The Punakaiki blowholes in Paparoa National Park. Photo / Supplied
A literary tour of the West Coast takes Bronwyn Sell on a journey that begins with gold fever, traverses brooding landscapes and ends with the sense of danger that echoes in an old mine.
In which four strangers arrive in Hokitika on a pilgrimage; gold is struck; ghosts are met; and we pontificate upon the literary appeal of the West Coast.
Late morning, as sunlight flickers over reddish-brown rocks in a trickling creek, the cry rings out.
Two pairs of eyes are fixed on a black gold-mining pan. One pair is sharp and bordered with wrinkles, the other wide, their colour not yet settled between brown and green.
"Are you ready to get stinking rich?" the old-timer growls to his young apprentice.
A quarter-hour earlier, the man and the boy scraped a bucketful of sticky, gravelly mud from a tunnel dug deep into a sandstone cliff. They carried it down to the creek and tipped it in the pan, the man warning the child to keep his hands out of the water in case the gold should pick up the oil in his skin and slip away, to be lost for another 100 or 100,000 years.
They flicked out the bigger stones, vibrated the pan to coax the paydirt to the bottom, then commenced circling it and rolling water through it, to wash away the mud.
With a half-cup left, the old-timer rolls it around, eyes narrowed. "There," he says, pointing to speckles of light amid the murk. "What do you think that is?"
"Gold?"
"Gold."
The boy turns to his father, who is seeking his fortune with his own pan. "Gold," he shouts.
At this crucial point, the old-timer takes charge. The gold is easily lost here, by hands too eager and heads too impatient. He walks to the untroubled water upstream, and gently sluices it through the pan's concentric ripples, trapping the heavier gold at the bottom while letting the lighter dirt wash out.
When he's finished, six wet flakes wink up from the black. The father adds another two flakes to the haul. Total value: $12.
"What will you spend it on?" the man asks.
"Lego," says the boy. "How much can I get?"
Yes, this is very much a 21st-century scene, but if you edit out the plastic accessories and DoC walkways it could be 1866, the year Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries begins, not far from here.
That's the beauty of the West Coast. So much of the human history is still in evidence, and so much of the natural environment is relatively untouched - and so stunning that after a while your jaw aches from all the sudden drops.
Is this why the region has proved so inspirational for New Zealand writers? Is it a coincidence that three of our most critically and commercially successful novels are set in this geographically dramatic sliver of the South Island - The Luminaries, Keri Hulme's The Bone People, and Jenny Pattrick's The Denniston Rose? Among them, these novels have picked up two Booker Prizes and sold more than 1.5 million copies worldwide. Not bad for a country where a novel is considered a best-seller if it sells more than 5000 copies.
It may shock you, then, that the West Coast hasn't yet made the international literary tour circuit. Granted, it may not be as literarily weighty as the Paris of Proust, Hemingway and Hugo, or the New York of Capote, Fitzgerald, Wharton and Salinger, but the scenery is pretty good. So here I am, dragging the husband and kids on possibly the first Literary Tour of the West Coast.
Catton, Hulme and Pattrick, aren't writing terracotta-tinted travelogues that have you dashing to the travel agent. Their books are half a world away - metaphorically and literally - from the ubiquitous chianti-doused, coriander-scented memoirs of Americans and Brits renovating their souls alongside their villas in [insert charming French or Italian village here]. Sure, there's grudging sunshine in their West Coast novels, but it's the exquisitely rendered gloom you remember.
The Bone People opens with a howling gale across the sea, and proceeds through thunderstorms, beating rain, drizzle, dark clouds, mist, greyness, frost, and wind "cutting into my kidneys like a knife".
As the Denniston Rose opens, Rose rattles and sways up the notorious Denniston Incline railway in a coal cart during a westerly "straight off the sea, heavy with salt and rain". Trees groan and slap, tents suck and billow, the wind screams and shrieks.
In The Luminaries, our first glimpse of Hokitika is "a shifting smear that advanced and retreated as the mist blew back and forth". Catton does rain like Peter Hoeg does snow and ice in Smilla's Sense of Snow. It drums, lashes, beats, clatters and drips; raindrops shimmer; a storm begins as a coppery taste in the back of the mouth. It's not a spoiler to reveal that the last word in this brick is "rain".
Wish you were there, yet?
Our arrival on the Coast is literarily uninspiring. The sky is a deep-blue dome. Cabbage trees clump together, nikau jut and kahikatea soar, while less-defiant trees are bent double, kowtowing to a non-existent wind. Pukeko and weka peck in paddocks and flap out in front of our car. Far out to sea the big blue sky meets the big blue sea in a clear line. To the south, the Alps are capped with snow.
At Hokitika, we spend a blazing morning on the beach searching for greenstone, the kids building dams and paddling in pools left by the sucking, dumping surf. It's hard to imagine this as the storm-battered coast of Catton's opening chapter. The only evidence lies in the driftwood: entire bleached trees that litter the pale-grey sand for miles, bringing to mind a cemetery upended by an earthquake, its tombstones toppling, its bones tossed from splintered caskets.
