Mount Holdsworth - Ben Iorns, Mar 1970

This paper was written by Ben Iorns in March 1970.  Ben was a great-grandson of Joseph Masters, the well-known pioneer Wairarapa settler after whom Masterton was named.  He was recognised as an authority on the history of his native Wairarapa area, and in particular on Masterton, and was also concerned with environmental issues in the region.  He was involved with a number of local organisations including Wairarapa Committee of the New Zealand Historic Places Trust, Tararua National Park Project Committee, Mt Holdsworth Club, and Masterton Historical Society.

Ben lived between 1875 and 1977.

The article was provided to me by Joe Hansen, ex DoC man in the Wairarapa.  I've tried to keep the text as originally written. 

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Mount Holdsworth, like all the main peaks of the Tararua Ranges, without consideration for any long standing Maori names they may have had, was, very early in the piece dubbed with a pakeha name.

In its case the name derived from J.G. Holdsworth who for a long period from 1870 onwards, was Commissioner of Crown Lands for the Wellington province.  Fortunately the Ranges themselves escaped this fate.

The prominence of this peak on the skyline, and its easy access up one continuous ridge, soon attracted interest, in spite of the fact that it was not by any means the highest, and its first recorded visit was by a Greytown party in 1863.

From then on there was a steady stream of casual visitors until in 1907 the Mount Holdsworth Committee was formed which cut a track up through the bush and built the first Mountain House about half way up in the same year.

Undoubtedly, one of the outstanding features of this track is the original undisturbed native forest, especially of its lower area, a real botanical museum, foam mosses on the ground to rimu, kahikatea and rata up to six feet in diameter and 100 feet high.

Naturally, these caught the eye of sawmillers, and from 1907 onwards repeated applications were made to mill this bush.

However, a continuous line of organised and unorganised dedicated bushlovers, stood vigilant guard, until the Mt Holdsworth road and remained as the most attractive entrance to the ranges.  In fact around the whole 150 mile perimeter, it is the only place where a car can be driven up to the unmilled and unburned native forest.

It is fortunate in that immediately around this entrance there is a considerable area of natural clear flat land, so essential to the manouvering and parking of motor vehicle transport and even to helicopters.

Further to this, after a mile of level walking upstream along a bush path walled in by tall trees draped with climbing and perching plants, and beneath them an almost tropical profusion of lesser trees, shrubs, tree ferns and ground ferns, plants mosses and lichens all sheltered from snow, frost, wind and blasting sun.

This path opens out onto Donnelly’s Flat, another natural clearing of several acres of sheltered grassy flat, bordered around by river and bush.

This whole set up is in a place of natural landscaping unequalled in the Tararuas, and its survival intact after almost 100 years of human intrusion is a great joy to those elderly survivors of a long line who fought for its presevation.  The fight has not been easy, sawmillers quite naturally coveted the tall, clean trunks of those rimu, kahikateas, meadows and beeches of three species, very generously offered to leave us the stumps and branches and a promise of a never and more viral forest that would soon replace its “over-mature” ancestors.

 Cattle from adjoining poorly fenced farms moved in and wintered well, leaving a sorry looking dilapidated flora, also some of their own ever sorrier looking carcasses rotting along the main track after they had been poisoned by eating tutu bushes.

Misguided sportsmen liberated red deer, the most efficient and wide ranging destroyers of them all.  These along with their fellow destroyers, the opposums, were for long protected  by law, since when the same lawmakers have spent large sums trying to get them out.  Vandals in various forms damaged or destroyed every form of amenity provided for their shelter and safety, even robbing and destroying contribution boxes, setting alight to inflammable vegetation and shooting protected birds.

Possum trappers at times provided problems by locking up public huts and ordering people off the main tracks, along which they set their traps.

Pigs and goats joined in with the deer and possums to carry  every form of vegetation from the bark of tree roots underground, to the leaves of the highest trees.  However, the increased human evidence and movement in the lower levels has reduced this to almost vanishing point and all types of growth are in infinitely better shape that it was 40 years ago.

