Gordon, Angus John Interview

Good morning. Today is Thursday 7th October 2021. I am Lyn Sturm and on behalf of the Knowledge Bank I have been given the privilege of interviewing Angus Gordon of Clifton Station. Over to you Angus.

Good morning. My full name is Angus John Gordon and I was born on 16th March 1950. I was born here at Clifton … well, my parents were living in the house but I was actually born in Napier on the hill; we were all born in a place called Harvey House which I think is still there, I’m not sure; anyway, we were born in Napier.

My mother’s full name was Barbara Rose Gordon. She was born on 6th March 1924, and she was born in Hastings. She lived at Lindisfarne … her parents lived at Lindisfarne House.

My father’s full name was John Gordon. He was born in Napier on 5th April 1924, and his father was Frank [Lindsay] Gordon, and he had a family, Lindsay and Eileen, from his first wife, Ellen Tanner. He was married a second time to a Dorothy [Halliday] and they had just the one child, [John]; Frank was sixty years old, and John was their only child; and his mother [Dorothy] was forty years old at the time.

Great-grandparents – Thomas Edward Gordon [m. Janet Elizabeth Scott Robertson]; and the great-great-grandfather was James Gillespie Gordon who came to New Zealand in 1859 and bought Clifton Station from the Government. The Government had already bought the land from the Maori. This particular area was called the Kidnappers Block, and it was bought by Donald McLean from Te Moananui Hawea, who lived near Clive on the Tukituki River.

So my father was a single man; my mother came from a family of eight children, but three of her brothers were killed in the Second World War; they were all pilots. So she wanted a big family. My father was only a single, so they ended up having six children. It was after the war and everyone was wanting big families because the male population had been decimated. So everyone we knew had big families in those days.

And it was good money; farming was very successful at that stage. Farming was going well and so we had [there were] six children. I was the eldest, Angus, Jenny, Rosie, Edward, Serena and Charles, who’s ten years younger than me. And so they’re all around here still … yes, a lot of them live here. My mother is still alive and she’s now ninety-five, nearly ninety-six, and she still lives by herself up Gordon Road in Te Awanga. That’s the house that they retired to when they left Clifton in 1989. They left Clifton and we moved into the house, and my father died not long after, in 1992; he was very young. My mother is now ninety-five, still drives a car, plays bridge, and has her hair done every Friday in Napier. So she’s … bit of a character, my mother, she’s definitely the matriarch of our family. I’m not sure how many grandchildren she has, I think she has seventeen grandchildren; she has an awful lot of great grandchildren now.

So they were farmers and my grandparents were farmers, and my great grandfather, Thomas Edward Gordon, was actually a soldier from India, fighting for the East India Company in India, or working for them, and he came out to New Zealand to run Clifton for his family.

What year would that have been?

That was in 1866.

The year of the battle?

Yes. So he was a soldier, and Hawke’s Bay at that stage was opening up. They’d had the Indian Mutiny in India in 1856, and so a lot of talk was going round, and the banks collapsed. And this is why my great great grandfather, James Gillespie, came to New Zealand, because he was from India too; he was a jute merchant. He retired back to Dundee where the family came from, and then his wife died; and then they had the mutiny and he lost a lot of money in the bank … the Calcutta Bank was a big financial centre. There was a crash, so he decided to come back to India. He had his own schooner, and he sailed back to India and bought his sons out of the Army. Then he went on to New Zealand because everyone in India was talking about Hawke’s Bay; Hawke’s Bay must’ve just been coincidental with the time of the mutiny and the time of Hawke’s Bay opening up, in the 1850s. So if you think about, all of the names of Hawke’s Bay are all Indian Generals – Napier, Hastings, Clive, Havelock – all East India Army Generals. There were quite a few Indians came to Hawke’s Bay, that’s why Hyderabad and Lucknow and Meeanee and Scinde Island … these are all Indian names, and so that’s why they must’ve all been talking.

So J G Gordon sailed to New Zealand, bought, went to the offices in Napier or wherever it was, and bought Clifton which was fourteen thousand acres at the time – they were just great big blocks of land. Then he went back to India and had a house … the first house at Clifton was prefabricated out of teak and a shingle roof. And he came back to New Zealand and the house came obviously on a boat, barge or something, and was prefabricated. It was floated ashore at the beach just in front of where the present homestead is, and he had Indian Army mules to do the work. They had no horses or anything at that stage, and it was the only house between here and what was Clive at the time, so there were no other houses on this side of the Tukituki River at that stage. He stayed here – he was sixty-six when he arrived in New Zealand; it was quite an age to actually come out to New Zealand, sixty-six years old.

His son stayed in the Army; one of the sons came to New Zealand, William, but he died. He drowned, which was a perennial disease; the major cause of death in those days was drowning, because there were a lot of rivers you had to cross; there were five rivers you had to cross to get to town from Clifton here to Napier, and a lot of water. And he must have been drunk … I think he was drunk in charge of a horse [chuckles] and fell off and into the Waitangi Stream, which is only a small stream but he must have been so drunk he died anyway, he drowned. But I think it was very common … drowning was very common in those days.

