'They’re living, breathing entities': Hazel Phillips

Author photo credit: Adrian Cook at Tintype Central Hazel Phillips is passionate about bringing the histories of Aotearoa’s wilderness to life through storytelling. Her fourth book Fire & Ice: Secrets, histories, treasures and mysteries of Tongariro National Park does exactly that, but also centres one of Hazel’s other passions: Ruapehu, the mighty volcano in the centre of Aotearoa’s North Island.

She has a Master of Creative Writing with first-class honours and has worn out eight keys on her laptop keyboard through writing! Kete asked her some questions about the book and its making.

Kia ora Hazel, what a beautiful book Fire and Ice is, with the soft sunrise colours on the cover. Are the pink and orange tones a nod to the fire in the title, that must be a huge part of Ruapehu’s history?

Thank you – full credit to Lisa Moes (@lovethyland), who illustrated the cover. I explained to Lisa the concept and imagery inside my head and she brought it all to life in the most beautiful and perfect way. If you’ve ever spent time high up on Ruapehu at sunset, you’ll have been lit up by the fire along the sky as the sun sinks. At sunrise, the sun lights up the crisp ice again for a new day. It’s also a nod to the fact that our volcanic maunga are ever unpredictable and can erupt at any time. They’re living, breathing entities, and they’re on their own schedules, not ours.

You say in your introduction that ‘this is the story of how Ruapehu and Tongariro took possession of my mind.’ I’m guessing every book project takes a huge chunk of mind space, but this sounds very intense. Can you tell us more about it?

When you look up at these mountains, they are huge, but they’re colossal in other ways, too – when you start going inwards and researching stories, it feels endless, all these little twisting pathways you can follow. I was Alice down the rabbit hole, every day, finding new and fascinating facts and stories. Utterly obsessed. There’s real magic inside these mountains – you can feel it beneath your feet. The slopes thrum with the supernatural.

Ruapehu and Tongariro National Park are spaces with long Māori histories too. As a Pākehā, and saying that ‘stories of tangata whenua are not mine to tell,’ how hard was it to negotiate the shared stories, and not to overstep—but also not to whitewash the histories?

That’s my acknowledgement that there’s a whole other history yet to be told, and I’m not the right person to do that. In places this book travels alongside stories from te ao Māori, but mostly it focuses on the European footprint on the central North Island volcanoes. We’re about to embark on a cultural redress process for Tongariro National Park, and I’d like to think Fire & Ice goes some way towards outlining how Europeans have impacted these mountains and wilderness spaces, and hence the book might add to greater understanding within that process. I feel very strongly that our maunga are real treasures and they need to be looked after.

The ghost stories were a lot of fun. I wanted to know a lot more about Goatman. Can you tell us more about Goatman, or the general investigation of ghost stories?

Unfortunately I have no more information about Goatman and he has repeatedly failed to show up to chat to me when I’ve been cruising the Desert Road at night, so until he fronts up for our now well overdue coffee catch up, I will be none the wiser. So I, too, would like to know more about Goatman, only he seems a bit shy. Goatman, slide into my DMs any time.

You’re writing a new book now set at Aoraki Mt Cook. Is it taking over your mind in the same way as Fire & Ice did? Can you tell us more about it and what your writing plans are over the next few years?

Yes – I’m researching early women climbers and adventurers of Aoraki Mount Cook – there’s a lot of information so that book is some way off being a reality. Early stages, but I’m already properly obsessed again. These women were incredible – flouting convention and going after their adventure goals with absolute clarity and focus – I’m seriously inspired. Fire & Ice: Secrets, histories, treasures and mysteries of Tongariro National Park (Massey University Press) is available in bookstores now.