Saving our Skins: Chapter 5. Nights to Remember
Saving our Skins: Chapter 5. Nights to Remember
Atmospheric Reflections from a Lauder Stargazer
The continuing story of “Saving our Skins”. Here I try to convey what it was like to live in the tiny settlement of Lauder in the 1980s.
Updated September 5, 2021.
The settlement of Lauder is a tiny village in a forbidding landscape. It’s so small that by day its population is about double that at night when staff at the nearby research station return to their homes further down the valley. Although well known among atmospheric scientists around the world, most New Zealanders have never heard of the place. They can’t even say the Scottish name properly, pronouncing it as “louder”, even though they can correctly pronounce the French cosmetic company Estée Lauder, or Florida’s Fort Lauderdale.
At 45°S latitude, Lauder is halfway between the Equator and the South Pole. In a rain-shadow area 370 m above sea level, its climate is about right. It’s a great place to observe the atmosphere – and it’s a great place to live too, unless you have a hankering for the ocean. It’s near the centre of the widest southern part of the South Island of New Zealand, about halfway down the broad Manuherekia river valley, which runs about 120 km from the Hawkdun Range in the North-East down to the foothills of the Old Man Range in the South-West behind Alexandra (altitude 150 m), where the Manuherekia river flows into the Clutha river.
That’s the heart of Central Otago, the nearest thing New Zealand has to a continental climate. It’s hot in summer and cold in winter. High mountains to the West and South protect the area from the prevailing winds and provide the rain-shadow effect, making it the driest area in the country. As a result, the land is parched and would be a semi-desert without irrigation. It’s easy to imagine how inhospitable it must have been for the early settlers. But it has a certain beauty too, with layer upon layer of hills, punctuated by strange craggy outcrops of schist rock.
The mountains surrounding the valley are not particularly high or steep, rising to a little over 2000 m above sea level. At times in winter the tops in all directions can be snow-clad, but the place is unspoilt by developers chasing the tourist dollar. Their playground is further to the west, in Queenstown and Wanaka. To this day the valley remains quiet and off the beaten track. When we first came the nearest traffic-light was about 200 km from Lauder and even now it’s not much closer.
If you live in Central Otago, the weather is never far from mind. Especially for us at Lauder, where we maintained an official weather station for New Zealand’s Meteorological Service. Of all the observations in the “Met Enclosure”, only the wind conditions were semi-automated. Wind speed and direction were measured atop a 10-metre mast using a “Munro” Anemometer that was connected to a chart recorder and analogue display meter in the office below – no computer logging in those days. For all the other daily weather observations, we had to walk the 100 metres from our office up the hill to the Met Enclosure at 9 am to manually record the rainfall, evaporation, and temperature range over the last 24 hours, along with the current temperatures - of the air (including the wet-bulb temperature for the air humidity), surface, and soil. It could be a miserable and thankless task when I was on the roster for that duty in the middle of winter, especially on hoarfrost-weekends when I should have been snugly indoors.
Happily, those bleak days are the exception rather than the rule. Overall, the weather isn’t too bad at all. With the protective hills, there’s no scrappy weather with its scudding southerly rubbish that plagues the coastal regions, or the thin Easterly sea breezes that cut through you like a knife. In any year, you can count the number of weekends on one hand when the weather won’t be good enough to play tennis or golf – as long as you don’t mind playing in the cold. When it is cold, it’s usually dry and calm, so if you’re rugged up you quickly warm up. There are plenty of golf courses to choose from. They don’t charge too much either, and you don’t have to book. It’s a good lifestyle, especially if you like the outdoors.
But you do need a warm home. In winter, temperatures can fall as low as -20°C on clear nights, but those nights are usually followed by clear crisp sunny days. Although winter temperatures by day sometimes remain in low single figures, it’s still comfortable to sit outside as long as you are in the sun. Lauder doesn’t suffer from the foggy winter mornings that Alexandra and Clyde further down the valley experience. The altitude is just high enough to be above the inversion layers that cause those. Only very occasionally are there several days in a row with sub-zero temperatures, when the valley is blanketed in cloud with hoarfrost conditions below. Quite beautiful, but also quite miserably cold. In summer the temperature rarely exceeds 30°C.
The valley is protected from the prevailing north-west wind by the Dunstan Ranges, about 20 km to the west. But it’s not always calm. There’s one notable gap in the range where Thomsons creek flows in from the next valley. If the wind comes from that direction, you can sometimes hear it whistling through Thomsons Gorge, especially in the spring and autumn months when the winds blow strongest.
Perhaps the best thing about the area is its skies. By day, the cloud formations - like lenticulars of all sizes which are set up from undulations in the flow of winds over the mountains to the west. They can sit transfixed for hour after hour. And by night the stars. The Southern night sky leaves the North’s for dead. Even though it’s not particularly high in altitude, Lauder’s clean dry air, and the lack of man-made lights bring it into sharp focus. The milky way with its Magellanic Clouds is dramatically visible too. And, of course, our defining navigational aid: The Southern Cross. I’ve seen visitors from mega-cities like Tokyo cry when they see our night sky. And if you’re lucky, you might even see an aurora!
