Too cold for stubbies
A day in the life of the Kāreao cutters, as perceived by Lenny.
Bright orange, covered in filth, and armed with a sausage roll, I break away from my stare-off with the neighbouring cows, not long before they return to their perpetual graze, indifferent to the day ahead.
It's a pretty good office, you know. I can see Taranaki.
"170 km in a straight line," says Terence, also bright orange, but wielding a pry bar, a few hundred pink tags, and nails in place of a sausage roll.
Louie shuts the ute door and checks his armoury: a GPS, a roll of flagging tape, and some secateurs. Geared and ready to go, Terence and Louie leap over the electric fence from paddock to bush as I tuck and roll to protect my sausage.
Together, we are the Kareao Cutters, and today, like every day, we march against our relentless adversary, Kareao, also known as Supplejack. A misleading name, as there’s nothing supple about it except for a few inches at its apex. At two inches thick and many kilometres wide, it turns a 500-metre trek into a full day's endeavour—a proper menace of a liana.
We’ve been posted here for the past couple of months, and after bearing legs fit for a cat pole and deltoids fit for Arnold, a slow march to victory is underfoot as we cut the last track of the Aotea Bait Line.
I often think of our work as gardening, but on a biblical scale, although it's anything but methodical, more like a war zone in slow motion, where branches and stems compete in a silent battle for light. And we, mud-caked and secateur-wielding, are carving space in the struggle—not apart from the battle but swallowed by it. Just a brief presence in the long war for light, scratching our lines into the living earth.
"Know thy enemy," I think, while eating a few ends of the Kareao as we stop for lunch next to some Kōtukutuku we didn’t know was growing here. It's a sign that our work is paying off, as it’s a favourite of the possum.
It feels good to be out in the bush, knowing it’s the only place you need to be, sharing a few yarns with the Kareao cutters over more than our fair share of hard work.
Choice.
From left to right: Lenny (storyteller), Terence, and Louie