Little remains in Hokitika from the 1860s, when The Luminaries is set. If you stroll along Revell St or Gibson Quay and squint a little you may be able to summon Catton's wild-west town "full of bustle and appointment". You may follow the road upriver to Kaniere, where Ah Sook and Ah Quee walked. You may visit Seaview, where Crosbie Wells was buried and Anna was jailed. You may gaze over the river mouth and imagine the "shattered graveyard of the Hokitika bar". You may hike the Blue Spur bushwalk and bike the Arahura Valley, where Wells lived and prospectors dug. You may inspect relics at the museum, or take a guided walking tour. It all requires a fertile imagination.
It's 50km northwest at Woods Creek, inland of Greymouth, that we get a clearer sense of place for The Luminaries, albeit under brighter skies, as we pan for gold and explore the network of gold rush-era tracks, tunnels, races and stacked-stone walls. Our guide, Paul Schramm of the Wild West Adventure Company - the not-so-old-timer of our opening scene - spins yarns about fortunes, families and minds lost to gold fever and skullduggery, not all of them historic. Like many Coasters, Paul has a hobby claim, and has seen many a digger with nuggets in his eyes lose everything on a well-combed patch of land.
It seems unjustly dry to call all this "industrial history". It's people history - people toiling for better lives, many dying in the effort. Little of it is cheery. Many dreams have been shattered, and unhappy ghosts are said to still lurk. On a dare, Paul once overnighted in a Greymouth building rumoured to be haunted by a Chinese goldminer.
"I didn't hear anything banging or calling but, by God, there was something there. There was definitely a chill. There was this space that felt different, this field of unease."
He shudders. "I still don't know whether I'm talking myself into it."
We meet a ghost of our own at the Denniston Plateau, up near Westport and 1000m above sea level. When we arrive, John Gurney of The Denniston Experience apologises for the balmy weather.
The coastline sweeps along far below us, a haze of paddocks and clustered houses, fringed by a foam of white where the land meets the endless sea. A biting wind dissuades us from admiring the view too long but, even so, this isn't a fair indication of what life was like up here 130 years ago, when the only access was via the sometimes deadly incline - "1800ft in two near-vertical drops".
It's a wonder how intact the incline and yard are, considering they were created in the late 1870s. I inch to the edge and look down, imagining little Rose swaying up on a dark and stormy night. Nearby are the overgrown remains of The Camp, where houses were bolted to bare rock.
As we enter the mine on a narrow-gauge train, we get a sense that a shift of miners has just clocked out, circa 1904. That atmosphere is not wholly contrived - when John's colleagues scoped out this mine eight years ago it had barely been touched.
Wooden sleepers - pit props - are wedged between the floor and ceiling at intervals, leaving us a horizontal slice of space that disappears into blackness beyond the beam of our miner's lamps. Smaller tunnels - cross cuts - snake off the main ones, some blocked by rockfalls, others stretching out unseen for kilometres. John warns against wandering off. I clutch the 5-year-old's hand. Hewing marks remain, made by miners dead a century. There are rusted tools, coal tubs, rail tracks. The cold seeps through our jackets and our breath puffs out as fog, lit by our lamps. Glowworms hang in sticky threads.
Hidden speakers recreate the groans of wood and rock, scurrying rats, miners' shouts. The dripping of water through the porous sandstone is real; on rainy days it pours even 40m underground, and winds can roar through the maze. The mine has been made safe for tourists, with rock-bolting systems, gas sensors, and communication equipment, but it's genuinely spooky.
John warns that we are here to work and assigns us union cards and jobs. The 5-year-old gets to be the shot firer (appropriately), while the rest of us are hewers, truckers, clippers, the surveyor, the union rep. We load the trucks, push them down old tracks, size up seams. Together, John and the 5-year-old set a fuse. When it "explodes" with a bang and puff of smoke, the boy's eyes flick wide and he takes off into the blackness. When I catch up with him his heart is pummelling fit to break a rib.
We retire to the crib room, where miners took their breaks, and switch off our lamps. A man appears in a tunnel yonder, trapped in a rock fall, calling for his buddies.
We watch him slowly die. We assure the kids that it's a video and the guy's an actor, but of course there's plenty of fact behind that fiction, and not all of it historical.
Perhaps it's that sense of danger and tragedy, alongside the brooding landscapes, that makes the Coast such a fertile literary setting.
As we near the end of our six-day road trip, we've seen barely a streak of cirrus in the sky.
The rain finally comes as we reach Okarito in the south - the lagoon that inspired the setting for The Bone People, where Hulme's octagonal home has long invited parallels with the book's Tower.
And so, as rain pelts the windscreen and wind belts the car, ruling out a planned fossick through rock pools, we reach The End of our literary journey.
Perhaps in years to come hordes of literary tourists will embark on pilgrimages to the West Coast, reciting, "Rose of Tralee arrived on the Hill at night during a storm." In the meantime, fellow New Zealanders, it's all (or mostly) ours.
CHECKLIST
Contact details:
• Wild West Adventures, phone (03) 768 6649.
• Living History Heritage Walking Tour (Hokitika), phone (03) 755 8550.
• Hokitika Museum, 17 Hamilton St, phone (03) 755 6898.
• The Denniston Experience, phone 0800 881 880.
• Coaltown Museum, 123 Palmerston St, Westport, phone (03) 789 8204.
• Woods Creek.
The author visited the West Coast with the assistance of Tourism West Coast.
The trendy spot is just six minutes from the Waikiki beach.