From Heritage New Zealand, Spring 2010

by Ruth le Pla

Part ofour industrial heritage, the man-made lake which drowned an earlier hydro station is now a setting for a sport which cherishes memories as well as champions

Sometimes heritage is not so much about what remains in bricks and mortar but about what seeps into our collective memories. It’s about what lurks in the combined consciousness of the people who follow on. It’s about their actions and behaviour and their willingness to be part of something larger than their own individual endeavours.

In the still of the morning when Mahe Drysdale pulls away from the shore of Lake Karapiro, it’s easy to imagine that this same scene has played out for centuries... a man and his boat, a magnificent stretch of water, the gentle curve of the bank affording a view straight down the lake.

For four-time world rowing champion Mahe, these are some of the best training facilities in the world: 15 kilometres of water enclosing a two-kilometre rowing course. He heads off into the cool morning. The fog is just lifting off the lake. The water is flat and the sun is coming up. Mahe turns for the homeward leg. He says this is his favourite time of day. But he’s out on the lake no matter what, usually for 20 hours a week, in his run-up to the 2010 World Rowing Championships at the end of October.

Much has changed since the world’s best rowers last competed at Karapiro back in 1978 amidst what has been described as a previously unseen frenzy of “involvement, enthusiasm and friendship” and “the greatest show on water”. The old buildings recently made way for the new $4 million Rowing New Zealand High Performance Centre. Downstairs are a gym, boat-storage facility and space for physiotherapists, nutritional consultants, sports scientists and biomechanics experts. Mahe and the other rowers can rustle up a meal and even do their laundry down there.

Upstairs, the administration and coaching teams work surrounded by rowing memorabilia. On the wall there’s a 1910 wooden oar pulled from an old boatshed. Photo after photo shows our nation’s rowing greats in the baggy sportswear of their times. The oldest scene portrays men competing in heavy whale boats for the 1886 Auckland Anniversary Regatta. Yet Lake Karapiro, just eight kilometres south east of the Waikato town of Cambridge, has not always been like this. Part of the bank has been altered to provide the best view of the rowers on the course. More to the point, today’s lake was created by man, not nature.

For Gail Henry, NZHPT Area Manager, Lower Northern Area, it’s a place of unexpected linkages. Today, she says, the most obvious physical traces of the past are the “awesome structures” along the Waikato hydro system, the industrial heritage, the technology and the dams. “Standing on the shores of the lake watching our rowers gearing up, you wouldn’t realise they’re rowing above the first large-scale hydro-electric scheme in the North Island which at the time was the largest generating plant in the country. Built by private enterprise, it was also the first plant to harness the waters of the mighty Waikato River for power generation.”

Built in 1913 by the Waihi Gold Mining Company, the Horahora hydro station was submerged in 1947 as the valley was flooded to create Lake Karapiro. There’s a photograph taken at the time of a crowd of men, women and children watching the turbine still running as the Horahora powerhouse fills with water around them.

The young children nearest the water look suitably concerned. Many of the adults are smiling. Maybe that’s just for the camera. Or maybe they’re thinking about how the demise of Horahora will mean the new Karapiro hydro station can now kick into action and put an end to recent peak-hour power shortages.

Twenty-four years later, when divers went down to salvage copper left on Horahora, they found it covered in silt from the Waikato River and Pokaiwhenua Stream but in remarkably good condition. Once loosened with specialist equipment, nuts could be spun off by hand.

Today, the Karapiro hydro station is the last in a string of nine hydro stations harnessing the energy of the Waikato River as it flows from its source at Lake Taupo. From a control room in Hamilton, Mighty River Power co-ordinates the output of each of the stations. A drop of water would take more than 18 hours to navigate its way from Taupo to Karapiro through the eight dams, the nine hydro stations and their combined 39 turbines.

Mighty River Power’s archives room contains stacks of giant grey ring-bound folders, their pages handnumbered like old-fashioned children’s scrapbooks. Some of the photographs’ captions are carefully typewritten, cut out and glued onto the pages.