So Thomas Edward came out with his family and they moved into that house, but he was also really an Army man, he wasn’t a farmer. and so they had someone helping them with the farming obviously. He had a little troop in Napier that he kept organising for future battle; they didn’t have guns or anything, they just had wooden guns, but they practised on horses and he had a little cavalry unit.

Anyway in 1866, virtually not long after he got here … when was the Battle of Omarunui? I think it was in 1866. He arrived in February; what happened was they were at the house here – the whole family was here at the house at Clifton – and they saw this great cloud of dust coming towards them across the Plains between the Tukituki and here, and it was a group of Hauhau warriors who had come to Hawke’s Bay and were being supported a little bit by Te Hapuku at that stage. And they terrorised the family; they galloped round and round the house – and they were full moko of course – and walked through the house, picked up knives, and just did whatever they liked. And my great grandmother, who’d been through the Indian mutiny and survived that … the terror of the Indian mutiny … was absolutely terrified ’cause she had young kids; she had a whole lot of young children at that stage. So the grandfather managed to get them to leave, and then my great grandfather, Thomas Edward, he leapt on his horse and raced to Napier to find out what was going on. And what was going on was that Donald McLean had formed a contingent and they were going to go and fight these Hauhau at Omarunui Pa.

And so Thomas then galloped all the way back here to get his uniform and his sword and his guns. [Chuckles] And all the staff at Clifton were seconded to do battle and one of them was the Clifton gardener – I’ve forgotten his name now – but he was in here and was the only man injured in that battle. He got his jaw shot off, or shot at; he had it broken by a stray bullet. So Thomas Edward looked after his family and looked after him for the rest of his life.

But by the time Thomas had got over there and they got up early in the morning and they raced – he was given the job of going down to Petane which is on the other side of the water, ’cause it was all water in those days – and by the time they got there there was no one there. They could hear the shooting at Taradale, so they raced back; and the fighting was going on. All the troops were Maori … mainly Maori troops … fighting against the Hauhau, and they very quickly routed them, and the Hauhau took off. So Thomas and his troop took off after them, and then they were called back; and that was really the end of the battle. He came down, and there was one injured man and he looked down and he said, “What are you doing here?” It was his gardener. So that was the only injury of the whole battle.

So after that Thomas’s wife said she couldn’t live in New Zealand, she was too frightened; she had these young children and she’d just been through all the hassle of the Indian mutiny. And so they left and went back to Scotland where they came from originally. She had eight children I think it was, and then she died … childbirth; so she had quite a tough time.

One of her children was Frank, my grandfather, who then, when he was eighteen, returned to New Zealand and took over the road [reins]. The Hill family were managing Clifton for the family in England, and Kenrick Hill had been a soldier in the Indian Army with my great grandfather. And so the Hills then left and went to Fernhill which also belonged to us – family owned all of Fernhill – and they then built a house at Fernhill and gradually took over – well Fernhill became theirs, anyway.

And so my grandfather, Frank, ran this place for fifty years and he wrote letter books … letters to his family; and they’re beautiful letter books, he had beautiful writing. For fifty years he wrote reports back to England on every single thing they did on Clifton – every building that was built, every detail. And I found these when we moved up to Clifton. My parents left the house in 1989 and we moved up, and we’ve got a big walk-in safe which was part of where Frank had his office. And I opened it up and there were all these books in there, and my father showed no interest. They’re beautiful, you know, they’re just beautiful, and the paper is very fine, and they’re like you do with invoices today – he must’ve had a cardboard underneath, and you wrote on top and then you sent the top copy off to your family, or to the debtor, and kept the bottom copy.

So you have a record?

So I have this record of fifty years, when this house was … ’cause it’s a long history but the first house was eventually burnt down in 1898 when Frank and his family, his wife Ellen and his two children, Lindsay and Eileen, were coming back from England. ‘Cause in those days they called England home, and they always went back to home and then came back here. But they were coming back and the housekeeper was cleaning the house, and a candle or something caught fire to the curtains and burnt the house down. They were shearing at the time and there were about forty people down at the wool shed, so they all raced up and got all the furniture out of the house ’cause James Gillespie had all this lovely furniture made out of Indian sheesham wood [Indian rosewood] and stuff like that, in India; specially carved … beautiful, beautiful stuff, which is still here. So we saved all that historic furniture, but the house was burnt down.

And then in 1900 they built this house, this existing homestead, which took them – hard to believe this – but it took them six months to build. And I think the reason why it took six months to build was because they had a big crew, the carpenters, the builders all came out here and lived onsite; there was a big tent, and they all lived onsite. And they would’ve pre-made a lot of the stuff I think, the big window insets and things like that; I’m not sure, but it was very quickly done. And I know all this because in his diary he said, whenever it was, before Christmas, or June – in those days when the foundations were being laid you put a bit of a good luck thing, you put some money and a little note in a container and you put it under one of the piles for good luck. And he said, “We came out to do that on” such and such a date, and then the next thing they were moving into the house … “On February the” whatever it was, “we moved into the house.” So that was extraordinary, and it’s a very well built house. The house was built out of rimu, matai flooring and rimu timber walls, and we still maintain all the timber downstairs in all the halls; all the halls are still original timber – and the original varnish too.

