By the 1930’s the deer population in New Zealand was out of control and causing serious environmental damage through grazing, severe soil erosion and slips from the thousands of hooves ripping up the ground. Even today you can find deer trails several feet deep crossing major passes.
Listen to Episode 1: The Last Great Adventure
Photo: Supplied Paul Roy
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The Department of Internal Affairs creates an ambitious program to drastically reduce the deer population, run by World War I veteran Captain George Yerex, aka “The Skipper”. The programme hires men, mostly experienced shooters, as cullers. Their job is simple; to kill as many deer as possible, leaving the bodies where they fall and cutting off the tails as proof of kill.
Photo: Supplied by Paul Roy
There are no huts. Cullers stay in tent camps or rock bivouacs, spending up to nine months at a time in the field, often without seeing another person.
This is some of the toughest, most remote country in New Zealand. The men are working above the bush line in snow and ice, fording dangerous rivers and negotiating ravines. With no radio communications, they have to be totally self-sufficient.
Photo: Supplied by Paul Roy
The job attracts a mixture of applicants. Some are experienced bushmen but others are enthusiastic teenagers and overseas immigrants with no idea of New Zealand’s harsh, mountain conditions. All of them are thrown in at the deep end with very mixed results.
Follow Deer Wars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can hear it on Sunday mornings after 7am on RNZ National from Sunday 22 October.
Written and presented by Paul Roy.
Sound engineer - Alex Harmer.
Additional sound engineering - Jeremy Ansell and William Saunders.
Executive producers - Katy Gosset, Justin Gregory and Tim Watkin.
Deer Wars is made with the support of a Ngā Kōrero Tuku Iho, Piki Ake! Kake Ake! New Zealand Oral History Grant from Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage to Iguana Productions.