Wild Journeys

by Bruce Ansley

  Half an hour later ‘an Islander’ complained that two men had attacked him and stolen his car on Ponsonby Road. Police were looking for a 1954 green Ford Zephyr.

  The escapees shared the front page with the Queen, who wrapped herself in furs and boarded an airliner with the Duke of Edinburgh, bound for Fiji at the start of her Royal Tour of Australia and New Zealand, an event which later was to eclipse even George.

  On 2 February, the same day that gales across the Pacific forced the Queen and Duke back to Canada, Rueben Awa walked into a Newmarket butcher’s shop ‘famished and unkempt’ and said he wanted to give himself up.

  He chose well. The butcher, a Mr N. Stratton, bought him a couple of bread rolls from the baker next door. The candlestick maker was not needed that day.

  A couple of days later Frank Matich was recaptured in scrub at Whata Whata in the Waikato, ‘hungry, barefoot and exhausted’, but still defiant and ‘prepared to fight’ — until police dog Jon dissuaded him.

  Now the royal visit was depleting the searchers’ ranks as police concentrated on escort duties. The Queen knocked everything else off the front page. ‘Fresh and cool as a summer breeze,’ she was said to be, unlike George on the run. A ‘triumphant tour’ trumped the mad escape.

  Until: drama in the Hunua Ranges. Near the little town of Kaiaua the fourth escapee, Patrick Wiwarena, was surprised on the road by two pig-hunters, who offered him a lift (of course). Another man with him dived off the road and down a steep bank. Police believed the diver was George. Several baches between Kawakawa and Kaiaua had been burgled in the previous few days, and food taken. Police were fair about that: they weren’t sure the two escapees were responsible, they said.

  Then, as a gale prevented the Royal Yacht Britannia from entering Wellington Harbour, police dog Duke gashed a leg climbing through a barbed-wire fence on the Wilder hunt. This was a quandary. Police dogs weren’t as newsworthy as the Queen, but they weren’t far behind. A disabled girl crawling on hands and knees to see the Duke carried the day for the royals.

  As the royal couple left New Zealand, a crowd of 5000 roaring goodbye, Wiwarena was recaptured at a bach between Lake Rotoehu and Lake Rotoma. It was not much more than a kilometre from search headquarters. He appeared in court with a black eye and his right arm in a sling. Police said he had injured himself eluding pursuers.

  Pine forests now darken the land here, but bush still forms a tunnel as you drive from Lake Rotoiti to Rotoehu. Rotoma has more baches, many of them appearing more than fifty years old. Perhaps George looked them over. A beautiful, still place, very quiet, and I would have thought he’d have been exposed here.

  I take a curly side road to the shadowed valleys on the northern side of Rotoehu. Secluded, with many classic Kiwi baches — pale green, the further back from the lake the older, waterfront property being a more recent maxim of real estate. The place would have suited George, I think.

  Police next focused their search on Murupara, where police believed he and Wiwarena had arranged to meet. I go there.

  Road workers are rebuilding the bypass, and I wonder why the town needs one. Surely there couldn’t be great numbers of cars heading for the Ureweras, probably the wildest road in the country? Besides, Murupara never seemed prosperous enough to lose its through traffic. A roadman gestures furiously at the ground as I drive through. Slow down? Stop? Then why the bypass? Perhaps I’m being blamed for Murupara’s woes.

  This was Wilder country in the 1960s: remote, sparsely populated, a wild expanse of New Zealand sweeping into the all-but-impenetrable Ureweras.

  Yet the police soon lost interest in the town. A car was stolen from Kawerau and later found at Whakatane. Nothing to connect the theft with Wilder, but it was their only fresh clue. They cast about. They searched on the Coromandel after a report that a horse-float driver may have picked him up and dropped him near Paeroa. Another sighting placed him back at Lake Rotoma.

  A bach-owner found her door jammed, and upon pushing it open, saw a man standing inside. In her fright she fell, hurting her arm. Police were ‘almost certain’ it was George.

  By the end of February, George had disappeared altogether.

  Frank Matich had another crack at freedom, trying to hacksaw his way out of his cell again. He made too much noise and was nabbed. George was better at it. Hacksaws seemed to be freely available in New Zealand jails then.

