I have seen Paradise. I went there as a boy in the back of my dad’s Holden.
One autumn nearly half a century ago, the family packed up our car and drove for hours from Invercargill to find Paradise at the end of a dusty, metal road. We didn’t need a prophet, or the Good Book, or signs in the sky to show us the way, just a gas station touring map.
To a small boy on his first proper country adventure, Paradise seemed like the middle of nowhere, and it was. Then, as now, this rural retreat lies at the head of Lake Wakatipu, between the Rees and Dart rivers, in a valley betwixt Mts Earnslaw/Pikirakatahi and Alfred/Ari. Civilisation was an hour to the south in the still-sleepy hamlet of Queenstown.
The first people to see this beautiful area were its local iwi, Kāi Tahu. The first Europeans to settle it were shepherds and their sheep in the 1860s. One of those shepherds, Alfred Duncan, is said to have called the place Paradise. The name was good enough to stick.
The first homestead – Eden Grove – was built by one William Mason, said to be New Zealand’s first architect, in 1883. Not long after, he sold out to the Aitken family, who opened Paradise up to everyone, making it a place for city boys and girls and their families, like the Dixons of Invercargill, to visit and stay – a place to experience the middle of nowhere.
By the mid-1970s, when our Holden turned into its metal driveway, Paradise belonged to the Millers, who owned the retreat from the 1940s until they placed it in a trust in 1998.
Unlike the early years, by the 1970s you could no longer stay in the old homestead, then called Miller House, but you could still enjoy a rustic holiday in the small collection of old wooden cottages that dotted the property. We were given the Annex, the old staff quarters. It had no internal doors, only ones opening out onto the veranda that ran the length of the building. This made for a chilly run to the dunny in the middle of the night.
Half a century later, my memories of Paradise are battered Polaroids: Mum and me rowing a dinghy in circles on nearby Diamond Lake, while Dad and my sister watched from the beach; shooting tin cans with the tiny air rifle Dad had bought for me; walks through a beech forest; watching horrified as a farmer shot and butchered a sheep. And on a night visit to Miller House, perhaps to pay the owner David Miller for our stay, I recollect seeing, in the half light of a wood-panelled hallway, small piles of borer dust on the floor.
But what I remember most is the smell of the place, redolent of trees and pasture, of livestock, of the damp on a cold, autumn night. It’s a scent that has the power of time travel: on a twilight walk up the avenue at Lush Places last week, I sniffed the air and there I was, again a small boy on another evening half a century ago. I was visiting Paradise.
I rang Geoff in London. I told him the good news: “I’ve finally got all the firewood in,” I announced, possibly triumphantly. “Excellent,” he said, possibly ironically. “I shall have a beer to celebrate.” It was heartening my success was welcomed half a world away.
In the end, it took nearly 17 hours to move and stack, in our two woodsheds, this winter’s firewood, a record haul of some 20 cubic metres of pine and macrocarpa. That’s nearly half a week’s proper work; if only someone was giving me proper pay to do such proper work.
I suppose it might be adequate compensation to know that the wood is in and the sheds are full. A weight has been lifted. I am finally ready for winter’s trials.
