FEATURE: OUTDOORS

Walks on the wild side

“Tramping tests your resilience, which all lives need to be meaningful,” Shaun Barnett writes in A Wild Life. 

The new book is a tribute to the legacy of a man who became this country’s preeminent tramping writer and photographer.  

Barnett died earlier this year, having worked with publisher Robbie Burton to complete the book. A generous coffee table edition, it spectacularly showcases the images he took over 35 years of roaming the New Zealand backcountry. 

A Wild Life spans the country north to south, taking in much of our greatest tramping country, including the Tararua, Ruahine, and Kaweka ranges, Tongariro, Kahurangi, Mount Aspiring, Fiordland, and Rakiura national parks. But many less trodden places that he visited also find a place in the book. 

The result is an engaging chronicle not only of the wilderness on our doorsteps, but of the rapture Barnett regularly experienced in his life in the midst of it.  

Capable of “feeling joy in a storm”, the author was deeply passionate about the beauty of the great outdoors in all of its guises. 

“A huge part of it is the awe you get about being in places,” Burton reflects. “With Shaun it was really evident and hugely pronounced. He lost none of his enthusiasm for doing this. He just loved it.” 

The publisher, who with photographer Craig Potton owns Nelson book publisher Potton & Burton, first met Barnett in the 1990s through writer Rob Brown. 

Born in 1969, Barnett had decided to try and make a living as a tramping writer and photographer. Ultimately he managed to do that for 25 years, contributing to and editing Wilderness magazine, and writing various books. 

Burton says Barnett was modest, humble, and gentle, but with a steely determination to achieve what he wanted to. He was also extremely organised and meticulous. 

“He applied himself with a huge amount of dedication,” Burton recalls. “One of the things I really admired was he just got better and better at what he was doing. It was really evident in his photography. He was taking the most beautiful images at the end.” 

With a degree in Zoology and a Post-Grad Diploma in Parks, Recreation, and Tourism, Barnett had a solid academic grounding.  

That knowledge was continually supplemented by his wide reading, which as Barnett wrote offered him an “immensely enriching and rewarding” inner world.  

Dave Hansford’s brilliant introduction to A Wild Life details how all of this fed the writer’s craft, forging a unique written and visual vernacular for capturing New Zealand’s abundant beauty. 

Over the course of his career Barnett was influential in encouraging readers into the outdoors. He was also instrumental in capturing the history and culture of tramping in New Zealand, and so helped to keep it alive. 

Barnett wrote guides including the hugely popular Day Walks in New Zealand and Tramping in Aotearoa. He also co-authored Shelter from the Storm: The Story of New Zealand’s Backcountry Huts and Tramping: A New Zealand History, and selected the country’s best tramping writing for the excellent Across the Pass anthology. 

“He was just as into all the cultural stories as he was into guidebooks,” Burton says. “He had a very broad vision, and was extremely knowledgeable about not just the physical act of tramping, but who was writing what, and who had.”  

A revised edition of Shelter from the Storm, which was first published in 2012, is due to be published by Potton & Burton in December.  

Barnett wasn’t able to contribute much to that, after being diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2023. But he did work on A Wild Life until late in the process of its creation.

Both he and the publisher had arrived at the idea for the book independently. For Burton, as both a longtime friend and colleague of Barnett, it was a privilege to see the project through to completion. 

“I was thrilled in the face of such bleak news to be able to do it,” he says. “It was such a long relationship, with a great deal of between the two of us, as we’d been working together for so long. He was also very trusting of my photo editing, which is a big part of what I do.” 

 The book was fast-tracked due to Barnett’s diagnosis. Burton had a huge archive of photos to sort through, but he says the structure of A Wild Life quickly became evident.  

Like the other projects he’d worked on with Barnett, it was a relatively smooth process. Towards the end it became challenging for the author, and so his wife Tania assisted.  

Due to the sad circumstances surrounding it, the book was one of the bigger challenges Burton has faced as a publisher. Knowing that Barnett was able to see the page proofs before he died gives him comfort though.  

There’s no question that Barnett was influential in helping inspire new generations of trampers to hit the country’s tracks.  

Bookings for the Great Walks often sell out in a day, while numbers on the nation spanning Te Araroa Trail have grown to thousands each year. 

“It wasn’t like that 10 years ago,” Burton notes. “Even though old school trampers are complaining about places getting crowded, it’s got to be a good thing that people are getting out into the hills. I think it’s marvellous.” 

• A Wild Life: Photographs from the Backcountry of Aotearoa by Shaun Barnett is published by Potton & Burton