For over fifty years the New Zealand deer cullers blazed trails across
much of this countries unexplored back country hunting the animals that
were damaging the mountain lands. They have become part of this
country's folk law in a time before bureaucracy ruled the mountains.
This video captures some of the characters as well as the humour
inherent in them, the adventure and danger involved in what many
believe was the greatest job ever.
Good Keen Men
Reviewed by John Rhodes
The deer cullers of the former NZ Forest Service lived a life which today seems almost mythical. Good keen men indeed, they were fit and self-reliant. Clad in boots, shorts and swanni, a culler stayed in the hills for weeks at a time, collecting his tallies of skins and tails, making camp oven bread and occasionally washing his socks if not his body. The cullers have become, as the blurb for this DVD rightly claims, part of our folk lore.
Producers Dave Asher and Dave McCarlie obviously love the mountains and any human activity in them; if they’d lived 40 years ago they’d surely have gone deer culling themselves. By tracking down and interviewing former cullers and documenting the experiences of these men, whose years with a rifle were the best of their lives, they have done us a service. Some, like Ken Miers, Jack Lasenby and Les Pracy, are household names. Others not seen, but oft-remembered by interviewees, include ‘Skipper’ Yerex, Bert Barra, Barry Crump, aviator ‘Popeye’ Lucas and legendary NZFS field officer Con Malone.
Confusingly, the video starts with promotions for other South Coast DVDs, making you think you’ve put the wrong disc in the machine. But when it gets down to its deer culling business, Good Keen Men’s skilfully-blended mixture of archival footage and stills and the producers’ own film, interviews and re-enactments is highly watchable – even if your only experience of a .303, like mine, is on the parade ground.
One ex-culler says of his first weeks: ‘If I wounded one deer I thought I’d had a great day.’ Some beginners lasted only a few days or, when they saw the country they were expected to hunt in, got straight back on the bus. But many others took to the life and learned fast, achieving tallies of more than a thousand deer in a season. In the years before helicopters did them out of a job, the cullers accounted for two million animals.
The old cullers look back fondly on a time of freedom when nobody knew about occupational health and safety and, as one puts it, ‘before bureaucracy ruled the mountains’. Says another, ‘It was the best life ever.’
Good Keen Men
