Tom Hay, who died in April 2016, aged 92, was a CAFCA member for around 20 years from 1991 and he was a regular generous donor to the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account, which provides my pay (he consistently gave an annual $100 donation for a dozen years). In addition to that he was one of the hardy few who regularly attended CAFCA’s Annual General Meeting – he (and sometimes his wife Joan) used to come with Stan Hemsley, a fellow Lyttelton member, fellow conservationist and great mate of Tom’s.

Indeed the only mention of Tom in Watchdog is an extract from his eulogy at Stan’s funeral (my obituary of Stan is in Watchdog 115, August 2007, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/15/10.htm). He and Stan had known each other since 1943. Most unusually for a couple of old white male greenies of their vintage they were blue collar workers – they worked at sea and on the wharves. There wouldn’t have been too many of their ilk among Kiwi working class men in those days.

In the 1990s when CAFCA operated a Christchurch phone tree (it’s all done by e-mail now) Tom was on my section of it (as was Stan), so he and I used to have regular chats whenever I rang him up to tell about some upcoming event. But beyond that I knew nothing about him and had lost all contact with him in the past several years. He ceased to be a member; he’d had serious heart trouble for years; the combination of old age and earthquakes took their toll; he and Joan moved away from Christchurch (they’d lived in their Corsair Bay, Lyttelton Harbour, home for 63 years but he died in Dunedin). I’m indebted to other people for filling in the details needed for this obituary. Particular thanks go to Tom’s great mate (and CAFCINZ founder) Pete Lusk, of Westport.

Decades Of Conservation Activism

Pete and fellow conservationist (and CAFCA member) Diana Shand co-wrote Tom’s obituary for the April/May 2016 ECOLink (ECO = Environment and Conservation Organisations of Aotearoa New Zealand). “Tom Hay was a revered Aotearoa environmentalist who died in early April, he was 92. He started with the campaign to save the Waipoua Kauri Forest (Northland) in the late 1940s with Professor Roy ‘Barney’ McGregor when he was a young seaman. He tried to get the then Federation of Labour under Fintan Walsh to ban the export of kauri which was still going to Australia under war regulations in the 50s. He continued through his decades working on the wharves at Lyttelton and through his retirement. He campaigned for a Nuclear Free New Zealand, to Save Lake Manapouri, against the corporate power (with CAFCA) and he spoke for the trees in his many, many campaigns to protect New Zealand bush and forests”.

“Tom was a member of a number of conservation groups. Starting in the 1950s with the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society (F&B), where he was the Canterbury Branch Chairman from 1964-73 and helped establish a Youth Study group within Canterbury F&B to educate and enthuse young members. He was a prolific, well-researched and articulate campaigner. The filing cabinet inherited by Bernie Calder, who succeeded him as Chairman, revealed work on conservation issues throughout the country, as far as the Chatham Islands, and submissions and correspondence relating to nearly every Nature/Scenic Reserve in the South Island. With another Lyttelton local and waterfront worker, Stan Hemsley, Tom campaigned against the destructive West Coast and Southland Beech Forests utilisation scheme. He made many trips to Westland and Southland informing himself and gathering support against the scheme”.

“His fight to save West Coast native forests, initially with F&B and the Beech Forest Action Coalition, led to him forming Friends of the Earth New Zealand and with Bernie Calder and Denys Trussell, to throw himself into the campaign against the logging of our precious podocarp forests. Tom led the campaign to save the Oparara (Buller) – which he knew from West Coast explorations when the Westport Bar trapped his ship. When he took a TV crew into the Oparara to show them the extraordinary forest and fabulous limestone arches and caves, much later made famous through the ’Lord of the Rings’ movies, the then NZ Forest Service put in gates and local police to thwart them. In the Oparara Basin he would take his camping gear and an axe for cutting his firewood and walk all over the area, making himself familiar with every creek and gully. A common taunt of the pro-logging lobby at the time was: ‘I bet you have never even been there’. Tom would answer that not only had he been there but he would demonstrate that he knew it better than most West Coasters.

