'Taihoa' Translates Loosely As 'No Hurry'

A private tramping hut in the Orongorongo Valley embodies the prelapsarian spirit of the people who built it by hand 56 years ago.

- Greg Dixon

There can be few buildings in New Zealand that embody friendship quite so profoundly and quite so uniquely as tiny ‘Taihoa’. The private tramping hut, built by school mates more than half a lifetime ago, has been both source and sustenance for the friendships forged in its making – relationships that, in the years since, have grown and matured like the bush that surrounds it. And the story of Taihoa’s making – in an almost prelapsarian New Zealand of good keen young men and women – and the history of its continued existence in the wilds of the Orongorongo Valley near Wellington, are yarns best heard on the walk to its door.

On a fine, cool morning in early November, with wild winds promised later in the day, I joined six of its owners and guardians – including Wellington architects Philip Porritt and Chris Cochran – on the gentle, 90-minute ramble from the Rimutaka Forest Park’s Catchpool carpark to Taihoa, which sits hugged by bush above the Orongorongo River. The hut, Porritt said, as we walked through stands of red beech, rimu and nikau, might not have been built at all, if not for a remarkable woman, Gwenda Martin.

The year was 1962, and Martin, a biology teacher and leader of the tramping club at the not-long-established Wellington high school, Onslow College, guided a small party of its students to a hut set deep in the Orongorongo Valley, which lies in the southern Rimutakas. Called ‘Paua’, the hut was one of scores already dotted down the valley. Orongorongo Valley is to Wellingtonians as the Waitakere Ranges are to Aucklanders. But it is a peculiarity of the valley that, for nearly 60 years until 1980, the Wellington Water Board, which administered the area, allowed private hut-building.