Our family's landscapes and the stories they tell

Queens Drive, Lyall Bay, Wellington.

I have no recollections of living in Lyall Bay, but Tony certainly has. He can remember fishing off the rocks along with friends, using bread in milk bottles, and Dad hauling in what seemed to be huge Leather Jackets and Kahawai as he fished off the rocks. As kids they spent a lot of time at the beach, usually forbidden time but state houses did not run to fenced sections at that time. A favourite time was when the Italian fishermen hauled their fishing boats up out of the water and discarded all the less than desirable fish (red cod mostly) into the sea, when the kids would wade out to retrieve them, and fight over the biggest! On one occasion the wire rope cable used to haul the boats up on to the beach broke and whistled over their heads, decapitating a Pohutukawa tree they were standing under.

He can also remember standing up on the terraced gardens Dad had dug from the huge sandhill behind the house, and fertilised with hundreds of wheelbarrow loads of seaweed, taunting my very pregnant mother, who could not get past the first level. Dad had no such difficulties though.

As a new and developing suburb, there were considerable road works being done, and this proved irresistible to kids like Tony. He can recall, somewhat painfully, falling into a barrel of liquid tar, and the mess it made in the bath while Mum and Nanna scrubbed him down with sandsoap and kerosine. The stormwater drains also provided an unscheduled swim, after testing out his strength in lifting the cast iron grate.

The odd scrap with the kids up the road had him in hospital with a cracked skull, somewhere he returned to a few weeks later with a poisoned arm, and then again for six weeks quarantine with scarlet fever. That wasn’t so much fun as it meant no Christmas presents or visits. The poisoned arm necessitated an ambulance ride to the hospital. Having only ever had one ride in a uncles open Austin seven, Tony was impressed with the ride in the ambulance, and its sheer size. He had his arm operated on, and the surgeon or anaesthesiologist asked him to count to ten, which he did and waited with the chloroform cloth over his nose. When the surgeon picked up his scalpel and Tony’s arm, Tony asked him what he was going to do, whereupon he was asked to count to twenty, and he doesn’t recall anything much after that.

He can also remember his first day at school, walking down the wooden corridor of Lyall Bay School with our mother to class, with a male teacher which must have been unusual for junior classes, although back then there seemed many more men teachers than women. From then on, it was the adventure of copying the other more streetwise and experienced characters and going by Tram – as a non-paying customer of course – riding on the steps and jumping off while still in motion. A wonderful treat was fish and chips for lunch and streaming across the road with other school kids to the shop with sixpence for a piece of fish and a scoop of chips. Lyall Bay School had but one tiny triangle of grass, by the flagpole, and nobody was allowed on it. A rather vigorous game of Fire Engines saw Tony lose a tooth, which was never found despite his desperate searching, along with all the other kids, knowing that the Tooth Fairy would not visit and leave the usual three pence.

He can also recall the battle of walking into the wind, and on occasions not being able to move because of its power or being blown across the footpath and road. During several storms Dad would be up on the roof fastening down the concrete tiles before they joined the others in hurtling across the section. Also, he remembers the thick ice that would form on the puddles, that was so much fun to smash and suck on.

Tony was severely asthmatic as a child and had considerable difficulty breathing at times. Opening the window for some air in those southerly gales was not at all appreciated by our mother, probably because the new blinds took such a beating. However, the upshot was that the doctor advised a move away from the pollen from the lupins that surrounded the house, and for some reason, the sea air. That was when Dad took a job as an AA Patrolman in Dannevirke, as far away from the sea as possible, and we shifted there around 1950. Thus began another stage in our family’s life, which will be dealt with below, as will more information on my brother Anthony Geoffrey Sims..

But before then, it is worth noting that all of this was happening against a backdrop of World War Two (1939 – 1945). Dad was never eligible to serve overseas, having had osteomyelitis as a child, which necessitated his wearing callipers for a time. He was however in the Home Guard. So, he married my mother in the midst of the war, with all its chaos and casualties, rationing and restrictions and unsettling uncertainties. And Tony was born just before it ended.

My early memories of my father are quite different to those of my mother. Mostly they are impressions rather than specific memories. My father was caring, loving and supportive, but there was always a certain reserve compared to my mother. Perhaps that was because it was a pretty traditional household with traditional roles, which undoubtedly reflected his own upbringing. Perhaps it was the fact that he worked in a military-like uniform, the appearance of which my mother was at pains to protect, and which lent him a certain authority. If there was disciplining to be done (and as young boys there was plenty of cause), and my mother’s use of a wooden spoon or belt didn’t suffice, then it was my father who administered it. The words “just you wait until your father gets home” were the ultimate threat.

