Trevelyan, Colin Stuart Interview

Good morning. Today is Friday 19th November 2021. I am Lyn Sturm [and] I have been given the privilege of interviewing Colin Trevelyan of Mangateretere. Over to you, Colin.

Okay. I’ve got the property which originally was Plant & Food Research Station.

Okay, so I was born in Waipukurau in 1947 and me [my] parents were in Waipukurau. Me [my] grandfather was one of the first doctors in Waipukurau Hospital in 1898, and he had a medical business across the road from the hospital – well, it’s the older house from the main door of the hospital. But he died in 1957 about; photos are out there on the wall. And I lived in Waipukurau and I had many sort of jobs, like … paper run and mowing lawns and that … and I had one plan from when I was about ten years old, that I would be a millionaire by the time I retired. [Chuckle] Every penny you ever get … any money you ever get, you save one third to pay for things, invest one third and one third you have to spend. And from when I was doing my paper run I’d do the same thing and I still even do it now. But it’s a bit different now. [Chuckles]

Okay, I’ve been round the world a hundred and forty times. I was working in Waipukurau as a paper boy, then I was working before school down at Mr Stewart’s in Ford Road helping milk cows, and then I’d go to college. And then after school I was working at Hume’s Pipe Company until about five, half past five; then I’d go to milk the cows again for Mr Stewart for the night. And then next day the same thing, so it was quite handy. Oh, and then at the same time, just after I left school I got a job in the Waipuk [Waipukurau] Power Board, and I was also working for Wendy Studios as a wedding photographer, taking photos and that. So that was a very handy job, because I bought one of the first really posh sports cars in Waipukurau. You’d probably know the car, that Daimler V8 … Daimler Dart I had; and it was very good for picking up young ladies, especially at weddings and everything else when I was doing the photos. [Chuckles] Many bridesmaids had their ride home in the car [??], [chuckle] between Hume’s Pipe Company and milking me [my] cows and everything else.

I’m blown away …

So I worked in the Waipuk Power Board up until 1969, and then I decided to go overseas so I bought a ticket to Australia on a ship. We were going from Wellington so I went down to Wellington, got on the ship and went over to Australia. And then I got a job on the ship and went to South Africa. I was meant to go to England but I got drunk in South Africa and so the ship left without me. It didn’t matter.

So I went up to the electricity supply thing in Johannesburg, out of Germiston, and I went in and said that I knew everything about power and everything. And they said, “Okay, what have you done?” And I said, “Worked for the Waipukurau Power Board.” They said, “That’s okay – well you can go out and build power pylons through the gold fields in Bloemfontein.” “Oh, I know everything about that.” Never even seen one. I saw one out at Onga [Onga Onga] once. [Chuckle] So I had a Dutch crane driver and a Dutch digger driver, and the rest of them were native crew. We went out and dug holes and built power pylons through the gold fields, and lived out in the jungle and had about – I think it was a weekend off every three weekends – the third weekend we’d work. But it was a lot of fun out in the bush in the towns that we were there then. Apartheid was in full swing, and it was a very good time for some people there.

And so I did that for about nine months or so, and then I bought an old Mazda pickup truck and I took a Mpidi and a Zulu guy – the two of them had to ride in the back of the truck until we’d crossed the border up the top, and then they were allowed in the cab and that; and then we travelled all over Africa living in native villages; just living with the natives, so that was for about six months, a year or so. Then I eventually got back to Cape Town and got a job on a boat, and the boat was meant to come to New Zealand but we went via America and I never had a visa or nothing, [anything] so I got put in the compound there. They took half the money off you to put you on a plane to fly you out, and so I think it was $27 they took off me because I only had $56. And then they flew to London; they put me on – I think it was Oriental Express or something then – one of those cheap airlines that were operating then, and I was dropped off in London.

So I moved into the Underground with my sleeping bag, and went and got a job with Harrods at an agency and found out that I could go in the front door, walk through the shop and go to where I was meant to be working down the bottom, walk up the stairs, walk out [of] the shop; never come back until five o’clock at night when I went and clocked my card in. Never did a day’s work in the whole time but got paid the money for it every week. And the agency didn’t mind, they were taking twenty percent or something off of it, and I just lived the good life round London and everything else.

Then I decided to travel across Europe, so I learnt very quickly that … I went for about nine months or so and it cost me £100 for food, travel and everything, and I went to about twenty countries. The first thing I learnt was when you get on the train you always have your money in American dollars because guards could never take foreign money; he had to take only the money for their country. So he’d come along and say, “Ticket?” And you say, “Yep, I’ll buy a ticket”, and he’d tell you how much and so you show him $10 Ame[rican] – “Can’t take foreign money.” I say, “I’ve got nothing else.” “You’ll have to get off at the next station and change it. And so of course you get off with your bag and you let that train go, ‘cause you’re going to get on the next one for nothing and you might get another two hundred mile.

And I lived in a lot of parks, because at night-time you make sure you get picked up. You’ll go and sleep in the park … maybe get a bit drunk and sleep in the park, but always sleep near the gate because when the police come and throw you in the paddy wagon you get to the jail. And if you get in the van first and get to the jail, well then you can get the bunk beside the cell doors, ‘cause there’s not enough bunks for everybody; plus in the morning you’d be beside the door – you can get out because they’ve only got a little bit of breakfast, so you get a good feed before they throw you out into the outskirts of town and drop you off and tell you to get out of their city. So you could travel … I travelled all over Europe and everything else for very little, costing me nothing at all for travel, food and everything else. Plus you learnt to know all the supermarkets that had free samples and everything else all over Europe and that.

Then I eventually got back to England, and I went berry picking first up in Northern England. And I was hitch-hiking around and I went up to Scotland and got a job as grouse feeder on Invercauld Estate which is just down the road from Balmoral. Invercauld is about three or four kilometres from the town, so every night we would have to over there and get drunk. We didn’t have enough money to drink every night, so we’d talk to the Queen Mother ‘cause she’d be fishing down the river and everything else; ‘cause then there was no guard. They didn’t have no [any] guards or nothing [anything], she would be out there fishing by herself.

