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| With Mike at his home in Barrytown on the West Coast 2011. |
Mike Bennett
11.01.1935 - 20.02.2015
It was at the Deercullers' reunion over the weekend that I heard of the passing of Mike Bennett. Although he hadn't been well for awhile it was a shock to hear this sad news. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to meet and hear Mike recounting the good old days, his storytelling always delivered in a rich well spoken English voice, sometimes appearing quite gruff in character but always a gentleman and a very articulate and skilled raconteur.
I phoned him from time to time to see how he was and he always had time to talk and always bemoaned some local council or government policy and was always in the middle of some dispute with both, writing letters and sometimes he would e mail me these to read, saying something like, 'look what these bastards are up to now!'
I phoned him from time to time to see how he was and he always had time to talk and always bemoaned some local council or government policy and was always in the middle of some dispute with both, writing letters and sometimes he would e mail me these to read, saying something like, 'look what these bastards are up to now!'
His book The Venison Hunters published 1979 was made into a film of the same name, and the link at the bottom of the post will take you the website which also has his wonderful film where he plays the legendary Westcoast icon Arawata Bill.
The following is a combination of the meeting at Barrytown and recorded phone conversation from 2011. All told in Mike's voice...
I used Vic (Erceg) in a film called Alpine Airways. I
was the director and we were a bit short of people, we went up the Dart and we
were pretending to be deer cullers. We crashed across the creek and did a few
things and we had a little tent camp way up on the ridge flat. Vic and I we
were mates years ago you lose touch with people you know.
And George, I remember him.
He was a lovely man.
I played Arawata Bill in Denis Glover’s
sequence of poems set to film and we had to cart a bloody DOC officer around
with us because we were in the wilderness zone but let's not get into that, my
blood pressure goes up.
I’ve been on the coast for thirty years and
I’ve lived in Barrytown for twenty.
I knew Frank reasonably well; we kept bumping
into each other. I always remember him, I’m not sure if he was best man or
groomsman (Frank was groomsman and Rod Rudolf was best man) at Doug Jones
wedding and he had bare feet and Doug’s rather posh wedding turned out to be a
deer shooters party – so you said you’ve been talking to Doug.
I didn’t shoot with Frank but we were deer
cullers together – not together on the same block – he was around Makarora and
he poached into the head of the Te Naihi.
He probably didn’t discover -
but he certainly used Newlands Pass, a very difficult pass at the head of
Newland and under the flanks of Mount Alba. It’s a series of very step terraces
and a bit like the OLeary Pass at the head of the Arawata.
'The Mueller Glacier is a
tributary of the Turnball and all these headwaters come together on the same
bit of the Main Divide. He would have known about that country, they’re all
interlocked with ridge systems; once he was up at that altitude it's easy enough
to keep walking along the top and drop into these main river systems.'
Would you believe it, my former wife Lorraine, was over last year
and we went to Hokitika for the day. I said that’s funny, that’s an old Fox
Moth flying around. We went up to the airport and it was the bloody plane I
pulled out of the sea on my back, old APT.
I actually have the bottle of whisky from
Henry Buchanan for saving the plane.'
Lorraine was talking to these various people and they
were interested in meeting me. They said their Dad - Malcolm Forsyth one of the
pilots from the early meat day’s winter 1959 - was the pilot and they said
we’ve got these photographs from dad’s collection and we don’t know any of the
people.
They all looked alike to me; well they were me forty
years ago! Its funny to see all these photographs you didn’t know existed. I thought God I was a handsome young bugger in
those days. The first colour photographs of their dad and me and taken on
that same strip when we nearly lost the plane. Such a coincidence.
We were lucky to have that photo Frank and
Cummings (being brought down off the mountain) that’s not only the first two
people who died on meat operations it was a very significant and historic
event.
There were just a handful of us and Frank was
one – we all used .222s. People scorned, in fact Tim Wallis would never hire me
because I shot a .222. .243 was the smallest calibre Timmy would allow on his
helicopters. I told him to stick it, nobody tells me what calibre to use. Frank
was a .222 man and Alan Duncan; there were just a handful of us.
'You do have to be a good shot that was the
thing you see, that was our rifle. And even today I have friends in the Police
who say its bloody ridiculous using a calibre like that on a deer, it’s a small
bullet, its high velocity against really big stags you have to really place
your shot.
If you remember in the Cascade (refers to The Venison Hunters) I shot 87 deer one day 12,500 Ibs some of those stags were 300
pounders and the .222 did the job. And this is the thing you can just put shot
after shot into a neck of a stag around the time of the roaring period and he’ll
just shake his head because it wont penetrate the muddy hair and the thick skin
on his neck, where if you stick it in the ribs he goes down because that’s his
one vulnerable spot. Funny enough most of the .222
shooters on big game we were lung shooters. Once you get a bullet into there,
the poor sods, that’s it.
On the Log Cabin up the Arawata:
You wouldn’t be allowed to do
it today; you’d have to have all sorts of resource permits.
Mike Bennett.
Here is the link to Videosouth Productions and the film featuring Mike Bennett as Arawata Bill:
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