So perhaps it is not surprising that my first clear memory of my father just being my father is in that role. The northern exterior wall of our house in High Street faced a narrow strip of lawn and path between our place and the Hargraves house next door. Halfway down it was a large wooden coal box. And I can still remember my brother Tony hiding in there to avoid my father, who had been called upon to administer some corrective actions to his behaviour. 

But it wasn’t all about the negative. My father was the one who took us places and connected us with the outside world. He was very familiar with country around Dannevirke as part of his job, and perhaps my next clear memory of him was during the 1953 floods, when he drove us out to Oringi, and we stopped above the river dip to survey what seemed to me to be an endless sea of floodwater stretching before us. 

I grew up in a fairly orthodox, middle-class family in a small town, in the 1950’s. My father was a caring, loving man, and his place within the family was as expected. He was the head of the household, the ‘breadwinner’, and the final arbiter of decisions made about the family. He worked hard to support his family, and he was strong and decisive. As kids, we simply accepted this. After all, it was no different in any other household we knew.

So, my first realization that there were more dimensions to this paradigm was when he fell ill. Dad had osteomyelitis when he was a child, which necessitated him wearing bracers or calipers on his legs for some time. It was the reason that he was excluded from serving overseas in the Second World War. And when I was still young, probably about 6 or 7 years old, the bone in his leg became infected with tuberculosis. Given what I have subsequently learnt about this disease, you would have to wonder whether it was a new infection, or a recurrence of the original one.

But regardless of its origins, Dad was packed off to the Tb Sanitorium at Waipukurau, where he stayed for almost a year. Again, with the advantage of hindsight, I can appreciate just how much the early antituberculosis antibiotic treatments would have knocked him around while he was there, but as kids, we had no concept of that. All we knew was that my father was very ill and a long way from home.

It was my first hint that there was a vulnerability in my father’s status and authority, and perhaps an unspoken threat that it, and the familiar order we had grown up with, may not be permanent. Of course, my mother stepped up to fill that role, she had no choice but to; not that my brother and I made that easy or realized just how much of a strain it put her under.

So, my main memories of that time were the long car trips to Waipukurau to see Dad, with Mum driving the old citron car we had at the time, with front-wheel drive and a gear leaver that stuck out of the dashboard, while Tony and I sat in the back seat, usually fighting (as we usually did), because we knew Mum couldn’t do much about it. I remember Dad, initially looking pale and gaunt, on the occasions we were allowed to see him, and playing in the sunshine in the sanitarium grounds when we couldn’t.

But it certainly changed the family dynamic, and even after Dad recovered and returned home, Mum was much more assertive and played a bigger role in supporting the family through her own career.

As a child, my father was very good at encouraging us to develop and follow our own interests, both physical and academic. Within the accepted boundaries of the family behaviour, of which he was the final arbiter, we had a lot of freedom to pursue our own interests. Although I have to admit that I was a lot keener on the academic rather than the physical. Not that I was in any way gifted academically, something I realised from an early age. But with both sets of activities, the concept of ‘being first’, ‘winning’ and ‘being better than the others’ was something that I always struggled with.

So, I somewhat reluctantly participated in the physical activities he organised for my brother and I, such as swimming, athletics, and cross-country running. As kids, I’m sure that they were good for us, and perhaps because he had osteomyelitis as a child and was denied many such activities, there was a bit of compensation involved, but my participation was a lot more dutiful than enthusiastic. My brother Tony was the complete opposite, he enthusiastically participated in such activities, which didn’t make my reluctance any easier.

That aside, my father was very good at allowing us the freedom to develop and pursue our own interests, both recreationally and career-wise. With one proviso; that we did it on our own, off our own bat. We could count on him for encouragement and support, but it was up to us to make it happen. I know that my brother struggled with that, especially when he found that his chosen career of going farming was out of his reach and he had to take his second choice (just like both of my parents had to), but to me it was liberating. I had already decided that I didn’t want to go to university without a clear goal of what I would do afterwards, even though there was a certain academic expectation and back then it was even affordable. That led me to a profession that challenged and stimulated me academically, that satisfied my desire to help others rather than just myself, and most importantly, paid me from day one. There is more than a little irony in the fact that it involved five years of intensive study and more examinations than I had ever encountered before in my life, before I qualified, but it was something I thrived in. And I had my father’s encouragement every step of the way.

My father was a remarkably tolerant man. That didn’t mean that he wasn’t critical, he was. But he was remarkably accommodating of others, and other points of view. He almost never argued with my mother, who held much firmer and more rigid views of the world, and what was right and wrong. His advice was lived, modelled, and explained, rather than dictated, and there are a whole lot of things wrapped up in that.

