Chapter 9 - Last days at Hawera and moving to Shannon

The boys were taken to kindergarten as soon as they could be enrolled. Our elder son, Gregory, appeared to be a very bright and attractive child and initially we were unaware of any difficulty with his speech. An example of his astuteness was that there were three houses up the Goodson Road that ran past our house and he knew each owner by the sound of the car engine. Now 45 years later he can name practically all announcers and singers on the air waves without seeing their faces. We were never sure of the reasons for his handicap but have been told it was lack of oxygen to the brain at birth.

Through Plunket, Heather met up with two other mothers, Shirley Herman whose husband Walter was head builder for Arthur Brown Construction who built major constructions with emphasis on dairy factories all over the country, and Audrey Smythe who, with her husband, ran the TAB in Hawera.

Walter was a hard task master, a fine up-standing bloke but tough, and was a bit of a miser – not that I was liberal. Heather and Shirley cleaned motels, partly for the money but also for the company. Shirley’s boy and girl and our two boys were at kindergarten and both Walter and I were away from home for long days but we got together to socialize at the Hawera Club on Thursday nights. The hardship got to Shirley and she suffered a nervous breakdown to which Heather responded in a caring way.

Gregory was having difficulty with his speech and we took him to Stratford for therapy. When he was five years old he was kept at kindergarten for another year and when he turned six the Education Department psychologist had him go to the new IHC School in Hawera. I was not at all happy with Gregory going to the IHC School, he was in the learning mode and a lot of the pupils at the school were accident victims and could not speak properly either, often making guttural noises and Gregory was mimicking them which did not help to improve his speech.

Gregory was terribly constipated and suffered terrific trauma. He paid numerous visits to the doctor, an Indian, who wanted to cut his anus sphincter muscle or give him a colostomy and he booked Gregory into the hospital. Fortunately the doctor’s wife took off to Australia and the doctor went after her so Gregory escaped the knife. It took him some years to get over this and he often experienced terrific pain and went blue in the face. We made an appointment with the Education Department psychologist, Callender by name, and he was in a white coat and when Greg saw him he ducked behind us because he thought that this was another doctor who was going to try and invade his privacy. The psychologist told us to cut our losses and put Greg in to Tokanui which is the hospital for the handicapped at Te Awamutu. He told us Greg would be a burden to us for the rest of his life. Heather and I turned away from him and walked out.

The following week I was driving towards Stratford and I saw the psychologist driving towards me. I turned around and followed him to his consulting rooms at the Intermediate School and walked in on him. He told me I needed an appointment to see him. I replied that I did not need an appointment to see him as what I had got to say deserved to be said directly to him and sooner rather than later. I told him that if one wanted to climb the social ladder one did not go around the back bar of the hotel looking for friends and I wanted Gregory out of that school. The psychologist said that he had expressed his professional opinion. I replied if I ever gave an opinion like that with so little consideration I would need to take my shingle down. He told me he was going to Australia the following week and that I should take my concerns up with his successor.

Before we left Hawera we asked Dr Cameron exactly what was Greg’s problem. He said we should reconcile ourselves to the fact that we had a ning nong in the family, which we didn’t think was a very nice answer. When we came to Shannon we asked the local doctor, Dr. Poor, if he knew what was wrong with Gregory. We gave him Dr. Cameron’s view and he agreed that it was not a very professional answer and would we like him to do some investigation. We agreed to this and he took Gregory into the Palmerston North Hospital to have specialist tests. After the first week Greg was making excellent progress with his speaking and getting on well with the in-house teacher and Dr. Poor agreed he could stay there for another month. This certainly did make a difference to Greg’s speech and it was the opinion of the hospital staff that Gregory had suffered a shortage of oxygen at birth. We were inclined to agree with this as we knew the Matron of the Taihape Hospital where he was born and we knew she was not very sympathetic to the needs of solo mothers.

