The Eels of Ellesmere
Saturday 7th April 2007


Clem Smith pulled 74 tonnes of eels from Lake Ellesmere between early February and mid March. Today however he has just ten, in a small sack he retrieves from tea-coloured water by the boat ramp at Fisherman’s Point.

He drops the sack on the gravel and the children crowd around the writhing slick of eels, delighted and disgusted. The eels are handed around – large eels, small eels, green and silver and purple as deep as aubergine. The big ones are females, Clem explains, filled with eggs and ready to swim to Samoa where, with their smaller mates, they spawn and die.

A hand from the back of the group – how big is the biggest eel you’ve ever caught? Clem is thoughtful. He has a photo, he says, taken in 1959 of himself with an eel twice his size. “Of course, I was smaller then myself,” he grins shyly.

The eels are returned to the water where they quickly vanish. Children drift off to skip stones across the water or fossick among the debris at the lake’s edge. Their beach combing is purposeful – a teacher-inspired scavenger hunt that could win them valuable group points. One boy drags an ancient neoprene diving boot from the mud and holds it aloft. “That’s not what I need” – he consults his list – “what I need is a sock.”

Since January I have travelled daily to my new job at Southbridge School. I am enjoying the experience, although it is a little unnerving to cross the Rakaia and leave behind the familiar networks of Mid-Canterbury. I have discovered there is a membrane, permeable but nevertheless real, that separates our side of the river from the wider world.

I am also discovering another corner of Canterbury that I have never before explored. This school camp at the corner of Lake Ellesmere opens my eyes to new perspectives that are all the more startling because they lie within the scope of familiar landmarks. There is Banks Peninsula, the Torlesse Range, Mount Hutt and, far off, Mount Peel – all familiar but slightly different from this new angle.

The daily experience of driving a few kilometres from the main highway brings me to understand a poverty of experience.

The journey of my life has been traced, by and large, along the narrow strip of State Highway 1. From a Southland childhood I ventured up the road to spend my student years and early working life in Dunedin, followed by a decade each in Christchurch and Mid-Canterbury.

Some of my earliest memories were formed along this route. I recall the Kilmog as a rain-drenched gravel road viewed from the back seat of the family Volkswagen in the early 60s. I bought my first twin-cone ice cream at Ashburton’s Snowdrop dairy in a breath-taking sprint from the railway station while the Southerner paused, southbound, about 1974.

And in all these journeys I have hardly strayed from the narrow path. I have explored no more than half a dozen of the countless side roads along a hundred kilometres of main highway north or south of here. I have not the faintest idea what lies behind the main streets of Dunsandel or Temuka. I presume not much, but I am poorer for that conceit.

If it were not for my new job I would probably never have visited Southbridge or spent these few days at the corner of Lake Ellesmere. I am glad I did – it is country that needs a few days to appreciate.

Like much of the Canterbury coastline it is not pretty. The land is laid bare, its ribs of gravel and sand exposed by low, knife-edged winds that fillet the best of the soil and vegetation, leaving a hard scrub of box thorn, lupin and gorse.

The lake itself is slumped and flaccid, sprawled like a victim. The settlement at Fisherman’s Point seems, at first glance, to echo the mood of the lake. Its fifteen or twenty houses appear to have long since lost their battle with the elements. Damsel flies swarm thickly around the water’s edge and the scrubby farmland is home to half-wild pigs and a scatter of malnourished cattle.

But a closer look reveals small treasures. Ngati Moki marae, where we stayed, lies in the elbow of a spring-fed stream that is as fresh and clear as mountain water. The gullies are moist and fruitful, filled with raupo and flax and a rustling busy-ness of waterfowl.

There is a muted but tenacious narrative in the broken dinghies and tumbledown shacks, and a more ancient story in the earth ramparts of the old pa.

If all this is to be discovered on one side road I begin to imagine what I may find if I explored others. What mysteries and pleasures lie behind Waikouaiti, Clinton and St Andrews? What undiscovered hinterlands lie within this strip of island I call home?

Perhaps it is time I found out.