  Around 10 April, when George had been at large for more than three months, police reported a positive sighting — in the Waitakeres. A car reported missing in Gisborne had passed a police patrol car on Scenic Drive near Swanson. Police gave chase. The car pulled up. A man hopped out. Wilder. Police were certain. They said he looked slim and was shaven. He dived into nearby bush (George always ‘dived’).

  Police dog Duke gave chase, lost him. They found an apple core, so fresh ‘it hadn’t turned brown’. Had George stopped for a bite?

  Then a man who had been seen looking into the garage of a Titirangi resident was tracked by police dogs until they lost his scent in a creek.

  Over eight days, thirty police checked more than 400 houses in Karekare, Piha and all the way up to Anawhata. Whoops! A man looking Wilder-like bought milk and doughnuts from a Jervois Road dairy back in Herne Bay. A constable gave chase but the man ran into Shelly Beach Road and disappeared.

  After a taxi driver saw a man dive (of course) into bush, police dog Duke was on the case again. He tracked down a fourteen-year-old boy.

  Four months after the escape Mr Justice Gresson gave Matich and Wiwarena ‘an exemplary sentence which will demonstrate the futility of these escapes, and perhaps help strip them of the false sentimentality and even glamour with which they are sometimes imbued by foolish and irresponsible persons’.

  Ah, too late. Sentimentality and glamour were limpet-like on George. People were humming along to the Howard Morrison Quartet’s ‘George, the Wild(er) N.Z. Boy’. It was sung to the tune of ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’, the traditional ballad which had the same outcome in both Australian and Irish versions: romantic Robin Hood bushranger hunted down and shot dead.

  However, George was still very much alive, somewhere, for he’d vanished again.

  At the end of May, newspapers reported that he had been at large for four months. The New Zealand Herald ran a photograph of him. It looked vaguely like George. ‘He could be anywhere,’ the newspaper said, wisely. He was reported to possess a good knowledge of bush craft — ‘but that did not mean he was sitting around in the bush’.

  By then, he probably was.

  In his absence, we had other things to read about. Gordon Cooper, the US astronaut, was rocketing around Earth in his space capsule, setting a new endurance record. The bodies of Dr Gilbert Boyle and Mrs Margaret Chandler were found on the banks of a Sydney waterway, cause of death unknown. The Profumo affair was in full light. A rise in Golden Kiwi prize money was front-page news.

  That June, Wiwarena escaped from Mount Eden a third time.

  In July a National Airways Corporation DC3 crashed in the Kaimai Ranges killing all twenty-three aboard. Aucklanders were outraged by the proposed purchase of a Barbara Hepworth sculpture, Torso II, for 950 guineas, which, in terms of its current value, was next to nothing. City councillor Tom Pearce compared the sculpture with ‘the buttock of a dead cow’. It was eventually bought by businessman George Wooller and donated to the art gallery.

  On 16 July Wiwarena was recaptured not far from Tokaanu. He was said to be ‘well-dressed, well-fed and clean-shaven’.

  A day later, George Wilder was caught near his old haunt, Taupo. He was recaptured at 11 p.m. on a cold, showery night, almost exactly a year after his first escape ended at Mangakino.

  He had last been seen on 9 April, when he abandoned the stolen car near Swanson; at least, police thought it was George. For more than three months, he’d vanished. The most common newspaper story had been along the lines of ‘nothing to report’.

  He’d disappeared into the blue and that was his
most remarkable feat. New Zealand was a much smaller country in the 1960s. We were a nosier place. Everyone knew not only their neighbour’s business, but the comings, goings, attitudes, ages, incomes, sports, politics, marital states and IQs of their entire suburb.

  You didn’t get someone like George, bad photographs or not, wandering about without anyone noticing, especially when any poll (had there been one) would have shown that three quarters of the nation wanted to clap him on the back and the others to dob him in, without any ‘don’t knows’.

