Picton

The flat land at the head of the Sound was long occupied by Māori, who knew the place as Waitohi; the sheltered harbour gave access to fishing grounds and to the crossing of Cook Strait. In January 1770 James Cook anchored about thirty kilometres down the Sound at Meretoto / Ship Cove, which he used on that and five later visits as a base for repairs, water and observation, making the outer Sound one of the earliest and most frequently visited European anchorages in the country.

European settlement followed the purchase of the land from Te Āti Awa in 1850, after which its people moved to neighbouring Waikawa Bay, and the town that grew there was renamed after Sir Thomas Picton, a British general killed at Waterloo. When Marlborough separated from Nelson as its own province in 1859, Picton became its capital, but the rivalry with Blenheim on the plains was quickly lost and the seat of government moved there in 1865. The harbour kept the town alive instead: timber, wool and produce were shipped out, and whaling and later mussel farming worked the surrounding waters.

The railway ran south from Picton to just north of Blenheim from 1875, but the line through to Christchurch was not completed until 1945. The decisive change came in 1962, when a rail and road ferry service began across Cook Strait between Wellington and Picton, joining the two islands' road and rail networks for the first time and turning the town into a national transport hinge. Tourism followed as the Marlborough Sounds became a destination in their own right, and Picton's population and its port facilities have grown steadily around the terminal ever since.

Picton's identity is that of a port and a gateway: a town where a large share of the working day is timed to ferry sailings, and where the population swells and shrinks with each arrival. The rhythm gives the place a cheerful, transient surface — tour desks, cafés, luggage on the footpath — over a small permanent community that knows everyone. Many residents work in tourism, on the ferries, in the port or on the water, and boats are treated less as leisure objects than as ordinary transport.

Māori connections run deep. Waikawa Bay, just over the hill, has a marae and a long-settled community with ties to the iwi of Te Tau Ihu, the top of the South Island, and the Sound carries the official dual name Queen Charlotte Sound / Tōtaranui in recognition of that history. Place names, carvings and interpretation panels around the foreshore tell both the Māori and the European story of the harbour.

Cook's visits are the other thread of local memory, marked at Ship Cove and in the town's museums, and the arrival of European ships is presented with more attention than it once was to what followed for Māori. Otherwise the culture is recognisably small-town New Zealand: a rugby club and bowling greens, a summer of fishing competitions, boat races and barbecues, a Christmas period when the foreshore lawn fills with families, and a winter when the town returns to itself.

About 4,800 people live in Picton and neighbouring Waikawa, with more in the bays of the Sounds. The port is the largest employer, directly and through the trucking, rail and logging traffic it generates; tourism, aquaculture, boat building and marine services provide much of the rest. Forestry trucks and log stacks are as much a part of the waterfront as the yachts, and mussel and salmon farms in the Sounds send produce out through the town.

Housing climbs the hillsides in streets of weatherboard bungalows, with newer subdivisions towards Waikawa. The town has schools, a medical centre and a supermarket, but specialist shopping, hospital care and secondary services mean a drive to Blenheim, and a longer trip to Nelson or a flight for anything more. Many households keep a boat, and access to the water shapes where people choose to live.

The daily pattern is set by the timetable across the strait: the first sailings before dawn, the shops busy when passengers walk off, then quiet stretches in between. Local concerns include the redevelopment of the ferry terminal and the condition of the ships serving the crossing, the pressure that holiday homes and short-term letting put on housing for workers, the sustainability of the mussel and log trades, and the state of narrow Sounds roads after storms.

Seafood is the mainstay. Green-lipped mussels, farmed on long lines throughout the Marlborough Sounds, appear steamed in wine and garlic, in chowder and in fritters; king salmon raised in the same cold currents is smoked, cured or grilled; and blue cod, snapper and gurnard from local boats fill the fish and chip shops on the waterfront. Scallops and pāua, an abalone with a dark iridescent shell, are seasonal treats governed by strict catch rules, and crayfish comes up the coast from Kaikōura.

Marlborough's vineyards begin a few kilometres inland, so the wine list in a Picton restaurant is short on distance: sauvignon blanc with the region's characteristic sharpness, along with pinot noir, chardonnay and traditional-method sparkling wine from the Wairau and Awatere valleys. Craft beer from Nelson and Blenheim breweries is widely poured, much of it made with hops grown in the Nelson district.

Everyday eating is simple and generous in the New Zealand country manner: the bakery pie, the flat white, fish and chips eaten on the harbour lawn, and pavlova or hokey pokey ice cream for dessert. Summer brings farmers' market produce from the Wairau plains — cherries, stone fruit, olive oil and cheese — and the barbecue culture that comes with long evenings, with whitebait fritters appearing in the short season when the tiny fish run in the river mouths of the top of the South Island.