Shanley Surveying – Colin Shanley

[Background audience conversation initially; interference on microphone]

Jim Newbigin: It’s the 13th of April [2021], and I’m at Landmark[s], and this evening we’ve got Colin George Shanley of Havelock North, who’s [been] a surveyor for fifty to sixty years.

Joyce Barry: Now, welcome everyone; lovely to see a lovely crowd for Colin, I know a lot of you know him. He knows every nook and cranny in Hawke’s Bay. He retired last year, but every time I’ve rung him over the last year he’s still at his desk in town. So what’s going on Colin? [The] thalidomide [theodolite] has to get hung up sometime, so … he’ll tell you tonight what’s going on. But Colin’s had [made] a wonderful contribution to this district; he represented Havelock North on the Borough Council, he represented the Hastings District Council as a Councillor. He has been in his firm for sixty-two years now, so he knows a lot. He has been [a] wonderful fund raiser and contributor to sports clubs in raising money, so it’s a privilege to have people like Colin in our community – I know he will be modest about it, but that’s Colin for you. So could you give a round of applause for Colin please. Thank you.

[Applause]

Colin Shanley: Good evening everybody, and I’m certainly pleased to be here, and I feel as if I’m amongst friends, so that helps a lot. When Joyce rang a while ago, and said could I do it, I said, “Yes, I would be quite happy to do that.”

Yes, I’ve had an extremely pleasant environment for the last sixty-two years, but it’s all due to having wonderful staff – you’ve got to get people, you’ll be well aware of that. Right now, for example, there’s five of us left in the office – Aaron Brittin, who’s been with us for thirty-five years and he’s taken over; and Frank Nijssen’s been with us … some of you will know Frank … he’s been with us for forty-seven years. The other two, Jimmy and [?] have both been there twelve years. So you know, it’s been a long stand in terms of having staff. We’ve had two guys that’ve been with us previously, Jim Waterhouse from Napier – he was with us for nineteen years, and Scott Ferguson who some of you will know, he was with us for eighteen years. So you can imagine what it’s like to be working in that sort of environment with that sort of commitment from staff. Apart from that, they’ve all been experts in their field, they’ve been the best around, and I’m sure I’m right.

So it’s been a great environment; we’ve done a lot of survey work around. We’ve stuck pretty well to the Hastings district in more recent years; avoided working in Central Hawke’s Bay and Wairoa for obvious reasons – we’ve always plenty to do around here. We’ve avoided working in Napier because it’s another big environment to be working in, and so you’ve got to be in or out in those situations, I feel. So we’ve been very fortunate to have been able to concentrate on where we are, and get on with it. We’ve done big jobs, small jobs; we work in all of the survey environments, which are infill subdivisions – we’ve got one and [or] two round town, and they go on all the time … hundreds in a year.

We’ve been very committed to lifestyle, particularly around Havelock [North] and when you look at the area from Endsleigh Road going through to Black Barn, you realise that the hill proportion of that is all lifestyle. It’s a huge number, hundreds and hundreds of lifestyle blocks. Some of them are sixty and seventy lots within a subdivision. Margaret Avenue, for example, there was [were] two subdivisions there of thirty-eight sites each; that’s a big lot of residential sites. And it’s been very pleasing to be involved in that because in the time of the Havelock Borough Council, the Council placed a lot of importance in the latter years of [on] the potential for lifestyle around Havelock although it was contained within the Hawke’s Bay County, and so we were dependent in Havelock on the County being able to accommodate and plan for that sort of expansion. But you all know how well that has worked for Havelock in terms of the commercial area and that sort of thing.

And at the time of the Havelock Council, before amalgamation when the final town plan was drawn up by Jim Bentley, it was with the intention of endeavouring to captivate the shoppers from the eastern side of Hastings and Havelock, and as the rural environment or the lifestyle environment increased that would give more for the village in terms of its future potential retail.

And the other thing the Havelock Borough Council were very adamant about … there were going to be no traffic lights or parking meters, and the [cough] roundabouts, we felt, were going to be the answer to traffic movement. And I think you’ll agree that that is the way it’s working. It’s going to be only a few years before it’ll be totally congested and the Council are going to have to do something towards a further outlet; it’s going to have to happen sooner rather than later. But if they continue to do that and we retain our free parking, which will be hard work, well then I’m sure that Havelock will continue to benefit. So that was all part and parcel of being involved in Council activities, and I’ll say a little bit about that now.