I was getting a little frustrated with my job with the Guardian Trust. The hierarchy insisted that I go off contract and on to a salary and I did not think that I had any option. What’s more, Mr. Campbell did not approve of me or my work ethics. He used to say that the farmers of Taranaki were no better than French peasants, that the Chairman of the Board of the Guardian Trust, who came down and did a bi-annual inspection of the farms with me, was just a bastard, and I did not think that he deserved that. Campbell was also getting hold of what I claimed were my share milkers because I had a one-to-one relationship with all the share milkers and the employees. Unbeknown to me, Campbell appointed an assistant for me, by the name of Ray Hill, a pip-squeak of a bloke who had no intense farming background. Perhaps he was of the same church, I do not know. He was to look after the 39% share milkers and these workers came to me and expressed their concern that he was bordering on the arrogant and was of no help to them at all. Actually he was more like a “Little Hitler”. Campbell said that I was to be responsible for him. I said that I could not agree to that as I had had no part in his appointment and quite candidly I would not have appointed somebody of that nature with a lack of intense farming knowledge. Unfortunately the daughter of one of the share milkers became pregnant to Mr. Hill and it wasn’t long after I left that he also left. A few years later I saw him in Levin where he was then living. He had become – what shall I say – a depraved person of mumbo-jumbo. He passed away some years ago.

After I left the employ of the Guardian Trust in 1965, I came to Shannon, but I still retained a small clientele at Taranaki who I used to visit, perhaps, once a month.

On one of these occasions I had agreed (on the Friday) to meet up with the family in Palmerston North at six o’clock. We were to meet in Colinson and Cunninghame’s and if I was running late I would certainly be there by 6.30 pm or, at the latest 7 pm.

However, on this particular Friday I was at Lake Alice at 5.20 pm and I heard the news that the Bulls Bridge had collapsed. I had to change direction and travel through Greatford and out to Feilding. At Feilding the lights went out on the car and I was fortunate enough to get a serviceman to repair the alternator.

I eventually got to Palmerston at 7 pm, and met with the family as arranged. When I told them I had been diverted because of the collapse of the Bulls Bridge Heather’s reaction was that “I had told some porkies in my time, but this excuse must really take the biscuit”. I was taken aback because it was not a “porkie”.

We met Ron Hornsby who worked for Domet in Marton and I asked if he knew that the Bulls Bridge had collapsed. He said ‘No”. I asked him what time he had come through Bulls and had he crossed the bridge. He said he had crossed the bridge at about 5.15 pm. I told him he would not be going home that way and I was not making it up; the Bulls Bridge really had collapsed. An assistant on the counter nearby where we were talking told him that I was correct and she had heard the news on the radio. She also said that a bus had fallen into the river.

A Mr. Farrington was the driver of the bus. He got washed out of the bus into the waters of the Rangitikei River but was rescued. I think he was compensated for his ordeal.

I also did casual work. I built a cow shed for a neighbour and got in to Real Estate and I had a real good year. I say I didn’t sell properties, my clients bought them. Gordon Smart, a lawyer, wanted me to take up a Real Estate license, but by and large, I had a poor opinion of Real Estate agents I felt that they were so often untruthful to get a commission.

I used my time in Real Estate to seek out a farm and that farm was 1200 acres at Shannon only a kilometre away from the Waring-Taylor farm I had been supervising. The farm was hilly to easy undulating country, with a very good house containing four bedrooms and two bathrooms. The sheds were poor; there were no cattle yards, no hay country and a lot of scattered and dense manuka on the mid section of 500 acres with 100 acres of regrowth bush on the back portion which bounded the Mangore Stream which was the east boundary.

When we came to Heights Road we had the only house on the road except for Jock Easton, who farmed the 200 acre section on top of the hill near the end of the road and he had a bach on his block. There was no electric power and his bach was pretty primitive. He was able to put up with it as his feelings were dulled with alcohol. He lost his driver’s license about the time we came to the district and he had a chap to drive his car, mainly to the local pub.

There were a few sheep on my property so I purchased 400 more and 217 of these escaped onto Jock’s place I went to see Jock about all the stray sheep on his place but Neil, his driver, told me Jock was too drunk to talk to me. A few days later I was up on the hill behind our house talking to Ross Weggery and a sheep truck went down the road. I looked over to Jock’s place and I could see there were not many newly shorn sheep there so I went back to Ross Weggery and asked him if he knew whose truck it was that went down the road. Ross was a local and had a farm on the main road between our place and Shannon and I was sure he would have known whose truck it was but he said he could not remember seeing a truck and when I tackled him about it again he said the Easton’s were clients of his – Ross was in the Real Estate business. Ross did eventually come back to me and asked if I would like to buy Jock’s place. When I first bought the Shannon property the agent told me that Jock would not be able to farm for long and his block would have complemented my property admirably but the loss of 200 ewes and the fall in the wool price caused me to reassess my ambition so I took up off farm work going through to Wanganui four days a week and working for Freeman R. Jackson a stock and station firm.

