Memorial to cold rushing water

Press, 22 December 1987, Page 13

Memorial to cold rushing water

By

MAVIS AIREY

As a boy, Robert Logan swam and fished in it, coxed rowing crews on its lower reaches, and waded Kaiapoi streets awash with its floodwaters. Later he tramped its riverbeds, climbed its mountains, and endured its storms. Now retired, he has spent the last six years photographing and writing "a kind of personal memorial” to his affection for the river called, simply, “Waimakariri.” “Now I suppose you could say the Waimak belongs to me,” he smiles, exulting over a rave review. It certainly is a beautiful book, packed with illustrations and painstaking detail on every aspect of Canterbury’s "River of Cold Rushing Water,” from the “Hundred Years War” against flooding to the explorers, road builders, sheep farmers and hoteliers who used the river to open up the back country and find a route to the gold-rich West Coast “I didn’t really mean to produce anything like that" he admits. “I went into the library one day to borrow a book about the Waimak and found there wasn’t one, so I decided to write l’d been a mountain man I thought I’d look into that aspect but when I came to look at the records I realised what a fascinating story the Waimak had.” Robert Logan makes no claims to being a historian “In the university sense.” The son of the owner of a newspaper in Rangiora, he was, as he puts it “transferred as part of the chattels” when the paper was taken over by a former editor of “The Press,” Oliver Duff, and renamed the “North Canterbury Gazette.” Logan

worked his way up on the paper, finally becoming editor for 10 years. Always Interested in illustrations, he started his own publishing company to produce “Photo News” magazines, first in Rangiora, then in various provincial cities in the North Island. When television started to knock the bottom out of the market, he

spent five years touring the country’s motels inducing them to have colour brochures illustrated with his photographs. After 21 years in Gisborne, he decided to return to Christchurch to retire, but his son continues to run the graphic arts firm they co-founded. So as well as doing the research, writing and illus-

trating of "Waimakariri,” he has been able to have control of the printing, production and distribution of the book: a go-to-whoa involvement that clearly pleases him.

The work was not without frustrations, nevertheless. Despite his years of experience in taking photographs, "it was the most tedious, frustrating, soul-destroying process to get what you want. I don’t know how many times I went over Porter’s Pass to find the light wasn’t right or it was raining. Then on another trip I’d get half a dozen corkers.”

He relied heavily on old copies of “The Press” for his research, but still found big gaps in the story. “Take 1865. It was a lively year in Canterbury history where 1000 men were trying to hack a road over to the coast, but the papers were more interested in cricket matches and what was happening in Afghanistan,” he grumbles. “The Waimak gorge bridge was one of the engineering marvels of Canterbury, but it rated no mention in either paper. I searched "The Press’ in despair and finally found a one-inch story a week after the opening.” He had some trouble locating old illustrations as well, sometimes having to go by an infuriatingly circuitous route to track things down. Try as he might he could find no picture of White’s original bridge across the Waimakariri’s south arm, even though it caused a good deal of controversy when it was built. Library and museum files on bridges drew a blank. Finally, a chance conversation put him in touch with someone who remembered seeing a tattered picture of soldiers in a mock battle on a bridge in 1868. “I knew my bridge dates and decided it must have been White’s Bridge. I went back to the library — where I had looked under ‘Bridges’ hundreds

of times — and looked under ‘Military.’ “There it was. Then by chance, I saw the same picture, in a better state, in a book I had at home. I had passed it over before because there was no mention of the name of the bridge. That’s how obliquely you have to work.” Proud though he is of “Waimakariri,” he vows it will be his one and only book.