Gerry: 0:00

I've got a memory in my lifetime of things like Red Crown Parakeets, Blue Duck, and most of the Valleys Kiwi calling at nighttime. And within a matter of another 20 years, most of those things had become either extinct or very rare.

Speaker: 0:21

Kiro and welcome to the Tramping Life, a podcast about hiking in outro New Zealand, or as we call it here, tramping. I'm jt, and in each episode I chat with people who share passion for exploring this incredible country. We'll hear about the tracks they love, the huts they return to, the lessons they've learned, and what keeps them heading back into the bush.

Jonty: 0:41

My guest today is Jerry McSweeney, former president of Forest and Bird, and founding member of the Forest Heritage Fund Committee, which is now called Nature Heritage Fund. Together with his wife, he established wilderness lodges in Lake Maraki and our Arthur's past. Jerry spent decades working to protect our forest, rivers, and wildlife, and I'm delighted to welcome him to the podcast. Yeah, Kira j. Great to be here. So what are some of your earliest memories of being outside?

Gerry: 1:08

My parents were both biology teachers. I got pretty exposed from a young age to catching tadpoles, looking for praying mantis, going out and doing vegetable gardens and uh,, traveling around and camping with the family. And so we were four children, two parents, little car. We did lots of camping trips, but probably from a tramping viewpoint it was Boy Scouts, which in Christchurch, just yesterday we retraced by car. The 17.5 kilometer trip between Sheffield in Canterbury and Oxford, where we were put on a train. Told to go off at age 14 and walk between Sheffield and Oxford. Camping halfway along the way, and it's gotta be one of the most boring walks you could ever do. But boy, it was exciting just planning it, getting out there, being responsible for your meals, and that really led to my greater engagement in tramping.

Jonty: 2:01

That's wonderful. And then when you've been tramping, was it generally with family or groups of friends or solo, or a bit of a mixture?

Gerry: 2:08

I was at a couple of schools in Christchurch and they were very focused on formal sport. And at both St. Thomas's and Christchurch Boys High, we said hang on, what about Tramping? Why can't that be a sport? And we did actually start a tramping group at both schools and had all sorts of adventures, at age about sort of 1415, which I think then led to the Christchurch Training Club, which is a very active. Group at the time in Christchurch and then continues to be active. Christchurch Tramping Club was made up of some pretty hard men, and as a teenager I was, roped into going on some pretty hard trips. And I have a lot of scours to remember that by.

Jonty: 2:46

So mostly in the Southern Alps

Gerry: 2:48

Yeah, mostly in the Southern Alps. And I think today people may not quite appreciate just how critical public transport was, in an era when people didn't have a lot of cars or were too young to drive. And so the classic one was the rail car. Across the Southern Alps linking Christchurch and Grout, that would stop on request at a number of locations through the Arthurs Pass National Park. And so we would pile onto the rail car on Friday night at the end of the university school or work week and get off one of the stops, mountain White Bridge. And then we would walk like crazy for the next two days and catch the train back on a Sunday night, arriving back in Christchurch about 10 o'clock at night. Luckily, exhausted usually to be back by parents. We were very indulgent. Took you home and then you'd sleep your way through Monday school. So yeah, tramping was really a great way of discovering the wilds and I suppose for a lot of us. At that stage, it was more about endurance, how much you could do stamina, who achieved the greatest things. And I remember, but with the Christchurch Ramping Club, we did a thing called the three pass trip in the day. This was normally a three day trip. We managed to do it in about, I think it was about 14 hours. The other interesting thing was there was builders, roof painters. It wasn't an academicy group, it was a really cross section of Christchurch Canterbury people. And got us to explore all sorts of places.

Jonty: 4:12

Now, particularly I'm thinking around Arthur's past, did you have any moments with particularly dodgy river crossings?