  In the end he was nailed by — a bird. Well, the combination of a bird and a concerned citizen. A ranger, Don Main, employed by what, in those pre-Department of Conservation days, was the Department of Internal Affairs, knew that someone had been killing kereru, native pigeons, in an area called Runanga. It lay beside the Napier highway, about fifty kilometres from Taupo. Up to then it was noted only for the Runanga stockade, built like a Maori pa, one of a chain of small fortresses thrown up by Pakeha troopers in 1869–70 against Te Kooti’s dwindling forces, and abandoned in 1876. After that the area was given over to farming and logging.

  Main inspected a rough old wooden hut, sagging, missing some of its weatherboards, evidently part of a defunct logging operation, but found no one there. (Wilder later said he saw the man approach and took to the bush until the coast was clear.) But he must have suspected something. Soon afterwards, at nine in the evening, he and three policemen, one of them his brother Brian, left Taupo. It was a cold, wet night. They turned off the Napier–Taupo highway a few kilometres south of Rangitaiki onto a rough pumice road leading to bush on the foothills of the Ahimanawa Range and sneaked along the track.

  ‘We could see a light inside,’ Main told reporters. ‘Fortunately I know the track well and we were able to reach the hut without tripping over anything.’

  As Brian Main described it later, they kicked down the door and charged into the hut. They found George inside, dozing beside a fire, a couple of candles burning on a shelf over the fireplace, his radio playing soft music.

  In this romantic setting George must have been feeling warm and comfortable, his usual instincts snoozing with him, his sixth sense put away for the night. In Ranger Main’s account, ‘He tried to get up at first, but then he realised he was properly caught and he just lay there. He was sullen after his arrest, and did not have much to say.’

  George’s wildest journey had come to an end. The handcuffs went on 172 days after he escaped, the longest New Zealand escape on record, beating Trevor Nash’s 158 days from two years before.

  The officer in charge, Sergeant Marson of Taupo, said that George was in very good physical condition but uncommunicative. He offered no resistance. He denied being George Wilder at first but Marson knew him from his recapture at Mangakino.

  He had three loaded rifles and a dozen rounds of ammunition with him. He had apparently been living in the hut for some time, trapping possums, living off the land, using the rifles to get his dinners, maybe the kereru which led to his downfall.

  Compare his arrest with the twenty-first century version. Wilder was known to be armed. In a modern version, the Armed Offenders’ Squad would go in with body armour and assault weapons and dogs and a helicopter or two. Here, a trio of cops and a wildlife ranger tiptoed up a bush track in the dark and rushed in, no shots fired, fair’s fair, everything’s jake, a testimonial from the arresting officers, Sergeant Marston declaring there was nothing sinister about Wilder’s weapons and Constable Main averring that he wasn’t a violent person.

  That was more than half a century ago but worlds away, and now I am traipsing through the events — and the deeper into it I go, the more I am immersed in its essential decency.

  Did I have the sense of following in his footsteps? Nah. He trod too lightly, too easily.

  So I go to Rangitaiki. The road passes Opepe, another of the stockades built during the Te Kooti campaign, where on 7 June 1869 some of Te Kooti’s force surprised a detachment of fourteen Bay of Plenty militia camped in the abandoned village. Nine militia men were killed, but no Maori. I walk up through damp bush to their graves, heavy, cold, wet, even in summer.

  The sky lowers over the landscape and it begins to rain. The road tracks through arid pine forests that would not have kept George in kereru for very long. In fact, it doesn’t look the kind of place where anyone would worry about pigeons now. Is there any country more depressing than a place where pines have been? A formless landscape, without landmarks, and I am lost in it. No sign of anything that once was, and especially no trace of George.

  I follow this track and that, to the place where I calculate, or guess, George had been caught, but the land has been turned over. The old mill has long gone and George’s hut was already falling down when he was found in it. I float around in this modern wilderness and come to an oasis: the Rangitaiki Tavern, ‘home of the famous bugger burger’.

  A bloke there remembers George being caught ‘on one of the blocks up the road’. Lots of bush mills were working then, all gone now. He has a sharper memory of coming home over a bridge after a session and, bugger, there was a roadblock on the other side and he was bound to be snapped. But the police just looked inside the car and waved him through. They were looking for George. George had saved his bacon.

  It is 7.30 a.m. I sit in a long room with the TV on the wall going, eating poached eggs on big square pieces of white-bread toast with thick bacon. The cook tells me he’d thought George was OK. He remembers the Howard Morrison song and looks as if he might break out a line or two.

