Arrowtown
By Karen Goa
Driving into Arrowtown through sun-spanked hills is like stumbling onto an old but good secret. Gold-rushed into existence in the early 1860s, the nuggety little town’s wooden and schist buildings amble down Buckingham Street in their new guises - the butcher’s shop is now a real estate office, stables are a shopping mall - but in an endearingly twee-free way.
There’s still ‘gold’ in them thar streets, in the Gold Nugget souvenir shop, Gold Shop jewellery and the Golden Fleece (no prizes for guessing what they sell). Wedging myself through the throngs in The Remarkable Sweet Shop I stumble across true Arrowtown Gold - chocolate-covered hokey pokey nuggets.
With 500 different types of sweets flaunting themselves like pure temptation, it’s impossible to choose just one. Nosey porkers jungle berries squirrel floral gums milk bottles conversation hearts jet planes Dutch liquorice truffle chocolates – ‘the sweets appeal to young and old’, smiles shop manager Jonathan Palmer, who’s wrist deep in a fresh batch of sticky date caramel fudge.
“Ninety-year-olds walk in and say, ‘Oh, I remember those from my childhood’. It’s particularly nostalgic for English people.”
Sucking sweets forever sounds like a fine idea but there’d be hell – or at least dental bills - to pay later so, saddlebagged with cola cubes and jelly worms for afters, I set off in search of lunch.
Joe’s Garage is new on the café/coffee bar scene and it takes some sleuthing to get there. Maybe that’s why it attracts luminaries like Sam Neill and Anthony Hopkins. “It’s less of a secret on Friday or Saturday nights,” winks the guy at the counter.
While waiting for lunch I trawl through old fishing books and other diners’ cast off novels and watch the happy shoppers on Buckingham Street (there’s a clue). So far, Arrowtown is turning up foodie gems all over.
Next, a post-prandial stroll past the restored miners’ cottages hunkered under The Avenue’s broad sweep of green leafy trees. Fashioned after Scottish or Irish crofters’ cottages they’re terribly cute. It’s tempting to peek in the windows, but the cottages now house families and businesses that must get tired of tourist snouts pressed up against their panes.
The videos and static dummy displays of ‘the way we were’ type in The Lakes District Museum give some idea of what gold-mining life was like in the late 1800s, and we should all be thankful we weren’t around then. There are also collections of rocks with off-the-planet names like ‘galena’, and several portraits of Queen Victoria looking her most Transylvanian Gothic.
The Museum turns up some interesting if shameful facts about the Chinese miners. Invited to Arrowtown in 1868 when European miners deserted the place for the Westland goldfields, Chinese miners emigrating from Australia had civil rights equal to the British miners until the 1881 Chinese Immigrants Restriction Act booted them down to second-class citizens.
Opium smoking and importation were still legal for another twenty years, a clue that the government of the day approved of some Chinese habits if not the Chinese themselves.
The restored buildings in the Chinese Settlement at the other end of town tell a mean and miserable tale. The gnomish huts tumbling higgledy-piggledy down a hillside are only tot-sized: a pair of blonde twins think they’re grand, rushing from hut to hut squealing “I want to go in this one! And that one!”
The sturdiest are made of schist stacked up from floor to the thatched or tin roof – the original roofs were flattened kerosene tins – while others are nothing more than a bit of canvas flapped up against bare boulders and pinioned with poles. It’s all a bit Grimm’s Fairy Tale-like, especially when you remember that it snows in these parts.
The white stuff I’m scuffing ankle-deep through isn’t snow, but soft as sheep’s wool poplar and willow fluff drifting down on the flats near Bush Creek, where it entwines with the Arrow River. Here families are picnicking, prospectors panning (good luck to them, too), and languid lupins sway like the debutantes of the flower world in pastel pinks and purples, white and yellow. I wander off down the riverside Arrow River Walk in search of the perfect lupin but only manage 0.2km of the 4.2km track before realizing they’re all perfect, and it’s time for a nice lie down before dinner.
My dinner date finds me wide-eyed and drooling into my wine glass over the glossy slabs of greenstone topping the bar in The Postmaster’s House Restaurant. The old villa was variously incarnated as rental flats, an art gallery (and of course where the postmaster lived) before restaurant owner Peter Waters got his energetic and creative hands on it.
The day’s last treasure is hidden down an alleyway and up some stairs. Dorothy Browns Cinema and Bar – named for a turn of the century photographer who cohabitated with a Chinese man and frequented the town’s opium dens - shows the cinema world how it should be done. Order a coffee, wine or Kapiti ice cream and settle into classy cube sofas in the bar.
Then hark to the call into the boudoir-ish theatre, where pink and mint chiffon sheers float floor to ceiling, pearl and crystal chandeliers dangle from padded Chinese silk ceiling panels, and armrests are spacious enough for a glass of pinot noir and the cheeseboard you ordered for the interval. What a find - it’s a jewel of a place to end an Arrowtown treasure hunt.
Karen Goa visited Arrowtown with assistance from Destination Queenstown.