“He also championed Canterbury wetlands (he was first President of Christchurch’s Travis Wetland Trust) and rivers and much, much more, including Banks Peninsula forest remnants (visiting many farmers on Banks Peninsula during the mid 70s) and supporting the Hinewai Trust. Tom was an energetic helper on reserves whether attacking willows with a huge Canadian chainsaw or donning waders in Travis Swamp to look for mudfish. Even into old age Tom was writing submissions. In 2010 he was awarded an Old Blue, Forest & Bird’s highest award in recognition of his volunteer work throughout the years and ‘on behalf of Nature’, as he would say. And indeed he was one of Nature’s gentlemen as well as its champion. He deserved many more awards, but his legacy lives on in the natural world”.

In a couple of April 2016 e-mails to me Pete Lusk wrote: “In my eyes, Tom Hay’s most important contribution was bringing the militancy we usually associate with the union movement into the environmental movement. Tom started with Waipoua Kauri Forest in the 1940s, then Save Manapouri, then dozens of other issues, social and green. He was still campaigning into his 90s, writing submissions from home as his health declined and he couldn’t get out. Another of Tom’s special legacies was his thorough investigation of every issue he campaigned on. I saw this in the late 1970s when he led the battle to protect Karamea's Oparara Basin with its fabulous limestone arches and caves”.

“Tom was still working on the Lyttelton wharf then. He would drive all the way to Karamea, stay the night at our place at Little Wanganui, then set off into the Oparara with his camping gear and an axe for cutting his firewood. He'd walk all over the area, making himself familiar with every creek and gully… We could add another legacy with his ability to look ahead and predict what the public might be interested in in ten or 20 years’ time. We see this in Tom's ‘Lord Of The Rings’ names for the magical Oparara Basin where he played the leading role in the late 1970's and early 80s, saving this fabulous area from the chainsaws”.

Tom “Spoke For The Trees”

The Press entitled its obituary: “Conservationist Tom Hay ‘A Mighty Totara’ Who Spoke For The Trees” (Charlie Mitchell, 23/4/16): “Tom Hay fought many battles in his life, and he was always on the same side: he fought for the forests. Hay was involved in some of New Zealand's largest conservation battles, dating back to the late 1940s. He was an uncompromising figure, who fought valiantly against the creeping desecration of native forests. ‘He was just somebody who really understood the importance of connection to the natural world and the value of our wonderful heritage’, said conservationist Diana Shand, a fellow Forest & Bird Life Member. ‘We always used to say he spoke for the trees’”.

“Hay's love for trees took root early in his life. As a boy, he used to visit his aunt in western Southland, on the fringes of civilisation.  When they approached her home, he would see the sky light up with flames, as trees surrounding the long country roads were scorched to create pasture. Even then, he felt it was senseless. It began his life-long opposition to the NZ Forest Service, which would burn tracts of native bush, sometimes using napalm, to plant pine trees. ‘He was even-tempered with a very slow fuse’, his son, Cameron Hay, says. ‘But mention the Forest Service around him and steam would come out of his ears’”.

“Hay was a member of the Merchant Navy during and after World War II. While his colleagues took to the bars on the West Coast, Hay, a teetotaller, would instead go exploring. He made his way to the Oparara Basin, where he became transfixed by the magic of the place, with its network of limestone caves and jagged arches. ‘He sort of fell in love with that part of the West Coast’, Cameron says. ‘It was the love of his life. He was distraught to see that the Forest Service was thinking of burning up the Basin and replanting it with gum trees’”. 

“He returned often to the Basin, and even named some of its geographical features in the 1970s. Features such as 'Galadriel Creek' and 'Moria Gate' owe their names to him: they came from one of his favourite books, ‘The Lord Of The Rings’. Hay's first major conservation battle – among the most prominent in New Zealand's history at the time – was against logging in Northland's Waipoua Forest in the early 1950s. He later helped save Lake Manapouri in Fiordland from being raised to help power an aluminium smelter, and joined the campaign to prevent the milling of lowland beech forests on his beloved West Coast”.

“He became one of the earliest members of Forest & Bird, and served as Canterbury Branch Chairman, obligations he performed alongside community work and his day job at Lyttelton port. Hay was an adversarial sort: always at odds with politicians, and occasionally at loggerheads with his fellow conservationists, who he sometimes felt didn't dig their heels in deep enough. ‘His feeling was that they'd compromise everything out of existence... he was a pretty uncompromising man’.

