Windy Tops

Tag: book

  • Tararua Adventure Guide, by Jonathan Kennett (a few thoughts)

    Cover picture of Tararua Adventure Guide, by Jonathan Kennett

    The Tararua Adventure Guide, by Jonathan Kennett, was recently published in August 2010 by the Kennett Brothers. It’s available in a bunch of places such as outdoor shops, probably some bike shops given who’s publishing it, a few online bookstores if you search around, and allegedly good book shops. (I couldn’t find it in the likes of Whitcoulls or Borders, but no surprises there.) It cost me about $21.25 after an FMC affiliation discount, and for that I got a 152 page paperback handbook, including a 3 page index. The price was right!

    Bivouac in Wellington was sold out when I first visited to snap up a copy during September, but they had another shipment coming in the next day, and sure enough about 10 copies were displayed on the counter a day later. I guess it’s been a popular book. This should be expected because the Tararuas are on Wellington’s doorstep, and there’s not been much of an attempt at a decent route guidebook for ages, possibly not since Merv Rodgers’ Tararua Footprints of 1996. Please post a comment below if you think I’ve missed a recent good one in the past 15 years. I’ve not been on the scene long enough to be sure.

    An unlikely twist to my purchase was that I’d only just managed to track down my own copy of the 1996 Tararua Footprints about a week earlier, after several years of trying. The reason for this lack of guides that specifically target the Tararuas is probably the relatively localised market that is the greater Wellington region combined with the small proportion of people who often get into the outdoors to the extent of being able to benefit from such a guide. Few people beyond the lower North Island would buy such a book, and it’s a risk for a publishing company to run off the thousands of copies likely to be needed just to break even. The initial print run is 2000 copies, which is probably on the low side for most publishers. The Kennett Brothers have a recent history of publishing books to similar localised and niche markets, especially around mountain biking, so my guess would be that they’re probably in a better position to understand the audience and distribution channels, and could manage the risk better than less specialised publishers.

    About the book

    The Tararua Adventure Guide is a description of all the main things to do in the Tararua Range. It’s not restricted to tramping, and is more of an adventure guide as the title suggests. The author has filled about a third of the book with “classic tramps” of the Tararuas, and another quarter towards the end with additional popular tramps and less common routes. The rest is filled with ideas for short walks and daytrips, several good river explorations, a single canyoning adventure (Chamberlain Creak), a few pages on mountain runs and mountain bike rides, and two pages about hunting and fishing opportunities. That last one is more as an explanation than a guide for hunters, and only a paragraph of the section is actually about fishing. The book has photographs scattered throughout, as well as brief history notes here and there, helping to give a better feel for the areas being described.
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  • A Trampers Journey by Mark Pickering (my notes)

    Several years ago I picked up this book by Mark Pickering titled A Tramper’s Journey, subtitled Stories from the back country of New Zealand, and noticed the entire opening section was all about the author’s 1970s experience in Tongue & Meats, also known as the Wellington Tramping & Mountaineering Club. (Its slang name was adopted from a local butchery in the early days that had the same initials.) With this being a club I’d recently joined, I bought it and began rushing through the early pages, keen to pick out any names I might recognise. Before long the author began to venture into other parts of his experience which I hadn’t been able to relate to very well, and at that time my interest was distracted by other things. Recently I re-discovered it on my bookshelf, read through the entire thing, and noticed many more aspects of this book that now resonate.

    The book was published in 2004 and as far as I know hasn’t been reprinted, so it’s now 6 years old. I do still see it on occasion being sold in bookshops as a new book, so I think it’s still available, or should at the very least be easily found in most New Zealand libraries. [Edit 25-Mar-2012: An electronic PDF copy of the entire book is now available for download from the author’s website.] It totals just under 200 pages of relatively easy reading that’s divided into so many distinct sections that it’s easy to pick up and put down for short stints. My paperback copy is on good quality paper. I thought it was heavier than it looked as if it should have been when I took it tramping a couple of weeks ago.

    This is a tribute book to tramping more than anything else. Unlike similar books on the shelves, this one isn’t about climbing or mountaineering, and it’s not about hunting. Mark Pickering himself commented that while there are a plethora of journals and newsletters and several guide-books that include elements of story telling, there are very few books specifically devoted to tramping stories. What he’s produced is a semi-autobiographical combination of stories that mostly, but not exclusively relate to his experiences of tramping all over New Zealand. Over 30 years between 1974 and 2004, he tallied visits to about 900 distinct huts, and learned a lot of history and stories to go with his experience.

    The book is structured into a combination of stories, trivia, and both anecdotes and larger explanations of tramping history. The author is a self-confessed history buff. All these elements are structured between eight chapters that group related topics, and with each chapter clearly divided into several sections. Sometimes the association of the section with the chapter is generous. Mark Pickering’s story about his discovery of a gold mine of old maps seems to be affiliated with his chapter about tramping in the Canterbury back-country on the thin premise that the second hand bookshop with the maps happened to be in Christchurch. It doesn’t really matter though, because that’s exactly what this book is — a journey of loosely connected anecdotes and stories laid out in a way for the reader to flow between, to gather an appreciation of why people go tramping, what’s important, and how things work in the back-country.
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