Ward, George David (David) Interview

Today is the 20^th January 2015 – I’m here to do take two of the life and times of Dave Ward. So Dave if you could just run over where we’ve been …

For the last 20 minutes.  [Chuckle]

Thank you.

OK. My parentage hails from Tyneside in the North East of England, particularly a town called South Shields which is on the Tyne. My father was a ship’s furniture maker with some metal docks on Tyneside but he lost his job as many thousands did in the Great Depression of 1929 and he turned his hand to teaching. He had his City & Guilds (I think it was called) … he did a year I think at Loughborough College and took up woodwork teaching. My mother was a well qualified pastry chef which was wonderful for the food we eat.

I was born shortly after the outbreak of First World War in September 1939. My father was a fairly astute kind of guy and he saw the problems which were about to befall us, and we moved from South Shields to Appleby in Westmoreland, or Cumbria as it now is. For the first five years of my life of course I didn’t have a father because he was called up. He spent the war years in the REME (Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers) and he was involved in … with a team doing radar research and he became a very competent electronics radio technician, but he chose to stay with woodwork when he came out of service. My father was very unsettled when he was demobbed and after only I think a year we moved down to Feltham in Middlesex.

When you say “we” do you have brothers and sisters?

I have one sister, three years older than me, and my mother, the four of us moved, and we lived with a remote branch of the family for six months which was a bit of a disaster. My father was teaching in Woking in Surrey. He was going across London every day and back, but after six months it was obvious that there was nothing down there for us. Housing was incredibly short and people were moving into pre-fabs which were going up by the thousand. So we moved back to South Shields which was another disaster because every school we went to was doing something different in my educational experience and I was just getting left further and further behind.

After a disastrous two years at South Shields where I was also picking up with street kids which my parents didn’t approve of, we moved back to Appleby in ’48. In 1950 I passed my 11+ exam to get into Appleby Grammar School. Appleby Grammar School, a very good school, very small, only 160 pupils serving a very large area. Appleby only had a population of 1600 people and it serviced about fourteen villages in the area going out perhaps five or six miles.

I enjoyed school but I was absolutely useless academically. I joined the geographical society, the debating society and I became a school cadet. I would have left as a corporal in the cadet force. Cadet forces were run by the local regiments; in my case it was the Border Regiment and you were treated like soldiers. You did all the drill and ball etc. And I also came out qualified as a communications tutor which was the beginning of Sirtrack a long time later.   Yes, just links.

I didn’t do very well at school, I was slow to find out what learning was about. But I struggled and succeeded in passing six subjects at O level and went on into 6^th form and struggled there and failed dismally in my A levels passing only one subject, having spent two years playing the drums in a jazz band which half a dozen of us put together. We had our own garret at a town called Kirby Stevens sixteen miles up the valley, and we had a swinging jazz club every Saturday night. Very entertaining and I learnt a lot.

Having failed to achieve access to London University where I had been accepted to do a degree in horticulture, I chose to stay with horticulture and pursue a national diploma which was a 6 year course. I gained entrance to the Hertfordshire Institute of Horticulture down south but I had to do a year on a mixed nursery to start with to get some field experience … practical experience, which I did. Fortunately in town there was a very good nursery which was way ahead of its time. It was already using – commercially using trickle irrigation, hydroponics, extended day treatment. It was grafting things that had never been grafted before. It really was a leading nursery and very good grounding for me. My year in Hertfordshire was very successful. I’d found a niche that I could manage and I passed out top student and gained a number of external exam qualifications which helped toward a National Diploma. From there I needed experience in vegetable work, so went to a major farm in Surrey, along with 30 other students from all over the country, for a year’s experience. Very hard work, everything was done on piece work, very long hours but we also got lectures at night from the staff which was good.

