The Bridge to Nowhere was just what the soldier settlers wanted. But by the time it was completed in 1936, it was too late, and few farmers were left in the Mangapūrua Valley.

The rusty plough that trampers pass on their way up from the Mangapūrua landing on the Whanganui River is the first incongruous feature of the bush-clad valley you encounter.

A few minutes later the second appears, a sweeping concrete bridge that would be more at home in the centre of a provincial town than spanning a gorge in the depths of the Whanganui National Park.

The bridge, which replaced a precarious swing bridge, the remnants of which still snake across the gorge, was intended to expand vehicle access to the isolated farms that made up the Mangapūrua Valley Soldiers Settlement. At its peak in the early 1920s, the settlement included nearly 40 World War I veterans, many farming with their families.

But by the time of the bridge's completion in 1936, most of the farmers in the Mangapūrua Valley had left, abandoning their efforts to tame the slip-prone hills they had begun clearing of virgin bush more than 15 years earlier.

This wasn't the outcome wartime prime minister William "Farmer Bill" Massey had in mind when he talked about paying a debt of gratitude to the soldiers returning from the horrors of Gallipoli and the Western Front. New Zealand had paid a dear toll, with 18,000 dead. Now it was time to help those fortunate enough to have returned.

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* Creating a new blueprint for hill country farming

Peter Griffin The old plough at the entrance to the bridge.

The Discharged Soldiers Settlement Act 1915 paved the way for thousands of veterans to buy or lease Crown land as part of settlements dotted all over the country. All up, four million acres was made available to ex-soldiers. Much of it was in remote areas and of marginal quality for pastoral farming.

But by 1920 the scheme was in full swing and soldiers who had shipped back from Europe the previous year, many bearing the physical and mental scars of the conflict, began arriving on their newly acquired plots.

Over the next decade they faced collapsing agricultural commodity prices, the challenge of paying rent or interest on land that was overvalued to begin with, and, as the 1930s began, the crippling impact of the Great Depression.

But some struggled more than others. If the soldier settler scheme still evokes the Man Alone images of men hacking at the bush with axes and eventually walking off the land, it is largely down to the tale of those unfortunate enough to have taken up plots in the remote valleys of the upper Whanganui River.

Blue Duck Station Dan Steele at the entrance to Blue Duck Station where he farms sheep, cattle and deer side by side with an eco-tourism business.

"The valleys should never have been opened up," says Dan Steele, owner of the 7300-acre Blue Duck Station, which spans part of the Kaiwhakauka Valley 40 kilometres from the Bridge to Nowhere and is made up of the remnants of 15 farms settled by ex-soldiers.

I met Steele over the summer on the track up to the farm lodge he hosts guests at.

This was before Covid-19 shut down the Conservation Department huts at which canoeists paddling the Whanganui can stay as well as Steele's eco-tourism business and the Blue Duck Lodge, which employ nine people.

Steele's station today carries 6500 sheep, 800 cattle, 150 deer and 1500 beehives, a thriving, diversified farm by any measure. But he says it remains a battle to keep the land stable and productive.

He has let parts of the farm revert to native bush and plans to put them into a QEII covenant, as his parents on the neighbouring farm have done, so they can't be converted back to pasture.

"The tops of those hills aren't designed for heavy herbivores, grazing and putting on weight," he says. "It's too steep, you are flogging a dead horse."

Steele marvels at the early progress the veterans made with just axes, shovels and occasionally a stick of dynamite.

"There were no bloody bulldozers in there clearing those roads and farm tracks. Once you climbed across the gorge to your block you'd have found it challenging to find a flat patch to put up your tent."

Some of the plots, secured by the soldiers through a ballot weren't even taken up, such was the effort required to clear the bush.

Still, the first few years of settlement at Mangapūrua were reasonably successful.

Blue Duck Station A hut on Blue Duck Station that was originally occupied by settler farmers.

Those farmers able to get sheep on to the land initially received a good price for their wool. But 1921 saw a slump in farm produce prices as wartime bulk supply agreements with the British imperial government came to an end.

