Rain, rain nowhere, and not a drop to drink anyway…

New Zealand’s problem just now is it’s not very green. It’s brown. And yellow.

After four summers washed out by relentless rain, 2013 has opened with a one-in-seventy-year drought. Wellington region is especially hit – the municipal water supply is at crisis level. Any external use, even a watering can, is strictly forbidden – and they’re pinging people who transgress. We had a present locally last week in the form of two-and-a-bit days rain. But not enough – it sufficed only to wash rubbish into the system – throwing Wellington, where I live, on to its 10-day emergency supply.

The other Saturday I went to have a look at the Hutt River – Te Awakairangi, also called the Heretaunga river. Or, to anybody who’s seen The Fellowship of the Ring, Anduin.

The Hutt river. An American frontier-style fort was built on the bank on the left of this picture in the late 1840s. There’s no trace now, of course. What this picture doesn’t convey is the stagnant smell.

The Hutt river, looking south towards the rail bridge. Usually there’s a lot more water in it than this. Its pakeha name comes from Sir William Hutt (1801-1882), one of the shareholders of the New Zealand Company.

It’s the main source for most of Wellington region’s water. And it’s virtually dry.

Worse, New Zealand also generates a big chunk of our power with water, down south. That’s not in good order either. I’ve got a post coming up on our nifty eco-friendly hydro-power engineering. But that won’t fill the storage lakes.

Time, I think, to plan Laundry Day. That usually spurs rain. At least if I’m involved.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up this week: more writing posts – ‘sixty second writing tips’ and ‘write it now’. More geekery. And, aside from blogging, rain… I hope.

Inspirations: New Zealand’s wild wild west

A century and a half ago, New Zealand could easily have been mistaken for mid-west America. It was the spitting image of the frontier across the Pacific.

The towns had the same limed roads, hitching posts and clap-board buildings. When the railway went in, even the locomotives were the same.

In a literal sense our ‘west’ was actually our south, our middle and our north. Oh, and our west. The whole country, really. It wasn’t surprising. Colonial-age New Zealand was part of the ‘Pacific rim’ – a frontier subculture that shared values, look, speech patterns and even people. Many of them were gold miners, rushing from California to Victoria and finally to Otago.

You can still see traces of it today – a point that came home to me a little while ago when I was in Cromwell for the first time in many years.

Cromwell’s preserved historic district – once a road at the top of the town, now lapped by the waters of Lake Clyde.

I have to say, the phrase ‘yeeeee-haw!’ went through my mind when I took this photo. Inappropriate, really…

Cromwell is unique; the town was part-flooded during the 1980s when the Clyde Dam was completed and Lake Clyde began filling. There was a scrabble to do some last-minute archaeology. And what had been one of the upper town streets was preserved as a historic district, redolent of the way the town had appeared during its golden age in the 1860s.

Elsewhere,  glimpses of later history still poke through – in places, redolent of mid-twentieth rather than mid-nineteenth century – less American, but still here and there with that cross-Pacific influence.

This scene is pretty classically mid-twentieth century New Zealand, complete with English car - except for ‘gasoline’. We usually call it ‘petrol’.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up: more sixty second writing tips, ‘write it now’ – structure, and total geekery with ancient astronauts.

Inspirations: Scotland away from Scotland in New Zealand’s deep south

In the late 1840s migrants from Scotland poured into New Zealand’s deep south, looking to build a devout Presbyterian settlement untrammelled by the schism that had ripped the Church of Scotland asunder, unbothered by the social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution.

It didn’t work. When they arrived, they discovered the Anglicans – the ‘little enemy’, as they called them - had got there first. The Scots also brought their social problems with them. And then the gold miners arrived, with their rough and rouse-about life, sending shivers up the spines of the more God-fearing Dunedinites.

Still, there were some compensations. After travelling half way around the world, they found their little corner of New Zealand was altogether familiar. I covered that story in a book I wrote a few years ago for Penguin, Old South. But what I didn’t mention there was just how awesome that landscape is.

