By Kate Morris, 01 August 2023
An excerpt from Victoria University College; an essay towards a history, which was written in 1949 by JC Beaglehole to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the university.
But of all the clubs of that day, the one most touched with morning was the Tramping Club. The first Sunday afternoon excursions faded into insignificance beside the first September week-end expedition to the Orongorongo, when fifty students straggled over to that watery magnificent valley, and a less number arrived at the top of Mount Matthews; and that gentle walk itself became nothing in comparison with snow-clad or tempest-smitten Tararuas, the exploration of lost spurs and brown-running stony rivers. Cold words cannot register that glory.
There were cold words, such as those on a Labour Day week-end: ‘Some fifty miles of walking … over every type of country-road, bush-track, trackless bush, and river-bed.… two crossings of the Rimutakas; the first, by Matthews Saddle, … interesting enough, but not to be compared with the second traverse, made by map and compass near Bau-Bau trig. Ours was probably the first party since the early surveyors to cross these bushy ridges; certainly, no woman had gone through there before.’
There were tough days that became legendary with the participants: the descents of the long ridge from Alpha to Renata and to the Waiotauru stream, the mist and the rain and the supple-jack, eight miles in a twelve-hour day; crawling against the wind at Palliser Bay; the start at two in the morning, the first steep pull after breakfast.
But oh the stars at two in the morning the deeps of the bush, the sun in the river-valleys, the sweep of the eye from the hill-tops. The poets went tramping, and trampers became poets; for a while Spike [the student newspaper] was redolent of manuka and wet fern and the sun on hot hills. No one, unfortunately, kept statistics of rivers crossed, or of the billies of tea that Boyd Wilson boiled.
https://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-BeaVict.htm