My parents over the years, they did a lot of work on the house. They re-piled the house ’cause the house was affected in the earthquake, and it would’ve sank on its piles and all the chimneys fell down inside. So my grandmother fixed a lot of that up and put central heating in the house.

Frank Gordon – I’ve said this before – Frank Gordon remarried. His first wife, Ellen, who is the mother of Lindsay and Eileen, she died tragically; she was with her sister and brother-in-law on a trip round Auckland, North Auckland, and they got stuck on a railway line at Helensville, and the only train of the day [came] and she was killed. The others all survived.

By then Lindsay and Eileen were living here in the house and they were getting worried about their father being lonely, so they sent him back to England to find a wife, and he got on the boat and met my grandmother on the boat going back to England. They went back to England; they got married in Salisbury Cathedral because his brother-in-law was the Dean of Salisbury Cathedral. Came back to New Zealand and then just had the one child, who was my father, John. And then he [Frank] died when my father was thirteen, so they left New Zealand – my grandmother didn’t like it here, she was an Englishwoman; wanted to be back in England. So as soon as my grandfather died in 1937 they closed the house up, put sheets over all the furniture and took off. She never expected to ever come back. But my father had been brought up here for thirteen glorious years of running around in bare feet on the farm and having just a marvellous time with all his friends, and he had this great ambition to come back to New Zealand. So they went away and didn’t come back to New Zealand until 1947, so the house was shut up for ten years. And then they came back and he married my mother, and so that’s the story of the family. My grandmother then had to stay here in New Zealand. She built another house down at Te Awanga, where my mother now lives. So that’s the story up to then.

As a family we had a very happy life, you know, we all … well, Jenny and I in particular rode horses; we used to go and help our father doing mustering on the [farm]. In those days all the work was done on horseback. Clifton’s now two thousand acres, and it’s very steep country and so we still had to do everything on horseback. So my sister and I had a lovely time, and my brother Charles and Serena also did, the last two children, helping our father muster and do all the stock work. It was a great life … swimming in the rivers; we’ve got a river boundary and sea in front, so it was pretty idyllic.

Then we all were sent off to boarding schools. First of all I went to Hereworth … we all went to Hereworth, then we went to Christ’s College. The reason we went to Christ’s College in Christchurch was because my father had been at Harrow School in England, in London, and he had an obsession about wanting to send me to Harrow. And my mother said, “No way! I’m not sending my child [chuckle] all the way to England to go to school.” So the nearest he could figure to Harrow was Christ’s College, so we were all sent down there.

And then I went to Victoria University ’cause I’d decided by then that I wanted to be a writer; I was quite artistic, quite interested in writing [and] stuff like that. So I went off and did an English degree at Victoria University, got a BA, which stands for ‘bugger all’ of course, [chuckles] nowadays. But we had a very good time, the best time of my life most probably.

Did you stay at Weir House?

Yes, I was at Weir House for two years, and then I went flatting and had all the girlfriends – it was just a wonderful life. I didn’t know what to do at that stage. I wanted to be a writer but I didn’t know … I was doing a lot of poetry at that stage and got a lot of poems accepted in university magazines and things at Victoria University. So then my mother said, “Well why don’t you go and do VSA?” VSA’s Volunteer Service Abroad. So then I left New Zealand in [19]72 and I went over to Vanuatu … Vanuatu now; it was called New Hebrides in those days … and I was a teacher over there and I was at a mission school right round the other side of the island. And I had the most glorious time for two years, I fell in love with all the … we call them Ni-Vans now, they were New Hebrideans in those days, but they’re now Ni-Van … Ni-Vanuatuans … and had a lovely time; would’ve stayed on there I loved it so much, but I knew I had to get away.

So I came back and then travelled for three years, in Europe mainly. And I ended up with my girlfriend at the time, English girl, we went to Spain and lived in Spain and taught English as a foreign language, and had a wonderful time down there. And then my father was getting a little bit worried that I was … and I was writing books at that stage, I was trying to write novels, and doing all that stuff; and he was getting really worried that I was just wasting my time and mucking round, so he said would I be prepared to come back and help on the farm, because my youngest brother was here but he hated farming, and he was getting on the old man’s nerves. So I said, “All right – well, I’ll come back to New Zealand.” And that’s what I did and I came back in 1977 and started working on the farm, and I’ve been working on it ever since, basically.

In 1981 I got married to Dinah Annette Eivers. Her father was manager of a huge fourteen thousand acre station up in the back blocks of Gisborne, Ihungia Station which was a cadet farm where all these young boys came and did cadet work there. And she and I met in Hawke’s Bay here – she was looking after a stud breeder down here at that stage – and got married in 1981. Had two children, Tom and Abby, and Tom did the same thing, went to Hereworth. Abby went to local schools, then she went to Woodford, and they both ended up at King’s College in Auckland [which] was where they wanted to be.

