Ross, Kenneth (Ken) Kinghorn Burrows Interview

Good morning. Today is Tuesday 14th June 2022. I am Lyn Sturm and I have been given the privilege of interviewing Ken Ross of Frasertown, Wairoa. Now it’s your turn, Ken.

Okay, I am Kenneth Kinghorn Burrows Ross, born in Waimate in [on] 7th November 1928. My mother was Vera Ruby Butcher, a Christchurch girl, and my father was from Balclutha, South Island, and he was a farmer/bushman. His people were farming out at Owaka.

From Waimate we went to Christchurch; I don’t know what age I was then but I remember being in the suburb of Papanui when I was about four and five year[s] old. Now my mother worked as a home domestic and my father worked in the freezing works. Unfortunately, while there he got on the beer in the night-time. Came home, and he used to abuse my mother if things weren’t just as he wanted it [them] to be, so much so that she got knocked about. Put up with it for a little while, and decided that she’d had enough and packed my younger brother, Ashley, and myself up and she moved to her sister up in Christchurch, taking a pram and two suitcases which I can quite clearly remember. She had about seven sisters in and around Christchurch and we were shifted from one sister to the other, my aunties, who were very good to us. They gave us bed and dry, warm lodgings and fed us until, I remember, I was about five, and my mother said to me that we were going to the North Island where she had a sister in Wairoa, a married sister; married a returned serviceman, First World War.

We duly left Christchurch – I can’t remember how long we were there but I remember just starting school – left Christchurch for the North Island, coming up on the ferry from Lyttelton to Wellington, then the train to Napier and bus to Wairoa – about a two day trip in those days. And my Aunty Mil and Uncle Joe were on a rehab [Soldiers Rehabilitation] farm from the First World War. They’d only been there about five years, just getting their home established. They took us in. And they didn’t have children ‘cause my Aunty Mil couldn’t have children, and they wanted to adopt me. But Mum wasn’t keen about that so I was never adopted although they looked after me, and my mum got a job with a neighbour across the road about a mile away; a bachelor guy … Scotsman by the name of Jack Boyle … being a housekeeper. She wasn’t paid for it, but I could go there from my aunty’s place. He took my brother in, Ashley, and my mum, and he housed them and fed them for nothing, which was a good deal as far as my mum was concerned. I stayed on with my aunty.

It was six mile[s] to school; I’d’ve had to go on horseback but I was too young, so my Uncle Joe and Aunty Mil taught me Correspondence School which was based in Wellington, and I was with Correspondence School for about three years I think it was … four years. When I was old enough to ride a horse to school the six mile[s] was a big day for a young guy, but my uncle had taught me how to ride a horse, and I enjoyed riding so it wasn’t too bad.

I went to [what is] now known as the Ohuka School but in those days it was known as the Mangaaruhe School, named after the river which ran past it, although it served the Ohuka First World War soldiers’ settlement area of about twenty settlers, but they weren’t all married. From the Mangaaruhe School, now known as Ohuka School, I went back to one of my aunties that I was very fond of … Aunty Flo, Mum’s sister … to Christchurch where I went to Shirley Intermediate, out in the suburbs of Christchurch known as Shirley. I went there for a year.

And then as there was no boarding secondary education other than going to Napier and my Mum couldn’t afford to send me to Napier, my aunty took me on with the proviso that I had to cut the lawns and dig the garden, and she fed me and looked after me for about five years, although I didn’t go to school for that long. My form master at Christchurch Boys’ High School, at the end of the year thought I was a bit of a waste of time and I’d be better out working. I wasn’t much good at English; I didn’t mind arithmetic but English was the downfall. Geography was good; history wasn’t good, so I decided … well, my aunty and Mum decided that I’d probably be better working.

I started work as soon as I was fifteen, and I worked at a seed merchant’s place that [which] supplied market garden seeds for the market gardeners down Marshlands Road [Christchurch] that [who] grew the vegetables … potatoes, tomatoes … for I think, consumption all over New Zealand but mainly for the Christchurch market.

After being there about four years I could see there wasn’t a lot of future in it for me, and I bought myself a motorbike and decided to go farming on Banks Peninsula; Hickory Bay’s the name of the bay on Banks Peninsula, the eastern-most bay on the Peninsula. And I was there for a few months until we had to run the sheep in and crutch them for getting ready for shearing. And there was gorse on the farm, and at the end of the day my arms and legs were full of gorse prickles, and I vowed and declared that day that I’ d never buy a farm where I could see a gorse bush. I’d had enough of gorse [chuckles] and I left there. They were good to me, didn’t get a big wage but actually the motorbike I bought, I bought it off [from] this farmer. It’s an Indian … ex-army Indian … and I went out there and I paid the bike off. And when I’d paid the bike off doing work for him I went back to Christchurch and went to the Labour Department, and they man-powered me down to Lake Tekapo where they were building the first powerhouse.

Got a job there doing concrete work and shovel work really, but anyway I was in a gang of about five guys. And the boss man that [who] was the overseer said to me one day, “I can get you a bit better job than this.” He said, “If you like you can join the staff.” And I said, “Oh, no.” I was too young; I didn’t want to be over men that were a lot older than I was. I said no, no, I was happy where I was. But he got me a better job; and I have to say I enjoyed it because I learnt how to do concrete work, and I learnt how to handle a hammer and drive nails, and found that I enjoyed it. And I stayed on there ‘bout … under twelve months; came home at Christmas time when the works shut down. And while I was away on holiday at Christmas time the overseer, my boss, was drowned with another guy in Lake Tekapo while out fishing. And that I felt, was the end of my career as far as joining up with the Public Works Department.

So I said to my mum – I called it home at Ohuka, between my uncle and Mr Boyle I called it home – and I said, “I wouldn’t mind having time at home.” And I spoke to Mr Boyle and my uncle; they said yes, they’d give me a job. But it wasn’t a paying one as far as I was concerned – I’d been getting weekly pay on the Public Works down at Tekapo, and I came home to just working for my shelter and tucker. And if I needed a pair of boots they’d buy me a pair of boots or a shirt; I could go to the firm and buy myself a shirt. But it was good, I learnt quite a lot and put up with that; no money. Sometimes they’d give me a pound or two – in those days it was pounds – if I went to town, which was probably once every two months or something. We lived about thirty mile[s] from Wairoa on a rough shingle road, so didn’t go to town that often. Social life was nearly nil.

But in the meantime I was at Tekapo, and before that I’d met a very nice girl that I really admired, and enjoyed her company. And we got together over those years, and I must’ve written hundreds of letters. And after a few months she’d write to me and say, “Oh, I’d like to see you – you’ll have to come down. There’s other boys interested.” So I’d drop everything and head for Christchurch as fast as I could go. [Chuckle] Yeah. I first met her when I was thirteen, going to Sunday School; my Aunty Flo and her daughter who boarded with her – she never married – were quite strict church people which didn’t do me any harm as a young fellow, and I enjoyed the company of the church people. I’m going backwards now instead of forwards, but that’s how I met my wife, Pauline.

So I’d go to Christchurch and I’d spend probably six weeks off the farm in Christchurch, and Pauline and I’d go out on hikes and walks, and to the pictures. I was never one for dancing, and she liked dancing but was not really keen on it, so that suited me. But we’d go to dances and I’d just socialise and she’d have a dance with friends which was okay.

