Although claiming a wild place as your favourite could be a masked attempt to tame it, the land either side of State Highway 67, between Big Ditch and Jones Creek just north of Waimangaroa, is my favourite. This stretch of highway which, if you’re heading north, has a row of houses to your left and a railway and the great Papahaua mountain range to your right, is called Birchfield.
There are no off-streets or gas stations. Not a single corner, nor corner store. Just some houses, several paddocks and, as of recently, one radio astronomy observatory. Perhaps it sounds a tame place, and to an extent – on a quick drive through the settlement – that’s fair.
Birchfield is on the land of the Ngāti Waewae people. The settlement is about 120 kilometres north of Mawhera where Ngāti Waewae’s chief Tūhuru and his people established a pā (fortified village) after moving south from Karamea, defeating the Ngāti Wairangi people.
Birchfield became an industrial settlement in the 1880s. A recently erected monument in the settlement says a Griffiths family arrived there from Lisvane, Wales. They tore away dense, wild coastal vegetation to set up a sawmill and flaxmill, then, by the late 1890s, a foundry and a butter and cheese factory.
About a century later, the sawmill, flaxmill, foundry and factory long buried, my mum and dad moved us (me, my brother and two sisters) to a wooden bungalow in Birchfield. Children lived in almost every second home. Together, we would cross the railway and trek into bush to pick from damp, pillowy beds of cold sphagnum moss, cross paddocks to climb into the huge broadleaf trees slumped over a dark, effervescent swamp, wade barefoot in creeks to search for precious stones, and throw handlines from bridges for herring.
I found a dying owl once, fallen from a macrocarpa tree. My mum took a ball of mince and rolled the raw meat in my cat’s snipped fur to trick the owl that we were offering it a mouse. The ruru was dead within 24 hours, not fooled by the faux-fur meatball. I’ve never forgotten how magic it felt to hold the kaitiaki in my hands, and have it look into my eyes.
Once, my friends and I were going camping on a nearby farm at the foot of the mountain range. We were only about three kilometres from home when we set our backpacks and sleeping bags in the grass and climbed a big tree. I was up fairly high – as I recall – when I put my foot on a rotten branch and fell. I was knocked out cold, maybe just for a few seconds. I opened my eyes, and my friends were gathered around me. My head was cut. My friends helped me walk home. Dazed and with blood running down my face quick and hot, three kilometres felt a distance. My mum took me to the hospital where someone stitched up my head.
Driving home, we passed the farm below the mountains. Sure, I felt kind of cool with the stitches in my head. I hadn’t minded all the fuss over me. But I was now going home to sleep in my plain old clean-sheeted bed, when I’d meant to be sleeping at the foot of the mountains; we had meant to stay up all night watching for stars and scaring the crap out of each other with horror stories. I should have got into a sleeping bag smelling of smoke from the campfire, dirt on my face and knees, under my nails, in my hair. The mountains the only thing watching over us.
The scar on my head is faint now. The fascination with the ranges remains glossy, thick, and warm.
As I understood it, every beautiful thing came from the mountain range, all the energy and water and promise. They were covered by dense rainforest. Trees in every shade of green and every possible texture. The mountains seemed to not only watch us but stimulate an indescribable hunger to see up close what we could not reach on our small feet: a desire to decipher codes stamped in lichen on trees, collect bones and teeth and line them on shelves, scour the needled forest floors for birds to save or old glass bottles to clean. The maunga (mountain) could not be colonised. Maybe its trees grew too thick and out of reach for milling; their mauri (life force) could not be cast in any foundry. They were the pou (supporting pillar) and the lifeblood of my favourite wild place.
Becky Manawatu (Ngāi Tahu) is a former journalist for the Westport News. Her first novel, Auē, won New Zealand’s 2020 Jann Medlicott Prize for Fiction
