Chasm danglers
On a single day last Easter, 3,300 people walked the Tongariro Crossing. My Facebook feed shows photographs of tourists shitting in the grass at the White Horse Hill campground at Mt Cook. Are there too many people on the mountains, or just not enough toilets? These problems and anxieties lie in plain sight across the pages of this delectable alpine chocolate box of a book. Helen Clark is characteristically on point in her Foreword: ‘we are no longer “thousands of feet above worry level”; we have some work to do.’
Mind you, it was work that got us into this pickle in the first place. They don’t call it the tourist ‘industry’ for nothing. This book celebrates work – the work of the artists, photographers, lithographers, printers, and copywriters who were, mostly, paid to arouse hankerings and scratch at the daily disappointments of twentieth-century life. The work began more or less in tandem with European settlement – Lee Davidson begins her thorough and thoughtful text in 1839, when New Zealand Company employee Ernst Dieffenbach measured his way to the top of Taranaki maunga, stuffing specimens into his knapsack as he went. As early as 1889 the mountains had been warehoused and put into storage, ready for dispatch from the photographers Wheeler and Son’s ‘New Zealand Scenery Depot’ in Cathedral Square.
Workers were also needed to provide the cocktails, tennis courts, and music – ‘anything that mortal man can desire’, thought the cigar-smoking gent who drags his wife off to the Hermitage in a 1925 Mount Cook Motor Company advertisement. The mountains are not only for ‘chasm-danglers, crevasse-jumpers, people who are surprisingly upholstered in knobby muscles’.
The work continues, although now we seem to do more and more of it ourselves, from online bookings to retrospective self-promotion on social media. It’s both a strength and a weakness of this book that it ends just as the era of mass air travel begins. On the one hand there is a gloriously cohesive machine-age aesthetic that, honed closer to perfection in this meticulous and vibrant showcase of the modern printer’s art, reinvigorates the familiar iconography of the mountains. But if ending the book at the moment colour photography fully triumphed helps to make sense of the art on display, it also leaves you feeling the book as a whole has raised questions it can’t fully explain, like why warning signs are now having to be put up around the Lake Wanaka Tree.
Part of an explanation, no doubt, is in the way that everyone comes to New Zealand secretly hoping to be the only one here. Davidson makes clear that the emptiness of New Zealand’s mountains was an important characteristic that marked the Southern Alps out as distinct from those in Switzerland. She dates this to the summer of 1881–82, when the Reverend Green, with two Swiss guides, turned back near the summit of Aoraki Mt Cook. Green just wanted to be ‘alone, with the purity and beauty which seemed quite removed from all taint of the evil and sorrow said to hang about all earthly things’.
Davidson also identifies an ‘erasing [of] Māori cultural associations’. But it never seems to have been that deliberate or even self-aware. In 1844, George French Angas looked on Tongariro and ‘wished there had been other than savages to have gazed with me upon its glories’. Once sufficient ‘others’ had arrived, his unsettled anxiety was blithely replaced with disregard.
The authors are careful to acknowledge that this is a book about mountain tourism. But I wondered, is this really how, as Peter Alsop puts it, ‘that image of ourselves as a people at home in the high country and mountains came to be part of our identity and national brand’? As a thought experiment, it’s worth trying to imagine what the mountains would look like without tourist publicity. Possibly they’d look a bit like the New Zealand Alpine Journal. And probably there would be more knobby muscles.
But there’d be nothing to match Riccarton Carpets’ early 1960s ‘travel rug’, featuring Aoraki and the Hooker valley under snow, with a Takahē in the foreground. For that, you need this book.
Scenic Playground: The Story Behind New Zealand’s Mountain Tourism, by Peter Alsop, Dave Bamford and Lee Davidson
https://tepuna.on.worldcat.org/oclc/1048887931
This review appeared in the Climber 106, Summer 2018
