve the monotony of the colour scheme.
The atmosphere, too, had changed. Whereas, on the other side of the hill, it had been still and hot, the stiff breeze from across the lake cooled and refreshed us. We seemed to have been transported suddenly to a different climate.
Man becomes used quickly to his surroundings. During the several days spent on the lakeside eating Waikaremoana cherries and trout, boating and swimming, our eyes became used to the blues.
When we returned home by the same direction as that by which we came, the change back to the golds and the browns was just as sudden and as marked as when we came without warning on the blues.
“Parson?” said the tobacconist to the inquisitive pressman, “Yes, parsons are heavy smokers mostly, and some of them are amongst my best customers. No, they don't bother about cigarettes much, I think, generally prefer the pipe. Keen judges of tobacco, too. Why I started to stock the five toasted brands on the advice of a parson. A good tip, too. My first order was only a small one, but I'm selling more toasted now than anything else. Is it as pure as it is cracked up to be? Rather! If there's any purer (or better) baccy than Cut Plug No. 10 (Bull's head), Navy Cut No. 3 (Bulldog), Cavendish, Riverhead Gold and Desert Gold, I'd like to know. Why is it so pure? You want to know a lot, don't you?—because it's toasted. That's why. How is the toasting done? Ask the manufacturers. It's their secret. It gets the nicotine out of the leaf and at the same time gives these blends their fine flavour and beautiful bouquet. No, there's no other toasted tobaccos manufactured. What—are you off? Well so long! Be good.”*
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(Photo., R. T. Wearne). Interesting formation at the entrance to a cave at Cape Kidnappers, North Island, New Zealand.
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Up the Mokau— (Cont. from page 15)
variety of greenstone, the rich, deep-green unspecked pounamu. The river, smooth and strong, ripples musically against the rocky banks, enamelled with red moss, and swishes the drooping flax and ferns as it goes. A kingfisher sits on a branch above the river, and looks at himself in the water below, till, hearing the splash of our paddles, he flashes across the river, a streak of blue and white. The afternoon sun gilds the tree-tops; the far end of the reach glistens and twinkles in the golden light.
The Pani-rau Rapids.
But not long are we left in peace. Round a bend and before us are the worst rapids on the river, the rushing Pani-rau or “Many Orphans.” The roaring of the waters comes down the gorge, and before us we see a long, crooked down-slant of foam, curling into little waves. Landslips of long ago have piled the river bed with a confused mass of rocks and logs, forming a zigzag of rapids some three hundred yards long. A fearful turmoil this gorge must be in flood-time.
Gripping hold of the slippery snags projecting from the water, and pushing with pole and paddle, we slowly mount the torrent foot by foot. As we near the top Piko jumps ashore from the bows, with the long painter, and tracks the canoe up, clambering along the shelving rocky bank like a wild goat. At last, with paddle-blistered hands and tired shoulders, and aching knees from long squatting in the paddler's position, we came to a little island at the great bend of the river, with the voice of many waters above and below, and went into camp for the night, making fast our canoe in a safe backwater.
Not even on the upper reaches of the Wanganui have I seen a wilder spot than that defile of the “Many Orphans.” Inconceivably solitary, palisaded by wooded ranges rising a thousand feet precipitously above us, rapids roaring below, and the ominous rumble of more rapids higher up, bidding us prepare for more strenuous work; the high crake of the weka in the bush—we heard the kiwi, too, that night; the gloomy tree-arched canyon on our right, where a tributary stream came stealing into the Mokau; the knowledge that we were the only human beings for many and many a mile around, and that the dugout canoe, swinging at the bank, was our only means of reaching the outside world—all these things created a sense of solitariness extreme. But the camp fire crackled, best of all friends in the wilds, and the comforting tea and fried bacon were ready, and when pipes and cigarettes came out and the jovial Hauraki was moved to spin a yarn quaintly humorous—humorous in the Maori sense—about the old Mokau days, it was cheerful on that lone log-piled islet where many a campfire of Maori warrior-bands had blazed in the long ago. The starry sky was our roof, but a narrow roof, the canyon walls rose in black shadow nearly a thousand feet on each side.
On the Upper Reaches.
Morning on Pani-rau! Glorious on the river, glory of early day on the mountains, as we push off again from our little island, and paddle up into the smooth reach above the grand bend where the Mokau crooks its elbow at a sharp angle in a magnificent forest gulch. The blue ranges lift tremendously above us, the Matuku-mai-uta and Matuku-mai-tai (“Bittern-from-Sea” and “Bittern - from - Inland”) shooting up on either side of the Pani-rau creek, like a knife-cut in the cliffs, and the Ranga-a-Waitara, a straight wall of a mountain, towering over the river on our right. The names of the Bittern Mountains carry a scrap of Maori exploring folk-lore; they were so named because the ancient canoeists camping on Pani-rau heard two doleful matukus calling to each other all night long across the Pani-rau canyon. As we open up the long reach in the Ranga-a-Waitara's shadow, the lights and shadows and tender tints of early morning are beautiful beyond imagining. A shimmer of mist is on the river; and a tablecloth of fog hangs from the range top. As the sun comes over the mountains, cliff and forest and river are suffused with the softest rosy light.
The mist veil melts away; the white forms of the Hau-maringiringi, the phantom figures of the fog drift into the deeper hollows; the mountains lift clear in the pearly light.
All that day we were hard at it with paddle and pole. In ten miles we tackled a rapid at every three-quarters of a mile, on an average. At one place the taheke bore an ill reputation. Two of the children of the King Country chief Tawhana were drowned here by the capsize of a canoe. On some of the higher mossy boulders, piharau or lampreys are often found after floods.
At last round the lovely Matai bend we come upon the first sign of civilisation, a lone pioneer settler's section, “Riddel's Clearing,” cut out of the bush on the northern side of the river. The banks are low now, with much kowhai shrubbery. In the calm reaches the river is smooth and shining, brimming to the woody shores, where the tawa tree and the miro pine grow tall. The half-cleared bush and fern lands of the King Country open out. A long thin column of smoke mounts lazily into the summer air. A slab hut looks out through the thickets.
Our camp this last night of the inland voyage is in a tall manuka grove. A touch of frost in the air, our feet towards a good fire of manuka—how its fragrance tingles in the nostrils even yet!—and there are yarns of fight and hunt and canoe-race on the river. Next morning we land at Kaiwaka, five miles further on, to ride over the hills to Te Kuiti and the railway. We call “Haere ra!” with much regret to good old Piko and Hauraki as they turn the bow of the canoe down stream. Our Maori friends cry their farewells. They bid us go on our journey. The long canoe glides round a bend, and just before it disappears the paddlers turn and lift their shining blades in good-bye, and next moment they vanish from our sight, for ever.
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A quiet reach of the Mokau.