Gerry: 4:17

We had a great deal of moments with dodgy river crossings and crossing mountain ranges and storms. Inadequate equipment, and I was listening to an interview with i's, um, publisher yesterday, and it described him as having a lot of trips where he discovered the inadequacies of cotton and synthetics and actually went out there and said we need stuff for climbing. And I recall crossing the Savannah range in deep snow in the winter with a pair of shorts and a. raincoat and getting pretty badly cut up and probably getting on the verges of hypothermia. But yes, the challenge was to make sure you had light enough, warm enough gear to actually survive those tramping trips. But also there was a really tough core, and I can still remember their names. John Visser, rod Whitmore. Robert Rains. John Stanton. These were people who were just really tough trampers, and they knew a lot about river crossing and they didn't muck around with ropes. It was linked arms was the secret for crossing rivers. Ropes were the most dangerous thing ever invented for crossing rivers because you put a single person on their own into a flooded river. There was no mutual support. And they got washed away or the rope got tangled around a branch or a rock and then dragged back into the river and drowned.

Jonty: 5:32

So were you often an instigator of these trips or you joined onto the group trips, and I'm guessing in those days you still had the topo maps, but you'd have a compass

Gerry: 5:40

You certainly didn't have GPS technology. Neither did you have an erb, which meant that, you would say where you're going, this is our intention. And that was the critical thing, was whether it was lodged with parents or in the National Park Visitor Center, there was this sense that, once you got out there, you were on your own. I think there was also issues like food, that rice risotto was the staple. Pretty tasteless and awful. I can still remember it every time I get close to a packet, but there wasn't the extensive range of dehy food that we have today. So your pack sizes were pretty heavy. The other dimension for me was discovering nature. And what made the trips delight was discovering all the different plants and animals and things that I started to be able to identify. I started to be able to find differences. And that meant that it wasn't a race to get, for example, across the three pass trip it was actually what you discovered along the way.

Jonty: 6:35

Have you revisited any of those sites I guess in more recent years? What kind of changes have you seen, either climate change related or due to some of the trapping programs in 10 80 in terms of wildlife,

Gerry: 6:45

when we were tramping. At early stage late sixties, early seventies, helicopter deer hunting was really just coming in, and the forest was pretty well stripped underneath what I saw over the next few years with the very successful venison, hunting of deer was a recovery of forests. So, In fact, the tracks that were easy to walk. Became more and more difficult. But we also saw a decline in bird life because of the failure to recognize just what an impact stokes rats feral cats were having on birds. So I have an intense recollection of a Red Crown parakeet at Casey Hut and. Valley of Arthur Park National Park. Looking out the window, oh look, there's a red crown, parakeet red crown parakeets are now restricted to offshore islands. I've got a memory in my lifetime of things like Red Crown Parakeets, Blue Duck, and most of the Valleys Kiwi calling at nighttime. And within a matter of another 20 years, most of those things had become either extinct or very rare. And then there was the Renaissance starting from about 2000, with the effective pest control and the recovery of all of these species,

Jonty: 7:56

I guess we're still a way off where we once were.

Gerry: 7:59

It's interesting actually because on the face of it, you'll hear people say, oh, but we've got this active trapping program and this is changing. But I think one of the things as a trapper, you recognize just the scale of the landscape that you walk through, the ruggedness of the topography. The fact that you can muck around with very heavy boxes filled with traps and maybe trap, 0.1% of the landscape. But it wasn't until there was a quantum leap in technology that we've been able to get much more on top of a comprehensive control. Of these really destructive, introduced mammals. And that's why from about 2000 onwards, in fact, by that stage, we'd established the Wilderness Lodge artist Pass. We had the, closest high country station next to the National Park, and we were working with Dock, looking at their trapping programs to save mo fronted parakeet in the valley. And what I saw was. a laughable absence of effective pest control because in fact, they were using just little trap lines in the valleys and it just wasn't comprehensive enough. But there was technology meanwhile, that had been really started about 1998, which had earlier been pioneered by the Forest Service, which was the use of helicopter biodegradable sodium Fluor acetate in 80. And that was just starting to be adopted by the Department of Conservation. And so I was campaigning in 2000 for much more effective pest control in the polter. So that in fact, you didn't just cover a tiny piece of the valley, you covered the whole lot. And that meant that there was then a whole period in between pest control programs when the birds could breed rather than just a token along the valley floor.

Jonty: 9:43

And then with the technology to date, you think there's a lot further to go, or do you think we're getting to the limits of what's reasonable on that scale?

