Park historians need old timers’ help

Press, 27 October 1977, Page 21

Park historians need old timers’ help

National park rangers are generally enthusiastic in the efforts they make to ensure that people get the most they can from

their park visits. The term “park interpretation” covers a wide range of activities —- slide shows, nature walks, headquarters displays, and so on — through which rangers try to inform visitors of what there is to see and do.

What rangers have mostly attempted to "interpret” is the natural history — plants, rocks, and wildlife. But in Westland National Park a determined effort is now being made to record and explain the human history. The board has set up an historic and publications sub-committee and has appointed Mrs Dorothy Fletcher the country’s first "park historian.”

Coasters are proud of their colourful local history, but there are surprising gaps in the recorded history of the region. The goldmining days in North Westland have been well recorded, especially by the late Philip Ross May. Surprisingly little has been gathered together and written of other periods of West Coast history, or of the history of the area south of about Ross or Fergusons. Mrs Fletcher is to fill in the gaps as far as the Westland National Park is concerned.

She is a dughter of Alex Graham, the well-known mountain guide, and also keeper for many years of the hotel at Franz Josef. This family connection with the area has already proved of value to her: she has been given an urgent priority — recording the memories of the older residents of the area. The

realisation that the person seeking the information was Alex Graham’s daughter has already, in one case, made an elderly person more forthcoming. At its first meeting, the historic and publications sub-committee drew up a list of about a dozen names of people the committee thought might have valuable things to say. Mrs Fletcher has begun tape recording the memories of three “old identities” — Mrs Scott, of Karangarua, who still goes whitebaiting in her 80s; Mr Jack Bannister, one of the oldest members of a prominent South Westland Maori family which traces its descent from Tutoko; and Mr Tom Condon, of Franz Josef Glacier. Mr Condon, at 93, gave Mrs Fletcher one of her moments of disappointment. She had thought that with someone

as old as Mr Condon she would be able to get back to the very beginnings of European settlement of South Westland. But as Mr Condon told her his story he referred in passing to much that was “before my time." And already, since she took up the appointment in the middle of the year, death has cut into the ranks of those from whom she had hoped to glean information about the early days. The feeling that much of the past is quickly slipping away has given an urgency to her task.

Besides having Mrs Fletcher tape the memories of old Coast inhabitants, the park board is gathering together old diaries, memoirs, letters, farm records, photographs — anything that casts light on the area’s past. There are more than 2000 negatives for Mrs Fletcher to sort through many of them her fathers. All the accumulated material will be stored safely in the park headquarters building at Franz Josef. The board has made a room available for the records and will install metal filing cabinets and a

sprinkler system to protect them.

Already, some of the information that has been collected has been made available to visitors to the park. Displays of historic interest are set up each month in each of the headquarters buildings, at Franz Josef and Fox. A series of photographic booklets may be produced; and in the longer term the park may publish a full history of the area, probably calling on a competent historical writer to write the story from the material Mrs Fletcher has gathered.

One of the main difficulties facing Mrs Fletcher is that many of the people who might be able to tell her something about life in South Westland in the early days, or who have old family or other records that would be valuable in the park’s archives, are scattered throughout New Zealand. This is especially true, she believes, of people who played a part in developing communications in the area as progress was made from coastal steamers and packhorses to the early cars

and buses, and on to the aeroplane. An amazing number of people who have passed through the Franz Josef headquarters have remarked that they have a family connection with the area. Mrs Fletcher is eager to get the support of these people. Interest in the history of their park is not confined to the rangers and board of the Westland National Park alone. On “the other side” — as those in Westland refer to the Mount Cook National Park — the rangers are also gathering information on such topics as the his-

tory of the climbs made of each of the high peaks and the fluctuations of the glaciers. At Mount Cook, too, efforts are being made to collect or copy old photographs. Mount Cook has no official “park historian,” but it does have a very active unofficial historian. This is Mrs Junee Ashurst, who is now “retired" after a distinguished climbing career as a guide, and after playing an important role, as a motel owner, in ensuring that the Hermitage was not the only accommodation available at Mount Cook.

She is building up impressive files of information and writing detailed accounts on such topics as the huts, bridges, tracks, and hotels, and almost every conceivable aspect of life in the shadow of the country’s highest peak. To a great extent, the success of these efforts to preserve the records of the history of each side of the central alps depends on public co-operation. The two women who have made the history of their own areas their main concern, and the rangers at each of the park headquarters, are eager to hear from anyone who can fill any gap, however small, in the knowledge of the two national parks.

By

JOHN WILSON