Transport and Early Tourism

There was no road access in the first days of the gold rush either through the Cromwell Gorge or from Kingston past the Devil’s Staircase bluffs. Packhorses were used from Cromwell or over the Crown Range. Rees used the lake as the main access to his sheep station. He had some small boats, and these transported goods from Kingston and further south.1 More boats were acquired, among them two Dunedin harbour steam ferries cut up for the journey.1 One of them, the Nugget, opened a regular service in February 1863, lost a man overboard within weeks and then ran aground on the unlit, unbuoyed reef across the mouth of Queenstown Bay.1

Ships built for the trade followed. The timber syndicate at the head of the lake built the paddle steamer Antrim at its own mill near Kinloch and steamed her on New Year’s Day 1869.23 The Jane Williams, later the Ben Lomond, was built of iron in Dunedin and put together on the Queenstown waterfront in February 1872.3 The Mountaineer, biggest of the three, was assembled in Dunedin, dismantled and railed to Kingston in sections, and launched there on 11 February 1879.34

The railway from Invercargill reached Kingston in 1878,5 and the lake service became what one of its own engineers called “a continuation of the railway system from Kingston”.6 Wharves came after the boats: until a place had one, steamers ran in close to the shingle beaches and laid a few planks ashore,7 and Glenorchy had none until 1885, its passengers landed on the spit between the two rivers.8

The railway brought about the creation of the Wakatipu Steam Navigation Company, registered in August 1878 and ruined inside three years by three boats chasing one trade.3 What survived amalgamated in 1885,3 and a Lake County deputation took the resulting monopoly, its timetables and its freight rates to the Premier, Richard Seddon, who said the government might be forced to put a vessel on the lake itself.3 A government report in 1901 found against the company,3 and the government took the service over, with every jetty and a chain of beaches.8

The tourists started coming for the mountain scenery. The famous English novelist, Anthony Trollope, came as a travel writer in 1872 and wrote that he did not know “that lake scenery can be finer than that of the upper ten miles of Wakatip”, and predicted the district would in coming days be known for its magnificent scenery.9 By 1883 a visitor found that “All tourists are impressed with the idea that they must ascend Ben Lomond”, then wrote up their times in the visitors’ book at Eichardt’s.10 Asked to count its beds in 1903, the borough returned five hotels and five boarding houses, Eichardt’s the largest at 45 rooms.11

The Earnslaw was built and engined in Dunedin and launched in 1912,6 and her story is in The Whakatipu steamers.