Havelock was a very different environment when we were on Council, because we were pretty well all mates from around town, and it was like being in a club; it wasn’t like being in a political environment. We had very good leadership and we had very good expertise with our consultants, Jim Bentley in particular; Keith Sands and other engineering expertise, so we were very fortunate to have the right people there at the right time. In my time on Council, which was three terms, Jeff Whittaker was the mayor in the first term, and he was great to work with; and then Harry Romanes in the last two terms. We all got on like a house on fire, and we did well; we were pretty good socially, too. [Chuckles] But it was a real experience to be part of that environment.

When we came into Hastings, it was sort of a great bunch of people and Jeremy [Dwyer] was an excellent mayor, but it was so political that we couldn’t believe that we were in the same sort of environment, Harry and I; and Harry could cope with it better than me, but two years was long enough, and I felt that it was damaging the business so it was time to get out, which I did; it was the right time to do it.

So the Council side of things was … well, it was good fun in many ways, and we did some pretty strange things in Havelock. And I can think of some of the more amusing things in terms of how they did things. I’ll think of his name in a minute – our engineer; we were talking about an intersection somewhere – it might’ve been Duart Road or somewhere like that – it was too tight and it needed re-engineering. Dick [?] was the guy … good folk. And I was chairman of the Works Committee at that stage, and I said, “Well, who’re you going to get to do it, Dick? Are you able to do that, or will we get somebody in?” And he said, “No, no”, he said, “Nimons’ll do it.” And I said, “What d’you mean?” He said, “Oh, I’ll put some blocks out, and we’ll drive the bus around them, then I’ll shift the [?] beneath them and that’ll be it.” [Chuckles] And for sure, it worked. [Chuckles] And that’s the way they did things.

And then at one stage, Max Peterson when he was Town Clerk, rang me one morning, and he said, “We’ve got $30,000 in our account that won’t be spent for roading.” And he said, “We’ve got two days to allocate it to a project.” I said, “What’re you going to do?” He said, “Well we haven’t got one, but”, he said, “We thought we’d do Muritai Road.” And I said, “Oh yeah – well how’re you going to do that?” And he said, “Oh, Tucks are lined up and he’ll give us a price tomorrow but you’ve got to give us the detail today.” And I said, “What sort of detail?” He said, “Well, we need an engineering design. We need that today so we’ve got it tomorrow to put a price on it.”

So I went back to the office, and I thought, ‘Well how the hell’re we going to do that?’ So I had a bright idea that if you went down the road and marked out the centre every so often, you then measured it and then worked out an alignment that would work in with that, you’d be okay. So three of us from the office went out there with two dozen full cans of beer, and we had one guy at each end of the tape, and each edge of the road had a [???] the middle and I took the middle measurement and put a can of beer on the road. And we did that all the way round, and then we just walked along it and shifted the cans so they lined up better; looked a better alignment. And that was it. We could survey those and work the details out overnight so they had their engineering plan in the morning. Max was able to [???] spent $30,000 on Muritai Crescent with the left over money. So those sorts of things, of course – you’ll never [cough] hear of it happening in a [?] organisation, but [it] sure worked in [cough] Havelock.

In my first term, I was Chairman of the Reserves committee, and some of you will remember Boris, a delightful guy who was the superintendent. And he was a straight shooter, and he used to get in trouble a bit for overdoing things and overspending, but he always got through that all right, and we always backed him up. And he rang me and he said, “Oh, Max told me I had to” – Max Peterson that was – “that I had to get you to come out and have a look at my budget, but” he said, “I know you’re far too busy so you needn’t worry.” And I said, “That’s okay – I’ll be out there in ten minutes, Boris – you have it ready for me.” And so I went into his office and he produced this budget, and he went through it with me; and something struck me as being a bit funny. He had ‘Propagation $10,000’, and ‘Glasshouse $10,000’, from two different parts of the estimate. And so I said, “Tell me a bit about the glasshouse estimate, Boris – what’s that for?” And he went on a bit about it; and I said, “Now what about this propagation?” And he went on about that. I said, “They sound very similar to me, Boris, they’re not the same thing, are they by any chance?” And he said, “Well not exactly, Colin, not exactly.” I said, “Well how do you mean, ‘not exactly’?” “Well, they are a bit.” And I said, “Well, if you took one out, Boris, which one would it be?” “Ooh”, he said, “you couldn’t do that, Colin.” I said, “Well, if you took half of it out, which one would you want half of it out?” And he said, [”???”], you know. So those were the things that we got through very comfortably, and it was completely enjoyable.