He showed me that you could care about people without necessarily agreeing with them or even liking them. There is a concept of service in there which may have originated in his parents and grandparents’ religious beliefs, but which he could demonstrate without the doctrine, such as in his own career. I think that the concept of community service was a whole lot stronger back then, especially in small communities, but it certainly had a bearing on my thinking and my ultimate career choice.

He showed me not to sweat the small stuff (and I was an expert in sweating the small stuff). He was not particularly materialistic or driven by wealth, something else I have also inherited. Both my parents were very careful with money, having lived through a depression and a World War, but were content with being ‘comfortable’ rather than just acquiring ‘things’. Sunday drives and picnics in the countryside were a regular thing when I was young, rather than organised events, as I suspect was the case when they were younger.   

He also taught me to ‘be the best that you can be’ in whatever your endeavors were, and to take pride in that, rather than trying to be better than everyone else. Which was a valuable lesson as I was never going to particularly excel competitively, either academically, socially or sporting wise. These days, ‘mindfully enjoying doing what you like doing as best you are able’ tends to be more passive than active, but it has aways been my motto; whether climbing mountains or fishing rivers and lakes, walking along beaches and through forests, photographing landscapes (as in the past), or biking along the river trail, researching the family history, or just watching the clouds drift past as the seasons change (more likely these days).

Sunday picnics were a feature of my childhood, even (or especially) when we had friends and family visiting. We would often go to the Manawatu River at Kaitoki, just east of town. These excursions seem to have been a feature of Dad’s family, with many of what old family photographs we still have, showing family picnics ‘in the bush’.

Sunday drives were also a frequent activity, but not quite so popular with us boys. It wasn’t too bad when they were to visit farming friends at Tataramoa or Makotuku, but otherwise being cooped up in the back of the car for no good reason was not our idea of having a good time.

Which is interesting, because later in life, exploring the landscapes of the surrounding countryside became quite an interest of mine. I wonder if that was a continuation of this family tradition, or sparked subconsciously from when I was a boy? It seems to have been a feature of Granddad’s as well, with his trips up to see the Manawatu Gorge when it opened, or the results of the Napier earthquake.

My Dad’s other family:

Before we leave this section, there is the small matter of Geoffrey George’s ‘other family’. It would seem that he had a relationship with a Marjory Cody (nee Rousell) while both were members of the Ngaio Tennis Club. Dad was still single at the time, but Marjory was not. As a result of this relationship, Malcolm Godfrey Cody was born in 1941. The Cody family had no idea that Ivan Charles Cody (Marjory’s husband) was not the father until Malcolm’s daughter took a DNA test while investigating her own family tree, which showed a very strong relationship to Tony’s DNA. Having my DNA tested put this beyond any doubt.

Margaret, Malcolms wife, is a lovely lady, who was already heavily involved in her family’s history. She was very patient with leading us to the conclusion she had already come to, assisted me in getting my DNA tested by the same database as hers and her daughters, and very welcoming when we all arrived at the same irrefutable conclusion. We had a half-brother that we knew nothing about! We were all set to meet their family personally when the Covid pandemic lockdowns made that impractical, and but we have since had the opportunity to meet Margaret and her new partner, and her daughter Lynaire and her husband when they have come down to Palmerston North.

However, the pictures she sent us of her husband Malcolm left very little doubt. The resemblance to Tony and to Dad when he was younger was striking. Malcolm had two brothers – Graeme and Russell Cody. Malcolm and Margaret have three children: Lynaire, Vaughan and Hayden.

All of which begs the question – did Dad know? And did Mom know? Was it a family secret they were determined to bury and take to the grave, or something they were unaware of? In hindsight, and from what I have learnt since, I rather suspect that they both knew, but we will never know for sure as everyone who could confirm it is now dead. It is a bit like walking up a river whilst fishing and stumbling across a fascinating side stream, hidden by a fold in the hills, but not being able to access it to explore it further.

Malcolm, the half-brother we never knew, was born in Wellington and grew up at Pinehaven, a suburb of Upper Hutt. He died in 1993 at Waharoa of bowel cancer when he was 52 years old. He and Margaret owned and ran the dairy opposite the Waharoa Dairy Factory (both of which have since been demolished), and later he was a roofing contractor. The funny thing is that I remember that shop and can envisage it clearly, as I drove past it on numerous occasions going fishing while living in Hamilton, and later when we were visiting Sharon’s family in Paeroa.

Norm and Mildred were the closest of the Sims Family to ours. They often visited us in Dannevirke, and we often visited them in Wellington. They had a house up on the hill at Strathmore Park, overlooking Rongotai. I remember the winding, narrow streets with nowhere to park, which seemed ridiculous after the wide flat streets of Dannevirke. I also remember going down there to watch the opening of Wellington Airport. It made a great place to watch all the planes coming and going, including the Vulcan bomber that flew so low it scraped its bottom on the tarmac. Their eldest son Chris was just slightly older than Tony while Carolyn was a bit younger than me.