During that time I decided that I did want to travel. I had no money but I found I could get to New Zealand for nothing if I had a job and I went through the process of applying for passage and interviews at New Zealand House in London, and was accepted. I organised a job in Palmerston North at R E Harrisons & Sons, who were tree and shrub specialists. And I moved from there … from Surrey I moved back to the Lake District – I thought I’d spend the last two or three months near home to keep my parents happy because mum wasn’t very pleased about me going off on my own at aged 22. But as it turned out my stay in the Lake District ran to something like 15 months because New Zealand House moved very slowly. But I had a very good time in the Lake District – the nursery I worked at was run by a landscape architect who had a very good business in the Lake District – specialising in rock gardens particularly.

But I came out to New Zealand by ship of course in – I arrived in March 1962 and went up to Palmerston North where I worked for a year in a very large nursery, acres – hundreds of acres of trees and shrubs. [Speaking together]

I know it is huge.

Soul destroying, you know, budding ten thousand roses, back bent, day after day. And after a year I thought – there’s no challenge in this. There was nothing rewarding, I had to do two years before I went back to Britain – stay two years or refund New Zealand House with the cost of your passage which I think was £150.

So I thought. ‘I’ll move. I’ll do something different for my second year’, and I opened the Manawatu Evening Standard that evening, having made this decision while budding roses. And there, the very first job in the Situations Vacant, was an advert for a field technician to work with small mammals, must be prepared to work alone and to live alone for short periods, and prepared to spend time away from home in the field. And I thought, that’s me. All my life I’d been very interested in natural history. At the age of 10 I was a charter member of a natural history society in Appleby. A whole bunch of very important people, very keen birdwatchers, decided Appleby could support a natural history society. Appleby is on the River Eden and they called it the Eden Field Club and I don’t think I missed a meeting in the subsequent eight years that I was living in Appleby. Very good lectures during the winter and field trips once a month during the summer. Bird banding, geology, all kinds of stuff, really good and I fell on my feet.

Interestingly I went for an interview to Lower Hutt which was where the office was and the person who interviewed me, a Dr John Gibb, was asking me about my experience with wildlife and of course I had had very little actual experience. I was telling him about the Eden Field club and he said “give me some names.” So I mentioned two or three names. One of the big names was Bill Robson, who was a well-known ornithologist in the north. He looked at me and said “Bill Robson – you mean Robson R W?” I said “yes, Bill Robson.” “Good God” he said. When he was doing his PhD at Oxford University he earned pocket money by working at the bird ringing centre. And Bill Robson was a very keen bird ringer and was always sending in reports of having spotted birds with this band or that band, and he quoted – compared the number and let it go again – sent the number down to the bird centre, and he had frequently corresponded with John Gibb.

The job was mine. And it was a wonderful job. My first work was designing an electric fence to keep cats out of a twenty-acre pen in which rabbits were being studied. The population dynamics of rabbits and from there I was down to the Nelson Lakes National Park working on hares and deer observations and up into the Ruahines shooting deer and collecting jaws so we could pull the teeth out so we could measure the age of the deer, and it just went on like that. It was wonderful.

Here’s this rock climbing man in his …

Element. And from then on I would have to say – OK we had some stressful times, and some hair raising times, but I never actually did a day’s work. I felt for the next 40 years that I was being paid to do a hobby.

Yes, see well it was interesting, you start off by saying that you were in communications when you were a cadet and that helped a little bit to where you ended up. Also you made mention of banding birds, being a chartered member of this club, the whole thing was being predestined for you wasn’t it?

It’s interesting in that that’s how it fell together – yes. Alright, I was a very much a junior technician, learning – very hard. I think I was doing correspondence courses and going to day-release classes at Polytech and university almost every year for probably the next twenty years.

This is in … Manawatu? [Speaking together]

In Lower Hutt.   I went to a statistics course at Wellington Polytech every Friday morning for three years. I knew more stats than senior scientists in the organisation.

Because stats are not the most interesting …

It isn’t, but it’s essential in working with the data that we were gathering.

Yes, I went back to Britain in … I was unsure whether I had made the right choice by doing what I’d done. I wasn’t sure that New Zealand was the place for me. I’d left a lot of friends back in Britain – I had to go back and get my head around what I’d done.

Sure.

