Rare slab hut refurbishment keeps traditional ways alive

A refurbishment of the West Coast’s Slaty Creek Hut has served as a catalyst for rangers to learn about wood working methods used by pioneers.

The historic Slaty Creek Hut, in the Grey Valley, was originally built as a winter project in 1952 by deer cullers. The hut was built with timber milled with hand tools using logs from the beech forest surrounding the site. It’s now used by recreational hunters, trampers and climbers.

Slab huts are a surviving form of the slab houses which European settlers built in 19^th century New Zealand to accommodate themselves in a practical and cost-effective way, using a material found readily in many areas – trees.

Before the introduction of water and steam powered sawmills, trees were dissembled by splitting, sawing or hewing, and it is these techniques that were carried on into the 20^th century in building slab huts for deer cullers, musterers and gold fossickers in rural areas of New Zealand.

Because of the impermanence of wood due to rot, and that slab houses were only seen by settlers as temporary housing until something more permanent could be built when resources allowed, very few slab houses or buildings remain, making slab huts like Slaty Creek Hut a real link to the past. There are 12 slab huts on public conservation land in the South Island.

Because so few people still have the skills to hew timber from logs with hand tools, maintaining historic huts like Slaty Creek is becoming more difficult – which is why rangers spent time learning about the techniques.

The rangers spent a day breaking down beech logs and hewing these into hand shaped timber, which was used to replace boards and framing on Slaty Creek Hut. While the rangers were at Slaty Creek they also replaced the hearth of the fire, installed a new sub floor structure, dug drainage channels around the hut and gave it a good spruce up.

Ranger Casey Rhodes, who has been on the team restoring the hut says, “We went in six months ago and scoped it out and worked out which boards needed to be replaced and made a list, so we’re only replacing the minimum to try and keep as much heritage factor as we can”.

Mike Gillies, a senior heritage advisor who is sharing his skills in these historic building methods, says it’s important to maintain traditions of how huts and structures were built.

“We could use modern methods and materials on the hut, but you pretty soon lose authenticity, whereas doing it using the same tools and techniques ensures that craft and those traditions stay alive. So the guys are using axes and draw knifes and wedges and mauls, the same way people have been building for hundreds of years.

“It’s the best feeling in the world, compared to a modern building site where there are lots of power tools and you are working with treated timber. It’s very quiet, all you can hear are the axes and adzes hewing. It’s a real privilege to be able to continue this tradition and this craft that’s been passed down for a really long time.”