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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 7, Issue 7 (December 1, 1932)

Wakatipu's Landscape

Wakatipu's Landscape.

Different again are the great lakes of Otago and Southland interior. Wakatipu, set in mountains of grim wild contour, is the most accessible; you reach it by rail from either Dunedin or Invercargill. It is a place of sharp contrasts, a place to stir the imagination. The south arm, along which one steams from the train terminus at Kingston to Queenstown, is very narrow, immensely deep, and profoundly blue-black; on each side it is walled in by craggy precipices, weathered into shapes strange and awful, and deeply-riven by race-tracks of the avalanches. Then on the right shoots up the amazingly broken range of the Remarkables. By contrast there is the prettiest and whitest of little towns, lying among its parks and orchards, old-settled Queenstown, founded in the great gold-rush days of the Sixties. The magic call of gold is giving interest anew to this ancient haunt of the world's digger brotherhood, for the Kawarau and its neighbourhood are the scene of an eager and—for some—profitable search for the treasure in the alluvial drifts.

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