Max White

Exploring the high Inland Tracks of Abel Tasman National Park (ATNP) has long been on my bucket list.

And over the last couple of weeks, I knocked them off. Rough and rooty would be a good way to describe them, the odd interspersed stretch of mossy track lolling you into a false hope that the hard parts were over. No way, the pick-your-every-step knee-crunching grunt always returned.

This all said, the two separate tramps I did proved not only an inspiring insight into the delightful upper reaches of the ATNP, but it also led me to find out about the ranger who pushed to put them all through - Max White.

If it wasn’t for him, ATNP would be a coastal playground only. Sure, that idyllic coastline may be the best part, but it’s still just a skerrick of the 27,530ha park overall.

Previously a ranger at Tongariro National Park, Max White was appointed Park Ranger for the ATNP in 1951, stationed at Tōtaranui with his wife Margaret and two young daughters, Heather and Alison.

Their quarters were the modest ranger’s house built on the foreshore near where the visitor centre now stands. This ranger residence got shifted back 500m in the early 1980s, a fact I know for sure because I drove the Solly’s articulated truck which shifted it.

I wasn’t allowed to drive up the protected avenue in case I knocked off a branch, so I promptly got stuck in the boggy paddock, necessitating Jim Robertson from Wainui Bay to drive his Field Marshall tractor over the Tōtaranui Hill to tow me out.

Crazy how they wanted no buildings along the foreshore, then they went and built a monster visitor centre there!

Back in the 1950s when Max White turned up, Tōtaranui was about as isolated as it could get.

Few trampers came through, and in winter it went dead completely. The place did get its regular summer visitors though, mostly Nelson area locals who knew its delights of the place and been coming for years.

Max and his family partook in and enjoyed many a swim, picnic and barbecue with these regulars, including Barrington and Cole founding families from Riverside. Dick Moth became a good mate of his too.

Chess was a game Max particularly enjoyed playing with anyone who would take him on. Intelligent, high energy, multitaskful, that was Max.

“PR is is the most important part of being a ranger”, Max often told people. That attitude applied to everyone he met, always giving them his all. I bet by the end of summer though, he would be pining for a bit of solitude.

I wouldn’t know much about Max White if it wasn’t for my good mate and backcountry wanderer Paul Kilgour who got many personal insights into the man on his trips through Tōtaranui.

“He really had a way with words,” recalls Paul. “He gave me a book manuscript to read that he’d written. It was almost like poetry. He never got it published as far as I know.’

Some decades later, Paul come across a cutting amongst many others glued to a wall in a derelict beach shack at Wainui Bay which DOC wanted gone.

He got the job of dismantling it in return for the materials, but ended up taking the cutting, and its sodden hardboard backing, home for safe-keeping.

The article, headed Tōtaranui Dawn, by Max White, had appeared in the Weekly News of Wednesday Dec 12, 1958, and describes going out for a hunt at first light.

“In this light, Tōtaranui Bay has none of the beauty that makes it the loveliest place I have ever seen. There was no suggestion of gold about the sand at this hour, though in broad daylight my children, reared at bush sawmills in the King Country, ask to be allowed to play in the ‘sawdust’. And indeed, our sand is the very colour of heart matai sawdust fresh from the mill.”

After briefly reflecting that his nearest neighbour was four hours walk away, and that person had told him the avenue was planted in 1886, Max describes crossing over the little inlet at the end of the beach and promptly shooting a small black boar just up the little valley that runs into the bush from there.

Instead of gutting it immediately, he gets the idea to fetch his 6-year-old daughter. Once at Tōtaranui, she had watched fascinated as he had cut up a 12-pointer stag, and “here was another chance to make her life at Tōtaranui just as memorable”.

He sets off briskly back for home, musing to himself as he goes ...

“I was happy striding along the track. A lot of people could not understand why I wanted to bury myself in such a remote corner so isolated from fellow men. Where else! Where else could a man get wild pork and venison out the back door. And sea fishing and bathing at his front door, together in a lovely climate, rich soil and a varied open air life.

“To most people the glen of Tōtaranui at that hour would have looked desolate indeed. loneliness and hardship were here, accentuated by the mournful cries of the marsh birds. There was no butcher, baker or milkman, no postmaster, no school, no electricity, and forty million sandflies. But in my eyes at that moment, the place was inexpressively beautiful.”

Max’s article struck me as being written by a man totally in tune with his environment. Energetic too, because he pushed for the Inland Tracks of the upper reaches of the National Park to be constructed, doing much of it himself. These tracks utilised and connected various ad hoc sections of historical access such as the old logging track up from Pigeon Saddle, and the rough route from Canaan over Wainui Saddle to Moa Park and onto Castle Rock, from where trampers, early stockmen too, would formerly bush bash their way down to Marahau.

Hut building along the tops began with Max putting in four-bunk Wainui Hut in 1958, in the upper reaches of the Wainui Catchment. Accessible from Wainui Saddle, this prefabricated hut was one of the first backcountry huts to be dropped off by helicopter in this country. Fixed wing used to drop the odd bundle of timber, but damage to materials was common.

Max told Paul that despite being initially confident, the US military-trained helicopter pilot flying the Bell 47 became nervous about operating in such a confined bush clearing, something new to him, but the drop went well.

Moa Park Hut, now a shelter, followed, along with Castle Rock and Awapoto Huts later.

Max was always keen to correct people that Moa Park was originally Moor Park, after its resemblance to shrubby English moorland.

Interesting how the correct Te Reo pronunciation of Moa is close to Moor anyway.

Everything was hands-on back then and rangers were expected to be both thrifty and resourceful.

Paul recalls visiting the White family one evening to find them all around the kitchen table, painting jam tin lids orange so Max could nail them onto trees as track markers. Some of these are still in place along the Inland Track today.

Interesting that the other dynamo park ranger who came along not long after this period was also a Max, Max Polglaze.

They both had the energetic initiative and progressive ranger qualities which gave them the “Max Factor”. Both left their separate legacies, respectively in the Abel Tasman and Kahurangi National Parks. Legends both of them.