Book of the Week: ‘Ruapehu took possession of my mind'

Newsroom

6 days ago

The main image on this page — above, spread out happily across the screen — is from the constantly fascinating illustrated book Fire & Ice: Secrets, histories, treasures and mysteries of Tongariro National Park by Hazel Phillips and is surely, surely, the best photo ever taken in New Zealand of post-colonial leisure in paradise, at once supremely happy and inevitably troubling, a 1960s ideal of the governing race at play, a portrait of Little Rhodesia, consenting adults without children enjoying themselves tremendously in the bright light of the South Pacific and achieving the seemingly impossible feat of stripping off and wearing sexy patterned bikinis in a sulphuric lake in the freezing show. The only photo I know that comes near its classic depiction of the Good Life for white people is the cover of the 1973 album Shaun at Wairakei Vol 2: the lascivious middle classes lounge poolside in bikinis and psychedelic shirts at the Tourist Hotel Corporation luxury resort in Wairakei. The LP cover carries a heavy suggestion of illicit affairs, of Brut, of what kind of man reads Playboy. The picture from Fire & Ice is less sexualised, from a more innocent and more explicitly apartheid age; it was taken in 1962, at Ruapehu's Crater Lake. Hazel Phillips, the book's author, positions the photo right at very front, and writes in the Introduction, 'I became obsessed with Ruapehu about a decade ago when I [first] saw the photo.' Her book investigates European representations of tourism, and European narratives of approaching the mountain as something to be conquered, but she goes way beyond either of these narrow subjects. 'The volcanic mountains of the central plateau have gripped me and held me tight,' she writes. 'This is the story of how Ruapehu and Tongariro took possession of my mind.'
Two members of the Auckland Tramping Club peering into crevasses on the Mangaehuehu Glacier at Easter, 1933. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections, 282-0426
There are too few good books and too little good writing about the central plateau. You would not think so. The mountains claim the middle of the North Island, citadels in a white kingdom, beautiful and dangerous. John Mulgan chose the adjacent-ish Kaimanawa Mountains as the setting for the best pages in his 1932 classic novel Man Alone, sending his brooding protagonist to take refuge in its wilderness after killing his farm boss. But no other great work of fiction comes to mind that climbs or goes even anywhere near Ruapehu and Tongariro. Hazel Phillips includes a bibliography of nonfiction books on the plateau in the end pages of Fire & Ice; it's an interesting but rather motley collection which includes a forgotten classic, the appealingly titled 1960 memoir Susan in Springtime. Its author was Susan Graham, a survivor of the famous 1931 Stanton search, when a party of university students were lost in a blizzard on Ruapehu. Phillips devotes a chapter to the search. She writes that survivors were given hot drinks and food, then stripped and rubbed down with whiskey to warm them up: 'I am reliably informed that stripping someone and rubbing their naked body with whiskey is no longer accepted search and rescue practice.'
A hole appeared in the ice next to the Crater Lake following the lahar that caused the 1953 Tangiwai disaster. Air Force Museum of New Zealand
There are a lot of dead people in Fire & Ice. They include 18-year-old Auckland University law student Warwick Stanton. He did not survive the 1931 search named after him. His body was found on the banks of the upper Makatote River. Phillips' account of that tragedy is deeply felt; her book often reads as a beautiful and moving record of death on the mountain.
View from Paretetaitonga of an empty Crater Lake following the 1945 eruption. Bagnall Collection, Massey University Library
Even the gorgeous Crater Lake, as immortalised in that amazing 1962 photo at the top of this review and which 'obsessed' Philips, has been the cause of death. At 10:24pm on Christmas Eve 1953, 151 people lost their lives after a flood from the Crater Lake collapsed a railway bridge beneath an express passenger train at Tangiwai. The tragedy has inspired numerous literary responses such as Laurence Fearnley's novel The Hut Builder, and Anthony McCarten's play Cyril Ellis, Where Are You, named after the young man who acted heroically to save the lives of passengers. Phillips only devotes a few paragraphs to the disaster in Fire & Ice; her attention is diverted in the rest of that chapter to other aspects and other, primarily geological stories of the Crater Lake. It's an interesting editorial decision and I think it's a good one. A different kind of writer, eg a hack greedy for content, would have mined it. Phillips is neither a hack nor a content tourist. She writes seriously, scientifically, sometimes jovially, and her book stays close to the mountain at all times, on it and inside it, in a very physical and emotional sense.
Chateau Tongariro, the base for the Stanton search. Archives New Zealand, AAQT 6539 W3537 A2117 R21010634
