Gone Bush by Paul Kilgour

Gone Bush: A Life in the Backcountry and Beyond, is the remarkable memoir of a man who has spent a lifetime tramping in New Zealand and on the way bagged over 1200 tramping huts.

Paul Kilgour grew up on the family farm near Waimauku and, from a very young age, was given the freedom to wander far and wide into the scrub beyond the farm. On his wanderings, he ran into old folks, many of them Māori, living ‘off the grid” in little huts on Māori land (he thinks it was probably seeing such whare where his fascination with huts came from). It was also a time in New Zealand when there were still swaggers around. As a five-year-old, he would sneak out of his room at night and head to their camp under the trees and listen to their tall tales.

When he was twenty, he had his first tramping club experience in the South Island backcountry. He bagged his first hut the following night and over the next fifty years went on to bag 1208 huts, an incredible feat! If a hut was in a particularly remote or obscure place, he was always especially keen to see it.

But for Paul Kilgour, it was never about the number of huts he had stayed in. By his own admission, he is not competitive by nature. Rather, it was about the pleasure of walking in isolated places and being alone in the bush.  

‘For me, the bush is the place where nothing else seems to matter, and being there is everything. The air is clean, the world is quiet, time stops.’

Paul Kilgour has had a varied working life which has included a spell in the air force, managing a YHA hostel at Aoraki/Mt Cook, being a DOC hut warden, and driving a tourist bus. And he lived in a commune for eleven years. He also recounts his intrepid journeys to Nepal, Antarctica, Alaska, Australia, and the Subantarctic Islands.

But the major part of his book is devoted to his fifty years of tramping around New Zealand, the longest of which was his epic tramp in 2010 from deepest Fiordland to his home in Golden Bay, which is the length of the South Island!

In these tramping tales, he transports us to isolated places and tells of challenges faced and overcome. His lyrical descriptions of our stunning landscape are riveting. And there are many captivating anecdotes about his tramping companions as well as the characters he met along the way.

After five decades of wandering around New Zealand, he felt the need to give back and has dedicated himself to conservation projects, especially predator control. He is also an enthusiastic member of Permolat, a community group of volunteers that take the time to restore and preserve rundown huts so other avid trampers can use them.

Aged 70 years now, the unstoppable Paul Kilgour has been temporarily laid low with a knee injury, but he is already planning more backcountry trips he wants to do (although slower now and with walking poles).

Paul Kilgour is a legend! He is not only an intrepid tramper but a humble man with a big heart for conservation. I found his story completely engrossing from the beginning to the end. A great summer read!

Reviewer: Lyn Potter

HarperCollins