It was Norm who was the original Sims historian, and who was able to shed a little light on the Sims/Watson name change. Tony can remember him recalling seeing his grandfather Thomas Watson sitting cross-legged on a table, sewing a suit.  Norms endeavours at the family tree were inherited by his daughter Carolyn.

Chris moved to Australia and had a family there with his wife Christine. I remember that Sharon and I looked him up just out of Melbourne, when we were travelling the Great Ocean Road, west of Melbourne.

Carolyn and her family live at Waikanae, on the Kapiti Coast. We have been able to re-establish contact and keep in touch with them.

Of all of Dads family, Bill and Coralie are perhaps the most enigmatic and hazy. I really don’t have many memories of them at all. Which is strange, given that Bill died (and obviously lived) in Hastings, which isn’t that far from Dannevirke. Like the Watson/Sims name change, I just get the feeling that there are a lot of family questions still to be answered in Hastings. All I know about Bill is that he lost the sight in one eye as a result of a darts game when he was young but being keen to enlist for the Second World War, he had his brothers each memorise a line of the eye chart and was thus able to be classed as A1 – fit for action. This was fine until he was knocked over by shellfire in Italy and subsequently given another eye test, which of course he failed. Rather than send him home with no sight in one eye and receive a pension as he was no longer A1, he was kept over there, and he spent to last year or two of the war joyriding about in the American Bombers.

Nancy and John: Again, I have very few recollections of Nancy and John. I get a vague impression that Nancy was a favourite sister of Dads, but we really only saw them at family gatherings. Which is a pity really because John’s family tree looks really interesting. But back then, that particular landscape was of no interest to me as a child.

Molly and Fenton (Fen) are another relationship coloured by the actions and attitudes of my parents. Because they weren’t particularly close, I didn’t give them much thought. Fen, I remember as a tall, very polite and correct man. Molly was just lovely. They showed a keen interest in Sharon’s bowling career, and she probably met them more often at Horowhenua bowling events than I did. Interestingly, their son Larry uses the same online database as me to map the family tree.

So, there are some conversations I wish that I could have with him, that I’ll never get the chance to. You see, as he got older Dad tended to slip into the background of our lives. This was not deliberate or intentional, but as his life slowed down ours speeded up, full of things that seemed important at the time (but really weren’t). Then there was the tyranny of distance, again not great and more perceived than real, which tended to limit visits. And finally, when he had to go into supported care, that seemed to add another hurdle, and barrier between us.

I would love to be able to have a non-judgmental conversation with him about how much (if anything) he knew about his son Malcolm. And if he knew or suspected, why did he keep it a secret from us. And whether my mother shared that knowledge. Conversations we will never have and questions I will never know the answers to. I would love to be able to let him know what I now know about Malcolm and his life. I’m sure that he would be chuffed by it.

Again, from having explored our family history, it would be great to talk to him about what I now know, and don’t know. It simply wasn’t important, or of any interest to me at the time; but times and interests change. Dad seemed to have a very close relationship with some of his family, and quite a distant relationship with others. I would now love to know why. And just as I can look back on the immense changes in my lifetime, I would love to be able to talk to him about the changes in his, and what he thought of them. I would love to show him what I have learnt about our family history. Would he be interested? My interest in it, as well as Tony’s, had to come from somewhere.

Ever since I was a boy, I have always had a fascination with the landscapes around me, the forces that shaped them and the creatures that inhabit them.  Did I get that from Dad? I rather suspect that both he and his father shared that interest. Certainly, my interest in landscape photography came from them both. But again, these are conversations we will never have.

Dad saw more than his fair share of sickness during his life. When he was a boy, he had osteomyelitis that required him to wear calipers on his legs. When he was an adult he got tuberculosis, again in his leg, which saw him shipped off to the sanitorium at Waipukurau for over a year while the pretty harsh drugs that were available at the time finally cured him. The family afflictions of cardiac arrythmia requiring a pacemaker and having cataracts removed from his eyes both affected him. Then later in life he had Paget’s disease which badly affected his mobility and caused him considerable pain. This also caused him to withdraw into himself even further as physical activity and even driving became denied to him. It is only now that I enter a comparable age, and find my own mobility and activity begin to be compromised, that I can start to understand his utter frustration and loss of interest. I wish I could talk to him about it, from where I stand now rather than where I was back then.

So, I guess that if there is a message here, it is to not wait to have these conversations with other family members. Because it may become too late, and the knowledge and answers you might seek can become lost in the mists of time.