Yeah, at thirteen we met, but sort of no association – I knew her through Sunday School. But when I got to sixteen I plucked up courage to ask her to go to the pictures with me, and she accepted and that’s when it started. So from sixteen to eighty-odd is quite a long association. We had our little ups and downs. I remember her mum saying on our wedding day … no, not our wedding day, it was a day that we were coming back to the farm … and she was leaving home, and she said to me, “You look after her, Ken”, she said, “I don’t want her back here.” [Chuckles] So I remember those words, and I did my best. Yeah … they were good …

My uncle gave me a job managing; he was ready to retire, and he said, “If you’d like to manage the farm for me you’ll have the house.” He’d got older and not able to do a lot of hard work. He said, “You’ll have to fence the farm up and bring it back to life again”, and I said, “Yeah, I’ll give it a go.” And I’d learnt quite a bit over the years that I’d been home. We were married in [19]53, and I was twenty-three at the time, so we had our life ahead of us; and we had a nice home … no power. The ironical part about it was that Pauline worked for the Municipal Electrical [Electricity] Department, and her friends and workmates when she left gave her an electric iron, electric jug, electric everything, and she had them on the shelf at home without any power. So we looked at them and said, “Some day we may have power”, [chuckles] which we did. But anyway, Pauline adapted to the farm life and cooking on the wood range, and no flush toilet; and oh, I don’t know … pretty primitive, but it was a good healthy life. And she loved the animals; she had the chooks and the ducks and the pet lambs and pet calves and a couple of pigs, and I gave her that job of having to look after those which she loved doing. Yeah.

I had to work hard on the farm; there was only two paddocks on the farm, and that was a little holding paddock that barely held sheep. And the rest – the fences had fallen over because they’d used rimu posts, and rimu only lasts about seven or eight years in the ground and it rots; had to all be ripped – the wires were there but no posts – but finally got some fences up and improved the stock. It was hard work, but good clean healthy country.

What were you running?

Well, we were running three hundred ewes when I first went there, and about twenty head of cows … beef cattle for calving. We were just running a bull and breeding them on. But there was no fertiliser in those days so there was only more or less native grasses which grew about once a year; so you had to be very careful not to eat the grass out too much before winter got over. But we toiled on there.

Yeah, the farming was fairly tough. The wool shed had a shearing board that the shearers could shear on, but the wool room was on the dirt floor; just an open front shed, no machines – it was done by the Māori gangs [who] used to come down from Tuai with their hand shears and shear them in those days. Yeah, it was all pretty hard manual work, but it’s about all we knew so it was what we did as far as the shearing and sheep work. The ewes were Romney ewes, and cattle was a black bull, Angus bull … Angus cows, which were good for that type of country and fairly docile, quite good to handle; although the sheep were big heavy woolly ones and they used to get wool blind and couldn’t see where they were going which was a bit of a worry at times, ‘specially when we were only shearing once a year. When we went onto twice a year it wasn’t so bad, but we changed the breed later on to Perendale Cross; they were much more open, freer-moving sheep.

Power came on [in the] later end of ’53, so we went without power for only a few months, so it wasn’t too bad. And aerial topdressing came in the same year. Mr Boyle by the way, before this, married my mum and became our step-father, although we always called him ‘Dad’. He was such a generous guy; loved children – he should’ve had his own children, but that didn’t happen. But we were fortunate enough to be in his care and he looked after us well over those years, and he loved our children and Pauline. He used to play the bagpipes, and Pauline loved music and she played the piano and he played the bagpipes. They enjoyed one another’s [each other’s] company. Now I can hear her today … No, we had a good life; isolated, but a good life.

A year or two passed. Pauline said to me one day, “I’d like to have children.” She said, “I don’t want to get any older and have them later on, I’d like to have children now.” So I said, “Oohh” … took me by surprise really, we’d never discussed this topic very much at all. We both liked children, but I thought to myself, ‘I don’t know what sort of a father I’d make … whether I’m ready for it or not.’ But anyway, we had our first girl sometime afterwards, Jeanette; and we had a lot to learn. The Plunket Society had a nurse on the road, come [came] up I think, about once a month. She had a hard job, that young lady, getting around those roads up there, visiting the mothers with young children. But yeah, we had a lot to learn about bringing up children, and Jeanette wasn’t easy. For some reason for three months when she was about six weeks old she started screaming at night for about an hour or so. Whatever we did she just wouldn’t … and then she just switched off one night; that was it, which was really good. It was nice to have a daughter that [who] wasn’t screaming at night [chuckles] and we enjoyed her, and we decided to have another one. Pauline said, “Oh, got to have another one, [a] boy and a girl.” But it was the other way with us, it was a girl and a boy, the second one, and we were a bit more relaxed with him and enjoyed him. And then a love one came along about five years later, Heather; and yeah, she was our joy. We enjoyed her right from the start, right through, just because we were relaxed with the way we handled her, and it wasn’t strict Plunket; Plunket nurses came to us but we had a fair idea how to bring children up, which we did on our own more or less. Yeah – she’s still here today.

Jeanette married an Aussie – Sydney – and she went over there. Jeanette had two children which [who] unfortunately we don’t see a lot of. They’re vegans, and I don’t agree with the way they’re bringing their children up, so we’ve had a few rather heated talks about that. But everybody does their own thing, so I accept that. Heather’s children were brought up in the natural way which was good.

And Bruce has one girl which [who] he doesn’t see a lot of unfortunately, just through the in-laws and outlaws not getting on too well together – but that’s another story, unfortunately. We didn’t see a lot of her either; but yeah, they’re okay. Bruce has another partner now, so they’re happy doing their own thing.

Pauline and I raised our family, and our family went to the Ohuka School right through, then on to Napier Girls’ High and Boys’ High. Jeanette was an academic; she was very serious about her lessons and studies, and in those days they had … what do they call the exam? Not Proficiency …

School Certificate?

Yeah, School certificate. And UE [University Entrance] followed, yeah. Most children … those who were bright got four subjects; a lot got three subjects in School Certificate, but to our surprise Jeanette got five subjects. And none of the Ohuka mothers could understand how Jeanette got five subjects – they weren’t high marks, but she got through. And she went on another year at school … oh, she just fooled around and didn’t do anything. Waste of food as far as that went. [Chuckles] But anyway, she was offered a job in the Bank of New Zealand in Wairoa which she accepted and was there; and then they reckoned that she was more capable of doing more work, and they transferred her to one of the branches in Hamilton. And she went and stayed with friends – very good friends of ours. Actually Joy, the mother of three boys, was a friend of Pauline’s in Christchurch as girls, so they had a fair bit in common and they accepted Jeanette to stay with them, which was good for us; we knew she was in a good home and well looked after.

And Jim and Joy became good friends; in August they’d come down, bring their three boys – they had three children too – bring their three boys down to the farm to experience lambing and calving and feeding out hay, and all those things that you do on the farm. And our children would go up in the May holidays and experience city life for two or three weeks, which was a really good swap-over as far as educating our children and their children. And this went on; Jim and I became good friends. He worked for the NZED [New Zealand Electricity Department] as an engineer, putting new lines into isolated areas and building substations. A very talented guy, and I really appreciate what he taught me as far as buildings go ‘cause it stood me in good stead later on when I wanted to build a new wool shed and modernise the home on Ohuka a wee bit … put another bedroom on because we had the two girls and a boy. We needed to have [them] in separate rooms so we put another bedroom on and a sunroom, made the house very comfortable.

And Jim went on, he’s only just … he was well in his eighties … not long passed away actually, or both Jim and Joy have passed away, unfortunately. One boy stayed in Hamilton, worked at Horotiu as a meat inspector; another boy’s [a] Lincoln College lecturer and the other boy was a Fisheries vet. He was in Scotland for a while and then came out to the Islands. And they still keep in touch – I give them a call. And they’re getting into their seventies now so it’s hard to believe really, we’ve stayed in touch all that time.

Yeah, as time went on and we came to Frasertown, Pauline got involved with her ladies’ meetings and the church choir here in Wairoa, and I started a contracting business. I made the mistake of bringing my hay baler down with me and doing my own hay here on this little farm; then the neighbours would come and say, “Oh, would you come and bale my bit of hay?” Which I did; and then their neighbour would ask me to do the same, and it built up to quite a big business. And all this started after I was sixty, supposed to be retiring, but no, I enjoyed the work. What it did was I was able to get out and meet the neighbours and see how they farmed. Anyway, I said to Pauline, “No – this can’t go on much longer.” We always promised ourselves that we’d travel and have a look around; see how other people lived around the world, which we did when we were seventy.

