“The grey one never went to the Golden Shears. The horse went nine years running.” — Why a seventy-two-year-old Wairarapa stick maker is letting his last 284 hand-carved walking sticks go at a special price, before his workshop closes for good.

One in three New Zealanders over sixty-five has a fall every year. Most of those falls happen close to home: on the back steps, in the garden, on the way to the letterbox.

A walking stick lowers that risk. But only if it leaves the house.

The grey stick behind the hallway door

Hamish Rountree has carved walking sticks in the Wairarapa for fifty-eight years. In that time he has heard the same story hundreds of times. Someone comes home from hospital with a grey aluminium stick. They use it twice. Then it goes behind the hallway door, and they stop going out.

“Nobody says they’re ashamed of it,” Hamish says. “They say they don’t need it. Then they miss the A&P show, then the bowls, then church. By Christmas they’re in the chair all day.”

Five things a cheap walking stick gets wrong

• “The wrist breaker” (a flat handle). A handle that sits straight across puts all the weight on the wrist. “Hold a full kettle out in front of you and count to thirty,” Hamish says. “That’s your wrist on every step.”
• “The announcement” (a hollow metal tube). A thin tip on a metal pole clicks on every floor. People turn around before they even see you.
• “The slippery grip” (foam or varnish). Fine in the shop. With a wet hand after rain, or a sweaty one in January, it slides. That is the one moment a stick must not slip.
• “The rattle” (push-button height). Adjustable metal sticks always rattle a little at the pin. A walking stick should be cut once, to the person, and left alone.
• “The patient look” (grey and medical). The biggest fault of all. A stick that makes you feel old is a stick that stays at home.

Forty years a shepherd, fifty-eight years of sticks

Hamish carved his first stick in 1968, in a shepherds’ hut, from a piece of mānuka. He was fourteen. Every musterer on the hills carries a stick, and his own was the first of thousands. That crooked mānuka stick still hangs on the shed wall.

For forty years he worked as a shepherd on a hill-country station behind Tinui. He carved sticks for the other shepherds, then for their fathers, then for half the district. In 2009 he left the station. Since then the old implement shed on his section has been his workshop.

He starts at first light, with the door slid open onto the hills. His wife Bev, a retired teacher from Tinui School, brings the tea out at ten. He runs his thumb along a rough edge without looking up.

“On the hill you carry a stick twelve hours a day,” he says. “If it doesn’t fit your hand by smoko, it’s firewood.”

The hand comes before the wood

That rule from the hills is still how every grip starts. Hamish puts the rough grip in the hand, watches where the fingers press, and carves again. And again. Until the hand closes around it without a gap.

The summer his own Dad stayed in his chair

In the winter of 1996 Hamish’s father, Arch, fell in the yard and broke his hip. He was seventy-four. He came home from Wairarapa Hospital with a grey aluminium stick.

Arch had been at the Golden Shears in Masterton every March since the very first one in 1961. Thirty-five years without missing one. In March 1997 he said: not this year. No Shears, no pub, no A&P show.

“I’d made sticks for half the Wairarapa,” Hamish says. “And my own Dad sat in his chair all summer because of a grey one.”

So Hamish put Dad’s hand on a piece of rimu and shaped a grip to it. Arch had been a drover for twenty years, and his old mare Kit had carried him over every hill in the district. Hamish carved Kit’s head.

The next March, Arch was back in the stands at the Golden Shears.

Before that, Hamish only carved plain shepherds’ sticks. Since then, every grip has had an animal on it. Dad’s grey hospital stick hangs on the shed wall on two nails. Hamish sees it every morning.

Shape first. The animal comes last.

First Hamish shapes the grip until it sits right in a closed hand. Only then does the owl or the horse come out of the wood. “Do it the other way round,” he says, “and you get something pretty that hurts to hold.”

From the first saw cut to the last coat of oil, one walking stick takes him about eight hours. Most of that is the grip.

