Milford Sound

Milford Sound/Piopiotahi wasn’t always as easy to access as it is now, but it’s understood that Māori would have travelled extensively through the area to collect the precious tangiwai pounamu (greenstone) and also to access the fiord for its abundance of sealife and birdlife to use for food and other resources. Māori legend has it that the atua (god), Tū-Te-Rakiwhanoa had carved out Fiordland with his adze and his final and most spectacular work was of Milford Sound. Māori named the area Piopiotahi after the now extinct, thrush-like bird, the Piopio.

Captain James Cook was famously passing through the Fiordland area in the early 1770s aboard his ship, the Endeavour, and despite his meticulous mapping skills, he sailed past the entrance into Milford Sound, not once, but twice. It wasn’t until some years later, in 1812, when Captain John Grono entered the ‘cove’ and discovered it opened up into what is now known as Milford Sound. He initially named it ‘Milford Haven’ after a waterway in his native Wales and it was later changed to Milford Sound. The name is a misnomer, as the geographical feature of Milford Sound is technically a Fiord, being a valley carved by glacial action, and not a ‘Sound’, which is a valley carved out by river action. However, the name Milford Sound has stuck, and from 1998 it is officially named Milford Sound/Piopiotahi to incorporate the name given by the first guardians of this whenua, the Ngāi Tahu iwi (Māori tribe of the South Island).

Once the route between the head of Lake Te Anau and Milford Sound was forged with the European discovery of the Mackinnon Pass/Ōmanui in 1888, many tourists followed thereafter to be able to access Milford Sound and experience the incredible scenery. Made even more famous by an article published in the London Spectator in 1908, labelling the Milford Track ‘The Finest Walk in the World’, you could say that the word was now out! Identifying Milford Sound as a potential tourism hotspot for New Zealand, in 1933 the idea of boring a tunnel through the Darran mountains was proposed to allow road access, and the Homer Saddle area was surveyed. Work began on the Homer Tunnel in 1935 with just a few men using picks and shovels. It was an extremely tough area to work in, with hard granite rock, constant rain, avalanches and sandflies to contest with. The Homer tunnel was opened almost 20 years later in 1954, at 1.2 kilometres long, with a gradient of 1:10; this was a fantastic engineering feat.