The Chateau! One of the great New Zealand place names, and it looks magnificent in the undated photo above, from Fire & Ice, immediately conjuring up visions of Jack Nicholson running amok with an axe in The Shining. Phillips touches on the Chateau now and then — the best Index reference in Fire & Ice is 'Chateau, temporary use as a mental health facility' — but she spends longer, quality time writing about old-timey huts, and tells great stories about the so-called Haunted Whare: 'A small shack near Tawhai Falls below the Chateau was reputedly haunted by the ghost of a woman searching for her lost lover. The whare burned down, twice. Rumours trickled through that a plaque or sign still existed on the overgrown site. Could I find it, and would the ghosts talk to me if I did?' The answers are no and no but she does make a pretty exciting discovery — an old battered sign, completely hidden in a stand of trees, which reads, 'About 1881 a shepherds hut was built on this site. This hut replaced the first hut built in 1880 which was deliberately destroyed by fire after the finding of a dead Maori inside. HUT BECAME KNOWN AS THE HAUNTED WHARE AND WAS FINALLY DESTROYED IN 1943.' It's another fun, detailed, immersive chapter; Phillips take every opportunity to get out and about on the mountain, intensely curious and always respectful, aided and abetted on the page by a stunning collection of historical photos as per the one of two jokers stripped to the waist, below.
The crevasses of the Whakapapa Glacier used to be large and distinctive. Now, there's almost nothing left. Harry Keys collection
One of the most powerful stories is told in Chapter 1. A man given the nom de plume of Henry first destroys on his own and later, with Phillips, goes to retrieve parts of a memorial on Ruapehu. He wants the 'backcountry kept clear of this shit. Why do we feel the need to mark wherever we've been?' It's a shocking act but Phillips is alert to the nuances. She writes, 'Were Henry and I undoing history by removing the plaque from the summit? Were we carrying out a radical act of decolonisation? Were we committing an offence? Or were we restoring the environment to its natural state? Perhaps we were doing all of those things, somehow, in a big contradictory mix.' The thing is not to rush to judgment without reading the whole story in this chapter. As she comments, 'Assumptions can be dangerous.' It reads like a short story, full of incident and thought, and like any story you have to get to the end. Phillips salvages remains of the plaque and keeps them safe. She tracks down the grandson of the climber who was memorialised in the 1922 plaque. They meet for coffee. 'I told him the whole story of the trip with Henry, Henry's motives, and my desire to ensure the plaque wasn't consigned to rubbish in Ruapehu.' His response? All good. No problem. 'The plaque was a reflection of the time,' he says. 'I mean, do we really want to keep ramming colonialism down the throats of iwi?' For all of the stories of death and tragedy, Fire & Ice searches out, and finds, stronger feelings inspired by the central plateau: understanding, resolution, peace.
The broken plaque and valves on Girdlestone Peak, Ruapehu.
Back, once again, and finally, to the Crater Lake, that golden pond, in delicate handcoloured pale turquoise in the photo below, taken about 100 years ago, and positioned in the pentultimate and quite transcendent chapter in Fire & Ice. It's about the 2002 discovery of a skull near Dome peak on Ruapehu. What happened to it? Phillips puts in an Official Information Act request to police. They are unable to help. She puts in an OIA to the ESR and is told the skull was probably a pre-European Māori, 18-20, and female. Later, she sits down with Bubs Smith from Ngāti Hikairo ki Tongaririo, who tells her of an old waiata he learned from his mother. 'It speaks of a young girl who was betrothed to someone in Ngāti Rangi, which was something that was done to keep the ties strong between iwi. She didn't want to leave her homeland and went up to the mountain never to be seen again.' Phillips writes, 'That meant that none of our European climbers were the first to get to the top of Ruapehu…Although mountaineering was a European construct, the first ascent of Ruapehu – incredibly – probably belonged to a young Māori woman.' Smith says to her, meaning the skull, 'Chances are these are her remains.'
Crater Lake and the Summit Plateau in the 1920s or 1930s, showing many crevasses compared to present day. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections
Fire & Ice is the second excellent book of the great New Zealand outdoors published in 2025, after Naomi Arnold's account of walking the Te Araroa track in Northbound. Both have been patiently, admirably managed by their respective publishers, with Massey University Press pulling out all the stops to gain access to over 100 archive photos of Ruapehu pulled from the Turnbull Library and other repositories. It's a damned good looking book, destined to be among the year's best, appealing to trampers, mountaineers, climbers, ski-ers, Tongaririo crossers, local iwi and other citizens of the plateau, and really anyone who appreciates an intelligently told natural history.
Fire & Ice: Secrets, histories, treasures and mysteries of Tongariro National Park by Hazel Phillips (Massey University Press, $49.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.