Answering the call of the wild

March 20, 2010
Kahurangi has been calling Gerard Hindmarsh for more than 30 years. Now he has put together the first comprehensive collection of stories about the vast wilderness. By Geoff Collett.
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IF GERARD Hindmarsh looks out the back window of his Golden Bay home he gazes across to Parapara Peak. He's lived with the vista for years and years, "and I never ever tire of it, I'm always absolutely fascinated - in fact, every year goes by I get more and more drawn to it", he says.
The peak is more than his local mountain. It serves as a sentinel and marker post to the vast Kahurangi National Park, hundreds of thousands of hectares of some of New Zealand's toughest wilderness, rolling back through mountain and forest all the way to the West Coast.
It is countryside which has claimed a special place in Hindmarsh's heart and mind, and one which the Golden Bay journalist and writer has paid tribute to in his new book, Kahurangi Calling. The book's broad sweep across the park's natural and social history is a sort of culmination-so-far of an adult lifetime's worth of Hindmarsh's own direct connections to the park, but is much larger than that.
As he explains, he started seriously pulling together the idea for a book of stories from Kahurangi country about 10 years ago, as he kept coming across various epic and unlikely tales.
But when he started talking his ideas through with his editor at Nelson's Craig Potton Publishing, Robbie Burton, the message was that "if you want to be authoritative, you're going to need to weave in all the natural history and the geology and the geography and everything else, because that's what will catch the imagination", Hindmarsh recalls.
Which he duly did, throwing himself into two years of writing and research, gathering both the big picture and the telling detail, to weave together stories of the Kahurangi's unrivalled geology, its rich flora and fauna, its rugged geography, its cast of unlikely characters and legendary experiences.
His is the first attempt at anything like a comprehensive portrayal; after all, as he points out, the national park itself is young, only being gazetted in 1995, and despite its numerous significant natural features it lacks what he calls any "big noters" - no tallest mountains, spectacular glaciers or geothermal wonderlands to grab the attention of the wider world.
Something it does have, in spades, is stories. They include the Murchison earthquake, for example, and its almost incomprehensible effects on the landscape, and the legendary asbestos prospectors, Henry and Annie Chaffey. And there are the less- remembered but no less memorable, such as the four greenhorn rafters from Takaka who made a pioneering descent of the grade-5 Karamea River in airforce-surplus inflatable rafts in 1954; or the two ambitious Forestry Service workers who attempted to claim salvage rights to a wrecked squid boat on the Kahurangi coast back in the mid-1970s.
That latter story serves as a sort of metaphor for Hindmarsh as to how the attitudes towards and within the park have shifted over not much more than a generation.
He sees a change from a place where the wild nature of the country was reflected in the way people responded to it; to today where he laments the continual outpouring of rules and reports from the Department of Conservation in Wellington dictating how things need to be in the modern national park.
Back when he first began exploring it, after he moved to the Bay in 1976, the country was forest park and aspects of its story (including various attempts at exploiting its resources and the introduction of undesirable exotic plants) reflect that.
These days, Hindmarsh occasionally finds himself cast in the role of defender of some of its traditions - notably through his well-publicised criticisms of DOC's removal of historic huts. He pulls up another example, just drawn to his attention - proposed new bylaws for the park seeking to limit the size of groups and the length of time campers are allowed to spend there.
As he puts it in the preface, "an unexpected theme that I became aware of while writing these stories was how they all hark back to a less structured and unregulated time . . . A time when wilderness meant just that, wilderness, left alone except by those who dared enter at their own risk".
If it is a time that has been cast into history, at least he can claim to have started to commit it to posterity.