From the time that I started working part-time for Freeman Jackson in Wanganui (operating in the Wanganui and Waimarino area) in 1960, there have been numerous changes in the names of the Stock and Station firms. Firstly it was Newton King with Head Office in New Plymouth servicing the Taranaki and Waikato, with Rod Weir from Levin steering the ship. Rod (the Silver Fox) had dis-established the Farmers’ Co-op Mercantile operations through the country and brought them under the Dalgety-Crown name.

One day that I shall not forget was the day that man landed on the moon. Rod Weir, Ken Davidson, the Manager of Newton King in Wanganui, Tom Weston, Farm Advisor with Newton King in Wanganui and I, were on our way to New Plymouth and we stopped just past Waitotara Township to listen to the landing report on the car radio..

At the meeting in New Plymouth, Rod Weir told us that he was dis-establishing the Farm Advisory section of Newton King. That meant Tom Weston and Peter Tulloch, who was a very good personal friend from the RFC days, and I were redundant.

Peter set up as a private Consultant and many of his clients retained him as their consultant away from Newton King. He was based in New Plymouth and worked mainly in the hill country of Central Taranaki surrounding the Whangamomona district.

One of my the first jobs concern a client, Bill Larsen, who lived in Wanganui, who owned or leased 3,000 acres in the Makakihi Valley north of Raetihi and was for the most part a logging contractor recovering native timber for various mills. He had a hard core debt of $1,500 to the firm which I was instructed to collect.

I met Bill at the farm and suggested that we look around and sum up the potential for carrying out what looked to be a difficult exercise given that the logging operation could be a full time job. He said of all the blokes that had been sent to collect the debt I was the first to get out of the car.

At the front of the property bounding the Manga-a-te-o River there were about 400 acres of flat in grass but invaded by blackberry and that ran up into easy hills which carried some good, millable native trees, so it was obvious he had assets that more than covered his liabilities.

For all that he did not have a boundary fence with Richard Corliss at the back I did not think that was the cause of the loss of stock. However, I thought erecting a boundary fence would be a good way to start so asked Ken Davidson, the Wanganui Manager of FRJ if he would lend Bill $1,500 as his contribution to complete a boundary fence with Corliss. Corliss strongly objected, so we took him to Court. I was appointed fencing advocate with full power to have a fence built and it was duly completed. Within a couple of years Bill bought the farm on the near side of the river and moved his wife and two sons on to that farm so that more attention could be given to looking after the livestock and keeping an eye on what the neighbours were up to.

A year or so later they saw Corliss mustering along the boundary fence and had a suspicion that he had got sheep out from Bill’s through a gate that Corliss had put in illegally. When Bill got home he went down to Corliss’ shed and found eight of his sheep locked in a pen under the shed. Bill suspected that they were destined for Corliss’ home kill business at Wanganui as it was the week before Xmas. Bill parked his truck on the road then before he went to sleep the lights in Corliss’ shed went on and an hour later they went off but no vehicle came up the road.

Next morning Bill (Larsen) did not go to work but decided to go over and see if any sheep had been taken through the boundary gate but on the way he saw eight newly shorn sheep behind Corliss’ shed, so he went and had a closer look to find that they had an ear cut off and Corliss’ ear mark in the remaining ear. Corliss was fined $240.00 and the judge said that it was the second time Corliss had been in court and should it happen again he would be sent to prison.

Corliss decided to get out of the district and started negotiating for Andrews’ farm on the Para Para next to “Otamoa” Barry Plimmer’s 6,000 acre station and, par for the course; he bought 500 of Barry’s five year old ewes and took them up to Raetihi until he took over the new property.

When Corliss got settled on the Andrews’ farm he actually brought 14 ewes back to Barry Plimmer at weaning time. But he brought no lambs. The head shepherd for Barry and my son Fraser took the trailer with a crate to Corliss’ and brought out 14 lambs whilst Corliss watched but took no action.

Initially Corliss wanted to co-operate with Barry and helped him put in a deer trap on a bulldozed track near the boundary. After an initial flurry of several deer in the trap there were no more deer. Barry found that Corliss had felled a tree across the track and diverted the deer through a hole in the boundary fence into a trap on his side. Later Barry said to me that Corliss was not as bad as I said he was but a bloody sight worse.

