Smells like Paradise

I have seen Paradise. I went there as a boy in the back of my dad's Holden.

- GREG DIXON

One autumn nearly half a century ago, the family packed up our car and drove for hours from Invercargill to find Paradise at the end of a dusty, metal road. We didn't need a prophet, or the Good Book, or signs in the sky to show us the way, just a gas station touring map.

To a small boy on his first proper country adventure, Paradise seemed like the middle of nowhere, and it was. Then, as now, this rural retreat lies at the head of Lake Wakatipu, between the Rees and Dart rivers, in a valley betwixt Mts Earnslaw/Pikirakatahi and Alfred/Ari. Civilisation was an hour to the south in the still-sleepy hamlet of Queenstown.

The first people to see this beautiful area were its local iwi, Kāi Tahu. The first Europeans to settle it were shepherds and their sheep in the 1860s. One of those shepherds, Alfred Duncan, is said to have called the place Paradise. The name was good enough to stick.