They both went to university, both got degrees, and Abby then trained to be a commercial pilot and worked in Indonesia for four years; really rough flying in West Papua and all those sorts of places … mountain flying. She was a mountain pilot; it was like having a child at war. They had three accidents while she was flying, so it was quite frightening. But now she lives in Malta and she’s married to a Norwegian who’s also a pilot; she flies corporate jets. She’s just been made a captain so she’s flying corporate jets all around Europe and Russia, and … it’s a good life.

Tom decided to stay on; he went travelling all around the world and then he went to Japan and did a lot of work shearing; ‘cause I wasn’t ready to hand over the farm at that stage. But then I said to Tom, “If you want to be a farmer you’ve got to show that you’re interested; I just don’t want you to think you can come back and lounge around.” So he learned how to shear and he went off to Japan with a Kiwi guy who had this tourist business up there where they did shearing sheep and running sheep … doing the whole New Zealand sheep thing, and the Japanese loved it. It was in a big park up in the mountains, it was a glorious place. Tom did that for five years, on and off; he’d come back in our summer, then go back in the winter. So it was useful so we could do work, but in the meantime I’d leased the farm out because I wanted to get on and start doing my proper writing.

I wanted to write the family history, called ‘In the Shadow of the Cape’, 2004 I published that. It took me two years of [a] lot of research and work to get the book done, as you know yourself, you’ve done a book. So I’d leased the farm out because I wanted to do writing; I was writing short stories and poems and things as well. I haven’t published any of that stuff.

Oh, in the meantime of course, before that in 1999, I’d always wanted to build some sort of hospitality centre down here at the end of the road; ‘cause we’re at the end of the road at Clifton before it goes round the beach to Cape Kidnappers. And there’s a lot of people used to drive out here every day, so for ten years I thought and thought and thought about it … ‘I’ve got to build a cafe’, but I just didn’t really have the courage for a long time. But eventually I did.

We were growing squash for the Japanese market at that stage. And farming had been through the doldrums, as you know, in the eighties when we nearly disappeared. We had three major droughts in the eighties … ‘84 drought, the ‘86 winter drought, and the ‘88-’89 summer drought again, and the prices just fell away from [to] nothing, and I don’t actually know how a lot of people survived; a lot of people didn’t survive. We survived because we went and started growing squash for the Japanese market, and we grew the earliest squash in New Zealand, so we had the reputation of being the earliest on the boats out of New Zealand, and I was able to command a good price. So for twenty-five years we did squash growing, and we’ve given it up now.

And so I was feeling reasonably confident because we were making very good money; we were making more money out of a hundred acres than we were out of the rest of the two thousand acres of the farm. So I plucked up enough courage, got a building designed and I built the Clifton Bay Cafe down on the beach. And then I tried to find someone to run it, ‘cause we were farmers, we weren’t restaurateurs. But I couldn’t get anyone interested because they said, “Oh, it’s a seasonal thing, you’ll only be working in the summer.” And I said, “No, no, no – people come out here all year, especially on the weekends.” So we had to run it ourselves, and that was a bit of a shock to the system because it was a big building and it could take hundreds of people at a time, and we knew nothing about the industry. Dinah was never very keen on the whole thing ‘cause she couldn’t work out why I’d plunged us back into debt. We’d got out of all our debt and then I plunged us back into debt again. And it was hell for the first year or so, but then we got going and we ran it for fourteen years; and we leased the farm out as well so I could be involved with the cafe. And we had a very good manager eventually, and we did very well.

And then in 2014 we leased the cafe out, and had bad tenants for a while. But now we’ve got very good tenants there … excellent tenants, Kerry and Robyn Brannigan, and they’ve changed the name of the cafe to Hygge, which is a Danish word for welcoming, cosy, comfort, you know … a comfort word. Everyone calls it ‘Higgy’ [chuckle] – New Zealanders can’t get their … So everyone knows Clifton, so they just say, “We’re going to Clifton.” So that was a big venture in my life.

And then I did the books, and we travelled a lot actually, at that stage. Tom was working overseas, Abby was doing her stuff, and then we took the farm back in 2012, Tom and I. Tom by then had proven that he was mad keen about the farm, that’s all he wanted to do, so he came back and we’ve been [a] farming partnership ever since – and very successfully. And we’re learning a lot; Tom’s an ecologist really, he’s very much into tree planting, so we’ve done a lot of fencing off gorges and gullies and areas and he’s done a lot of planting. We’re also now planting for carbon credits of course, ‘cause that’s the new thing to do, so we have timber for that.

And then we’ve changed our breed of sheep to Wiltshire sheep which is a self-shedding sheep so we don’t have to worry about shearing, ‘cause shearing’s … wool carried this place for a hundred and thirty years; was the main source of income and now costs us money to shear.

