by Bruce Ansley
CONTENTS
Introduction: Journeying
1. Chasing George
2. Voyaging north
3. Raiding south
4. Pointing down
5. Rolling on One
6. Finding God
7. Strutting stuff
8. Hunting ghosts
9. Going south
10. Dashing madly
11. Passing muster
12. Feeling the heat
13. Passing by
14. Keeping count
15. Travelling first class
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
Journeying
New Zealand was built on adventure. It was extraordinarily difficult getting here for a start. Waka and sailing vessels created a catalogue of disaster.
Once here, why, fierce escapades lay all around. Early adventurers were confronted by an unruly country. They had mountains and rivers to cross, glaciers, forests, volcanoes to conquer. The nation’s early history is one of battling raw nature, of privation and fierce determination and, of course, wild journeys. It made a lasting impression on us. Sturdy self-reliance remains one of the markers in New Zealand’s perception of itself. High-country farmers and wilderness women have a legend to support. One of our most unlikely heroes, the prison escapee George Wilder, captured the nation’s imagination for his ability to elude pursuing forces, vanish into the bush and survive on his own.
What is a wild journey now? Well, the classics remain rugged enough. Try, for example, following the path of the doomed surveyor John Whitcombe across the Southern Alps. I did, and as I dangled in something like a tea tray above a West Coast river I considered calling this book Teetering on the Edge.
The country hasn’t lost its edge. If you sail around North Cape, or South Cape, you encounter exactly the same seas, the same perils as Captain James Cook did, your advantage being that you at least know where you are. You can walk through the valley under the Two Thumb Range and know just how it felt to Samuel Butler, the first European to set eyes on it.
But wild journeys in modern New Zealand can both traverse unexpected territory and take you by surprise. I set out one day to drive from my home on Waiheke Island to Wanaka in a hurry. It developed into a wild journey. So did the usually placid State Highway One, riven by earthquakes in the top half of the South Island. Even Queen Street in Auckland can blow its cover. Or getting to a wild journey can be wilder than the journey itself, as in a blighted hunt for the South Island kokako.
Wild journeys depend on perspective. I’m not full of derring-do. I don’t dress in camo, strap on a knife and take on the wild. I’m an average, easily scared man who has to brace himself. The wildest journey I’ve ever done was as a Boy Scout launched upon an unknown landscape. For what seemed days, weeks, we were lost in the wilderness, terrified by things that went bang in the night. Years later I retraced my steps. It was just a short walk in the hills.
1
Chasing George
New Zealand in 1962 was a nation of just two and a half million people, who prided themselves on knowing everyone else by their first names.
Keith Holyoake was Prime Minister, Dove-Myer Robinson Mayor of Auckland. Peter Snell ran a world-record mile. Wilson Whineray captained the All Blacks. George Wilder escaped from prison.
George broke out of prison three times. He fooled the police. He lived in the bush. He swam rivers, crashed through roadblocks. He was polite and apologetic to people he stole from.
What else? Well, nothing really. He’s like a frame that has lost its photograph. Only a murky background remains.
Yet George was once the most celebrated man in the country. People followed his tracks. They applauded his escapades. They diminished his crimes: oh, a few counts of burglary and car conversion. Nothing, really. Just a young man feeling his oats.
They even sang songs about him, or at least, sang along with Howard Morrison’s ‘George The Wild(er) NZ Boy’.
Even today he is elusive. He got away from the police dozens of times. Now he escapes the public. He lives near a tiny settlement at the bottom of Hawkes Bay. It is as much a bolthole as you could find in this country. Some people know where he lives, but not many. Oh, and he plays golf.
Half a century on from the days when every newspaper marvelled over the way he stayed out of sight, George Wilder is still lying low. He remains fleet. In fact, he seems to have got rather better at it over the years. His tracks remain on the land nonetheless.
