New Zealand Huts: Resources and Bibliography

New Zealand Huts Resources and Bibliography

by Sam Demas

(Note: this is part of the larger work New Zealand Huts: Notes towards a Country Study)

Following is a very brief selection of publications, web sites and organizations to begin delving  into the world of New Zealand huts.   There is a rich literature on huts and tramping in NZ, I recommend starting with two indispensable books:

  • Shelter From the Storm by Shaun Barnett, Rob Brown, and Geoff Spearpoint (Craig Potton Publishing, 2012).
  • Tramping a New Zealand History, by Shaun Barnett and Chris Maclean (Craig Potton Publishing, 2014).

The bibliographies and footnotes in these amazing works will immediately lead you deep into the relevant literature. 

[For those interested in more detail than is provided in the components of my own report, but are not yet ready to read a full book, check out my reviews of Shelter from the Storm.]

–>For a brief introduction, even better, read the downloadable reprint of the Introduction to Shelter From the Storm; this essay by Shaun Barnett is an excellent introduction to NZ huts.

Also by Barnett, Brown and Spearpoint A Bunk for the Night: A Guide to New Zealand’s Best Backcountry Huts, Potton & Burton, 2016(?).

Other insightful works on huts and tramping include works by Mark Pickering, notably:

  • A Trampers Journey, Craig Potton Publishing, 2004.
  • Huts: untold stories from back-country NZ, Canterbury University Press, 2010.
  • The Hills, Heinemann Reid, 1988.

Golden Bay writer Gerard Hindmarsh has written about huts in some of the essays in his Kahurangi Calling, Potton and Burton, 2010, and Kahurangi Stories, Potton and Burton, 2017.

NZ huts are best understood within the context of environmental conservation and the role of humans in this fabulously beautiful, remote landscape.

  • For a quick, informative and stimulating sense of the broader landscape/environmental history of NZ, see: Michael King’s magisterial overview Penguin History of New Zealand, Penguin Books, 2012. While a 500-page book can only skim the surface of a nation’s history, this one does it very well.  For most of us, dipping into chapters selectively is more manageable than reading the entire book.  The first few chapters set the pre-historic and early history, chapter 11 on the seminal Treaty of Waitangi is useful (even more so is the Wikipedia article), and Chapter 26, land under pressure, briefly provides invaluable historical context on environmental history.
  • Wild Heart: the possibility of wilderness in Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Mick Abbott and Richard Reeve, Otago University Press, 2011. These 17 essays by trampers, conservationists, historians, writers, scientists, and conservationists provide useful perspective on how Kiwi’s are thinking about the nature, roles, uses and protection of wilderness today.  It gives a good sense of the many ways in which wildness is “at the nation’s psychological and physical core”.
  • Environmental historian Geoff Parks’s provocative Theatre Country: essays on landscape and Whenua, Victoria University Press, 2006. The Maori word whenua means both placenta and people, and this series of essays explores how New Zealanders – indigenous and colonial — are, and are not, connected to the land they occupy.  Parks’ thinking about wilderness and landscape seems to be in the spirit of William Cronon, but with a distinctive Kiwi sensibility.   The essays range widely, discussing the historical views of landscape and the picturesque imported from British romanticism, nature tourism, and it frames New Zealand’s approach to landscape as a profoundly and misguidedly dichotomous insistence on dividing the nation into two distinct theatrical scenes, both playing out on a national stage largely outside the critical awareness of the actors: 1. the intensively cultivated 51% of the land, and 2. the highly protected, puristic notion of “wilderness” characterized by DoC’s management regime for the 33%

A few relevant websites:

  • NZ Department of Conservation  With persistent, creative  searching, this extensive website will yield a wealth of information and perspective.
  • Tramper.co.nz  – A great site for locating tracks to walk and learning about the range of tramping and huts in NZ.
  • Remote Huts  A valuable online forum for those interested in the preservation and restoration of remote huts and tracks.  Includes information about Permolat.
  • Backcountry Trust  Information about grants and projects of this remarkable hut and track maintenance program, funded in large part by DoC.
  • Facebook sites for “Shelter from the Storm”, the Backcountry Trust, and the Federated Mountain Clubs, and other groups are great for staying up to date on developments and for networking.
  • NZ Alpine Club  source for climbers and information about a network of alpine huts.
  • Wilderness Magazine , an excellent print and online publication, also has a useful website.
  •  Federated Mountain Clubs  A key outdoors organization  representing 80 clubs,  FMC is at the nexus of outdoors activity and information.  Their brief includes advocacy and information/ publishing.  Their quarterly magazine Backcountry, available in print and online, is an indispensable source of information about huts, tramping and outdoor activities generally.  Their page providing links to other websites is a great place to start exploring beyond what is listed above.