Lake Clyde – an artificial ‘hydro’ lake formed in the late 1980s after the huge Clyde Dam and associated hydro plant was completed.

Not surprising in a way; similar latitude, similar geography and similar climate combined to make things – well, similar. Shortly intensified by the settler effort to import every plant and animal they could find. Including deer, rabbits and – if urban legend is anything to go by – at least one puma.

A photo I took of the Kawau gorge, north Otago, 2013. It wasn’t easy, the place was socked in with rain most of the day I was there.

Today, Southland and Otago are the only parts of New Zealand to have any trace of a regional accent – a slightly rounded ‘r’. Nobody outside New Zealand would likely spot it amidst the universal ‘I’ll have sux fush and a scoop of chups, eh’. But that slight ‘Southland burr’ is definitely there – a legacy of that old Scottish heritage. Cool.

Are there any places you know of that are weirdly similar – despite being geographically distant? Is there any landscape you’ve found that’s totally awesome? I’d love to hear from you.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Inspirations: eco-recovery in extreme dirt road trucker land

Ever watch Ice Road Truckers? One of my favourite shows de jour. A few weeks ago I spent half a day in New Zealand’s own extreme truck-driving environment, the open-cast coal mine at Stockton. It’s New Zealand’s biggest mine, perched on a dizzying plateau north of Westport, right above a town with the apt name of Granity.

The view from the Stockton plateau, looking southwest towards Westport. I have to say it… is this an awesome view, or what?

The view from the plateau is stunning. As is the work in the mine – which is where the extreme trucking comes in. It’s to do with the scale. Everything looks normal, until you stand next to it.

This digger is way bigger than it seems. Look at the size of the driver.

Some serious earth-moving. The tech term for the soil covering the coal is ‘overburden’.

Here’s a picture of me in front of one of the trucks. I am 182 cm tall without the hat. I think I’ve lived in houses smaller than that truck. These can carry 70 tonnes of spoil downhill in one hit. And there are bigger ones on the mine that lug 100 tonnes uphill (not down – it’s a brake temperature problem). The big rigs operated by the trucking company I once worked for, an aeon or so ago, topped out at less than half the loaded weight of these suckers.

This Tasmanian-built Haulmax with Caterpillar diesel is one big sucker.

Kind of cool – certainly for blokes. Did I mention they start by using explosives to break up the rock? Then cut loose with that ultra-heavy moving machinery? My wife watched the earth-moving action and made some comment about boys in sandpits, but hey… A little later, we learned that women drive the trucks too, and have a better maintenance record than the men.

Down sides? Well, the coal’s exported, mostly to India, where it’s used for steel-making, but also burned. And as you can imagine, open cast mining leaves its mark on the landscape – piles of spoil, great ledged pits where coal has been scooped out, all surrounded with the detritus of heavy industry. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. I took a photograph.

Part of the coal mine. Kind of ugly.

Plus side? That landscape is temporary. New Zealand has strict resource laws, and this place operates under conditions. One is that there must be no visible sign of the mine from below. Another is that they put back the original top-cover, plant cover and animals – returning the plateau to a natural state as good as, or better than, it was before.

Restoration – back to what it was once like. A pretty bleak plateau in natural state, but with its own rugged asethetic.

That’s been ongoing. Before excavation begins, the original top layer with its plant and insect life is re-positioned nearby for preservation and re-installation later. It’s important. The plateau is home to specialised life – unique plants adapted to the bleak environment, even rare native snails. Some snails, I am told, are collected and preserved for the future in refrigerators. Not only does the chill not hurt them, they’ve apparently even been breeding there. Slowly – uh, obviously.

I think it’s pretty inspiring.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Dreams stay with you in a big country

It’s a big country, in places – New Zealand. Quintessential Middle Earth, to some. And suddenly my wife and I find ourselves in this part of it:

Open road, big country and big sky. To me, my SLR and polariser, irresistible.

