Kahurangi celebrated in new book
Gerard Hindmarsh says he’s attached to the Kahurangi National Park—in more ways than one.
“The park’s boundary is right at the back of my place,” he said. “There’s about 140ks of it between here and Murchison. I’ve been tramping and hunting and exploring in it since I came here as a 19-year-old, but it’s only in the last 10 years or so that I’ve really come to appreciate all the stories I’ve heard about the people and places in the region.”
Gerard says that his latest book, Kahurangi Calling – stories from the backcountry of Northwest Nelson, arose partly out his sense of obligation to gather and record the stories of the park.
“I reckon there really hasn’t been a complete anthology of stories relating to the Kahurangi region,” he says. “It’s only been a national park since 1995 and it’s not a big-noter like Fiordland or Mount Cook. It’s got no towering peaks or glaciers. Actually it’s a geological and botanical treasure-trove and there are all these great human stories kind of woven through the history of the place. I reckon it’s kind of underappreciated but there are lots of people from all over with connections to it.”
“Things are very regulated these days,” Gerard says. “I wanted to write about the days when the regulations didn’t reach the backcountry of Northwest Nelson, when huts and shelters were just built because they were needed, and bureaucracy didn’t intrude. Also when people ventured into the wilderness out of a sense of adventure or went there to do improbable things like grazing and mustering sheep up at Boulder Lake. I’d heard those stories about the mustering and so on, and when I told other people, they didn’t believe me. That’s when I knew they had to be recorded accurately and in full.”
“It’s impossible to do justice to such a vast and diverse area in just 17 chapters,” he says. “ I’ve tried to substantiate the stories -even if they’ve been told elsewhere before - and put my own observations on them. In the backblocks, small details are important. I loved it when Rosie Little’s sister Christabel rang me up and told me that Christabel Creek was named after her. She’d been in there with her uncle in 1962. They found a tomato sauce bottle and a plate. You have to ask who had been there before them and how did they get on at their next campsite without their tomato sauce and plate. Stuff like that really interests me.”
Gerard devotes a whole chapter to the campaign by Golden Bay visionary Frank Soper to have a big chunk of the Northwest Nelson region designated as a national park to preserve it from the deleterious effects of human occupation. Frank also features in the thrilling tale of the first-ever white-water rafting expedition in New Zealand when in 1954 he, Eric Page, Brian Reilly and Skeet Barnett negotiated the Karamea River in two surplus RNZAF rafts.
Gerard says that it was a real privilege to get access to the private archive material of a whole lot of people, including photograph albums that no one outside the families concerned had ever seen before. “Someone told me that a man in Karamea called Barry Chambers had a couple of spiral-bound books of local history he had typed up. One was called The Heaphy and Its People. It was just a treasure. That’s where I read about a couple of gangs of men working on the Heaphy not long after 1900. They split into a gang of smokers and a gang of non-smokers. Apparently the cook who was assigned to look after both gangs always prepared less food for the smokers. It ‘s been great that people have been happy to give me all this material – not just about the more distant past, but about recent times too.”
Gerard says that places like Kahurangi National park must be safeguarded. “The director-general of the Department of Conservation is now talking about the national parks having to generate more money. We’re in a time when bridges and huts are called ‘assets’ and wildlife is called ‘biodiversity assets’. The wilderness should just be allowed to be wilderness.”
Kahurangi Calling – stories from the backcountry of Northwest Nelson, (Craig Potton Publishing $39.95) will be launched in Takaka next week.
Neil Wilson