How did I come to be a surveyor? I went to Nelson College from here as a boarder, and it was marvellous. I couldn’t get there quick enough, and I couldn’t get back big quick enough after holidays. There was so much to do … plenty to do. I let school work pass me by a bit, and that got worse as time went by. And Dad thought I was working okay, and the reports were usually all right. Came the Fifth Form – School Cert – [Certificate] which I didn’t commit myself to very well, so I missed by four marks. And I realised that when I went back next year I wouldn’t have to do too much work ‘cause I could do all that again and do it a bit better, which I did. So I left after four years, but without University Entrance like most of my friends had because they were pretty bright and committed. And I got home and Dad said, “What’re you going to do now?” I said, “Well I hadn’t really thought about that; I think I’ll be a builder.” He said, “Oh yeah, builder. Mm-hm. Why do you want to do that?” I said, “Well you know, I’m pretty good at building huts and things.” And I had my own set of tools, and I’d helped John Beaumont build his house when he was building his house so I learned a fair bit from John.” He said, “Yeah, that’s all right. Have you ever thought of anything else?” And I said, “Not really, no.” And he said, “Well I had a call from Mr Allen”, who was a teacher at school, that [who] Dad had been to school with. And he was the maths master; he rang to tell Dad that he was disappointed that I wasn’t doing something that was more worthwhile, and that I was good at mathematics, and an outdoor kid and energetic. “Has he ever thought of surveying?” So Dad and I talked about surveying. And the catch was that you had to have University Entrance to do it because it was a correspondence course, and unless you had UE you couldn’t do it. So we talked about my capabilities of getting UE, and I assured him that I’d be able to do that. And he realised that I wouldn’t do it unless I pulled my finger out. So we [I] went back to school to get University Entrance; and I didn’t change my lifestyle too much – I still played a lot of sport and that [cough] sort of thing. But when [the] time came round for … what do they call it when you’re ..? Accrediting; I realised that I was going to be okay on maths and French, as it happens. I liked the French master, he was a hell of a good guy, so I usually attended his classes with a bit more commitment. He was Skip Wilde – some of you’ll know Skip; he played for Central District and he was a really neat guy. So I thought I’d be pretty right in French.

Before the final examination for the Sixth Form students we had what they called Asian flu, and that meant you were isolated for … I think it was a month. It went around the boarding establishment and I made sure I got it [chuckles] so that I could concentrate on my other two subjects, English and geography. I knew that I’d got French, so that meant I only had these subjects to work on. And in the exams I worked on sixteen places in one and fourteen in the other, and I was the last in Nelson to be accredited … the last on the list to be accredited. And of course the person below the last one was supposed to get it by sitting it, and that guy happened to be my room mate. His name was Duncan Gibbs, and he was determined to be a medical student, with surgery in mind. So he eventually went to [?] and then he ended up as a surgeon overseas in England. So I hadn’t seen him since school days until a jubilee ‘bout twelve years ago, which was the school’s one hundred and fiftieth. We’d been at school for the hundredth jubilee, and I said to Duncan when he came over from his university, I said, “I’ve got a lot to thank you for, Duncan.” And he said, “What d’you mean?” I said, “Well you made sure that I got University Entrance.” He said, “You’re a bit luckier than me, I had to bloody well sit it again.” [Chuckles] So he went back to Victoria [University] to get University Entrance before he could go to Med [Medical] School, so I sure was the last one to get it in Nelson, and that’s how I ended up being able to go surveying.

I didn’t do too much better then either, for that matter, because [at] correspondence school they were a bit strict, and if you didn’t keep your assignments up they dropped you off. They gave you two years to get your act together. I was pretty busy with other things … socialising and rugby in particular, but I was also playing tennis and I was still [?], so some of the time I should’ve been studying passed me by and they dropped me off after a couple of years; which wasn’t too unusual because only about fifty percent of the guys that were doing surveying through the correspondence school ever got it. And then they were working on the survey school being at the Dunedin University, and they gave those of us that were still left in the system eighteen months to get finished. So I had eighteen months to get probably about half of the subjects – I think there were fourteen, and five project ones; well I’d done the five project ones ‘cause I enjoyed doing that. They were [??] at night-time, so that wasn’t a problem, they were done. But these other ones were … just the names of them … astronomy, geodesy, photogrammetry … I can tell you that it’s hard work. And so I had to get my act together somehow, and I always carried the subject. One that I didn’t do any work on but I sat it every time it came around – you could sit them twice a year, and I got the first mathematical one at the first shot and I fluked town planning at the first shot, so I thought I was pretty smart first up to get two of the exams out of the way. But it stayed like that for a good while. And the second mathematical one that I didn’t do anything for, I sat fourteen times before I passed it. [Laughter] I didn’t have to work for it so it didn’t cost me any time, but it cost me a lot of money. [Chuckles] But anyway, I got that when they told us we had a year and a half to go and I had these three other ones to do.

