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Bush HouseIt was a return to the place he loved most, the Hollyford. Even back in 1981 he acknowledged it as home.

August 1981Here I am, lying at anchor in a sheltered sunny bay on Lake McKerrow … the boat is slowly turning around in the light breeze, showing me a continuously changing view. I love the sounds and sights and smells here – this is home – I’ll never be able to stay away. Sometimes in the last few days I’ve been speechless with the beauty and the feel of the place. – DJC

This is the place we all now call home. Our daughter Billie calls it her ‘bush house’. There is a lot of bush, ever encroaching on the crib. The forest takes all that is left behind, so every time we come here we work to claim some sunlight back. Dave fashioned a beautiful scythe from a deer antler. Whenever we walk the tracks we use it to pare back the foliage just a little.

A tomtit sits on the radio aerial strung outside the crib’s window. It must be a good vantage point to snatch sandflies off the glass. From where I write I can spy the lake – a slender triangle of a view between tree ferns, kowhai and the bush following the path to the lake, sheet metal in the morning sun. From here you can see the sun come up over the Sara

Hills, or the moon. Both silhouette the trees on the ridgeline, sometimes with light rays between the boughs, before making their grand entrance.

Dave first came here in the mid to late 1970s. Viv Allott, who built and owned the crib, was a good friend and mentor to Dave, Dave helping him with building jobs and often staying at the crib. Viv had a half share in the Hollyford Guided Walks venture alongside pilot and raconteur Jules Tapper. Viv was the quieter one, a leprechaun of a man – small of stat-ure, thinning hair, a twinkle to those blue eyes, and forever a generous smile. When guiding on the track he could out-walk anyone thirty years his junior.

Come whitebait season Viv always filled his net with quantities of ‘bait’ that others envied. Whitebait is a delicacy in New Zealand. The fledgling form of the native trout, they migrate back from the sea to the freshwater rivers and lakes in late winter and spring. As they swim into the current they’re caught in the many nets set up on the sides of the river. Prime spots on the river were, and still are, fiercely guarded, permits only going so far to protect the fish stocks and keep the peace.

Back in the 1970s to early ’80s, Viv had the walls of the crib covered in hideous orange wallpaper, and the bathroom walls and floors coated in purple linoleum. The crib was basic, functional, yet even then cosy and warm around the stone hearth of the open fire.

Dave found another version of the Ranginui – a necessary retreat in the wilderness – in 1989. Between spells of film work he would come here for months on end, work on the crib, hunt, fish, read, mess about in boats, photograph and contemplate the world around him.

Lake McKerrow, lower Hollyford Valley.

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Viv died within three months of being diagnosed in early 1983. We carried armloads of rata flowers into his Invercargill hospital room, loose red spikes of petals trailing the clean, white hallway.

Old man, we are looking for our friend Like the sunrise in winter, eyelids are lifted. Heavy dew in the morning Catches the first light through the grass.

Thirty-one years later rata flowers were carried into another hospital room.

Dave bought the crib and surrounding twenty hectares of bush here at Martins Bay from Viv’s family in 1989. An anomaly within New Zealand national parks, the private freehold property has its origins in the 1870s when surveyors and politicians attempted to establish a settlement in the lower Hollyford Valley. Their ambition was to create a port town

on the West Coast a ‘stone’s throw’ from the goldmines of Otago (with promises of roads over the Main Divide from Queenstown), and thereby ease the passage of gold to the market of South Australia.

The surveyors drew up quarter-acre sections around the most beautiful and sheltered bay on Lake McKerrow and named the town Jamestown. They also measured out fifty-acre lots elsewhere around the lake, down the lower Hollyford River and along the coast. The few immigrant settlers who attempted to make a life here were almost all beaten – by rain, disease, isolation and hopelessness. One family, the Webbs, lost five children. Two ate poisonous berries, one died soon after birth, and the fourth was stillborn (presumably owing to his mother’s poor health). The fifth child, a son, died of influenza in his teens. I recall Dave and Viv in the early 1980s beating a path through the dense bush from Jamestown until they came to the picket fence, overgrown, around what was left of the cemetery where the children were buried.

