New book sheds light on life at Manapōuri hydro power station

Saturday, 2 August 2025

The Manapōuri hydro village hosted hundreds of families, a BNZ office, a community hall, and primary and secondary schools.

Tussock and thick bush now grow were hundreds of workers used to live while building the Manapōuri hydro power station.

In her new book, The Middle of Nowhere, Rosemary Baird details the lives of those who worked on the project and the families who lived in the two villages attached to it.

Over a five-year period starting in 2009, Baird interviewed 18 people who either worked on the project or lived at the villages.

The ready-made hydro village was built by the Ministry of Works.

She also travelled to archives and libraries in Dunedin, Wellington, Invercargill and Christchurch, consulting unpublished memoirs as well as the Wanga Tella newsletters published for the men on Wanganella, a floating hostel moored at Deep Cove.

Baird also gleaned from letters, digitised radio interviews, newspapers articles, maps, photos and notebooks to complete her book.

When the crews working on the two tailrace tunnels finally met, surveyors celebrated with a three-day drinking binge.

It was in 1963, when the first workers and 700 tonnes of heavy construction machinery arrived.

The power station was built to be an engineering masterpiece, with water dropping down to the machine hall, 200m underground, in seven vertical tunnels.

In the 1960s, West Arm Lake Manapōuri, where the power station was built, became a small town, with its own post office, police building, warehouses, hostels and medical centre.

After 52 years since construction started on the Manapōuri hydro power station, a new book, The Middle of Nowhere, revisits the construction years.

Around 900 men lived at the West Arm camp and the book details how residents consumed 9460 litres of beer, or 1000 cases of cans, per month.

At the other camp, Deep Cove, built in Doubtful Sound, there were around 550 men, who drank 5670L of beer, or 36,000 cans each month.

The book, published by Canterbury University Press, was written by historian and researcher Rosemary Baird.

The two camps were connected by a newly built road, Wilmot Pass Rd, and two tailrace tunnels for the power station.

When workers from the two camps met midway during the construction of Wilmot Pass Rd, they drank 480 cans of beer and 12 bottles of whisky, the book notes.

And when the crews working on the two tailrace tunnels finally met, surveyors celebrated with a three-day drinking binge.

This map shows the power station, with the machine hall, at 200m underground, and the seven vertical tunnels.

The historian said for the majority of people alcohol did not create any social problem, however there were instances when it did, including some of the 18 worker deaths between 1963 and 1969.

“There was one death where the young man, I don't think we say that he was drunk, because we’ve got no proof of that, but he’d been in the bar, and then he went to the spa on the ship with a sauna – he basically died of dehydration, like there was no one there to keep an eye on him,” Baird said.

Then, in another incident, when Vytas Kran, a tunneler from former Yugoslavia, died after being hit by a large rock, his colleagues gathered to remember him, she said.

“A very good friend [of Kran], that same night, was walking out and probably very drunk and fell and hit his head on the gangway of the ship and then basically died of a concussion.

“So even though people say alcohol didn’t affect the project, they’re right, probably it didn’t for most people, but there are some actual concrete examples where people did drink too much,” the 40-year-old said.

Most of the buildings were burnt, buried, or sank in the lake once the project was completed in 1969.

It wasn’t just men, there were women and children living at the construction sites too.

Baird said women who lived there had fond memories of that time.

“They remember a very happy place for their children, where there was a lot of freedom, and where they managed to keep themselves sort of busy.”

However, it was isolated and the book recounts an instance where a family expecting a baby could not find a doctor.

“Then they did have to go to Invercargill, and then there was snow, and their windscreen cracked, and so they were driving back to Manapōuri village with a broken windscreen – with a new baby,” she said.

Baird will be presenting her book at the University Bookshop Canterbury on August 14 and at WORD Christchurch on August 29.