George first escaped on 17 May 1962. He climbed a ten-metre wall to break out of New Plymouth prison. It was quite a feat; the hopelessness of the place must have lent him wings. New Plymouth prison was built around 1870 in an era of Victorian prisons. New Zealand favoured, then, dreadful stone dungeons, although at least this one didn’t become a backpackers’ hostel like Christchurch’s Addington jail, or a tourist attraction like Napier’s.
These prisons fascinate the public because of their meanness, their sense of bread and water. They are the deepest, darkest dungeons of fairy tales. People look at their barren cells and shiver deliciously. They ask to see the places where people were hanged.
Only two people were executed in the New Plymouth prison, both in the late nineteenth century, both Maori, one for killing a surveyor parcelling up his land for sale, the other for murdering his wife.
The jail stands on the corner of Downe and Robe streets, prime CBD real estate in New Plymouth, a sad place with its blank stone walls broken by tiny windows. As with all the other relics of grim justice, no one wants to stay very long.
Neither did George Wilder. Hard-labour convicts were still breaking rocks there in the late 1950s, not long before George escaped. He was in for burglary, car conversion (a Jaguar, one of his favourites) and shop-breaking.
The cells were tiny, only 2.1 metres by 3 metres, the smallest in the land, too small to swing a cat or hold a man. So over the wall went George, and you only have to stand outside this stone pile to sympathise: he was a creature of bush and space.
He was said to have changed out of his prison clothes on the jail’s roof, putting on a check shirt and air-force blue trousers, although there’s no record of where he got them. A small car was reported to have broken through a police road checkpoint on the New Plymouth to Waitara highway shortly thereafter and, chased by a traffic officer, it disappeared. Police said it was a green 1935 Chevrolet Junior with primrose grille and wheels; George always liked his cars. Police said George was a tough man but not dangerous.
The legend began at that moment.
He might have been seen here, he was reported there, but essentially he disappeared.
At the time, Scott Carpenter was orbiting the earth and winning a reputation for disobeying orders. Adolf Eichmann, who stood trial for Holocaust atrocities inside a glass cage in Jerusalem, was on his way to the gallows.
George Wilder was creating his own reputation. A stolen Thames Trader he was believed to be driving crashed through a roadblock near Tokaanu. A policeman fired two shots at him. They missed. ‘Crashing through roadblocks’ was to become the most-used phrase of his escapes.
Police gave chase at speeds of up to 75 miles an hour (120 kilometres per hour) — not too bad for an old Trader. They found the van abandoned. Wilder had ‘escaped into the bush’, the second most-used phrase of his escapes.
Police believed he’d doubled back to Tokaanu. They set up a roadblock at Moerangi, not far from Tokaanu. A light-blue Austin A50 slowed, almost stopped, then crashed through the roadblock and roared away. Next day the car was found bogged in mud some ten kilometres to the north. Police began searching the western shores of Lake Taupo.
Well, Moerangi is sti
ll named on the map, but on the ground it is no more than a sign pointing to a nearby station. I reach the top of the Waituhi Saddle, driving through bush, before realising I’ve gone too far, although the view is worth it. Then back, past Moerangi and through Karatau Junction, whose perfect old school is now the community hall, with the new school beside it.
But Tokaanu has seen better days. The petrol pumps have gone but the little church is well-cared-for, unlike in some small towns. If there are people here, they’re staying indoors.
Tokaanu was once a popular thermal resort but it is eclipsed by nearby Turangi now. The grand hotel still dominates the town, giving the empty streets an air of gravitas. When George Wilder was on the run, the Tongariro power scheme and the Tokaanu power station were in full swing and the area was thriving.
I begin to realise that half a century ago is light years away for New Zealanders. The country has changed so much in that time. This is a journey through a New Zealand that once was but no longer is, just as the George Wilder character could no longer exist.
George was a child of his time. I first heard of him at school. The teacher asked what we thought of him. One boy said he was a crook who should be back behind bars. Oh, the indignation. The world, or at least our world as contained in Room 13, rose up against the heretic.