Jamestown is now a misnomer. There is no town, just two cribs and another couple of privately owned sections somewhere back in the bush. The settlement was a complete failure. There never was a safe har-bour or road. Only one family eventually remained, the McKenzies. They farmed the flats alongside the coast until the 1920s when they passed the land into the hands of Davey Gunn.

When Fiordland National Park was established in 1952, any land left without title was absorbed into the park. Today, nineteen freehold sections remain, scattered around the lower Hollyford Valley. Dave’s – previously Viv’s – was one of them. The original name on the title from 1876, handwritten in fine black pen and only just legible, is Michael O’Dea.

If you walk downstream from the crib along the river it’s a dense bush bash through kiekie – a strong and wiry plant, prized by Maori for the leaf, which they weave into kete, or baskets. (When Billie was just a baby, friends Bubba, of Hokuri Hut fame, and Gael Thompson came to stay, gathering up sack-loads of kiekie to take back to the marae in Bluff. Years later, they gifted Dave with a beautiful poha titi, a traditional form of basketware woven from kiekie and used for storing titi, muttonbirds.)

After twenty minutes or so of scrambling through mud, kiekie and cutty grass on the rough track downstream, you break through into the relatively clear understorey of old rimu forest, towering cathedral-like Dave with our daughter Billie, Christmas 2005.

Lake McKerrow, the lower Hollyford River to the Tasman Sea, the Skippers Range and Sara Hills to the right (northeast).

opposite top The Hollyford River in flood.opposite bottom Pilot Janey Blair landing outside the Bush House, with windsurfers.left The inside of the Bush House after a hunt, early 1990s.

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Lord of the RingsThere are three bread crates of Lord of the Rings. They’re stacked in the far corner of the office, the old plastic folders of photographic prints slotted neatly into rows and columns. This corner requires a deep intake of breath. I make a little space, extract the first crate and begin the dissection.

Here is Wakatipu, the Twizel area and Fiordland, Norwest Lakes, Mavora Lakes, Nelson/Tasman, the Kawarau Gorge and many, many more. There is Paradise, of course.

I open each folder in great expectation, but the photographs are often banal, the nuts and bolts of water, marsh, hill, mountain, rock – all the ingredients of what a piece of Tolkien’s prose might demand in terms of individual angles or shots. The photographs become more spectac-ular as I open ‘Norwest Lake’, a favourite, or ‘Poison Bay’, vertical rock walls to the west of Milford Sound, an image redolent of Tolkien’s Misty Mountains. Fiordland makes the lens come alive, in all weathers.

If there is one production, one series of films, that has put New Zealand’s wilderness on screen, it would be Sir Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and, later, The Hobbit.

Dave came on board in 1997, before secure financing to make the Rings trilogy was even in place, but finding locations was key to ensure the ongoing development of the project.

‘I do remember emphasizing to Dave that all the locations we were looking for are very carefully described by Tolkien in the books,’ Sir Peter said. ‘Read the scripts for sure, I told him, so you can see what’s in and

what’s out, but where you’re looking for inspiration for what you’re look-ing for then go to the book, because Tolkien was very good at describing landscapes above all else.’

Peter insisted that the history being portrayed on screen was real history, a real story relying on real locations, a world that Tolkien might have imagined was akin to a Europe of 7000 years ago.

‘New Zealand is an almost primitive form of Europe,’ Peter explained, ‘a Dark Ages form of European landscape without today’s human pol-lution all over the place. I don’t think there’s any country better suited than New Zealand.’

According to Dan Hennah, the Rings’ supervising art director, the word Peter used over and over when describing locations or art direction was ‘epic’.

‘When I started on Lord of the Rings, I was saying to Peter that we could shoot in the Wairarapa,’ said Dan. ‘But he’d say “No, no, this is epic; we need epic! This is in New Zealand, but we need to find places people have never seen before.”’

