Steve Braunias reviews Fire & Ice by Hazel Phillips for ReadingRoom:
‘The main image on this page — above, spread out happily across the screen — is from the constantly fascinating illustrated book Fire & Ice: Secrets, histories, treasures and mysteries of Tongariro National Park by Hazel Phillips and is surely, surely, the best photo ever taken in New Zealand of post-colonial leisure in paradise, at once supremely happy and inevitably troubling, a 1960s ideal of the governing race at play, a portrait of Little Rhodesia, consenting adults without children enjoying themselves tremendously in the bright light of the South Pacific and achieving the seemingly impossible feat of stripping off and wearing sexy patterned bikinis in a sulphuric lake in the freezing show. The only photo I know that comes near its classic depiction of the Good Life for white people is the cover of the 1973 album Shaun at Wairakei Vol 2: the lascivious middle classes lounge poolside in bikinis and psychedelic shirts at the Tourist Hotel Corporation luxury resort in Wairakei. The LP cover carries a heavy suggestion of illicit affairs, of Brut, of what kind of man reads Playboy. The picture from Fire & Ice is less sexualised, from a more innocent and more explicitly apartheid age; it was taken in 1962, at Ruapehu’s Crater Lake. Hazel Phillips, the book’s author, positions the photo right at very front, and writes in the Introduction, “I became obsessed with Ruapehu about a decade ago when I [first] saw the photo.” Her book investigates European representations of tourism, and European narratives of approaching the mountain as something to be conquered, but she goes way beyond either of these narrow subjects. “The volcanic mountains of the central plateau have gripped me and held me tight,” she writes. “This is the story of how Ruapehu and Tongariro took possession of my mind.”
There are too few good books and too little good writing about the central plateau. You would not think so. The mountains claim the middle of the North Island, citadels in a white kingdom, beautiful and dangerous. John Mulgan chose the adjacent-ish Kaimanawa Mountains as the setting for the best pages in his 1932 classic novel Man Alone, sending his brooding protagonist to take refuge in its wilderness after killing his farm boss. But no other great work of fiction comes to mind that climbs or goes even anywhere near Ruapehu and Tongariro. Hazel Phillips includes a bibliography of nonfiction books on the plateau in the end pages of Fire & Ice; it’s an interesting but rather motley collection which includes a forgotten classic, the appealingly titled 1960 memoir Susan in Springtime. Its author was Susan Graham, a survivor of the famous 1931 Stanton search, when a party of university students were lost in a blizzard on Ruapehu. Phillips devotes a chapter to the search. She writes that survivors were given hot drinks and food, then stripped and rubbed down with whiskey to warm them up: “I am reliably informed that stripping someone and rubbing their naked body with whiskey is no longer accepted search and rescue practice.”
There are a lot of dead people in Fire & Ice. They include 18-year-old Auckland University law student Warwick Stanton. He did not survive the 1931 search named after him. His body was found on the banks of the upper Makatote River. Phillips’ account of that tragedy is deeply felt; her book often reads as a beautiful and moving record of death on the mountain.
Even the gorgeous Crater Lake, as immortalised in that amazing 1962 photo at the top of this review and which “obsessed” Philips, has been the cause of death. At 10:24pm on Christmas Eve 1953, 151 people lost their lives after a flood from the Crater Lake collapsed a railway bridge beneath an express passenger train at Tangiwai. The tragedy has inspired numerous literary responses such as Laurence Fearnley’s novel The Hut Builder, and Anthony McCarten’s play Cyril Ellis, Where Are You, named after the young man who acted heroically to save the lives of passengers. Phillips only devotes a few paragraphs to the disaster in Fire & Ice; her attention is diverted in the rest of that chapter to other aspects and other, primarily geological stories of the Crater Lake. It’s an interesting editorial decision and I think it’s a good one. A different kind of writer, eg a hack greedy for content, would have mined it. Phillips is neither a hack nor a content tourist. She writes seriously, scientifically, sometimes jovially, and her book stays close to the mountain at all times, on it and inside it, in a very physical and emotional sense.’
Read the rest of the review here.
