For King’s Birthday weekend research – in case it rains…

Even though the peak tourist season is over, SWMBO (She Who Must Be Obeyed manages tourist propaganda at TRM) has continued Her “relentlessly positive” approach to encourage more tourists to Turangi and into the National Parks.

But is She misleading them with a 1962 classic publicity photo taken at the crater lake on the summit of Mt. Ruapehu? (More on this below) This photo was taken before the hobbits discovered Ruapehu. She might be more than a little out of date with this shot. At least it has not been photoshopped…

Her sneaky inspiration to enhance the promotion of the National Park arose from an old film, which was funded by the NZ Film Commission and NZ On Air and impressed critics at the international film festivals in Cannes and Venice, where it won a special critics’ prize.

This film was probably the first time many had ever seen any mention of the younger, slim version of Peter Jackson. We understand he went on to produce some other fictional films, including a trilogy which became the most successful promotion of the Tongariro National Park but the commercial potential was never appreciated. The LOTR films confirmed how desperate for entertainment and how gullible the public is. So, for commercial reasons, perhaps SWMBO’s old photo may now be acceptable

i.e. Gollam’s cute little waterfall (with hindsight, perhaps Tawhai Falls should have been renamed?) has become a tourist trap must-visit on the way to the skifields above Whakapapa. As the councils have failed to grasp the LOTR promotional opportunities, SWMBO has to try to do it for them.

In this scene below Gollum munches the freshly-caught fish just as Frodo Baggins arrives, supposedly to entreat Gollum to follow his Master (or he may have been checking for his fishing licence?).

For another memorable hoax, google “Forgotten Silver“- a wonderful con job.

It was an epic documentary chronicling the extraordinary life of  Kiwi filmmaker Colin McKenzie. Or was it? The first television screening of this Costa Botes/Peter Jackson production memorably stirred up New Zealand audiences. Forgotten Silver went on to screen at the international film festivals in Cannes and Venice. Amongst those bearing witness, supporting the credibility of this extraordinary story, were other celebrities, Sam Neill and disgraced American producer, Harvey Weinstein. 

The producer, Costa Botes, replied to angry newspaper correspondence, The Evening Post, 16 November 1995: The art of storytelling is the art of spinning a convincing lie. I’m not going to apologise for doing my job well. If Forgotten Silver causes people never to take anything from the media at face value, so much the better. (– It does have similar characteristics of whether or not to believe the plot in TRM’s “mockumentary” – the Skulduggery book…)

Above sign indicates how our Government promotes a rare LOTR tourist opportunity…

See previous TRM blog answering tourists questions:

January 1, 2024

Where is Gollum’s waterfall?

In the footsteps of Gollum at Tawhai Falls in Tongariro National Park

Every long weekend holiday time tourists ask the same question: “Where is the waterfall where Gollum ate his trout – from LOTR”.

The kids will never forgive you if you miss it. The simple answer is to find the Whakapapanui Stream – take SH48 (off SH47), aka the old Bruce Road heading up to Whakapapa ski fields, and you cannot miss it.

Book of the Week: ‘Ruapehu took possession of my mind’

In praise of an outstanding new book on Ruapehu and Tongariro

by Steve Braunias 29/05/2025

The main image on this page — above, spread out happily across the screen — is from the constantly fascinating illustrated book Fire & Ice: Secrets, histories, treasures and mysteries of Tongariro National Park by Hazel Phillips and is surely, surely, the best photo ever taken in New Zealand of post-colonial leisure in paradise, at once supremely happy and inevitably troubling, a 1960s ideal of the governing race at play, a portrait of Little Rhodesia, consenting adults without children enjoying themselves tremendously in the bright light of the South Pacific and achieving the seemingly impossible feat of stripping off and wearing sexy patterned bikinis in a sulphuric lake in the freezing show. The only photo I know that comes near its classic depiction of the Good Life for white people is the cover of the 1973 album Shaun at Wairakei Vol 2: the lascivious middle classes lounge poolside in bikinis and psychedelic shirts at the Tourist Hotel Corporation luxury resort in Wairakei. The LP cover carries a heavy suggestion of illicit affairs, of Brut, of what kind of man reads Playboy. The picture from Fire & Ice is less sexualised, from a more innocent and more explicitly apartheid age; it was taken in 1962, at Ruapehu’s Crater Lake. Hazel Phillips, the book’s author, positions the photo right at very front, and writes in the Introduction, “I became obsessed with Ruapehu about a decade ago when I [first] saw the photo.” Her book investigates European representations of tourism, and European narratives of approaching the mountain as something to be conquered, but she goes way beyond either of these narrow subjects. “The volcanic mountains of the central plateau have gripped me and held me tight,” she writes. “This is the story of how Ruapehu and Tongariro took possession of my mind.”

There are too few good books and too little good writing about the central plateau. You would not think so. The mountains claim the middle of the North Island, citadels in a white kingdom, beautiful and dangerous. John Mulgan chose the adjacent-ish Kaimanawa Mountains as the setting for the best pages in his 1932 classic novel Man Alone, sending his brooding protagonist to take refuge in its wilderness after killing his farm boss. But no other great work of fiction comes to mind that climbs or goes even anywhere near Ruapehu and Tongariro. Hazel Phillips includes a bibliography of nonfiction books on the plateau in the end pages of Fire & Ice; it’s an interesting but rather motley collection which includes a forgotten classic, the appealingly titled 1960 memoir Susan in Springtime. Its author was Susan Graham, a survivor of the famous 1931 Stanton search, when a party of university students were lost in a blizzard on Ruapehu. Phillips devotes a chapter to the search. She writes that survivors were given hot drinks and food, then stripped and rubbed down with whiskey to warm them up: “I am reliably informed that stripping someone and rubbing their naked body with whiskey is no longer accepted search and rescue practice.”

