Wild Journeys

by Bruce Ansley

  There are two ways of getting to Waihaha now. One of them wasn’t there in George’s day, for now tourists on foot or on bikes traipse past the bay on the Great Lake Trail.

  The way George probably arrived there was along the Waihaha Road. It must have been a pretty safe bet then — remote, little used, rough. He could have sneaked along it in the dark unseen. Even these days the road starts well. I drive past farms and through an increasing number of gates, growing lumpier and bumpier all the way. Sheep and cattle take a close interest.

  Eventually, after a final, indignant twitch of a bull’s tail, I can go no further.

  I abandon the car, go through one last gate, and find a few young Italians camped in a clearing.

  Waihaha? They look puzzled. One of them thinks it is five hours’ walk away. (A Department of Conservation worker had told me the same thing, but it turned out she was talking about the Waihaha hut, which was in the opposite direction.) I don’t bother asking if they know anything about George Wilder. They are here for the scenery, and there is plenty of that. The green land slopes gently before it dives through bush down to the lake.

  Taupo, the resort city, glitters across the lake. It seems a very long way away. Half a century has created another world. The town has grown and grown. New subdivisions are everywhere. Is there anything more jarring than the accommodation industry en masse? The rule is, the more beautiful the place, the more dire the architecture, and Taupo does its best here.

  George’s side of the lake, though, would still be recognisable to him.

  I take an unmarked track which seems to lead in the right direction, downwards, and find the Waihaha track not far away. The sign assures me Waihaha is only 15 minutes away, but it takes longer. The old track to the baches below is now used also by anglers, who are asked to first register with a local Maori trust board. It angles down the hill and dives into a stream bed. All around, bush birds tsk and chatter.

  I shuffle over rocks and around boulders. The bed is dry, but must be a precipitous, dangerous route in the wet. More bush in George’s day, more runoff, more water in the stream. As for doing it in the dark, you’d have to be a mug — or a prison escapee. Yet this is probably the path George used.

  The track lands on a flat and threads through bush, emerging beside a simple, attractive house, the Richwhite place. A sign has that ring of patronage: it is private property. I am welcome to pass through but not to camp, light fires or leave litter, which seems fair enough.

  Along the foreshore several other cottages poke their fronts through the bush. The George Wilder cottage is a simple affair down at the end. A few dinghies lie about. The lake is full of trout. Plenty of baches in other bays all nicely stocked. Would he have been living off roots and ferns, as the police suggested? Oh dear, no. Only a week after his escape police were confident that starvation would force him out of hiding and perhaps it did, baches and homes around Lake Taupo becoming his larder. But he was at large for another two months and no one ever grabbed him as he was pinching a feed.

  Police complained of the rough country they were searching in. Fifty men were hunting for him, but on his side George had bushcraft, cunning and a degree of desperation too.

  His hideout must have seemed safe enough. Waihaha is closed in by cliffy headlands on two sides. Anyone coming in from the lake by boat would be easily seen. It is a long noisy walk through the bush and along the foreshore. Plenty of time for a man on his guard to slip away.

  George would have been very happy here. I wanted to escape to this place myself.

  But the net was closing. Police had got wind of him. They were concentrating their search along Taupo’s western shore, where Waihaha lay. Police cordons of men and dogs were joined by launches, even an aircraft. Residents were asked to search their houses and make sure their cars were locked.

  The search became a national sport. All of the wild money was on George.

  He broke cover next at Mangakino, in a stolen Land Rover, another favourite of George’s. Brian Main, the policeman who later arrested him, reckoned he kept a fleet of cars in the bush, and he would amuse himself doing wheelies.

  This time newspapers reported he ‘flashed past’ a police checkpoint near Mangakino. Can you flash in a Land Rover?

  The vehicle was found abandoned near the top of Titiraupenga, 1042 metres high. Police admitted that the task of finding him up there was formidable. The mountain was surrounded by a logging area and heavy bush. It was criss-crossed with bush tracks and hunters trails, gouged by creeks and gorges.