So I went to Brian Perry at Aerial Mapping for photogrammetry … some of you would’ve known Brian … and he was very helpful and he got me through photogrammetry. And then I was pretty matey with a guy in Napier called Lance Leikis who was a surveyor, and I’d played rugby against him in the [?] tournament; he was at Wellington College, so we were good mates, and he was hell of a lot brighter than me so he was quite happy to help me through astronomy, and I picked that up with a few points to spare. And on the last exam I had geodesy. Geodesy as I recall, was the fact that the earth wasn’t actually a sphere and so there was every reason survey-wise why you had to know why. None of it made sense of course. And I passed the fifty, so I know damn well that they gave me that one to get me out of the way. [Laughter] So that was my scholastic attitude towards success in rather devious ways in terms of being able to do what I’ve done for sixty-two years.

Dad had arranged for me to work with Davies & Hewkin – they were the only survey firm in Hastings at that time. I didn’t actually even meet any of them. There were three guys in the firm at that stage – Norman Hewkin, Sandy Tong and Harry Davies, the older guy; and I actually turned up at work on Monday the 6th, so that was it, you know. They didn’t know me, I didn’t know them, and that’s how they started, and I just thought that even though Harry, I’ll call him now; he was Mr Davies then, and he was about seventy-eight, I think. He was working on two big jobs; one of them was McDiarmids down there in Ada Street which was probably about forty sites, and they had a new one in another road there – he was working on that one. And the other one was what we call the Stephens block, and that was the housing block off between Williams Street and [Frederick] Street probably … something like that, and I think there were probably seventy or eighty sections there. So here I was, fourteen only, banging in these survey pegs for weeks. And I’d go to sleep at lunch time – I’d be buggered by lunch time, [chuckles] and I’d go to sleep. Mr Davies used to wake me up when it was whatever time to start. Sandy was a bit more casual – he’d let me sleep until I woke up. [Chuckles] So I had to not go to sleep, otherwise we wouldn’t get our work done. So I learnt how to bang in pegs in the first few months, that’s for sure.

We were doing quite a lot of farm surveys in those days, and if we were around town, it was good too. There wasn’t so much traffic as there is these days, so it was always good fun and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Within the first year they felt that I could handle it myself, so here I was, fourteen and in my first year, doing my own surveys; and I thought I was Christmas of course, standing behind a theodolite in the middle of the road, and I feel like, in the middle of the road and traffic going all around you. There was no such thing as cones in those days. I can well recall one time when we were working at Fernhill – it’s different there now, but there was a bend in the road at the end of the long road. I had to set up the theodolite in the middle of the road on the white line with trucks going either side of me, you know. You can imagine these days how you’d, you know, get away doing that. But that was the way it was, and so I progressed pretty rapidly in terms of being able to do my own stuff; and then of course, by that time I was registered and had my ticket.

At that stage I had taken over one of the partnerships. I think I was twenty-eight then when I acquired the first partnership when Mr Davies retired, or soon after he retired. And then my partner at that stage, Norman Hewkin – his wife was keen to go back to England, so I was able to purchase Norman’s shares at that stage too, so I think I was twenty-eight when actually took over the firm.

And we started sort of rebuilding with young blood; and we invariably took good guys from school that [who] didn’t want to go to university but were energetic. From my own experience I knew that if you had a guy that [who] was playing sport he’d be energetic, so we stuck to that policy. And if they were a nice guy I never bothered to ask them how scholastic they were, as long as they looked the part and seemed the part, it’d be okay, and they always were.

More recently when I interviewed Trinette, our current office lady – she’d been a friend of our previous secretary who was going overseas … going over to Australia … and we had farewell do for her. And I said to her, “Is that the girl that you went over to England with?” She said, “Yeah, that’s Trinette. I’ll introduce you to her.” She did so; she liked the spot, and I was going quite well myself, so we had good chat. [Chuckles] And the next day I said to Cindy, I said, “How would Trinette go in your job?” “Ooh, she’d be good.” She was working for an accountant at that time, part time. “She’d be good.” So I said, “Get her to come and see me.” And so she came in a couple of days later and we had a talk; and I said, “Well that’s great – when do you think you can start?” She said, “Oh, I hadn’t really thought about that”, she said, “I’ll let you know.” So that was that, and she said, “By the way, do you want me to leave you with my CV?” [Curriculum Vitae] I never even thought of checking out the CV, but she’s been there for twelve years and she’s hugely valuable, so there’s more ways of doing it than you know, going about it the right way. So that’s the way we’ve always looked at things. The only big disappointment we’ve had was more recently. Franklin had been with us from his secondary school days; he was a keen cyclist in terms of going out and keeping himself in shape. About four or five years ago he came unstuck on the Havelock Road through a freak accident and ended up in the brain unit in Auckland. He was away for a year, and then when he came back he was only capable of doing about three hours at a time, three days a week. He was pretty jaded and quiet and all those things; and four years later – today – he’s his good old self. He’s hugely valuable; he’s right with it and he’ll do anything that I can’t do, because they’re technically capable and I’m not, and it’s been the greatest thing that’s ever happened to us. So that’s the staffing thing.

