Every wall is lined with shelves, supporting stacks of white cardboard file boxes, reams of historic documents, notebooks, diaries, and newspaper cuttings.
Three compelling images hang high above the door.
The woman on the right is Rebecca Pearce, who was born in the UK in 1834 and died at Mt Barker in 1923.
The man in the middle is Gideon Anderson, born in the Shetland Islands in 1830.
He was the former Albert Town puntman and died at Mt Barker in 1906.
Left is Emily Anderson, Gideon’s wife (they married in 1886, Gideon her second husband).
She too died in 1906, on the road to Frankton Hospital.
Lower down, on a shelf close to the end of a large table, is a framed photo of the former society president and founder, Stan Kane (1917-2012).
The table can’t help but have pride of place, in the small room. And it is around this table, under the implacable gaze of ancestors, that society members gather to shed a light on the mysteries of histories and lives from years gone by.
During my hour or so with the society, I learn three new things about names.
First, the archiving tasks are "Ozymandias".
I look this up later to discover Ozymandias is the name of an ancient King, the Greek name for Rameses II, an Egyptian pharaoh who lived somewhere between 1303BC and 1213BC.
It is also the title of a poem by the complicated and eccentric Percy Bysshe Shelley, a Romantic poet.
When he wrote the poem in 1818, Ramesses II, or Ozymandias, was almost completely unheard of in modern society.
Shelley’s poem describes the discovery of a broken wreck of a statue lying in a desert beside its plinth, on which is carved:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Mr Waddington says the poem loosely means that whatever we do to try to protect our history gets covered by the sands of time.
As the poet observes:
"Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
But back to the room and the occupants who volunteer to keep the dust off Upper Clutha’s not-so-distant past.
Mr Waddington, a school teacher who joined the society reasonably recently, says the volunteers’ are "forensic", their knowledge "voluminous".
"I guess there’s a little bit of Ozymandias in all of us."
Ken Allan, for instance, is the author of many long, detailed articles about Wanaka people and places, which are then published in the society’s newsletter.
Last year he published a very article on Roy’s Peak, a two-year labour of love.
Recently — perhaps five years ago — members began to worry the society’s collection could be lost to sight.
Which brings me to the second learning about names.
How do you get the society resources to the top of the Google search results so people can find the group and their room?
After thorough and careful consideration, the members decided to rebrand, to choose a new name that people knew better than Upper Clutha, that had more of an internet presence.
So Wanaka — a name that has had 900 years of usage and means, in the Kai Tahu dialect, "a place of learning" — replaced Upper Clutha.
(Clutha, the Gaelic for Clyde, was chosen by the Otago Settlers Association in 1848 for the river, also known as Mata-Au, that runs from its outlet in Lake Wanaka to the sea at Balclutha.)
The third naming project is to increase the number of QR coded plaques and signboards around the district at various historical.
Using cellphone apps, visitors can stand in place and upload historical photographs and information from the society’s new website, wanakahistory.org, which will be a repository for maps, images, stories, biographies, audio, video and other digital resources.
Unfortunately Wanaka is not going to get its own museum anytime soon, because real estate is pricey, Mr Waddington said.
"Instead we are going to make the town a museum.
"So rather than take artefacts to a building we’ll take labels to the artefacts, which are largely built, but also geographical."
The town naming project will begin modestly, with project manager Catherine Hart and graphic designer Kagwa Kironde engaged to organise it.
Meanwhile, volunteers will carry on archiving boxes of history that are regularly received from donors.
They meet on Wednesdays at 9am for a couple of hours.
The society has successfully approached the Queenstown Lakes District Council for $15,000 a year to help fund the plaque project.
It’s applying for community trust grants and seeking donors.
While there are about 60 members, about 250 people subscribe to their newsletter.
The society is on a drive to encourage all those readers to join up too, it costs just $15 a year.