“Despite an obstinate streak, he was well-loved and enjoyable to be around, his son says. He loved radio comedies and rarely lost his temper, and could be brought to tears upon seeing forests burned to the ground. ‘He had a great sense of humour. He could immediately make friends at any bus station’, Cameron says. ‘He was very outgoing and generally interested in what people did’.  For 63 years he lived in Corsair Bay with his wife, Joan, in a house he built himself.  He bought the property in the 1950s, converting it from a pine plantation to native bush, something many at the time thought was a mysterious thing to do”.

“‘In those days, everybody thought he was slightly peculiar. Now the top halves of all those sections are almost a green belt. He was advocating wind power so long ago I can't remember when he began advocating wind power. He was very far-sighted’. Later in life, he joined the Travis Wetland Trust in Christchurch, which successfully protected the Travis Wetland from being developed. He and his wife moved to Dunedin after the earthquakes. He became a homebody in later years, indulging his other great love: jazz music”.

“His family requested mourners plant a native tree, or ten, in lieu of flowers at his (Lyttelton) funeral (at which CAFCA was represented by our Chairperson, Jeremy Agar, a fellow Lytteltonian. MH). Friends from around the country did just that: a fitting send-off for the man who, until his final days, spoke for the trees. ‘He dedicated himself to making sure heritage was protected as far as a single individual can do things. And a single individual can do a great deal when they're as dedicated and committed and well organised as Tom’, Shand says.He left big shoes to fill, Cameron says. ‘He's certainly going to be a hard act to follow’”. 

In His Own Words

Pete Lusk also sent me a typed, undated five page memoir by Tom, entitled “The Good Old Days”. It is a mixture of his life and conservationist activities. He explains that his family arrived in NZ from the Shetland Islands (off the top of Scotland) when he was a little kid. “Fresh from treeless Shetland, the native forest opened up a whole new world to me. Elsewhere in Southland, burning for pasture, or maybe just for the hell of it, was the norm and at night at Pukemaori the fires ringed the horizon”.

An uncle took him for drives in his old Model T Ford “and one stop I have never erased from my memory. From the top of a hillock we looked around us and as far as the eye could see in any direction was the still smoking ruin of what was once native bush, and the silence was oppressive. No one spoke and then my uncle sighed: ‘You know, this is very wrong and one day we’ll be made to account for it’. That moment I know was the beginning of my resolve to do what I could to protect the bush and its fauna”.

He was lucky to be able to live long enough to do so, as World War 2 thrust itself into his life, as it did for hundreds of millions of others around the globe. “My people were all seafarers and neither my brother nor I entertained the thought that we would be anything else….At 17½ years I volunteered for the Navy, was rejected allegedly for ‘flat feet’ (which were never flat, incidentally), and a fortnight after I turned 18 I found myself conscripted….to become a Bren Gunner (in the Army). A year and a half later my Company was sent to Italy and those of us not yet 21, or even 20 as in my case, were not allowed to go even though we volunteered”.

“It was providential because our Company was decimated at a bridge in Italy shortly after arrival…Subsequently I contrived to transfer myself to the Merchant Navy where they did not worry overmuch about such niceties as age or flat feet, and I became an Able Seaman Bren Gunner on sundry merchant vessels and a troopship. When the War ended I was in Bougainville and joined the Australians to witness the Japanese surrender”.

Post-War, seaman Tom got actively involved in conservation activism. “One effort of my own warrants mention because of the moral lesson embodied in it. The President of our Seamen’s Union was Fintan Patrick Walsh, who owned a farm in the Wairarapa somewhere and like many a seaman was sympathetic to bush protection. I asked him (unions had a bit of clout then) if we could use industrial action to stop the Waipoua milling, and he said: ‘You get me the official backing of your Forest and Bird Society, and we’ll stick up every ship heading for Australia until Forestry comes to heel’”.

