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Molesworth Station
Photo Essay
Imagine waking up to this scene every morning for nearly a year. I had applied for a job teaching six children in the Awatere Valley, a remote rural area in New Zealand’s South Island. Big wide open spaces amongst sheep farms and wineries. Sunny days with little rain. A chance to get out of Auckland and work on my book. I was hooked. What I didn’t know was that the job came with an unexpected bonus: a cottage on Molesworth Station, the largest farm in New Zealand at 180,476 hectares (approximately 500,000 acres, or over 700 square miles). Now Government owned, Molesworth Station is run by the Department of Conservation as a farm park (open for a few months a year) and leased out to a farming corporation which runs 10,000 head of cattle there. Instantly I was the envy of all my friends who said they would definitely come and visit. And they did.
The job description was right about the remote bit; it is over a two-hour drive to the nearest supermarket. There are no daily newspapers. Mail is delivered once a week. Luckily the mail man also delivers groceries and spare parts that we order from Blenheim, the nearest town center. So for most of the year I had this amazing farm park almost to myself. Needless to say, my camera accompanied me on all my long weekend walks.
This unique landscape was carved by ancient glaciers into broad u-shaped valleys, conical and round-topped hills, moraines and corries. Shifting layers of scree create fascinating patterns over steep rocky slopes. It is an ongoing visual feast spreading west from the knife-edged ridges of the Inland Kaikoura Ranges.
It takes over two hours (more if you stop to take countless photos) to drive across Molesworth from its Bleinheim end to the Hanmer Springs’ gate. Traveling along the ribbon-like gravel road that threads its way across this ‘moonscape’ land, fine dust billows high into the air. The road is rough in places, but suitable for a two-wheel-drive when there is no snow.
During spring and early summer, leaves from numerous briar rose bushes emit a crisp, green apple scent, accentuating the clear, unpolluted air of New Zealand’s high country. Under a clear sky watering holes glow a brilliant blue, contrasting in stark relief to the brown-sided hills rising up behind them. When I walked too close, ducks and geese alighted from the water in a cacophony of quacks and honks. Whenever I stood still near a small herd of young horses, they would come up to mingle around me as if curious to know why I was there.
On sunny weekends I ate breakfast on the veranda and listened to the Molesworth sounds: the lazy buzzing blowflies and bumble bees, the happy chirping of birds in a nearby willow tree, and the distant yack, yack of a plover. On frosty mornings magpies warbled pleasant tunes, reminding me of my home country, Australia. Sometimes a helicopter landed in the Molesworth homestead’s yard and the pilot dropped in for breakfast there. But most times, the only sound was the wind, or galloping hooves of stock horses as they frolicked in the paddock around my house.
That’s what it is here: quiet and vast and empty.
See Photo Essays for:
Molesworth Station
Living on Molesworth: Views Around My Cottage
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