The New Zealand Forest Service had ’Training Schools' for many skills - hunters, timber cruisers, timber graders, woodsmen and forest rangers.
For over 30 years, boys leaving school were invited to learn the ‘Skilled Crafts of forestry’ and they attended a number of Woodsman Schools throughout the country.
The work was hard, the pay low, the food often terrible, but they thrived on learning new skills, which included everything from planting trees on land they’d burned, to splicing wire ropes on heavy logging equipment, and building and managing the huts, swing bridges and tracks that DoC now manages to overseeing the log’s journey from nursery seedling to forest giant, from bush to sawmill.
With the sale of forests to private industry, the training schemes were abandoned in the eighties, but these men kept on doing what they had always done – they work and play hard. They were the Woodsmen. A new book by Enrico Hoover is about their journey.
“Much of what we as ’Trainees' went through was brutal and often, more youngsters left the courses than succeeded. At times it was pretty tough. Most of those who left early didn’t actually fail - they were pushed out by a system that encouraged the abuse, and I’ve often wondered at the logic of this type of extreme 'boarding school' mentality,” says Enrico (Harry) Hoover.
“Still, it was what it was. Those of us who went the distance were generally better people for the hardships, and most of us wouldn’t change how it was.”
Not wanting to lose this history, he has put together this collection of stories of life at the Woodsman Schools, titled Woody Tales, Tall But True – Living, working and playing in New Zealand’s wild places and, “although some of the stories aren’t very nice, some humour is there to help alleviate the hard memories” he says.
This month we take a look at one of those by woodsman, Cam Barrowman. Now 87, he says his first memory of the Woodsman school was a letter arriving in the mail confirming his appointment as a Junior Woodsman at Golden Downs: “The letter detailed that I was to be at Bigg’s Corner on 12 January 1957. I travelled by New Zealand Road Services bus from Greymouth, stopping at Murchison to take on extra passengers. We were dropped off at Bigg’s Corner and I met a group of other lads, all Woodsmen to be…”
Copies of Woody Tales, Tall But True are available from Copy press in Nelson and some bookshops around New Zealand or contact hoover@xtra.co.nz.
To read more, get your copy of the September 2025 edition of NZ Logger magazine, on sale from 1 September. Check the link on this page to subscribe to either a printed or digital copy (or both).