Yes … and so then I got onto writing more books, and then I went and did the book on the ‘Famous Times’ which is the historic wool sheds of Hawke’s Bay, and I had a lot of fun doing that, ‘cause I know a lot of the places anyway, and I know a lot of the people. I went right around Hawke’s Bay from Wairoa to Akitio; I call Hawke’s Bay from Wairoa to Akitio; Akitio’s really Wairarapa, but I include it in Hawke’s Bay ‘cause they all go to shop back to Dannevirke … Dannevirke’s their town; that’s the ‘Famous Times’ I got published in America. And then just this year I wrote – well, it’s taken me two years – the ‘Historic Homesteads of Hawke’s Bay’. I went round and photographed all the houses, talked to all the people and then came back and wrote all the histories of the places.

What sort of order have you got that?

Alphabetical order. The houses had to be a hundred years old or more, so nothing after about 1918. There’s a couple of houses built in the 1920s … well we’re now into the twenties … but the majority of the houses were built between 1870 and 1914, most of the houses. It was a period of great prosperity in Hawke’s Bay, but in New Zealand, [the] East Coast [of] New Zealand, with wool and all the rest of it. And that’s when everything got broken up when the Seddon government came in in 1900 and they started breaking up the big estates; then they just got broken up more for soldier settlements. Maraekakaho Station for example, which was fifty thousand acres … monster place …

That was McLean’s, was it?

Yes; that’s got sixty-two farms on it now … big farms, you know, two thousand acre farms. You’ve got Olrig Station, that was broken up into sixty-two farms, so there was a lot of people could start farming out of these land[s] which had already been cleared and was ready for them to go. So the original parties had done a great job of developing it all, and then these people became more intense.

And so we’ve been farming ever since, and I’m now coming up seventy-two, and still seem to be fit enough to help on the farm. Tom and Lucia … Tom married in 2016; he married a local girl called Lucia Plowman, whose parents are great friends of ours who live in Te Awanga, and he’d grown up with her. They’ve been living in the cottage, and they’re going to move up to the homestead next year, or whenever we get organised. We’re trying to get architects and things for them but it’s very slow, as you can imagine at the moment, so I don’t know when it’ll happen but it will happen within the next year or so. We’ll move down to their cottage; they’ll move back up here. They’ve got two children, Jasper and Frankie, and they’re the seventh generation of family to be here. So that’s it really.

Just talking about the schooling days – I went to Hereworth when I was eight – well I was really nearly nine actually, to be quite honest – I was nine in March, so I’ll say nine. I went to Hereworth for five years, and we had a lovely headmaster there called Pat [?Beech?] who was a very soft man. But he had three teachers there who were very tough, and they almost bullied him in a way. We had one called Prof Rickard, another one called Hank Grant, and another one called Tommy Harrison, and they were very tough men. Prof Rickard would line us up in the morning – we had cold showers in the morning – we all stood naked in a line and he would stand and say, “Next!” And you’d have to rush into the cold shower, have your cold shower and rush out again. And we did get caned there of course; no one understands that now, but the headmaster had a cane and if you were really bad you got caned, so we all got caned at some stage. But we all had to do runs at [a] certain time at Sandy Lane; so it was a fun time.

And I was in the First XI cricket, so we played a lot of cricket; but I got belted by Hank Grant with a wicket once for talking too much. I wouldn’t stop talking, ’cause I was a big talker at Hereworth – I was called the second biggest talker. There was another boy called Robert [?Wakeman?] … Bobby Wakeman was considered a bigger talker than me. [Chuckles] And so I was a big talker; he caned me for talking during the game. I’ve never forgotten it, with one bash with the wicket.

And Tom-tom Harrison – I just … he was a bully really, and he would frighten us, you know … we used to have exeats; we used to come home once or twice a term. I was a boarder so we’d come home to the house about once or twice a term. And I used to be sick, almost physically sick, and not want to go back to school, I was so frightened of old Tom-tom Harrison, ’cause he was quite a bully in those days. Anyway, Hereworth was good, and even though Prof Rickard was tough, he was a character and he was funny, and he had a big booming voice and we all used to imitate him. He was a great coach, he coached us in the [First] XI.

So then I went to Christ’s College, and Christ’s College was also a long way away. You had to get on the railway, so you drove into Hastings, got on the railcar, and there were boys from Gisborne and girls from Gisborne who were going to Nga Tawa School in Marton. And some boys were going to Wanganui [Collegiate] and some of us were going to Christ’s College. So we all got on this train down to Palmerston North where the girls and the Wanganui boys got off. We carried on to Wellington where we were looked after by some friends of the family who gave us a meal and looked after us, and then we got on the ferry which was the … I think it was the ‘Rangatira’.

Was that the overnight one?

Overnight one from Wellington.

You slept in bunks?

