Photoprint for Sale: Ruined Stone House Among Autumn Poplars, Lindis Valley, 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

Prints For Sale: Dudley's Cottage, Arrowtown

This print is identical to my original drawing that appeared in my book 'New Zealand House & Cottage'.

Size of image is approx. 27 cm x 36 cm .

Price is $NZ 51.00 inc. 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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New Zealand Odyssey: Presbyterian Manse, Lawrence, Central Otago

'New Zealand Odyssey', published in 1989 by Heinemann, was authored by me, Don Donovan (who did the text and illustrations) and Euan Sarginson, who did the photography and design. In this series of blog posts, I will publish some of my drawings.

I did this drawing of the Presbyterian manse at 20 Peel Street, Lawrence in 1988. It still looked much the same in 2010. In a small town that sprang into prominence in the nineteenth century because of a hugely rich goldfield nearby the house looks indecently grand. But I guess gold and goldminers (forever short lived!) helped pay for that. It seems also that in great Anthony Trollope tradition, the clergy of those times, for all their avowed humility, made sure their living accommodation was a layer above the ordinary.

There's been a bit of a revival in Lawrence in recent years brought about by people who want to exploit the town's history. That's no bad idea as long as they can keep McDonalds and KFC off the main street!

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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Cobb & Co's Stagecoach

I did this drawing of the ‘Burton’ coach some years ago. It is in the collection of New Zealand’s Canterbury Museum who also supplied some of the information below:
This Cobb & Co ‘Telegraph Line’ coach went into service on the Hokitika-Christchurch route in about 1865, taking gold miners and other hopefuls to the new goldfields of West Canterbury (later the Province of Westland).

It is a derivative of American-built coaches, although the design was perfected in Australia.
As New Zealand’s railway network expanded, the coaching trade declined. This coach, however, was used for a surprisingly long time. Until 1923 and the opening of the Otira Rail Tunnel, it continued to cross the Southern Alps with teams of five horses and up to 17 passengers and their luggage.

Charlie C. Cole who had been running a coach service in Victoria, Australia introduced his coach service to Canterbury in 1863. He set up stables at Christchurch in partnership with his brother Leander. In 1869 operations were taken over by W.H. Burton & Company who continued to use the established name of Cobb & Co. in association with their own. The firm was sold again in 1874 to Hugh Cassidy who ran the operation until his death in 1922. Within twelve months the operation had ceased. The opening of the Otira Rail Tunnel in 1923 was the last link in a rail system joining both coasts of the South Island. After sixty years the coaches had become redundant.

***
On a personal note: I knew Sheila Sarginson and her sister, Mona Clark, mother and aunt of my late friend, Euan Sarginson; they had the memorable experience of having travelled together in the Cobb & Co. coach to Otira before the rail tunnel was opened. I once walked the remnant of the stagecoach track that ran, south of the modern highway, from the bottom of Porters Pass to near its summit. It has probably eroded completely by now.

© DON DONOVAN. With acknowledgements to Canterbury Museum.
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New Zealand Odyssey: Commercial Stables, Murchison

'New Zealand Odyssey', published in 1989 by Heinemann, was authored by me, Don Donovan (who did the text and illustrations) and Euan Sarginson, who did the photography and design. In this series of blog posts, I will publish some of my drawings.

I have no idea how old this building is but I reckon that when I drew it in 1988 it was well over 100 years old. Can't you just hear the hooves and the rumble of iron-rimmed wheels echoing through that archway to the forge beyond? 

Murchison was, is, not only an important farming area but also has a romantic gold history revolving round the powerful Buller River and its tributaries. I first went to 'Murch' in 1960 just after arrival in New Zealand and made lifelong friends who farmed on the Mangles River where brown trout haunted the stones like nuclear submarines!

© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz

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The Good Old Kiwi Pub: Introduction

I wrote and illustrated ‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’. It was published in 1995. It’s a snapshot of some New Zealand pubs as they were at the end of the 20th century. I have decided to share some of the entries from the book from time to time on this blog.

Title page.

INTRODUCTION

There is a critical point at which Nature through gradual processes such as throttling creeper and encroaching lichen, blends with human artifact to produce Art. I like that. As an illustrator I take my delights from shape, texture, colour and the mildewy stains of dilapidation. Mottled brickwork, weathered timber, mossy masonry and rusted corrugated roofs enchant me. I paint and sketch tottering barns, old houses and crumbling public buildings adorned by all manner of public writing from graffiti to some surprisingly good or endearingly primitive examples of the sign-writer’s craft.

