By Dave Hansford (Potton & Burton, 2024)
Aotearoa’s second largest national park, Kahurangi National Park is known for its epic tramping, diverse landscapes, wealth of fossils, and extraordinary range of flora and fauna, including great spotted kiwi, cave spiders and a giant carnivorous Iand snail (the Powelliphanta, which can grow as big as a gym bro’s fist). It is, Dave Hansford writes, “87,000 hectares in which to renounce all trappings of humanity except those you carry.”
Kahurangi is more than a coffee table-style photo book with some informative captions. Dave is a great writer with an eye for what fascinates. He had me from the first sentence of the introduction, which describes all that is left of a trilobite orgy: their calcified exoskeletons, cast off in the name of mating, then preserved by “some undersea calamity – a landslide, or an eruption”. Horny arthropods, eh?
The book never gets less interesting. There’s the Bulmer Cavern, the country’s longest-known cave system, that extends more than 70-kilometres underground. How much more? No one knows. There are Kahurangi’s alpine plants, some of which pre-date the ice ages. Fun fact: raoulia and haastia, commonly called “vegetable sheep”, have a windproof breathable shell which keeps moisture in and the elements at bay. There’s the kuaka, or eastern bar-tailed godwit, who uses “magnetoreception” to read the earth’s magnetic lines to navigate during long-haul flight.
Which is to say, I learned a lot from this book and was reminded what places like Kahurangi National Park and northwest Nelson offer us, not to mention what we should be offering back. As Dave notes, “It does us good … to just go for a walk, in a place that wants nothing from us save to be left alone.”
Laura Williamson
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