The settlers also found that after burning and clearing the land, pasture would grow well for two or three years before reverting to fern and scrub.

Large swaths of land around the central plateau that by contrast had gentle contours were considered "bush sick" and largely unfarmable as the settlers toiled in the Mangapūrua Valley.

"They'd put the animals on it and they'd wither away and die," says Steele. "In the 1940s or so they found out that it was just cobalt deficiency. All that pumice land you could build access roads on then became farmable."

The Whanganui River was still well-trafficked with cargo and passenger ships in the early 1920s, so there was a reliable supply line to the Mangapūrua landing before narrow roads were eventually carved out on the other side of the gorge, opening an inland route in all the way to Raetihi.

The late Arthur Bates, the historian who penned the definitive book on the ill-fated Mangapūrua settlement after taking down first-hand accounts from original settlers, writes that many of the ex-soldiers held Massey's view that "with a bit of hard work, everything would come right".

Alexander Turnbull Library Agnes Bettjeman and Frederick Bettjeman (with their son-in-law Hector Oliver), in 1951, almost 10 years after they left the Mangapūrua Valley with virtually nothing.

The most prominent of the soldier settlers in the Mangapūrua was Fred Bettjeman, who arrived in 1917 and with his family was among the last to leave in 1942.

Working for the Westport Coal Mining Company at Denniston when war broke out, Bettjeman joined the 13th Canterbury Company and fought at Gallipoli.

Wounded during the campaign, he ended up in a military hospital in Surrey, England, where he met a nurse, Agnes McNab. They wed and she followed him back to New Zealand after he was invalided home.

Fred and Agnes would bring up five children in the valley, with Fred becoming a tireless advocate for development of the region, at times appealing directly to Massey for help. Many of the soldier settlers in the valley had been wounded in the war and had varying levels of experience in farming.

"Fred did his best to make a good fist of it," says Steele. "Some of the settlers were breaking in their land for 10 or 15 years and then they left. Fred thought, 'That's all right, I'll take over their land as well and end up with a really big holding'."

If collecting enough from wool sales to pay the bills was challenging enough, keeping the road through the valley intact proved too much for the Mangapūrua settlers who began departing, family by family, from the late 1920s, leaving their land and homesteads vacant.

Sections of the metal road were regularly flooded or washed away, requiring repairs that the government was less willing over time to pay for as settler numbers dwindled.

Peter Griffin One of the last remaining signs of an ambitious land development scheme, the Bridge to Nowhere stands resolute in its misty valley.

The hulking bridge spanning the Mangapūrua gorge seems like overkill now. But at one point, the government envisaged it forming part of a highway cutting east across the North Island from New Plymouth. It was exactly what the settlers wanted. But it came too late.

By 1942, only three families were left farming in the valley when a biblical downpour again washed out the road.

While Bettjeman offered to take over the whole valley and assume responsibility for the road if the government would just fix the latest damage, his plan was rejected. The Bettjemans were ordered off the land, a cabinet paper signed off by then prime minister Peter Fraser sealing the settlement's fate.

Bettjeman walked away from the Mangapūrua with virtually nothing.

"There was a gap of 23 years of heavy work over long hours, on the part of my wife and myself, that never was and never can be filled," he told Arthur Bates.

Mrs Bettjeman left the valley the same way she had come in all those years before, on horseback. But Fred Bettjeman wasn't done with farming. He was assisted in buying a new farm near Te Kuiti, where he eventually retired. He died in 1987 aged 102.

After the settlers left, the bush and the pigs quickly reclaimed the valley. Mangapūrua was largely forgotten then mythologised as the place of the pioneers' last true battle to tame nature and evidence of how the country failed its war heroes.

But more recently, historians have taken a more nuanced view on the soldier settlement programme, which for much of the 20th century was written off as a failure to honour that debt to the soldiers.

"There's this image of the people in the upper reaches of the river," says Professor Michael Roche, who has a research focus on historical geography at Massey University. "But it wasn't by any means all pioneer farming."

Roche has examined the land records and accounts of about 100 ex-soldiers who took up land under the scheme on plots spread from Northland and Auckland to Wellington and Canterbury.