Fire is always just around the corner as an enemy of any bush on very dry weather Hodsworth included.  Close around the State Forest boundary, the country has in the past, been extensively burned over, both accidental and incidental to farming, but much of this has now regenerated into scrub and second growth.

Higher up on the main track around Rocky Lookout, an extensive area was burned off about 60 years ago, and its succeeding regeneration, was again burned in Nov 1937.  This too has regenerated into scrub cover.

There is still some evidence of a considerable burn-off on Pig Flat near the Mountain House, but just where is uncertain. 

The original Mountain House reputed to have been the first public hut in the Tararuas, chronically suffered from the anxiety of its builders to shelter it from the prevailing north west wind, and in consequence it got little sun, was damp and its two chimneys smoked excessively, in spite of this the wind did prevail, blowing its roof off twice.  It its prime this but had five rooms, 30 or 40 bunks, with mattresses on them, a verandah, and curtains on the windows.

In 1920, a small one roomed hut was built at the road end by the Masterton Scouts with the active assistance and supervision of the late Mr Sam Miller and Charles Bannister, from whom it derived the name of Bannister Hut.  This but like the Mountain House also suffered from too much shelter.

In 1950 after the Military had moved their Jungle Training Camp from the road end, the Y.M.C.A rebuilt the Bannister Hut on the Jungle Camp site, utilising the concrete floor and chimneys.  This was a sound building, and when demolished after the completion of the Holdsworth Lodge, much of its material was used in a hut some miles up the Ati-Whakatu stream built by the Masterton Tramping Club in 1968.  Actually some of the material was inherited from the original Bannister Hut, so is still doing duty in its third but after 50 years.

The stream running through the Holdsworth Road and valley area, for long bore the 20-lettered hyphenated name of Mangatarere-ati-Whakatu with variations in spelling.  As this was a constant source of confusion with its near neighbouring stream, the Mangatariri (also with variations) with only a ridge between them, I personally made intermittent applications to the Geographic Board for a change, over a period of 15years, as no available Maoris could give it’s meaning or origin.  Eventually in 1950 the Board reduced the name to Ati-Wakatu, much more acceptable, but still indefinite in meaning and origin.

For many years this stream contributed substantially to both the Carterton and Masterton Borough water supplies, but Carterton abandoned their intake some years ago, going elsewhere, and Masterton apparently will also soon bypass this stream so any question of pollution should not arise in the future.

This stream has had five bridges across it inside the forest boundary.  Admittedly one was on only three wires, one for the feet to slide along, and the other two for the hands to do likewise.  This was an Army effort.  Just outside State Forest boundary, a tributary creek across the main road was for a long time, a major hazard as it had a rapid fall scouring badly and each flood bought a fresh lot of boulders down onto the ford.  This stream was bridged over by the County Council fairly recently.

Further up the stream, Hans Thomsen had a water wheel in it to drive his milking machines.  Hans was a picturesque and popular personality around there for many years, apparently the altitude and atmosphere favoured his constitutional weakness. He built his first house on the Masterton side of the creek ford, but when this was burned out in a bushfire in 1908 he rebuilt near to the main gate.  He acted as an unofficial caretaker and watchdog, keeping a visitors’ book, collecting donations and providing packhorses.  His services were greatly appreciated and valued. Hans was once nominated for the Wairarapa parliament seat, but although he withdrew before the election, his name remained on the ballot paper, and it drew many votes.

His second house was removed by a later tenant of the property who did not live there.

Donnellys Flat got its name from Thomas Donnelly who was a housepainter living in Masterton, who set up a camp on the flat for a prospecting venture of his, having a weekly food supply left at the road-end, when he failed to pick up a supply in April 1910, an intensive search was made, but it was a year later his remains were found.  Apparently he had a fall which incapacitated him, and he died of the consequent exposure.

Tom was one of the five who lost their lives in the Holdsworth area, the first being named  Loader about 1905 from exposure in snow conditions, Sergt. Wild of the Military Force at the Jungly Training Camp was killed by the explosion of a Mills bomb set to catch wild pigs.

In 1949 a schoolgirl Merle Gwynne became separated from her party and died of exposure.

