Criticism of station managers is unfair

The criticism of Hunter Valley Station’s public access is illinformed and uninformed, writes Mike Hunter.

YOUR editorial (ODT 26.7.18) cannot be allowed to go unchallenged. For years your columns have been full of illinformed or uninformed commentary on the character and ‘‘attitude’’ of Taff and Pene Cochrane, the previous lessees and now managers of Hunter Valley Station, and you have systematically failed to investigate and report the salient facts which impact markedly on the access situation there.

Such denigration of a very kind and generous couple, and their family, has to stop.

I am the first to applaud efforts to allow public access to New Zealand high country, but it requires fair dealings from the Government and public bodies.

Ever since Taff’s father Cliff , his wife Mary and two of their sons took up the lease in the 1970s, they have been up against a long litany of disingenuity, breaking of promises and shifting of goalposts by a succession of government departments and local bodies (whose bureaucrats kept changing and conveniently forgetting the agreements of the past), culminating in prolonged court action in which the Cochranes eventually won a sort of pyrrhic victory, but at huge financial and personal cost.

They have also had to contend with an increasingly demanding public, a small minority of whom have made things really difficult for them. Kidds Bush camping ground, originally on station land, was for years not properly tended by Doc, despite permission being given for its use as a public facility, and has had major problems with lack of rubbish removal, overcrowding , inadequate toilets, poor supervision of behaviour and the presence of significant numbers of dogs, which are not permitted on the station for good reason.

In the late 1970s, the lambs coming off Hunter Valley Station suffered a rejection rate at the freezing works of around 30% because of taenia ovis or sheep measles (a tapeworm carried by dogs), yet the station was spending hundreds of dollars every six weeks to have all the working dogs dosed.

It was a mystery until Cliff flew up to the head of the lake with one of the Doc rangers in a plane and they counted over 60 dogs in the valley and on boats in the upper parts of the lake.

In the 40 or more years I have been visiting Hunter Valley, the only people I have seen turned away from travelling up the road, have been those in entirely unsuitable vehicles. I know hundreds of people who have been readily granted permission over the years, and there are literally thousands who pass up and down that track every year. I talk to a lot of people around Otago, and I have never heard one word of complaint about being denied access. And what a road it is. It is one of the more challenging farm tracks that I know, and very hard on vehicles. Any comparison with roads into Aspiring Station or Birchwood Station in the Ahuriri is completely disingenuous; both are virtually flat, wide river valleys with public roads (maintained mostly by public bodies). There is no public road on Hunter Valley. The farm track clings to a very steep valley side in many places and crosses a few very makeshift bridges, but has to ford all the major streams and rivers. This is not a trivial matter.

On countless occasions when word has got down to the homestead that someone is stuck, broken down or injured, it has been Taff or one of the boys who has gone to pull them out, a journey sometimes of several hours on a tractor.

The track is subject to washouts and damage. Running a bulldozer up the track costs the station tens of thousands of dollars, none of which is contributed to by those allowed free passage over it, the government, its agencies, or local bodies.

The crowning insult in your editorial, however, is the dismissive line about ‘‘excuses on health and safety grounds’’ which demonstrates just how out of touch you are about the seriousness of the liability. As the Berryman bridge collapse saga of the early 2000s demonstrated, the lessee could well be held entirely accountable for lack of maintenance or any failing of a bridge or other structure should a member of the public come to grief on what is a pretty precarious private road.

There is no way the station could afford to put in a road that would meet current engineering standards for allowing open access to all comers. Had the government or its agencies replaced the road they submerged with the raising of the lake in the 1960s, this might have been quite a different discussion. There may indeed have been a golden opportunity missed with the recent sale of this lease to put public access on a better footing. But it requires that the cost is fairly borne, and the issues of risk and liability, as well as rescue of those who come to grief in difficult terrain, properly sorted.

Both in regard to Mead Road and the onward continuation of the track into the valley, both the QLDC and the Government have been content to allow its legal status to remain unresolved, and allowed the Cochrane family to be pilloried for being allegedly obstructive while carrying all the risk and virtually all of the cost. I am amazed they have been as generous in allowing the access that they have. They deserve better.