They gave me six months’ leave of absence – leave without pay, but I had enough to get back to Britain and was over there – but within two weeks I knew ‘this is ridiculous. New Zealand is the place.’ The attitude, the narrow mindedness, the parochial approach to everything in Appleby was just blowing my mind. I’d see people in the street I hadn’t seen for three years and they’d say “Oh, have you been away?” [Chuckle]

So, I came back out to Lower Hutt, picked up my same job again except by now the rabbit work had closed down, and I’d been assigned to join a team on Forest Ecology in the Orongorongo Valley in the southern Remutaka. It was a new study site and the whole approach was to make it a very integrated, intensive study of ecology of a patch of temperate rain forest. And I found myself with a group working on possums – none of us had worked on possums before and I was asked if I could find a way of finding out where possums went at night. How far did they go? The standard technique was to put out traps, and over a period of time you catch these animals in traps. You mark them, tattoo their ears, put coloured bands in them and over a period of time from the traps you caught them in, you build a picture of …

Where they were going – sure.

But we didn’t know whether they would have gone there if there hadn’t been a trap with a bait in it, or if they hadn’t gone into the trap how much further they may have travelled. They needed to know. It was the early days realising that possums were spreading bovine TB, and we needed to know how far possums were travelling. So I did a lot of reading and a lot of research – and it was the early days of radio tracking. I corresponded with a number of people who had published papers on the early years … the early days of radio tracking, and I worked with – I should say that this was in the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research – in DSIR, which had twenty two different divisions and one of the divisions was called the section engineering division where they had some excellent electronics people. I made contact with them and with me setting down the specifications I really needed and them going on a learning curve to find out how they could meet these impossible specifications, we finished up with a transmitter. I was the first person in New Zealand to put a transmitter on an animal. And I was given carte blanche to radio track eight possums for two years in the Orongorongos. Going out … I used to track for three nights in a week, locating their positions, identifying which trees they were in. As preparation for that, over quite a large area – I mapped the whole area to start with, and a couple of students mapped all the trees in that area, precisely located, every one was numbered, every one – the species of every one was identified. So we built up a very complex picture of what was going on.

Yes, that’s amazing. [Speaking together]

And I suddenly found myself the centre of activity because nobody else had done any radio tracking in the country, and I was giving papers at conferences. And probably the highlight of that was an invitation from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington to attend – all expenses paid – attend a conference and present a paper on my work at the Smithsonian – which I did. And there was a girl who went over with me as well – she’d been doing very good work on identifying possum diet by teasing out possum droppings. Possums were then vegetarian. On the under surface of the leaf you have a pattern of stoma – the little holes through which plants breath. I didn’t know it but those patterns are unique to the species, and the leaf cuticle is not digested. So if you take a possum dropping, tease it out in the right chemicals you get these little floating pieces of cuticle …

Good Lord. [Speaking together]

… put it under a microscope and you can say, oh – rata, oh – hinau. And she was doing this, identifying what the possums were eating, and quantifying what they were eating as well, like 37% was rata this week or last week or …

And coming back to your possum tracking, that really worked …

All kicked in together.

You found where the possums …

The integration … was working.

… went and what they were eating and everything?

Yes, yes. She went to the Smithsonian too and we gave a paper at this conference and on the last night we were having a wrap up session – there’d be probably 150 people from all over the world. A lot of monkey people from Africa – from the African continent. The title of the conference was ‘Arboreal Folivores’ – animals that live up trees. And I was asked if I would say a few words about radio tracking and I finished up running a two-hour workshop on radio tracking techniques. And I’d only been back here about six weeks and I had a letter from somebody from that conference who was in Venezuela. He wanted to come and work in my laboratory for six months to learn radio tracking and … incredible.

But from there, I continued to work with possums, with – again, the engineering people – we developed a transmitter which could tell us what possums were doing by sound. This was a radio tag which could pick up the sound the possums were making which I was able to calibrate putting possums in a pen and watching them and listening to them. And you could hear them breathing during the day – you could hear them snoring, chewing, scratching, grooming. You could hear the moreporks. And I ran a two-year study on that which was very revealing, finding out not just where they were but what they were doing. To the extent of learning that on a filthy wet night in the Orongorongos, possums didn’t feed. And they could go without food for days until they got so weak they just had to go out, and that’s when you see possums out during the day. They’re on their last legs.