In between I’d got quite ill. It’d come on to me and I’d be really ill for about three days, and then I’d work it off and be okay again. And [to] cut a long story short, over quite a long length of time I finished up going to Wellington and having a cancer operation. Not everybody’s familiar with the procedure but they called it the Whipple’s Procedure. Pretty lucky if you come through it … there’s chances you are [will]. But I had a very good surgeon, Peter Johnstone in Wellington, and he pulled me through. They actually called the family together one afternoon; they didn’t think I was going to make it but I pulled through that which was … oh, it’s just marvellous, and I’ve been so good, no illnesses, no pains or aches. Took me two years to get over it, but I said to Pauline, “We’re going to go and travel.” I said, “If we do it now … might be too late if we leave it”, and we booked in. And I had a reaction to the operation; doctors wouldn’t let me travel so I said to Pauline, “That money” – we’d insured – I said, “we put it aside, and next year.” Which we did.

I saw a [an] ad[vertisement] in one of the magazines, Playaway [Tours], from Taradale, Napier, advertising older … mature people tours of up to thirty or forty clients with a tour guide … guided tour. It was to Alaska, so I said to Pauline, “What about we try it out?” Part of it was travelling on a boat tour from Alberta up through the sounds to Anchorage, and then the other was a coach tour from Anchorage up to Fairbanks and up to the Arctic Circle, and a round tour back down to the airport; flew from there down to the West Coast of America …

Vancouver?

We stayed in Vancouver. Seattle … down to Seattle where the big airline is. We went up the [Space] Needle; just did the touristy things. The Needle’s got a glass platform that you walk on, and you’re away up in the air. It was strange to see how some people reacted – they didn’t trust the glass. But no, it was good, we enjoyed that tour. Came down the Inside Passage, called in the ports there, Alaska. We were there in the fall which is the autumn, and it was just beautiful, I loved Alaska.

The following year we went over to England. Pauline had been corresponding with a cousin of hers over there since she was ten … pen friends, they called them in those days, and she’d never met her. And I said to Pauline, “Next year we’ll go to England” … she lived out in the Yorkshire country, farmers … “and we’ll meet up with your cousin”, which we did. And oh, it was beautiful; just a wonderful experience going into York which is one of those walled cities, walking around the wall and meeting her cousins. We travelled over a fair bit of England there, into the Lake District, and it’s a beautiful country, very pretty. Old … can’t believe it’s so old; buildings so old, cobblestones … but we enjoyed it. But it was good meeting Pauline’s people and we thoroughly enjoyed it.

In between times we were going over to Heather who lived in Perth with John, her husband, and her two girls and staying a week or two with them. And of course Jeanette, being in Sydney, would say to us, “Oh, you’ve got to come and see us! You’ve got to come and see us.” Yeah, so we’d finish up going over there for a week, and yeah, it was starting to get out of hand, this travelling business. But anyway, we enjoyed every minute of it.

And we did travel one year between Sydney and Perth over the Nullabor … drove across it. What a vast country – you’ve got to do that to realise how big Australia is, get on those highways. But you’re allowed to do a hundred and twenty, hundred and thirty k [120-130 kilometres per hour] so you get through a few ks in a full day … ten or twelve hour day. But a beautiful country … beautiful scenery in parts of it. Some people can’t see it, but Pauline and I went over twice when the wildflowers were out [a]round Perth and north of Perth … [it] was a beautiful experience. And that area grows a lot of wheat and cranola, [canola] and when the cranola’s out in flower there’s just … [as] far as you can see, golden paddocks. Amazing!

Yeah, we travelled the continent; we did Germany, Switzerland, France …

How many days did you stay in each country on average?

Ooh … some we just drove through, virtually. We went down through France, the Pyrenees, over to Lisbon, and then travelled on down through Spain to the Mediterranean; got on a cruise there, and cruised the Mediterranean to Italy; motored through [a] good part of Italy up to … when I say motored, coach … up to Venice, and then cruised down the Adriatic into Greece and the Greek Islands, Croatia – all through that eastern end of the Mediterranean. Never got over into Africa though; somehow or other we missed going. We were going to go to Africa but … can’t remember now why we didn’t do some of those safari trips, which we’d’ve enjoyed.

Another year we went to Singapore, toured right up through Thailand; yeah, had a look around through there; top end of India. Where did we go from there? Can’t remember [chuckles] … I’ve got albums here [chuckle] full of photos – should’ve had a look through them – renewed my memories of them. No, we enjoyed travelling. I didn’t think I’d like the boat cruises; I thought there’d be nothing to do, but ohh … they were really good; so well looked after, and good food and good entertainment.

So how many kilos did you add? [Chuckle]

Ohhh – I never varied my weight, I could eat as much as I liked. I could eat any sort of food and I stayed around the eighty-five ks. [Kilograms] I never varied much, but Pauline would have to watch – she’d slacken off and she was a terror on sweet foods, she loved them. [Chuckle] But no, I don’t know why it was, I must’ve burnt it up. But yeah, on the cruise if I felt like it I’d go for a walk around the deck a couple of times, early morning. But the people you met were so good, made life worthwhile living – all walks of life, and on the cruise you just seemed to be one big family, you know. You had … the evening meal you were at a different table and you met different people … but you were all just people on a cruise, you know, it was so nice. We both enjoyed it, and I enjoyed the cruise – it was relaxing.

You had that period of travel, so how long?

Ten years, ‘70 to ‘80. Well I got ill again – not cancerous, just not well, and [it] sort of put a stop to it. But no, overall we did quite a lot of travelling; not as much as some people. Some of the people on those cruises live on the boat. More ladies – and it’s not silly really, ‘cause they’re well looked after, all the laundry’s done for them, the food’s done for them; they get off and go for a walk around the towns when they pull in. And it’s not a silly idea, it’s quite a nice lifestyle – for a while. Yeah.

Have you got a favourite city?

A favourite city? Yeah, and it’s not too big, but it is quite large and quite busy, and that’s Perth in Australia. You wouldn’t think you were in Australia in Perth, compared with say Sydney or Melbourne or Brisbane. It’s way out west on its own; it’s got the sea, it’s got the rivers, it’s got the farming country and the mine [mining] – it’s got a bit of everything, you know. In the wildflower time it’s beautiful, the countryside. And of course having Heather and the family there made it so much better too. When we went over to Perth Heather’d take time off, and she’d take us for quite an extensive tour, like up to Kalgoorlie and all those places and big mines and then right down south to the coast and around the coast through the eucalypt country, where those big huge kauri [karri] trees – not kauri as we know it, but they call them kauri [karri] too. Yeah. Those old cities like the ancient cities in England, Germany and Switzerland – Switzerland’s a beautiful country, but you’ve got to be young to go to Switzerland.

Did you go up the mountain?

Yeah, we did – we went up the … what do they call that mountain rail up the cogs into the ice caves? [Montenvers Cog Railway] We went to Switzerland twice actually; went to Italy twice.

What did you think of Rome?

Yeah, Rome was … very old, Rome, you know, a lot of old places. But we didn’t really have a … well, the experience was okay, but I don’t know how it happened, but we got into sort of … ‘bout a third grade hotel, and it was noisy. You know, wasn’t … But I liked Rome; we were lucky enough to have audience with the Pope, but there was about two hundred and fifty thousand other people [chuckles] there as well. [Chuckles] But at least we saw the Pope – over there, way out, in his big four-wheel drive glassed-in transport, yeah. No, you could see him in his robes … but oh! So many people, yeah; but very ancient …

Did you like Venice?

Yeah, I did. Venice – it’s old and new too. But a nice day [in] Venice, and the gondoliers were up and down and it was a good experience. We were only there about a day … oh, two days I think it was, yeah. You don’t see much in that time; you’ve got to go and stay there for a while. But the people were nice, and Venice was as I thought; you know, gondoliers and these arched bridges … yeah, it was a good experience; good to say we’ve been there. Going to Greece was good too, but we did two trips to Greece and the Greek Islands. In fact I’ve got a wall hanging in there, I’ll show it to you; handwoven by old ladies. Yeah, it’s silk on cotton, I think it is. Yeah … rather nice; we bought something to sort of remind us of our trip to the Greek islands. I think cruising the Adriatic to the Islands was very pleasant really; not far, half a day from one island to the other. It was good.

