Photoprint for Sale: Dansey Pass Road And Snowy Mountain, Otago, New Zealand

This is an original photoprint from my personal collection

Size of image is 30cm x 46cm (12" x 18").

Price is $NZ 50.00 inc. urban p. and p. in NZ.

Please contact me at donovan@ihug.co.nz or 09 4159 701.

© DON DONOVAN. donovan@ihug.co.nz 
www. don-donovan.blogspot.co.nz
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Schist Outcrops: Dansey Pass

Most of the romance has been removed from the roads of New Zealand so that tourism may be more comfortable, easier. Roads that were once serpentine and shingle-surfaced are now straighter and macadamized; the traffic travels faster, the roadside histories are passed by, the grandeur is now seen in broad sweeps with detail left unconsidered.

But Dansey Pass, once a miners’ route from north Otago into the gold fields of the Maniototo and Central Otago, remains narrow, winding, rough and romantic. It runs from the Kyeburn Diggings to the south bank of the Waikato River and if you care to stop at one of the few off-road refuges and switch off the engine and then listen to the sweet nothings that come on the air from the stream below and whispering tussock grasses your eyes will start to distinguish slow moving sheep who, like the remains of miner’s stone huts, are the same colour as the landscape: sometimes, grey, perhaps pink, often amber.

The rock is mainly schist; speckled pancakes perfect for building huts and fences where one layer may be snuggled above another without mortar – like giant flaky pastry. In an otherwise hostile surround the rock was often home and shelter to the miners.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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Open 7 Days 33. Patearoa Community Store

I wrote and illustrated ‘Open 7 Days’. It was published in 1991. It’s a series of freeze-frames of some historic New Zealand general and convenience stores as they were preserved in the last decade of the 20th century. Bit by bit, on this blog, I re-publish some of the entries from that book.

PATEAROA COMMUNITY STORE

Patearoa, Central Otago.
Proprietors: Bill and Mal Warren

In 1987 the century-old Patearoa Store and its post office were on the point of closing down. However, the locals wouldn’t hear of it, so they clubbed together (as did the people of Millers Flat) to buy the land and buildings, which they now lease to the Warrens.

Bill, a retired Christchurch policeman, and Mal, an unretired sign-writer, own the Pateroa Hotel across the road. It dates from 1928 and is on the site of one built by Thomas Newton in 1887. It was called the Sowburn Hotel then, and the first store was next door, on land owned by the publican. That hotel, like so many others in New Zealand over the years, burned down in 1927.

In the 1940s the publican, Arthur Keegan, tried to raise the rent and this incensed Mr Robertson, the storekeeper, so much that he bought the abandoned Upper Kyeburn schoolhouse, moved it from near Dansey Pass and set it up on the other side of the hotel. The resultant ill-feeling was sorted out by the parish priest. What now constitutes the Patearoa Store is the old store and the schoolhouse butted together.

Patearoa was part of the Central Otago goldfields, and remains of the nearby Sowburn diggings are evident in buildings and abandoned machinery. Now a farming area, it’s a vibrant community, its residents competing actively around the Maniototo Plain at rugby, cricket, tennis, golf and bowls. The store, besides being a postal agency, supplies general groceries, milk, bread, newspapers and the friendliest of welcomes.

© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz
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