“So, I proceeded to hot foot it to our Secretary with the proposition but he threw up his hands in horror. 'We could never agree to that’, he said, aghast. ‘It is political’. I argued that all the affairs of our country were political and we should make them work for us for a change, but I got nowhere. I complained bitterly (to the head of Forest & Bird) and he reasoned that since the Forest and Bird Council was mostly made up of retired departmental heads who had risen in the ranks by playing both ends against the middle and studiously offending no one, they were hardly likely to alter the mental conditioning of a lifetime to accommodate me. So I had to go back to Fintan Patrick with my sorry tale but he only laughed sympathetically. ‘I’m not really surprised, but you have learnt one important lesson in life, son’”.

Tom’s memoir details his many decades of campaigning, concluding with his 1973 resignation as Canterbury Branch Chairman of Forest and Bird “to devote more time to the issue” and he went on to be a founder of Friends of the Earth “sooner than subscribe to Guy Salmon’s Gospel of Compromise. Pete Lusk, who was also a founding father of the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa, has been a prime mover in rainforest protection throughout….I am especially indebted to him for his assistance in our Oparara campaign”.

His memoir concluded: “The battle to save the bush will never abate as long as its trees are worth something for nothing to someone. The price, as ever, is eternal vigilance. Although my generation gap is now nearing a chasm, I am eternally thankful that Native Forest Action was reincarnated to keep up the pressure against the despoilers and avert any hint of identification with Guy Salmon’s unfortunate bunch of backsliders but while, figuratively, we have now denied the millers their last native forest log, the urge to convert our remnant rainforest into cold cash is still alive and healthy in certain sections of the community and we must never let down our guard”.

It Is Indeed All Political

Tom’s long exemplary life is a good reminder that CAFCA is as much a child of the 1970s’ environment movement as it is of that era’s anti-war movement. He was actively involved in the enormous and successful Save Manapouri campaign, which prevented that lake being dammed, raised and ruined in order to exclusively supply power to Comalco’s Bluff aluminium smelter. From our very beginning 40+ years ago, we have campaigned against the huge transnational corporation Rio Tinto which owns that smelter as part of its global empire.

CAFCA’s foundational activity was the 1975 South Island Resistance Ride and a major activity on that was to highlight the scandalous West Coast beech scheme, which aimed to log native forests and replace them with good old exotic pinus radiata, the main tree in NZ’s plantation forestry industry which is dominated by transnational corporations (TNCs). Saving native forests was Tom’s life’s work. CAFCA is not an environmental group per se (so we don’t belong to ECO); our primary issue is the economic and political domination exercised over this country by TNCs. But environmental damage is very often the insult added to injury. For decades we have campaigned alongside groups such as Coromandel Watchdog who are fighting TNCs (mining ones, in their case) and the environmental damage they cause, among other detrimental effects. That is just one example.

And all New Zealanders owe Tom and his generation of conservationists a great debt of thanks. I have walked through Northland’s magnificent Waipoua Kauri Forest, gazing in awe at those ancient giants (until the February 2011 earthquake, a big framed photo of Tane Mahuta held pride of place on our lounge wall). Thank you, Tom, for fighting to save that forest all those decades ago. I have been to Lake Manapouri, Milford and Doubtful Sounds and consider Fiordland to be the most astonishing place on Earth. There is nowhere else like it (I’ve been to Norway’s jawdropping fiords but they don’t have Fiordland’s bush).

I have never been to the Oparara Basin, which was his great passion and cause celebre, but I have tramped both the Heaphy and Wangapeka Tracks in that northwest corner of the South Island and have seen for myself just how amazingly beautiful it is. In the North Island I have tramped in the Ureweras and canoed the Wanganui River, so have personal experience of the glorious native bush in those areas. So, thank you, Tom, you were an eco warrior before that phrase was invented, you were a fighter who never gave up, you were farsighted and you truly did “speak for the trees”. In doing so, you spoke for all of us.

And by your long membership of CAFCA, you recognised the need to build links between pure conservationism and opposition to the huge economic players that profit from exploiting and despoiling the environment. As you said in your memoir: “I argued that all the affairs of our country were political and we should make them work for us for a change”. You were right, and the country is a better and (literally) greener place because of your efforts. Rest in peace.