I’ve had a few other things on the way through; I started life off as a kid that was energetic, naughty, and we were in Waipawa. We moved from Auckland when I was five. My mother had TB [tuberculosis] and had to be handy to a sanatorium, so we shifted to Waipawa. I was always up at five o’clock in the morning and disturbing the household and normally in trouble, so Dad got me a paper run with the Dominion paper, and I was able to go down there at five o’clock and meet the bus, pick up my papers and go and do my run. That would keep me occupied until school started. The weekends weren’t quite so good if there [it] wasn’t rugby season or tennis.

The grocer in those days down there was a guy that the kids knew as Fatty Barker. So Dad arranged me to mow Mr Barker’s lawns on the weekend, so that helped out there a bit. He also got Mr Barker to occasionally … after school at times when I didn’t have other things to do … to pick up kerosene bottles and plough bags and things like that, so that was the way that they kept me occupied to keep me out of trouble.

But then I had a lucky break because I went into Standard 4. Some of you may remember Barbara Towers; Barbara was my teacher in Standard 4, and we got on extra well. And the first report came home, but … Dad didn’t tell me this; Barbara told me years later … the first report came home and Dad rang Barbara and said, “Barbara, you’ve given us the wrong report”, [chuckles] and she said, “How do you mean?” He said, “Well, he’s never had a report like this before.” And she said, “Well, he’s the best kid in our class.” She got through to me. So that started off another thing; Barbara put me in her church choir in my cassock and surplice, red and white, and I led them into the church for the church services, and I even sang the page’s verse of ‘Good King Wenceslas’ on Christmas Eve. So that kept me pretty well occupied too.

And then, in Standard 5 I was lucky enough to have Athol Rigby as my teacher, and many people would’ve known Athol. Athol looked after the cricket and the rugby, as well as the Fifth and Sixth Standard[s] combined class. And so Athol was extra good; through him and those activities I got on extra well, and I was coming out of my naughty little boy … these days they’d be called hyperactive, but in those days they were called ‘little shits’. And so I just about got through that. When I left school and found out that Athol was living in Havelock, I went round to see him; and Athol and I remained great friends until the day he died, so it was great.

And I remember one day when I was probably in Standard 4 something went wrong in the classroom and I was to blame, so I had to stay behind to write out a hundred lines or whatever they made you do in those days. It must’ve been Miss Towers, and I said, “I’m sorry, Miss Towers, I can’t do that – I’ve got rugby practice.” And she said, “Colin, you’re going to have to miss out on rugby practice”, and with that she walked out of the room. And my good little friend, Diana Joll, was still in the classroom, and I said, “Diana, I’ve got to write out these hundred lines; you do half and I’ll do half.” And Miss Towers had said to me, “You put them on my desk when you’ve finished, and you go off to rugby.” So I did that, so the next morning she said, “Colin, you did well with those lines, but” she said, “it was pretty decent of Diana to help you.” [Laughter] So that was the way things went.

At that stage my mother died, in April that year; really, that’s when we came to Havelock, and things never looked back.

I’m just looking at other things that have been part and parcel of my working life, and some of the more important things that’ve happened in terms of change, as you will well imagine. And I made a note here of metrication; so of course, when metrication came in it wasn’t quite so bad for us because we had a system [coughing] anyway; links – a hundred links to a chain – so we were in decimalisation anyway. Horizontal was chains and links, but vertical was still feet and inches. But then we had a system that decimalised the feet as well, so it was easy to convert into the new system. But it didn’t mean that the changes all had to … ‘cause we had a thin steel ban that rolls up, and a lot of you will’ve seen them. And they were five or ten chains long, so that’s a [coughing] hundred and two hundred metres, and you used to have to pull those to a certain tension. It was 6.4 pounds or something, so you had a stick on the end that you clipped on and you pulled it out until it was on the right tension, and then you could take your reading. Because I was only little, even littler then I am now, I didn’t have long enough arms for this, so I found that there was a different sort of measuring stick that didn’t have a spring balance on it, it was built into the stem, and that meant that I could just manage to get a proper reading.

