Jim Childerstone, long-time columnist for NZ Logger, passed away recently at the age of 90.
Along with forestry and writing, he was a man of many talents – fencer, shearer, shepherd mountaineer, keen sportsman and tramper, environmentalist and ‘there wasn’t much he couldn’t shoot between the eyes with his trusty 303’, says his wife Margot.
His love of nature began at an early age when living with his aunt Jeannie and uncle Kim Ferguson in Arrowtown during the mid-forties. Kim was a keen fisherman, hunter and tramper. Raised in Arrowtown, Jim’s parents were Mary and Walter, and Mary’s father was well-known local doctor, William Ferguson.
When he was almost seven, Jim and his mother, joined his father, Walter, in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where Walter developed tea plantations.
However, it was World War II, and as Japan was about to invade, they escaped by boat to South Africa. After staying long enough to learn rugby “the South African way” under a former Springbok, it was back to New Zealand.
In his book, Up the Rees Valley, Jim wrote about 60-plus years of local trips and tramps with friends including summiting The Remarkables with a schoolmate in 1952 during a challenging 16-hour day.
He received an agricultural diploma and post-graduate degree in soil and water from Lincoln College, near Christchurch. Margot says he paid for most of his books from gold panning in Arrowtown.
She adds that he stayed an extra two years to play on the college basketball team.
He started his journalism career at Auckland’s Herald newspaper, but had the opportunity to earn more as a pneumatic drill operator before a stint as a Sydney Morning Herald court reporter.
He later travelled to Europe, sleeping on beaches in Greece, then in Canada he worked on The Calgary Herald and was a part-time ski patroller in Banff.
He and Margot, who grew up in Argentina, met in a London pub and married close by, in Hampstead, in 1968.
Jim worked for the British government’s Central Office of Information which relocated him to the Solomon Islands.
“We had two-and-a-half years, which was fantastic,” Margot says, “and Jim trained some young Solomon Islanders as reporters.”
They had a summer in Queenstown, with Jim working as an Earnslaw stoker, then returned to England.
They popped back for good in the mid-1970s and bought a 5.5-hectare Closeburn property, near Queenstown, which was some 70% covered in wilding pines.
They lived in their pantechnicon, Margot recalls, while Jim built a log cabin from Corsican pines.
“Visitors commented on its lovely smell,” she says. They later moved into a larger residence built of Douglas firs milled above One Mile Creek.
Jim operated a portable mill, cutting timber, mostly wildings, for houses in nearby Sunshine Bay and Fernhill but also over at Walter Peak, at the Arrowtown golf course and even Stewart Island.
He set up a timber yard in Industrial Place, then a larger one named Closeburn Timber Corner.
Meanwhile, he wrote his Five-mile Fred column...