But things were ticking along nicely. I was involved in lots of other studies. By then I was a senior technical officer and was contributing in other ways to lots of other studies. I was working with the director of the division who was studying the breeding of … oh, one of the species of wallabies which is a major pest north east of Rotorua. Can’t remember which one it was now. But I was going up there every month with him, helping him to dissect wallabies. The local rabbit boards before they were integrated and became part of regional council –

Pest destruction.

Pest destruction, that’s right – they were doing shooting and we, over the course of … dissected over one thousand wallabies. They have a very clever reproductive strategy but we won’t go into that now.

In 1985 the writing was on the wall for the DSIR. The government of the day had decided that we had lived in luxury for a long time, mainly unaccountable to the tax payer for what we did … choosing what we did. It wasn’t driven by economics or anything, we just went. And the writing was on the wall and the first sign was that we were told to earn 30% of our research budget, which for a bunch of ecologists was frightening. For the industrial divisions no problem, they already had contracts with industry but we didn’t. The director at the time was Richard Sadleir, Dr Richard Sadleir. He called together the senior scientists and team leaders and brought in two marketing people to look at the division and what it could achieve in terms of raising revenue in some way. And we homed in on two options. One was what has become eco-tourism, which then was putting people in the back of a Landrover and going for a cruise around hills. That was a definite starter but there was no staff to do it. The staff were saying, ‘but I’m a scientist, my job is research, not teaching other people about what could be done.’

The other one was making radio tracking equipment and selling it. I’d been making it and it became such a big job that I’d started buying in from somebody else in Canada because I couldn’t keep up with the demand within the division. But that seemed to have definite go.

And one afternoon, the last afternoon of this three day get-together with all these people, the advertising people, the marketing people said ‘”right Dave, put a small group together, you’ve got one hour. I want a marketing plan”. My experience with business was certainly in the horticultural industry, I’d seen a lot of the business side including watching the bartering that goes on in Covent Garden. But I did, I rang two or three people, extracted information from them under different pretexts, and put forward a business plan which seemed sound – and it was immediately accepted. And the story was, “Ok Dave, go and start a company and start making radio tracking equipment.”

So I did. We didn’t have a name, I didn’t have a market, I didn’t have a product. But we soon got a product. I employed the first technician for the job. A chap called Kevin Lay who was a qualified radio technician who was worth his weight in gold I must say. I handled the business side, he handled the electronics side. We put together a nice little package of transmitters. I worked with some graphics people – we put a nice little chart together – a flyer – and we swamped New Zealand universities and government departments – anybody we thought might be interested in radio tracking. But it very quickly became obvious that New Zealand was too small, there just wasn’t the demand. There wasn’t the money either because it’s quite an expensive technique.

So I opted to go to Australia. And we did the same in Australia. Just all the universities. There is a massive book which has a list – it lists all the universities, all the educational centres in the world, and you can find out what departments they have and head of departments. It’s a very personalised approach and it worked. We were the only company down here worth anything that could do what we said we could do. There was a company in Blenheim, a one man band, who was making transmitters – badly – with quite a high failure rate which is very expensive when transmitters fail. And the business began to take off. We started in ’86 – by about ’88/’89 we were beginning to get meaningful sales, and I started going over to Australia with an exhibition stand and attending major conferences and meeting customers first hand. I’d already published papers on radio tracking, so my name was already out there and I knew some of the leading scientists because I’d corresponded earlier with their problems and offering suggestions to solving them and the company slowly grew from there.

By ’94 I’d taken the company with a staff of six through the whole of the ISO certification process for quality control. We were the smallest company in the country to achieve that at the time. That year we ran at a loss. It was an expensive exercise, but it was absolutely essential for us to get our act together. I could go away for a month overseas and I knew everything would run like clockwork. There was a procedure for everything. And the staff had written those procedures, or created them, and I’d written them – and they had ownership of it. So very much their involvement. That was a driving force throughout the development of Sirtrack, was the involvement of the staff and ownership by the staff of everything we did, rather than ‘do this, do that – you don’t ask questions’.