But then we hitch-hiked into Aberdeen, [and] we went down to the wharf to find job. We went into an oil company, and we said, “We want a job as a roustabout or something.” And he said, “Are you single?” We said, “Yep”. There was me and me [my] mate. And he said, “Get out to the airport by four o’clock, there’s a plane coming up from France; you’re flying to Norway, then you’re going on a helicopter; you’re going about two or three hundred miles above the Arctic Circle. You’ll be on to Drill Mast Twenty Three drilling rig. He said, “You’ll arrive out there about midnight, one o’clock in the morning; you’ll start work immediately ‘cause you’ll join that shift, and your job will be with the steam guns, cleaning the ice off for the guys to work.” So that was very good.

We got out there; we started on the Thursday night. But on the Saturday night the diving bell went down and the weight broke off and it shot to the surface, and the four guys inside were blown to bits and killed. So being the roustabouts, we had to get in with a rubbish bag and get ourselves a body each. The other two guys that [who] were roustabouts quit, and so me and me [my] mate, we got two bags of bits. And we were promoted on the Monday to roughnecks – we only took four, five days to get to be roughnecks. We used to do two weeks on, two weeks off, and then [were] flown back to Aberdeen where we’d signed on. I used to go back to Aberdeen and then I would wait until the rest of the crew went out of the airport, then I’d go over and sign myself up to another oil company and go out and work with them for a couple of weeks; come back and do the same thing, go back to the old company so I could make me [my] money, work[ing] two jobs.

Then after about three months or so the derrick man fell out of the derrick and spattered all over the floor. They wanted to carry on drilling so … “Who knows how to work the derrick?” “I do.” “Get up there, and put a belt on would you? Don’t be like him, splattered all over the place. You guys clean him up, clean the deck up. Righto – get up, we’ve got work to do. Hurry up, chop chop.” So we carried on drilling, so I got promoted up to derrick man then, and I worked there for … oh, few months more. And then I went down to Iraq as a system driller and worked me [my] way up from that. In the finish, I worked in about fifty-two countries.

But once I went to Iraq I started doing month on/month off, so that’s how I would fly back to New Zealand for a month and then fly back. But many of the months that I’d come back to New Zealand I’d come back for a week … mow the lawn, take Anne out for dinner a few times, then I’d just say, “I’ll be back shortly, I’m just going over to America.” So I’d go over to Houston and do a course for a week or something. I’d say, “I’ll be back in a week”; come back in a week and I’d mow the lawns, take her out a few more times, then I might have to go to Australia and do another course for a week. I’d say, “I’ll be back shortly”, before I’d go away again; so I’d come back home, mow the lawn again, take her out a few more times; then I would go back over to Europe or Africa or somewhere … which[ever] rig I was on … or Japan or somewhere, and do another month. Then I worked me [my] way up to a company, and from about 1982, I think, I was in charge of me [my] first lot of rigs as a tool pusher, so that was very good.

But it was very well paid ‘cause I could come back for my month off and I would have enough money to buy a house. I would get me [my] push bike out and ride around Te Awanga and say, “Hmm – I think I’ll buy that house.” So I would go home and I’d write a letter and say, “If you cash this cheque and sign this bit of paper for the sale of your house, your house is sold. Cash the cheque, you’ve sold your house; be out in thirty days. Thank you very much.” At one stage I owned about twelve, fifteen houses out there, ‘cause they were only about $17,000 – $40,000 each then, and so I’d buy up many, many houses … many, many, many houses. And not only there, I bought them in Napier and I bought them in Waipuk. At one stage I had about six or seven in Waipuk, then just carried on from there.

I got my first camera to start me [my] museum off on 10th April 1959, half past ten in the morning – it’s out there behind the door. Mrs Lunt up in Porangahau Road lived across from us, and she brought the camera over and give [gave] it to me for me [my] tenth birthday, because her husband had died a couple of months before. I knew her pretty well – I mowed her lawn too – so she come [came] over and give [gave] me this camera for me [my] birthday. And that’s the camera that’s still out there – that was the start of collecting cameras.

So how many do you own now?

I don’t know, about six or seven thousand. It’s one of the biggest collections in the world. Before Covid I had more visitors; ‘cause it’s never advertised …

It’s word of mouth.

… so I get more people. I used to get ‘bout the same number of people from overseas; people would fly from Belgium and France for the day just to play with cameras, see some particular cameras. Three doctors from Singapore had nothing to do so they flew over here and played with the cameras for the day and flew back at night. One guy flew from Poland to London to Los Angeles, all night to New Zealand; got to Auckland, you know, half past six or something in the morning, flew down to Napier, got a rental car, come [came] out here, saw the cameras he wanted to play with – I give [gave] him some lunch – and then he took the rental car back to the thing, flew back up to Auckland at four o’clock, caught the six o’clock flight back to Los Angeles, back to Europe. [Chuckle] Just to see some cameras that he wanted.

But the big problem now is, probably in the last two and a half months I’ve had over a thousand cameras come in. Even yesterday afternoon I got an email – a guy’s got eight trailer loads of cameras and photographic gear he wants to bring down. Because the problem is that in New Zealand cameras are not a big collectible item. The second-hand shops don’t want them; Cranford Hospice shop and you know, the shops in town used to put them in a box and give them to the kids down the bottom, but they’re not allowed to now under Health & Safety ‘cause small kids can eat those little batteries in there – that kid in Sydney that swallowed one of those batteries. They can get cut with the glass, so they’re not allowed to do that now, so they save all the cameras up, ‘cause they get a lot from the States, in a box up top on the shelf. They give me a ring every month or two months and I go and give them a donation, and they say, “Take the cameras – go!” ‘Cause if I don’t they end up in the landfill.