Just more recently, unfortunately Pauline got blood poisoning, and it took her about five years ago. I’ve been on my own since then, and … yeah, it was a terrible blow that. I never thought that would happen … but it’s going to happen anyway. But I’ve been on my own since then … living on my own … but I’m not on my own because I’m lucky enough to have Bruce about ten minutes away and Heather’s about quarter of an hour away, and she calls in every day that she goes to work, which is very good.

But just more recently, in the last two years … coming up two years now … I got oleander poisoning through working in the shrubbery in the garden, brushing and pushing and shoving around the big oleander bush, and within an hour I couldn’t move. Got to my bed and lay on my bed, and if it wasn’t for Heather coming in in the evening to see how I was getting on I wouldn’t’ve been here now. [As] soon as she saw me she said, “Dad, you don’t look any good – what’s wrong?” I said, “I don’t know; can’t do anything, I can’t move.” And she rang the ambulance and they came out, and they rang Auckland to see [what to] do. And they said, “Get him into hospital as fast as you can”, which they did; and they put me on two sachets [bags] of blood and put me on a heater to warm me up …

It’d taken your body temperature down, lowered it?

Oh! They couldn’t get a pulse, and that’s why the guy rang Auckland to see what to do, and they said, “Get him in there …” If Heather hadn’t come in I wouldn’t’ve been here.

So where’s the oleander bush now?

It’s still … it’s a seventy-year-old tree – well, shrub, and they’re popular. They were brought out from the Mediterranean as flowering shrubs. Do you know the oleander? Got those lovely flowering clusters all over them. When I got out of hospital twelve months ago, I drove down one of our main residential streets and back up the other one, and I counted seven oleander bushes in the gardens, just … without looking, they were just there. But the problem with oleander is, it’s so rare the doctors don’t know – I had four doctors looked at me, and they wouldn’t believe it was oleander.

It’s deadly poisonous, and it can kill stock just like that.

I killed a bull at Ohuka with it – I just threw a handful, a little handful, of leaves over that’d broken off on the track; threw it over the fence, and the bull and the house cow were there, and he ate it. Next morning I went out … holy heck! There’s the bull stretched out at the gate. I couldn’t believe it! I rang the vet up and he said, “Has he had access to shrubs or dead branches, like wilted tut [tutu] and stuff?” I said, “No, not really – not that I know.” I said, “Oh, I did throw a handful of rubbishy branches over the fence last night”, and he said, “bring some in.” I took it in and they diagnosed it – oleander. The neighbour, a few days afterwards – he’d heard about it – he said, “I killed twelve sheep with that. He did some cuttings back and threw it over the fence, and they ate it.” Killed twelve sheep, yeah.

Deadly poisonous.

It’s deadly. Oh …

It shouldn’t be sold in garden centres.

It shouldn’t be, no. In fact I was talking to a doctor in hospital just … it reoccurs; it affects my nervous system. I go completely immobile – I can’t even get off the chair when it attacks me, for about three days. And it seems to dehydrate you for some reason, ‘cause they always put me on the drip … intravenous. Going through I don’t know how many tests I’ve done; the more recent one just a couple of weeks ago. It was potassium in your blood – lack of that in your blood, you lose your strength.

Oh, it just shuts down …

I think, I hope …

But you’ve got through it now?

I’m on pills now for that. I think it’s about a two-week course. Doctors in there said – they’re very good – “We’ll see how you respond to that” … this particular course, yeah. But I’m feeling good; not ill at all, just drained of energy and strength. Yeah, so I’ve had to put up with that for … coming up two years in July, end of July, so it’s not far away. But the bush is still there, yeah. When I mow the lawn I brush past it, but just in and out; but that particular day I was working round under it, pulling down old branches and dead bits of sticks and stuff, and just inhaling the dust. And I might’ve got a bit of sap on me, I don’t know – but if you burn it and you inhale the smoke, that’s deadly too. Every part of it is not good. But Heather looked up on Facebook and she found a lady recently had died in America somewhere with oleander poisoning. But it’s so rare, they don’t know … they don’t make a study of it at all.

That’s awful. I knew it was deadly poisonous, and it’s a plant that’s pretty so children would be inclined to go and pick the flowers …

Could do it, yeah. They would.

And they’d be gone.

Yeah. Especially, I would imagine, children would be pretty vulnerable. But no, it’s not a good thing to have around. But that bush – we’ve had this place thirty-odd years, and we understand it was built about thirty years, might’ve been forty years previous to when we bought it; and that would’ve been planted … I’d say they established these shrubs around the place originally, so it could be sixty, seventy years old. But it’s a big bush, yeah.

Well I think I’ve run out of puff. [Chuckle] I’ve got a written copy … well, I’ve written twenty pages I think, and I don’t think we’re married yet.

I’ll just refer to the Te Urewera National Park when it was formed; the locals that were interested in the park and visited the park frequently … Bernard Teague, actually … decided to form the Friends of the Te Urewera. The first chairman was Philip de Lautour, then later Lou Dolman, and in Lou’s time Pauline and I were elected as Secretary/Treasurer, a position we held for seven or eight years. But in that time, the Friends developed lots of the facilities and walks within the park with the aid of the National Parks’ chief rangers and honorary rangers; quite a big band of people. And we did such things as opening up tracks, opening up helicopter pads, cutting up timber for transporting to hut sites which was [were] cleared by the Friends, erecting pre-cut huts. And also for flying – later on when helicopters became available, we flew in huts to [the] top of Panekire; the only way you could get a hut up there was by helicopter into Āniwaniwa; up to the Sandy Bay on Waikareiti – that was helicoptered in. Yeah, all those isolated huts were helicoptered in, and the others around the lake were taken in by launch and boats and erected by school parties from Whakatāne, around the perimeter of the park. They’d come down school holiday time, the boys, under a tutor and erect parks. [Huts] We also put in platforms around trees such as the rātā tree going up to Ngāmoko. Yeah, what else? Oh, we tried to eradicate blackberry and ragwort around the road which we did thin out pretty good because any of the members, or anybody else as far as that goes, were encouraged to pull out ragwort. We used to spray the blackberry.

What about possums?

No, the possums were very much controlled by the possum hunters that were hunting for furs. Waikaremoana furs in that area were sought after because of the density of the fur [of] possums living in the high country; the fur grew very dense and always brought a premium at the sales, so we had pretty good control although there were a lot of possum.

Deer were another thing too. [A] lot of the Friends were hunters, and we hunted the deer around the lake where you could get a launch to and camp the night. But the meat hunters also came in and took them out; the guys that [who] were professional deer cullers moved in as well, but they covered areas sort of beyond the lake, a day’s walk. Big numbers of deer, and they had eaten out all the secondary growth, just left the crown fern and the rubbishy stuff to grow. But it’s amazing how quickly the vegetation has regrown and covered over the land, that bare land that the deer and the possums – the possums were that bad up there one part of it, they were killing the tītoki trees, eating the leaves off the tītoki trees and tāwa trees; they were just so numerous that [they just denuded the trees and they died, ‘specially up around towards Ruatāhuna and those isolated areas, yeah.

No, the Friends – they’re still operating today, but through the regulations of Health & Safety we’re not allowed to do much – not allowed to even use a chainsaw unless you’ve got permission to use one, or a skill saw. And you’ve got to be supervised by a qualified person which makes it pretty awkward when it comes to voluntary work, so unfortunately a lot of that’s not undertaken.