Excluding the Alexandra-Clyde townships, the entire population of the valley is less than 1000 people (though quite a few more livestock). The hardy souls who live there are a rugged independent lot. They are self-contained and inventive. They don’t pretend to be sophisticated (which incidentally can mean false, deceptive, or misleading). True, some may be a bit red-necked, and not just from the sun, but they’re the real thing. Nobody’s perfect. Most are the “Salt of the Earth”. Good people to have on your side in a crisis. Though we found that it pays not to be too critical, as many of the families are inter-related. The next valley towards the East is the Ida Valley, which is known to the locals simply as “The Valley”. It’s dominated by a few farms that have been handed down from generation to generation. Locals on our side of the hill sometimes joke that the gene pool there is very small. But that might be a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
The whole area is a bit of a throwback to the old rugby, racing and beer Kiwi lifestyle immortalised by classics like John Clarke’s portrayal of the archetypical Kiwi bloke Fred Dagg, or Murray Ball’s Footrot Flats cartoons, or Austin Mitchel’s The Half-Gallon Quarter-Acre Pavlova Paradise. As you might imagine, there’d be occasional conflicts with their values nowadays in today’s politically correct world.
When we arrived at Lauder there weren’t many others living on site. One was science technician Des Rowles who was a bachelor and keen golfer. At first there was just one family, Paul Johnston, his wife Carol and their two kids. But it wasn’t long before our new electronics technician Chris Johnson (no kidding, but without a “t”) arrived with his wife Beryl and their two toddlers, who moved into the house next door. We were all living in each other’s pockets, cut off from the rest of the world. Although we enjoyed aspects of the country lifestyle, it was an isolated existence. No internet in those days. We did have TV, but with reception from only two channels. Sky satellite TV wouldn’t arrive until about 20 years later.Our social life revolved around sports: tennis for both of us in the summer, and in winter golf for me and netball for Louise. And - of course - the local pubs. It wasn’t quite as isolated as living in a lighthouse, but it’s not a stretch to describe it as a social backwater.
I joined the Omakau golf club, a delightful nine-hole course about 10 km down the valley from Lauder. There was another golf course at nearby Becks too, about the same distance back up the valley. It’s closed now but was a social centre for the area in the early 1980s. It was on a local farm and was looked after by the owner and a group of neighbouring farmers. It too was a nine-hole course, but was even smaller, with electric fences around the greens to keep the stock away. The only time I played it was August 16, 1981. I remember the date well. The local farmers’ wives had provided a meal in the little club house after the game, and socialising carried on well into the night. Louise joined me there, though she was heavily pregnant. There was a lot of merriment. Perhaps a little too much, because very early the next morning, we had a rushed trip to Clyde hospital, where our son Hamish was born. It must have been very early in the morning. Our neighbour, Carol Johnston, came over to look after Andrew and David, while I took Louise to the hospital in Clyde, about half an hour down the valley. When I got back home a few hours after the baby was born, the kids were still fast asleep in their beds.
Despite its small population, there was a bit of unwritten social stratification. At the top were the “landed gentry”. That word, gentry, doesn’t really capture the way they looked and behaved, but they were quite well off, especially those with larger sheep runs that could extend to thousands of hectares. At the bottom of the heap were manual workers, like race-men who described their work as “shovelling water”. Their job was to make sure water from the irrigation races got evenly spread over the landed gentry’s paddocks to keep their grass growing. The Lauder atmospheric science enclave of researchers fell somewhere between these extremes and were (sort of) accepted by both.
One of the few times all groups got together was at a party we threw in April 1983. We advertised it as a Bad Taste party. People had to bring something in bad taste, and to dress in bad taste. Invitations went out far and wide. The locals were used to driving long distances for sport and entertainment.
There was a strong nor-west wind blowing on the day of the party, and several of the farmers – who obviously knew a bit more about weather than we atmospheric scientists - rang to check if the party was still on. They’d had a bit of trouble with falling trees causing breaks in power lines. But the weather didn’t seem too bad to us at Lauder. Anyway, Louise had already done a lot of food preparation; and Paul Johnston and I had spent a lot of time booby-trapping the place by setting up powerful car lights (the same as described earlier) that would turn on and dazzle guests as they arrived, and garden hoses that would spray them with water as they tried to open the gate latches that we’d meddled with so they didn’t open easily. But we did start to wonder if anyone would come.
We needn’t have worried. It was a roaring success. The wind gathered strength, and as the party warmed up it started to scream its way through the breach at Thomsons Gorge. It wasn’t just the 1970’s hits from ABBA, Boney M and Charlie Pride that were roaring that night at Lauder. The wind roared louder and louder as the night wore on. The place was jam-packed. Even the local publican was there. He must have decided there was no point in keeping the pub open with all his potential clients at the party. It was a great mixing pot, with all sectors of the community jammed shoulder to shoulder in our small home.
We’d recently had a solid 6-foot wooden fence built around the perimeter of the section. Somebody called out that the up-wind side was collapsing. We went out and found the problem. Our neighbour’s skyline garage had ripped off its foundation and had been rolled 30 m up the hill by the wind until it hit the fence where it was now pinned. A few guests’ cars were parked behind the fence on the leeward side of the house. They became concerned about that one collapsing too, so moved the cars to open ground. No sooner had they done that than that fence came down too. The 150 x 100 mm (6 x 4”) fence posts just snapped off at the ground. Sheets of corrugated iron and roof tiles were being whipped off other buildings. It was dangerous to go outside, so we partied-on inside until the storm abated and it was safe to go home.
We’ll never know the maximum wind gust that night because the chart maximum on the Munro wind recorder was limited to 90 knots, and the pen had maxed out there. All we know is that it exceeded that speed (about 160 km per hour). Luckily nobody was hurt, and to this day when I meet people in the street who were there, they happily reminisce on one of the most exciting events we can remember in the district.
The next episode, “Lauder Star-gazers”, will focus on our work at Lauder in the 1980s. Vastly different in so many ways from the present day.