When we measured a line [cough] we had to make three corrections – one for the temperature; the steel band was correct at sixty-two degrees, or twenty degrees in Fahrenheit [Celsius]. We had to make a correction for the sagging, which was on the table; and you had to make a correction for the slope, in terms of land measurement. So you had to make those three corrections with every measurement you made. But we could do about a mile and a half in a day on a farmed hill; it was amazing how quickly it could be done. And if you were on a flat paddock for example, if you had three, the third guy’d go down and find where the five-chain mark was and just hold it to there at the same height as the two ends, and you’d have a sag there and a sag there; and that worked. We were working to … oh, an eighth of an inch, I suppose … correction. This is only two or three mls, [millimetres] which is the same accuracy that they’re working to today with [??]. What I’m saying is that if you could go back tomorrow and measure that same line and you could expect to be within half of an inch of what you had yesterday, even if it was two hundred metres long.

So metrication came in; and then all survey plans were hand drawn and coloured, and for dummies like me that hadn’t shown any interest in art, it was pretty hard work to draw a decent plan, but you soon learnt to. But they disappeared about the same time as metrication, and we had black and white transparent plans. They were drawn by hand too, but they could also be drawn by stencil if you had the right sort of people, and we were pretty fortunate. At about this time, or just before it happened, [I] had a ring from Brian Perry at Aerial Mapping, and he said, “Oh, I’ve got one of our girls here that [who] wants to work full-time, and we can only give her part-time work.” Carol Stevens was her name … Carol Woollard more recently. I forgot to mention her as a long stayer; she was there for thirty-one years. “Can you give her a job?” And I said, “Yes we can”, and I knew her ‘cause I’d been around there often enough, but I didn’t yet know what her work was like. I said, “What’s her work like?” And he said, “Oh, as good as you can get.” I said, “Oh, well that’s great.” So she came and got our system going for the stencilling of plans. And we were getting pretty busy at that stage, and we picked up another girl which [who] many of you will know again, Marion Lang, from Lands & Survey [Department]. And between them they taught another girl, so all of a sudden we had three draftswomen and we were churning out these new plans long before anybody else locally, and it really set us up. So that was black and white plans.

And then EDM – that’s Electronic Distant [Distance] Measuring – that came along and we’d been waiting for that for quite some time. The travellers had been calling in with the new models and that sort of thing and it was very hard to determine how to handle it because they were mounted on a theodolite, and if the theodolite wasn’t strong enough the equipment was too heavy for them ‘cause they were pretty solid things. There was a Surveyors conference in Nelson, so I went down specifically to have a look at what was coming up, because everybody was a bit nervous about taking a plunge; and they were still in their infancy, and it wasn’t tempting enough to take the plunge. So we went back to Te Anau the following year with the specific intention of actually having the representatives of all the different individual models; there might be half a dozen of them there, so you could have a good look and work out how to go about it.

So I got involved socially with a guy by the name of … don’t know his name … I think Reginald, was what we called him. We spent too much time talking about it at the bar instead of being at the conference. And we did that simply because, with all the others gone into the conference we could go out to these guys displaying these goods and have a fair go at it. And there was one particular one that I liked the look of, you know – the fact that you weren’t working it didn’t give you the confidence you needed, and you were dependent on them telling you what it could do. So [?] this guy’s name was, and I said, “Hey, how about we see if we can go out, you and I, and use this thing for an hour or so?” Which I did; the guy said, “Yeah”, he said, “next session there’ll be nobody here; come and get it and I’ll show you how to work it.” Anyway, by the end of an hour or so we were full of confidence with this thing, and the only quibble there was, it was mounted on too light a theodolite, for my dough. So I said to this to this sales guy, who was a hell of a good bloke, that I wasn’t confident on the instrument.” And he said, “Well I’ve got a Hungarian one coming in in the next few months”, he said, “how about I bring it up when it comes and you can have a look at it? And I’ll bring it mounted.” And he brought it up and it was magnificent; and we’ve still got it there. It hasn’t been in use for twenty years, but it was just amazing – had a distance of 2.5 kilometres with a bracket of reflectors, and the accuracy was plus or minus five mls over that two and a half kilometres. We reckoned that the accuracy was two millimetres, because you always were able to get the same measurement out of it. Absolutely amazing. So anyway we got that, and it was amazing.