Gerry: 9:51

At our wilderness at Lake Molac in Southwest, which we established in 1990, from 1998 onwards, every three years there's been, aerial 10 80 programs funded by doc covering each. Application about 50,000 hectares. Twice the size of Abel Tasman National Park, it's done with 10 helicopters. And in fact, only two months ago, carried out a comprehensive operation around our lodge covering a hundred thousand hectares. And then they're doing another hundred thousand hectares. Alongside that, creating 200,000 hectares, which is let me think, eight times. Abel Tasman National Park. We'll be treated this year and we'll get three years in between those treatments when the birds will breed successfully. That's a huge area and what we are really achieving there is sustained suppression of predators. You wipe'em out, you don't eliminate them. To get those last few ones just cost such an enormous amount of money. I don't think it's practical, but the other thing is you're using highly sophisticated GPS technology. So that you make sure these biodegradable baits drop by the helicopters on a precise grid, get everything, they don't get deer. the application rate is very low. They don't get native birds, they don't get native insects, but they do get the very vulnerable rats, mice, possums, and And so in the time we've been living at Lake Moki, which is basically 35 years. We've seen increase in number from being something you'd hear about once every six months to a bird that you hear every day. We see them flying around. We don't feed them, but They'll be flying around on the tops of the trees. Same with Kia, same with Tom Pitt. We've seen Fern Bird come back and recently, actually march this year we helped the Department of Conservation to liberate. Whole lot of Theo Blue duck in the headwaters of the Maki, Ravi, where there was still a healthy population hanging on cause of the Canadian work. And they were supplemented by birds that had been bred in captivity, in Christchurch. They needed somewhere to put them, and this was a very suitable habitat. You asked originally about climate change. Climate change is a big issue. But for us in New Zealand, an even bigger issue has been the devastation caused by pests and weeds that were introduced stupidly by humans. And while we can collectively do something about. Climate change is huge. It requires enormous international action. We can nationally do things to safeguard, whether it's the terrestrial systems, the land, the forests, or the oceans.

Jonty: 12:23

It's a very interesting perspective. And I was thinking on the wilderness lodges. ecotourism is not even a buzzword anymore, it's been around a little while, but when you started out with those wilderness lodges decades ago, it would've been quite cutting edge.

Gerry: 12:34

Yeah, we started in 1990 and the University of Auckland hosted New Zealand's first ecotourism conference and I was invited to be guest speaker amongst other people. I remember saying that in a hundred years time, the awesome foursome. Will be regarded much like, shooting Tigers is today the awesome force of being taking a helicopter and a jet boat in Queenstown and doing all sorts of outrageous things that mostly involved burning vast amounts of fossil fuel. And my challenge to the tourist industry then was let's sell a tourist experience. doesn't require burning vast amounts of fossil fuel in jet boats or helicopters. Traveling vast distances. And yes, you will say to me, but what about air travel by jet planes? That's true. But if we didn't have international visitors bringing in$16 billion worth of revenue to New Zealand, we would probably not have a third of New Zealand protected. As national parks and conservation lands, they really are critical for arguing against people like our Minister of Resources, Shane Jones. That these protected natural areas are actually already earning us a huge amount of revenue, creating a lot of jobs, and keeping a lot of small communities going. And that was really the goal of setting up the wilderness lodges was to show that you could save trees and create jobs. At a time when people were saying, oh no, all the environmentalists wanna do is lock it up, throw away the key, and not let anybody in. And I think that message from 1990 is as relevant now as it was then because we've got a huge resurgence of the, anticon conservation movements, wanting to strip away the protections and open up areas to what they see as a sort of future development. Whereas in fact we've actually transitioned away from those old fashioned activities into a. Pretty remarkable experience that we offer visitors to New Zealand and New Zealand is alike.

Jonty: 14:29

I was gonna ask, what's the mix of international versus domestic visitors and do you think, do you get a different experience from them? Do you think domestic people maybe take it more for granted and internationals? It's more special to them'cause they don't have it in their own country.

Gerry: 14:42

I think it's been fascinating to watch the evolution places like West Coast. Where people initially, when we set up the lodges and people would come from all over the world to experience the rainforests and the fjord and crested penguins and key parrots at Arthur Pass and the Alpine flowers the joke they said was actually, so first prize in a competition is one week, stay at the Wilderness lodge. What second prize is it? Two weeks. Because they really saw it as almost like a prison sentence. And I think one of the brilliant things people coming here do for us is they remind us just how special some of the things we have, the emptiness of the landscape. Water, you can drink air, you can breathe, safety, which is. Pretty critical freedom from wars. How could you recreate in Ukraine with prospect of a drone, dropping a bomb in your head at any stage?