There are a lot of dead people in Fire & Ice. They include 18-year-old Auckland University law student Warwick Stanton. He did not survive the 1931 search named after him. His body was found on the banks of the upper Makatote River. Phillips’ account of that tragedy is deeply felt; her book often reads as a beautiful and moving record of death on the mountain.

Even the gorgeous Crater Lake, as immortalised in that amazing 1962 photo at the top of this review and which “obsessed” Philips, has been the cause of death. At 10:24pm on Christmas Eve 1953, 151 people lost their lives after a flood from the Crater Lake collapsed a railway bridge beneath an express passenger train at Tangiwai. The tragedy has inspired numerous literary responses such as Laurence Fearnley’s novel The Hut Builder, and Anthony McCarten’s play Cyril Ellis, Where Are You, named after the young man who acted heroically to save the lives of passengers. Phillips only devotes a few paragraphs to the disaster in Fire & Ice; her attention is diverted in the rest of that chapter to other aspects and other, primarily geological stories of the Crater Lake. It’s an interesting editorial decision and I think it’s a good one. A different kind of writer, eg a hack greedy for content, would have mined it. Phillips is neither a hack nor a content tourist. She writes seriously, scientifically, sometimes jovially, and her book stays close to the mountain at all times, on it and inside it, in a very physical and emotional sense.

The Chateau! One of the great New Zealand place names, and it looks magnificent in the undated photo above, from Fire & Ice, immediately conjuring up visions of Jack Nicholson running amok with an axe in The Shining. Phillips touches on the Chateau now and then — the best Index reference in Fire & Ice is “Chateau, temporary use as a mental health facility” — but she spends longer, quality time writing about old-timey huts, and tells great stories about the so-called Haunted Whare: “A small shack near Tawhai Falls below the Chateau was reputedly haunted by the ghost of a woman searching for her lost lover. The whare burned down, twice. Rumours trickled through that a plaque or sign still existed on the overgrown site. Could I find it, and would the ghosts talk to me if I did?” The answers are no and no but she does make a pretty exciting discovery — an old battered sign, completely hidden in a stand of trees, which reads, “About 1881 a shepherds hut was built on this site. This hut replaced the first hut built in 1880 which was deliberately destroyed by fire after the finding of a dead Maori inside. HUT BECAME KNOWN AS THE HAUNTED WHARE AND WAS FINALLY DESTROYED IN 1943.” It’s another fun, detailed, immersive chapter; Phillips take every opportunity to get out and about on the mountain, intensely curious and always respectful, aided and abetted on the page by a stunning collection of historical photos as per the one of two jokers stripped to the waist, below.

One of the most powerful stories is told in Chapter 1. A man given the nom de plume of Henry first destroys on his own and later, with Phillips, goes to retrieve parts of a memorial on Ruapehu. He wants the “backcountry kept clear of this shit. Why do we feel the need to mark wherever we’ve been?” It’s a shocking act but Phillips is alert to the nuances. She writes, “Were Henry and I undoing history by removing the plaque from the summit? Were we carrying out a radical act of decolonisation? Were we committing an offence? Or were we restoring the environment to its natural state? Perhaps we were doing all of those things, somehow, in a big contradictory mix.” The thing is not to rush to judgment without reading the whole story in this chapter. As she comments, “Assumptions can be dangerous.” It reads like a short story, full of incident and thought, and like any story you have to get to the end. Phillips salvages remains of the plaque and keeps them safe. She tracks down the grandson of the climber who was memorialised in the 1922 plaque. They meet for coffee. “I told him the whole story of the trip with Henry, Henry’s motives, and my desire to ensure the plaque wasn’t consigned to rubbish in Ruapehu.” His response? All good. No problem. “The plaque was a reflection of the time,” he says. “I mean, do we really want to keep ramming colonialism down the throats of iwi?” For all of the stories of death and tragedy, Fire & Ice searches out, and finds, stronger feelings inspired by the central plateau: understanding, resolution, peace.

Back, once again, and finally, to the Crater Lake, that golden pond, in delicate handcoloured pale turquoise in the photo below, taken about 100 years ago, and positioned in the pentultimate and quite transcendent chapter in Fire & Ice. It’s about the 2002 discovery of a skull near Dome peak on Ruapehu. What happened to it? Phillips puts in an Official Information Act request to police. They are unable to help. She puts in an OIA to the ESR and is told the skull was probably a pre-European Māori, 18-20, and female. Later, she sits down with Bubs Smith from Ngāti Hikairo ki Tongaririo, who tells her of an old waiata he learned from his mother. “It speaks of a young girl who was betrothed to someone in Ngāti Rangi, which was something that was done to keep the ties strong between iwi. She didn’t want to leave her homeland and went up to the mountain never to be seen again.” Phillips writes, “That meant that none of our European climbers were the first to get to the top of Ruapehu…Although mountaineering was a European construct, the first ascent of Ruapehu – incredibly – probably belonged to a young Māori woman.” Smith says to her, meaning the skull, “Chances are these are her remains.”

Fire & Ice is the second excellent book of the great New Zealand outdoors published in 2025, after Naomi Arnold’s account of walking the Te Araroa track in Northbound. Both have been patiently, admirably managed by their respective publishers, with Massey University Press pulling out all the stops to gain access to over 100 archive photos of Ruapehu pulled from the Turnbull Library and other repositories. It’s a damned good looking book, destined to be among the year’s best, appealing to trampers, mountaineers, climbers, ski-ers, Tongaririo crossers, local iwi and other citizens of the plateau, and really anyone who appreciates an intelligently told natural history.

Fire & Ice: Secrets, histories, treasures and mysteries of Tongariro National Park by Hazel Phillips (Massey University Press, $49.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.