Back to Bluff

There are a lot of things I could tell you about Bluff. For example: its oysters, a delicacy, have been known to fetch up to $5 each in Auckland eateries.

Local Māori called it Motupöhue, after the convolvulus flowers (pöhue) that covered Bluff’s hill and appeared, from distance, an island (motu).  It’s one of the oldest European settlements in New Zealand (c. 1824), though its original timber wharf – still visible – is now dwarfed by current arrangements.

Annual tonnage at the port totals a heady 2.5 million, most of which services the aluminium smelter across the harbour, some of which services the local fish and chip shops.

For current purposes, all you need to know about Bluff is that my father was born there, and I’m exploring the place where I would have grown up had he never left.

Bluff markets itself is where the journey begins. As the mainland’s southernmost town and the terminus of State Highway One, “where the journey ends” would perhaps be more apt.

In my father's case, his journey began here in 1949; a childhood spent by, on and in the sea. In 1968, Dad left for Otago University, putting the population of Bluff one closer to 3000. He never properly returned, a few years later my grandparents retired to Tauranga with the rest of the extended family.

Fast-forward to 1993, and I was born in Wellington, presented with opportunities, a lifestyle, and a city radically different to what would have been.  

According to a bakery window poster advertising for more volunteer medical staff, today’s population is down to a very precise 1836. This isn’t unusual for small New Zealand towns, as main centres continue to lure those living in rural areas. Today, 86 per cent of New Zealand lives in urban areas; when my father was born, it was less than 70 per cent.

In keeping with the numbers, it certainly doesn’t look like many houses have been built in Bluff since Dad left. Even Bluff’s most iconic house has disappeared – Fred and Myrtle Flutey’s famed paua shells were moved to Canterbury museum in 2008.

Our family used to get paua from the Flutey’s, and I’m told my grandfather would sometimes grumble about a long-forgotten debt, unsettled by Fred, the legitimacy of which is now lost to time. My only visit to the paua shell house is shrouded in vagueness in the way childhood memories often are. So, there’s a certain parallelism to my en-route visit to Canterbury museum, and my attempts to sentimentally preserve my history through the Flutey family’s preservation of theirs.

The original house was on Gore St and had a splendid view of the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter – poster child for industro-dystopia and devourer of 14 per cent of New Zealand’s entire electrical output.

The long drive to Bluff is toe-curlingly, lip-bitingly beautiful; the type of stuff you need to be well out of cellphone reception to even begin imagining.

My father grew up in a different time, when Tiwai Point consisted of a long sandy spit pocked with marshes positively bulging with birdlife – “the sort of thing DoC would have a fit about today,” he says. The smelter opened in 1971; a year later, the Manapouri Underground Power Station was completed, and began sending a good deal of voltage across Southland to Bluff.

These projects sent ripples across small communities, and the world. At any one time, nearly 2000 men from 22 countries worked on the Manapouri project, with countless more in secondary support roles.

For a time in the ’60s, my father was one of them; a summer job for the Fiordland Tourist Company saw him ferrying these workers across Lake Manapouri to the hydro scheme. (His take: “Belgian boys came over to build. They had the expertise but they wanted to fight us. So, we fought them back.”) Today the hydro station is largely automated and the workers village has regressed to farmland, but the fate of the Tiwai Smelter is still closely tied to many Southlander’s livelihoods.

 I grew up in Wellington, a small city by any standard. Southlanders, however, often refer to Invercargill, population 53,000, as “the big city”, such is the size of most towns in the region. Southland, a disparate series of small towns, with eccentricities, foibles, and livestock-counts easily outnumbering people, represents a New Zealand I’ve driven through, but never really connected with. My father would later name and predict each and every one of my rural stops, to me, they are more alien.

There is Te Anau, two hours drive from Bluff, the distinguishing features of which are New Zealand's second-biggest lake and a workforce which appears to be made up primarily of middle-aged women. There is Lumsden, which non-ironically has arrows annotated with distances to the world's other major cities, and Gore, best-known (sadly) as a punchline. There is Dipton, home of politicians past and future, where a signposted attraction is a small hill, and which you might miss entirely if you were to look for something in the back seat at the wrong moment. There is the beautifully quaint architecture of Winton and surrounds. Each town carries the general air of a Richard Scarry book: one police officer, one baker, one shopkeeper; life goes on.

It would be remiss not to mention The Scenery. The Scenery is New Zealand's touristic bread and butter. It is not a Rangitoto selfie from St Heliers and it certainly beats Wellington On A Good Day. Much of the long drive to Bluff is toe-curlingly, lip-bitingly beautiful; the type of stuff you need to be well out of cellphone reception to even begin imagining.

I am somewhat ashamed to admit that “well out of cellphone reception” is somewhere I generally prefer not to be. My lodgings at Bluff’s Foveaux Hotel, thankfully, come with free wifi, a luxury that certainly wasn’t there when my father worked as its cleaner, aged approx: “Too Young To Be Cleaning But Who Worried About That”. The Foveaux is heartbreakingly quaint, and my stay is studiously managed by three women so caring and kind they may as well be my second-through-fourth mothers. (Incidentally, one of the Mothers tells me I look like my father, not a startling comparison, but made more startling by the fact we had just met.)

I couldn’t see myself living in Bluff. I feel this way much the same as I couldn’t imagine myself riding a motorbike, dyeing my hair or studying commerce. There’s no good reason that I’m not driven to do those things, just a sort of cosmic (and parental) luck.

Small town New Zealand is, increasingly, not where we’re from but where our parents and grandparents grew up, this doesn’t mean it’s no good to live in. It’s charming, and fun, and community-minded, and as close to the New Zealand of old than you’ll find in any city. It’s a given my life would have been different had I grown up in Bluff, exceedingly so, but spending time in Bluff I’m no longer so convinced this would necessarily be a bad kind of different.

One cold southern night, I find myself at the bar of the Eagle Hotel, which according to posters on the walls, is the club rooms of the Rusty Nuts Motorcycle Club; the home of the Eagles darts team; and a place where I Deserve a DB. The Southland Darts Club has just completed its biannual visit, finding themselves beaten by the Eagles in the darts traditional and also the inaugural quoits. The results are of great delight to a fleshy veteran who makes clear – loudly – that when it comes to the biennial darts, he “comes every time”, all innuendo intended, thank you very much. The entire bar takes a break in the prizegiving festivities to sing Debbie a very happy 50th.

It's a Sunday night and every bar – all three – are doing a roaring trade, something you seldom see in cities, and which I am chalking up to community spirit rather than alcoholic pursuits (eg a factory worker I’ll call Dan is only having one jug before work the next day.) And what a community spirit, too: I feel more welcome with the commoners (their word) at the Eagle than I do in most city bars. Sticking out like the proverbial thumb, I’m not asked “where are you from?”, but “what are you?”; an attempt to learn my family name, and thus, how I fit in to this town.

Though my family name doesn't have much currency today, I found a connection to a town I didn’t expect to have a connection to. Most of us no longer live in small towns, but most all of us have connections to them somehow: stories, street names, schools, photographs, war memorials, headstones. It wasn't at the Eagle, but at the Bluff cemetery that this realisation set in; reading the engravings of my family name, obscured, but surely there, under lichen that’s taken years to grow.

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