  Millworkers, forestrymen, farmers and soldiers joined the hunt. This was becoming a national pastime, and oh, the drama of it.

  George was said, again, to be exhausted and desperate for food. But, police said, the chances of him being caught while on the mountain were not high. This was Wilder country and George was at home in it.

  Yet they did almost catch him. He was spotted near Whakamaru, a little way down the road from Mangakino, and quite close to the road leading up the mountain. ‘Net closes’, proclaimed the newspapers.

  One moonlit, frosty, misty night he broke into a farmhouse. He smashed a back window of the house. The farmer thought the noise was his cat. ‘But then I heard footsteps,’ he told reporters. ‘I grabbed my rifle from beside the bed, tiptoed out to the back room and kicked the door open. George must have heard me coming because he wasn’t there.

  ‘I moved outside meaning to fire a couple of shots in the air to alert the police and the Army men. But I’d forgotten to put the bolt in the rifle and load it.’

  The farmer was sanguine enough. He went back inside and telephoned the police instead. He thought Wilder was probably starving but he wasn’t going to get any more involved in the search: ‘If he tries again tonight he can have it. I’m not going to stay here.’

  Four Alsatian police dogs and a posse of more than thirty police, prison officers, soldiers and bushmen gave chase. George threw them off by doubling back on his tracks (possibly giving rise to the backwards boots story), leaping into the Huiarau Stream and swimming across it. The stream was perhaps ten metres wide, the very stuff of legend!

  Next day George was back on the front page: ‘Wilder tears through cordon on bicycle.’ He’d pinched a bike and crashed a cordon, racing down a steep hill on the Whakamaru straight and onto the Mangakino Stream bridge. Cars formed a roadblock. He nipped through a gap between them, pedalling all the faster, flying like a bird, because a policeman fired a shot allegedly in the air to alert searchers, and George may have thought the rifle was pointed at him.

  But a bicycle? For a man as keen on cars as George Wilder?

  Perhaps the locals had obeyed police advice and locked their cars, every one of them, although a practised car converter should have had no trouble with that. More likely he was improvising. Cars can be heard from afar on quiet country roads. Bicycles are silent.

  He threw police dogs off the scent by wading through a freezing, knee-deep stream and at 4.30 that morning broke into a farmhouse, again in nearby Valley Road.

  The farmer heard him. ‘At first I thought it was one of our three young sons in the bathroom,’ he told reporters. ‘I called out something about getting back to bed, then heard Wilder bolt through the window.’

  He tried to start the farmer’s car but the canny cocky had removed the rotor, an old-fashioned device essential to cars of that era.

  Again George escaped. This time he confounded the police dogs by walking through a mob of sheep to kill his scent.

  My, it was cold. Frosts of minus eight to minus fourteen degrees had whitened the land for a week. How long could George stand it?

  Not very much longer.

  A day or so later, a Saturday afternoon, he was caught. Constables Hamilton and Gyde, with police dog Bruce, found him hiding in a hole ten metres from a logging road.

  A famous newspaper photograph shows him in a police car, flanked by policemen, in irons, handcuffs being a lame term for the heavy steel bracelets
on his wrists. He doesn’t look worn-out, or cold, or at the end of his tether. He doesn’t even look resentful, just resigned. The headline says, ‘Got him!’

  One newspaper described him as hungry and tired, but lean, fit and far from exhaustion. He was clean-shaven and dressed in black jeans with a black jersey and boots with no soles (perhaps he’d ruined them by wearing them back to front). They took him to the Mangakino Police Station and fed him his first meal in two days. Then, back to the pokey he went.

  More than half a century later he would still find his way around Whakamaru and Mangakino without any difficulty at all, even on a bicycle. The two small towns are in their own time capsules. Both began their later life as hydro villages, both of them bustling and busy when George was scooting around.

