Couple keen to share heritage and wildlife
Murray (Giff) Gifford has helped clear the overgrown track up to the old Paturau River bridge that was once used by log trucks of the Benara Timber Company. Photo: Gerard Hindmarsh.
It’s been two and half years since Murray (Giff) Gifford and Sally Everett purchased their 47-hectare property at Snake Creek, Mangarakau, and a little less since they began attracting visitors to stay at Wetland View Park.
Their place is aptly named, as it affords magnificent views from its elevated terrace adjoining Mangarakau Swamp. But it’s the vista over the impressive limestone cliffs that really rocks. The escarpment clearly echoes the pounding waves of the Tasman Sea, a reverberation effect that is most spectacular during a thunderstorm.
This unique property was previously owned by well-known local identity “Stinger” Ray, but it’s fair to say the half-swamp, half-pasture is now well-and-truly stamped with Giff and Sally’s hard work. The sloping vegetable and berry gardens are clearly flourishing, and they still run a few dozen beef cattle, but their time now is largely devoted to ensuring their guests have a great holiday, even providing home-cooked three-course meals if required.
At the Christmas before last they finished building their quality tourist cabins, actually two semi-kitset “Shantysea Chalets” brought down from Tauranga. Now they are concentrating on making a walkway right around the lowland, swampy part of their property, soon to be reserved with a QEII Open Space covenant.
The first part of this new track winds its way through regenerating manuka, perfect fernbird habitat, before crossing a sturdy bridge over the tannin-stained Snake Creek. From here the vegetation becomes avenues of flourishing three-metre-high flax that can fair rattle in the wind, so much so that Sally routinely warns visitors with children: “Don’t get separated—you will not be able to hear their calls in the flax.”
Impressive too are the windblown stands of mature kahikatea trees whose branches can only grow on the lee side of the trunk in the prevailing wind. There is much to take the eye: a high forested mound gives a view; an old steam winch tells of the effort that went into hauling out big kahikatea here, as do the old tramway lines once used by horse-drawn trams that carted materials to scows waiting in Whanganui Inlet. There’s even a long-abandoned launch with manuka and ferns all growing through it, and a “weta whare” with a door you can open to inspect its occupants. Sally’s painted pukeko signs are at every turn. It may be work in progress, but it’s a dedicated one at that. Eventually, they’d like to open their new track up to the public.
Giff and Sally admit to getting a buzz from the new flora and fauna they find on the place. Like when Selena Brown from DOC came out and found “a pile of mud fish” in their black-as-ink waterways. Or when orchid specialist Sarah Garland recently identified a rare native orchid on their property - only the fifth time the distinctive split-sepal Pterostylis irwinii has been found in this country.
Giff has become particularly fond of the surrounding area’s heritage. He has helped to clear the old track down to the steel-girdered bridge over the Paturau River once used by log trucks of the Benara Timber Company on their way to Lake Otuhie. Alongside the upper river today, the lushness of the regenerating cutover forest is impressive, the bush bristling with tall and fat-trunked nikau. A side track leads to another mound and a most spectacular view back over Lake Mangarakau.
Giff enthuses as he points to a “floating island” of rushes, then a flock of ducks paddling near the snaking outlet. “There is just so much to see out here,” he says.
Sally was born in England but Giff came from Katikati in the North Island. During his working life he has been a builder and boatbuilder, living for 17 years on a property at Wakatahuri in Forsyth Bay in the outer Marlborough Sounds, where he also ran his own mussel farm offshore. There, it was five hours by boat to civilization, so they still consider the 90-minute drive to Takaka town “a luxury”.
They have also milked in Bainham, and worked and studied in Christchurch, where they ran a busy motel.
“I learnt a lot about money, and how to make businesses run more efficiently,” said Giff. “I wish I’d learnt it all a lot earlier. Living out here at Mangarakau is our life now. This area is slowly being discovered but not everyone wants to rough it, which is why we are offering a little bit of luxury on the wild west coast of Golden Bay.”
Gerard Hindmarsh