Another thing that was coming in was the calculators. As you can imagine, we started off with the wind-up ones, you know? And then went on to the first of the electronic ones. We didn’t ever have an electric one that used to bounce and play around the room; the Lands & Survey [Department] had those and they were worth a fortune. But anyway, eventually a machine came out, [coughing, inaudible] Munroe 1880. It was a card system like your credit card, those were the programmes. And I’m talking thirty or more years ago, possibly forty, and they were worth $3,000 which was a lot of money. And anyway, we said, “Yes, we’ll have one’, and he sent it up the next day.

At that stage we were doing a lot of work in Flaxmere; and by a lot of work I mean it … three hundred sections a year on top of our normal work. And we had a staff of thirteen, all of them extra good guys and girls. Brian Philip, who many of you will know, was with us then; he qualified with us, and Warwick Marshall; both of them are in opposition businesses at present. They were with us at the time and we were churning out a lot of work, but the other guys couldn’t get onto the 1880 because these guys were dominating it, and it wasn’t ‘til they got back outside again that the other fellows could get onto these other ones. These were the smaller jobs, and they were stockpiling work and they weren’t getting through it. So I rang up … think of his name in a minute; good bloke … and I said, “Have you got any more 1880s?” He said, “Well I haven’t actually, why?” And I said, “Well I want one.” He said, “Well you just bought one.” This was about a month later, or less; I said, “Yeah, I know, but I’m going to buy another one.” He said, “Why?” And I said, “Well, we’re not getting through the work, the guys are stockpiling their stuff.” He said, “Oh yeah, I can understand that.” So he said, “Well, you can have my demonstration model … do you mind that?” I said, “No, that’d be fine.” So he sent it up, and we got the other one going and it was really neat having these two machines to complement each other, and that was okay. About two years later this guy rang me from Wellington and he said, “My wife and I are coming up to Hawke’s Bay – we want you and your wife to come to dinner with us at the Mayfair.” And I said, “Oh yeah, that’d be neat.” We did that; and after we’d had a few drinks he said to me, “Oh, thank you for what you did for me.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, the 1880.” I said, “Well what do you mean? We got two, you got paid for them and we found it hard to pay for them.” He said, “Yeah, but,” he said, “I’d just finished going around the country when you rang me”, and he said, “I set off and went right round again and sold the same number to every firm in New Zealand.” [Chuckles] He said, “I realised that they’d have the same problem as you were having, but no one had spoken up.” And he said, “I sold as many again.” So that was interesting.

GPS, the in-thing at present – as yet we haven’t gone into GPS, mainly because it’s an entirely new system. We’re very much ingrained in what we’re doing, and when they get a replacement for me, which hopefully will be pretty soon, they will endeavour to employ a licensed guy that is right with it. Unfortunately, at present everybody’s looking for surveyors so it might take a while; but when we get into GPS we’re not going to do it on a trial basis, we’re going to do it with some expertise and turtling. In the meantime, Aaron’s as good as he ever was at doing his thing outside and nobody, regardless of what they’re using, would be doing any better than him. So that’s the next thing to deal with.

Also, there are no such thing[s] as plans now; its all computerised sheets. And a survey plan … instead of it being a twenty-by-twenty-inch, or thirty-by-thirty, hand-drawn as it was initially; or a black and white A2 which is transparent … there might be forty or fifty computer sheets. So you can imagine how [?] matters, so I’m getting out at the right time, for sure. [Chuckles]

Another – very quickly, it’s another subject on its own, or another talk on its own – but when I was fifty or thereabouts, [my] daughter, Sarah, was involved in triathletes; she was at high school, and we went up for her to do the annual event at Mount Maunganui. My brother lived halfway between Katikati and Waihi; I’m not too good with being on holiday. We had to take Sarah’s bike up obviously, so I said to Shona, “I’m taking Blair’s bike up as well.” “What for?” I said, “Oh, I might do a bit of bike riding while we’re away to kill time.” So I went out every morning on Blair’s bike, and I started off doing five ks [kilometres] and built it up; and then when Sarah finished her triathlon I rode her bike back from Mount Maunganui around the road, to halfway between Katikati and Waihi, which was a relatively long ride and I was feeling pretty good about it all. And we were going to Max and Carol Petersons who then lived in Whakatane, for New Year. So I put the bike on the back of the car and Shona said to me … I haven’t said much about Shona, but Shona has been [?], and has made me successful [???] … anyway, I put the bike on the back, and she said, “What’s that for?” I said, “I thought I might go out for a bike ride when we get there, for something to do.” Oh yeah … and I had in mind biking back from Whakatane to Tauranga, you see. So I went out for a bike ride that afternoon, and I got lost; and this guy came up behind me … a proper cyclist [chuckles] … and he cycled with me up this hill. And he said, “Where’d you come from?” I said, “Whakatane.” And he said, “Where’re you going to?” And I said, “Oh, I hope I’m going back there, but I don’t know where I am.” [Chuckles] And he said, “Well, if you get to the top of this hill and turn left, you’ll be heading towards Whakatane.” And [to] cut a long story short, instead of doing a fifty km [kilometre] ride I did an eighty km ride.

