Southland: Following in their footsteps

The Roaring Lion Track in Southland. Photo / Ben Arthur

One morning in 1925, Chinese worker Jimmy Long left his smoky sod hut on the hillside above the Nokomai gold mine to meet his friend Lee Lum.

The pair were among 30 Chinese labourers who toiled with pick and shovel to build and maintain the 47km Roaring Lion water race that brought water from the Nevis to the lower Nokomai Valley to sluice alluvial gold.

The gold has long panned out but the sluice remains and is now a 27km loop walking track at Blackmore Station in Northern Southland.

Tom O'Brien, whose grandparents have farmed here since 1911, spent the past two years rebuilding the track using a pick and shovel - his way of preserving the landscape and honouring the Chinese labourers who travelled from the other side of the world to be outcasts in a strange land.

I walk in Long's footsteps on a warm summer's afternoon nearly a century later. The path is narrow and curves gently around the hill. The Roaring Lion is now more of a purring kitten and the quiet chuckle of the water in the gently sloping race accompanies me, as it would have Long. Tussock swishes across our feet and scatterings of alpine flowers nod their white faces to the sun.

Small birds flit and sing. Long probably saw more native bush where I now see steep slopes browned by a dry summer, ribs of rock exposed by the action of grinding glaciers millennia ago and, later, gold mining and sheep farming.

In the valley far below are the regular variegated green swards of the sheep paddocks of Nokomai Station, where Long saw the Nokomai gold mine workings.

Long and Lum kept the race clear of tussock and made sure the schist and slate slabs they took from nearby tors to keep back the crumbling hillside did not block the flowing water. I think of my daughter, left behind in Auckland, and sympathise with Long and Lum, yearning for their own families at home.

A short distance from Long's hut, a pretty waterfall tumbles awkwardly down the hillside and across the path to disappear into the bush-clad folds of the hill. I stop, as Long probably did, and scoop up a handful of the fresh, clear water and fill my water bottle.

When Lum wasn't at the appointed meeting place, Long may have waited for a while then decided to walk to Lum's hut.

The door was closed and when knocking didn't rouse his friend, Long entered the hut to find Lum sitting upright on his pallet. As the traumatised Long told police later: "Me look at him, he look dead. Me speak to him, he no answer. Me shake him, one eye open. Me get such fright me run all the way to Nokomai."

That's a long way. Police returned with a horse and cart to retrieve Lum's body but when they couldn't get the cart to Lum's hut, they tied his body behind the horse and dragged it back to Nokomai.

O'Brien doesn't know where Lum was finally buried but he points me to two gravestones, age having nearly worn off the Chinese epitaph, in the tiny little cemetery between a tiny little Catholic church and a tiny little Presbyterian church in Garston, which I visit when I leave.

O'Brien hopes opening the race will raise awareness of the influence and contribution of the Chinese to New Zealand's early pioneering days. He is keeping sheep from the area to allow the land to regenerate. That explains why the two sheep I do see look so furtive as I walk by them.

O'Brien has restored Long's tumbledown hut, using mud bricks made from the surrounding earth. A corrugated tin roof replaces the old tussock-filled hessian sacks that kept Long dry. Long's rough pallet is now a padded bunk but the candlelight that brought comfort to his evenings - I imagine him writing letters home - also illuminates my evening reading.

O'Brien has added a delightful concession to 21st-century luxury: a gas-heated outdoor bath. Once I convince myself of the unlikelihood of neighbours unexpectedly dropping by, I bathe in the gloaming, as the encroaching darkness leaches the nuances of colour from the surrounding landscape and the moon rises above the peaks.

I am a little worried about creepy crawlies joining me in my bunk but O'Brien assures me I will have to really go looking to find any spiders - I have no intention of doing that.

But, he warns, carnivorous native snails live at this altitude. That's okay. I am pretty confident I will be able to outrun one of those. So I spend a cosy night with only the rising wind and Long's ghost for company.

At 27km, the Roaring Lion is doable in a day but Long's mud hut is one of three on the trail. It is open year-round but be equipped for sudden weather changes in this alpine environment.

It is graded as an intermediate mountain bike trail which, for safety reasons, must be ridden anti-clockwise from the ski hut.

I eat my breakfast outside the hut the following morning. The sun's rays are spreading their golden summer light across the tussock. Long and his friends spread along the race may have sat outside their huts, too, awakening to the miracle of a perfect new day and revelling in a growing feeling of optimism for the future. I really like to think they did.

Helen van Berkel travelled to Southland courtesy of Venture Southland. www.welcomerock.co.nz