Small-town hotel home to history of ‘last frontier’
From royal visits to riots, 6 o’clock swills and gun-slinging antics – Lake Hawea Hotel’s history is wild, reports Jo McKenzie-McLean.
Atowering stone statue looks out over the waters of Lake Hawea. Its nose has crumbled off and its hands, which hold a fishing rod, are cracked.
The figure is Claude Capell. The original owner of the Lake Hawea Hotel.
If that statue could talk it could tell some tales, from royal visits to riots and 6 o’clock swills, to gunslinging antics.
Since the 1980s, Lake Hawea Hotel’s fame has spread far and wide because of its New Year’s bashes. But its colourful, wild history goes back much further.
The small Central Otago settlement of about 2000 swells to more than 5000 over summer as visitors come to experience the quintessential Kiwiana holiday – and to party.
At the centre of the swell is the hotel. With a legal capacity to hold 300 people, for three days a year it has resource consent to take in 2500. In its heyday, in the 80s and 90s, that was 5000.
Patrons partied all night, pitched tents around the country pub, bused across from Wanaka and wandered up from the camping ground to be entertained by big-name artists. This year, that line-up includes Kimbra.
‘‘When you think a pub that has a legal capacity for 300 people to suddenly go to 2500 – it turns what is a country pub into a whole different animal for three days of the year,’’ current owner Ant Alderson says.
Locals won’t tell many tales about New Year’s antics. Most make themselves scarce.
Boris Munro sits at a table in the garden bar, draws back on a cigarette and fills a 7oz from a jug. He has been coming to the hotel since the 60s. He says he was the first person to take a drink when the new building opened in 1987, after former Dunedin mayor Sir Clifford Skeggs bought the hotel and redeveloped it.
Boris was drinking at the hotel when several days after it opened a riot erupted.
It happened after a patron climbed a tree and started pelting fellow drinkers with cans of beer.
In the chaos, a barman wielding an axe smashed down the fence to let trapped people escape.
‘‘The riot was entertaining,’’ Boris said. ‘‘The riot squad was here and everything. It had only been open for about three days and she was all on.
‘‘There wasn’t a bit of glass left in the place. They broke every window in the place.’’
Boris said he put barbed wire around the tree to stop a repeat of the incident and that barbed wire remained around the tree for years.
Kevin Capell, the grandson of Claude Capell, says the riot put the hotel on the map, but the hotel had always been popular over the Christmas and New Year holidays.
‘‘I can remember about 1960, Christmas and New Year was that hectic they would bring truckloads of crated beer up from Cromwell.
‘‘Instead of unloading the beer into the coolers in the cellar, they were selling it to the public straight out the back of the truck.
‘‘It’s fair to say there was more
beer drunk then than there is now.’’
Wild times at the far-flung watering hole go back to the early days. One story famous throughout the hotel was an incident that occurred late one night in the 1970s under the reign of ‘‘The Arab’’ – the enterprising Lebanese publican at the time.
‘‘Someone was trying to put the dart in the bullseye. One of the guys said, ‘I’ll show you how to get the bull’. He went outside and brought in a high-powered rifle and shot the bull with his rifle.
‘‘The bullet went through the dart board, into the bottle store and tore into a line of bottles on the top shelf That is just one of a lot of things that happened there. It was quite wild times.’’
The hotel did not get a liquor licence until 1952 when crews arrived to build the dam.
Before 1950, Claude Capell had run the hotel as a guest house. He had moved from Balclutha, where he ran a cheese factory, to fulfil his dream of opening a fishing lodge at Lake Hawea. He achieved his dream in 1925 when he opened the lodge for business. The Lake House was the first building to be constructed in Hawea.
A highlight that has gone down in history for the Capells and the hotel was when Claude hosted the Duke of York in 1927, during a royal visit to New Zealand.
‘‘Claude took him and his entourage up the head of the lake and had a picnic.
‘‘While they were having lunch, a hunter came down the valley, passing them. Claude stopped the hunter and asked where he was going, and he said to Wanaka to see the Duke of York.
‘‘Claude didn’t let on to the hunter that the Duke of York was sitting there having lunch with them.
‘‘At the end of the lunch break, Claude introduced the hunter to the Duke of York.’’
In the 1950s, Kevin’s father Tim took over the hotel, redeveloped it and renamed it Hotel Capell.
The town was a surge of activity then with Ministry of Works men arriving to build the dam and, with several shifts of thirsty workers and a compulsory 6 o’clock closing, the hotel was ‘‘hectic’’.
‘‘The workers would finish work and come in for the 6 o’clock swill. At that time there was a bit of after hours going on.
‘‘We had a policeman here who was quite officious, and he used to try to catch the guys drinking after hours. It often became a battle of wit.’’
The Capell wit and ingenuity kept Haast in supply of beer while the road connecting inland Otago to the West Coast was being built.
Tim Capell used to load crates of beer onto Land Rovers and trailers, and follow a track to where the road was being built. The booze would be off-loaded onto a bulldozer when the track got too rough, and offloaded again onto Land Rovers driven across from Haast for the final leg of the all-important journey.
‘‘There was no hotel or bar on the West Coast. Dad sent a lot of beer to Haast from Hawea. The road to Haast wasn’t open in those days so it was quite a hike.’’
Once the road opened to Haast in 1961, tourists started coming through, but in the early days the locals were the hotel’s ‘‘bread and butter’’.
‘‘In the 1960s and 70s it was patronised mainly by locals.
It was quite a busy hotel. The tourists used to pass through and carry on to Wanaka and Queenstown.’’
Times have changed. Alderson says without the tourists and busy summer season the hotel would not be a viable business. ‘‘Summer is crucial to business.’’ Alderson has continued the New Year’s party tradition, and works with promoters to bring events to the hotel, including this year’s Rhythm and Alps’ warm-up night, and the Top Paddock music festival.
‘‘It’s been going for 30 years and history has made it much easier for me to get licences in place.
‘‘The hotel does have such a great old history and is known very much as the last frontier before the West Coast through to the mid-80s.’’