There are things Max Polglaze did that could never be done today. There are things he built as a park ranger in the 1970s and 1980s that would never get signed off by the bureaucracy and ‘processes’ that would eventually drive him from the hills he loved so much.
Anyone who's tramped in Kahurangi National Park would have seen – and marvelled at – Polglaze's most famous handiwork, the Gridiron rock shelters. These nooks in the limestone that Polglaze somehow fashioned into magical sleeping quarters are the most unlikely abodes to wear a Department of Conservation (DOC) badge.
Design them today and you'd be laughed out of town, or threatened with arrest. But 40 years ago things were different. Visionaries like Polglaze could innovate and leave their mark on the patches of bush they adored. For him, that patch is Kahurangi National Park, known
