Before there were roads through Central Otago, before bridges, before the gold rush changed everything, there was a place called Whatatorere.
It sat in the Kawarau Gorge near Roaring Meg, where the river narrows to little more than a metre. For Māori, it was one of the most important features in the South Island: the only point on the entire Kawarau and Clutha river system where the water could be crossed without a boat. Everything else was impassable without one.
This wasn’t a curiosity. It was infrastructure.
A route built around pounamu
The crossing formed the crux of an ancient travel route that came down from Wānaka through the Cardrona Valley, followed Roaring Meg Stream to the river, crossed at Whatatorere, and continued up through the Nevis Valley toward Southland. The journey was made in pursuit of pounamu, the greenstone found on the West Coast and among the most precious materials in the Māori world. Pounamu was used for tools, weapons, and taonga passed through generations. The route that led to it mattered.
Kaumatua Huata Holmes of Kāti Huirapa Rūnaka ki Puketeraki is recorded as having described this exact route. It wasn’t a rough shortcut. It was a known, named, travelled corridor through country that most people today would consider formidable on foot.
When the goldminers arrived
In the 1860s, the Otago gold rush brought thousands of prospectors into the same country. They followed the lines Māori already knew, and Whatatorere became a bottleneck for an entirely different kind of traffic. The first European known to cross it was explorer Nathanael Chalmers in 1853, led by Māori guide Reko, who described it as “a bridge of stone.” Chalmers called his crossing Chalmers Leap, which gives you a fair sense of how casual it wasn’t.
The rock formation was destroyed not long after, during the rush. The precise details are disputed, but the practical result isn’t: Whatatorere is gone, and the river has widened at that point since.
What remains
Joseph Perry photographed the natural bridge in 1865 as part of a photographic survey of Otago, commissioned by geologist James Hector for the first New Zealand exhibition in Dunedin. Two of Perry’s 100 images from that survey are held in the Hocken Collections at the University of Otago. This is one of them.
We came across it thanks to Sue, mother-in-law, an extraordinary keeper of Central Otago history. She has a gift for producing exactly the right newspaper clipping at exactly the right moment.
Why it matters now
The trail that opens in September 2024 follows much of the same corridor through the gorge that Māori used for centuries. Riders pass through country with a layered history most of them know very little about. The engineering of the trail gets most of the attention, and rightly so. But underneath all of it is a much older story about people who knew this landscape long before any of us, and who understood its geography well enough to find the one place in hundreds of kilometres of river where you could simply walk across.
That’s worth knowing before you ride it. Find out how you can ride the Kawarau Gorge Trail.