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While the discussion that follows of the relationship between the subject and park is positioned as the culminating moment of the chapter, it is in the first opening of the brochure (shown in Figure 31) that the skifield and skier subject are visually introduced. Featured in this position in the sequence of openings, the ski holiday and skiing subject assume a dominant position in the hierarchy of information. This is announced by the tagline “Holiday in Sun and Snow – have fun – 5,000 feet above worry level! ”. The irregular reverse slant drawn capitals aim to capture semiotically the thrills and spills of the skiing holiday. It is the positioning of the field as experience of both “sun and snow”, however, that captures the essence of the invigorating qualities of this white and blue environment.

Figure 32: The Chateau and Tongariro National Park publicity brochure ca 1960, designed by the New Zealand Tourist and Publicity Department, produced by Pictorial Publications Ltd, Hastings. Internal trifold spread. (1960a)

The tagline “5,000 feet above worry level” present in early publicity for the park now reappears (Figure 32). The reference to the elevation and wilderness environment of the park as an escape from the “worry level” of everyday urban life was present in the rhetoric of the Tongariro Tourist Company’s Prospectus for the Chateau project in 1929. This in turn reflects Cowan’s 1928 positioning of the Tongariro National Park as a “corrective” for the “artificial life of cities and towns”. The “above worry level” rhetoric was used throughout the 1930s by Wigley’s Mount Cook Tourist Company in publicity for the Mount Cook Hermitage. “5000 feet above worry level” in this brochure specifically locates the elevation of the skifield and establishes a rhetorical pattern whereby elevations are cited throughout the composition. The development of a skifield as a primary mode of recreation in the park

had been envisaged from the outset. It was not only an attraction that would draw a large population of visitors to the mountain; it was also the element that would give surety to the vision of the Chateau as resort hotel. Used here in 1960, “5,000 feet above worry level” now carries the familiarity of convention in its reiteration of the separation between the urban/ work world of worry and the health benefits of mountain elevation.111 _{It is the distance}

between “worry level” and the skifield that summarises the park’s relationship to the urban visitor. This firmly states the park’s status as holiday heterotopia.

The representation of newly expanded Whakapapa Skifield spatially dominates the composition. The western face of Ruapehu, formerly represented as an indomitable backdrop for the Chateau (as discussed in Chapter 5), now appears in close up. The ski- styled banner heading Where the White Sport reigns is compositionally located inside the frame and occupies the same spatial zone as represented site and subject, binding them together into a co-constituted rhetorical formation. The progressive construction of new ski lifts at the field throughout the 1950s continued the narrative of modern progress and entrepreneurial development at the park. In this representation, access to the mountain’s topography is now delineated by vectors representing the new built lifts and the mountain is bounded by their trajectories. While the uphill carriage has its own excitement the thrill they offer is the National Downhill ski-run. This is symbolised by a curving vector that leads the reader’s eye to the illustrated male skier subject in the salient centre foreground position. Moving at speed towards the reader, this figure genders the physically active relationship to the mountain as male. The angle of his ski pole in alignment with the National Downhill vector visually connects subject and mountain. Considerable detailed is provided about the “Uphill facilities” that now configure the leisure field. Elevations, for example, are specified at the top and bottom of each of the new chairlifts. In this way the mountain, positioned since the 1920s as an “easy climb”, is now made even easier by engineered uphill facilities that physically carry the subject to its higher elevations. The accessibility to the lifts themselves is reiterated “… Mt Ruapehu, in spite of its vast

proportions- is “an easy climb”. You can drive your car - except under heavy snow conditions – 4 ½ miles above the Chateau to the 5,500 ft. level at the foot of the chair lift”. In this way the

ski lifts configure a very different relationship between mountain and subject. The lifts engineering enables the ‘White Sport’ to reign and configures the subject as king or queen, able to conquer the mountain’s heights.

111 Embedded in this pitch for distance from the urban and its associated worries, is, as other commentators noted, an instance of anti-urban thinking (see for example Leotta, 2011). The dominant representational legacy of sublime wilderness provided a philosophical justification for anti-urban rhetoric. This arguably perpetuated the

Queens and kings of the white sport: middle class family mobility

It is the subject and skifield relationship that figures prominently in the brochure’s second opening (Figure 33). The woman seated on the chairlift, turns back to directly engage with the reader. Her smiling disposition shows and tells the subject she addresses that this is fun. Her position on the chair lift reiterates the position of the cover girl, shoring up the discourse of ease and relaxation. While the cover connoted social mobility; now on the chairlift upward mobility is realised physically.

