Life in Arthur's Pass village, 1970 to 1975, by Tony Perrett

Life in Arthur’s Pass Village 1970—1975, by Tony Perrett

• I started as a National Park Ranger in July 1970. Jenny and I were married in September 1970. The first 6 weeks of married life was characterised by 6 weeks of near continuous rain apart from a brief interlude of one and a half days without rain. This wet spring was followed by a gorgeous sunny summer, the best we experienced in our time at Arthur’s Pass.
• I have the impression that today’s climate has changed and it is now a lot drier, from a 1970s average annual rainfall of 2500 mm down to about 1500mm average?
• We initially lived in the Single Men’s Quarters at Rough Creek. The unit consisted basically of one room, being a combined kitchenette, lounge and bedroom, and a small toilet/shower, with shared laundry facilities. The single bed was a built in permanent fixture .It was basic and perfect for a single person, but barely tolerable for a married couple!
• We endured this living arrangement for about 9 months until the Lockwood house opposite the store became available. Just as well as Jenny was about 5 months pregnant by then and sharing a narrow single bed was starting to become problematic.
• At this time, the permanent population of the village was about 60, consisting of 4-5 railway staff and families, 4 National Park Rangers and their families, a school teacher, Dave Stove and his family, a storekeeper, Jack and Bonny Acland and family, Pat and Hans Bohny and family at the Chalet Restaurant, Paddy Freaney and his wife Lynn, who ran the Outdoor Education Lodge, and a Dutch couple Ooms? who looked after the Alpine Motels. There were other single staff two or three Park work staff, A MOWD roadman, Jack Soutar, our local idiosyncratic fix-it man, and the burgermaster, Oscar Coberger. A Railways Department Bridge gang was resident in the village for much of this time period, building the new rail bridge at Cora Lynn.
• Compared to now, the population is about 30. The Railway staff are gone as is the MOWD roadman, the teacher and the school, and notables such as Jack Soutar and Oscar Coberger have passed on. The Chalet Restaurant is now closed and the general store has morphed into a tearooms mostly. There are less DOC staff now too. And I can’t forget to mention John and Judy Charles, who currently hold the record for continuously living the longest in Arthur’s Pass, 50 plus years and counting. There are obviously replacements in the village now to fill in the gaps, but somehow the place seems to have a bit of a different vibe about it. Maybe the loss of the primary school has something to do with this as there are a dearth of young children in the village today.
• Otira then had a population of about 440 souls, mostly comprised of a large Railway community, plus NZ Electricity staff, a MOWD roading crew, a teacher and primary school, a publican with a functioning public bar, a policeman, a District Nurse and a playcentre. Now the population is about 100.
• Back in the day, the Arthur’s Pass Railway Station was manned 24/7 with 3 traffic assistants who controlled train travel including the electric trams used to haul freight wagons through the Otira Tunnel. There was a Stationmaster who was also the Postmaster. We had our own post office. There were at least two railcars a day. The midday one brought up the day’s mail plus perishables like fresh meat from the butcher in Springfield. Everyone used to cram into the tiny post office and wait for the mail to be sorted and delivered. A great community meeting place. Now locals collect their mail from post office boxes opposite the tearooms.
• Being a small mountain community meant that we were frequently cut off from the outside world through snow or slips so it bred resilience and self-sufficiency. We generally had pretty well stocked larders and freezers and would shop up large once a month in either Christchurch or Greymouth. If the road was closed, we could usually get out of the village to Christchurch or Greymouth by railcar.
• Some romantic strolls around the village at night after heavy snowfalls with the road closed are among some of my fondest memories.
• We actually had a relatively bug free, healthy lives. We would often be vulnerable to bugs brought into the community by hordes numbering in their hundreds of railway excursionists from Christchurch or after holidays. We would find whole families of excursionists picnicking on our front lawn, inches from our dining room, as smooth grassy places to recline were scarce in the village. Bloody cheek!
• We all got along pretty well together which is what you had to do in a place like Arthur’s Pass. Some of the women with young children, trapped inside for weeks on end when it rained, struggled to cope.
• A mate’s mother warned us of the reputation she said that the village had for wild wife
  swapping parties. We never ever saw any wild parties like that in the time we lived there.
