John Gardiner

John joined the national park service in 1963 as a Park Assistant in Fiordland National Park.

He began four years of formal ranger training in 1964, two of which were spent at the Forestry Ranger Schools in Reefton and Rotorua, with time in the Urewera, Arthur’s Pass and Westland National Parks, and the Forest and Range Experimental Station (FRES). After reaching the status of Senior Ranger in Fiordland, John accepted the position of Assistant Supervisor of National Parks and Reserves in Wellington in 1976.

In 1978 he took on the Chief Ranger role in the newly-formed Bay of Islands Maritime & Historic Park, where he remained until DOC was established in 1987, then becoming the District Ranger based in Whangarei, and later Operations Manager for Northland, and finally Area Manager for the Whangārei Region.

He retired from DOC in 2010, and from 2011 to 2023 took on the role of Regional Field Advisor for Herenga ā Nuku Aotearoa - NZ Walking Access Commission. He also continued his role on the Bream Head Conservation Trust Rangers Committee from 2002.

In 1976 John was appointed the government representative on a private expedition to recover gold from the General Grant which was wrecked at the Auckland Islands in 1866. Although the salvage attempt was unsuccessful, it led to numerous expedition cruises to the subantarctic Islands and the coastline of Aotearoa as a guest lecturer and expedition crew member.

"I was born in Temuka in 1945 and raised on a South Canterbury farm. My older brother was destined to take over the farm, so I went to a Vocational Guidance counsellor and right at the end of the papers he gave me was a small paragraph on National Parks and Reserves and immediately I saw that I said that’s me. In those days you weren’t employed by Lands and Survey but by the park Board but there was a guy in Wellington, Ray Cleland, who was responsible for recruitment and somehow I sent the application to the right place and he came down and interviewed me in Timaru after I left boarding school, a year later as I had one year on the farm after school, and I coincided my interview around about lunchtime and so we went for a walk and got some lunch in a little takeaway place, strolled in the park, had our lunch and had an interview and I suspect that was probably one of the reasons why I got the job. There were about 200 applicants. Because the interview was in a park it was really relaxed, and I probably did better in that environment. I got the job as a triallist trainee, the absolute lowest you could go, I wasn’t even a trainee, I was on trial to see if I was good enough.

My first job was in Fiordland, and I had never been down there before, it was a major trip to Christchurch. I’d done a lot of trout fishing with my father, so I was used to the outdoor situation. I’ll never forget coming over the brow of the hill and seeing Te Anau and the Murchison mountains and that whole vista you get. It was tiger country. That was an expression my brother had, he actually took me down because he was working at a sheep station down there. He dumped me off at the HQ and Harold Jacobs was there, the Chief Ranger, the HQ was out of town, and I met Harold and the rest of the team. This was the 13th December 1963 and my accommodation was a caravan with 2 other guys, another trainee and a carpenter. So, the three of us lived in the caravan for 12 months, it wasn’t the most hygienic and there was huge difficulty in getting women back there. We all got on very famously. We showered in the motorcamp."