Logging machines, lost ships and quail
Southland’s largest logging machine was the Lidgerwood, an enormous steamdriven winch imported from the USA to work at the Port Craig Timber Mill.
It hauled the logs by means of aerial wire ropes attached to a 127 foot high main spar.
Rather than haul the logs through the forest, they were brought out on the aerial system from as far as 800m, three or four at a time, and placed directly on trolleys.
The massive machine worked well for a few years.
Shifting it from one site to the next, however, was a mammoth task and eventually a number of smaller more mobile haulers replaced it.
In 1926, the Lidgerwood was abandoned, stranded by its sheer bulk, boiler unsafe and no doubt well worn by its five years of service.
In the end it was dismantled and shipped out with some of it, at least, going to the Ngahere Mill on the West Coast, and the massive baseplate remaining in the forest.
Native quail
Southland had a native quail that became extinct soon after European settlement.
The quail was a tiny bird, a seed eater and a poor flyer, unwary and vulnerable in the first instance to the poisoned grain laid for rabbits, secondly to the great fires that were set to clear the rough vegetation and thirdly to the influx of stoats and weasels.
Within a few years the New Zealand quail, once counted in tens of millions, faded much as the passenger pigeon had done in America, and the last one was seen about 1875.
The Californian quail, introduced in 1869, thrives in the Central Otago climate and extends south to the dry scrub country around Athol and Waikaia.
Odd ones turn up elsewhere in Southland but don’t appear to be breeding here.
Lost ship
Southland’s most lost ship was the French barque Marguerite Mirabaud.
Sailing from Hobart to Tahiti, she was fog-bound and approximately 720km south of where she should have been when she passed the Snares Island and the Southland coast and grounded at Akatore Beach on February 17, 1907.
The Southland Times said: “The Marguerite Mirabaud, ashore at Akatore Beach, near Milton, is a French steel barque of 2293 tons gross, built at Nantes in 1900. The vessel had been enveloped in fog for nine days, rendering it impracticable for Captain Tatterin to take observations. Seemingly the skipper and crew had no idea they were near the New Zealand coast. It is stated that the former was under the impression that the vessel must have struck at some point on the Australian coast. The Marguerite Mirabaud was bound from La Rochelle, France, to Tahiti, and carried a cargo of 1,000 tons of coal and 400 tons of general cargo.”