We're in on the joke in our nimby paradise

Small is beautiful? Crowds gather in Buckingham St, Arrowtown, for the annual Autumn Festival...
Small is beautiful? Crowds gather in Buckingham St, Arrowtown, for the annual Autumn Festival street parade. Photo by Tracey Roxburgh.
John Lapsley considers the rejection of a proposed new development for Arrowtown.

Arrowtown's good fairies begin arriving each morning, shortly before nine.

Delighted busloads of Chinese and Koreans pose for photos in the town's pretty main street, and, opening their wallets, sprinkle their trail of fairy dust through the small retail outlets.

Within 45 minutes their guides have hustled them on - gone forever but followed next by another stream of admiring day visitors.

Considerately, they too disappear around 5pm, and quite suddenly the town is no longer at work. Arrowtown is given back to its locals.

The tourists bring their money because Arrowtown is historic, beautiful, and - by the skin of its teeth - remains a genuine small town.

I suspect that, sensing this, the visitor leaves feeling the town isn't a fake tourist trap and is more than just a postcard of cottages and old commercial buildings.

Since 2001 Arrowtown's population has bulged 42% to 2400 people.

Such was the sense that this growth had almost cooked the town's "historic village" goose, that 97% of residents responding to an opinion poll two years ago said it was time to close the gates.

This month three independent commissioners appointed by the Queenstown Lakes District Council agreed with the town that wanted to stay small, and recommended the rejection of a proposed 30ha town extension which would carry more than 200 new houses.

Karen Swaine, the local environment activist, said the town had heaved "a collective sigh of relief".

In most towns this proposed development would have seemed entirely reasonable.

 

It is situated in a discreet, barely visible pocket on the edge of Arrowtown, and is a natural spot for the small urban area to grow into.

The growth will now have to be shoehorned into some other part of the burgeoning southern lakes region.

Unsurprisingly, some Arrowtown residents believe the town will eventually wither and stagnate if it continues to reject growth. Australian academic Gordon Forth earned a reputation as "The Small Town's Dr Death", when his research into New World country towns concluded that in today's changed society a township of less than 4000 people is usually doomed to a slow and painful demise.

Below 4000 people, most towns can no longer provide their residents with enough jobs, diversity, lifestyle or opportunity to keep them.

The town becomes unattractive to new business and constricting for established ones.

In times when education is crucial, its kids will more probably have to be bussed out of town for high school, and no supermarket future planner will touch the place.

Arrowtown lost its only petrol pumps in 2007, when a petroleum chain decided demand wasn't big enough to warrant replacing its storage tanks.

So most homes have a jerry can petrol bomb sitting in the garage.

Arrowtown has a pharmacy, a convenience store, four bars and a liquor shop, but has no bank.

Equally there's no funeral director and one still has a fair chance of beetroot bobbing up in the McDonaldless hamburger.

As always, rumours of a supermarket come and go.

The sick, unemployed, and poorly educated are over-represented in many small towns - the people who weren't up to escaping.

Dr Forth doubtless had such towns in mind when he derided as "false wizards" the consulting quacks who arrive with armloads of butcher's paper to run seminars about town salvation.

Arrowtown, of course, needs no quacks and, banks or not, is in rude good health.

However, its recent growth hasn't been pushed by the usual development drivers.

It's not a growing business centre with new workers being transferred in, and relatively high real estate prices mean it isn't a "cheap suburb" choice for burgeoning Queenstown.

Much of Arrowtown's recent growth has been classically lifestyle - in large part, it's a town of people who chose it, with its neighbourly smallness being a serious piece of the attraction.

But Arrowtown is also the centre of an enormous rural subdivision.

Its surrounds now carry more than 100 country lifestyle blocks and expansive homes, mostly built during the past 10 years.

The Millbrook golf resort, also on its doorstep, has a further 170 residences.

In short, Arrowtown owns a "rural suburb" which may be the wealthiest in New Zealand.

All of this contributes to a small town having a lot more than its fair share of attractive facilities like restaurants, bars, and its charming Dorothy Brown's cinema.

The commissioners probably got it right in appreciating that with the clear heritage value of "old Arrowtown", and the residents' strongly expressed desire to stay small, it is important the town isn't swamped by its own runaway success.

There is a price to pay of course, and it's met rather unfairly by the families who own the developable land.

When I worked in Sydney, the cops who ran King's Cross described those colleagues who shared the spoils as "being in on the joke". People are selfish by nature.

And I think an honest Arrowtowner would concede that beyond the desire to preserve its small-town character sits a decent slab of nimby self-interest. We'd rather go undisturbed.

So as they build the fence around Arrowtown, I wonder whether, as one of the chosen 2400, I too, am in on the joke.

Well, it's a good one.

John Lapsley lives in Arrowtown.

 

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