Small-town hotel home to
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
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