On a magical family road trip in the 1980s, we spent a week travelling across Molesworth Station at the top of the South Island. With all our camping gear, including leaky blow-up mattresses and even leakier tents, food and extra petrol loaded into the boot and crammed with my two siblings across the back seat of our family’s old Triumph, we drank in the high-country’s vast and majestic landscapes, camped beside snow-fed mountain streams, had close encounters with cheeky kea trying to eat the rubber seals off the windshield and even got to stay a couple of nights in the station’s shearer’s quarters, being fed by the station cook while stock hand, Kirsty, let us ride her pony round the homestead’s cattle yards.
It was absolute heaven for three horse-mad sisters who grew up ‘mustering’ the 12 sheep we had on our little Waiheke farm block on highly uncooperative ponies.
The idyllic trip across a working high-country cattle station was probably among the top highlights of our childhood and is still remembered with longing and nostalgia.
Known formally as the Rangitahi/Molesworth Recreation Reserve, it covers 180,000-hectares and is so vast, it runs from inland Blenheim all the way to Hamner Springs.
The station has another island connection. It was while Sandra Lee was Minister of Conservation that the vast block was, controversially, transferred from Landcorp to the Department of Conservation in 2003 as a recreational reserve with a mandate from then Prime Minister Helen Clarke for public access to increase. It was seen as a way to protect it from privatisation, ensure greater public access and allow greater conservation from pest species including rabbit and wilding pines which have been a recurring and growing problem during the station’s long history.
This publicly-owned recreational reserve is now administered by the Department of Conservation (DOC) while being run as a working beef farm, the most recent operators being Pāmu, the state-owned farmers, as a viable financial entity of its own, with all profits going back into Pāmu’s bank account.
However, the station’s future is now at a crossroads as Pāmu have not bid to continue their contract – although the group has said if DOC can’t find a suitable arrangement, it is open to discussing coming back.
There are five separate lease applications to take over the block and Molesworth’s former manager of more than 20 years, Jim Ward, confirmed to RNZ’s Nine-to Noon last week that he is involved in one of those proposals and would see it run as a not-for-profit with heritage status, remaining open to all New Zealanders to visit and without any foreign capital.
“This way,” he told Kathryn Ryan, “all of the money that is earned on the property will stay within its boundaries”.
It’s a plan that, in true kiwi style, began as idyll after-dinner musings one night on the back porch of the station’s homestead in Tarndale. Jim says a group of visitors, including Kerry Prendergast and Fran Wilde, were staying there after bidding on an overnight stay at as part of a fundraiser for Te Papa. He recalls listening in awe as the group tossed around ideas for the future of Molesworth. Discussing, discarding some, and then: “One of the ideas that came through was, ‘Why not turn it into a ‘not-for-profit?’.”
Jim says it stuck because it was one of those ideas that has been in the back of his own mind for a long time.
“We have over five million owners… It was always publicly owned and it is always part of New Zealand Inc, so this looked like a way to me to build something into the future that was there for all New Zealanders.”
Calling it ‘A station for the nation’, his plan is to turn the farm into a self-funded not-for-profit, backed by an investor who would take on the farming operations, and reinject money that would normally go on rents and rates into conservation, particularly getting on top of the ongoing issue of wilding pines – something he sees as one of the biggest threats to the land.
Jim says he knows the budgets, and knows what it can do.
“On a reasonable year, [turnover], that’s 2.1-2.2 million dollars gross and you can turn somewhere between $300,000 to $600,000 or $700,000 into profit.” He thinks it is realistic to expect at least half a million dollars to go back into maintaining the assets “at its current base” while expanding conservation efforts every year.
“Smarter minds than me put their heads to it, and I really ran with it – it’s something I thought would be a good future-proofing of a New Zealand Inc.”
Jim says the working farm would remain just as accessible to the public, if not more so, with the addition of more mountain bike trails and free camp sites while capturing the values of heritage and biodiversity.
“It’s always been about mum, dad and the kids. You can go in there with a tent and a fishing rod, a mountain bike, and you can enjoy what it has to offer.
“And it’s free.”
Having experienced the magic of Molesworth first hand, the thought of this vast and unique taonga being run as a charitable trust with meaningful conservation efforts ensuring the landscape will be preserved for generations to come seems like an idea we could all get behind.
• Merrie Hewetson
