THERE ARE PLACES THAT SEEM DREAM-LIKE, haunted by memories and fantastical stories: places with an atmosphere that comes from somewhere mysterious. For those of us brought up in Canterbury, this place is the high country, the mountains that loom distant on the horizon beyond the flat monotony of the plains. Up there is where mysteries live.
In the Craigieburn Range, on the way up to Arthur’s Pass, a moa was sighted in the bush in 1993; the claim was accompanied by the mandatory grainy photo, making nationwide news for weeks on end. Also, in the Craigieburn Range is the jumble of strange, sculptural limestone blocks scattered across the hills, Kura Tawhiti, Castle Hill. A 19th-century visitor, Reverend Charles Oakes, described them as “… like the buildings of a Cyclopean city”, and “… solitary masses like the gigantic monoliths of Stonehenge”.
A unique world, irresistible to film-makers, it has become the setting for and : a dreamscape of the imagination. Beyond the ranges, to the south, is where Samuel Butler set his 1872 novel . Erewhon, an anagram of nowhere, was the story of a utopia, set in the Canterbury high country; an enigmatic place deep in the mountains, heralded by strange, gigantic statues of men, which howl in the wind.
