Martin Heine

I was a ranger at Mt Cook from August 1973 to March 1987 My story begins in the 1950s and 60s, growing up in Nelson in a family with a keen interest in the outdoors and a passion for plants and natural systems. I started university in 1968, and studied botany and zoology at Canterbury.

It was a time of restless energy, protest, and demonstrations. In 1968 there were the protest marches against the Omega project to hang a massive aerial system above Lake Pearson to guide Polaris submarines. Later there was the Heaphy Road, raising Lake Manapouri, the West Coast beech scheme, the Vietnam War - issues of varying magnitude and impact but all evoking impassioned debate and action. I well remember going to a lecture at Canterbury University given by an articulate, hairy looking ranger (Geoff Rennison) from Fox Glacier who was pleading for the protection of lowland forest.

The lecturer who most influenced me was Dr Colin Burrows, a plant ecologist who at the time was a Board member for Arthur’s Pass National Park. Colin was starting out on the botanical survey of the park, and hired botany students to do the summer fieldwork. Over the summer of 70/71 Chris Ecroyd and I did a large number of plots in the forest to east of the main divide. The following summer 71/72 we ventured into the wetter West Coast side. Having graduated with a B.Sc (Hons) I went to work at Lincoln College from the start of the 1972 academic year as a tutor for the Dean of Science, Professor (Mac) Morrison who was head of the Horticulture Department. Mac was quite a visionary and had already got the Landscape Architect course underway in the hands of Charlie Challenger. A programme for rangers was the next step. To develop this concept, Professor Art Wilcox, from Colorado State University spent a year at Lincoln in 1972 advising on the possible structure of a tertiary course for rangers.

By this stage, I knew from the summer botanical surveys and my tutoring work in natural sciences that I wanted to be a park interpreter, and spent some time talking with Art about how I might achieve that. In early 1973, I gave a terms notice to Lincoln, and was interviewed for a ranger position at Mount Cook. When I was offered the Mount Cook job, I intended to tell the Chief Ranger Barrie Thomas that I really preferred to go to Arthur’s Pass where there was a possibility of a park interpreter position. I managed to blurt out something to that effect, but Barrie said, “no, you’ll be much better off at Mount Cook” and quickly persuaded me that Mount Cook was the place to be. I never regretted that advice and the decision to go there.