‘Dave was the key motivator in that search,’ Dan continued, ‘integral to the images that we were able to put together, and the epic landscape

Norwest Lake, Fiordland National Park.

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of the whole of Lord of the Rings. Dave would know what you meant when you talked about “epic”. Dave knew epic right down into his soul. Which is lovely.’

Dan Hennah – gentle, smiling, ever effusive – had worked with Dave on New Zealand commercials back into the late 1980s. ‘For me, there was always a big sigh of confidence when I heard Dave was on the job. I’ve never come across anyone who has the knowledge but also the eye and the ability to negotiate with people, that first-up situation to get onto the land, all of that tricky stuff.

‘If you heard, from the art department point of view, that Dave had been employed on the project, you’d suddenly be very confident about the look of what you were going to do.’

Epic included Fiordland, flying seven helicopters through Doubtful Sound and beyond. ‘All through that Fiordland area, Dave had such a great knowledge of what it was and where it was,’ Dan remembered. ‘We’d be flying along and he’d be talking to Alfie – pilot Alfie Speight – in the lead helicopter, saying, “Let’s just pop around the next headland, and there’s a little lake.” His knowledge of the area and his knowledge of what was going to be there and in what season was hugely valuable.’

Dan credits Dave not only for the knowledge of the areas he knew intimately, but also the ability to find what he didn’t know but could sense was there. ‘Right through the country there’s almost an intuition in areas you haven’t been before, that sense that up there to the right is going to be something interesting that’s causing this landform. Dave had that knowledge. You’d think that in a helicopter you could cover every bit of amazing ground there is, but you can’t. And you don’t see things unless you know where to look. Dave’s intuition was extraordinary.

‘I’ve never met anyone who could do that, not before and not since. It was peculiar to Dave. Other people go out all the time and look for things, and you invariably get there and you’re disappointed. But Dave was always honest about it, and he could find the right places. Often it was just around that next tree. Or just around the next rock.’

Sir Peter chuckles when he remembers Dave’s reticence to leave ‘The Mainland’. ‘Dave was always a bit grumpy when he had to come to the North Island. He was a South Island boy, that’s for sure. But he wasn’t without his skill and knowledge up there. We forced him into the North

Island and made him look for stuff, but the South Island was his true love.’I spread the bread crates across the living-room floor, unsure of

what I’m looking for, prising open each folder hoping to find a few gems. Strangely there are no negatives. So when I come across a beauty shot – Edoras, for example – I’m unable to trace its negative. Such is history, and the passing of prints, negatives and notes from one production office to another.

Later, in Sir Peter’s archives in Wellington, I open the various folders relating to the final locations. Here the otherwise lifeless prints become a little more interesting as Dave had pasted the landscapes together like a rough jigsaw puzzle onto black card (this was the era before digital cameras could do panoramas); beneath each image, his handwriting, in silver ink, noting critical details. The notes are so typical of Dave – quirks or difficulties, driving distance from the nearest town, helicopter flight time from base, and exactly where the shot is taken, all written in economic shorthand.

I laugh at the shots of various options for the Dead Marshes. In one Dave has shot down at his feet, leather boots and Carhartt trousers to provide a sense of scale. In another he’s laid one of his waders (thigh-high gumboots he used when fly fishing) alongside the reeds. There are beauty shots of the wetlands up the side of Lake Te Anau, the final choice of location for the Dead Marshes. But the practicalities of shooting in a swamp – thigh-deep mud – meant much of the scene was eventually shot on set, in a swamp created behind the film studio in Wellington.

The expanse of the bread crates at home and the many file boxes in Wellington chart a journey almost all the way around New Zealand, just as the final film flies the length of the Southern Alps, and from Wellington to the Waikato. In his office are pages upon pages of details of each location, some asterisked, others with lines drawn under or through, emphasising difficulties of access or whether or not they made the final, very long list on the production schedule.

