This month NZ Logger meets up with Ngahere Oho’s Cherie Rangiahua. With 30-plus years in forestry, her history dates back to her great-grandfather, Hamuera Rangiahua. He worked for the Fletcher Timber Company, which would later become Fletcher Challenge in Ruatāhuna.
She says her father, Lucky Rangiahua, used to share stories of carrying his father’s gas tin for him as an eight-year-old, starting his own forestry journey.
Lucky’s official career began as a forest worker in Tasman. When that role was made redundant, he used the payout to set up on his own. He had a production logging crew in Kaingaroa and Minginui for many years.
During intermediate school, Cherie started helping out her dad’s crew. First with a tomahawk, delimbing trees on landing, working her way up to swinging an axe and then log-making with a chainsaw.
It was a family-run business: “There was my brother, my mum, myself, and my younger sister came along later. We also hired a lot of relatives in Murupara and Ruatāhuna. So anywhere between eight to 10 people.”
She started formal training with her dad’s team in 1996, learning how to use each type of machinery, including maintenance at weekends. “Bell Loaders, John Deere Skidders… anything and everything really.”
Production thinning was a big part of the process at the time: “Back in those days, you did a lot of ultra-high pruning. And you would get this extra value out of the log, so you could sell them on the export market. It was a real big moneymaker.”
In 1998 she began her NZ Diploma in Forest Management at Rotorua’s Waiariki Institute of Technology.
Upskilling and educating herself have always been important to Cherie. But she says nothing can replace time spent in the forest.
“Those early years, that’s where it was instilled in me, to learn a good skill set – basic knowledge that you don’t learn in a classroom,” she says.
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