And anyway, when we were cycling up this hill he said to me, “You do a bit of cycling?” I said, “Well, not really.” He said, “Well, I didn’t think so – your jandals give you away.” [Laughter] And anyway, he said, “Where’re you from?” I said, “I’m from Havelock North.” He said, “Havelock North – where’re you staying?” I said, “I’m staying with a mate from Havelock.” He said, “It’s not Max Peterson by any chance, is it?” And I said, “Yes, it is.” He said, “Oh, well I’ll see you tonight when we come around for his New Year’s barbie.” [Chuckles]

So anyway the next morning I got up and got myself organised, and Shona thought I was going out for another ride; and I went out and I said to Max, “I’m heading off now to Tauranga.” I said, “You tell Shona I’ve gone”, you see. He said, “No bloody way – you tell her yourself.” I said, “Well you’ll have to, I’ve gone.” And so off I went you see. And in … oh, I suppose an hour later Shona and Sarah turned up; and it was raining – not hard, but it was a bit unpleasant – but I was really enjoying it. So no way I was going to get in the car, so off I went. And so this happened two or three times until we met up at the identifying spot at McDonald’s, which was the turnoff to Waihi, and I got off the bike and couldn’t even stand up. I hadn’t had a water bottle or anything, and I stopped and bought a can of juice at a wayside shop.

So that’s pretty well everything. There’s one only other thing, but that’s another story altogether; I took time out eleven years ago and a mate and I cycled from Cape Reinga to Bluff for our 70th birthday challenge. And that as an amazing experience; greatest experience I’ve had, but that’s another story. Now apart from that, there’s nothing else that we haven’t covered pretty well, so yeah – thank you for your attention.

[Applause]

Joyce: Thank you. Now there’s time for questions …

Question: Colin, are you responsible for the roundabout in [the] entrance to Havelock North, with the give way sign on the roundabout?

Colin: Yes, yes. That was intentional, and it created a lot of concern at the time. But the nature of the traffic coming out like that, you can imagine the stack up of cars at the bridge; that was certainly the intention.

Question: It was a creative solution?

Colin: Yes. Yeah, well we got engineering advice. And I often think about that because seldom do I use that approach. So yeah, it was intentional.

Question: Was that an exclusive feature that nobody else has used, or was it used elsewhere?

Colin: Oh, I wouldn’t know. I’d never stuck it anywhere else. There’s another thing that’s humorous from our point of view – there’s a heavy traffic sign in Middle Road heading into Porter Drive, right? A blue heavy traffic … what do they call it? Alternative Route. And anyway, when we went to have it engineered we were told it couldn’t go there for whatever reason. We just said, “Well, put it up anyway.” The Transport Department – it didn’t fit their criteria, and we just said, “Well, too bad.” And it’s been there for the last thirty years [chuckles] and nobody would know that it’s not supposed to be there.

Question: Colin, you’ve done some very good work for us, but the Council made it a bit complicated sometimes. I can’t understand why you didn’t stay on the Council and run all the sign business for us.

Colin: Because there were businesses better than our business around, John.

Joyce: Could we please have a round of applause for Colin?

[Applause]

Colin: Well I’ll be away for Christmas again because I’ve got to kill time sometimes, and I’ve got the two books, and one of them was ‘New Zealand Disasters in the 1900s and 2000s’, that I found with books that’d gone out of the system. And I opened it up and it was from our son, Blair, dated 2008.

Joyce: One question … yes?

Comment: This is not a question; I’d just like to say that Colin hasn’t told us he’s got a road named after him on the Taihape Road, called Shanley Road.

Joyce: Oh, Colin – have you really? Oh! [Applause]

Colin: I think it was a bit controversial because I was on council at the time, but it was to do with Shanley Surveying, not Shanley, Havelock. But thank you for mentioning that. And it’s a nice little subdivision, I’ve got to say that.

Joyce: That’s the one up the Taihape Road?

Colin: Yeah.

Joyce: Yes, it’s lovely. Thank you for coming; safe journey home.

[Applause]