John Breen is sitting in his office at The Breen Construction Company Ltd headquarters in an industrial area of Alexandra.
Behind him, outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, various four-wheel-drive vehicles and vans, ubiquitous modes of transport in the building trade, crowd the asphalt.
Inside, on a wall opposite a large desk, are other clues to what drives this man.
Several framed photos depict some of the more challenging engineering projects in which Mr Breen and others have been involved.
There are ski fields, radio masts, jobs that others might have shied away from.
On a chair rests his most recent test, a 200-page book.
Though Mr Breen has written "little sorts of books for long enough", their entries detailing some of those projects that adorn his office wall, River of Blood: tales of the Waiatoto is his first published effort.
In River of Blood, Mr Breen focuses on the Eggeling family, descended from a German immigrant who arrived in South Westland in 1875.
The family made a home amid wild isolation, farming cattle which they would drive to market through 200km of bush, crossing glacier-fed rivers, swollen creeks, precarious bush tracks, swamp and quicksands.
"River of blood" or "water of blood" are common Maori translations for the Waiatoto, one of five separate river systems that drain the western flanks of the Main Divide in South Westland.
Mr Breen illuminates what it has been like to live, work, raise a family, hunt, explore and climb in the Waiatoto, a place where the weather is sometimes so bad it rots the hair from the backs of live cattle.
It's a place where generations of Eggelings barely made a living.
Then, in the 1950s, they had to withstand the erosion of their tenuous livelihoods by invading red deer hordes.
By 1959, deer were in their thousands, eating the vegetation and reducing cattle to the point of starvation, leaving the Eggelings with barely any stock to sell and eventually forcing them to switch their hard-won, cattle-based livelihoods for the venison industry that thrived from the 1960s to the 1980s.
The Waiatoto history is also a record of the adventures of deer hunters, whose personalities sometimes clashed.
Mr Breen recalls an incident in which Haast identity Kerry Eggeling quickly erected a fence around rival Mike Bennett's grounded plane, then requested the song Don't Fence Me In be played by the local radio station.
Mr Breen's history of the Waiatoto wasn't meant to be the "main event" when he first thought of writing a book.
His original plan was to detail some of the construction projects "in wild places" in which he and others have been involved, perhaps also working in some tales of hunting, tramping and fishing.
However, having met Kerry Eggeling in 1977 at Haast, his appreciation of the people and place grew.
"I felt the need to do a good job of it. The hunting trip I scribbled a few notes about was in 1988. My first time in the Waiatoto was 1984, catching deer or something. That is where it developed," Mr Breen explains, adding that an introduction to author Brian Turner proved to be a turning point in the book's gestation.
"I didn't know what to do about it three or four years ago. I'd been writing for 15 years or so. Tony Gilbert is a friend of mine and he happened to know Brian Turner and asked me if I'd like to be introduced to Brian. I said `yeah', because I was stuck. That proved to be a bit of a breakthrough, really.
"Without Brian I would never have got to a publisher, I don't think. I was stuck in the middle of nowhere.
"Turner took it up, criticised it, pulled it to bits and sent it off to [Dunedin publisher] Longacre, who sent it back saying, `it's no good the way it is; you've told us what they do but haven't told us about their characters' - that sort of stuff.
"So I had to go back and try to bring it to life ... the deeper knowledge of the people and place became central to the book," Mr Breen says.
"I've spent a lot of time in Fiordland, chasing wapiti and moose, those sorts of things. I think Turner described the Waiatoto as `the last frontier'. You could say Haast is the last frontier and the Waiatoto is beyond the last frontier.
"People struggle to maintain touch with the bloody place. It is a bitterly difficult place; you had to be some sort of stoic, to have a huge amount of resolve and resourcefulness.
In the past, the valley of the Waiatoto River has been the stamping ground for legendary figures such as ferryman and gold prospector William O'Leary, otherwise known as Arawata Bill, and explorer Charlie Douglas.