Some locations stand out, either because of how they were found, or because they were favourites, secrets Dave ventured to share with the world. HobbitonAt Dave’s farewell at Paradise there were over 400 people. There were

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so many well-wishers, wishing goodbyes and that curious word ‘condo-lences’, I failed to see or couldn’t remember who was there. But one man waited patiently to introduce himself. His name was Dean Alexander, the son of Ian Alexander, whose door Dave had knocked on back in October 1998.

Dean told me that Dave changed their lives. If it had not been for Dave’s patience, his calm manner, care and respect, the Alexander family future may well have been very different, Dean said.

The story of how Hobbiton was discovered on the Alexander family farm has become the stuff of film legend, often exaggerated and featur-ing an ever changing cast of protagonists. The real story is still a touching one.

The Shire, and Hobbiton in particular, was one of the most diffi-cult locations to identify in New Zealand. Dave began on the Otago Peninsula. The brief was to find rolling hills of green, old stone walls encrusted with lichen, and established evergreen trees. There are screes of images of these, but the trees are rugged wind-blown macrocarpas, and the backdrop is often a dull stormy sea.

Dave put Otago Peninsula aside, and flew to the North Island. In the office I find several inch-to-the-mile topographical maps of the entire Waikato area, contours carefully studied for any likelihood of rolling green. Dave identified one reasonably contained area, south of Hamilton near Matamata, hired a Cessna 185 and went for a fly.

Dean Alexander, then a young man on the farm, remembers the aircraft overhead that week, flying reasonably low and turning sharply again and again. A day or so later, he saw a man with binoculars leaning over the fence from the main road.

The following Saturday Dave knocked at the door of the Alexander property. It was the day of the NPC, the National Provincial Championship in rugby, Waikato playing Otago. Dave had interrupted Dean’s father and farm owner Ian Alexander, fortunately at half time.

The story went that Ian was irked by the interruption. Today, Ian laughs at that scenario. ‘I’m usually pretty welcoming to most folk, but, yeah, I might have said to myself, “Who the devil is this bloke coming in?” But it was half time. I told Dave, sorry, I couldn’t come with him around the farm ’cause I was watching the rugby, but to go for it, have a look

around, just be sure to close the gates.’Ian Alexander’s home team Waikato lost to Otago that day. Even

so, when Dave returned after the game had finished the reception was a warm one. ‘We offered him a cuppa, but he said he had to get back to Hamilton to get his films processed overnight.’

I laugh. For Dave to turn down a cup of tea he must have been pretty excited that he’d finally found Hobbiton.

Six weeks later, confidentiality contracts signed, Dave returned to the Alexanders’ property with a cavalcade of SUVs, bringing production designer Grant Major, Dan Hennah, conceptual artists Alan Lee and John Howe, producers and the director of Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson. The footage and images from the eight hours they spent on the farm that day – sketching, envisaging, planning, dreaming, and walking over rise and hill and around lakes and streams – have since been viewed by millions.

There are three sons in the Alexander family, and it was eldest, Russell, who oversaw the contracts and negotiations. It took six months, though, before the final contract was signed. Russell has always com-mended Dave’s part in the process: ‘His affinity with people, his patience, and his handling of meetings and negotiations was critical,’ he said.

Today, Hobbiton welcomes over half a million visitors a year. The story began with a topo map, a Cessna 185, and Dave driving around a farm in the spring, closing gates behind him. The story ends with a place in the firmament of cinema history and a massive tourism enterprise.

Ian Alexander still chuckles over how it all began – at the small moments in a day when his beloved Waikato side lost to Otago. Ironic, then, that it was Matamata, in the Waikato region, that won out over the Otago Peninsula.

Edoras – A journey into the Rangitata Our Queenstown home overlooks several Lord of the Rings locations. Sometimes, taking the dogs to the lake for a swim, we’d encounter a German tourist, nose into a guidebook, who’d ask us for directions to this or that location. Dave, politely, pointed the way, never expounding further.

On a drive through Skippers Canyon he’d show his daughter where Arwen fled from the Nazgul, riding furiously across the rapids of the

Building the set for Edoras, Mount Sunday, mid winter.

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