Geoffrey Sims Parents:

My dad, Geoffrey George Sims, was born at Hawera on October 30^th, 1912.  He was the second eldest of seven children born to Thomas Herbert Sims and Ethel Jackson Sims (nee Scott). His brothers and sisters were:

1. Trevor Herbert Sims (1911 - 2007)
2. Norman Harold Sims (1916 - 2008)
3. Helena (Peggy) Sims (1919 - 2000)
4. Laurence Noel (Bill) Sims (1921 – 1990)
5. Nancy Winifred Sims (1923 - 1985)
6. Molly Ethel Sims (1927 - 2011)

Trevor, Geoff and Norman were born in Hawera, and the rest were born in Wellington.

Thomas Herbert Sims (my Granddad)

Thomas was born in Wellington on 6^th November 1884 and died in Wellington on 10^th February 1978. His wife Ethel was born in Dunedin on 10^th March 1886 to George Scott and Thirza Harriett Havill. She died in Wellington on the 14^th of December 1961. So, granddad was a widower for 16 years before his death.

Granddad was born into and raised in a strongly orthodox Methodist family, and always seemed severe later in life, as if perplexed as to why us kids always asked questions. He obviously raised his family with the same traditional values, but while the values might have been retained, the dour Scottish severity seems to have been shed by my father’s generation. 

After leaving school, his parents arranged for him to be apprenticed to a watchmaker, but he disliked the job and took himself off and arranged his own apprenticeship with the building firm of Paterson and Martin of Wellington. It perhaps says something about his family life that he didn’t discuss this with his parents and the first they knew was when he arrived home with tools that were obviously far too big for watchmaking!

After they were married in 1910, Thomas and Ethel moved to Hawera, where their first three children were born. I have not been able to find out what Granddad was doing in Hawera, although I assume it involved building. He is certainly listed in the 1916 Hawera Street Directory as a carpenter. 

Returning to Wellington sometime around 1919, they had a house in Ngaio (250 Cockayne Road). He had a wonderful workshop under the house that smelt of wood shavings, sawdust, and polishing oil – rather like he did. I have a vague memory of garden paths leading down steep, tree-clad slopes amid bush and shrubs. Which I guess is the sort of thing that makes an impression on a preteen boy such as I was.

Granddad was a skilled carpenter and joiner. He used to make ‘coffee tables’ expertly and intricately inlaid with native timbers. Later, when that became too much, he made wooden stools with his own tapestries covering them.

He was also a keen gardener, always pottering about in the huge section they had, and a keen photographer, and my father recollected sitting with a fixed smile for minutes while the huge cameras of the day operated. Among his collection of photos are some he took as a builder from the top of the Wellington Town Hall, which he helped build. At that time, it had a tower on top.

He was an interesting character though, he once told Tony that he walked up from Wellington to see the newly opened Manawatu Gorge, and that he rode an Indian Motorcycle up to Napier to see the aftermath of the 1933 earthquake.

The place at Ngaio obviously became too much, because they moved to a smaller place, tucked in under the hill in Miramar. Granddad always was on the frail side.

Despite generally good health (he lived to 94) Granddads biggest problem was a combination of stubborn independence and failing eyesight. This used to cause my mother (and his other relatives) considerable angst. One of the few enduring memories I have of the inside of his place in Miramar was of his living room carpet covered with brown circles, where he had dropped one of his cigarettes and then couldn’t find it again. Mum was convinced he was going to burn down the place around his ears.

I think that the final straw was when we visited him (well into his eighties) and found him up on the roof trying to fix a leak. Not being able to see much meant that he had to crawl around and work from touch, but that didn’t seem to bother him. Granddad moved into a retirement home not long after that, where he spent the rest of his days.

As a small boy, my memories of visiting Granddad were shaped by different things. I remember the fox terriers he used to keep, and later the yellow canaries singing incessantly in the cage hanging in the sunshine by the front door. Directly behind the back of the house at Miramar was a steep hillside, its crumbling rock face covered with scrub. My favourite activity was hunting the abundant, handsomely marked common skinks that basked in the sun on the rock faces. I used to catch them, pop them in a jar, take them home and ‘liberate’ them in mum’s rockery. To my knowledge, none ever survived the subsequent attentions of the neighbourhood cats.

I have very few memories of Ethel. A large, warm, affectionate woman, who always seemed cheerful, she died in 1961, when I was thirteen. But her family will feature largely in a further section of this site.