Yeah. I think it was called the ‘Rangatira’. And we’d had these big meals, and we’d get outside the heads at Wellington, and of course there was [were] big seas and we’d all be sick as anything [chuckles] in these bunks. I remember my friend James Williams not being able to make it to the lavatory and he was sick in the sink. And then we couldn’t get it down the sink and it was sloshing around the sink in these rough seas, [chuckles] and he had his toothbrush and he was trying to get it all down [the] sink and it all blocked up; and it was disgusting. [Chuckles]

We’d arrive in Lyttelton at sort of six o’clock in the morning – always overcast and misty and dark, and then we’d have to get onto a train to take us through to Christchurch; then we got on a bus and we arrived at Christ’s College at about seven [am], just as everyone was getting up in the morning. And it was so depressing – it’s something that sticks with you forever, that – going back to school – it was awful. But of course the opposite applied when we were leaving school and we were going home; it was a sense of great freedom when we did the opposite, going back to Hawke’s Bay, three times a year. We had three terms in those days – I can’t remember when the holidays were now …

May …

May, August and December, so we went home three times. So you can imagine, when we got home … getting back here was like paradise; and so we just rode, and we swam and we fought amongst each other. And we had a house at Kinloch … eventually got a house, ‘cause all farmers were doing really well in the sixties. The wool price had boomed and the Korean War was on and wool was just selling at astronomical prices, so farmers with five hundred, eight hundred acres were making a fortune and they were all building houses up at Taupo, and all over the place really; Rotoiti … lot of people at Rotoiti; mainly Gisborne farmers at Rotoiti. And Kinloch was just opening up, and my parents went up there and they bought the first section at Kinloch, which is out on the Western Bays of Taupo. They bought on Nisbet Terrace which is in the front, so we went up there and they built a house, so that was a happy time; we had many happy times going to Kinloch every summer.

When we first went up there, we’d go up in the old Landrover Series 1 which we bought in about 1953; first vehicle. And it was so exciting, but it was [a] canvas back, and so going up to Taupo … the road to Taupo was all shingle, no tarseal; there was a bit of tarseal on the Taupo Plains, a little bit – the rest of it was shingle. And it was windey, windey, windey, and the back of the Landrover just used to fill up with dust. It was like a film, about an inch of dust by the time we got up there. It was a long, slow business; my mother would come in the car with some of the kids and we would go up with my father with all the gear in the Landrover. And my father would drop us up there; we were up there for a month. He then turned round and came straight back home, because that was the busiest time on the farm. We had shearing, we had dipping, we had just everything on the farm at that stage of the year, so he would come home. Eventually when I was at secondary school I didn’t go there so much; I came back and worked on the farm as well in the summer holidays to give him a hand, ‘cause it was very hot. Hawke’s Bay doesn’t seem to be as hot nowadays, but it used to be very hot [background noise] and dry, and it was just a lot of work over that summer period. Hay making … we had to do all the hay making as well.

So that was the schooling. Then I left and went to University at Victoria and stayed in Weir House and made a lot of friends that’ve been with me all my life. And it was a marvellous freedom, you know, after being at Christ’s College and Hereworth, these sort of quite cloistered boarding schools, to suddenly have all this freedom, and it was just a very good time. [Chuckle] Four years I think I was at university, and I did a bit of teaching as a relief teacher down there to help make some money, ’cause I never had much money then.

And I got a little 50cc Suzuki motorbike for Christmas from the family and I decided to drive that down to Wellington – 50cc is nothing, it’s like a little scooter – and I set off from here on a nice day but by the time I got to Havelock North I’d already had two bee stings on my arms, so then I had to wear this big coat. I had my bags on the back, and so I set off for Wellington. It took me ten hours to get to Wellington. It was the journey from hell [chuckle] … I was on the Takapau Plains in a head wind with rain in my face and I was going at about fifteen ks [kilometres] an hour – that was maximum speed. So all these cars were passing me and all these people were looking at me, and I got to the bottom of the Paekakariki Hill – Pukerua, just past Paekak[ariki] – and I just fell off my bike on the side; I just said, “How am I going to do this? How am I going to get up these hills?” ‘Cause the bike by then was buggered; it was overheating and it had no power, and I had to go up the Paekak[ariki] Hill, you know, to Pukerua and round through Mana. And all these people were looking at me, all these kids going back and I felt … hated them, all these kids in these cars all looking at me and pointing at me. Anyway, I got there.

I was still at Weir House, ’cause one of my first girlfriends, she was an opera singer … Italian … and we were going to go for a big night out. I picked her up on the bike, ’cause Weir House is at the top of Kelburn, up the hill, and we set off and everything went well. We were going downhill of course, and then we went round all the bays, Evans Bay and all round Seatoun and all that, so we had a very romantic time and had a meal somewhere. Came to come back, and of course the two of us couldn’t get up the hill together, [chuckles] and she had to walk all the way up; and it was the end of the relationship after that. [Laughter] The bike just ran out of power. [Chuckles] So after that I used to hitch-hike home a lot. Whenever I came home I used to hitchhike, you’d take the train to Paekakariki and then get off the train and hitchhike from there to come home. Yes, so it was quite [a] hard time, but we had a lot of fun and made a lot of friends at university.