Why people actually take one of his sticks out the door

• “The Hand-First Fit.” The grip is shaped to the closed hand first, the way a shepherd’s stick has to be. The animal is carved around it afterwards. The weight spreads across the whole palm, not two knuckles.
• “The Hill-Country Angle.” The handle sits at a slight angle, not flat across, like a shepherd leaning on his stick going downhill. The weight goes into the palm and forearm instead of the wrist.
• “The Forward Swing.” The weight sits up near the grip. The stick swings forward on its own as you walk, so the hand does less work.
• “The Wet-Hand Grip.” Rubbed with oil by hand, never varnished. Varnish gets slippery when your hand is wet from the rain or warm in summer. Oiled wood gets a better grip, not a worse one.

Four animals for four different hands

The Owl is for a weak or stiff grip. The rounded chest fills the whole palm. Hamish calls it the morepork, after the one that calls over the hill behind his shed every night.

The Horse is for travelling. The brass ring unscrews, so the stick comes apart for the car, the bus or the flight to see the grandkids. It was Dad’s.

The Elephant is for people who really lean on it. The curled trunk is a hook for the fingers when getting up out of a low chair.

The Leopard is for longer walks. “This one goes to people who still walk the dog on the beach every morning,” Hamish says. “Wind or not.”

Where his walking sticks end up

Hamish still gets letters. A man in Gisborne who walks to the RSA again. A woman in Invercargill who took the owl to her grandson’s wedding and made sure it was in the photos. “Nobody writes to tell me how nice it looks in the hallway,” Hamish says. “They write to tell me where they went.”

When the middle of everything goes grey

It started in 2022 with straight lines that looked bent when he read the paper. The eye specialist in Wellington gave it a name: macular degeneration. The middle of what he looks at slowly goes blurry and grey. The edges stay clear.

Every six weeks Bev drives him over the hill to Wellington for treatment. It slows things down. It doesn’t bring anything back. Last year he bought the big magnifying lamp for the bench. This spring, even that stopped helping.

The sawing still goes. The oiling still goes. His hands are as good as ever. But the eye of the horse, the feathers of the owl, the spots on the leopard are exactly where he can no longer see. And a carving knife you can’t see slips.

284 walking sticks, and then the shed door shuts

Hamish doesn’t complain. “Forty years a shepherd,” he says. “You get used to the weather deciding.” His son Craig is an electrician in Hamilton. There is nobody to take over.

What is left stands in a rack along the back wall: 284 walking sticks. Owls, horses, elephants and leopards, all carved, oiled and finished. When they are gone, they are gone.

Why he priced them the way he did

A dealer from Auckland drove over the Rimutakas in September. He wanted to buy the whole rack. Hamish said no.

He kept the price low on purpose. “A stick in a shop window is a stick that failed,” he says. “I want them at the Shears in March. At the bowls club. On the beach at Castlepoint with the grandkids.”

Bev drives the parcels to NZ Post in Masterton. Anyone who gets one of these last walking sticks is carrying on fifty-eight years of one shepherd’s work.

What people say about Hamish’s walking sticks

• ★★★★★

  Mum had two walking sticks and used neither. She has carried the owl every day since it arrived, including to bowls on Saturday. She tells everyone who made it.

  Karen W. · Palmerston North
• ★★★★★

  I bought the horse because it comes apart for the car. What sold me was the grip. After a bit of rain my old one slid in my hand. This one doesn’t.

  Barry H. · Timaru
• ★★★★★

  The angle of the handle makes a real difference. With my old stick my wrist ached all evening after the walk to the dairy. Same walk with the elephant and nothing.

  Pauline S. · Whanganui

Questions people ask before ordering

More from people who carry one

• ★★★★★

  Bought the leopard for my husband, who walks the dog along the beach every morning and refused anything that looked medical. He has given it a name. That tells you how it went.

  Jan F. · Tauranga
• ★★★★★

  You can feel the grain right through the finish. It came in brown paper with the length written on the end in pencil. My grandson cut it to my height in five minutes.

  Ian M. · Ashburton
• ★★★★★

  I’m eighty-one and I’d stopped going to the A&P show because of the uneven ground. The elephant got me back there this year. Three people asked where I got it.

  Noeline R. · Feilding