  I put my dishes on the counter. ‘Thanks, boss,’ he says.

  George escaped from jail once more, for a only a few hours, but this seems the place to end the quest, except for some postscripts. For a start, how did George survive so well for so long within easy reach of Taupo? Someone must have known he was there, someone must have given him a hand.

  Someone did.

  I encounter a woman I once worked with in Christchurch, June Peka. She spent her childhood in Taupo. Here is what she told me:

  I was eleven, I reckon. We lived in Taupo. I had a horse and all the freedom in the world.

  We were quite feral. We didn’t get into trouble but we weren’t overseen much.

  I was riding my horse in the bush when I found this beautiful, shiny black Buick. I was mad about cars so I was sure of it. Flash cars like that were few and far between. Later I saw George had a liking for Buicks and Jaguars and I know this one was a Buick. I think it might have been owned by Henry Johnson, who had a milk bar/restaurant in Taupo. Mum and Dad had the pie shop, the Cindy Lou restaurant and later the Le Mans hamburger bar.

  I rode my horse up to it, and there was a bloke sleeping in the front seat. I thought he’d been injured and he needed help. I rode home and got Dad.

  We went back in his old Fordson van. We parked it and had to walk into the bush a few hundred yards. Dad told me to stay back.

  He opened the door, and the bloke woke up, and they talked for half an hour or so.

  I didn’t know who he was. But I think that was how George and Dad met. Dad was a bit of a wide boy; he was on the fringes, but he was never involved in anything seriously criminal.

  Later, after George had been caught and was in jail, he made contact with Dad again. Dad was a cook up at The Terraces hotel out of Taupo. He told me about meeting up with George again after he escaped. He took a waitress called Luvvie with him.

  George was hiding in a hut, a cabin way up in the bush. It was pretty bare, just somewhere to sleep in. On the walls he’d drawn light switches, a calendar, he’d even drawn a light hanging from the ceiling. It was very realistic.

  Dad was taking out food from the Terraces for some time. He must have given George my mother’s rifle.

  My mother’s name was Ngaire, my father’s Sonny. We were a shooting family.

  The cops gave it back to us. They said they found it when they caught George.

  It has words carved into the stock. Th
ey’re quite faint: ‘George Wilder.’ I never really examined it, but now, I can see, faintly, underneath, ‘ C/- Sonny.’ Dad almost definitely would have given it to him. He went out there to the hut quite a lot.

  I still have the rifle. I’ve never used it since. I put the bolt away many years ago. It’s lost now, so it can’t be fired.

  My brother and I always wondered why Dad didn’t get into trouble. They wouldn’t have been surprised to know Dad was involved.

  I remember Brian Main too. I was in awe of him. He threatened to kick my arse once or twice.

  I probably went up to the hut where he was caught, but I can’t remember it. Taupo was the wild west in those days. We lived in the bush, even in the town streets — we lived in Tamatea Avenue — and half the houses were holiday houses. Most were batten and board baches or two Ministry of Works huts joined. Most you couldn’t see from the road. You’d follow a track and there’d be a holiday house at the end of it. George would have had no trouble getting into them. Some weren’t even locked. At others the key would be under the mat.

  My friend Raymond and I did things like that and we were only kids. No one would be there for six months, or a year, and they were very easy to get into in those days. We didn’t vandalise them, but we’d quite often get into those places, cook up some rice, make some cocoa.

  I think everyone thought George was harmless. He was certainly not someone you’d be afraid of.

  I remember the talk around town, people saying George was out there searching with the buggers last night, it was raining like hell, everyone had parkas on and George was with them with a big grin on his face hunting for himself.

  That’s another story for the George Wilder file, and here’s one more. George is said to have had his hair cut by a well-known Taupo barber. He had no money, so the two made a deal: George would pay for his haircut with the skins of animals he’d shot.

  Brian Main later went much further. By his own account he got George a job at Poronui Station, now a glamorous sporting lodge in the Taharua Valley, south-west of Taupo: ‘He was a bloody good worker, did earthworks, built bridges, did anything and enjoyed it. He was just a young fella sowing his oats.’