  You get to Whakamaru across the top of the power station’s dam, Lake Whakamaru quiet behind it. Black swans and blue herons poke about carefully. Grassy slopes run up to the inevitable pine forest. George could not have chosen a more dramatic backdrop, although having other things on his mind, probably he didn’t give it much thought.

  Unbelievably strong forces shaped this country. Whakamaru is the oldest of eight volcanic centres, some twenty-eight eruptions over thousands of years spraying the area with burning debris. Volcanic rock forms monuments, sculptures, cathedrals, cliffs, bluffs, all around it.

  The last upheaval, a mere sixty or so years ago, shaped an entire village: the Whakamaru power scheme. State houses are laid out in curving streets of such beauty it is hard to believe now, in an age of geometrical subdivisions, how government planners could have been so derided. A little further on lies the village centre, with its store, café, takeaway, garage — everything a modern society needs.

  The turnoff to Titiraupenga lies along the modern road the hydro workers built between Whakamaru and Mangakino. The mountain rises at the edge of the Pureora Forest Park, where fifteen years after it gave refuge to George Wilder protesters took to the treetops to save the ancient rainforest — podocarps which sheltered the rare northern kokako among other species. Unusually, they won. Trampers, mountain bikers and guided tours follow George’s tracks now.

  From the north the mountain looks like a child’s sandcastle, sloping sides, flat top with a perfect cone sitting on it. Its reputation is more severe. Its points and planes glower over the land. Shadows lie across valleys and ravines, giving it a ravaged look.

  The road leading towards it, Sandel Road, is a pleasant, storybook sort of road, not quite wide enough for a centre line, but tarsealed for much of its length and running through farmland and the remains of plantations until it ends quite suddenly and becomes the gravel Bush Road, the name hinting at what the country must once have been like up here.

  The landscape changes at about the same time and starts to show its volcanic bones. Little bluffs, odd bumps and turrets begin poking out of the paddocks. The road ends in private property now.

  Huiarau Stream flows through it. Frankly, it doesn’t look much. It’s early spring now. Perhaps the stream is quieter, but its banks show no sign of it running rampant.

  George was said to have leapt into a raging torrent and swum to safety, but now, even at his age, he could wade across without getting his shorts wet. Sharp cliffs, gorge-like, show where the stream was in its heyday.

  Farmers around here evidently take the view that any tree not a pine is taking up good grass space.

  Valley Road, home to the farmhouses George broke into, is nowhere to be found.

  I go down to Mangakino, a town of charming cottages where power-scheme workers once lived, now painted pink and yellow and pale blue and green, with verandas and trellises and flowers, the kind of place where people stop what they’re doing and peer at your passing.

  The town centre accommodates a big tavern, which locals boast has the first and largest island bar in the country. They might have mentioned something more important: it was one of two towns designed by the famed émigré, modernist architect and town planner Ernst Plischke, making the town truly unique. The other town was Kaingaroa.

  Mangakino has a café and store, and a real estate office where I pop in to ask about people with long memories. A nice woman there points me towards Robert Dwane, said to know a lot about the place.

  Robert tells me his father lived in the town before him. Robert, though, was away during the George Wilder affair, returning a little while after and staying there ever since. But he remembers a lot, confirming the newspaper stories, and he says I couldn’t find Valley Road because it is now McDonald Road and he knows of no one from Wilder’s era still living there.

  We stray from the subject. He tells me about his hair. He is seventy-two and it is still pure auburn without a trace of grey. Somehow, without any chemical help, he has reversed the ageing process. His hair was pure white until he got married. Then it took on its present hue, a pure, unflecked, dusky Titian. Unbelievable — but then, so is George.

  I surreptitiously question his wife, Gwen. It is true, she says. If she ever discovers his secret, she’ll patent it.

  Somehow, this seems to fit. The town looks topsy-turvy, as if anything can happen here, and probably has. It exists in a bubble of its own. George could sneak in tomorrow and feel at home. Some, quite a few possibly, would recognise him immediately. Hello George. How’ve you been?

  George’s next escape lasted almost six months: 172 days. He was serving six and a half years for burglary, shop-breaking, theft and, of course, escaping.