Jonty: 15:32

Be interesting what you think we do better or we could learn from overseas.

Gerry: 15:37

My wife is Australian. I've spent a lot of time visiting Australia, probably 40 or 50 times I've been there. And it always struck me when I was guiding natural history tours of Australia in places like Barrier Reef. That nature interpretation was much better in the tourist industry of Australia than it was in New Zealand. And part of that was in New Zealand you put somebody in a helicopter. It is just jaw dropping. the pilot doesn't need to say anything except a few sort of grunts and groans. The earphone often work, it is so awesomely spectacular. That's what people see. Whereas if you go out on the barrier reef, you don't actually see much until you put a snorkel and mask on and until you go underwater. And then if you've got somebody telling you. What all these different things are. This is a giant clam, this is a crown of Thorn starfish. This is a giant coral cod. You actually, there's a whole story, and I think part of what we've worked hard at the lodges is been to tell the story behind the scenery. And I think possibly in New Zealand, we've fallen behind Australia in that respect because they've had a, maybe a more challenging story to tell. In a landscape that isn't quite so dramatic. So look, telling stories is important. Getting people out to do things by themselves. it's often too easy to just put them in a helicopter or a jet boat and roar them away somewhere, tick done. Whereas slow tourism is maybe the other approach, which is experience things. And we're seeing that evolving in terms of iwi groups. Running sort of Mariah experiences. The guide becomes very important. And if there was a regret, it's that we probably don't have enough nature guides in New Zealand. It's a skill which we do need and we need some of those trampers to be also really good on their birds and plants and be very good communicators.

Jonty: 17:20

It's interesting reflecting on your, time in Australia. In a lot of states you have to pay to use the national parks there and whether that's something we should be considering here

Gerry: 17:28

yeah I was articulating this yesterday as we drove, down through Canterbury and Otago, we're getting 16 billion a year from international tourism. I think the total figures about 40 billion a year from tourism. But a big component of that is domestic tourism. So 16 billion from international. 15% is GST goods and services tax. So that's 16 billion times 15% is about 2.2 billion. That's 2.2 billion, which is being contributed to New Zealand economy and those people are not using, in most cases, our hospitals, our education system, our social welfare system. In addition, the places that they're patronizing are paying dock concessions. They're paying taxes. So yeah, look I think we are already tapping our international visitors pretty well. We just have to be smarter. And one of the interesting issues post COVID is that airfares increased considerably. And we've ended up with a slightly different mix of visitors, which we tending to have more high spending visitors now than we did. The backpacker market has contracted because in part the airfares were so expensive. Shane Jones, the minister who is pretty anticon conservation, environmental protection. was arguing that the conservation land wasn't bringing in much money. But again, I've driven through the south island in the middle of a whole lot of spring storms. The most important thing that land is doing is actually stopping the hills falling down around us and maintaining high quality water. If you look at Japan, which is a country topographically, very similar to New Zealand, they've got exactly the same situation where the bulk of their mountain forests are protected simply'cause you can't afford to take them away. And so that land is already making a huge contribution to the New Zealand economy. And then I'll add on that the income I've already covered with international tourism. And the most important thing probably is what it does for us. It does provide a. Wonderful place for us to go tramping, to go climbing, to go mountain biking and all those things that we love to do as Kiwis. And I think that's my answer to Shane Jones is that conservation land is already paying. Its way

Jonty: 19:36

And it all contributes to the quality of life, even if it's not well. As I said, a lot of it actually is represented in the GDP figures, but life is more than GDP figures and the opportunities to explore the outdoors are easy to take for granted. Living in New Zealand, it may be like asking you about your favorite children, but have you got any wildlife that you are particularly fond of?