And that’s what the problem is with these big collections that I’ve been getting; the guys’ve had camera shops up in Auckland and that sort of stuff, but now they’re all pretty elderly and they’re moving into retirement villages and they’ve got no storage space. They go to a second-hand shop and say, “Would you buy it?” Or you could have a truckload of cameras; basically [chuckle] we’ve got no room for them – you can’t sell them, and the auction rooms get nothing for them. They might get $10 or $20, but the amount of work they’ve got to go into [to] sell them, it’s not …

But I go out and sometimes I come back with some – I went over with me [my] mate, we got three Queens ships for four or five months around the top of Europe and that sort of thing. We met a lady friend in town one day … I didn’t know her, I met her [for] the first time … I said, “What do you do?” She said, “Oh, I’ve just sold me [my] business.” I said, “Oh, do you like tigers?” And she said, “Why?” I said, “Want to come to India chasing tigers on the elephants?” So we did, we went to across India for three weeks.

One day when I opened the museum down in Waipukurau … it was quite funny. I went out to the bank one day – I’d got it all rigged up and everything done, you know, I’d got all the cases and the cameras all set up and everything – but as I was saying before, the rates went up that high and so I offered it to the council. I went to the council and said, “I’ll donate the whole museum down there with the cameras, the cases …” They didn’t want it. They said, “No, we’ve got a museum in Waipawa that costs the ratepayers a lot of money to keep; we don’t want it. We’d have to pay somebody to look after it and they’d know nothing about it, and we’d have to pay maintenance on the building. So no, we don’t want it, thank you very much.” And so I packed the whole lot up and sold the building.

But elderly people … like, they have these big collections, and you know, they’ve saved up over the years for all sorts of things, so they just want to get rid of them somewhere. Sometimes I get these boxes on me [my] verandah with no name or nothing, [anything] full of cameras that come from all over the place. [Chuckles] That’s okay.

With most things, if you’re doing something you’ve got to find out every single thing about them and all that. So … like, a guy come [came] in here one day … he come [came] in a campervan and he was travelling round New Zealand. And I always rave on about Leica and Leitz and that in me [my] Leica room there. And so he went down to South Island for two months, and then I think it was two or three months after that I got a phone call, and he said, “Colin, I was in your museum a few months ago”, he said, “and I was in a campervan going down to the South Island.” He said, “That name you want – there’s a guy got an old camera with that name on … a little silver plate with that name Leica Leitz on it, and it’s in a garage sale between Bluff and Invercargill. He might still have it, I’ll give you his number.”

Oh yeah, I retired in 1999.

How old were you then?

Just on fifty. That lasted about six weeks. [Chuckle] I got that many phone calls and things, so I went back as a consultant for oil companies. I went into Russia and all over Russia, and Angola, Congo and Cameroon, and did all those places, but I was working on a day rate as a consultant so I was quite well paid.

But I think that … you know, like when the fires were between Kuwait and Iraq during the war? Well they had on TV [television] they were putting the fires out, you know – they had a picture on the news that they’d put another fire out. It was nothing that was like that at all. It was fairly good because … I mean I was getting paid at that time about [US] $3,000 a day to work with Red Adair, putting out those fires. And so do you think we put them out? Well the one for the camera was put out, but we kept them going for nine months; even the coffee boy was being paid $US500 a day. [Chuckle] So it’s quite ridiculous, a lot of stuff you see on the news.

It’s the same as another thing, the ‘Gorillas in the Mist’, you know, in Cameroon? You know, they’re always going on about ‘Gorillas in the Mist’. I’ve worked in Cameroon below that mountain; they never ever once said that that’s the national food. They’ll eat the gorillas – you go down [to] the market, you can eat the gorilla heads and paws and everything else; they sell them in the market, you know, as meat. But they were doing the big begging trick for ‘Gorillas in the Mist’. And it’s the same as in the Congo and that sort of place where they, “Save the elephants, save the elephants” from all the poachers. You’ve got to get rid of the elephants because there’s that blinking many of them – they’re the ones doing all the damage getting food, breaking up the forest, the villages and everything. And it’s people like Helen Clark, that [who] goes over there and watches with the Kenyan Prime Minister … when she was in United Nations … [the] Kenyan Prime Minister burnt $4 million worth of elephant tusks and then turns around and gives them $2 million or something for the schools. Why didn’t he go and sell all those elephant tusks instead of just burning them up … put a big show on for TV. Yeah. So anyway, I got to Libya, and I was looking after rigs for a Canadian company; and Gaddafi got up and went stupid, and blew up me [my] rigs, and so I decided to retire again.

And ever since then … Anne and I did four or five trips. Before we used to [on] go four or five trips a year, down the canals, and all of Europe and all that; went to see the pandas, do [did] all those things, so yeah, we had a pretty good time.

So where’s your favourite place in the world?

Oh, anywhere, the whole lot. Well, Africa’s all right. New York’s pretty good. I took Anne’s sister – we went over to New York to the marathon – went twice actually. Anne [and I] didn’t go in it but her sister went – she was seventy and she went in it, so I shouted her a trip over there to go in the marathon. That was about 2013, I think, yeah. And then we did a lot of trips with APT [Australian Pacific Tours] down in canal boats, you know, Paris down to Nice and all those places, and down the Danube. Otherwise, not much else.

One day Anne … oh, ‘bout 1980s … Anne said Shane, her son, was going to start college. I said, “I know what – why doesn’t he go to college in Dannevirke?” And she said “Why Dannevirke?” And I said, “’Cause there’s a whole row of shops for sale, and I’ll go and buy them; there’s a few houses – I’ll go and buy the whole lot and you can live down there and run a few shops, and he can go to school there.” So that’s what we did. [Chuckle] But I carried on working on the rig; I’d come home for a month, eat all the ice cream and then go back again, [chuckle] and she was running the shops down there. That went off very well.