In the case of this book, I have found graphic satisfaction in a few of the hostelries and taverns that have survived - albeit scarred - the regional planner, the bulldozer, fire and that destructive process which breweries call ‘upgrading’. It is significant, I think, that nearly every pub I have illustrated is independently owned and owes the big breweries nothing. Independent publicans do not, as a rule, have the financial resources to ‘improve’ their premises by tearing down walls and fitting false façades, consequently their pubs remain more closely identifiable with their beginnings, and their old kauri beams and pine planks bend with the burden of their years to carry the stains of hospitality with ageing dignity. There used to be a poster in the London Underground for a famous brand of shoe polish (’Kiwi’?) which showed a pair of shining brogues above a slogan ‘They’re well-worn but they’ve worn well!’ That’s what I’m getting at.

There are only two city pubs in this book. The rest are country or provincial hotels and taverns. There’s a reason for that; I like to enjoy what I do and hanging around city streets isn’t one of them, I’m not that enamoured of metropolitan New Zealand. To me the best of this favoured country lies in its rural landscape and its country towns. There’s another reason: I’m a romantic. I like to picture what travel was like in this country in the early days and it doesn’t take much imagination to see how important country hotels were when the likes of Cobb & Co. were carrying travellers across a forbidding land of mountains, dense bush and the capricious, sometimes deadly streams that ran down and through them to the sea.

On one of my journeys in search of subjects for this and other works, I found myself overnight in Haast Township with the weather closing in fast. My work was done and all I then had to do was drive home to Auckland. Apart from food and fuel there was nothing to stop me travelling as far and as fast as freshness and the law would allow, so I drove from Haast to Picton in one day, crossed Cook Strait on the pre-dawn sailing next day and then directly to Auckland. The road was tar-sealed and uncluttered all the way and the journey was not only easy but entirely enjoyable. On my way I passed numerous old hotels or the sites of others long gone and reflected upon their role in the development of early New Zealand.

Derelict White Horse Hotel, Becks, Central Otago 

The journey I was making would, a hundred years ago, have been impossible. Indeed, it was not until November 1965 that there was a road connexion between Haast and Hokitika. Travel in the early days of European settlement was by sea between the major towns and apart from ancient Maori river routes and foot tracks, the development of inland routes was entirely a matter of short distance expediency, to link settlers with their nearest towns, to supply diggers on the goldfields or, perhaps, to facilitate movements of armed constabulary and militia from one garrison to another.

Once the demand for the movement of people and goods had grown sufficiently for roads wide enough for wheeled transport to be formed, a network of primitive routes would have been established. Any serious journey would have been a succession of relatively short day stages by horse or horse-drawn coach on rutted roads following, as far as possible (in order to maintain easy gradients) the contours of the land. There would have been few cuttings or tunnels, the tracks would have snaked appallingly around headlands and re-entrants, often teetering over terrifying precipices and crossing rocky fords. At unavoidably steep climbs or descents passengers might be asked to alight and, at best, walk behind the coach: at worst they would be obliged to assist, with groaning joints and bruised shoulders, slowly to rotate wheels slimy with mud and caramel clay. They might spend hours in rain or humid bush, attacked by sandflies and itching with grime, while a wheel was changed or the carriage was jacked up to replace a broken axle.

Little wonder that in those early days seaports had a pub on every corner, while along the narrow highways, hotels were closely and regularly spaced so that travellers of all ages, occupations and classes could find food and a bed for the night while the horses were rested. Those of a genteel disposition might affect an aloof indifference while all manner of itinerants, ne’er-do-wells or local workers drank, fought, gambled, danced or cursed the night away in the bar.

Over-nighting at a roadside hostelry would have been a great leveller and, as such, might most appropriately have exemplified what New Zealand was all about - equality. ‘…you can forget those ancient European airs and graces, they won’t wash here!’

Railways and greatly improved roads gradually reduced the importance of closely spaced travellers’ hotels, with their accommodation and dining rooms, lounge bars and facilities for stabling of horses. Today, the emphasis is upon destinations rather than stages along the way, and a highly developed network of motels and luxury hotels serves tourists and business travellers at their journeys’ ends. In one or two of the remaining old country hotels you can still get a hint of what life might have been like at the turn of the century - in hotels like the Brian Boru at Thames or the Mangonui Hotel - but most of them, with redundant upper storey bedrooms and their attendant spindly fire escapes, are simple taverns, offering, at minimum, beers and lagers to farm or factory workers, but often rising in sophistication to a ‘good table’ with fine food and wines, and achieving seven-day opening by allowing food and non-alcoholic drinks to feature on their menus as prominently as liquor.

