Tony Watkins

The idea of "restructuring" sounded exciting. I was very naive. Everyone was going to spend the next thirty years restructuring. It became a way of life, and no one could remember when it was any different.

My fondest memory was careering around Lake Wakatipu with the Earnslaw packed to the gunwales with drunken architects. Peter Beavan was shovelling coal into the boilers with his usual enthusiasm. Ir the crew had been sober it would been called a mutiny.

The Earnslaw was built in Dunedin for the government and then taken to pieces. Each of the 78 frames and 140 plates was numbered and taken by rail to Kingston where the ship was put back together with the aid of 70,000 rivets. Her maiden voyage was in 1912. After being the main means of transport in the Whakatipu region for fifty years she was sold to a tourist operator in 1968, the year after the NZIA Conference. The road from Queenstown to Glenorchy had been built in 1962.