You can’t do very much now, with the … you can’t travel or anything, otherwise I would‘ve been over in London now, because last Sunday was the London to Brighton run – or two weeks ago. It’s always the first Sunday in November. I would’ve been over there for that – when you could travel I used to go over to it, but now you can’t do that or anything.

And what plans for the future?

Well I don’t know, but I’m going to travel. Me [my] mate worked on the oil rig too, and he made a lot of money. He had a big house over in Perth, but he sold that and I’ve got hold of him now. I said, “Where are you? ‘Cause I can’t come and visit you.” He said, “No, no”, he said, “I’m in Scotland.” He said, “Me [my] wife’s parents were a bit sick, and so I come [came] over.” He said, “I’ve bought a castle, and I’ve got eight posh bedrooms and [it’s a] wedding venue with turrets and everything else up the back of Oban, on the west coast of Scotland.” And he’s got his own private plane – he’s got a a 1957 Tiger Moth type plane; that type of plane but much [more] powerful. He does all the air shows, so he said, “As soon as all these restrictions and everything [end], come over and I’ll pick you up; we’ve got a lot of air shows to do in Europe, and play around.” I said, “Now, I’m not sleeping in the dungeon on [in] the castle.” He said, “No, we might let you have a room.” [Chuckles] Yeah.

I’m trying to work out what I’m going to do with this museum. See, I’ve got no family, nothing. But I’ve had a few offers … well, talked to a few people over in London and China, but [if] someone comes along, good. But a young guy come [came] down the other day and he’s interested in old cars, so I might sell him some old cars. I’ve got rid of half a dozen cars or so in the last few years, sort of twenty that are …

Colin, what about the bits and pieces you got from Aerial Mapping?

Oh yeah, I’ve got the whole lot. But I’m actually going this afternoon, because Napier Aviation with the Napier Aero Club, they’re wanting to start a museum of flying in Hawke’s Bay. And they actually have their meetings on Friday afternoon from two o’clock to five o’clock, so I went last Friday. There’s only ‘bout five of them in it, but they said more will come along. So I’ll go again, ‘cause they’ll eventually end up with it all in their museum. But I own the hangars and everything, so … well you see, there was a camera that I particularly wanted. Because you see Aerial Mapping … Piet van Asch died in about the nineties or something, and then his son [Hugh] took over, you know, from out at Havelock [North]; his wife [Peggy] runs Duart House. Well he died about six months ago, but in 1998 and from then on, he got to be Chairman of Aerial Mapping. Well he sort of went bzzzz, ‘cause he was not into electronics and digital stuff. And so one of the main reasons why it went under was in 2004 he bought a big camera for the planes. It cost $US1.4 million and it was [a] very good camera; it was made by Leica and it took 23cm photos, and this huge roll of film to take five hundred photos. That’s why in Hastings they had that big set-up there to develop the film. Well, in 2007 that complete film was never made any more in the whole world, so that was sort of one of the reasons why Aerial Mapping went down and went into liquidation; because they’d spent all the money on doing film photography for surveys, but that was being finished because they didn’t need all those places. They could’ve done digital stuff with drones and everything, ‘cause drones were taking over.

So the camera … well it was in the paper [that] they were selling the hangars [in a] liquidation sale. It was by tender, so I put a tender in for the camera; it was $3,000; and I put a tender in to buy the hangars for ‘bout $800,000, I think, something like that, it was round that mark, but didn’t get it. Didn’t get any of it. Nobody got it.

And so two years later they put it all up again. I put in for the hangars but only put in half the price that I put in the first time, and I got the whole lot. And then about a month or so it was, I think, afterwards, I got a phone call from Price Waterhouse ‘cause they were the ones that were the liquidators. And they said, “Colin, ‘bout [a] couple of years ago you put in a price … $3,000 to buy a camera. How much will you put in for it now?” I said, “Okay – listen carefully. You’ve got one minute; I’ll give you $100 for one minute.” He said, “Sixty seconds – what happens after sixty seconds?” I said, “You’ll know in about forty seconds because you’re wasting time. Do you want the $100 for the camera or not?” He said, “No, I can’t make that decision.” I said, “You’d better hurry up, you’ve only got about ten or fifteen seconds left.” And I said, “Righto, time’s up – the camera’s mine now. I have the whole lot for nothing.” He said, “How do you come by that?” And I said, “Well, you didn’t accept the $100.” And he said, “No”, and I said, “well, where’s the camera?” He said, “It’s stored in the hangars at Bridge Pa.” I said, “Who owns the hangars in Bridge Pa?” He said, “I don’t know.” I said, “Well look it up.” He said, “Oh, some company owns it … some trust.” And I said, “Oh, it wouldn’t be [?Rangoon?] Trust would it?” He said, “Yeah”, and I said, “I own Rangoon Trust.” I said, “Oh, God – fancy your camera being in my hangars. Now”, I said, “if you read down in that contract … I bought all those hangars, and if you read down there, there’s $500 a month for storage”, I said, “so you owe me $3,500 plus GST for storage. I’ll send you a bill, and I’ll keep the camera.” I sent him a bill for $3,700 or something, and sure enough they paid it. And [chuckles] … He said, “We’ve got to take the camera out”, and I said, “Don’t be stupid – it’s two o’clock.” He said, “Well …?” I said, “I’m shutting the doors and they’re being locked up in about one hour’s time.” I said, “Have you got a forklift and a truck? The camera weighs over six hundred pound – it takes up a whole half a container. You could never get it out in an hour”, I said, “you can’t beat me out there to shut the doors.” [Chuckle] Sure enough, that’s what I did. So that’s how I got the camera, so the camera’s out in a container out there; it’s huge.