We also put a fence up around the ngutukākā, which is the red-flowering kowhai, to protect them from hares and deer in Rosie Bay; quite a substantial little area there was fenced off with deer fencing, something that the Friends did along with the Parks people. Yeah, we tackled everything. One day we took seed up and scattered it up in the rocks under Panekire, hoping that the possums and deer wouldn’t find them as they grew.

No, that’s about it, I think, you know, it was just the general welfare of the park that we were interested in, and helping anybody out, you know, like a new ranger [would] come in [and] we’d help them out … introduce them to the tracks, and whatever they wished to know. Good bunch of people.

They usually are when they’re volunteers, aren’t they?

Yeah, they are; well they [have] a genuine interest.

[Break; interview continues on another day]

Good morning Lyn, nice to see you on such a rough morning. [Chuckle] You were game to tackle the road, actually.

But anyway, we are going to continue with this little interview and we’re talking about the Te Urewera National Park. When it became a park after the Forestry looking after it – Bernard Teague pressured the authorities to get it into a National Park – and he was successful. And those people that lived around the park, and also away from the park, had a meeting and we formed the Friends of the Te Urewera National Park at Waikaremoana. We had the meeting on the lawn down at the jetty … beautiful afternoon, [I] think there’s photos somewhere. But yeah, there was Philip de Lautour who was a farmer, beyond us … de Lautour is connected with the Bayly Trust places; Philip and Natalie de Lautour. Philip was made chairman and Noel Bishop was the secretary, and with his wife, Zita Bishop, they were very strong visitors and workers around the lake and the park generally; very interested in it.

We had our meeting, and we had delegates from Whakatāne, Ruatāhuna … surrounding area, anyway. And after a year or two, Pauline and I were nominated to be secretary – I was secretary and Pauline was treasurer, and we held that post for about … I can’t remember whether it was seven years or nine years. And it was a very interesting post to be in charge of because we knew everything – letters coming in and letters going out – we knew what was going on. And yeah, it was an interesting time.

And in those days before Health & Safety regulations came, we were allowed to do lots of jobs in the park that needed doing because the park hadn’t been developed at all. There were new huts put in, there was [were] landing pads for helicopters, there was [were] jetties put in for the boats going down, and all the materials other than up on top of Panekire were delivered by boat, and that one was helicoptered up from down on the lawn car park at Onepoto. And a lot of us – we were young guys in those days – volunteered to do the spade work such as set up the sites and put the piles in and the heavy work, and the Board engaged builders to do the erection. Some of the huts were built by, I think it was Whakatāne High School, in kit form and transported over and erected in the school holidays by the boys that had cut the frames out in the workshops back at school. It gave them a great interest in the park as well and they had probably a couple of weeks living in the park, living under canvas, building or erecting the kitsets and doing a good job of them.

We flew pieces of a hut and it was erected at Sandy Bay and Waikareiti, far end of Waikareiti; a comfortable hut was built there. A day shelter was built at the end of the track that leads up to Waikareiti; [it’s] since been renovated and it’s a nice hut now, it extends out over the water and you get a great view of the lake … beautiful little lake. There’s seven islands on that lake, and on one of the islands is another little lake – that’s quite unique.

What else did we do? We fenced an area with netting, made it hare-proof and deer-proof, in Rosie Bay for the ngutukākā which is the red flowering kākābeak. ‘cause the hares and the rabbits, and the deer and possums, were just devastating and killing them. That was another project. And we took out all the trees that weren’t natives. We had a two or three week project, cutting and poisoning exotic trees which was quite a big job. And we had a lady visited – I think in all her spare time she visited the lake or around the lake, and she was called Miss Ragwort, because she hated ragwort and she’d walk the roads pulling … [Chuckle] And her name was Miss Ruecroft but she got the nickname of Miss Ragwort. She’d take half a dozen or a dozen children up there and pull ragwort, and there would be heaps of ragwort pulled out lying on the road. And she got it down too, she made a good job; she did a really good job there.

What age would she have been?

Oh, she’d have been probably in her sixties then, yeah; she wasn’t a young lady, but she was one of those kindly types of ladies, yeah … you sort of took to, and she’d toil away all day. But she’d also come and help with other jobs, but that was her main thing, was get rid of the ragwort. It’s horrible stuff to see it growing through the native trees.

Would that’ve been carried there by birds?

Oh, wind I think mainly, ‘cause it’s got a little umbrella thing that floats around [it]. But I don’t think birds … it’s pretty poisonous, and animals don’t eat … sheep would eat ragwort, cattle don’t like ragwort. Sheep will eat it if you push them onto it.

That time when we were developing the amenities at the park was a busy time; lots of volunteers. But the local Māori worked very well with us, and some of those guys even now today – the children – they still say hello to me and say, “Oh, I remember when you used to work up at the lake on the volunteer work you did up there.” And I said, “Yeah, that’s right”; and they were only kiddies then, you know. But I was in hospital just [a] couple of months ago and there was one in hospital too with me, and he remembered me and he said, “Oh, you used to do a lot of work.” I did, but I’d take the family up in the good weather and I had a small eighteen foot boat up there that we could camp on … two bunks in it … and my son and I’d camp out on the shore under the tent, and the girls’d camp on the boat in the bunks. And it was a good arrangement – they got a love for the lake, and they still do – they frequent it; not so much just now because relationships up there haven’t been quite as they should be and that hasn’t happened lately. And some of the work we did, unfortunately has come undone now.

But one of the big jobs that we helped the Māori with was the kiwi restoration programme, and that was set up on a block of land that was Māori land. And we’d go up there and help them with the vermin-proof fencing to keep the rats in the breeding area. And then they fenced a big area and they had the kiwis in there until they were a certain weight … I’ve forgotten what the weight is, [a] certain size, so they could chase the rats off and not be devoured by rats. And we helped the Maori out with that on that project. Unfortunately that’s collapsed at present.

So who provided the funding for the materials?

Oh, DoC [Department of Conservation] – it came through DOC all of it. We didn’t get paid, but … how they did it I don’t know, but we were paid so much an hour for our services but it was book terms only, not cash. Yeah, and those funds were donated back to the Parks Board, yeah. But then that dried up too; we built a woodshed for the hut up on the top of Panekire so they could have dry wood; we didn’t get paid for that, it was just a labour of love. It’s at the hut site on top of Panekire, or Puketapu. You can see the hut on a clear day and you can see the ridge; if you look along the ridge and you see a V in it, like that, that’s where the hut is, and it’s on the highest point. From here, or going down to Napier, you can see that point.

So how many sleep in the hut?

They upgraded it recently – I think probably up to sixteen. Yeah, that was only a small hut for a start when we first built it up there, but then they upgraded it to stainless steel and wood burners and all sorts of things. But in the finish … well, wood was supplied, and they used to helicopter the wood; cut the firewood down in the lowlands around the farmlands and helicopter it up into the hut site. That’s why we built the wood shed so they could keep it dry, but yeah – the more wood you put up there the more they burnt, of course. They’re not allowed to burn any of the native wood, not green wood, you’d go and drag the dead wood around. The main helicopter pads – we cleared those on some of the outlying blocks for getting injured people out or taking supplies in. Yeah, I think that about exhausts that …

You produced a book after twenty years?

Yeah, there’s a book here on the Friends. Yeah – it was made up of different stories that happened. Oh, that was another thing, that’s right, where the lake became very low one season, and the petrified trees that were in the lake were standing up with just a point; big rimus with all the branches like branches. Smaller branches had rotted away and just left like big spears sticking up. And there were something like seventeen boats holed hitting these stumps that were just under … the ones you could see were safe, but the ones you couldn’t see just under the surface did the damage … but luckily nobody was drowned. [They were] able to get off or get rescued. But anyway, it was decided between the honorary rangers and the Friends and local DoC that we would get rid of the stumps; how was going to be the difficult thing. But anyway the army engineers heard about it, and they volunteered to come in and blow them off with gelignite – put a ring of explosive around the trunk at water level and cut them off with explosives – which they did, but it was far too slow and too costly in the finish when they found out what they had to do.