Some years later when I was on the Te Horo farm, Bill Larsen called in, it was the afternoon of 13 November 1979. He was in a carefree mood and said that he had paid Newton King, bought the farm next door, his boys were home from Boarding School and he was going to the Antarctic with Air New Zealand and he offered to shout me the trip in appreciation of the help I had given him to get established. I declined the offer as my brother-in-law, Roger Dalziell was the training captain for the DC10’s with Air New Zealand and would be taking an Antarctic flight one day and I had arranged to board his flight in Christchurch. Unbeknown to me Roger took the flight that day having been called in at short notice. On his return he advised the computer operated navigation section that the co-ordinates between Cape Hallet and McMurdo were 2 degrees out, to which the navigation seniors countered that they could not be 2 degrees out, Roger must mean 2 minutes. Roger conveyed his concern to his friend Collins. He and Roger had spent five years in the RNZAF at Ohakea training on twin engine planes. When Collins was called to take the flight on the 27 November, he spent time preparing a flight plan using logarithms, leaving the workings on his home table before he took the plane Flight 801 on the fateful Erebus disaster. After the crash ANZ staff raided Collins’ house and took his working papers.

Bill Larsen was on the flight where all crew and passengers were killed. I became Bill’s trustee and was engaged to claim against Air NZ for compensation for his family as well as the families of Levin brothers, Tony and Geoff Kilsby.

After the crash a policeman said all the log books were in Collins’ flight satchel, but the logs were never noted as having been returned to Auckland.

The Inquiry into the crash gave rise to the phrase “A Litany of Lies”.

Times were hard when taking over the Shannon Farm as it co-incided with the adoption of decimal currency and a dramatic drop in wool prices. The first four bales I received £52 a bale, the balance of the clip was $54 and the next year it was $48 a bale. I told Heather we would have to tighten our belts to survive and live off the land as much as possible. We had a house cow for milk and cream, hens for eggs, a good vegetable garden and home killed meat.

One day Heather came home from the Women’s Institute meeting and told me that Mrs. Strawbridge from the farm to the west of us had said that the Farmers’ Co-operative Distributing Company intended to auction our farm in the New Year. I went through to Feilding and faced up to the General Manager. I was placated and the General Manager referred to the Minutes of their last creditors meeting which stated that although I owed over $3,000.00 but while the reductions carried on at the current rate, the company had little option but to carry the account. Because the season’s surplus stock had still to come forward, Bob Belgrave, the Commission Manager was behind the desire to sell our farm. Whenever I saw him at the Feilding sale he would not look me in the eye. I did not see him again until September 2008 at a Probus Meeting in New Plymouth, and I had great pleasure in reintroducing myself and telling those within hearing what I thought of his business tactics.

By now Frazer was 6 and Gregory 8 years of age. We acquired a small pony called Raffles which Greg rode.

At left: Greg's pony Raffles at his new home in Levin 20 years we sold him. Raffles came up to Greg when Greg called him.

We had a small hack, it would be called a pack hack, and it was a very good ambler and a nice horse to ride. Fraser rode that when we went mustering. When we did go mustering we left before daylight and the boys would come with me and we would spend most of the day out on the hill trying to get sheep out of the scrub and get them back to the yards for treatment.

The wool shed was a wreck it was impossible to work when it was raining because the front wall was virtually non-existent and the floor got wet and it was impossible to stand. The following year a merchandise store in Shannon came up for sale. It was 21 ft. wide by 28 ft. long and I bought it and when I looked at getting it up to the farm I found that there was only 16ft width so we had to cut the store in half so that it was in two sections of 14ft by 21ft. I set the two sections 7ft apart and the section that was going to be the holding pen and shearing board 2ft 9” higher than the wool room. This worked out to be a very good system. I finished it off and it gave me three shearing stands on a raised board and it was built beside the old shed and we were able to put a shearing stand on the floor where the sheep came up long the wall to get into the holding pens behind the shearing stand.