These are albums of men dwarfed by nature, structures and machines. The skeletons of penstocks, tailraces, diversion tunnels and spillways crawl with men in braces, rolled-up shirtsleeves, flat caps and waistcoats. These are the visual traces of an ambitious scheme which, from the early 1930s, sent men out into the bush for months at a time to assess the potential energy of the Waikato River.

In his book The Wind in the Tussocks, surveyor Harold J Jenks details their daily lives. He writes of their fly-camps, of skinning a horse to get an extra blanket, of kiore running over the sleeping men at night and of waking in the morning to find teeth marks in the soap. He details the technical aspects of the river-flow testing, drilling and rock sampling.

He records the characters and incidents of the time: of stumbling by chance across New Zealand’s then Governor-General Lord Bledisloe in the bush; of Madge the cook on a bolting horse; and of hydraulic engineer GP Anderson who could calculate the roughness constant of a river by sitting quietly for five minutes and just looking.

Later, when construction work started, workers were allocated cottages. A photo of the Arapuni workers’ camp south east of Lake Karapiro shows desolate rows of cottages laid out in the barren landscape. Access here was so problematic that workers first had to build a swing bridge so they could get from their cottages to the construction area.

Completed in 1925, the bridge still swoops high across the gorge. It looks down on the Arapuni hydro station which, with its incongruously beautiful 1920s-style detailing, is wedged into the narrow gorge like a tiny doll’s house.

Tom Mayo admits to still being relatively new to the Karapiro area. But, as chief executive officer of World Rowing Championships Karapiro 2010, he’s building up a repository of other people’s thoughts and memories of what it means to them. He tells the story of how he was waiting at Auckland Airport recently when someone spotted his World Rowing Championships bag. They came up to tell him about their own rowing past and how their children rowed for the national secondary schools’ Maadi Cup.

He’s been buttonholed in coffee shops in Cambridge and once bumped into a Canadian couple in Boston, USA, who had met each other at the World Rowing Championships at Karapiro in 1978. Tom jokingly refers to his group’s administration and finance manager Tony Popplewell as “the official  human repository for rowing in New Zealand”. Tony, who rowed for New Zealand in the 1964 Olympics, has dedicated almost 50 years of his life to rowing as a  competitor, coach and administrator.

Yet, like so many others, he still remembers the very first time he went to Lake Karapiro. It was the New Zealand Championship regatta in March 1963. He was in his second year of rowing. “The organisers had a huge marquee on the banks of the river and everyone from all the clubs slept there. There were around 100 of us; it was a big marquee. We used to wash in the lake because that was the only water available.”

Similarly, Rowing New Zealand chairman Bill Falconer can track back through his 57 years of involvement with rowing to pinpoint both the first time he visited the lake to watch others perform – it was the Empire Games in 1950 – and his own first time out on the water there five years later.

Mahe Drysdale’s own sense of connection spans back to his mum’s uncle who owned the petrol station at Horahora. He remembers first visiting Karapiro as a 15 or 16-year-old to watch his sisters Eloisa and Sophia out rowing. Fast-forward a couple of years and he was on the lake himself.

Tom Mayo reasons that the biggest legacy will always be memories. “At Karapiro there are now new buildings and infrastructure. There’s all the concrete and hardware. But the biggest thing we could try to leave is the association that the next generation will have with this event. So a 10-year-old kid will walk in to the venue and think the World Championships were such a fantastic event that it will colour their view of rowing for the rest of their life. Maybe they’ll row themselves or become involved administratively or support colleagues who are rowing in schools. This event will shine a light on the sport. Buildings may last 30 years but memories last a lot longer.

“Everyone talks to me about 1978 and how much it affected them. The bricks and mortar from ’78 came down for this championship and new ones have gone up. When these new buildings eventually come down I just hope people will be saying what neat championships they were. Because of their association with the past, people say, ‘You gave me something special; I’ll give you something special back’.

“And the most special thing that people have is time, so they volunteer. We’ve got 144 volunteers signed up and working for us already; they’re helping with everything from accreditation to the venue, competition, transport and team liaison. And I guarantee more than half of them are doing it because of some association with ’78.”