Denis Wastney thinks back fondly to his time in the forestry service – an industry he dedicated much of his life to.
He was just 15 years old in 1957 when he left home to go to the Golden Downs Woodsman Training School.
“I can’t imagine a 15-year-old being taken 40-odd miles out of Nelson now, by 15 they’ve probably got motorbikes and cars and are probably going out every night, but in those days, we were taken way out into the bush and dropped off.”
He was one of 45 young men to begin the training that year, but four years later was one of only 16 who qualified as a skilled woodsman.
Entrants were usually just 15 or 16 years old, and spent the next three years learning forestry skills, two at Golden Downs before heading to Totara Flats on the West Coast to learn more about native species.
Over Easter weekend Denis had the chance to reconnect with some of those men at the reunion of the woodsman training school.
Reunion organiser Sally Quickfall says more than 150 people attended the dinner on Saturday night, spending time reconnecting and reminiscing of days gone by.
The weekend was packed with activities including heading back to where the Woodsman school once stood in theGolden Downs Forest and a visit to Tapawera – where the school moved to in 1982.
Denis, now 82, still remembers starting at the school in what he describes as the beginning of a physically and mentally tough career.
“It was hard life but an easy life, a lot of people can’t handle the isolation.
“It weeds the wheat from the chaff, it was quite a traumatic experience coming out of town. I wasn’t too bad because I was so used to working outside, I had part-time jobs after school in market gardens and been associated with forestry people all my life.”
Denis’ grandfather, father and uncles had all been in forestry, so he reckons he had a slight upper hand on some of the other young men.
During the first year at the school, he came home to visit just once.
A bus would run to town once a month on the weekend – heading back around 10pm once the final movie sitting had finished, other than that it was their own company and the outdoors that kept them going.
“You went in there knowing nothing about trees. Out there you were taught everything from land-clearing, planting, policing, silviculture work, pruning, thinning and logging.
“It was a dangerous operation,” Denis recalls.
“We didn’t have chainsaws, we had what they called an M tooth crosscut saw – one person on either side of the tree and you had to drag it each time. It would take 2-3 minutes to cut through the tree once an axe had been used to scarf the tree.
“They didn’t always fall the way we wanted them to go.”
He recalls having great fun setting the trees up like dominoes while on thinning duty.
We could cut the trees part-way through and then drop the last one and there’d be a whole crash and maybe a dozen or two dozen trees would come crashing down, we’d see how many we could get down in one go.
“You made your own entertainment up there. We had a lot of fun.”
After graduating Denis headed to Eyrewell forest in Canterbury where he stayed through two major wind throw events.
It was here that he met his wife – the daughter of the forest’s 2IC.
“My mate, who was my best man at the wedding, said ‘this family’s got a girl’, the old story happens and I asked her out and she said ‘yes’. We got married in 1965.”
Denis later headed up to the North Island, where forestry was booming, before eventually coming back to the Golden Downs in a management capacity in 1977 before taking over management of Hira Forest.
“I’d been there not very long when the fire broke out in 1981 – that was my big induction into fires.
“We had a very good crew at Hira, I can’t praise them enough, they had been working in Hira since they left school and they just wouldn’t go home.
“Three days later we basically had to force them off the hill, they weren’t going to let their forest burn.”
Denis retired from forestry when the Forestry Service disbanded in 1987.
He did a bit of work here and there before heading to Nepal to trek to Everest Base Camp. He says he never really found another job that filled his heart quite like forestry did.
“I treated the Forest Service like my second home, I was very upset when it disbanded.”
Denis says his best memory of his career is simply being in forestry and he looks forward to the next reunion.
