On The Banks Of A Braided River
Kate Fraser
Old farmers know why hills turn purple, why cows sit down in the morning and when it’s going to rain. “It’s the weather,’’ said my Uncle Reggie. “When the hills on the other side of the river are purple it’ll rain tonight. When cows sit down in the morning it’ll rain before tea. You need to know these things about your place, girlie.”
Uncle Reggie was probably 79 at the time. I was about nine and we both lived in Kurow, a small township on the banks of the Waitaki River in North Otago. Kurow is girt about with hills large and small, near and far, and most are rugged and bare with nothing much between tussock and scree but thorny matagouri.
The Hunter Hills on the other (Canterbury) side of the river, though, are different. They rise from the valley floor in gentle folds with sometimes a broad plateau, gullies of bush and bracken. In the mornings these hills are golden-green; in the afternoons they’re pretty with blue shadows. And when they’re bruised and purple as plums, sure enough, it rains in the night.
Kurow is the only settlement right on the river’s banks, yet most of North Otago claims the title “Waitaki District”. It is where I grew up and it is the place I think of as home. I can still say I’m a local as we now have a crib there, albeit further down the Waitaki Valley in Duntroon.
 The Waitaki River is a braided river, wandering from the Southern Alps to the sea and depositing vast spreads of greywacke shingle along its course, among which the water must find its way. Its string of hydro lakes (Waitaki, Benmore and Aviemore) is man-made but their beauty and serenity suggest they have been here since the Ice Age ended. In summer the verges are lush with wildflowers, especially viper’s bugloss, known hereabouts as blue borage, and the air is rich with the scent of blooming briar roses. Even in the chill of winter there is colour: snow-white mountains, jade-blue water and the golden reflections of a thousand willow trees.
Change has come to the Waitaki, but it is not immediately apparent. A couple of rickety-rackety one-way bridges still straddle the river joining Otago (Kurow) to Canterbury (Hakataramea), wild salmon still come upriver to spawn, orchards continue to flourish east of the township, and as ever the autumn muster drives hardy merino sheep down from the tops to the river flats.
It’s a sociable place, Kurow, with two pubs in town – “and one over the river”, as the locals say – and at last count three cafés and two catering businesses. Fast-and-fried used to be the order of the day, but the food revolution is making inroads all the way up the valley from Oamaru to Omarama. Today a good cup of coffee is as easily found as were scones and a cup of tea when my mother and her friends had afternoon tea parties.
 Everyone in our house spent lots of time in the kitchen. My mother had baking days to fill the tins and every day she cooked a two-course meal – three if it was soup weather – served sharp at noon. My father did breakfasts: sausages, eggs, chops, and mushrooms, tomatoes and oysters in season. Like everyone else we had a vegetable garden but also looked forward to the first Jersey Benne potatoes from Totara near Oamaru and tomatoes from Kakanui.
The river offered trout and salmon. Hogget was the favoured meat, sausages were fat loops of coarsely cut pork and “far too much bread”, according to my mother, and bacon was never watery. If we had steak it was “undercut” and pan-fried in butter. Offal was a treat. Rabbit was often on the menu – in pies, roasted, braised in milk and mustard, fricasséed. Uncle Reggie’s version of the mating habit of rabbits was riveting stuff for a nine-year-old.
Rabbits are scarcer now, dairy farms have arrived and sheep numbers are down, but the major change is the arrival of vineyards. Clay Cliffs vineyard in Omarama was 
Photography by Guy Frederick
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