Patron of the Ohau Conservation Trust
John Hall-Jones, OBE, Hon LLD
The Ohau Conservation Trust is honoured to have as its Patron the well known historian and conservationist Dr John Hall-Jones.
John and his late wife Pamela, who until her death in February 2011 was joint Patron of the Trust, have had more than their share of associations with Lake Ohau. They and their children regularly spent August school holidays in the 1970s and 1980s skiing at the Ohau Ski Field and staying at the Lodge. John says that one of the things they liked about Ohau was the pioneering type of skiing, with the rope tow and few facilities. It evoked nostalgia for his first skiing days with the Otago University Ski Club on the Rock & Pillar Range, where "on Friday nights we used to stagger up the ridge in the dark, and we used to make our own fun. Ohau retained that sort of atmosphere for a long time."
They did not visit Ohau so much in summer, though John recalls once tramping with a couple of friends from the Hopkins valley over the Brodrick Pass and down into the Landsborough, right up the Landsborough River to the McKerrow Glacier, and then back again. The family also camped once in summer by a water race near the Lake Ohau turn-off. Pamela, who was a tireless walker, tramped over several of the mountains around the lake, in particular Mt Benmore.
Pamela's family were historically associated with the Ohau area, as her great grandfather Thomas Middleton was manager of Benmore Station from 1873 to 1899. Little Lake Middleton was named after him, although he himself had seen the waters of "that sparkling lake" as so champagne-like that he called it Lake Cliquot.
In 1888 Pamela's grandmother, Jess Middleton, was selected to drive in the last spike of the newly established iron bridge over the Ohau River, which remains today a short distance below the Ruataniwha dam. Jess Middleton married James Menzies in 1897, and they returned to Scotland to live and bring up their family. There Pamela was born, herself coming out to New Zealand in 1952, curious to retrace the steps of her ancestors.
John Hall-Jones's associations with Lake Ohau go back even further. His great grandfather was John Turnbull Thomson, New Zealand's first Surveyor General. During 1856 and 1857 J T Thomson explored and mapped Otago and Southland, some 17,000,000 acres [6,879,527 ha]. In the process Thomson named Mt Aspiring, and a great many place names such as Earnslaw, the Lindis Pass and the Twizel River (from which, much later, the Twizel township drew its name) are Scottish or English names from close to his birthplace in the Border Country near Bamborough. Thomson was also an artist, among whose works are the first paintings of Mt Cook and the southern lakes.
John Hall-Jones has compiled two histories of his notable forebear - "Mr Surveyor Thomson" (1971), and "John Turnbull Thomson: First Surveyor-General" (1992). These accounts were enriched by a series of family excursions following in J T Thomson's footsteps, including a week-long camping trip to the headwaters of the Waitaki River, the source of which Thomson was the first European to identify. The Hall-Jones family took with them the first paintings of Mt Cook and Lake Ohau, done by JTT. Each day they climbed a different hill to line up one of the paintings, and found it fascinating to compare them with the scenes as they are today.
John and Pamela were among about 100 of Thomas Middleton's descendants who in October 2004 enjoyed a reunion at Lake Ohau.
The Ohau Conservation Trust has been honoured and encouraged by the enthusiasm and support for its work shown by John and Pamela Hall-Jones.