HUNKERED DOWN IN my jacket as the evening breeze rustled the tussock. In the distance two climbers made their way up one of Castle Rock’s more prominent turrets. Close by an elderly couple approached their car at the end of an afternoon’s walk. Chatter from a small gaggle of mountain bikers floated up on the wind before they turned off the main trail and sped back down to the city. My dogs, panting with exhaustion after another fruitless rabbiting expedition, collapsed in a contented heap next to me. As the sun sank over the Southern Alps, Christchurch’s Port Hills were, as usual, emanating their powerful aura of freedom.

I grew up in a small Waikato farming community, and an enduring memory of my youth is the sense of space and liberty I felt walking the backblocks of my parents’ farm. University, work, the search for adventure—all contributed to a move to the city, something of an inevitability for my generation of farm kids. I am still an uncertain city dweller, for whom the proximity of the Port Hills is a godsend. Without the opportunity to roam across them, to revisit the “landscapes of the mind,” I don’t think I would survive here for long.

For many years I happily explored these hills without ever wondering how they came to be a public asset. Now I rarely visit them without paying silent homage to the heroic efforts of one man: irascible, audacious Harry Ell. The struggle to see the Port Hills preserved for public enjoyment, and, central to this, the dream of creating a walkway between Christchurch and Akaroa, was an obsession Ell pursued for some 30 years, until his death in 1934.

Growing up on his father’s farm at Halswell, now an outer suburb of Christchurch, Harry Ell had the Port Hills on his doorstep. He regularly rode his white pony up the bridle path through Kennedys Bush, on the hills’ western flank, to the ridge crest. At that time native flora and fauna still had a grip, albeit a weakening one, on the slopes, and Ell’s boyhood rambles instilled a love of nature that stayed with him all his life.

It was at Kennedys Bush that Ell’s crusade to protect the Port Hills would start, although not until after campaigns of a different nature. In 1879, following short spells as a junior attendant at the Canterbury Museum and working on a sheep station and at a wool-scourer’s, Ell volunteered for the Armed Constabulary. He served for three years, helping crush resistance by Taranaki Maori at Parihaka (although he was subsequently critical of the race policies of the time). Returning to Christchurch, he took up civilian employment once again, working in the printing department of the Press and later with a firm of manufacturing stationers.

In 1892, aged 30, he married Adelaide (Ada) Gee, whose conservative parents the liberal-minded Ell seems to have had a harder time charming than their daughter, although with equal success. He and Ada had two sons and three daughters, to whom Ell proved a caring if disciplinarian father: physical fitness, cold washes and outdoor living were mandatory for the Ell offspring. Of a gentler, more retiring disposition than her husband—yet no less determined—Ada provided something of an antidote to the animated idealism so characteristic of all he undertook.

The 1880s were years of depression in New Zealand; jobs were scarce, wages low, working and living conditions poor. Those bent on remedying matters were drawn to the reformist agenda of the Liberal Party, in opposition to the governing Conservatives. Ell was among them, joining a variety of political, educational and social-service organisations. He was also an ardent prohibitionist, and it was as such, in the 1896 election, which revolved largely around the issue of liquor trading, that he first stood for Parliament, backed by the National Council of Women.

During the election campaign, a newspaper drew attention to that characteristic of Ell’s passionate nature that would become the running theme of his Summit Road crusade in years to come—his propensity for forging ahead with schemes close to his heart without the necessary funds: Mr Ell out-crimsons even Mr Smith and Mr Taylor [two fellow campaigners] in the brilliant red of radicalism. His socialism does not even pretend to have regard for the practical side or the possible. Money with him is no object. He advocates, as all the candidates do, the old age pension scheme. But, says Mr Ell very finely, “cost is out of the question. If it is right to do it, it should be done and done properly.” This sanguine young man has apparently still to learn the value of money.

Failing to win a seat at his first attempt, Ell was back in 1899, when, as an independent Liberal in the newly formed Christchurch South electorate (today known as Wigram and represented by Jim Anderton), he topped the poll and embarked upon a 20-year parliamentary career.