This gave us four shearing stands and I contacted the Wool Board through Godfrey Bowen and asked if their team would be interested in shearing there. The learner shearers were billeted at Massey College and they did a lot of shearing in the Manawatu and Horowhenua. This was agreed to and the fourth stand on the wool room floor was very handy because the real new chum shearers could get hands on instruction from the Wool Board instructors. We called them Wool Board instructors but they were really shearing technique instructors. They helped me with my shearing, even if all I did was just watch what they were doing and how they did it. Later I actually often shore all my own sheep. I have shorn 100 sheep in the morning and 80 sheep in the afternoon. Often Heather would pick up the wool for me and she was a very good fleeco. We got good prices for our wool, often to the envy of Dave Law our neighbour. He did not realize that he had a left handed shearer in his farm team and he had a handicapped chap picking up the wool who could not differentiate between belly wool and fleece wool and it got thrown in the press altogether. The left handed shearer threw the belly wool to the left side of the board and it got mixed up with the fleece wool. The belly wool was stained, discoloured and matted.

When I took over the Shannon farm there were about 400 sheep, no cattle and six horses. The previous owners were not farmers but had hoped to set up trekking business. The grass was very rank and mostly unpalatable for sheep. I took on 400 cows that local farmers Newth’s, had bought out of drought stricken Gisborne.

I also bought 400 woolly ewes which I had shorn and turned out on the hill before ear-marking them. When I brought the sheep in to earmark them I was 217 short. I saw a large number in the neighbour’s farm and on closer inspection I found that they had gone through beside a creek that came out of Jock Easton’s property. I fixed the fence but did not see Easton for a few days. Before I did see him, he rang Heather from a hotel and told her I had no right to fix the fence. She disagreed with him and he threatened to run her and the children off the road.

In June, Newth’s came to take their cattle away and they were 59 short. On closer inspection there were no carcasses but I recalled I had seen signs of cattle being driven down the road very early one morning.

Jock had a cousin who farmed in the district around Shannon and it appears the missing cattle finished up on his Buckley Road farm where I claimed I saw them but a few days later they were gone. I asked Shannon Transport if they had shifted cattle and was told they had taken cattle to Karl Marks’ farm at Makarina. Two trucks and trailers were engaged to take the cattle to the Feilding sale but on the way Laddie had redirected them to a yard on Makino Road beyond Feilding.

I called a muster on Jock’s property and invited Laddie’s neighbours. They got 23 sheep but I got none. That night Laddie rang me and said I would be charged with trespass if I set foot on his farm. I assured him that I knew what was going on.

In spite, Jock ordered a muster on me which meant I had to bring my sheep into the yards just before lambing. As it turned out Jock did not have a registered ear mark so the stock inspector allowed me to release the sheep from the yards.

Years later Jock went to the stock inspector and asked if he would give evidence to confirm that there were unsatisfactory dealings as Laddie had not paid for the cattle which was more than the sheep were worth.

The first winter on the Shannon farm I took on 400 cattle belonging to local farmer Newth. The next two winters I took on 400 cattle from Hawke’s Bay, they were railed from Waipukarau to Shannon. One of the days was Wahine Day. We coped with driving the cattle in the gale force winds. I was helped by a neighbour, Dave Law.

I then applied for Marginal Lands finance to buy my own cows. Tom Lees, who had acted as our Groomsman, processed my application and recommended a loan to buy 140 cows. After they arrived I left them in the first paddock for a month and when I went to shift them they went berserk, chasing the dogs and falling over into the creeks or down steep banks. They were in good condition, but on closer inspection they were lousy. There were as many lice as there were hairs on their heads. The lice were living on the cows’ blood. The cows had to be sprayed pronto. This was prior to the pour-on days and a cattle yard had to be built in a hurry. I had been planning for that and the posts and timber were at Mitchpine preservation plant near Foxton.

Day 1: The treated timber was delivered to Heights Road and I bought the bolts, hinges and gate fasteners and sharpened my spade.

Day 2: I dug 23 holes to take the big posts and pulled a bundle of posts up to the site with the bulldozer.

Day 3: I made five gates. The timber was saturated with preservative and the partly finished gates could only be stood up by using the blade of the bulldozer. The gates were then bolted and hinge straps fitted.

Day 4: I dragged the gates to the site and after putting in the 10 key posts I was able to swing the gates.

Day 5: The last of the posts and some timber were dragged to the site. I rammed up all posts and fitted the first row of 150 mm by 50 rails to the top line. The timber rails were very heavy as I stropped 1.6 metre fence posts to the big posts around the yard and lifted one end at a time and rested it on the fence post before I nailed it in place.

Day 6: For the rest of the rails I used joiners’ clamps to give the correct spacing.