So I’ve got the complete series of all of their cameras

But I was very lucky, I was going through … ‘cause I’ve got a lot of the paperwork to it when they sold in Hastings because I knew all the old guys who worked for them, like the Havelock mayor … I knew them all, and they used to bring me out cameras and all the information [and] tell me all about it. I’ve got a whole sort of little part down there just on Aerial Mapping in the Aerial Mapping room. I’ve got all of this information, so I was going through it only two weeks ago. I’ve got a theodolite, and I found a booklet – it’s only a small booklet, but it’s all about Sir Edmund Hillary when he went across the Antarctic in 1957. Here he is being presented with the theodolite that I’ve got. And there’s a photo of him accepting the theodolite and the whole story of him going right across the Antarctic in the Ferguson tractors. [There’s] a lot of that sort of stuff in the museum here.

And where did you get all the hospital stuff that you’ve got?

Oh, well I get a lot of the hospital stuff like that because hospitals and all that are government, and they’re stupid. So they go and buy all this gear you see, and so what happens is, you know, when they buy microscopes they go and buy new ones, but they never sell the old stuff – they go and stick it in a storeroom. Then they go and buy more new stuff and they stick the other stuff in the storeroom. And what happens eventually is the storeroom gets full, so the government call in the dump to go to the recycling – they never do anything – or else, once they get hold of it and know that I want it they send it to me. So I’ve got all sorts of stuff from Nelson Hospital, from Auckland Hospital … I get all these old microscopes, and all that sort of stuff. They send it to me, because you see, now it’s all digital they can’t use all this old stuff. You know, because all schools used to have science classes when you had a microscope and looked down it – they’ve [that’s] all finished now. Schools have a cell phone or a computer screen where you press a button and it comes up.

So that’s where a lot of it comes from; it’s like when they got rid of the Waipuk Hospital – all that stuff went to the landfill, and just ground up and dumped. You never see them advertising old microscopes. Even most recently one I’ve got is from … what’s the name of the hospital in Hastings, the private one?

Royston?

Royston. Well a lady doctor come [came] out one Sunday afternoon; she said, “Oh, Colin, I’ve got something in the car for you”, and she give [gave] me three complete units … you know, the cancer one where they go up your rear and it takes the cancer out? All the screens, everything – they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, these complete units. She said, “There’s all the cameras with them, and the tubes; everything works.” And I said, “Well why are you giving it to me?” And she said, “Because people pay a huge amount of money to go to hospital and have this sort of stuff at our hospital” … or like, any private hospital. But she said, “This stuff is fifteen years old; even though it works good for us if we’re just here, we can’t send the stuff to London or Harley Street to the specialists overseas because they’ve got the latest and greatest gear.” And all of this scientific gear – the cards inside, you know, that run them, are good for five years. After five years you have to renew the whole … nothing lasts longer than five years because [if] they want to get results and diagnosis from some professor, he can’t read the information on the computers. That’s why they have to keep up to date all the time with all the newest stuff.

Even big companies like Leica … up until 2000 they were all film cameras; they were good. After that they start on digital cameras. Now digital cameras, they are never ever going to be real collectors’ items because the batteries are changed from [with] every model and so do [are] the battery chargers; and you can’t go and use a battery in an old one, so if you’ve got a ten-year-old digital camera, it’s useless – it’s only on show, it can never be used. Even Leica, I mean you have a five-year warranty when you buy a new Leica, costing you a fortune. Now if that camera breaks in that five years they don’t fix it, they give you a brand-new model. Canon and all the big camera companies, now there’s no more repair facilities, they’ve finished. They’re all given brand new stuff. No company could hold all the little circuit boards and everything to go in them, they would have to store them up … what? Maybe to repair one camera or something. So that’s what happening; so digital ones are never going to be really big collectibles, they’re just going to be show collectibles where the old film ones, you can still use them. Like, that one that I was telling you about that the guy that I got from Bluff, and I rung [rang] the guy up and said, “You[‘ve] got this old camera?” And he said, “Yeah.” I said, “Give you $200 and you send it up to me, but I need to get it quite quick.” This was in 2002 or something, so he sent it up. And I set it all up and I checked up on all the history, and it actually come [came] to New Zealand in 1874 on the sailing ships; it was used down in Dunedin when they were setting up the hospitals. It’s in there – a microscopic camera for photographing small things onto a big glass plate. So I got all the history that I could find about it.

So then I went off to London; I had to get a visa to go down to Congo, so I was in London for four days and I went to the big shop in London where you’ve got to go through the alley; you’ve got to press the buzzer, and he’s got a little peep hole and he looks through, and if you’ve got a Leica camera around your neck or he knows you, you can come in the shop – it’s between Pall Mall and Trafalgar [Square] – if you’re not … you can’t go in, he won’t let you into the shop. There’s too much valuable stuff in there. But I knew him so I got in[to] the shop, and I said, “Have you got any books about the 1874 10×12 glass plate cameras that were used for medical purposes?” And he said, “No, there’s no such thing, the best is 1888.” I said, “No, 1874. I’ve got it. Here”, I said, “have a look at this photo.” He said, “Oh God! Where did you get that?” I said, “I’ve got it, actually”, and he said, “What do you mean you’ve got it?” I said, “I’ve got it – that’s a photo of my camera set up.” And he said, “Oh! I’ll give you £50,000 for the photo, and next time you come over here you bring the camera over and give it to me.” I said, “No … no, it’s all right.” He said, “How long are you in London for?” And I said, “Four days, I’m leaving on Saturday.” He said, “Come and see me Friday and I’ll have a deal for you.” I said, “I’ll come and see you, but I don’t know …” So I went to see him on Friday; he said, “Okay – $NZ750,000 I’ll give you – that’s equal to about £400,000. I’ll give you $50,000 now and I’ll give you the rest when you bring the camera over”, ‘cause he knew I was coming back and forward. I said, “No.” He said, “Okay, [I’ve] got you $1,000,000; I’ve got actually $1,150,000 – $150,000 commission for me, 15%, and you get $1,000,000.” And I said, “No. What happens if I get up in the morning and I want to go over there and play with my camera, and it’s not there?” He said, “Well you don’t do that!” I said, “[Of] course I do – what else am I going to do?” I said, “No – I don’t need to sell it, so I’ll keep it. I’ll keep you in mind if I ever decide to get rid of it or something, but” … that’s life. Still sitting there. [Chuckle] But you know, it’s what somebody wants to pay for it if somebody wants it. But being the only one in the world, a lot of people want it.

