Feature
Heart in the high lands
by Bruce Ansley
It’s called “tenure review”, an unremarkable term for a remarkable transformation now taking place in our legendary South Island high country. In exchange for giving up the scenic and uneconomic parts of their land for a massive conservation estate, pastoral lease holders get freehold title to the rest of their property. But is this just privatisation by another name, and is it the last hurrah for the iconic southern stockman?
New Zealand’s high country is legendary in the most literal sense. Myths swirl like mist around its peaks. Anywhere in the Southern Alps it is easy to feel as Samuel Butler’s hero did in Erewhon, that the high pass at the head of the valley is the gateway to some mysterious land.
For a century and a half the mountains were ruled by men and women living a hard life in a strange land whose occasional revealing – such as Mona Anderson’s tale of Mt Algidus, A River Rules My Life – only emphasised their aloofness.
New Zealanders loved the notion of a land beyond reach. It gave space to a small country. Merinos, tussock, kea, camp ovens, nor’westers, woolsheds, huts and hobbles were part of an exotic language still their own. Station names on road signs rang like verse: Bellamore, Black Forest, Blue Mountain, Cascade, Gem Lake, Irishman Creek, Leaning Rock, Mesopotamia, Minaret, Obelisk, Rainbow, Stew Point, Sunset, Temple Peak, Woodstock. Television advertisements still sing of the untamed musterer, now a legend in his own primetime.
The South Island high country is a great deal more accessible now. Many more New Zealanders are tramping, climbing, skiing, kayaking, gliding, mountainbiking or simply admiring it. The means of getting there is no further than the 4WD in the garage.
Most of the mountains are publicly owned and leased back to the farmers. The public now want them back, for recreation, or to preserve their grandeur and fragile ecosystems, or because they believe, following a major review in the 90s, that the way it is being farmed is unsustainable.
High-country runs have been embroiled in their own revolution, as recreation and adventure tourism displace sheep. Running tourists alongside merinos has saved many a cockie’s bottom line.
Rising foreign and corporate ownership have been controversial, and increasingly common.
For all that, most high-country stations are still farmed by the independent, wilful, resourceful, staunch, exasperating little group of families who, generically at least, have always been there.
Now they are seeing what could be their last revolution. The Labour government is turning the South Island’s spine into a conservation estate running from top to bottom. Newly created conservation parks, such as Te Papanui, west of Dunedin, which opened in March, will link national parks, estates and reserves. Government officials estimate that as much as 50 percent of the island could be under some form of protection. It will be a vast theme park, the theme being wild New Zealand, or as close to it as predation will allow.
Currently, the main way of achieving it is known as tenure review: a huge land swap inside the pastoral leases that make up 20 percent of the South Island and 10 percent of New Zealand. The good-looking and ecologically valuable land goes to the Crown. In exchange, the farmer gets the more valuable farming country on the run to call his or her own. He is no longer a lessee; instead he becomes a fully fledged freehold owner.
When the idea first emerged from National government offices in the early 90s, the swap was heralded as the high-country solution. But after a few deals were struck, it stalled.
Under a Labour government the process has accelerated. Now some 165 leases of the remaining 304 are in the programme.
But high-country users and environmental groups are complaining to the government that the public are getting a bad deal. They say that tenure review has become a de facto privatisation of public land. Farmers, they say, are getting full ownership of public land at bargain prices and the public are not getting enough back in terms of conservation land and access. They see this as their best and last shot at getting a vast tract of country into the conservation estate.
The question is, are we privatising the high country by virtually giving it away, or are we getting a huge new conservation park dirt cheap?
Some farmers have welcomed deals that have sometimes made them rich. But others are worried that their reduced farms will be made uneconomic. Either way, it’s the end of an era for the legendary stockman whose demesne loses much of its magnificence.
Such huge country in so little a land.
The wide plain of the Mackenzie Country is so beautifully edged with mountains that it would be mawkish on a postcard. All of Auckland would vanish into the maw of this stillness, but there is only Twizel. The village, a hydro town in a previous existence, is deserted this early winter morning and made lonelier by the loudspeaker above the public toilets broadcasting an ancient ballad to an audience of one.
In warmer weather, though, it is a growing holiday centre.
The Mackenzie Country was once best known as the home of rabbits, hieracium, hydro canals and the way to Queenstown. Now it is a destination all on its own, with skifields, watersports and the run of adventure tourism.
Ben Ohau Station lies just outside Twizel. It is owned by the Cameron family, and Simon Cameron is the quintessential high-country farmer.
Cameron is pushing 50, but looks much younger. We sit in his big, comfortable kitchen with his black and white terrier sleeping in its basket before the fire.
His grandfather took over the lease of this station late in the 19th century after it had broken previous owners.
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