That’s amazing. And so during those periods you obviously extended your radio tracking from possums to lots of other species so … we hear about birds that fly half the world …

That’s right, yes.

So what other birds did you ..?

Oh, where do I begin? When I retired in 2004 we had designed radio transmitters for almost 600 different species of birds, reptiles, insects. And what set Sirtrack apart from everybody else – because by now there were something like 30 other companies manufacturing – some of them very big companies – was that we custom built everything. The other companies – they would have at these exhibitions a row of transmitters, and if they – you could walk up to them and say “well I want a transmitter for a lesser marmot” and they’d say “well – this one”. And you could say “but that collar’s too wide I want it narrower.” “Well that’s the one you’d want.” There’s no compromise. That’s model A1274. Whereas we would say “OK, how wide do you want the collar, how long, how do you want to fasten it?” and we’d custom build – and the business rolled in.

That’s amazing and it’s still going strong?

No. No, when I retired the Board of Directors who were appointed by Landcare Research who owned the company – they took over from the DSIR in 1990 – the Board of Directors waited 18 months before finding a replacement for me, even though I had given them a full year’s notice that I was leaving.

Yes, sure.

The replacement had a different idea of where the company should go or how it should go. I’d taken the company as far as I could. I had a staff (when I retired) a staff of sixteen full time and four part time. It needed somebody who was knowledgeable about overseas manufacturing, contract manufacturing – that sort of thing. Mike had that quality or that ability, but he overloaded the company with design engineers. The company was too small to support five full time design engineers … [speaking together]

Sure, sure.

… earning big salaries, so he was running at a loss. They did compete in a very good R & D programme which I’d originally put in place but Mike was eventually sent down the road.

Who was that? Mike…

Kelly. Mike Kelly was in – he was from Liverpool, he had a degree electronics and he was working for a company in Christchurch manufacturing medical scooters.

Yes, I actually did meet him down there – I think I met him maybe when you were still there – at the end of your period.

No overlap there at all.

Oh, that’s interesting – so that really was the demise of Sirtrack as a local company?

Yes, in the meantime Landcare had sold it. Landcare sold Sirtrack – it was a cash cow for them, but throughout its life the CEO of Landcare – chap called Andy Pierce … Dr Andy Pierce – was being questioned by Government personnel “Why do you own a company that makes radio tracking equipment?” Andy always had a good answer and could justify it, but there was pressure on. “For God’s sake get rid of it, you know – it’s not your field”. And eventually after I’d left … I’d been left five or six years … it went on the market and one of our rivals in Canada, a company called Lotek bought it.

Lotek had made its name radio tracking salmon in the Columbia River basin in Northwest America and they made a huge amount of money out of it – it was massive project. There were something like three hundred dams on the river and they had directional antennas on every dam monitoring the movement of salmon up and down and thousands of salmon carrying transmitters. But whenever anybody went to Lotek saying you know – or anybody said “well, we want some transmitters for elephants or lions or snakes” – and Lotek fronted up, they said “oh, but you’re fish people, we don’t want you”. So they bought Sirtrack. They bought the opportunity to get into the other market.

And two people left straight away. Lotek is a notoriously tough company to work for. You perform or you’re down the road, end of story. And nobody is going to work for you. Two left, morale dropped – seriously, Kevin Lay became very unhappy, and we were already … had already been working very closely with a company in North America called Wildlife Computers. He got a job with Wildlife Computers on the sales side, and he declared that to Mike, and he was run off site straight away – “get your things – go”. Two other people left, he downsized the R & D, somebody else left to go …he had a degree in agriculture and he went to work for Silver Fern Farms … but his job was ensuring that the Silver Fern Farm network could maintain a year round supply of meat for McDonalds. Full time job.

Isn’t that interesting?

The feeling with Sirtrack now is that I think the staff is down to something like twenty – they were up to forty-six.