George was a bit like the Lone Ranger, without his horse. He wasn’t a crook, not really, he’d hardly done anything wrong, and what about all of those nice notes? On the other hand, look at his courage, his cunning, his great thirst for freedom. For life!
In those days an ability to live in and off the bush was one of the great New Zealand dreams. To go off on your own, to survive without help from anyone, to run rings round the cops, to be your own person absolutely. The cold? The loneliness? The almost complete lack of food? Nah. In that age of nuclear paranoia all of us believed that when the big one struck, why, we’d just strike out for the bush. Exactly as George Wilder had done. He was our hero.
By 18 July, when George had been on the run for two months, police speculated publicly that hunger could force him to give up. He had only roots and ferns for food, they said. They believed him to be somewhere along the western shores of Lake Taupo, in rough, scrub-covered country — ‘Tough going all the way,’ said the search controller. They’d placed cordons of men and dogs. Launches had joined the hunt, and an aircraft.
Essentially, they were right. George was ensconced in Waihaha, a bay on Taupo’s western shore which still can only be reached by water or walking track.
Much later Antonios Papaspiropoulos, a writer and poet, moved into an old, derelict cottage in Waihaha with his wife, Victoria, and their three children. He wanted a refuge, a sanctuary where he could recoup, recover, find a new direction in his life. The cottage had not been lived in for at least ten years. Its owner told him that George Wilder had hidden there.
As the family cleared and cleaned and painted, they found four pencil sketches by George Wilder inside a wardrobe. That find led them several ways. Antonios found his sanctuary there, and his new direction. And, he wrote, ‘simplicity, serenity, and large doses of reprieve’. He felt a resonance with George Wilder, whom he believed had found both refuge and his creative muse in the cottage. The poet grew ‘a thief’s eye for detail’. He dubbed his home the ‘George Wilder Cottage.’ He began writing.
When the local newspaper ran a story about Antonios’s interest in the famed escapee, people dropped in notes of their experiences. George’s reputation had flourished in the half-century since his escape. He’d been invested with strange powers.
One man wrote of him escaping police by faking his footprints: he put his boots on back to front, so his pursuers thought he was heading in the opposite direction. Those who want to test this theory should try it.
Those stories are part of the enduring Wilder legend. He is said to have stolen cars and performed amazing stunts in them, to have crashed through roadblocks and fled into wild country, to have lived off the land, to have hidden from searchers under their noses and even to have joined them in searches for himself, to have swum wild rivers and leapt over tall mountains, probably in a single bound.
Some of those stories are verifiable; at least, they were reported in the nation’s newspapers, which in those days took a sober view of their responsibilities, named their sources and reported them accurately, if sometimes dully. (Though George Wilder was never dull: how could he be, on the run, police at his heels, for months at a time?)
An essential part of the narrative, and of his enduring popularity with the New Zealand public, was the notes he was said to have left in the houses and baches he broke into for food. They were said to be apologetic, humble, even sweet. Very sorry about the damage, sorry for taking your food, needs must etc.
But none of the newspaper accounts of the many episodes in his escapes reported these notes, none of those I read at least. I begin to wonder why he left them. They seem dangerous, for two reasons. First, they would alert the police to his whereabouts, and second, they would be, effectively, confessions to further crimes for which, sooner or later, he’d be called to account.
Did George leave those notes? Perhaps, perhaps not. Legends feed upon themselves and grow in the telling. The best I can say is that I haven’t seen one, or found anyone who did, or read a contemporary newspaper account which mentions them.
Yet George’s public insisted upon them. One of the tales related to Antonios came from a bride upset because George had stolen the bridegroom’s suit off the line on their wedding day. (Who would wash a suit? On the day of the wedding?) Another came from a woman whose parents had been burgled by Wilder, who quaffed her mother’s collection of miniature bottles of whisky, gin and so on, and left an apologetic note saying he’d been so hungry — and thirsty.