Hilda Falleni

My mother’s sister, Hilda Falleni was born in Wellington on the 17^th of November 1924. She married Norman Roy Stange (known as Tom) in 1947 at Lower Hutt, Wellington. After they married, their mother Hilda Lydia Morley lived with Hilda and Tom and their family until she died on the 15^th of October 1972. Hilda and Tom had four boys during their marriage:

• Rex John Strange, born on August 20th, 1950
• Max Stephen Strange, born on May 13th, 1953
• Wayne Paul Strange, born on November 29th, 1955
• Mark William Strange, born on July 31^st, 1959

Mum and her sister Hilda, and our respective families remained close when we were young. Not only were there plenty of respective visits between Dannevirke and Lower Hutt (and later Carterton), but for a number of years we spent Christmas holidays together. Uncle Tom had built a cabin on a farm out from Martinborough, where he used to go rabbit shooting. This was pre-myxomatosis, and there were lots of rabbits! Our family used to drive down at Christmas and spend a week or so there. We would camp in a large tent next to the cabin. I’m not sure what Mum thought of it – the only water was from the creek you drove through to get there, and there was only power in the cabin for the stove. Cooking rabbit was expected. But to small boys, it was pretty close to heaven. We got up and went to bed with the sun. We damned the creek to make a swimming hole. We could roam the farm early morning and late afternoons, shooting as many rabbits with .22 calibre rifles as we could find.

As we got older, it only got better. The farm behind the one we stayed at had been abandoned. It was becoming overgrown with gorse and regenerating bush. The cattle had gone wild and roamed freely. Wild pigs were plentiful. If you went back far enough into the hills you came to the bush line, and a plentiful red deer population. Below that, around the waterholes in the gullies, I saw the only wallabies I have seen in the wild. You had to be careful around such things as wild pigs and cattle, but Tony and I had a ball.

Perhaps my favourite memories of my father are from when we went down to the farm just out from Martinborough at Christmas. I have written about this previously, but it was when my father was most relaxed and happy. It was also when we saw some of the skills he had, that certainly appealed to us as boys. We would drive down through the Wairarapa paddocks bleached white from the summer sun to meet up with Mum’s sister’s family who stayed in a Bach that Uncle Tom had built there. We stayed in a large tent that Dad and Uncle Tom erected, sleeping on stretchers, and illuminated at night by the wonder of a hissing kerosine lamp. As if crossing a ford to get in (the stream being our only water source) and camping in a tent wasn’t exciting enough, we had the run of the farm to play in all day.

Dad helped us dam the stream to create a swimming hole to cool off in during the heat of the day, but most importantly (in our eyes) he introduced us to rabbit shooting; a shared activity that he, Tom, my brother and I, and Tom’s boys would participate in on an almost daily basis, walking the hills surrounding the river flats at dusk. We were all using .22 calibre rifles and Dad and Tom would patiently ration out the ammunition, and teach us about gun use, gun safety and shooting accurately. For any of the poor rabbits we intended to keep for food, there were the additional mysteries of taking them down to the creek (below the camp) to gut and skin, carefully checking the livers to make sure that there were no spots that would indicate disease.

In addition to all this, he would teach us about the sheep farm, it’s working and staying safe on it. To us boys, holidays couldn’t get much better than this. Of course, even Dad’s knowledge of these things was soon eclipsed by Tony’s, who was already developing a passion for farming that he hoped to turn into a career. But during those halcyon days of midsummer holidays, we could only admire and appreciate Dad relaxing, opening up and teaching us skills that would remain with us and which we could build upon.

Tom was a favourite uncle of ours, especially for Tony, as is described elsewhere. After he retired, they moved to Carterton. Of all our relatives, the Stranges were the closest to our Mum and Dad, with frequent visits between Lower Hutt and Dannevirke. Tony and I grew up with their boys, yet after our respective parents had died, we drifted apart, lost contact and it has proved very difficult to re-establish it again. Eventually, I regained contact with Max, and he was able to give me an insight into Tom’s family. Tony was able to attend Rex’s funeral, but there has been little ongoing communications with any of them. I have noticed that Tania, Max’s daughter now living in Australia has popped up on an ancestry database, having also had her DNA tested and confirming her relationship to me.

The eldest son was:

• Thomas Gordon French (1931 – 2019)
  • Married Stella Elizabeth Hunter in 1954

They had two daughters

• Colleen Rae (born 1957)
  • Married Maxwell (Max) Scott in 1976
• Wendy Lynne (born in 1962)
  • Married Alan Edward Law in 1986

Thomas Gordon (Gordon), the eldest son was born in Te Kopuru on January 15^th, 1931, and was named after his grandfather, but always called by his second name. He was still a youngster when the family moved to Kopuarahi in the Thames Valley, on to a one-hundred-acre river flat farm owned by Marj’s father. His Uncle Jim joined them, and he farmed half and Eric farmed half. The family later moved back to a fifty-acre block owned by my Eric’s mum near Dargaville, living in the large homestead with his parents before moving to a farm cottage while Eric share milked on a farm owned by the local butcher. After about 5 years, Marj and Eric were able to buy their own farm at Waihue, about ten miles north of Dargaville.