  In the early hours of 30 January 1963, prison officer R.H. Grubb was knocked unconscious as he was checking cells in the east-wing basement of Mount Eden prison, then bound and gagged. Grim Victorian piles evidently did not suit George at all well and this one was worse than New Plymouth. Thirty-six people had been executed there, latterly on a scaffold known as ‘the meccano’, its steel pieces bolted together in a thin space resembling a rocky gorge. The last was Walter Bolton, also the last person to be executed in New Zealand: the hanging in 1957 is said to have been botched so he was effectively strangled to death. That was only six years before George and his three companions, all of them seasoned prison escapees, made their break. No modern notions permeated the grey walls of ‘The Rock’: it was designed to intimidate. Its gaunt walls still rise above the motorway like a spectre. The prison might have cowed its inmates, but it also gave them a strong incentive to depart.

  George and the others went over the wall on a rope made of sheets, of course: next to letting down their hair, which would have made it a short journey, sheets were the traditional way to immortality. The record is currently held by one Ahmad Shelton who, while awaiting trial in a Los Angeles jail, rappelled fourteen storeys down a rope made of sixty bedsheets, calling the Los Angeles Times to boast about the feat even before his escape was announced.

  Two shots were fired at the Mount Eden desperadoes, one when a small green car failed to stop. Police warned that one of the escapees, Frank Matich, could be dangerous when cornered.

  A prison officer told newspapers that Wilder must have worked all night, using a hacksaw to cut away steel facing around the architrave of his cell door then patiently chipping through the wood around the lock with either a chisel or a steel knife. Clearly the New Zealand prison system gave him every reason to rehabilitate himself in society, if a little ahead of his time.

  The prison’s forensic description of the escape continued. George nailed a twenty-five-centimetre length of leather belt into the wood above the lock and used it as a lever for his knife or chisel. As soon as he got the cell door open he used an ‘improvised key’ to free the other three.

  They ambushed Prison Officer Grubb, knocked him out, bound him with lengths of towelling and a leather belt, took his keys and opened the heavy wooden door to the detention block. They locked that door behind them and used a hacksaw to cut a padlock on the door leading to the exercise yard. Obviously they weren’t short of tools. They dragged poor Officer Grubb into a lavatory in the exercise yard beside
the prison wall.

  ‘Standing on each others’ shoulders’, they threw the rope of sheets through the light steel mesh covering the top of the yard, forced a hole through it, climbed six metres up the sheets, through the hole and down a lesser drop on the other side.

  When Prison Officer Grubb (who was later treated and discharged) failed to make his next routine phone call to the officer in charge, the break was discovered. The hunt began.

  George was described as 1.8 metres tall, of sallow complexion, with fair hair, grey eyes and scars on both knees.

  The scars were of no use, of course, for George seems never to have worn shorts, and the description was pretty useless too. All photographs of George show him with dark hair.

  The New Zealand Herald published several pictures of him, all different, all looking little like the photographs taken after his arrest. The newspaper suggested he might be hard to identify. His face in the later photographs seems to be made up of triangles: his nose, his ears, his countenance itself the face of a pixie rather than a gnome, always a hint of humour; heavy eyebrows; big, sharp eyes wide-spaced; anxious lines etched into his forehead beneath a mop of dark hair. Not a face you’d be scared of, more someone you used to know.

  The four disappeared into the blue. The green car proved a false lead, as did a launch missing from its Hobson Bay mooring. The sure and certain sightings of George began, lots of them, many putting George in several different places at the same time.

  A citizen was waiting in his car on Ponsonby Road when two men came along, spotted the car and its driver, put hands to their faces, muttered, ‘We’d better get out of here,’ turned around and headed off in the opposite direction. The man had time to observe that one of them was Wilder, ‘beyond a doubt’. The other was said to be Rueben Awa, another of the escapees.

  Obviously Ponsonby Road was different then. In today’s eclectic crowd the pair would never be noticed.