Some of them managed to develop successful farms that were passed through subsequent generations and form an important, if overlooked, part of our rural history. Others were amalgamated or sold on to buyers with no wartime service history.

The "section 2" provision of the scheme saw millions in government loans taken up by 5000 ex-soldiers to allow them to buy land and houses in urban areas, though it caused widespread resentment as it was seen as the reason for soaring land prices.

Many ex-soldiers did leave the farms, often within a year or two of taking them up. "Looking at their accounts, you can see why they left," says Roche.

The collapse in agricultural prices made farming small holdings on marginal land uneconomical.

From the start, the scheme suffered through a shortage of quality Crown land available for distribution.

"Some men might be dismissed as failures for leaving quickly, but they were just cutting their losses. It wasn't worth hanging in for another year, you'd just incur more and more debt trying to get to the next season."

Some ex-soldiers just weren't cut out for farming. Agricultural experience was a prerequisite for participating in the scheme, but a desire to do right by the veterans, including at least 61 Māori ex-soldiers and a handful of nurses who participated in the scheme, saw a lot of leeway given.

Former farm labourers found themselves having to make important pasture management or cropping decisions.

Others weren't capable of the heavy labour required due to their war wounds – physical and mental. Roche has sifted through reports from Crown Lands rangers sent out to monitor the progress of the farmers.

There are references to drunkenness, erratic behaviour, a reluctance to do a hard day's work, and poor stock management.

Matthew Micah Wright/Blue Duck Station Steele on his 7300-acre property. "When I came out here I just felt like I was coming home," he says.

Little support was offered for those debilitated by the trauma of war. "There was no real appreciation for what they would call shell shock at the time. It was that generation that couldn't talk about it to anyone else," says Roche.

The real failure was the failure to understand the scheme wasn't working, argues Roche.

By 1925, when Massey died, the government was scrambling to keep the settlement scheme from collapsing. "They actually went to great lengths, in terms of debt restructuring, to try and keep people on the land," says Roche.

The revaluation of land plots lowered rents for leaseholders. Debts were written off or deferred. It helped avoid disaster. But records suggest that around two-thirds of both the land allocated as part of the scheme and the number of settlers who entered the scheme, had departed within 18 years.

"In some ways it was the last pulse of the pioneering phase where we pushed the margins out as far as we could," says Roche.

A similar, smaller scheme was offered to returning soldiers after World War II and fared better, the government having learned the painful lessons of the 1920s and 30s. By then, Massey's vision of New Zealand as a closely-settled rural society had given way to modernity, larger farms and more sophisticated land management practices.

Peter Griffin Paddling down the Whanganui River.

Dan Steele knew he'd found his place in the world when he investigated buying land in the upper valleys of the Whanganui in the mid-1990s.

"When I came out here I just felt like I was coming home," he says.

Some of the few remaining settler huts are on Steele's land, where he is also engaged in conservation efforts to boost numbers of kiwi and the native whio, after which the station is named.

He remembers talking to the old timers who grew up on farms in Mangapūrua and Kaiwhakauka, ex-soldiers' children who still lived in the area when he began farming there.

"They didn't speak so much of extreme hardship. They spoke of the friendships, how their parents had been given an opportunity after the war," says Steele. "It is fantastic history, naive as the whole thing was. They didn't know then what we know now.

"We can't make those mistakes again."

Locked down with his wife and their four kids, Steele waits to reopen Blue Duck Lodge and welcome more visitors on to the station. He is eager to get back to business. The proceeds from tourism help him fund the conservation efforts on the station, such as reverting some of his flatland to wetlands.

"Unfortunately, people are now saying tourism is no good and never was any good, it's all about production," says Steele.

"I see it already being printed in the farming papers now, let's drop the regulations and produce more on our land. That's a race to the bottom."

The fallout of the Covid crisis will hit the region financially, but Steele says it's even more reason to focus on efforts to balance the ecology and the economy.

Down the empty river, the Bridge to Nowhere stands resolute in its misty valley, fat eels swimming in the stream 40 metres below. It has weathered many crises before. It will withstand this one too.