So us keen young fellows reckoned we could do it with chainsaws out of our boats, and we went up one weekend and we had a go at it; tied our boats to the stump. And it worked, we cut them off in no time, so we organised a weekend and we did most of the lake that weekend, there were a number of boats. The government tourist boat, the big launch, came down, plus anybody that had a boat – I took mine down and there was two of us on it; one operated the boat and the other the chainsaw. We just threw a rope around the tree, pulled the boat up to the tree and started the saw up; leaned over the end and cut it off, and that was it, finished.

Was OSH [Occupational Safety & Health] in existence then?

Oohh … OSH wasn’t anywhere near us. [Chuckles] No. Well not long after though – a year or two after – some authority came up and saw what we’d done, and they said, “You’d never get a permit …” We didn’t even get a permit – we just did it, in those days, you got into it and did the job and it’s done. [Speaking together] And things were done.

Nobody was hurt, nobody was drowned. We left one down in what they call Stump Bay where there were a lot of stumps … we left one stump there sticking up so that people coming visiting the lake, if they went down that far they could see what a petrified stump looked like if it was out of the water. But all those stumps then were cut off at a certain level, so that when we knew the lake was riding on a certain level or above, that you were safe. And the only time you weren’t safe was if the lake level dropped down – you had to be very careful then. Yes, that was a major job; but that involved DoC, honorary rangers which I was one of, and the Friends, yeah. But that’s the sort of work that got done, and it got done no trouble at all. Today you wouldn’t even be allowed to go on the lake with a chainsaw; but we were fortunate in those days that that could be done.

Now another story … did the lake have a hole in it and was it leaking and some divers went down to fix the hole and they got sucked up and never seen again – is that true?

Oh no, I haven’t heard that story but that is partially true. No, the lake had big leaks in it and those leaks ran underground and came up on our farm, on my neighbour’s farm, and further down the road and right out here towards Nūhaka,. Those leaks seeped through the stratas and we were told by geologists that it could take sixty years for the water to go from the lake to where it came out down here. Pure water by the time it got filtered through the rock and the sediments; you got pure water then. And just just up the road here is a scheme that … I think they’ve got five farms on it … coming out of the side of the hill. They can’t use the amount of water that’s coming out of there … huge amount of water. But … I guess it was the NZED; government anyway … they employed divers and barges and they tipped hundreds of tons of soil and rock into those cavities and slowed them down, but haven’t stopped them. But they certainly slowed them down.

But there was a story going around about – and there were some very big eels in the lake – that these two divers were having a bit of a smoko, a bit of a spell, and they were sitting on the log having a bit of a discussion with one another, [each other] and one of them pulled out his pocket knife [to] peel an apple or something, and he stuck it in the log and the log slid away from underneath them. [Chuckles] I think that’s a bit of a story but but there were big eels. I knew one of the divers, not very well but I knew him well enough to talk to, and he told me there were eels down there as long as he was tall – six foot tall.

I believe that.

Yeah, and he said as thick as your thigh. But they’ve gone, they’ve disappeared, because … well, whether they got out of the lake … When they put the siphon in, it blocked all access for eels getting into the lake as well as getting out, and that ruined that. And there’s thousands of elvers go up the river; they get as far as Piripaua but there’s a powerhouse across the river and they can’t go any further. They’ll go up the wall on the moss, wet moss, until they hit the dry wall and then they drop back into the river. But I hear now, that I think the Māori have given them authority to artificially put eels back in the lake.

Right. That would give them a food source, wouldn’t it?

Yes, well it was in those earlier … an old chap that I knew and I used to take up to the lake when I had my boat there, old Mr Tom Hall – he used to ride to the lake before there was a road there, just a riding track, and he said he could remember canoes coming out from the fast end through the narrows; Māori paddling them from out Māhia way, loaded with kereru for winter supply and done down in fat; they took them back out there. Also eel, [it] was a source of food for them for the winter time. But not many Māori lived up there in the winter time. They had blocks of land, but they’d go up there through the summer months. One or two farmed but …

Is that Tūhoe?

Tūhoe. There’s other little tribes around as well, they split off from one another. One didn’t want to live with that crowd; too many there so they went down the track and established another little tribe down there – that’s how those smaller tribes have come in, but it’s Tehoe [Tūhoe] country, yeah, and smaller sub-tribes came off that. Yeah … I think that’s covered that one, Lyn.

[Break; continues with the establishment of the hydro-electric power stations]

The heavy machinery was brought in by coaster. I remember the coasters coming in up to the wharf which was in the river; they had to negotiate the bar, work the tides coming up to the little harbour on the Wairoa River, below where the bridge is now. And I knew the family, or my family knew the family very well, Captain Knight, and he was the pilot – that’s right, that’s what they call them – pilot for bringing the coasters in. They weren’t sailing ships, they were motorised, steam ships in those days. But Captain Knight brought the coasters into the harbour over the bar and up the river – he knew the channels. That was how heavier machinery got into the Wairoa area. And at that time they were building the powerhouses at Tuai. There was no rail, and that meant that all the freight, machinery, cement had to be brought in by coaster. I can’t recall them having any problems getting over the bar, thought; I don’t ever remember them tipping the boat over through it touching the bottom or anything.

So how did that equipment get from the Wairoa River, over the bar up to Tuai?

[Chuckle] Well that’s another big story. It’s funny you should mention that because we’re doing a restoration project now; it’s in process. That’s another story altogether. I don’t think I can tell you much more about Captain Knight; I know the house, I can point out the house. His son went on to live there. Knights had a carrying business, the sons, a couple of trucks delivering around Wairoa.

But yeah, transport to Tuai – that heavy transport of generators and turbines which were very heavy had to be transported to Tuai on a clay dirt track, and it was done by a four-wheeled, solid wheeled wagon which is still around. And three or four of us now, possibly half a dozen of us, are in the process of restoring it.

Are you getting it to work again?

Well the amazing thing was that when we found it, it had finished up … I remember seeing it sitting at Kaitawa on the roadside, just nobody wanting it. And the Riddifords who were loggers and post splitters up the Whakangaire [Road]; oh, they used to cheat a bit, go back into the Urewera … boundary of the Urewera [and] Whakangaire. Whakangaire was a farm farmed by the Footes, and the Riddifords had permission to take rimu and birch log out, and they grabbed this old wagon and they used a tractor to pull it around.

But to go back to when they were using it to take the generators and transformers and cement, there’s [there’re] photos of that being shifted to Tuai. And steel, that was drawn by a steam powered traction engine; I haven’t ascertained whether it ever operated out of the Wairoa harbour, but I know it operated out at Nūhaka, the harbour out there … just eluded me; I’ll think of it. Anyway, it operated from there, hauled the machinery from there to Tuai, and in the rough places where the traction engine would get stuck, or couldn’t pull or lose traction, they’d put horses and oxen onto it and there’s [there’re] photos of them pulling it with the horses. When I say horses – probably ten horses in the team and maybe as many bullocks pulling – and the bullocky there, pulling this thing. Horses weren’t good at pulling anything that didn’t move; if they could get it to move they’d pull it, but oxen – they would just keep leaning their weight and just lean, lean, lean, until it moved; and then they’d move it. They’re a lot slower than horses, but they could work the wagons where horses failed.

Yes, so anyway that’s how the materials got to Tuai; 1928 that was.

How did they actually build the turbines in the powerhouse when they got it there?

Well I don’t know. As a boy I remember going up there with my dad and my uncle, watching. Well my dad had teams up there doing the roads and tracks for the power lines for future use. But there were a heck of a lot of men, something like six hundred men in the camp up there when they were building them, so they had plenty of manpower. And I guess that’s how …

Ropes and pulleys?

Yeah, that’s right, ropes and pulleys, and it was just man-powered into position and taken from there.

But when they built Piripaua powerhouse there were trucks – six-wheeler trucks on the road I think, yeah. Some of them were ex-army trucks that the truckies were using, and the roads were better; they were crushing metal along the side[s] of the roads and putting that down and making the roads a bit more passable. Well water was the trouble – getting rid of the water – because the road went up the side of the river and crossed the river in two or three different places, and it didn’t take a lot of rain to make the roads pretty much a big mud pie, yeah.