In 2013 Leica 35mm Cameras was a hundred years old, and so Leica in Germany picked a hundred people round the world that [who] collected Leica cameras, and they flew us to Germany … paid for our air fares, give [gave] us a week in Germany with everything; you could go and get in a taxi – Leica paid. You could go and have a bottle of champagne that was $200 – didn’t matter, Leica paid. The whole town was free for one week … everything. Leica paid. They had a school down in South America that they were sponsoring for musical instruments so they flew the whole music class up to provide music for this week, [chuckle] and that sort of thing. And so I went over to it – I was one of the hundred – went to all the stuff they had on.

And I was invited down on the Tuesday to go through their museum. They showed me through it and I said, “You’ve really got a lot of shit in here, I’ve got more than you have.” He said, “We know what you’ve got”; [chuckle] he said, “we’ll get it off you one day.” I said, “You could get it now if you’ve got enough zeros [chuckles] on the end.” The thing is that …you see, Leica’s a huge company and it keeps being taken over by new people every [all the] time, and every time they take over the first thing they do is sell the stuff out of the museum for huge amounts of money. So they had an auction when I was over there and they sold a hundred items.

But the big buyers now are young Chinese and young Russians. They’ve got [an] absolute unlimited amount of money. Because in New Zealand, teenagers get a flat or something, and they want to buy a car – that’s usually their first thing, they want to buy a car. Well that doesn’t happen over in China because they’re living in these small apartments, they’ve got nowhere to keep a car and they wouldn’t want a car – and the Russians. So they don’t spend money on cars, they spend their money on watches and cameras – those are the two big things. I was sitting beside this young Chinese guy, and he would only be about twenty-eight; and in half an hour he spent over $US3 million, and he was non-stop; he was still spending up large, [chuckle] going through everything. But the cheapest thing was a piece of A4 paper the size of that – it was an advertisement of the 1929 Luxus camera. That was the cheapest thing in the whole auction, that went for $5,000 plus the commissions, for one sheet of paper.

But I’ve got in there – I can show you on the wall – in 1920 there was a Leica camera come [came] out, No 122. Okay? In 1988 an American guy write [wrote] me a letter and told me I was a prospective buyer, and he had Leica No 122; would I like to buy it for $US150,000 … that was $NZ300,000 then. So I was going over to school at Houston so I went and played with the camera, and thought, ‘If I buy this and Anne finds out that I’ve spent $300,000 on a camera, she won’t be very happy. But she wouldn’t know, would she?’ [Chuckle] But no, I didn’t buy it. Didn’t buy it but I kept the letter.

12th March, not this year but last year, Leica No 122 – you might’ve seen it on TV3 at [on the] half past five news, and it was going on at eleven o’clock at night – Leica No 122 had hit the world record for a price. Guess how much it sold for? $NZ10.85 million, or $4 million plus commission which about $US6 million. [Chuckle] I’ve got the letter and the newspaper cutting on 12th March.

But it’s silly little things, like … see that Negro doll up there? She’s a Barbie doll; oh, there’s a newspaper cutting over there, and she’s in the middle winning the gold medal for America in the Games in … oh, what was the name of the city in America where they had them in 1996? [Atlanta] Anyway, she won the medal, so Barbie [Mattel] made those Barbie dolls and they sold them at the Games Village and at the airport for two weeks only, that’s all. And so I bought her, she was $15.99, and I brought her back and give [gave] her to Anne to give to somebody or something, but Anne didn’t give her away or anything else. So then in 2000 I was over there in Houston; I went to the Barbie doll shop ‘cause I bought two winter Barbie dolls. I said to the lady, “Got any more of the Negroes from the ’96 Game[s] that won the gold medal?” She said, “No, but if you have one in a box that’s not ripped open, it’s not torn open or nothing [anything] and not damaged, I’ll give you $15,000 for it.” I said, “Oh – I do happen to have one of those but it’s not here.” [Chuckle] She said, “Why they’re so good … because they only sold them for two weeks. Guys bought them, took them home to their daughters or their grand kids; and they wound them up a few times and she threw her leg up in the air … she threw it two or three times, and ‘bout the tenth time she’d throw it over her head and she’d land in the rubbish tin and that’s where she’d end up, never to be seen [again]. And this lady was telling me, “I’ve never seen a kid that’s been given a Barbie doll carefully undo all the staples, and open the box and carefully take it out, and unwind the bit of wire holding it. It’s always [sound of ripping paper] … rip it out to wind it up.” [Chuckle] That’s what happened to them.

But these Swatch watches … 1996 was a hundred years of the Olympic Games, so they brought out this set of watches commemorating the cities for a hundred years. There’s nine watches in the box; they brought out thirty thousand sets worldwide. That was in 1990, three years before the Games. Then two years before the Games they brought out this set – they brought out thirty thousand sets of those – this set commemorating people over a hundred years, but they only brought out twenty thousand sets worldwide. Now that one’s Events; this is People. One year before the Games they brought out that set, and there’s only ten thousand sets worldwide. So there’s thirty thousand sets, twenty thousand sets, ten thousand sets. Then during the 1996 Games they brought out [a] gold watch, [a] silver watch, [a] bronze watch made of Olympic medals, but they only made two hundred and seventy-six gold watches because there was only two hundred and seventy-six medals in the Games. So that’s all they made. There was a few more silver ones and bronze ones ‘cause they were team events. So, only two hundred and seventy-six complete sets you can get in the world.