Not planned, though we’ve been planning this road trip for a while: a wander through New Zealand’s South Island, over Haast Pass into Westland – a spectacular bush-clad landscape that looks like a downstream slice of the Jurassic. Mainly because it is. But we never get there.

The view towards Glenorchy at the top of Lake Wakitipu. Fog rolled in as I took this one. Of course…

Our plan rests on good weather, not too big a gamble in January, except for my astonishing capacity as a rain god. Clouds roll in as we look around Glenorchy, home to a branch railway line that, at 50 metres, is regarded as New Zealand’s shortest. By the time we reach Wanaka the district is sodden and the information centre jammed with annoyed tourists.

TSS Earnslaw, 101 years old now and a New Zealand icon.  An old family friend of ours was the engineer on board this classic triple-expansion steamer until his recent retirement. You’d never guess, but I took this picture of the Earnslaw berthing at Queenstown, on Lake Wakitipu, with just two hours to go before rain socked in.

The pass is closed by a slip. Come back at noon. We dash through pelting rain to find brunch. An hour later nothing has changed, except the information board which tells us to come back at 3.00 pm for more news. The tourists fume: ‘Sie Kiwis! Ist Ihr Wetter so völlig undiszipliniert und ohne Ordnung!’

Quite. We have family to meet in Westport in two days, and Haast Pass is the direct route.

‘Let’s go up the east coast,’ I suggest. She Who Must Be Obeyed agrees. We set out for the Lindis Pass – the road to north Otago and the MacKenzie country, better known to the world as ‘Rohan’.

A few minutes later we break out into bright sunshine. Of course.

And we enter a gigantic landscape with a big sky and rolling ochre hills that defies the imagination. It is the antithesis of Westland; a vast land of vast form that leaves us breathless with its beauty.

We keep stopping. I am on a photography jag. What’s the point in lugging  a camera that weighs over 1kg with a lens that looks like a ½ scale Saturn V rocket, if you don’t use it?

These days anyone can create a perfect panorama. For reasons associated with ‘the emotion of art as a dada concept’, I still prefer the old collage effect with hand-held SLR. I took these shots of the Lindis Pass, deliberately moving the camera to create that jigsaw look, and pasted the results together manually.

Besides, this landscape is not to be missed. It is not just a big country. It is a huge country. It unfolds around us in a vast carpet of tussock and rolling yellow-brown, mythically gigantic when beheld from the puny scale of mere mortals. I find myself thinking not of the fantasy riders who pounded across it in Jackson’s ‘The Two Towers’, but of the hardy Scots and English folk who took it on for real in the 1850s, throwing sheep across Crown leasehold with enthusiastic abandon and reaping financial rewards that made them rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Tussock and Echium – Patterson’s Curse - in the top of Lindis Pass.

Otago tussock. Distinctive – and means the disbelief, for me, isn’t entirely suspended in ‘The Two Towers’.

It’s a big, big country down here.

Not to mention James MacKenzie, the alleged sheep-rustler who, legend goes, hid a stolen flock in the midst of this enormous landscape – a land that, today, bears his name.

It is a fantastic place, a land of legends, a land of history, an inspiration – and a place for dreams.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Summer skies, blue waters and a promise for the year

There is a pleasure about summer that seems to blow away the cobwebs of a busy year and the gloom of winter. Today I thought I’d share a few pictures I took recently in Napier, New Zealand.

It’s my home town, though I don’t live there these days; and it underscores the fact that there is a lot more to New Zealand scenery than Tolkien landscapes. Especially in summer when the blue skies stretch huge from horizon to horizon and the water laps against beaches lined with pohutukawa. These pictures are unedited apart from some minor cropping, adding my copyright notice, and re-sizing to fit the blog. I was playing with a polarising filter and new lens – looking to capture the feel of the day in a place deep in the South Pacific where the summers are Californian and the architecture pure Hollywood.. What do you reckon?

Ocean going waka moored against East Quay, Ahuriri harbour, Napier New Zealand. Earlier in 2012, I spent hours standing in Awarua harbour, Rarotonga, trying to photograph this one.