But to go back to the old wagon, it sat on the roadside at Kaitawa for a long time, and when I was going up to the lake I used to see it sitting there. And then all of a sudden it disappeared, and it went from hauling logs and posts to the mill at Piripaua for the Riddifords, up to Āniwaniwa, and was used for pulling posts and battens. Don’t think logs ever came out of Āniwaniwa, but the Forest Service let guys go up there and split posts and birch battens, and they used the old wagon. I can’t tell you what they pulled it [with] – would’ve been a tractor up there in those days. But anyway, they had a big flood at some stage so they dropped the wagon into the creek and they turned it into a bridge, and there it sat for years. When they stopped splitting posts and battens … yeah, it just sat there, and one of the rangers spotted it – this was the National Park rangers – spotted it in the creek and made enquiries about it, and found out that it was the wagon that hauled the equipment up to Tuai and Kaitawa for the powerhouses. And he thought, ‘That’s interesting’, so he got onto Dave Withers, Earl Brownlie, and who else? ‘Bout three or four of them. Dave had a truck and a little crawler tractor. He said, “We’ll pull it out, I’ll bring my truck up.” And this is how generous these guys were, volunteers. I didn’t get in on this act, I missed it unfortunately; but anyway, I was only talking to Dave about it the other day. He took the tractor up and pulled the wagon out of the creek, and the wheels turned and it didn’t fall to pieces, so this is a bonus. So the chief ranger at the time – might’ve been Don Bell – said, “We’ll drag it down to the headquarters”, which they did, and then they had the bright idea of setting it up on the lawn opposite the headquarters at Lake Waikaremoana, at the Āniwaniwa Bridge. And there it sat for quite a number of years; and it was used as a bench to have your lunch on, or you could sit on it. And the kids used to like to get up there and use it for a stage and dance around [chuckle] on it. But we were always frightened they would fall off – it was about four feet high. It was quite a big, very big, wagon made of hardwood and steel. And the beauty of it was, or is, that the steel hasn’t rusted because it’s been away from the sea in the fresh air, and the pure water up there didn’t rust it.

Anyway it sat there for quite a while. Genesis had a public meeting – the public could go to it every year around about November at Tuai and I was invited to go to one; this was some time ago … years ago now … which I did. Found it very interesting, because they were interested in the fisheries, water, the bush, anything to do with the natural … they are I think, now going to work in with the Fisheries people in getting eels back in the lake again. They look after the foreshore … yeah, all those sort[s] of things. But anyway, we got this wagon set up at Āniwaniwa, and then just recently, in the last year or so, we heard that Māori, or a section of the Māori up there, didn’t want anything Pākehā in the park, on their land.

So although the old headquarters, which was quite a fine building but certainly situated in the wrong place for the type of building it was, had been condemned, that disappeared overnight virtually and just luckily, [a] couple of interested guys – one had a big truck with a winch on it – heard about anything Pākehā going. He said, “Oh, that wagon’s going to disappear.” So they went up early one morning, and they decided to rescue the wagon, which they did, transported it to Wairoa and hid it away for a while. But before that I’d been to this Genesis meeting and I brought it up with the chairman in the meeting that something should be done with the wagon; it should be restored and looked after. It’s a hundred years old.

It’s worth keeping.

Yeah, and Genesis were very enthusiastic. Any help at all, they said, “Yeah, we’re happy to do that.” Everybody we spoke to – “Yeah, yeah. No, it’s a good idea.” But now we’ve got it in Wairoa, or we’ve found out where it was hidden away, we’ve water blasted it, cleaned it up; we were going to restore it. But amazingly, it doesn’t need restoring. Everything works – the wheels turn round on it, turntable works on it; I’ve had to make a new handle that operates the brake, and that was only a revolving wooden handle which wasn’t hard to do. But all the steel work is working; it’s just amazing the condition it’s in. It was built in Christchurch – Duncans I think, I’m not sure about that, but there’s a full description of it written up on a plaque. When we set it up at Āniwaniwa we had this plaque there describing what the wagon was used for and where it was built, and how it got to Wairoa which was by sea. And we’ve now got to the stage where there’s a dispute on [over] who wants it; everybody wants it now we’ve got it cleaned up, water blasted and functioning, different societies are laying claim to it and some of them haven’t put in any time on doing anything to it. But Genesis … and I thought it was a good idea at the time too, a spur of the moment thing setting it up on the lawn at Tuai; putting a cover over it.

The Māori at Tuai got a project going … well, some of the Māori, because others have said to me, “No, it’s not the place for it to go” … but they want to set it up at one of their maraes, but I don’t think that’ll happen either. It possibly came into Wairoa to the harbour down there, Waikokopu, out at Nūhaka; I know that was quite a good wharf there, quite a good harbour, and that’s where it mainly operated from. But now I’d dearly like to see it set up on the lawn beside the lighthouse in Wairoa, at the bridge.

And everybody’s got access to it then …

Exactly. And I’ve had two phone calls from down south; one guy worked for the Public Works Electricity Department, and he saw it and he said, “I’ve seen it, I know where it is and I know it; that’s where it should be, next to the lighthouse.” And when you think of it, it probably is – see, the lighthouse is an iconic piece of …

‘Cause it was on Portland Island …

… building, and this wagon is similar. And side by side they complement one another, [each other] and that’s as I see it now and that’s what I’m pressing for. And I’ve got Dave Withers on my side and two others from town, and [the] likes of you. I’ve told them what’s going on and they’ve said, “Yeah, well I think that’s the right place” …

Absolutely.

… where anybody interested in having a look at the lighthouse … “Ooh, what’s that?” and they just walk over and there’s a bit of history … a lot of history. And it’s not only that, but it did come through Wairoa – it didn’t come into Wairoa but it came through Wairoa on the North Clyde side to go to Tuai.

So at present Genesis are keen, they want to set it up and put a shelter over it which I appreciate. But … like, you wouldn’t bother going up there today to have a look at it, whereas if you’re going through Wairoa you’d say, “Oh, we’ll stop off and have a look at the lighthouse and the wagon.” That’s as I see it, and I’ll be advocating strongly for it to go to Wairoa, on the lawn there. Yeah … no, I think I’ve completed that one.

Yeah, farming on Ohuka in those early days, which were fairly early days too. I went up there as a five year old, and lived on the farm. I was taught Correspondence School by my aunty to Standard 3 and then went to the Ohuka School which was then called the Mangaaruhe School. Later when our children were there it was changed to Ohuka School, but the Mangaaruhe River is still the Mangaaruhe River which runs past the school and was our swimming pool in the summer time.

At twelve I went to further my education down in Christchurch because Mum and Dad couldn’t afford to send us to boarding school; the nearest one was Napier. So I went to Christchurch; boarded with my Aunty Flo who became a second mother to me, and Mum paid my board by me cutting the lawns and digging the garden, which was [a] pretty good deal I think, as far as Mum was concerned. But I didn’t mind; I’d gardened … Mum had taught us gardening at home. and we knew how to grow seeds. And I could cook a roast meal when I was ten, so Mum taught us the basics pretty early, which was not a silly thing to do in those days, in those times; so I could always feed myself if I had to.

Yeah – I went to intermediate school for one year and then to high school, but when it came to the end of the first year at high school I was fifteen, and my class teacher … master … suggested that I go to work. He reckoned that I was a bit of a hopeless case as far as learning English and geography … well, geography I didn’t mind; history I hadn’t got much time for, geography I was fairly good at; arithmetic, yeah, I could do some simple arithmetic, but I wasn’t keen on school as it happened, so Mum said, “No, you can come home, and leave school.” But anyway, I didn’t go home, I got a job in Christchurch which I stuck to for five years. It was in a seed merchants, supplying seeds to market gardeners and farmers, you know, it was interesting but very repetitious. I could see after five years I wasn’t going to learn any more really, and I bought a motorbike. The guy I bought the motorbike … I told him, “I’ve got no money.” So he said, “Well you can come and work it off; come out on the farm, out on Banks Peninsula”, right on the end of Banks Peninsula, far end. “Come and work the price of the bike off; you can stay, or when you’ve paid for it, if you want to go that’s okay.” Those were his terms, so I went out there and worked on the farm.

