Daily Photo – Clarks Junction

Leaving Sutton’s Salt Lake behind, I carried on along State Highway 87 towards Clarks Junction. Highway 87 peels off from State Highway 1 and Dunedin’s Southern Motorway south of Mosgiel, running through the Taieri Plains, past the Maungatua Range and into the Strath Taieri valley, before finishing at Kyeburn. It’s 114 kilometres of open road that rises and dips with the wide spaces it passes through, a road where the most daring thing you’ll encounter might be a lone sheep – lost and hungry. Once you leave the soft, green pastures of the Taieri Plains, the highway threads through the undulating country around Lee Stream before dropping into the Strath Taieri. Here the horizon suddenly stretches into the far distance, anchored by the Rock and Pillar Range, which carries snow in winter and shimmers like an oasis in summer.

This is a landscape whose vast, open spaces and dramatic landforms have drawn the attention of famous New Zealand artists. Colin McCahon found inspiration here, as did Grahame Sydney, Marilynn Webb, James K. Baxter and Brian Turner. There’s something about this country that demands a response through paint, poem, or photograph – it pulls you in. 

The land itself shifts almost without warning. One moment I was passing lush paddocks edged with trees, the next, tussock, scattered trees, and piles of schist as far as the eye could see. The hills in the distance rise under a vast sky, and you realise you’ve crossed into a country that is both stark and strangely beautiful. It’s like another world, empty, exposed and completely stunning. It was here that I found Clarks’s Junction. I pulled the car over and went for a walk.