Gore's giant trout is a memorable marker of the town and can be seen "looming over the top of the main drag". Photo / File
Gore's giant trout is a memorable marker of the town and can be seen "looming over the top of the main drag". Photo / File
Whisky and art are the first drawcards — but Colin Hogg is surprised to find there's much more to the once-named Chicago of the south.
I went to Gore for the fish, the art and the whisky - as you do. The first one was easy. There's no avoiding Gore's great big leaping trout statue.
It's right there looming over the top of the main drag. And, as it happens, the art and the whiskey are nearby - in the shadow of that trout, in fact.
It's a slightly weird combination of attractions, but it works. At least it did for me. I went into Gore a little nervous and came out converted to the funny flat faraway place - faraway being 45 minutes' drive from Invercargill, slap dab in the middle of the Southland Plains.
Gore is, in several ways, the heart of the far south, a region of the country that remains to many New Zealanders a slightly mysterious and under-explored place. It's not quite like the rest of New Zealand. They don't even sound the same down there.
Many place names in Southland even seem designed to encourage the local dialect and its famous rolling "r". There's Riverton, Riversdale, Ryal Bush and Invercargill, of course.
But perhaps no place better serves the great southern "r" better than Gore. When they mention the name of their town, some of the locals hang on to its third letter so long it seems they might never let it go. But that's just one small part of the charm of this town of about 10,000.
And, yes, charm isn't a word normally associated with Gore, but neither is suggesting that a traveller could do a lot worse than stopping and staying there a day or two.
As hinted at earlier, Gore is the brown trout fishing capital of the world and one of the things a visitor might feel moved to do is make a date with a local fishing guide, put on rubber waders and wade out into the fast-moving Mataura - the river that runs through Gore.
It's full of fish, though I failed to land one, despite the stout-hearted efforts of Barry Perkins, who runs Flyfish Mataura with his wife Diane. They quit dairy farming and set up their trout business 14 years and ago and haven't looked back since, as they say down south.
Barry's been fly fishing since he was a kid and has a gentle style with fools like me, though flicking that fly turns out to be easier than I expected. Catching is harder.
I actually hook a trout, but it flashes back into the river, possibly laughing at me. Even failing to fish properly, it's a beautiful feeling. Clients from all over the world agree.
They fly in, get themselves and their rods to Gore and fill up Barry's every daytime hour during the season. And, in their non-trouting moments, the visitors perhaps explore Gore.
Eastern Southland Art Gallery houses work by acclaimed New Zealand artist Ralph Hotere. Photo / Venture Southland
It's an elegant town - as I said, mostly flat - established in 1862 and named after one of New Zealand's lesser-known governors, Sir Thomas Gore-Browne.
Hopes for the settlement's growth were so extreme in the late-1800s that for a while Gore was called the Chicago of the South. And while that turned out to be a little optimistic, the town did boom quietly right through until the 1970s.
Then farming took a dive, the town shrank and businesses, including Gore's landmark cereal mill, closed, though it still stands. Then, come the turn of the 21st century and the dairying boom, Gore was back in business.
And businessmen probably stay where I stayed, at the Heartland Hotel, a bit of a classic sitting in a virtual park across the road from the river and next to eccentric Hokonui Pioneer Village.
It's old fashioned and rambling sort of hotel with a soothing spearmint-shaded interior decor and little balconies. I can see sheep in paddocks from my room. They ignore me.
In response, I have the lamb at the hotel's Blazing Copper restaurant. It's perfect, pink, tender. I count myself to sleep on sheep.
Next day, I get to grips with the art part of the Gore adventure. The town actually has an arts and heritage precinct that lives up to its name. The rather surprising Eastern Southland Gallery is housed adjacent to that trout statue in the beautiful old library building. It was designed by E.R. Wilson, who also did the famous Invercargill Water Tower.
It's all curves and, inside, the collection serves you another curve. It is extraordinary and not at all what you'd expect to find in Gore. Aside from a major collection of works by the great Ralph Hotere, the gallery is home to the mad and wonderful John Money Collection.
The John Money Collection is a key feature of the Eastern Southland Art Gallery. Photo / Venture Southland
Money was an expatriate art collector whose modus operandi was to buy art from struggling artists as a way of encouraging them to keep on creating - not necessarily because he liked the art. As a result, the considerable collection ranges through painters Rita Angus, Theo Schoon and Lowell Nesbitt and into Australia art and huge wooden figures from Mali and masks from Nigeria.
And if you come out of the Eastern Southland Art Gallery muttering with wonder, there are more wonders just down the road at the Hokonui Moonshine Museum, a shrine to the great spirit of the south.
It was the poor quality of the whisky being sold locally that drove the mid-19th century Scots immigrants to start making their own. By the time the imports reached Gore, they were often watered down.
A Scot called Mary McRae had come to the district with her sons and an old family recipe for making whisky. Amid the luggage she brought to her new home was a box marked "household goods".
It contained a small whisky still, which she schooled her sons to use, founding what became a new brand, Hokonui.
So when prohibition arrived to dry the district out early in the 20th century, there was a local industry that could devote itself to filling the gap in the community's drinking habit.
Now not only is there a Hokonui Moonshine Museum devoted to the colourful criminal history, but the museum has a licence to make and sell its own whiskey, made to McRae's original recipe, which it sells in bottles bearing its trademark skull and crossbones label. Part of the same complex, the Gore Historical Museum offers a more traditional approach to the past.
And if all that history makes you hungry, they do a good lunch at the nearby Thomas Green, a vast old-world bar and eatery in one of the town's lovely old buildings. The duck salad is outstanding.
