Following from part one and part two.
“It is, therefore, reasonable that the actions of Trampers who become—or are believed to be—lost should be thrown open to examination, and, if necessary, to criticism. When a party that was expected to return in about three days does not return for about fifteen days, and then says, it was “never lost,” a difficult precedent is created.”
—The Evening Post, 1st May 1933.
A LONG PROCESS
It is expected that it will be several days before all the searchers can he recalled. A party consisting of Messrs. H. Anderson, B. McGregor, and W. E. Davidson, of the Tararua Tramping Club, and Mr. F. A. McNeil, of the Radio Emergency Corps, left Wellington yesterday for the mountain house, and will remain there until the withdrawal of the search parties has been completed.
About thirty-five members of the Tararua Tramping Club and a number of others belonging to kindred clubs are still on the ranges, and arrangements have been made with the Railway Department for trains to sound three blasts on their whistles between Otaki and Levin on the west side and Carterton and Masterton on the east side as an indication to the searchers that they should return. It is stated that train whistles can be heard from almost any point on the ranges under normal circumstances.
About 150 trampers have taken part in the search. Most of them belong to the Tararua Club, the other clubs represented being Paua, Victoria College, Hutt Valley, Levin-Waiopehu, Manawatu, Carterton, Wairarapa, and Masterton.
The four missing people were finally safe, but a lot of cleaning up and analysis was still to be done. It took about three days for the last search party to return from the range, but criticism of the group began immediately, firstly in an editorial context on the same day in which their return was reported, and then with additional criticism from members of the public, fanned by the media. At least one searcher had sustained an injured foot, potentially serious in the back-country of the 1930s, and this at the very least highlighted that those who obliged others to search for them can put those people at risk. Comments that had been made on a whim by the rescued party about “never being lost” were now being taken out of context, and were received by some as insulting.
Fred Vosseler, who’d played a large part in organising the search effort, made comments while wearing his authoritative hat as President of the recently formed Federated Mountain Clubs organisation, publicly criticising virtually everything the group was reported to have done. In a war of written words waged through letters to the editor, his criticism provoked responses from the party members, who claimed that he’d been mis-led by media reports and inaccurate assumptions about their situation.
Eventually the arguments died down and fell out of the media, and what followed was a larger analysis, now beginning to be recorded in minutes of meetings and annual reports, of how the search effort had worked and what needed to be improved upon and done differently before there was need for another search of a similar nature. The structure for New Zealand’s largely voluntary and club-based Land Search and Rescue system that was set up in the 1930s, following what was partially learned from this event, lasted for 70 years.
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