Leaving school (early) Gordon enjoyed helping his father run the farm before taking up a truck driving job at Whakatane in the Eastern Bay of Plenty. Working for a couple of roading and cartage contractors, it was here that he met Stella Hunter, who worked for Prices Four Square at their Whakatane store.

He married Stella Elizabeth Hunter on May 22^nd, 1954, and they soon moved back to Erics new farm at Paeroa, where along with brother Warren they helped convert the dry stock unit to a dairy farm, eventually splitting the farm up and milking one hundred acres each. It was here in 1957 that their first daughter, Colleen Rae was born. Two years later, the opportunity came up for them to 50/50 share milk on Stella’s Dads farm in West Bank Road, Edgecumbe. They were keen for Stella to move back to the Bay of Plenty and have the family closer to them. The farm was 47 acres of first-class Rangitaiki plains country with a small run-off which despite the smaller acreage compared with Eric’s Paeroa property, this Rangitaiki Plains forty-seven acres would prove to be a better producer than the 100 acres. A year later, his father-in-law purchased a 90-acre property on Putiki Road which allowed them to buy the 47 acres.

In 1962 their second daughter Wendy Lynne arrived, and eventually both Colleen and Wendy went on to work for the Rangitaiki Dairy Company in Edgecumbe. Gordon decided to get out of milking and subdivide the property. He’d had enough of cows, and with the Kiwi Fruit industry taking off, decided to retain some of the land for planting citrus and kiwis. Colleen and her new husband Max Scott came in as partners in the orchard business. Wendy met and married a dairy farmer, Alan Law, in 1985. They lived just up the road from Goron and Stella, which could not have been better. However, Stella’s health was not robust, and while the doctors couldn’t say why, it was probably the intensive and toxic spraying regimes the orchards required that contributed to it.

The 1987 Edgecombe earthquake was perhaps a wakeup call for a change in lifestyle. Gordon and Stella moved into a house in Whakatane, Colleen and Max moved to Australia, while Wendy and Alan went on to own a number of farms in the district. In 2003 Stella suffered a severe stroke which left her debilitated and unable to get around without a wheelchair or a walker. She died in 2008. Gordon lived on, enjoying his golf and his family, until he died in 2019.

We were able to visit him just prior to that, when he was living in assisted care in Whakatane, and say our goodbyes. Like all of Sharons family and siblings, there was an easy acceptance and genuine interest in our lives that I found quite different to my own.

Gordon was a large, enthusiastic man, who had obviously spent a lot of time out in the Bay of Plenty sunshine. Stella was a homemaker and a traditional farmers wife. She was just lovely and very friendly. She held very definite views of the world though. Their oldest daughter Colleen is a similar age to Sharon, so they were quite close growing up. Like Stella, Colleen was asthmatic, a condition exacerbated by the spraying required by the surrounding kiwifruit blocks, and which ultimately led them to settle in the township of Whakatane.

Eric and Marj’s second son was

• Warren Eric French (1933 – 2002)
  • Married Margaret Anne Shaw in 1957

They had four sons and a daughter:

• Warren Michael (Michael) French born in 1958
• John Gary (Gary) French born in 1959
  • Married Karen Cristine Beere in 1986
• Susan Margaret French born in 1960
• Clifford Anthony (Tony) French born in 1962
  • Married Sandra Annette Reeve in 1981
  • Married Karen Moore Morrison in 1988
  • Married Angela Claire Caffell in 1998
• Norman Andrew (Andrew) French born in 1968

Warren was born in Thames in the Coromandel on the 29^{th of} October 1933. Like his older brother Gordon, he was actively involved in assisting his father on the family dairy farm, first at Waihue in Northland, then at Rotokohu Road in Paeroa. Unlike Gordon, he was a little more enthusiastic and adept at high school, reaching the sixth form before leaving to help on the farm.

After the family moved to Paeroa, he assisted converting the dry stock farm to a dairy farm, then later splitting it into two one-hundred-acre farms, one of which he farmed. Initially he lived with his parents in the homestead on the top farm, while Gordon and Stella lived in the three-bedroom house on the bottom farm.

He married Margaret Shaw on June 1^st, 1959, in Paeroa and they moved into the home on the bottom farm off Thorp Road while Godon and Stella moved back to Edgecombe.  Like Stella, Margaret was a homemaker and soon had a family of five children to look after. Like their father, they grew up helping on the farm.