To spray the cattle I had the use of the gorse spraying unit on the sledge with its 200 gallon tank, independent motor and spray gun. I put three cows at a time in the crush pen and sprayed all over with the lice treatment.

Days 7 and 8: To get the cows into the yard I had to do it without dogs so there was a fair amount of walking. I reckon I saved 90 cows. If they were sprayed they survived. The whole exercise sent the budget into free fall as I only got 80 calves.

The sheep never seemed to get so lousy but their lice were hard to see and not so damaging.

During 1970 I visited the Palmerston North A and P Show and ordered 10 straws of Simmental semen. The Simmental breed of cattle has a reputation for ease of calving and it was my intention to inseminate 10 Jersey heifers. These heifers were two years old and I hoped to make the first calving a less stressful experience for them. Having Simmental Jersey or Friesian cross calves made them valuable as bobby calves.

In 1972 I bought ten empty heifers (not carrying a calf fetus) at a clearing sale at Opiki. The cattle were delivered to the farm and I intended to winter them on the better grass in the middle of the farm. I drove them up the front ridge and when I opened the gate they took off down the ridge. My good dog headed them off, but the animals could not stop and turned away from the dog and went over a rocky, steep hillside and fell about 200 metres. They all died and I had to bury them

The bulldozer was on the ridge above the gate that I had proposed putting the now dead cattle through. The ground was not steep but when I started the bulldozer, lifted the blade and moved forward it took off towards the hillside where the heifers went over. Fortunately the blade was operated by a cable off the power take off. I hit the control lever and the blade dropped instantly into the ground and stopped.

I had been using the bulldozer in damp conditions and the tracks were full of soil to the depth of the grouser points. I had to clean all that dirt off with a large screwdriver before I could get back onto the track and drive down to the bottom of the hill and the dead cows.

With the help of our neighbours, Don and Nolan Strawbridge, who were qualified cement plasterers, I built a walk through spray sheep dip. They plastered the inside of two old corrugated iron tanks of 500 gallons capacity each which, because of astute siting, could be filled by gravity. The dipping made a big difference to the look of the sheep and this was reflected in the prices I got for them at the clearing sale before we took up residence at Te Horo.

For casual work on the farm I had Joe Buhler’s youngest brother who wanted to be a vet and was studying at Massey College for a Diploma in Agriculture the best part of it as a preempt to doing a Veterinary course. He used to come down to me at the weekends and I taught him how to shear. Just last year I saw him in the Bay of Plenty and he had qualified as a vet. He owns his own farm and I asked him how he came to get the money to do the Veterinary Course as I was sure his father would not have agreed and he said he did it through shearing. He got up to shearing 300 sheep a day and spent the best part of two years shearing

To help with the work on the Shannon farm I employed Lincoln College students in the summer holidays as they were required to do practical work. I had three of them, Kevin Miles, Paul Turner and Nigel Coster. In the main I got them spraying gorse and we got the front hills of the farm clear. The hills also had Tawhini and Manuka on them and I employed three Indians who had been scrub cutters on Guardian Trust farms and when they had finished there I brought them down to Shannon and had them for a week and they cut all the small manuka and tawhini. Then I went round behind them with a chain saw and cut all the big stuff , they said I was the hardest working white man they had ever seen It was all for a good cause as we got the front hills clean and over the hill in a big basin there were tall manukas - something like 16ft tall – but the ground was easy sloping and I employed Don Cottle who had a County Ford which had four big wheels the size of the rear wheels of an ordinary tractor and it was four-wheel drive. He put five rows of spade lugs on the back wheels, three rows on the front wheels and then got a Piako chopper, which was a rotary chopper which had no skids on it, and he cleared 100 acres with that. We were actually shown on Country Calendar doing that. Unfortunately this was done before Country Calendar preserved their footage and there is no record of the work. That cost me $700 which was all that I could afford at that time. When Dad came up he had seen the Country Calendar thing and had seen how much more we could have done with another $700 he said – “Why didn’t you let me know?”, but I could not believe that he would have helped me. But there it is and time is a great healer.

