Sugerencias

The Tongariro Park Tourist C., Ltd has acquired a lease of about 63 acres in the National Park and is erecting a commodious and up to date hostel, to be known as the “Chateau”, which will be completed by 1st _{December 1929. The “Chateau” which will cost £80,000} will be modern in every respect, and with its Georgian architecture, plate glass, lounge of 5000 square feet, special parquetry dancing floor, rock garden, sun porches, central steam heating, steam cooking apparatus, cinema room, room telephone connections, garage, children’s play room, electric elevators and with suites and a bathroom to every room, it will be the most up-to-date hotel in Australasia. Tongariro National Park Timetable, Fares and Tariffs, Tongariro Park Tourist Company Ltd brochure, 1929.

This chapter focuses on early publicity for the Chateau Hotel project. It addresses material produced by both the hotel’s developers, the Tongariro Tourist Company, in 1929-31, and in 1933 by its subsequent managers, the Tongariro National Park Board. I show how these representations produced the park as an international tourist site shaped by the strategies of entrepreneurial tourism development and the discourses of elite luxury and leisure. The representations of the Chateau in these texts spatialised the park in new ways when compared to those considered in the previous chapter. These new representations were premised on early twentieth century modes of leisure consumption as aspirational commodity. This new spatial formation provided a theatre for the performance and display of a new order of recreation defined by the leisured subject.

The vision of grand modernity “to be known as the “Chateau”, is notable for the foreign naming of the hotel. This initiates the semiotic investment of European cache at the site, something that is furthered in the selection of a (neo) Georgian architectural style for the structure.63 _{The brochure excerpt above details a vast stronghold of interior spaces}

and “up-to-date” features to be located in the national park. Attending to the material and social pleasures as well as physical comforts of the subject, the hotel is assembled as a self-contained interior topography. Its exterior appearance and visual command of the landscape are, however, features at the top of the list. Georgian architecture will present a structure defined through the solidity and control of neo-classical style, while plate glass apertures will afford its subject the command of an uninterrupted view. In announcing the construction of the hotel, the above excerpt from the 1929 brochure demarcates a new era of socio-spatial-coding in the national park. It demonstrates the extent to which the material expanse of the new hotel rapidly departed from the discourses of material reduction that characterised the hut/park formation outlined in Chapter 4.

The interior topography of the hotel asserts a new presence in a park formerly characterised by its landforms, wild alpine environment and liminal hut structures. This new interior territory and its exterior form will inevitably reconfigure the park in subsequent decades, incite polemics and assert its dominance well beyond the domain of hotel grounds carefully defined in the excerpt above.

This chapter addresses this period of the formation of the Tongariro National Park through close analysis of publicity material for park and hotel published in 1933 – four years after its opening in 1929, and only five years since the 1928 Park Board publication discussed in Chapter 4. By this time the hotel was under the management of the government Department of Industries, Commerce, Tourist and Publicity.64 _{The brochure that provides}

the evidence for the interpretation in this chapter was produced by the Tourist Department in 1933 (see Figure 11) and has been selected to represent the 1929-1939 period of the park’s formation.

63 Although it should be noted that in architectural terms Chateau style and neo-Georgian style exist within separate domains.

64 After the bankruptcy of Tongariro Park Tourist Company in 1931, the lease was returned to the mortgagee the Tongariro National Park Board, and after nine months of further difficulties was transferred back to the Government Tourist Department (then part of the Department of Industry, Commerce, Tourist and Publicity).

Figure 11: Tongariro National Park and The Chateau publicity brochure, 1933, published by the Tongariro National Park Board, printed by W.A.G. Skinner, Government Printer. Front and back panels and right reverse panel.

In aspiring to be the “most up-to-date hotel in Australasia”, in a remote alpine environment, the Chateau project was ambitious. While the urban grand hotel was well established, the idea of a grand and luxurious hotel at a national park was a first for New Zealand. Its precedents, however, were well established in the North American national park/railway hotel model. The Hermitage at Aoraki/Mount Cook, the South Island’s remote alpine hotel, was the nearest local comparison. While an international tourist destination, The Hermitage was not a luxury hotel and its origins were closely tied to mountaineering practices in the Southern Alps.65 _{The Hermitage site was leased by the Mount Cook Tourist}

Company, sister company to the Tongariro Park Tourist Company.66 _{Rudolph Wigley,}

managing director of both companies, developed a hotel for the Tongariro National Park very different to that of the wooden colonial style structure of The Hermitage. In Wigley’s

plan, the new Chateau Hotel would be the central tourist destination of the North Island, complementing its southern counterpart, whose place as the central southern alpine destination was well established (Tongariro Tourist Company Prospectus, 1927).

The Chateau was, from its inception, a speculative development premised on the growth of international tourism. The hotel and park were forcefully repositioned as a commercial venture through the deployment of a powerful set of semiotic resources. Although a suitable hostel at the national park had been promised a decade earlier, the architectural programme of neo-Georgian grandeur and scale designed by Herbert Hall of Timaru was a later development. Although fuelled by the growth in international tourists seen in the early 1920s, the reckless ambition and rapid construction of the project was akin to that of urban development in the latter part of the decade prior to the Depression.67

The drawing of the Chateau included in the Tongariro Tourist Company’s 1929 publication (see Figure 1) indicated that a radical transformation of the park within a very short time period was imminent. Already the subject of public discussion before its opening, established recreational users of the park were divided in their response to the idea of a luxury hotel. It was supported by some, including the primarily Auckland-based membership of the Ruapehu Ski Club. For others, however, including the Wellington-based Tararua Tramping Club, the elitist values of the luxury hotel clashed with the egalitarian principles embedded in the national park idea. One commentator noted in the Dominion newspaper in 1928 “that between the extremes of a rough hut and a palatial hotel the ordinary New Zealander would have nowhere to stay”.68 _{Nonetheless when the foundation}

stone of the hotel was laid in February 1929, it embedded a new structure that would irrevocably change the identity of the park and underpin its subsequent formations. The hotel opened in 1929 as the Depression set in and the growth in overseas visitors seen in the early twenties rapidly declined. Its luxury, perceived as out of reach of the thrifty New Zealander in a Depression context, meant lower than expected numbers of local visitors (Khoey, 1995, p. 41). Construction budget overruns followed by high running and maintenance costs exacerbated financial difficulties. Luxury in a near wilderness remote environment, it was evident, came at a significant cost.69

67 The Civic Theatre in Auckland was also constructed in 1929, but unlike the Chateau was not completed before the Depression.

68 Dominion, September 7, 1929, cited by McLure, 2004, p. 136.

Although publicity had been widely used to promote The Hermitage in the 1920s, there is little evidence of the constricted Tongariro Park Tourist Company’s promotion of the Chateau following its opening in 1929. After the hotel’s return to the Tongariro Park Board, and subsequently to the Tourist Department in 1931, advertising was prioritised. A national campaign in 1931 produced peak numbers of visitors and this was followed by high investment campaigns in subsequent years. Given the downturn in international tourists to New Zealand in these years, national visitors were essential for the hotel’s

economic survival and campaigns used state of the art visual strategies to target a wide range of the population.