Toe to toe with the changes wrought upon pubs by improved transport and communications are others both social and statutory. Drinking mixed with driving is legally and socially unacceptable these days, and while it’s true that the Sunday newspapers still carry plenty of reports of the public bar excesses of the previous night, things aren’t what they used to be: they’re getting better.

If you doubt me, read these edited extracts from Phil May’s ‘West Coast Gold Rushes’-

‘The number of hotels was commonly regarded as an index to prosperity…’

‘The presence of a barmaid was an undoubted stimulus to trade…’

‘Many of the bigger hotels provided a small orchestra in the evenings, for diggers loved to dance. Of necessity the style was “stag” or “buck” dancing…’(the first gay bars?).

‘Drunkenness was rife in the goldfield community. A large number of licensed hotels (102 in Hokitika in 1867) an unlimited number of unlicensed shanties, an unknown number of illicit stills, twelve local breweries (on the West Coast)… did not make for sobriety. Drunkenness was, of course, the colonial evil…’

***

I promised myself that I would not write a history book. That flaking paint and those distorted boards have a lot to answer for!

‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’ is neither a definitive survey of New Zealand hotels and taverns, past and present, nor a series of beer-breathed anecdotes or pen-portraits of public bar heroes - although I’ve had great fun turning up little snippets of history, some of which may turn out to be apocryphal! It is simply a collection of pubs that look interesting to me as an illustrator.

The pen and watercolour illustrations were done over five years to 1995, during which time many of the pubs have had new owners, and a new coat of paint. At the time of publication, one of them, the Rat Trap at Upper Takaka, had burned to the ground and so suffered the fate of most of the old hotels. There’s not too much one can do about that; sufficient to look at each drawing and say that that was how it was on the day I visited it. Nothing remains the same and, in time, nothing of the old buildings will remain at all. I’m happy to have captured just a few of New Zealand’s rural pubs of character as they were towards the end of the twentieth century.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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Country Churches of NZ 127. St. Patrick's, St Bathans, Central Otago

I wrote and illustrated Country Churches of New Zealand. It was published in 2002 by New Holland, Publishers and is still on sale in bookshops. The publishers have kindly agreed to me re-publishing some of the book’s images and descriptions in this blog.

ST. PATRICK’S, ST. BATHANS

The town of St. Bathans had such a fabulously rich goldfield that miners turned what was once a 120m hill into what is now the flooded crater of the 50m deep Blue Lake.

St Patrick's was built in 1892 for Catholics and has a 'stone lasts forever' look about it that contrasts with corrugated iron St Alban's up the road. A misleading impression, for like the nearby Vulcan Hotel, it is built of sun-dried mud brick.

I did my work in the churchyard on a chilly spring morning, my feet in dew-wet grass and periwinkle but as I sketched, the sun picked its way across the tombstones and lit up a magnificent horse chestnut in full bloom, probably as old as the church.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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Country Churches of NZ 124. St. Dunstan's, Clyde, Central Otago

I wrote and illustrated Country Churches of New Zealand. It was published in 2002 by New Holland, Publishers and is still on sale in bookshops. The publishers have kindly agreed to me re-publishing some of the book’s images and descriptions in this blog.

ST. DUNSTAN'S, CLYDE, CENTRAL OTAGO

I like the simple symmetry of St. Dunstan's Catholic Church at Clyde, and somehow the unassuming wire gate that guards the narrow, rose-lined path adds to its appeal.

The schist stones are sandier than those of St. James's' Roxburgh (see 123) and mimic the surrounding hills.

Dunstan was Clyde's first name. Its oldest buildings date from the aftermath of a huge storm in 1863 that destroyed the canvas town and the earlier Catholic church that had grown in this rich roughhouse of a goldfield.

This St. Dunstan's, with its Marseilles-tiled roof, was designed by Francis William Petre (see also 117, St Patrick's, Lawrence) and built by Thomas Wilkinson and stonemason John Holloway. It was opened on Sunday 18 October 1903, by which time Clyde was thoroughly respectable.

© DON DONOVAN 
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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