Mr Breen uses quotes from Douglas' journals to help convey the awe-inspiring nature of the landscape, in particular the upper Waiatoto, which is dominated by the "magnificent" north face of Mt Aspiring.
"Charlie Douglas . . . stood alone as a bushman. He was obviously hugely intelligent; he picked up surveying quickly, enjoyed his own company.
"He was tough. He lived off ground birds; his dogs kept him in kakapo. The Eggelings built a fishing boat and called it Mr Charlie Douglas. There was always a close affinity between the family and Douglas."
Kerry Eggeling and wife Fay remain heavily involved in community affairs in the Haast area.
Kerry's mother, Betty, now in her late 80s, only stopped whitebaiting last year, the first time in 70 years she hadn't been on a whitebait stand.
Mr Breen describes Betty, the first woman to drive over the Haast Pass - in 1957, three years before the road officially opened, as "the epitome of pioneering women".
Having spent "thousands of hours" researching and conducting interviews for River of Blood, Mr Breen believes those who chose to live in the Waiatoto area survived there through sheer force of personality.
Yet the environment also formed their personalities.
"How many times do you see a flood in South Westland or Fiordland reported? Never. Well, they have them every two weeks; it's not worth talking about. They just get on with it.
"The forces that made people the way they were ... they wouldn't have survived if they weren't like that. I could appreciate the tenacity it took."
That pioneering, sleeves-up attitude, allied to a large dash of modesty, are attributes that also lurk within this 66-year-old latter-day author.
A professional quantity surveyor who has worked in the family business, The Breen Construction Company Ltd, since 1966, acting as manager from 1978-2003, Mr Breen was born in 1943 at Ranfurly.
On leaving school, he chose to become a builder and to explore his wider homeland, working, hunting, fishing, climbing, skiing and exploring the wilds of southern New Zealand.
He prefers fishing to hunting these days.
"Fishing," he says, holding a hand flat, "the rivers go like that."
The hand then tilts steeply: "Hunting, the hills go like that."
His current disinclination for steep terrain aside, Mr Breen has often worked "on the edge": he has constructed base buildings at Coronet Peak and Treble Cone; a ski tow at Turoa, central North Island; radio masts for Hunt Oil at Port Pegasus on Stewart Island and at Bull Creek; the Teviot Power Scheme dams (including pipelines and powerhouses); Haast village (from 1977 to 1985); restored the Port Craig viaducts; and the Onslow Dam, built high in the Otago tussock country over a single summer in 1981-1982.
"The viaduct restoration on the south coast took 50 days straight without a break," Mr Breen recalls.
"We encountered foul Foveaux Strait for much of the time, not finishing 'till the shortest day of the year.
"I think there might have been an unconscious affinity there," he says of the parallels between his own challenges and those faced by the settlers of the Waiatoto Valley.
"A lot of those things are about keeping the blood running. We gravitated to ski fields or places on the edge. We took to that stuff like a duck to water; so did the young fellas in the company. That's what it's about - technical challenges, logistical challenges."
Amalgamated in Invercargill on August 30, 1939, Breen Ltd remains a family firm: Mr Breen and wife Valmai's three sons, Lindsay (managing director), Trevor and Peter, and daughter Maria work for the company.
"Most people would say you're asking too much to have siblings in a firm like this. But I don't know how you find out unless you try," Mr Breen reflects.
"Everybody has got a place. You make it work."
Though the company's 70th anniversary is three weeks away, the occasion was marked by a barbecue yesterday.
It's not the only event on the social calendar this week.
On Thursday, River of Blood was launched at a function at Alexandra.
In the lead-up to the launch, Mr Breen conceded, somewhat reluctantly, that he might "have to do a bit of talking".
And the party continues today.
The Eggeling family members are holding their own book launch at Okuru Hall, Haast.
Given their reputation for hospitality in an inhospitable land, it could be a late night, Mr Breen suspects.
Yet, again, he seems up to the challenge.
"In for a penny, in for a pound ..."
The book
John Breen's River of Blood: Tales of the Waiatoto is published by Longacre ($39.99, pbk).