And then when I went to VSA [Volunteer Service Abroad] I went up to Port Vila, ‘cause I had an English degree so I could teach English. But I actually had to teach French; it was one of the things I had to teach up there as well. We’d all done French at school; I had to teach French, I had to teach English, I had to do Social Studies and I had to teach farming. They had a little farm, pigs and cows, and I had to teach them all, in the tropics. We had to do sort of tropic farming; it’s a bit different from our type of farming.

It was a Presbyterian Mission school, ‘cause they were the only people doing education, the missionaries. In those days the British and the French both owned the country jointly, and so they both had a school each. They had the British high school and the French lycée. [French public secondary school] Those were the only formal schools there, and so the missionaries had all the schools at all the other islands.

Spent two very happy years there, and we started a piggery, and we had chooks there; we sold to all the local villagers. And we tried to teach the villagers … they used to get these pigs off us – good breeding in them – and they would take them back to the village and they’d put them in a little pen about as big as this table, and just feed them coconut all the time. The pigs never grew and they had terrible worms, so we used to try and educate them about the worms and giving them a bit more room, but they never did. We’d go back months later to see the pigs that we’d sold them; they hadn’t grown any bigger than what they had when we had them. [Chuckles] They still had them in these little bloody pens. But we did try to educate them; I don’t know if we had any luck at all really, but …

So who was paying your wages?

We weren’t paid, it was volunteer, so we were volunteers. We were looked after by Volunteer Service Abroad so I think the school paid for us to go over there, they paid for the air trip. We didn’t get any pay but we got a little allowance which we got given when we’d finished, you know, [a] thousand dollars or something like that. Two years of volunteer work.

I got involved in Vanuatu many years later when I was doing the squash farming here, which I was saying before. [A] friend of mine, John Bostock who’s a big grower in Hawke’s Bay, decided to go up to Vanuatu because there was a little niche in the market; because there was a little niche in the market to Japan where nothing was grown. And so they went up there and started a company called Paradise Growers, and then he got me in … ’cause it was Vanuatu and I hadn’t been up there since I’d been teaching … I went back; I was really keen to go up and have a look, so I went back and [of] course fell in love with the place again and so ended up by growing squash myself up there.

Then when that finished we grew mahogany, and I’ve still got the mahogany plantation up there actually. John and I grew mahogany, and we again tried to educate the locals about you can grow mahogany as well as have farms, you know, growing vegetables and stuff underneath the trees, which they do on my block because I have squatters living there. Because we never get up there, I have these squatters who live on my block, and they have all their vegetables and everything there under the trees; they have a very happy time. [Chuckle] And then we bought some property on a beach up there and built a house in 2007, but we’ve since sold that, so I don’t go up to Vanuatu much, and we haven’t had a chan[ce], but I’ve still got the mahogany up there; it’s still quite valuable, it’s up to about twenty years old now.

So what year were you up there the first time?

The first time I was up there, 1972 and ‘73, and I travelled in 1974. I got back to New Zealand in 1977; started farming.

Just talking about the writing, because of course I wanted to be a novelist or a poet but I didn’t consider myself good enough, so I’ve written a lot of novels that’ve gone into the bottom cupboard. I never really wanted to write this sort of stuff; I wasn’t even interested. The family kept on saying, “Oh, you’re a writer – you’ve got to write about the history of the family.” And I said, “Oh! That’s just boring.” But lucky for me when I moved into the house – I said before, I found those letter books. And once I found those letter books I was very inspired to write because I had all the information at my fingertips. So I wrote the first book, ‘In the Shadow of the Cape’. And then I decided no publishers are interested in these sort of things so I would have to self publish. So the first one I did was … lucky, there was a lovely company called Central Hawke’s Bay Print which were involved with the paper in those days I think …

It was Central Hawke’s Bay Press and they amalgamated. James Morgan was involved in that.

I think he was, yes. And they were brilliant, and they were just in Waipuk [Waipukurau] and they were great guys, so I would work with them. And that book was fun to write and it was fun to do ’cause I was discovering all this stuff about the family history that I didn’t know before. I suddenly decided that I was very interested in all that history, and being the original pioneers of course it’s just sort of Hawke’s Bay really. So I wrote that and published it myself, and it cost me a lot of money – I think it was about $50,000, ’cause I printed three thousand copies and it’s got colour in it, and a thousand copies were hardback. And so I was a bit shocked by it all, and I … over the year I had a big book launch at the Clifton Bay Cafe we called it in those days; and I was a bit shocked at how few I sold. But now, over a period of time, it’s the sort of book that goes on selling, so I’ve now nearly sold two thousand copies of that book now. And I’ll just go on selling it; there’s still bookshops … Poppies in Havelock [North] still just go on pottering along selling a few of them.

And so when I came to do the next book, I thought, ‘Well I’ve got to do it cheap; I can’t afford that sort of money, it’s just a lot of money. And why I could afford it at the time was ‘cause the cafe was doing very well so I was able to use a lot of the money that we’d earned from the cafe – we were doing very well at that stage. The second book which was going to be the ‘Historic Woolsheds of Hawke’s Bay’, I went off and I thought, ‘Well I’ll go round and photograph them all first.’ So I went round Hawke’s Bay – there’s some magnificent sheds in Hawke’s Bay … all those original ones were all architecturally designed, a lot of them.