On the other hand, something had alerted the police and led them to his whereabouts, and what could be a better clue than the notes? Antonios felt there was an element of folklore in the stories, but certainly, he believed, the notes existed: there were simply too many people talking about receiving them.
George could settle the account one way or the other, but he’s not saying.
Another point in the story seems clear enough: the Waihaha house was his base, for quite a while. Antonios’s account of finding drawings inside the wardrobe drew a rare, if indirect, response from the legend himself, holed up somewhere near Cape Turnagain: according to his sister, who contacted the poet, they weren’t George’s. Evidently he never drew inside wardrobes. Why this, of all the stories that circulate about George Wilder, should elicit a contact, even a denial, is anyone’s guess. Perhaps he simply objected to the notion that he might be in the closet, in any sense.
Another point: she didn’t dispute the fact that he had lived in the cottage for some time, marking off the days on the wall. Clearly he’d made the house in Waihaha his base.
Much later, I read a review by John Horrocks of Gerard Hindmarsh’s book Outsiders: Stories from the Fringe of New Zealand Society. The book included a piece about George Wilder, an outsider if ever there was one. Horrocks included a story of his own in the review: one of the houses in Waihaha was owned by the Richwhite family, whose scion David went on to become a very public merchant banker. They kept a plywood dinghy there. George took it and rowed across the lake to Kinloch, where he was said to have broken into baches for supplies.
I go to Kinloch and think about that voyage across the lake.
Kinloch has that affluent, self-satisfied air of lakeside subdivisions, flush rather than flash, every lawn mowed, all hedges trimmed, the lake’s Wanaka to Taupo’s Queenstown, with not too much space for visitors.
Sir Keith Holyoake, then Minister of Agriculture and later Prime Minister, first made it famous when he bought a sheep station there in 1953. Perhaps as a result, Kinloch was subdivided in 1959, and one of its best pieces of architecture remains the relaxed mid-century house which Holyoake is said to have described on his deathbed as his pride and jo
y.
In 1962, when George came raiding, the settlement was still embryonic, a scattering of baches, but it had one relevant feature. It lay 17.5 kilometres in a direct line from Waihaha, a long voyage by dinghy.
Horrocks told me that his family had bought the dinghy from the Richwhites. It was a small, heavy, blunt-nosed vessel, not easy to row.
Taupo is as much inland sea as lake. It is huge, the biggest lake in New Zealand. Fierce winds can sweep across it, creating a chop very much like a stormy sea. In 1962 there’d have been few lights around it, apart from Taupo on the other side.
George would have shoved off into darkness. Much worse, he faced a round trip of thirty-five kilometres. He’d have wanted to go there and back in the dark; the trouble with isolated places is that someone intruding upon them is much more visible. They’re difficult to hide in.
He’d have launched the dinghy from the beach at Waihaha, taken a fix on the odd light across the lake, and shoved off. Nothing in the legend says anything about seamanship — it’s all about his skills in the bush.
Well, rowing a dinghy is easy enough. But rowing a blunt-nosed one, a heavy old thing, a very long way on a lake which might have been calm enough but quite possibly was not, is an astonishing feat.
I take my own dinghy for a row in Putiki Bay at Waiheke Island as a test. It is a light, fibreglass dinghy, perhaps a little short to make a decent rowing boat, but then the Horrocks’s dinghy wasn’t long either. As a rough estimate, I reckoned I could row at a walking pace, perhaps three knots. But not against a wind. And for how long? After just a couple of kilometres, out to the bay entrance and back, I am quite ready to go home for a rest.
Without stopping, the journey would have taken Wilder at least ten hours there and back. In the dark. With only a rest at half time, perhaps lying back in some bach’s easy chair, opening a can from a kitchen cupboard. The thought of the row back certainly would have spoiled my appetite.
Perhaps, as John Horrocks suggested, he crept around the edge of the lake and hid in one of the many bays on the way. Either way the man wasn’t just a fugitive. He was a miracle.
