A casual conversation has led to a formal research and funding agreement between Victoria University and the Tuatapere Hump Ridge Track board.
The 55km loop track traverses Southland's rugged southern coast and includes the Port Craig area, a busy sawmilling town and port in the 1920s.
It was established after a huge volunteer effort 12 years ago and is still run by a trust and community-run company. That so impressed Victoria University deputy vice-chancellor (research) Prof Neil Quigley when he and his family walked the track last summer and got talking with co-manager Alistair King that he persuaded the university to support the track trust.
Victoria will offer two summer scholarships each year to senior students, who will live in the Tuatapere area and carry out research on the track for 10 weeks.
The research will be made available to the trust. The university will also offer one undergraduate entry scholarship annually to a student from the Waiau Valley area who wishes to study tourism, ecology or another closely related field at Victoria.
At a ceremony in Tuatapere, where a memorandum of understanding was signed between the university and the trust, Prof Quigley said the agreement was a first between Victoria and a community group and could be the model for other agreements.
The establishment and development of the track by the volunteers was a "fantastic example of a community doing something worthwhile", he said.
Prof Quigley said the track fitted well with Victoria's biodiversity, restoration ecology, tourism management and heritage and museum studies programmes.
Victoria students would learn important lessons working with Tuatapere people, said Southland Mayor Frana Cardno, who is patron of the track trust.
"They will learn about real New Zealand and how real New Zealand works. They will learn about our people, our heritage and our community ... They will learn about a community which refused to die."