Did you get Tuna Nui?

Tuna Nui? [Of] course. A lot of the big wool sheds, the best wool sheds were built in the 1870s, ‘80s, and Clifton was built then. Tuna Nui was built in 1878 … I think it was 1878. And a lot of the other big stations around Hawke’s Bay had these wonderful … Te Mata woolshed; just endless sheds that … Tautane, which was my family, the Herrick family … shed down the coast at Herbertville; it was the biggest one actually. So that was really good fun, going round and photographing. I was going to get a professional photographer but I discovered that really I could take the photographs just as well myself.

You’re a photographer!

So off I went. And I had a little Lumex camera, and I took really good photographs. When I did this book I didn’t know about editing, so some of the photographs are a little bit dark, but on the whole they’re pretty bloody good. And so that was just good fun because I’m a nosey sort of person and I love nosing around Hawke’s Bay; it’s the pastoral side that really interests me, and I knew a lot about it and wrote about them all.

My in-laws worked on Olrig, for Mr Smith.

Right. Yes, for the Nelson Smiths. So there’s a lot of history. But I decided to do this one in America because there was a company called Ex Libris – I never knew what a lot of scams were going on in America; the publishing thing over there is just constant scamming.

Anyway I got it done by Ex Libris and it was $9,000 so that was a lot cheaper than what I spent on this, but – that was only the beginning. I brought the books back. I’ve sold six hundred of the books, done quite well, but I’ve sold nothing in America. They made me do this huge packaging and marketing and promotion over there; they just talked me into it, I’ve had a terrible time with them, and they keep on talking to me until I paid more money and more money. So I suppose I’ve spent nearly $50,000 doing all the marketing over there which has come to absolutely nothing! The only books that sold [are] all the stuff I’ve sold myself back here in New Zealand.

So when I did the third book, ‘Historic Homesteads of Hawke’s Bay’, I decided, ‘Right, it’s the same process’; I went round all the houses and took pictures and met the people and then I came back and wrote up the stories, and that took [a] long time. I was also into editing by then, so I knew how to edit pictures, so the quality of the pictures is much better because I learned how to edit.

So you designed the book?

Well I did the design, yes; I wrote the book, did all the photographs, then I put all the photographs together, inserted the photographs into the areas where I wanted the pictures, and then I got hold of a company called Mary Egan Publishing, sent it to them in Auckland – she is a woman with two daughters, Sophia and Anna, and quite a well know publishing company, specially for self publishing. And then they did a design on it, and they designed the cover and they designed, you know, where to put all the pictures – I mean, they knew they had to put each picture with the house, and so they did all that. And then they sent it off to Chi[na] – this cost me a lot less; I mean I can’t remember what it cost, but it still cost a bit ’cause I had to pay for the publicity; I had to pay for the editing; I had to pay for the designing and I had to pay for the printing, so I think it was around about $30,000. But having said that, I’ve already paid it back; I’ve sold about twelve hundred books around the country in three months, which has been quite good. But the trouble is with me with this, is that again when you self publish and you publish around the country, you have to pay for the publishing, which I did … the $30,000. Then when you sell it in a bookshop they take forty-five percent, and the distributor takes thirty-three percent, so I end up with $16 in the hand when it goes through the bookshops, so it’s not a lot of money. But it’s just a numbers game, I’ve just got to sell a lot of books. And I have luckily, it seems to me I’m selling a lot of books at the moment.

The other good thing though, those people are going to read that book …

Yes, that’s right.

… and that’ll be kept for the next generation.

That’s right. And I even sent a book to Southland yesterday; the guy requested the book ‘cause he wants to review it in Southland [on] his radio show or something. But I do sell a lot of this book – it sells for $55 in the bookshops, but if I sell them – if I go and do talks or if I sell it myself I sell it for $50, so I’ve sold quite a lot, personally. And people ring up and want a book and they all want it signed, so the signing seems to be a very important part. Then I go and give talks, and every time I do a talk I sell about twenty books at a talk. It’s [They’re] all signed, and I can get my $50 then so it’s been quite fun. So actually, yes, I’ve just about … haven’t quite paid it back but it’s getting pretty close. The trouble is I ordered two thousand of these and we’re already up to thirteen hundred sold, so I’m going to have to re-order, I’m going to do a re-run, yeah, which costs a bit. The book’s done so the only cost is the printing really, and it gets printed in China.

Wonderful job you’ve done, ‘cause that’s for the next generation …

That’s for the next generation, so yes, that’s right. When I first wrote this book here, my main incentive to write it was because we’ve got so much history sitting in this house, and if we had a fire it would all be gone. So I wanted to write the history, get it all recorded, into the book, and then get it out of the house, so that if we were to lose the house, we’ve still got all the records.

It’s wonderful.

Thank you … thank you.

I would like to thank you very, very much, Angus, for letting me interview you today; really appreciate it.

Pleasure.

And I wish you all the very best for the future.

Thank you very much.