Greywacke brought down to the sea by the rivers that cross the Heretaunga plains give Napier’s beaches their shingled look – and tint the summer sea azure.I went for full polarisation with this one to bring out the clouds, which the hills inevitably sweep into interesting shapes.

The Tom Parker Fountain, on Napier’s town centre foreshore, was donated by local identity Tom Parker in 1936. Though modelled on an English example, it is pure deco, a Hollywood fantasy in a townscape that was once going to be rebuilt along the lines of Santa Barbara. At night the water is lit in rainbow colours from beneath. I’ve been photographing it for years in many weathers and seasons.

Coming up this year:

The response to my last post, making 2013 a year of kindness, has been just fantastic – and everybody agrees. Thank you so much for your support! And let’s do it.  The year of kindness. So – on this blog, this year, we’ll have:
- posts on kindness and the positive side of the human condition…with
- some posts on my favourite writers
- some posts on New Zealand scenery and photography
- a systematic how-to series on writing
- some science geek posts
- a short series on history mysteries
- and more

Copyright Matthew Wright © 2013

The perils of life around the real Mount Doom

New Zealand’s Mount Tongariro erupted today for the second time in four months.

A photo I took a few years ago. Lake Taupo, with Mount Tauhara (another volcano) in the background. Taupo isn’t a placid lake filled with trout. Well, it is. But it’s also the caldera of one of the world’s biggest supervolcanoes. Uh – yay.

The blast happened without warning. Geological and Nuclear Sciences staff had been worried about possible eruption from the next-door volcano, Ruapehu. But nothing from Tongariro.

It’s apposite. The Hobbit is revving up for its premiere next week – and back in 2000, Peter Jackson used Mount Ngaruhoe, technically one of Tongariro’s vents, as Mount Doom.

How it will develop – if it does at all – remains to be seen. The eruption earlier this year lasted for days, dropped ash across my home town of Napier, and sent a cloud of hydrogen sulphide drifting across the North Island. That reached Wellington, where I live now.

Still, it could be worse. It could be nearby Taupo, one of the world’s 50-odd “supervolcanoes”.  Taupo last erupted in 186 AD and gave the Romans spectacular sunsets (think about it!). But that blast was a tiddler compared to the real ‘blow’, 27,000 years ago. That mega-eruption sent over 1150 cubic kilometres of debris rocketing skywards, annihilating everything in the central plateau and blowing a great gouge out of the crust.

That’s our real Mount Doom. Kind of funny to realise that today it’s a lake, and a pretty placid one, too.

I wonder what it will be tomorrow?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Inspirations: Secret Gotham in Hobbit Land

The MLC building. It’s not really these colours…

 Amidst all the Hobbit hoopla with its seven-story promo posters and street-light banners and tie-in toys and movie ticket lines and book and all the rest, New Zealand’s capital city – Wellington’s – got a secret.

Like most secrets it’s in plain sight. Wellington Gotham. Streamline moderne buildings from the early 1940s.

Across the road from the MLC, the Prudential building. I didn’t filter this image, it’s natural colour (insofar as the CCD in my Canon captures it).

Two of them date to the early 1940s and that classic age of streamline moderne, quintessential Deco - the age when Flash Gordon conquered the universe. It was the pinnacle of step-Mayan, chrome-curve streamline architecture. It was ultimate Modernism in that breathless moment of triumph before the joy of it was cut short by the horrors of the Second World War, and changed forever.

They’re just part of the scenery. Nobody pays them any attention. And that’s a pity, because they’re magnificent examples of the art.

The other week I went for a wander down Lambton Quay armed with the camera and a notion of capturing the abstraction, the shape as idea; the feel of the buildings as Gotham; the sense of the late 1930s. Some of these pictures are exactly as they emerged. Others…well, I’ve been a bit adventurous with filters. Other than some minor cropping, though, they’re exactly what I saw through the lens.

This building used to house the Defence headquarters – wonderful example of art deco. They moved a few years ago; it’s under renovation. Another natural colour image; I had to wait for clouds to clear to get that blue sky.