• One type of incident that we experienced was UFOs. We were adamant that some strange lights we saw over Rome Ridge for several nights were UFOs. One of the railway traffic assistants reckons he saw a spaceship take off from the goods yard one wet night. Several others had similar experiences. One day a journalist from a magazine, the Woman’s Weekly or something similar turned up and wrote a story after interviewing people in the village.
• There was a very active women’s arts and craft group in the village that met weekly. Some of the women were very talented. I recall Margaret Stove once crocheted a woolen shawl that was presented to Prince Charles and Lady Diane on a royal visit.
• This group was probably also a bit of a foil to the menfolk’s keg night. Often on a Wednesday night in winter the Railway men and Park staff mostly would meet in the old stationmaster’s house for darts. A 4.5 gallon keg would come through the tunnel on a tram from the Otira pub. The pub at Bealey had burnt down in the late 1960s. In summer , we would pile into a couple of cars and go over the hill to the Otira pub. Sometimes the trip back could be a bit scary, depending on who was driving. This was before the viaduct was built and the top zigzags had to be navigated. The new pub at Bealey is a real asset.
• The District Nurse in Otira doubled as a Plunket Nurse so any babies in the village were well checked over. My eldest child was almost born on Porter’s Pass. Luckily we made it in time for him to be born in the Darfield maternity hospital.
• In the village, we were very fortunate to have a couple of handy fix it men. If you couldn’t fix the problem then usually, either Jack Soutar or the teacher Dave Stove who was a mechanic in a former life could. Getting spare parts was the only real problem and could take a bit of time. The Park Workshop was pretty well equipped.
• For entertainment , we relied heavily on radios. We found old style valve radios worked well but you had to have a long copper wire aerial up to 40 feet long to get a decent signal. Where you lived in the village determined how good your reception was. A few had television but reception relied on a repeater on a hill above the village which was often out of action from marauding keas.
• Daily bread, milk and papers were available at the store along with a reasonable range of other groceries, but fresh fruit and veges were limited. The storekeepers did their best to cater for the permanent residents’ needs but sometimes fresh goods were in short supply. They ran an account system where one would pay for goods purchased once a month. You could also withdraw cash, just like a bank, which was very handy. 
• Winters were challenging times especially for young families. It was often very cold, wet or snowy, so young kids wouldn’t spend a lot of time outside. Only 4 hour’s sun a day was all you got for a couple of the colder months. Some of us had gravity fed alkathene water pipes for domestic supply. Dragging a couple of hundred feet of frozen pipe daily out of the bush, lying it on the tarseal highway to thaw when the sun came up at 10 am and reinstating it in place before the sun went down at 2pm after topping up your internal tanks, then repeating every day until you got a thaw was a real pain. I think all permanent residences are now on town supply.
• To live in the village meant learning to live with kea. These clowns of the mountains could be very destructive. You couldn’t leave washing out on the line overnight or you woke to find it shredded. I lost a brand new pair of boots that I had left out to dry overnight. The next morning revealed that all of the sponge rubber internal padding had been stripped out.
• An essential piece of domestic appliance was the Shacklock 501 coal range. Every Ranger’s house had one. They were used for cooking, heating the living parts of the house and hot water supply. You burnt about a ton of coal a month. So every two months, four of us would chip in and buy an 8 ton railway wagon of coal from Heaphy’s mine at Inangahua. This lignite coal burnt clean in the range leaving only a small amount of white ash. This meant you could get away with cleaning out the range flues sometimes up to once a fortnight. If you got out of sync with the others and had
  to settle for burning bright coal, you ended up clogging up the range flues and had to do a major cleanout every 2-3 days, a real filthy pain of a job as the range wouldn’t burn hot enough or clean enough unless you did it.
• Despite the trials and tribulations of living in the village, the experience was unforgettable. We absolutely loved it and often used to wonder why we ever left.
• Some of the reasons why we left were we had as a condition of employment we were required to live in Park Board housing. We weren’t able therefore to ever own our own home. The staff houses were located on National Park land, so families could not have pets. Also the prospect of sending children to boarding school at our expense mostly would have been a major financial strain when the time came.