After Dad was awarded the Member of the British Empire (MBE) medal for his community work and work with the Young Farmers’ Clubs, I January 1972, he came up in May for the Investiture. Mum and Dad and my older sister I went to the Investiture. My sister did not come up to our place afterwards, she was a widow and had to go back home as she had children to care for. But when Dad came up there was 600 hundred acres at the end of the road that was for sale for $3,700. And I said that I would like to buy it but I had not been getting on very well with the bank manager and I owed the stock firm something like a $1,000, so I was reluctant to ask. Dad said that the younger sister who was on the home farm, and her husband, had just bought the Dorset down Stud off him for $4,000; he said he had no need of the money so he would let me have it to buy those 600 acres. He told me to get an Unconditional contract and when he got home he would send me the money.

While Dad was staying with us he was having a few chest pains and he was getting worried. He had had a big cancer operation 18 years before and he thought the Big C had come back. So he went back to the South Island and arranged the very next day to go into his Specialist in Dunedin. The Specialist gave him a barium meal which he had to take and return the next day for an x-ray. As he had not taken any nightwear to Dunedin he returned to Waimate. He got the pad out and said I will send that cheque off to Willie tonight, but then changed his mind and said he would wait until after the tests so he could tell me how he got on. He put the cheque book away. Next morning when they were getting settled in the car, Mum was trying to put the safety belt on Dad said she did not have to put it on until next week. Mum said she had to get use to it and he said don’t you trust my driving to which she replied you have always said it is the other silly bugger that causes the accidents. Dad had never had an accident on the road in his life and being the National Safety Officer for the Young Farmers’ Clubs it was quite appropriate that he not had an accident as he was quite a careful driver. I do believe he turned a two-ton tractor over once and got wedged under the plough but eventually he managed to dig himself out of that. So Mum said to put the safety belt on when they got into more traffic. As they approached Glenavy “Gilly”Thomas who had been the secretary of the Rifle Club for the 45 years that Dad had been the President, came out of the side road, through a give way sign and drove into Dad’s car, the two front corners hit, no glass was broken in the doors but both doors of Dad’s car were thrown open. Mum was thrown out onto the grass and sustained quite serious injuries and Dad rolled on the road and was killed instantly. So there it was, the $4000 he was going to give me did not eventuate.

I went to the funeral and found that I would get 3/10ths of the Estate, but Mum had a life interest. This meant that she had to die before I was the recipient of any money. When I came back I went to the bank and I said that I had to settle within the week. I was told that it was not possible to process an application in so short a time. But the Manager asked why I had not approached him before and I said that I knew the other neighbour up the road beside this block wanted to buy it and the vendor did not want to deal with him. I was very keen to have it because the boundary on the top and running down to the boundary at the back which was a mountain stream had no fence it was just a bush boundary and as I had heavy cattle on each winter the cattle were pushing into the bush and actually getting through the bush into this 600 acre block. I said that I knew the neighbour used this particular bank and I knew which church the neighbour went to but I did not know which church the Manager went to, so I opt out of even mentioning it to him. The Manager said he appreciated what I said but he did not go to the same church. Even though he thought I had a good case it was not possible to process it in time. I never thought of going to the vendor with whom I was on good terms, and asking for an extension.

We had to re-fence the boundary between Laws’ and us on the front side above the road and so I busied myself with that. Dave Law sent up two of his staff to help me. We were putting up a fence around the bush, we were not fencing on the boundary line so I thought better than to ask him but he was big enough to say that the spring for their water supply was in that bush so if we protected the bush we protect the water supply. We were having morning tea down on the road, when two chaps who were pansies with soft wrists appeared and said they were looking for William Raymond Wright as he had won an interest free loan for $6250. That bought the extra piece of land and also cleared the overdraft at the Bank. What a terrific relief that was.

The 600 acres had very little tawhini on it. It had not been top dressed but the following winter I was able to take on more cattle for winter grazing, clean it up and, in the meantime I had done some cultivation and I wanted to put in an air strip. I had to get the manure to the air strip. I had to cut a new track around rocky spurs to give the vehicle access. I became aware that the army territorial force would do such work for me. They came out one weekend and blasted all the rock. The following weekend they brought the bulldozers out. I had cultivated the strip directly in line with the legal access at the back of the farm. The army sent the graders out and they leveled the air strip for me. It was 800 meters long – admittedly there was a bit of a kink in it but when we used it we found that the planes were able to become airborne before they got to the slight bend in it. That was quite an achievement.

