26-05-2025
Destroying a Pākehā memorial on Ruapehu
'What pseudonym do you want in my book?' I yelled out. We were climbing up a short section of the Skyline Ridge on Ruapehu.
'Henry,' he called back immediately. Then turned and laughed. 'I dunno, call me whatever you want.'
'Henry' stuck. I didn't know any Henrys in real life, so that helped.
The day I had first crossed paths with Henry up on Ruapehu we'd got talking, and he had quietly told me what he'd done. 'That plaque on Girdlestone, I went up and smashed it.'
I only had a vague knowledge of the plaque, and the fact that it had been smashed, but Henry pointed me to a post about it on Facebook. Outdoors enthusiast and writer Dave Bamford, one of the authors of Skiing on the Volcano, a book I love, had gone up Girdlestone for the third time at Easter 2021. The climb was in memory of his grandfather Owen Campbell, a keen climber on Ruapehu who had been a member of the party that placed the plaque in 1922. Topping out on the summit of Girdlestone, Bamford found the plaque broken.
'It was initially a shock to discover the granite plaque to Girdlestone had been shattered fairly recently by the ravages of time and nature — frost and thaw,' he wrote in his Facebook post.
'Yes, man passes but the land endures.'
Bamford and his party spent an hour or so in good conditions putting together a few of the pieces of the plaque. 'It was a reflective time,' he wrote. 'Memories, families, colonial times and their actions.'
Henry had climbed Girdlestone with a mate the summer before Bamford discovered the plaque was broken. Henry had had no idea a plaque existed on the summit, and he was shocked when he found it. After thinking about it a bit, he went back up the next week with the specific intention of destroying the memorial. Grabbing a big rock, he pounded it repeatedly into the face of the plaque. It took many blows to smash the granite tablet, pinned as it was to the large, smooth face of the rock by its four thick copper pins. Finally freeing the tablet, he picked up the shattered pieces and cast them off the peak.
Later, after seeing from Dave Bamford's post that the plaque had been partly jigsawed back together, Henry went back in my company to finish the job.
*
I sat on a rock, staying well clear of Henry as he attempted to remove the copper pins — valves from an old car engine. They were a pale shade of verdigris and protruded about 5 centimetres from the rock. Ugly. A scar on the landscape, on the mountain Ngāti Rangi call Koro — their grandfather, ancestor and the source of their identity.
Henry used a hammer to bash at the valves sideways, pushing them around to weaken them on the neck. The sound of the blows echoed off the summit of Tahurangi nearby, creating tinny ding-ding-ding noises.
'The fulla who did this is as white as they come,' he said. 'Who the fuck are you to come up here and put this up here? Go and plant a fucking tree, a tōtara or a rātā or something that's going to be around for ages. Plant it in your backyard and go sit under it, for fuck's sake.'
He picked up his ice axe and used the sharp adze, knocking the hammer on the shaft to create an indent in the neck of the valves. Then, once the indent was sizeable enough, he went back to knocking the head of the valve around with the hammer. Soon enough the first one popped off. I picked it up to examine it, surprised at its heft. The oxidised green had been sheared off by the hammer, revealing bright copper in the spots where it had been hit, and on the inside stem, after it had been protected from the elements for more than 100 years.
'From back in the day when they made things to last,' Henry observed as he handed me another one.
Huge bugs were crawling over the summit, overly friendly in their approach, and whenever the breeze dropped, clouds of sandflies plagued us. A bug got in Henry's way. We were, after all, disturbing their home, crusading invaders in their peaceful environment.
'Look out, bug, you'll wear it,' Henry warned as he brandished the hammer.
'There are people on top of Tahurangi,' I said. My eyesight wasn't great, but I could see something in the distance. Clouds were beginning to form around us, lower down in the rugged and craggy Wahianoa catchment on the northeastern side, hiding the faraway terrain from view.
'Fucking white people and their sense of entitlement,' Henry said, referring possibly to the climbers on Tahurangi, the mountaineers who had placed the plaque a century ago, or humans in general. I didn't ask him to expand.
The last valve popped off. Henry straightened up, released the hammer and picked up his water bottle. He gazed around, then bowed his head to the scarred rock face. 'Sorry, mate, couldn't get it all out this trip.'
The valves had stuck fast and refused to come out cleanly, so the stems were still embedded inside the rock. Four round scars told the tale, each with a broken piece of copper stem shining brightly. Hopefully they'd fade over time.
Henry had wanted to chuck the broken tablet off the peak again, but we decided to take it down, to remove it from the terrain and environment entirely; I felt that throwing it off the peak would change it from history into rubbish. We split up the pieces, Henry stronger and fitter, and carrying a lot more of the load than I did, while I stashed the weighty valves and springs in the top pocket of my pack. I'd found an old newspaper report that indicated the tablet weighed nearly 16 kilograms, and the valves would have been extra.
We took a final look at the last of the scenery below that was still visible from the summit.
'Koro's let us up today,' Henry observed.
A thin wisp of mist flicked through from the south, between me and Henry. Koro had let us up, but now it was time to go.
*
Much of the time I had spent watching Henry abuse the valves until they succumbed had been filled with anxiety about the descent. These things are always worse inside your head, though, and the way back down was achievable, a lot easier than I'd imagined. However, I did have to lower my pack down to Henry through the most difficult section of the gully.
The rock that formerly bore the plaque, with the remnants of the valve stems.
It helped that the terrain below us was hidden from view behind cloud, which had touched us on the way down from the peak. Reaching a tongue of snow, we donned crampons in the mist and descended a short, steep section to the gentler slopes of the Mangaehuehu Glacier.
'We'll need to boogie across this bit,' Henry said. Rocks were falling, creating brown streaks in the snow underneath a small bluff. Henry went first. Neither of us had brought helmets, but our heads stayed intact. I felt Koro's protection in the enveloping cloud — like a hug, but also a gentle push back to the bottom of the mountain.
Despite the fog that now surrounded us, we managed to find our way back to our exact entry point onto the glacier. I dropped my pack and refilled my water bottle from a nearby stream, snow-fed and refreshing. We had a snack break and cycled through conversation topics, constantly returning to Girdlestone and the plaque.
'I'd be so embarrassed if someone put a plaque up for me because I fell off a mountain or something,' Henry said. 'I'd fucking haunt them.'
Henry told me he has some Māori heritage somewhere in his family, but he's never really been engaged in te ao Māori. 'I don't say Pākehā or European or even New Zealand European when I have to tick the box on the forms,' he said. 'I just say I'm a New Zealander. I don't think you need to be Māori to want to see the backcountry kept clear of this shit. Why do we feel the need to mark wherever we've been?'
A mildly abbreviated chapter extracted with kind permission from the newly published illustrated history Fire and Ice: Secrets, histories, treasures and mysteries of Tongariro National Park by Hazel Phillips (Massey University Press, $49.99), available in bookstores nationwide. It will be reviewed in ReadingRoom on Thursday.