But oh, the farm had gorse on it. And one day he and I ran the hoggets in to dag them, get them ready for shearing, and at the end of the day under my arms was raw and my legs were raw with gorse prickles. And I vowed and declared I’d never go on another farm if I could see a gorse bush and I would never buy a farm if there was a gorse bush in the district, and yeah, that prevailed; I didn’t.

But anyway, I left as soon as I’d paid my bike off but I had no money because I hadn’t worked for money, I’d worked for the bike. I went to a Manpower office in Christchurch to see what jobs … manpower was short in those days ‘cause the war hadn’t quite finished, or might’ve just finished but there was nobody doing the work. They sent me out to Tekapo building the powerhouse, No 1 powerhouse on the Tekapo River. I didn’t know how, knew nothing about building, but I enjoyed it. We were building the foundations for the powerhouse as well as doing the tunnel from the powerhouse to the lake, about three-quarters of a mile underground; it was being constructed at the same time so it was interesting work and I enjoyed it. My seniors, the overseer and my immediate boss, used to say to me, “Join the staff … join the Public Works staff and we’ll see that you come right.” And they wanted to make me Pannikin boss [team leader] of our team of five, but I was too young, and the guys that were working with me were older and they didn’t like a young guy [chuckle] like me being boss. So I did it for a little while and I could see tension there so I said, “No, I’ll just be one of the boys”, which I did. And then the overseer and my immediate boss said to me, “Well join the staff” – I think it was because they could see I was interested – and I thought about it fairly seriously; I thought, ‘Oh, totally different to what I thought I’d be doing’, which was farming. It was construction or engineering, but knowing that I wasn’t a very good student I thought, ‘Oh gee, I’ll have to settle down and try and learn something’, you know.

Well what happened was that Christmas holidays came around and I came home – hopped on my bike and came home, and finished up putting time in on the farm and quite liked it. During that time, 2 or 3 weeks that I was home, both my bosses were drowned in the lake, out fishing out of a boat. And those lakes down there are liquid ice, you don’t last long if you’re tipped out in them. So that finished anything like joining up with the Public Works, and I didn’t go back. Yeah, it was a sad time; they were good guys. They were good people down there, very good people; people I made friends of [with] came to our wedding and came and visited us up on the farm. I enjoyed that time, and I learnt a lot as far as building went, concrete work and building, which has stood me in good stead over the years.

So I said to the old man and to Mum, “I’ll come home and work on the farm”, and they said, “Oh yeah, okay.” And the old man said, “I can’t pay you – I haven’t got money to pay you.” I said, “Oh. No, all right. We’ll try it for a while and see how it goes.” So he said, “What I’ll do is, if you need a pair of boots, go to the firm and you can get a pair of boots; if you need a shirt or a pair of pants, just book it up to the farm. We’ll pay for that, keep you clothed, and you won’t be hungry and you won’t be cold.” So I said, “Yeah, that sounds pretty good.” I accepted, and I did that for twelve months at least.

And then, I’d met this lovely girl when I was in Christchurch and I’d kept in touch with her; whenever I had any time off I’d do the hundred and fifty mile[s] on the motorbike from Tekapo to Christchurch to go and see her. I kept that up; came back up here which was [a] bit further than a hundred and fifty mile[s] on a motorbike. But I did ride the motorbike home, I brought it back with me.

But Pauline – who turned out to be my wife in the finish; we spoke to one another on the phone occasionally and wrote to each other once a week regular[ly] – said, “Oh, I’ve got some other admirers down here. If you’re really interested you’d better come down.” So I said to Dad, “This is no good”, I said, “I’m off.” And he said “What d’you mean?” I said, “Aw, I want to go and see my girlfriend.” Yeah, well it wasn’t for a week; I used to go down for about six weeks and get a job doing anything just to pay my board, and yeah, we’d get reacquainted again and yeah, finished up there. Worked that for two or three years, and then she said, “Time we got married” – we were twenty-three, I think. In the meantime I’d got her to come up and stay on the farm with Mum and my aunty, who was about a mile down the road, and they got on well together.

But Pauline lived within a mile of the cathedral in Christchurch, and her circle was about a mile radius – that’s about as far as she’d been. She knew nothing about farming – she’d come up for a week or ten days, and I said to her, “It’s no good coming up here … us getting married … if you’re not going to enjoy the animals and the quieter country life.” She had no friends up there, just went to somebody’s place that was absolutely new, but I’ve got to say those ladies were very good to her; all of them were very good to her. And anyway, we decided to get married … got married in the church that Pauline went to. She did a lot of work in the church, yeah. She was a very good pianist and organist. And she was in choirs, that’s right – she was [had] a good voice. Yeah, she was a real city sort of girl, you know, what you’d expect; and she wasn’t a big girl; wasn’t a big lady at all, but tough … oh, she was tough all right.

But anyway, Dad said to me, “I’ll build you a cottage out the back.” And that would’ve been out the back all right – it would’ve been worse than where we were, because [in] ’53 we got power on – no, it was a few months after Pauline and I were married – but before that we’d had no power, and we wouldn’t have got power in a cottage out the back somewhere, so I said, “No, that’s not going to work.” My uncle and aunty were ready to retire and they said “If you like you can manage the farm for us.” So I thought, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a nice house’ – this was up Ohuka – ‘and it’s a warm house, and comfortable. No power, but a good wood range and kerosene lamps.’ So I said, “Yep, that’ll do me”, and I was sure that would be good, and Pauline knew the place ‘cause she’d visited a year or two beforehand. So I took that on for two years – I managed the farm as a bachelor; run-down farm – it was shockingly run down, and I told Pauline about it and she said, “No, no, no – I’d be happy there”, so we did. We got married and we managed the farm; started from scratch and worked our way through it.

And then about two years after that Pauline said, “I’d like to start a family.” And I thought, ‘Ooh, that’s something different.’ I said, “Oh, I don’t know if I’m ready to be a father … doesn’t sound too good to me.” And she said “Oh, you’ll be all right; it’ll come to you.” So anyway, we started a family; we had a girl, the first one – a screaming baby, I thought that’s what it was [chuckle] … a screaming baby. But that only lasted two or three months and it was all over. Then two years after that she had a boy, and that’s what she wanted, a boy and a girl. So that was okay.

By that time the school bus was running. I think the mothers were driving it at the time, and then the schoolteacher came along that [who] was interested in driving for them so that was good. But most times unless we were busy, [it] finished up I was driving; the men would take turns once every five weeks it turned out to be, and drive it for a week.

What licence did you have to have?

Oh, our day you’d get a bus licence, just a small bus licence, which was not hard. Pauline … yeah, she must’ve had her licence. Yeah, she drove it too. Yeah, she had her driver’s licence then, she got her driver’s licence after she came to Ohuka. I bought a bit smaller car … lighter car for her to handle. So those two children came along, and being a father wasn’t so bad after all. It was a lot of pleasure actually. I was able to handle it with Pauline’s guidance but she was a natural mother, she just … there was something about her. In fact she reared the children really, because I was busy on the farm daylight ‘til dark. I used to try and get home to have tea with them.

Well Ken, I’d like to thank you very, very much on behalf of the Knowledge Bank; I really appreciate it. You’ve had a very interesting life and we wish you all the very best, health-wise as well, especially for the future.

Thank you very much, I appreciate that and I’ll make the most of it – I always have made the most of my situation, and I’ve had a lot of very good people that’ve [who’ve] helped me out throughout my ninety-two years of being here. How much longer I don’t know. No, that’s good of you. Thank you.