The Saxton Oval ground can hold just about 6000 people, and there were a few empty seats for the Ireland v West Indies game. Cricket isn’t that much popular here. It’s so quiet that you move just 10 yards away from the boundary, you can hear nothing. One Irish fan, who had staggered to the ground, looking pretty drunk, had started the day brightly, shouting and cheering from the boundary lines, but disappeared after 10 overs. Passed out on the grass banks somewhere. The rest of the crowd, if you could use that term, quietly watched the West Indies innings meander along, with the occasional gentle applause. Green and gold A short distance from Havelock, just before Nelson, we pass Canvastown. Originally called Pinesdale, the name change was triggered by the development in late 1880’s - it witnessed a great gold rush and around 6000 gold hunters moved over, living in canvas tents. Hence the name. Incidentally, when Mrs Elizabeth Pope who discovered specks of gold sparkling at the Wakamarina River where she was washing her clothes, no one was interested! It was only three years later, when there was a reward of £1,375 to any person discovering a workable goldfield (at least 10,000 ounces had to be produced) that the Wakamarina gold rush began. Someone should have trusted Elizabeth earlier. And of course, the gold rush led to greed, reflected in a note in the cemetery: “This monument was erected by public subscription in memory of five late residents of the province of Marlborough who are interred here. They were waylaid, robbed, and barbarously murdered by a gang of four bushrangers, on the Maungatapu Mountain in this province, June 12 and 13, 1866.” Centre of things The geographical centre of New Zealand is at a botanical garden in Nelson, so they claim. The real centre, though, apparently lies 30 kms west of Nelson at Tapawera at a spot in Spooner hills. What about India? The colonial undivided India had its geographical centre in Nagpur but independent India’s centre lies in a tiny village called Karondi in Madhya Pradesh, where a memorial exists with a cement replica of Ashoka’s lions. That Ernest kid “That’s the place where the guy who split the atom used to live,” says the bus driver as we drive past a picturesque place called Havelock, on the way to Nelson. Those pine-tree hills hover in the background, a river streams down beside the houses and that’s where Ernest Rutherford grew up. He was actually born in rural Nelson before the family moved to Havelock, where his father James realised pretty quickly that his kid was different. James woke up in a middle of stormy night and found Ernest out on the veranda, mumbling something to himself. “Counting,” the boy said, before adding, as you do, “If you count the seconds between the flash and the thunderclap and allow 1200 feet for each second for the sound to travel, you can tell how close you are to the storm centre.” Oh well.