So they are manufacturing under the umbrella of the parent company in Canada?

Of the parent company – but I understand they are being micromanaged and everybody’s getting fed up.

And are they local still? Where does it operate from?

Still operates in Goddard Lane.

Does it really?

Still in the same building, still got the same customers. Doesn’t have a CEO here, it’s all administered from Canada.

Isn’t that an interesting story though? You know, from whoah to go, but the idea’s still there.

Oh, yes.

That’s still working, it’s just that the people have all changed. Oh, that’s an amazing story.

Well there are two of the staff now work for Wildlife Computers based in Seattle. They both live in Havelock North. I don’t know if they talk to each other but they both on the sales team, handling different aspects of sales.

Seattle, is that in Canada? No, it’s in America … [speaking together] … just south of Canada …

No, no it’s in America, Washington State, south of the border, Vancouver’s half an hour drive north.

Yes, that’s right. What a story. And so then – if we retrack back to – you were married?

Oh yes.

And you had children, and we need to catch up on that side of things. [Speaking together]

All right, that side of things.

… your life too, as well – ’cause that happened during your development of Sirtrack – or prior to?

I married another member of the rabbit team in the old ecology division of DSIR.

Did you really?

I did, and the common bond there was that we were both interested in ballroom dancing and we both had gained gold medals in ballroom dancing, and we were both going to the same studio and it was a case of well you two would make a great team, you are the right height, right proportions, think about it for competitions. So we did, and we got to know each other much better and we finished up getting married.

Interesting isn’t it? Rock climbing to ballroom dancing. It doesn’t really compute does it? [Laughter] But they both have a degree of precision.

Yeah, but it was not a good marriage. We had very little in common;  we had very little in common with respect to aims and where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do. We had two daughters from the marriage, but the relationship was not a healthy one, it wasn’t a good one. Daughters were doing well, they both went to St Oran’s College in Lower Hutt, but it was a marriage I walked away from. I made it quite clear, we either changed or direction or I’m out of here.  And I did.

During that time there was another interesting development. In the early seventies starting a new project I needed to get a very large antenna high into the canopy of the forest in the Orongorongo Valley. And to do that I had to first of all get a string of over it, and then a rope and that was notoriously difficult and somebody – I’d been throwing stones – and somebody walked passed and said, “Hey, there’s an old bow and arrow in the back of the workshop”, you know … “go and try that.” I found the bow, the arrow was no good but found the bow, and I went down to the Randwick Archery Club in Petone and said, “Look, could you show me how to use this thing? I’ve got a little job for it.”  And they died laughing – it was an old wooden bow, but I got hooked. They gave me some – or lent me some gear from the clubhouse to try and I thought this is me, archery. Great sport.

And I got involved in archery and I became very good with a bow and arrow. And I developed a technique for putting a fishing line over a bough In the forest and weighting an arrow so it would actually be heavy enough to pull the string over [talking together] and jiggle it down and then tie a string to that, and then a cord and then a big rope – and in the end this ten foot antenna went right up into the – eighty feet up into the canopy. And I was doing this for … we had one chap on staff – an ornithologist who was putting up mist nets – curtains of mist nets. They were going up probably thirty feet – and with him it was a case of, he’d say, “Look, I want a mist net from here to there, I want string over there, and a cord over there” … [speaking together]

Get Robin Hood to come down.

… “which branch? That one on the left? What, about six inches to the right? Right.”

How did you time the velocity so it fell immediately beyond the branch and didn’t go out over twenty other trees?

That’s a skill you see! But from there I got very interested in coaching the kiddies at archery and then the adults. Olympic Solidarity who is a spin off from the Olympic movement and do a lot of funding of development work – they put together a coaching course for archers, or archery coaches in the Adelaide Hills in 1980, and I was nominated by the National Council to attend as were three others from New Zealand, and I went on that course. Beautiful – amazing course for coaches, learnt a helluva lot about technique and technology as well. But when I came back I was made the national coach of the New Zealand Archery Association. Just like that.

So was that the days when the lass that use to shoot from a wheelchair was active?