Gerry: 19:56

Actually

Jonty: 19:56

earlier this

Gerry: 19:57

month, I did an interview with Jesse Mulligan, radio New Zealand, about Fjord and crested penguins. And no, they are not the bird of the year, nominee. We should get round and organized them, but here we've got the third rarest of the world's 18 penguin species. There's only about 7,000 of them. They're only found in the southwest corner of the south island. And they look spectacular. They've got great big yellow crest, red eyes, orange beaks, pink feet. They're your classic penguin. But unlike the other seven species of Crested penguin, they actually live in the rainforest. The other species all live much further south in either scrub or snow and ice. And so if Fi Crested or AK is their Maori name, they'd be probably my favorite. And I think what makes them even more favorite is the fact we've been able to work with others and identify just how many there are. They had the distinction at one stage of being second rarest of the world's penguins, second rarest only to the Galapagos Penguin, which has only got about a thousand pairs. And they were neck and neck with the yellow penguin of southeast South. What we've discovered is there's probably twice as many awa ki field and crested penins as there are hoho, and the projections on their population are looking pretty good. Hojo numbers have collapsed. There's 141 pairs now nesting in the mainland of New Zealand. That's down 83%. in the last 20 years. So their numbers are collapsing, fueled and crested. As far as we can tell they're holding their own breeding. The 10 80 programs meant that stokes are being kept, under control of much of their breeding area. We've got pretty good controls over people taking their dogs into these areas. And these large penguins, they're 70 centimeters high. They weigh about four to five kilograms. So they're fairly big birds, and funnily enough, they're the largest bird by weight living in the New Zealand Forest, But you could say they don't really live in the forest. They live in the forest for about five months, the other seven months, the way down to the southern ocean, sleeping on the water at night and feeding, during the day.

Jonty: 22:04

So if I wanted to go and see these penguins, where's the best place to do? So?

Gerry: 22:08

Well, Lake Moira, of course now the coastline south in the southern part of the West Coast. There's one particular place, Monroy Beach Walk, which we helped. Provide this public dock track down to the beach and you can sit there and watch the penguins coming outta the water. I just saw a Facebook post today sent to me with someone who sat there and saw 10 penguins coming outta the water. It's about a half hour walk from the highway and the most important thing is people just sit and wait for the penguins to come to them and don't try and chase them. We've got about six or seven locations. We go to, to look at these penguins, you just have to sit there and withstand a few sand fly bites as you're sitting and watch them coming from the ocean across the beach and then up into their rainforest nests, which are often up to a kilometer from the sea coast. And there they'll raise their chicks between July and December, and then come peak tour, December, January, February, March, they're gone, which is really quite good for them By contrast, Hoho, yellowed, penguins, they nest every night. And of course, they're more vulnerable to disturbance. But their greatest impact on hoho has been destruction of the ocean environment where they feed through dredging, bottom trawling and fishing.

Jonty: 23:19

They on the subject of favorites do you have any favorite huts?

Gerry: 23:23

There's one called Big Tops, hot Door, KU biv, the Pass National Park, which I saw a recent person said, it was my hut. But gee I went there years ago. I always remember arriving in the hut. There was a deer sitting on the doorstep. We opened the Hut book and there hadn't been anyone there for 10 years. It's very hard to get, it's in the catchment of the, um, probably. Living where I do now. Blue Hu, which is in the head of the Moki River. It's an hour and a half walk from the, road. It was built in 1905. It's one of the last Roads Hus in New Zealand, and it's been lovingly restored by doc staff the other two are Jack's hut at Arthur's Pass. Which has been moved and, done up. And then there's one called Roadman at Castle Hill, which is also a roads, but the Blue Hut, it's just, it was on a thing called the per cattle tray. And it's a tramping route for three days through the Southern Alps. That was the main West Coast Highway until in 1965 they opened the House Pass and Southwestern Highway. And it's still there. It's yeah, it's a lovely hut. First time we went there was about 1991 for my wife's birthday with our three little kids. They were two, four, and six. We thought it would be a wonderful romantic night, and in fact combination of rats running over us and mosquitoes eating us made it one of the, oh, and that's right. My son vomited up all night. It was a most memorable birthday, but not particularly pleasurable. But it is a great place to go and look. There's so many huts and I think Sean Barnett, Rob Brown, Jeff FairPoint, the whole group who've celebrated and published books about the huts deserve a real, congratulations from all of us. And of course, the back Country Trust have done this marvelous job of getting people to go out and restore these huts. And then Federated Mountain Clubs with their Adopt a Hut campaign have also. Providing protection for these shelters from the storm.