What I was interested in was the interplay of shape and colour, the way that these conveyed the essential feel of a bygone age. Did it work? I don’t know. But it was fun to do.

The State Insurance building of 1940. Not Middle Earth, but from the sky colour, possibly one of those new super-earths they’ve found, with thick air and maybe a touch of iodine in the atmosphere.

I find it amazing that these slices of style can be found in the city. To me they’re inspiring – inspiring to me as a writer, inspiring to me as a photographer. A prompt for thought, a prompt for the imagination. And definitely not Middle Earth.

Is there a place you know that is a little slice of Gotham?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Amsterdam’s taxing narrow houses

I promised a reader I’d post this. Writing inspirations for the day, part deux: pictures of some of Amsterdam’s buildings notable for their slender frontages.

I took this from the Damrack using Fujicolor Superia 200 asa film. Not the narrowest buildings in Amsterdam, but they’re up there…

Serious narrow, especially that one on the left. ‘I’ll put the table here, lengthwise, I think.’ Note the gantry at the top of the right hand house – this is how they get the furniture into the upper floors, via the windows. My wife took this picture.

How did it happen? Back in the sixteenth century, Dutch authorities levied taxes from citizens based – among other things – on the width of their houses. The results were predictable. Several houses are trumpeted as ‘the narrowest house in Amsterdam’, but they’re all pretty much of a muchness. The narrowest, I believe, is around 80 cm. (Don’t breathe out.)

What was more, during the age of the tulpenmanie (the ‘tulip bubble’) in the early seventeenth century, some of these houses could be swapped for a single tulip bulb. One that wasn’t necessarily even in the possession of the vendor – it was somewhere else, represented by paper scrip which, itself, became a tradeable item. This in the 1620s.

That automobile is not as natty as it once was.

Is this inspirational for writers? I think so. Because in this we can see an expression of our ability to abstract; and also – in those houses – our ability to creatively find ways around limits. That works for writing too. If one thing doesn’t work, try another.

I had to share one other photo. Those cars parked against the edge of the gracht sometimes drop in. I photographed one being pulled out. Apparently it’s too easy for someone wanting a parking spot to nudge the way clear. That lateral creative streak again…I think.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Writing inspirations: blustery Otaki beach

Otaki beach, north of Wellington, New Zealand, is a wonderfully inspiring place to visit. It is often blustery, a wide swathe of log-strewn sand backed by grassy dunes.

This beach carries the tales of two peoples. In the early 1820s, Maori surged up and down it, migrating or going to war. It was the road by which the fearsome Ngati Toa chief Te Rauparaha arrived in the southern North Island. It was the route he took in his forays to attack the people of the southern Manawatu. And it was where war parties came in their quest to hunt him down, though he sat safe in his island refuge of Kapiti.

Otaki beach on a blustery October day, 2012, Kapiti island in the distance. I took this at approx 18 mm – you can see the spherical distortions.

Later this same beach was a highway for settlers. It was here in 1850 that Donald McLean intercepted the Lieutenant-Governor, John Eyre, and rode with him for a few hours, sorting out the deal that gave McLean a state salary and set the wheels in motion for the first big government purchases in Hawke’s Bay. A political discussion that shaped the history of New Zealand’s settler world – played out, right here on this beach.

I took this picture of Otaki beach in October 2009. No tilt-shift gimmickry here; this is what came out of a 200mm lens stopped down to 5.6.

Even the name of the place carries inspiration. Otaki means variously ‘the place of a staff stuck into the ground’ or ‘the place of the yellow-eyed mullet’.

Most of the detritus on the beach is swept down the Otaki river. I found this stump in the middle of the river-mouth lagoon in 2009.

It is inspiring to walk where others have walked – to hear the crashing of the breakers and feel the wind-blown sand, hear the hiss of the wind through the grasses by the sandy edge. It is a place to contemplate, a place to think, a place to feel the memories. A place that fuels new ideas, new perspectives. An inspiring place for writers.

Do you ever visit a beach that inspires you?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012