Not as men alone

Waimarino Bulletin, Volume 4, Issue 36, 24 February 1987, Page 12

Not as men alone

There are several derelict huts in the eastern Kawekas, some going back to the 1860s. Perhaps the hut of Bill Crawley still exists. Soon after Johnson found Bill's hut, Bill says something very interesting: "Once there was some trampers lost in here and 1 had no peace at all for three weeks. They never found them either. Two of them there was, college boys." College boys! Was this Mulgan with his friend Doherty written into the story again? Perhaps more research will tell another interesting story.

Before Mulgan's death in Cairo in 1945, he wrote the outline of a planned book on his experiences in New Zealand and Europe, later published as "Report on Experience." I would like to quote from it, some of Mulgan's des-

criptions of the New Zealand landscape and people: "... the land and the people whom we know when we are young stay with us and haunt us until we die." "The country, with its sharp hills, gives you the same feeling as the clear salt of the sea. The country is, in fact, so old in itself that none of us have dared to touch it; we have only just begun to live there."

"The Maoris who came before us moved among the dark heavy trees like ghosts and could have sailed away at any time and never left a mark. We could leave it ourselves now. In a few years the red-roofed wooden bungalows would rot with borer

and crumble into the earth. Fern would cover the grassland and, after fern, small trees would come and in time the dark, rich, matted bush again." "Other men might come in a hundred years and nothing that we had left would worry them, but they would draw strength as we have done from the sharp, fierce lines of the hills and the streams always running and the wide sea on every side." "There is nothing soft about New Zealand, the country. It is very hard and sinewy, and will outlast many of those who try to alter it." "... New Zealanders, a

young people but already with a place in history, are often wanderers and restless and unhappy men. They come from the most beautiful country in the world, but it is a small country and very remote. After a while this isolation oppresses them and they go abroad. They wander the world looking not for adventure but for satisfaction." "On the whole nobody talked very much, certainly not more than they needed to." , "After winter the sun came in. In the sun the fern hills grew very brown and the clay roads yellow with dust. The deep green of the bush in the mountains never changed but a blue mist came over them." "... I have read that the pioneers turned out to help their neighbours in distress and survived because they lived as a community and not as men alone."

Concluding Noel Shepherd's account of his trek across the central North Island.