Jonty: 25:17

You've obviously got a lot of favorite places, but if you could only go back to one place in New Zealand, where would be your kind of special place?

Gerry: 25:24

I've always loved the Polter Valley, enough past National Park. It's the major tributary, the Waymaker area is one, the Polter is the other. And yesterday I was with Yvonne Taylor and her husband Brian Taylor is a long standing doc staff member who does a huge amount of work in North Canterbury. And Brian's favorite hut was also in the polter she was telling me, and it's called Trust Ter Huts at an old six bunk Forest Service hut. it was going to be destroyed by a doc and we ran a campaign to save it. They built a new hut and they said, oh, if we built the New Hut, the Old Hut should come down. He said, no, but it's in the most magnificent site. So yeah, no trust hut in the Poulter is, and the Upper Poulter Valley, lake Minchin, a wonderful place. And I think one of the things that makes it wonderful too is that it's not really discovered. There's a number of other places now and I think classic are the great walks that. Doc promotes, which are now heavily patronized, and they become Instagram favorites. And it's always ironic to me that somewhere like Roy's peak at aka vast numbers of cars there, everybody wants to climb Roy's peak. There's probably 20 other peaks that are just as spectacular, but they're not on the list. Great advantages in New Zealand is for every sort of famous place, there's about 20 other places that are just as good, but not famous. The other thing that I think it's worth reflecting on is the importance of the Tiara Rowa Trail, particularly in the South island. It's provided a wonderful linkage right down the chain of the Southern Alps, between valleys, between regions. And I think about two thirds of the people walking at are internationals, but I think it'd be really interesting to see how New Zealanders go, that third at present, but as the trail becomes increasingly popular.

Jonty: 27:09

So talking about must dos, do you have a bucket list of things you still wanna do and what's on it?

Gerry: 27:15

I'm just returned from Golden Bay and I'm fascinated with Kaeni National Park, which incidentally, two thirds of Kaeni is now receiving regular aerial 10 80 protection. There's places I want to explore there. When I was 14 with the same man that I did, my tramp from Sheffield to Springfield with the Boy Scouts, we went up into Boulder Lake, which is in the heart of. Ka Harran way above the Arri Valley. I'd love to explore some of those places, but of course, as you get on, you may be not as nimble or as fit. That's the other challenge is that every day for 37 years, I've guided walks. Either enough has pass around our lodge or lake Meraki, and in both cases we. We would take groups under a dock concession out into the heart of ABA National Park or into the heart of the World Heritage area down in South Westland. Yeah, look it's great to have the opportunity now that we've just retired, to go and explore some of these places and not have a tale of a whole lot of visitors coming along, asking questions.

Jonty: 28:15

My last question is, what is the next trip that you have planned

Gerry: 28:18

Our next longer wilderness trip's actually in Tasmania, which I used to run natural history tours through at a time when there was all sorts of battles over the forests. Again, just as we did in New Zealand, argued that through tourism you can save these forests. Now I want to actually go back and explore some of the alpine areas of Tasmania. the other, attraction to near the mountaintops of Otago, the Block Mountains, and I did my doctorate on quite a lot of sites on the Block Mountains. looking at the impact of destruction of the. Snow Tussocks and the other special elane plants. I wanna go back and actually explore some of those beautiful places that were sort of made famous by Graham, Sydney and poet Brian Turner wrote about them. we're surrounded now by central Target and I wanna go and explore some of those places. There are some wonderful choices people can make. without forgetting the North island, one of the most interesting places. Conservation's Mark Bellingham and our far north forest and bird branches was the um, the por peninsula tki. And there's some amazing plants up there. And I'd love to go and explore that country in more detail. So look the world's our oyster and just encourage anyone who's keen on tramping or walking or exploring to get out there, explore it

Jonty: 29:34

and help look after it. Wonderful. That sounds like an excellent retirement ahead. So thank you very much for joining, the podcast today. I really appreciate your time.

Gerry: 29:42

Great, John, you're doing a great job. Thank you very much.

Speaker: 29:47

Thank you so much for listening to the Tramping life. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please follow the podcast in whatever app you use. Tell a friend about it and consider leaving a rating or a review. It really helps more people discover the show. Drop me an email at the tramping life, one word@gmail.com.