I’d … gone into the shipyard in ’96 in Singapore, and so I rung up Anne and said “Ring up Swatch in Auckland and tell them I want a set of gold, silver and bronze watches.” So she rung [rang], and then she called me back in Singapore and she said, “They said there’s none coming to New Zealand, there’s none assigned; they’ve all gone. Finished.” And I said, “But I want one.” She said, “You can’t have everything you want”, and I said, “You want a bet?” [Chuckle] “Okay, that’s all right; I’ll be home in a couple of weeks.” So what I did was I thought, ‘Now how am I going to get that gold, silver and bronze watch? I know.”

In 1977 I was working in Burma on a [an] oil rig there, and I was a driller on the rig. And the big boss of the oil company come [came] over to Burma, and then you were allowed to drink on the thing, so he bought a lot of the wine ‘cause they owned wine companies, wine in France, and he brought that onto the rig, and so we had a big party for about two or three days while we were working. There’d been an oil rig that’d come from another company and was drilling in the bay out of Burma and it’d struck gas and blown up and sunk. And so we had the job of … drill into the gas line and pump in mud and cut off the gas, and hopefully the rig might come up again. They thought they could bring it back up again, but it didn’t work. Anyway, so he come [came] over.

And so … ‘I know what I’ll do.” This was in 1996 when the Games still was on. He still owned the company; they had four hundred and eighty-six oil rigs all over the world. So I sent him an email and I said, “You don’t know me, but about twenty years ago I got drunk with you in Burma – I was the tool pusher on the rig when you come [came] over to Burma. Remember the Caltex one that was playing up?” I said, “Would you get hold of the guy that [who] owns Omega Watches in Switzerland” – ‘cause Omega own Swatch – “will you get hold of the owner and tell him that I would like to get a gold, silver and bronze watch of the Olympic Games, because I’ve got all the other sets. And it’s really your fault that I’ve got them because if you hadn’t given me a job I wouldn’t have been able to buy these. And Dubai, Abu Dhabi … I wouldn’t have been able to buy them in the other places, so could you see if you can get me that other set?” And he did. I had to pay for them, but he got me the set; he got hold of the guy that runs Omega and I got it direct from the big boss at Omega. When I got home Anne said to me, “There’s a big parcel arrived for you.” I said, “Oh God! Fancy that!” [Chuckles] Sure enough, it was gold, silver and bronze watch[es]. [Chuckles]

Sure it wasn’t Father Christmas?

It’s the same with this; this is three hundred and sixty pound of solid teak. About 2015 we went for a trip to China to see the panda bears, so we went over and we were on the Great Wall, and then we went down to the jade factory in China to buy lunch ‘cause it was included in the tour so we went for lunch. And when we went in Anne said, “Look at that warrior!” She said, “You want to get one of those to guard your place.” So anyway, we go up for lunch, and I said to her, “Oh I’ve got to go down and find a loo, I didn’t see it when I was coming in; I’ll be a while but I’ve got to go and find it.” So I went down and negotiated and I bought this, but he was going to take twelve, fifteen weeks to come. But they’d already told me that because he had to be shipped, you know, on the course of the shipping line, so that was okay. So going down, Anne said, “That warrior – he’s gone!” I said, “What do you mean, gone?” She said, “That warrior I saw when we come [came] in.” I said, “Oh, that stone thing? Oh, some idiot must’ve come and bought it or something.” So we get on a bus and go.

We were home for a week and then we went for a trip down the South Island down for two weeks, and then we come [came] back for a week. It was getting to [coming into] autumn; she said, “Come on, let’s go over to Canada and have a look at the trees.” So we flew over to Canada and we got on a tour to go across Canada by train; then we were going to come back to Vancouver, then go to Alaska to see the polar bears. But when we were on the train at night she wasn’t very well – she wasn’t good at all, so I went online and I bought some tickets to fly home. So that was okay; when we got to Vancouver to catch the boat we got off the train and the bus was there, and we get our bags. I walk over towards the taxis. She said, “The bus is here!” I said, “We’re not going on the … oh, forgot to tell you – we’re going home. This is our taxi, we’re going to the airport.” She said, “Oh .. okay. That’s all right, ‘cause I was a bit worried about going to Alaska because if I got sick on the boat then I’d have to have a Medivac and everything”, she said, “so I’m quite happy to go home.”

She was only home for about three weeks and then she went into hospice; she had cancer bad, and so they give [gave] her a week, ten days or something to live. Well she’d been in the hospice for about four days, [and] the big box arrived with the warrior in. So I went to the hospice in Hastings – I said, “Look, if I pay for a couple of doctors and an ambulance and that, could you bring Anne out for lunch, just for a short time?” And they said, “Oh … if the doctors say she’s well enough to come out.” I said, “Well I’ve got it all arranged that you give her a moveable bed and she can come in it, and we’re going to have the van back up and move the bed in here.” We’d set up these tables and these Chinese things, and I’d invited ten people to come for a Chinese lunch and they were each to bring something Chinese. And then the deal was that we were going to have a competition after Anne had seen what was in the big box, So they bring her in here and we had all the table set up Chinese style, and she said, “What is this for?” I said, “Oh, just to [for] friends to have lunch.” She said, “Why Chinese?” I said, “Oh, we’ve got a special visitor”; and I’d already unpacked and had a sheet over the top of him standing there. She said “What special visitor?” And I pulled the sheet off and said, “Here, this guy – he wants to meet you again.” She said, “That’s the warrior!” [Chuckles]

Anyway, so he got weighed. I said, “All right, now we’re going to have a naming competition ‘cause he hasn’t got a name yet. So everyone’s going to put a name in the thing and I’ll draw the name out, so you write a name on a bit of paper … here’s a bit of paper.” So I knew which was her bit of paper; so they put the names in, we drew it out. I said, “Oh, this one here’s won” when I pulled it out, “and he’s now General Ginseng of Exmoor”, because this is known as Exmoor. So he’s General Ginseng of Exmoor. [Chuckles] He’s three hundred and sixty pound of jade, so she was really happy. And then she died four days later. So she saw the warrior. Yes.

