1/9 Everyone knows about Japan's war 'stragglers' - those soldiers who hid out for years or even decades on jungle islands in the Pacific, unwilling to believe that the war was lost. But after both World Wars, NZ had its own strange stragglers.
2/9 During the World Wars thousands of NZers avoided conscription by hiding. Many went into the mountains and bush, where they improvised camps & lived by hunting & fishing. A few of these inner emigres raided farms for food, or made money by selling liquor from bush stills.
3/9 In Southland alone, forty-eight war resisters' camps have been located. When a journalist visited a highland camp known as Shirkers Bush in 2016, she found relics: a sheet or iron, an axe head, an old fireplace.
4/8 The hidden men knew that, even after the end of the war, they might face prosecution & time in a tough defaulters' camp if they were captured. In 1920 Harry Willis was caught in the hills behind Taihape. He was skinny & ragged, & his beard stretched past his waist.
5/9 The war had been over nearly two years, but Willis was tried. Later in 1920, though, the Massey government declared an 'armistice' for hideouts, in an effort to bring the stragglers in from the bush.
6/9 In March 1946, nearly a year after the end of the war in Europe, police raided John Murdie's hideout in the bush near Rangataua. Murdie's hut was made entirely from newspapers. A gun hung beside his bed. Murdie was jailed for 3 months.
7/9 The image grips me: young men, bags flung over their backs, marching out of the towns & cities, into the trees. Unlike the Pakeha pioneers of another century, they did not fell trees & steal land & make money. They lived in something like harmony with their environments.
8/9 There is evidence that some of the exiles enjoyed their experience. A group of 3 men went bush near the town of Blackball, which was a stronghold of socialists & war resisters. One of them described 'pottering & prospecting' contentedly in the bush for years.
9/9 Historians like @anrchivist have begun to document the strange adventures of NZ's stragglers. As they become better known, will be begin to see these young men as exemplars rather than shirkers. Will we admire their abandonment of civilisation, & embrace of nature?
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