And with a guy called Bernie Fraser, not the … not the rugby player, the other Bernie Fraser – he and I put together a national squad – just selectors, and we started running workshops for the national squad. And Neroli was in the national squad. I took the national squad to the Australian championships, where we cleaned up totally. We dropped two or three out of it because they weren’t performing. I finished up with two girls. I took them to Japan – this is building up for the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane. And Neroli on her own, against my advice, went to the National Championships, but she got over that and we went to the Brisbane Commonwealth Games in 1982, and she won gold. And the other girl, she came fourth. She lost it on the last end – the last six hours – she should have got bronze – but the pressure was huge.

Yes, obviously you were a good leader and a good imparter of knowledge. Obviously people listened to you, because wherever you’ve been you’ve been in that leadership role, haven’t you?

I’m not an impatient person, but I like to see things done, I like to make it happen. People stand around and argue about things, and “Oh, this is too …”  I say, “Look, let’s just do it. I’ll find out about this, you find out about that – find out how much that costs and where we can get it from – we’ll do it”.

But in the meantime I’d remarried. My two girls were still at St Oran’s College. Sharon had two boys and we have been very happily married for almost thirty years.

And the two boys, where – are they in New Zealand or are they ..?

Matt became an automotive trimmer, he rents his own business in Napier and he specialises in classic cars, does the most amazing work with upholstery and last year landed a contract with Dickey Boats, who I’d never heard of before, but in Ahuriri there is a boat building company which is buying boats through 35 footers and he’s doing all the upholstery for them. And it’s like a sausage machine … the boat comes in, its assembled, I gather it’s a kitset kind of thing, it goes up to Tauranga where its painted, comes back here where it’s then finished and upholstered, then it does sea trials and as that one’s going out to sea trials there’s another kit set coming in. So yeah, he’s having a wonderful time. Stressed a little but …

And your other son is ..?

Other son Adam – Adam went to University, Massey, did a degree in … I’m not sure what the topic would have been but it was something like landscape management or environmental studies, or something like that.

A chip off the old block sort of?

Yeah … bit of influence there, because he was only three when we got together. He then decided to do – he got a job with MWH which is an international engineering company, and he was looking after the ecological side of the work that they were doing, – like OK you’re going to build a bridge, but what about the creek underneath, you’ve got to keep the lead paint out of it – all that kind of stuff. Auditing the environmental side of the engineering work they were doing, and he was doing very well. He decided he wanted his MSc. [Master of Science degree]  So he started an MSc part time and passed with honours four years later. And in that time he also decided he could do all this work on his own, he didn’t need MWH, so he started his own consultancy and decided he was doing a PhD [Doctor of Philosophy] as well which he will finish this year. In the meantime – gone through a divorce, found a new partner who’s currently doing an MSc in nursing …

Oh.

… she’s lecturing at EIT. [Eastern Institute of Technology]

And what about the girls?

Karen’s the eldest. Karen went to university, she did a degree in accountancy and a degree in business management, joined Price Waterhouse as an auditor and was an auditor here for three years and then transferred to Price Waterhouse in London and was an auditor there for about three years.

Talk about jammy – most Kiwis go to the UK for OE and they spend their time wondering where their next crust is coming from with a pack on their back. She went all over Britain, train, plane, best hotels, all expenses paid [Laughter] and then she decided she could do better. So she left Price Waterhouse and started doing contract work for a major bank in London. A bank just in that building alone had employed a thousand people and she would get a contract – she’s very good at computer work I should say. She would do a contract for five months and then take two months off and go trekking in Africa. Come back, another contract, 9 months and then she’d go and travel the length of South America with Kontiki Adventures or something. And she saw a lot of the world like that. Came back in – gosh hard to put a date on it now – she was over there for 9 years. Came back, got married … she was leading a team in Telecom, team manager Telecom’s internal finances – not the customer stuff, but how Telecom were managing. Telecom moved their headquarters to Auckland about three years ago, two years ago … and she found herself without a job. They wanted her to reapply and live in Auckland but she said no – they live in Karori in Wellington. So in that time – in that meantime – she got married, they have two children. Her husband has his own business as a quantity surveyor specialising in supermarkets. Did all the supermarkets in the Bay – just turned down a supermarket development in Tamatea. He’s winding down his business, he wants a change, but in the meantime, Karen’s just done two years with … it’ll come to me. Transpower, she works for Transpower.