Figure 33: The Chateau and Tongariro National Park publicity brochure ca 1960, designed by the New Zealand Tourist and Publicity Department, produced by Pictorial Publications Ltd, Hastings. Detail, left panel, internal trifold spread. (1960a)

The woman’s position in the upper left of the composition, the location of the “given” in a polarised composition, indicates that her presence in the park is now well established.112

Significantly, and consistent with the gender representations throughout the brochure, it is the female subject in this composition who is represented on the chairlift and the male subject who is actively skiing downhill, positioned physically in command of the mountain. Coleman’s (2003) work has addressed the significance of gender in the ways subjects formed relationships to mountain environments. She notes in relation to the North American ski industry that “Gendered relationships to the environment drove both the history of skiing and the ski industry. Defining the mountains as wild backdrops for physical adventure and conquest, skiers and resort advertisers associated skiing with masculinity” (p. 95).

It is interesting to note that the 1930s publicity texts in New Zealand, as I have discussed in Chapter 5, show a different story. In 1960, however, while women may have been active and athletic skiers, the rhetoric shaping their representation in this brochure is consistent with the structural gender differentiation that dominated mid-century New Zealand. The inclusion of children and family groups at the skifield marks a significant departure from both the other sections of the brochure focusing on the Chateau or wider park environs, as well as from the texts discussed in earlier chapters. In accordance with Kress and van Leeuwen’s theory of compositional meaning, they are as new elements positioned on the right-hand side of this polarised composition.113 _{Properly fitted out in ski-wear,}

the children look directly at the viewer through their ski-goggles, displaying the specific equipment and clothing required to participate in the sport. Advancing the earlier century initiatives to locate the international sport of skiing in New Zealand and develop it as a sport for women and men, the brochure constructs the ski-field as a populated zone of family recreation.

In the illustration featured on the cover of this 1963 brochure for Chateau ski hire (Figure 34), a fashionably dressed young couple are represented with a young child at the skifield. It is the mother (naturally) who is managing the child’s snow experience, but importantly this represents an inclusive family event where the family are at leisure together at the skifield. As a semiotic resource in this image, the mother represents family values and draws these values into the skifield that she co-constitutes. This inclusiveness is evident in the two groups of children and adults in the 1960 representation, coding the skifield as place at which families could cohere and identify as a group. The female gendering of the park shown in Chapter 5 worked in support of the production of the park as elite formation. In this period I argue that the texts show how female gendering supports wider accessibility and inclusiveness, mobilising the redefinition of the park as a family zone, and thus expanding its wider usage and profitability. As in the 1930s, representation of the relationship between gender and the environment is deployed in service of economic exigency.

The white sport: skiing and the European legacy

The copy in Figure 31 focuses on the “popularity” of the ski resort, its “high” reputation among ski experts “all over the world”. It has a team of “internationally famous” coaches there

to teach “beginners” the art of “The White Sport”. The establishment of skiing as a new international sport and leisure activity in New Zealand is significant. While an important addition to local leisure and tourism, its international nature connected the hotel, and New Zealand skifields and skiers, to an international network of ski tourism. The bonus of (European) off-season availability attracted overseas visitors and professionals. The cache that European status held at this time, perceived as sophisticated, was a standard to be measured against and aspired to in the hospitality world. As the skifield facilities were progressively developed, both park and hotel became progressively connected to a mid-century language of European sophistication. The presence of European tourists, instructors and skifield employees heightened the othered or heterotopic nature of the Whakapapa holiday. Their European race augmented the whiteness of the physical environment.

The racial overtones, therefore, of the banner heading

Where the White Sport reigns, cannot be overlooked.

Coleman (1996) has discussed the whiteness of visitors to the North American ski resorts such as Vail in the 1950s. She notes the:

… the skiing and advertising industries worked together to market destination ski resorts. They did so by creating an attractive image of ‘European’ ski culture that excluded people of colour, helping to create an ethnic whiteout on the ski-slopes” (p. 589).

The positioning of skiing as “the White Sport” in this brochure may not have been a deliberate Figure 34: Chateau Tongariro, Ski season

publicity brochure 1963, Published by the Tourist Hotel Corporation. Front panel.

strategy to represent the skifield as a racially white zone. Given the European origins of the semiotic resources across the entire park field, however, including most obviously the name and concept of The Chateau, it is consistent with the production of a racially white environment. While in recent decades Ngati Tuwharetoa youth in particular, and wider numbers of Maori generally, have been active participants in skiing, they are clearly not subjects represented in this 1960s brochure nor in those discussed in the preceding chapter. As heterotopia, the park holiday offers a place of altered time – alternative to that of the everyday, it opens up to the subject, for a short period of time, and then in effect closes for the subject after they leave. Hence the heterotopia is only activated on return. As the text states, “You’ll always be longing for another holiday at the Chateau”. The former luxury playground it is now re-differentiated as a site for specific leisure lifestyle consumption, delineated as and by a middle class habitus. As the hotel and park and skifield are opened to and claimed by the middle class, these sites and modes of leisure lifestyle become codes through which middle class status is defined. While opened to the middle class, however, the leisure lifestyle at the park is not open to those who do not have the means or aspiration to be part of this group.