Some years later when the Berryman’s bought the farm at Reteruki, the farm where the swing bridge had collapsed and their only access was a row boat across the Reteruki River, I referred them to Colonel Hei Hei of the Territorial Forces at Linton with the aim of getting the Army to repair the bridge and he initially turned it down and said it was too big a job, but then he came back as he had had an approach from the Fijian Army wanting to do a bridge building exercise and he said that it fitted the bill. The Fijians came out. They set up a camp on the roadside. They built the bridge and we know now that they only used demolition oregan timber for the stanchions and the decking. The Berryman’s gave them malthoid backing to put between the timbers but this was not done

I have to come back to this story in another part of my record and explain what happened. The Berryman’s were sent broke when trying to defend the charges brought against them by OSH and they have had Dr. Moody a lawyer, otherwise known as Lady Alice, defending them and it is only in the last week that they have won their case for compensation. A book has been written entitled “Into the Abyss” and that in itself is a major read, but it should be read in conjunction with any views that anybody has on the liability for the Berryman’s in the death of Keith Richards who was the bee keeper who drove his truck and crashed through the deck and was killed in the river.

There was no Pony Club at Shannon when we arrived there and our boys were riding their ponies on the hills. I thought it would be nice if they could ride with other children. My sister had been a very early member of the Pony Club organization but it turned out there were lots of catty mothers and jealous fathers and there were lots of petty squabbles over what my kid and your kid could do I talked to a few of the local people, mainly famers whose children had ponies, and said that I would like to have a social afternoon, maybe on a Sunday, where these children could get together and have some fun and maybe receive some tuition and just learn about the care of a pony. This was agreed to. I said I did not want to belong to the Horowhenua Pony Club as they were too competitive and would get into the same scenario that had afflicted all the other Pony Clubs that I knew of. Anyway the Commissioner for the Horowhenua Pony Club heard that we had held a meeting and formed a Social Pony Club and considered that we should join them and it would be mutually beneficial. We called a meeting in the Plunket Rooms and it was decided that we should have a Shannon Pony Club. I was to be the President and Mrs. McCullum would be the Secretary and that we would have a get-together on a Sunday afternoon on Sparrows property on Pretoria Road. I know that in Margery Laws’ “History of Shannon” Tony Cottle has been named as the person who formed the Shannon Pony Club but that is not right. The Pony Club that he got involved with after we left Shannon actually had their Pony Club grounds up behind East Road on the Dalziell property.

Anyway, we progressed and when we went to Te Horo from Shannon the boys really got into the Pony Club business. They both got better horses. The little pony that Greg started off on was sold and Greg’s grandfather sent him a horse from Rotorua, a mare named Polly. She was a young horse, but a real doll. She had been reared in Gisborne and used as a pack horse on the cattle drive to the Ngongataha Sale yards. My father in law bought her and when he sold his farm in favour of a dairy farm he sent Polly down to Shannon. We took her over to the neighbours, the Laws, who had a very good Arab stallion and mated her. We got a foal from her. This foal became a Pony Club horse, it became an area trialist horse, and it was used by the Clerk of the Course at the local race meetings. It went on to play Polo cross and then when we bought a forestry block at Shannon we used the horse called either Star or Southern Mist. He was finally put down when he was 36 years old. Polly was the first horse given to the Levin Branch of Riding for the Disabled based at Kimberley Centre.

The frontage on Heights Road or rather the majority of it had not been fenced. There were gates across the road at the boundary fences. About 200 yards passed the homestead there was a gate and perhaps another two kilometers, certainly another kilometer up the road, there was no fence on our side of the road. There was a fence on the lower side and there was a fence at Laws’ boundary. Laws, over the years, had fenced their frontage.

Heights Road traversed the front hills of the Tararua Range for three miles from the Levin-Shannon Road it was very tortuous but even graded. Rumour has it that the road was cut out of rock by prison labour. After the road climbed to 1,000 feet above sea level it flattened off.

At the top of the block there was 400 acres of flat to easy rolling country. It was peat in places and other places it was just a clay loam. History has it that there was a very good stand kahikatea (white pine) trees on the flat. The concrete block for the saw mill was still there. There had been a sawmilling operation there at the turn of the 20^th century. After that there were three dairy farms up on the flat area, but there was certainly no power to the farms and the cows were hand milked unless there was some auxiliary method. After being separated from the milk the cream had to be taken down four kilometers to the main road which is now Highway 57 and picked up by the truck. I believe they did this every second day and no doubt the three farmers took turns in doing that job.