It’s the most natural name isn’t it? Transpower.

And she’s just finished a contract with them, working on a twenty year financial plan. She’s very … wised up.

Now we all forget things, I’ve forgotten your wife’s name …

Sharon, yes.

Sharon … now Sharon … thirty years … you know, obviously she had some contribution too.

Oh, huge.

And what was her background?

Sharon’s background was – what would you call it? Her background was a secretarial background. She was a shorthand typist and then she moved on to ticker tape, telegrams, telegraphic, whatever it was called?

It wasn’t morse but it was the other one …

Yes.

Yes, it took over, yes, I know the one you mean.

And she worked for the Chamber of Commerce in Wellington. Telegraphy.

That’s right.

She decided she wanted to travel, she went to England. She was ¾ Irish, she caught up with a lot of family over there. Very proud of being Irish, and she did a number of jobs over there, typical OE, finishing up working for an electronics company on the admin side. When she came back here she got married, she started a family. I first met her in archery. She came along, she wanted to take up archery. She was given … allotted to one of the coaches and after three months she’d gone to the organiser of coaching saying “look I’m not getting anywhere”.  And he was a traffic cop. “Every time I come to a coaching class he’s been called out somewhere and could I have another coach?” So she was brought along to me and said “Dave I’d like you to meet Sharon.”

She got a lifetime coach, so there you are. Isn’t it amazing how little twists in life just …

I know.

… and its almost as if its meant to happen.

Yeah, it’s just incredible. So – I was going through a divorce process, or separation at that stage, and it wasn’t long before, well, she was living in a quite a violent marriage … black eyes and things … terrible mess – and she got out and went to live with Mum for a while and then we got together. And I was in Lower Hutt until ’84 then I was transferred up here to Havelock North. You would know or hear of Bob Brockie?

Yes.

Bob Brockie – he writes a science column in the Dominion Post on a Monday.

Yes.

Bob used to work for the ecology division of DSIR – we worked together. One of the reasons I was sent up here was because Bob had set out a whole set of studies on possums out on the Heretaunga Plains, but Bob was a post polio victim. He had polio when he was young and he came right and was getting around but apparently after you’ve had polio, later in life it comes back to bite you in the bum, because all the other things you’ve been straining to keep moving are not used to that strain and they begin to pack up on you. Bob now is confined to a wheelchair, but Bob was the real reason I was sent up here and up here they were using radio tracking equipment not very well and the Director of the day, Richard Sadleir wanted to establish a recognisable electronics laboratory for the whole division, so I was given the job of setting up here as well.

I think the first time I met you was in …

Elliott Crescent.

Elliott Crescent – yes I met you both there. I don’t know whether we were selling your house?

You were selling, or you were looking at selling.

Yes, that’s right we were too, and see that goes back a fair way too.

It does.

And then I remember one day …

Actually no, we were buying, we were looking to buy because we’d already – we were on the market with –

Ian Scott? No?

No, no … she lived in Muritai – husband and wife team and they moved to Auckland.

Anyway then I remember talking to Ian Scott who was looking on your behalf and I told him, told you – “have a look at this one.”

Oh, that was when we were looking for … this place. Since then we’d moved from Elliott Crescent and we had a place in Selwyn Road, and it was moving from Selwyn Road.

That’s right.

And we’d already sold Selwyn Road.

That’s right, well I didn’t – I didn’t know your Selwyn Road property, but I directed Ian and you to this one.

That’s right. And Sharon walked in here and she said, “The room, the space – it’s got to be ours”.

I know, so that really makes a wonderful story, Dave.

A very jumbled story.

And if there’s anything else that you think of, or you know – obviously it’s surprising just how so many things that happened, a lot things I think you made happen.

Could’ve been.