The last one, a young Wellington constable named Tweedale was caught in bad weather on the Holdsworth snowline in 1969, and died of exposure.  In spite of unrecovered injuries and mishaps that go with these fatalities, Holdsworth could be classed as one of the safest mountains, taking into consideration the team of thousands of all age, sizes and shapes who have tramped its tracks over this last 107 years, many of these under conditions of almost incredible recklessness and hazard.

Besides its own, Holdsworth has provided a base and avenues for rescues, removals of bodies, and burials of those involved beyond its own bounds. 

The responsibility for the track, bridge and two huts was passed on in rotation from the original Mount Holdsworth committee to the Mount Holdsworth Club, then to the Wairarapa Tramping Club and later to the YMCA Tramping Club.  Eventually this, with other commitments at Mitre Flats and Kiriwhakapapa became too much for any single Masterton club and the large Hutt Valley Tramping Club came to the rescue, taking over the track and building the Powell Hutt on the snowline in 1939. 

After the war the Wellington Tramping and Mountaineering Club also came in and built a new Mountain House on a better site with a better sort of shelter. 

Both of these huts are fine buildings of sawn timber with raised wooden floors in decided contrast to the their predecessors, the old Mountain House, Bannister Hut or Mitre Flats Hut.  These primitive originals were of green poles straight from the bush, bark and all, with dirt floors. 

These dirt floors had a lot of advantages, they didn’t need cleaning, as dirt can’t get any dirtier than dirt, they never needed any restrictions about hobnailed boots, you could chop up as much wood as you liked on them, they wouldn’t catch fire, and midnight arrivals didn’t wake any sleepers by clomping about as they now do on their drum like successors.

The builders of the first Bannister Hut inadvertly placed it diagonally across the State Forest boundary.  On one occasion when a suspicious District S.F. Ranger looked in on a trapper occupying the hut, his eye caught a sawn off .22 rifle on a bench just a few inches outside the S.F boundary line, therefore, just that much out of his jurisdiction.  There was nothing that he could do about it, but if I remember rightly he did offer the suggestion that it would be nice if the trapper took it home at the weekend.

Gentlemanly sort of blokes those District Rangers. When the Holdsworth Club ran low on funds and members, the Wairarapa Automobile Association came in and bought about five acres of private land around the bush entrance and did some worthwhile improvements, but found that a legal paper road ran through the middle of their land, making it practically impossible to carry out their original intentions.  They eventually sold the land to the State Forest Service.

At one time there were three gates to open and shut before you got into the bush.  Prior to 1954 the State Forest Service had little or no part in recreational activities or encouragement inside its forest areas, probably because they had neither the authority or finance.  Recreation was left entirely to private initiative, its own sweat and toil, and the depth of its pockets.  Meaning of course, the tramping clubs and some Scout groups, and the string of huts, bridges and tracks they left behind them proves how well they accepted the responsibility. 

However, when in 1954 the Tararuas were gazetted as a National Forest Park, they automatically came into the recreational field which previously had been the responsibility of the full National Parks, but it was not until the middle 1960s that this was really put into effect, with the Mount Holdsworth area as the experimental guinea pig.  Since then it has seen the erection of the Holdsworth Lodge, the first of such in any Forest Park, the erection of two bridges over the Atiwhakatu stream, the establishment of a full time resident caretaker, and a very great improvement in the parking area.

This is being followed at present by perhaps the greatest boon of the lot, a long wished for decent metalled track along the waterlogged flat through the bush across the river, which has been a nightmare of mud roots and boulders to several generations of bush lovers, and which except on rare occasions involved a full time concentration on the ugliness underfoot, to the total neglect of the beauty that was overhead and around.

Let us keep this for all time as a walking track only, and always keep in mind that just as there were those who hankered after introducing its four legged enemies into the bush, so too are those, equally misguided, who hanker after bridging in its four wheeled enemies.  Let us hope that we will never lack those with the authority and wisdom to stand at the Atiwhakatu and say as Fooch said at Verdun in 1914 – “they shall not pass”.