FEATURE: Explorers

Born to be Wild

The imposing geography of the South Island has long presented a challenge for the adventurous.

By Gavin Bertram

In April 1989 Mick Abbott stood on the dunes at the base of Farewell Spit, staring at the Tasman Sea. The thought of this moment had driven him forward as he walked 1600km up the spine of the Southern Alps.

Abbott’s solo effort was the first full-length traverse of the South Island wilderness, a massive undertaking that took 130 days, and 32 crossings of the main divide. “I wanted to know how I would respond to the isolation,” he wrote in New Zealand Geographic.

With no one to spur me on, I wondered if I would have enough drive to complete more than 60 passes of mainly untracked travel.

Others before and after have faced the same travails. The range of landscapes in the South Island means that it is constantly challenging, with immense mountains, unpredictable rivers, and dense rainforest.

But early Māori, colonial Europeans, and contemporary adventurers have pitted themselves against this seemingly unconquerable territory. In his book New Zealand Explorers, Philip Temple wrote that, “the reality of Māori explorations will never be known… yet, for the first time, the land began to exist in human consciousness as these explorers gave names to its features...”

The South Island is Te Waipounamu - the place of greenstone. Māori knowledge of the geography was crucial to later European exploration. Surveyors were among the first to venture into the interior.

Charles Heaphy and Thomas Brunner were employed by the New Zealand Company to survey in the Nelson area. With Māori guide Kehu, in mid-1846 they traversed the West Coast, from Golden Bay to near the Hokitika River. Later that year Brunner, again relying on Kehu, began an epic expedition following the Buller River’s course, and on to the rest of the West Coast. It was torturous, with near-starvation and torrential rain the party’s constant companions.

“Continued rain without any abatement until evening,” Brunner wrote in March 1847.

This is without exception the very worst country I have seen in New Zealand.

It was a year later, having succumbed to the weather, injury, and lack of provisions, that Brunner turned back from South Westland. The excellent TV series First Crossings has retraced this and many other important New Zealand explorations.

Over the following decades much of the rest of the South Island was surveyed. Julius von Haast explored in Canterbury and Westland, where he discovered many of the glaciers; Nathanael Chalmers ventured deep into Central Otago; Charles ‘Explorer’ Douglas surveyed the rivers and mountains of the wild West Coast; Henry Whitcombe and Jakob Lauper attempted to find a route over the Southern Alps in 1865.

Others, such as gold prospector Alphonse Barrington, ventured in search of fortune. His party’s 1864 expedition into the unknown, west of Lake Wakatipu, saw them almost perish - “three skeletons just alive” when they reemerged.

The Southern Alps provided new frontiers well into the 20th Century. Aorangi Mt Cook was first ascended on Christmas Day 1894 by Jack Clarke, Tom Fyfe, and George Graham. Mt Aspiring was conquered in 1909, again by Clarke, with Bernard Head and Alec Graham. As late as 1934, a party led by 21-year-old student John Holloway filled in the last blank portion of the map of New Zealand when they traversed the Barrier and Olivine Ranges in South Westland.

The South Island has continued to present challenges to those looking for adventure. Graeme Dingle and Jill Tremain’s 1972 book Two Against the Alps charted their winter traverse up the spine, from the south of Fiordland to Marlborough. Unlike Abbott, however, the pair travelled on some sections by jet boat, car, and kayak.

Brando Yelavich’s 2013-2014 expedition showed that something new was still possible. The then teenager walked solo around the coastlines of both the North and South Islands, covering 8700 kilometres. But it was the Kahurangi leg on the upper West Coast that was Yelavich’s favourite part of the odyssey.

I walked through forests that no one had ever been in before.

• Experience the South Island wilderness for yourself: Ultimate Hikes offer guided walks on the Milford and Routeburn Tracks; Active Adventures offer a range of adventures in the South Island and beyond.