Honestly, it wasn't the famous wineries of the beautiful Hawke's Bay region that attracted me there. It was scholarly research. (That's my story, and I'm sticking with it.)
Having decided some time ago to devote myself to the study of the Great
Plains of North America, I take an interest in other regions of the world that are
comparable. That means places that are subhumid to
semiarid and inclined to grass (and also, in my experience, congenial to
curious visitors). This interest has taken me twice to
On the second visit, early this year, Lotte and I
also had a lookabout the plains region of the
One reason for going there was to see the countryside that inspired a classic of pastoral literature, Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station. "Tutira" was the name of the sheep station, a few miles inland, of one H. Guthrie-Smith. He was a remarkable fellow.
His story is a common one. He stocked his run with sheep, took on a big debt, and ran into problems, mainly environmental. Blackberries, for instance--introduced from abroad, they overran the country. Guthrie-Smith brought in goats to eat the blackberries, which worked all right except the goats ate every woody plant on the place, denuding it and opening it to erosion.
Worst of all was the bracken fern. The common wisdom was you could build up a run by burning it off, scattering grass seed, and stocking it heavily. The sheep would keep the bracken down by grazing and trampling.
This was an English line of thought, emphasizing intensive grazing. The country just wouldn't support it. The hillside soils deteriorated, the forage was depleted, and the bracken resurged again and again. (Personally, I think Guthrie-Smith was being allegorical here, telling a story about the human soul, but then sometimes I imagine such things.)
Anyway, what was remarkable about Guthrie-Smith was that he was thinking all the time about the changes in the land. This led to his book, which is the work of an anguished man caught up in an agricultural system he knew was not sustainable, but unable to find a way out.
"Yet so the matter stands," he writes, "the particular hardship in this case being that the writer himself has been compelled to side against what he would fain cherish and protect."
I can think of only one writer from the American plains whose situation paralleled that of Guthrie-Smith and who wrote about it in such perceptive, tortured style. That writer was the farmer, Lawrence Svobida, whose memoir of the 1930s is called Farming the Dust Bowl.
Our visit to the Hawke's Bay region was a pleasure, however. Besides seeing
the hills of Tutira, and yes, some wineries, we were
charmed by the little city of
It seems that the entire town was destroyed in a great earthquake in 1931. Rebuilding commenced immediately, and it was done in the style of the time. What was timely then is historic now, and the effect is wonderful.
Of course, on the American plains we have some good examples of Art Deco style, too--mainly our old movie theatres!