Now the other thing before I forget – that book that belonged to the ship …

Oh, the book on HMS New Zealand. Yeah – it belonged to … well it was at Peter Circuit’s place and his son had come up with the photo with the sword and told me he had the sword, so I went down to get the sword. And he asked if I’d throw that old book over there into the skip on the way out. So I kept it, and I had a look and it was ‘Hall’s Battleships’ and it was about HMS New Zealand. I’ll show you the book. Peter Circuit’s other son was in the Air Force during the war, and from when he went in – started off as a Cadet – he made a book like this. It wasn’t as big and thick as this, and it was chucked in the dump before I got to know about it. Had all the photos of the training of the plane.

Art Deco in Napier, I went to see them and I said, “I’ve got an idea.” I said, “I’ve got ‘bout thirty or forty so far old photographs of Napier, Hastings, Waipuk, Te Aute and that, from [the] 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. I’ve got them all enlarged to 5×7 black and white photos. What I’m going to do is I’m going to go to Woodford House, get hold of the headmistress and tell her what I want to do. ‘Cause they haven’t got a photography school there now … go to their design class and first of all invite them out here and show them a bit about cameras, and set the old cameras; but then I also want to talk to them about it – I’ll put each photo in each envelope and I’ll keep a register of what they are. Then the girls will select a photograph and then before the school holidays in December then they will sit down, look at their photograph. Now what that photograph is is of a building that was in Napier; now that building might be destroyed now, but they can go and hunt up the address. If the building’s still there – like, a lot of them still have a name up the top, especially out at Ahuriri where they’ve got those people painted on the windows. Now they’ve got to go and find that building and photograph it with their cell phones and then print it off in A4, so that they’ve got … ‘This is a 1930s building of the skateboard [skating] rink when they were skating on Marine Parade’. Now if they’ve got three kids on skates, well the girl that’s [who’s] got that photograph has to find three of her friends and [have them] put skates on and sort of make the same picture – but now, seventy years later. And they told me they weren’t interested, and they would do the organising thank you very much. And I said, “Well – I’m just going ahead, and I’ll have a better Art Deco than you will ‘cause I’ll have it all out in my museum.” [Chuckle] Yeah – so that’s what I’m going to.

So I went to the Hastings Arts thing and saw them about it, and they said, “Yeah, that’d be great!” ‘Cause they have a grant; they said, “We can give you a grant to buy prizes, but there is just one small thing – you can’t really limit it to Woodford House, you’ll have to have a boys’ school too, like … what’s the boys’ one in Havelock North?

Hereworth.

Hereworth. Yeah, but you can’t just limit it, ‘cause somebody is sure to complain if you do it like that. or we can do Napier Boys’ High School or something. I’ve got photos like Te Aute College when it was a brick building, because that’s all gone now; and I’ve got some of the crossroads before they built the town clock in Hastings, and the shops out there – you’ve got to find that place and photograph them [it]. So I think they’d go off very good, so that’s what I’m planning on doing; school holidays over Christmas or something, so then they’ve got time to get out and find the buildings. They can come and ask [chuckle] where this building is in Napier, then they can photograph it with their cell phones and get it print off and redo the whole thing. Problem is, a lot of teenagers are not interested in photography now; they think you’re stupid if you have to wait three weeks for a photograph [and] you only take one photograph of something – you need to take a hundred. Yeah. I’ve got two or three young ones that are really interested and are right into it, with film cameras and everything else.

They’re the ones you nurture, aren’t they?

Yeah. And I’ve been lending them cameras; they borrow cameras off me and go out and take photos; like this one – he was over there photographing that rusted old truck over there. He’s about eighteen, nineteen. I was out there mowing the lawn and I went over and said, “What are you doing?” I said, “Oh, you’re using a film camera?” And he said, “Yeah, and I want to get the colours and the shadows and everything else.” And I said, “Oh, are you interested in photography?” And he said, “Yeah, but only film stuff.” I said, “Oh, come into me [my] museum and I’ll show you through here and so on.” That was ‘bout six weeks ago; now he comes out every Saturday and he’s really interested, and he buys cameras.

Last Saturday or the Saturday before he said, “I’m doing portraits.” I said, “Oh – who’ve you got for a portrait?” He said, “I’ve got the chief [of the] Mongrel Mob from Hastings. I’ve got the head one that’s [who’s] covered in all those stupid tattoos, and I’ve got this wall picked out. I’ve got to go and meet them at eleven o’clock on Saturday morning, so I’ve got this white wall”, he said, “I’m going to photograph this guy showing off all his tattoos.” And he did – he made a really excellent job of it, and apparently the Mongrel Mob guy was really good with him; he wanted to pose and everything. The house that he was living in was somewhere down past the old Women’s Rest in Hastings … somewhere down that road he said he went, and the guy was really, really good with him. [Chuckle] He said, “I just walked up to him in the street and said, “Could I photograph your tattoos?” [Chuckle] Yeah.

So I’m going to go and see Woodford House and one of the boys’ schools and see if they’ll … they might not want to do it, I might have to try two or three to get them to do it.

Who are you seeing at the schools? Is it the art teacher or the Principal?

Well I’ve got to see the Principal first to see if she approves. But why I picked Woodford was because when I was doing the wedding cars they had quite a few weddings up there and she got to know me quite well. Because when they got rid of the microscopes and the science class closed down, well she give [gave] me all the microscopes in the museum; so that’s why I picked Woodford out. Because there’s Iona too, I can go to Iona. I could do them both, but I haven’t got enough photographs of buildings; I’ve only got about forty or fifty. With that big book there’s some early photos of the baths – well I can photograph those with me [my] cell phone and then enlarge them up to 5×7 and that sort of stuff.

Right … Colin, I’d like to thank you very much for giving Carol and I your time this morning. We really appreciate it and wish you all the very best with your future endeavours, whatever they might be.

Oh yes, well that’s very good. Yep.