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Home / The Listener / Reviews

Book of the day: The Middle of Nowhere by Rosemary Baird

By Nik Dirga
New Zealand Listener·
20 Aug, 2025 06:00 PM5 mins to read

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Tunnel tales: 18 men died building the eight-year construction project to build the Manapōuri hydroelectric station. Image / Supplied

Tunnel tales: 18 men died building the eight-year construction project to build the Manapōuri hydroelectric station. Image / Supplied

Review by Nik Dirga

Imagine getting a job at the bottom of an island at the bottom of the world. You go underground to carve out a massive cavern 200m beneath a lake and every day you hope you make it out.

Between 1963 and 1971, Fiordland’s Lake Manapōuri was the site of a massive, controversial hydroelectric construction project.

The project is now mostly known for one of the country’s largest environmental protests, over plans to raise the lake’s level by up to 30m. The Save Manapōuri campaign captured the public imagination, but fewer recall the anonymous workers who built the still-running hydroelectric station, the largest in New Zealand.

In The Middle of Nowhere, Heritage New Zealand researcher Rosemary Baird captures their stories. “They faced danger, isolation and discomfort, in return for high wages and the chance to get ahead in life.”

It’s an oral history of working-class folk, for the most part never famous – one exception is former Invercargill Mayor Sir Tim Shadbolt, who worked at Manapōuri when he was just 19.

Hundreds laboured to build a 10km tunnel under a mountain, blast out a huge hall for the generators beneath the lake and build a road over Wilmot Pass.

Many worked at Deep Cove in Doubtful Sound, where the land and sea meet so steeply that a ship, the Wanganella, had to be brought in as a kind of floating hostel. The internet was barely conceived; these workers were about as isolated as you could get.

The Middle of Nowhere: Stories of Working on the Manapōuri Hydro Project, by Rosemary Baird (Canterbury University Press, $55), is out now. Image / Supplied
The Middle of Nowhere: Stories of Working on the Manapōuri Hydro Project, by Rosemary Baird (Canterbury University Press, $55), is out now. Image / Supplied

US companies supervised much of the work. Some had never heard of New Zealand and expected “to see natives running around in grass skirts”. The racial attitudes of some from the American Deep South didn’t go down well. Shadbolt recalls a Kiwi worker telling an American, “Listen mate, I’d stop calling that young Māori guy a boy. He’s getting really pissed off. You might get a good whack if you carry on like that in this country.”

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One American supervisor said: “The job would be relatively easy if it wasn’t for the rain, mud and vegetation.”

It wasn’t actually that easy – 18 men died during the project. Hundreds were injured. Safety measures could be inconsistent and workers were often left to manage the best they could.

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One 24-year-old worker literally disappeared somewhere on the Wilmot Pass, the likely victim of explosives, only a few fragments of him being ever found.

“You’d be drinking with one guy one day and the next day he’s killed,” one worker recalls.

The most dangerous work was underground, and Baird richly evokes the claustrophobic chaos of a noisy, cramped environment with water constantly seeping from the lake above. Communication was done by hand signals. When the explosions went off, “it was just like getting your body battered by a huge vibrator”.

Crews came from all over the world – Croatia, Italy, Spain – to work alongside plenty of Kiwi workers. Sandflies, mosquitoes and pesky natives plagued them. A newly arrived Irish boilermaker was attacked by kea flying down after his equipment – it even ate the lining out of his helmet. The Irishman was found weeping: “I’ve never met anything like these devil birds.” He left and didn’t come back.

There were attempts to make the isolated camps feel like a home. Māori workers in Deep Cove got a permanent hāngī going, and popular entertainers came in to break up the monotony. “It was entertaining, just to see a lady with a bare leg,” one worker remembers fondly.

Women weren’t allowed to visit the underground sites due to superstitions that death or an accident followed if they appeared at places under construction. Even Miss Southland wasn’t permitted; “She could have come in naked and she wouldn’t have been allowed underground,” one worker says.

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At the other end of the lake was the Manapōuri hydro village, where families were allowed to settle. Wives and children tried to build a community with their husbands away much of the time.

Decades on, the signs of the work are all gone – the men’s huts, the Wanganella, the hydro-village homes. But the power station is still there, humming away.

“The environment’s actually a lot tougher than you think,” Shadbolt recalls. “You go back there now to what was a bomb site and it’s really beautiful.”

Baird doesn’t omit the environmental clashes over Manapōuri, but that’s not the focus here. This is about the people who were there, making a go of it.

Packed with fascinating photos from the camps, Baird’s book excels in capturing the windblown isolation, the gritty character of the men bashing away at rock and bush and trying to keep their sanity in a sea of alcohol, sweat and constant danger.

Even going for a bush walk could kill you. “It’s country that’s got to be respected,” one recalls. “That’s why nobody lives there.”

The Middle of Nowhere: Stories of Working on the Manapōuri Hydro Project, by Rosemary Baird (Canterbury University Press, $55), is out now.

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