Te Anau

Kāi Tahu knew the lake and its arms as part of the network of trails that led west to the pounamu of the coast and to seasonal food-gathering grounds, and the name Te Ana-au — the cave of swirling water — refers to the limestone caves on the far shore, rediscovered by a local guide in the 1940s after being described in tradition. European surveyors reached the lake in the early 1850s, and runholders took up the grassland to the east soon afterwards.

Tourism arrived with the Milford Track. Quintin McKinnon and a companion crossed the pass at the head of the Clinton Valley in 1888, opening a walking route to Milford Sound, and guided parties were soon travelling by boat up the lake to begin it. A hotel, boatmen and guides made a small settlement at the lake's south-eastern corner, but until the road from Lumsden and Mossburn improved, Te Anau remained remote and seasonal.

Two projects made the modern town. The Milford road, begun in the Depression and completed when the Homer Tunnel opened in 1953, turned the fiord into a day trip and gave the town its reason for existing. Then the Manapouri hydro scheme of the 1960s brought hundreds of workers to the district, and the proposal to raise Lake Manapōuri drew a petition signed by 264,907 New Zealanders, almost a tenth of the population — the Save Manapouri campaign of 1969 to 1972, which succeeded and is remembered as one of the country's hardest-fought environmental campaigns. Te Anau has grown steadily since, on walking, cruising and flying into Fiordland.

The culture here is built around the national park on the doorstep. A large part of the working population guides, skippers, flies, cooks for or transports visitors into Fiordland, and another part works for the Department of Conservation on huts, tracks, traps and bird recovery. Conversation runs to weather windows, river levels, hut bookings and which road is open, and there is a shared, slightly proprietorial pride in the place.

Conservation is the local creed rather than an abstraction. The takahē, a large flightless rail believed extinct, was found again in the Murchison Mountains across the lake in 1948, and its recovery programme is run from near the town; the bird sanctuary on the lakefront introduces it to visitors. Predator trapping, whio recovery in the fiords and the memory of the Save Manapouri campaign all reinforce it. Biosecurity rules about cleaning boots and boats are followed closely.

Beyond that, this is Southland: farming families, a rugby club, an A&P show, hunting and fishing for deer, trout and salmon, and a dry humour about rain and sandflies. The seasonal workforce is international, so the cafés in summer sound like Queenstown in miniature, while winter returns the town to a few thousand residents, dark evenings and quiet streets. Visitors are expected to be competent outdoors and honest about their limits; guides are direct about turning parties back.

About 2,900 people live in Te Anau, which makes it the largest settlement in Fiordland and the service centre for a very large, nearly empty district. Numbers swell in summer with seasonal staff and visitors, and the town's accommodation, supermarket and health services are all sized for peaks rather than for the resident population.

Work divides between tourism, farming and conservation. Cruise companies, helicopter and light-aircraft operators, lodges, motels, holiday parks and transport firms employ most people; sheep, beef and dairy farms and deer farms run on the flats towards Mossburn and Manapōuri; the power station at West Arm and the Department of Conservation provide steady year-round jobs. The local school, health centre and trades round it out.

The rhythm is set by departures. Buses and vans leave for the Milford road, the Kepler trailhead and Te Anau Downs early in the morning, the town is calm in the middle of the day, and the lakefront fills again when the cruises and walkers return. Winter thins out the population, some businesses close for weeks, and households drive to Invercargill or Queenstown for larger shopping and hospital care. Local issues are the shortage of housing for seasonal workers, how many visitors the Milford road and the fiord itself can carry, and long-standing proposals for new transport links into the park.

Eating in Te Anau is straightforward and portion-heavy, aimed at people who have spent the day outdoors. Southland lamb and beef, farmed red deer venison, and blue cod brought up from the southern coast anchor the restaurant menus, often alongside Fiordland crayfish and green-lipped mussels. Brown and rainbow trout from the lakes and the Waiau River are a local catch, usually eaten by those who catch them rather than bought.

The regional speciality is the cheese roll, bread spread with a cheese, onion and evaporated-milk mixture, rolled up and toasted, and known in the south as southern sushi. Bakeries sell mince, steak and cheese pies by the trayload, particularly early in the morning when trampers are assembling food for several days on a track. Dried and freeze-dried meals, muesli bars and chocolate fill a surprising amount of shelf space in the supermarket for the same reason.

Drinks come mostly from the wider south. Central Otago pinot noir and riesling appear on wine lists an hour or two from where they are made, Invercargill and Queenstown breweries supply craft beer, and Bluff oysters arrive in autumn and winter when the season in Foveaux Strait opens. Coffee is taken as seriously as anywhere in New Zealand, and a flask of tea remains standard equipment on the lake boats.