Dick Watson - Glenorchy’s own ‘Crocodile Dundee’

He served for 53 years in the Glenorchy Fire Brigade, chief for almost 25 years, built notorious Wakatipu backcountry roads, leapt from choppers for Sir Tim Wallis, was chased by airborne Turkish Police with AK-47s and starred in the Lord of the Rings.

It was all in a day’s work for Glenorchy veteran contractor Dick Watson, who turns 81 on 11 December, and is still working 12-hour days, five days a week, rising before the birds for his five cups of breakfast tea.

“If you don’t keep at it, well you’ll probably drop dead,” he grins.

Dick’s a bit of a legend at the head of the lake, born in 1944 when his parents lived at The Hillocks farm. “We’d spend so much time at Routeburn Station with Uncle Wattie (Watson), driving his wee David Brown tractors,” Dick recalls. “I got a toy train circuit one year and my brother Tiger and I hid it from our older brothers in a rabbit hole behind Nana’s house. We stuck our arms in every rabbit hole trying to find that but never did. I was so upset.”

He was four when they moved south, attending Nightcaps School before the family moved to Dunedin where he went to newly opened Kaikourai Valley High in 1959. Holidays were spent back at Uncle Wattie’s where Dick worked as a musterer building up his own team of dogs after leaving school.

He’d earn £3 a day mustering and worked as cutter for Sir Tim on deer recovery operations, turning down a fulltime job doing that for £10 a day, to continue mustering.

“Wattie had an old horse called ‘Laddy’ who’d swim us across the river to Glenorchy and back after we’d had a few beers late after rugby,” Dick says. “Some nights there’d be three of us holding his mane and tail and the Dart would be in flood.”

At 18 Dick was gravelling the Skippers Road into Branches Station with legendary Queenstown contractor Darrell McGregor, following Darrell on his bulldozer in a Bedford truck.

A few years on a Gore farm with his then wife wasn’t for Dick who missed the mountains. “Darrell put me on a new 30-tonne bulldozer doing work for ACI around the scheelite mines.”

Dick built the road from Kinloch to the Greenstone in 1980 and almost met disaster when forming the road from Mount Nicholas to Elfin Bay. “We set fire to a face on the bluffs when the Cordtex went off. Thankfully, Maru Bradshaw came along with his tugboat deck hose.”

In 1971 Dick and his mates formed the Glenorchy Fire Brigade with minimal financial support from the Lake County Council and ACI, before the Fire Service bought them a Wajax pump. “We knew nothing about firefighting, so I bought a training manual from a second-hand shop, which Bob Robertson suggested. I trained them and we all worked like clockwork.” They fundraised for their own RT radios.

Dick, a life member who was awarded his double-gold star by FENZ several years ago, is most proud of how they saved the Glenorhcy Store. “Queenstown (Brigade) gave us a lot of praise for that,” he says. Historic Paradise House was another partial save.

Trouble is word got out. “We’d get calls to haul people’s bogged cars out of the sandy gravel under Dart Bridge and even got called more recently after a tourist, who rang 111, had his drone stuck up a tree.”

These were all handy skills for Dick’s tour guide business that he ran back in 2000, taking tourists, often upmarket Blanket Bay guests, up the Rees Valley to the 25 Mile. He’d ford rivers and spin yarns about possums, before boiling up billy tea. “We’d look straight up Lennox Falls and the Birley Glacier.”

Nicknamed the ‘Crocodile Dundee of Glenorchy’, Dick’s eaten possum when gold mining in the Buckler Burn with his large floating plant using a 20-tonne digger. “Sometimes I made an embarrassing amount of money in the 1980s and sometimes it would be embarrassing the other way,” he grins.

He’s not only galloped the Greenstone as one of the Riders of Rohan in ‘Lord of the Rings’, but dodged Turkish Police hovering above in a helicopter aiming AK-47’s. “I’d driven for Dart River Jet and drove commercial jetboats in Turkey, but the boss was illegally running 300 to 400 passengers a day. Us drivers were shooting the boats in under the willows below and the boss said: ‘You mad buggers! They have real bullets and wouldn’t hesitate,” Dick says.

Not surprising then that Dick’s also starred in a local TV ad with pro racing car driver Greg Murphy.

Dick played rugby for 30 years – playing with Arrowtown’s Jimmy Dennison in the Otago Colts and for Vincent, hitching a flight home to Routeburn Station via Milford with legendary pilot Tex Smith.

There’s the day Wattie suggested the Rugby Club start the Glenorchy Races, Dick’s helped organise and competed for 64 years winning the first ever Stockman’s Race. “They even handicapped me, but he still cleaned up,” he grins.