A Billy of Black Tea

Going bush with Man Alone

The man is Johnson. He comes to New Zealand after the First World War. He moves around, working on farms, on boats and in a road crew. Then things turn bad and he heads for the bush, tramping through the Rangipo Desert, the area known to most Kiwis for the Desert Road, and hiding out for months in the Kaimanawa Ranges. He carries only flour, tobacco and tea, a gun and an axe.

At first this seems the right place for a man on the run: “The hills seemed to close round and over him, surrounded and drowned in the hills and bush, safe and alone and submerged.” But it soon becomes awful and oppressive, terrifying. In Mulgan’s straightforward descriptions, you feel the damp and the dulling cold it brings, the feeble pleasure Johnson gets from his billy of black tea.

For years, Man Alone was lauded as the great New Zealand novel. It’s certainly the one with the best descriptions of the bush – unsentimental and accurate. The geographical details are also more or less correct. In a 2004 paper, Rod Orange mapped out Johnson’s route, plotting it across the Rangipo Desert to the Rangitikei River, to the Ngaruroro River and Ngamatea Plateau, finally emerging at Kuripapango (named Waiapapa in the book) in Hawkes Bay.

It is as Johnson emerges from the worst of his ordeal that he learns of a tramping party who went missing in the same bush, never to be found. It’s a fate still common today, and speaks to the point made by one of Johnson’s comrades: he is a man you can’t kill.