The French farm on Rotokohu Road was next to the Paeroa Golf Club and the whole family became enthusiastic golfers. Marj and Eric were longstanding members, with both being made a life-members. Gordon was a keen golf player his whole life, Warren who always preferred golf to rugby, became Club President, and Sharon was a regional golf representative while she was at high school. A creek ran through the golf course next to the farm and then continued on through the farm. There were always plenty of free golf balls to find after the weekend.

Eventually, with the children growing up, Warren and Margaret moved into Paeroa township, where Warren died in 2002.

Their eldest daughter was

• Olwyn Rae French (1938 – 2008)
  • Married Wynne Pennell Bradburn in 1960

They had two daughters and a son:

• Raewyn Ivy Bradburn born in 1961
  • Married Grant Breton Higgins in 1983
• Robyn Ella Bradburn born in 1962
  • Married John Kelly in 1982
• Grant Eric Bradburn born in 1966
  • Married Marree Young in 1995

Olwyn was born in Dargaville on December 4^th, 1938. She married Wynne Pennell Bradburn in Paeroa in 1960 and they lived in Hamilton. As they lived there while we did, we saw quite a lot of them and the kids. Their house in Greta Street was not far from ours in Cricket Place.

Wynne was a cricketer who played for Northern Districts and represented New Zealand in two test matches against South Africa in 1964. After his playing career ended, he served as an administrator, selector and coach for Northern Districts. Consequently, Olwyn and the kids were a familiar feature at matches around the country. It was a devotion that I could only admire. Wynne was a diabetic and as a consequence, had both lower legs amputated in later years.

Olwyn worked as a Dietitian at Waikato Hospital, but she also suffered from ill health in later years and died in 2008. Wynne died hours after her funeral of a heart attack. They were both 69 and had been married 48 years.

We were particularly close to Raewyn and saw a lot of her and Grant and their kids after they settled in Tauranga. Robyn became a radiographer and she and John settled in Havelock North. Grant followed in his father’s footsteps and became a successful cricketer, also playing for Norther Districts and representing New Zealand seven times between 1990 and 2001, before coaching the Scotland and Pakistan cricket teams. He married Maree Young, a local Hamilton lass, and like his siblings and cousins, their children are scattered around the country and around the globe.

Neither are too far away. Originally the valley floor was a huge expanse of tall forest (part of the forty-mile bush), but like most of the country it has been burnt, cleared, drained, tamed and transformed.

To the west, in the generous rain shadow of the Ruahine Ranges, lush pasture supports dairy farms, whose milk is transported south to the factory at Pahiatua. Once there were many small dairy factories dotted throughout the landscape, serving the small family farms surrounding them. Today, such farms have amalgamated into intensive corporate enterprises, all feeding the single voracious factory in Pahiatua to the south.

The eastern hills were also burnt and cleared. Their softer nature and thinner soils became the foundation for sheep farms, with some stations reaching prodigious sizes (Akitio Station alone was 200 km²). Like most of the eastern seaboard hills they are very prone to erosion. This, plus the uneconomical nature of farming such country has led to the establishment of large pine forests in their place. Ecologically, these vast monocultures are not necessarily an improvement.

As children, we were taught that Dannevirke was settled by Scandinavian settlers (mostly of Danish descent) in 1872, hence the names of towns like Dannevirke and Norsewood. They cleared, logged and burnt the Forty-mile bush and turned it into productive farmland. This was admirable. Never once was I taught that long before that it was known as Tāmaki-nui-a-Rua. That it was the home of Rangitāne whose tribal ancestors arrived at Māhia Peninsula aboard the Kurahaupō waka in about 1350 before moving south. Apart from a few Marae, the most obvious being the Makirikiri Marae just south of town, almost all traces of indigenous culture had been erased, and was never acknowledged.

This was part of a deeper, darker valley in the small-town social landscape that was always present, but never openly acknowledged or spoken of. At least, not in my company as a child. It wasn’t until I hit High school that it even became apparent, and it has taken until now, over seventy years later to realise its full all-pervasive extent. I am of course talking about poverty and racism and their counterpart’s privilege and entitlement.

Just by way of an example, while our childhood was full of good colonial tales and of heroes like Beau Guesde and Biggles, no one ever taught us the pre-colonial history of places like Te Rehunga. Te Rehunga is the name of a small farming district just to the southwest of Dannevirke. Marlene Kelly’s family, (my brother Tony married Marlene), had a dairy farm there along Topgrass Road.

Whatungarongaro te tangata, toitū te whenua

(People pass, but the land remains)

Te Rehunga was a Ngāti Kahungunu man from Heretaunga Hawke’s Bay, who married a Rangitāne woman, Te Hore, from the Tamaki nui-ā-Rua district. They made their home on the land of Te Hore several generations ago.

Te Rehunga was living in the Takapau area when he met Te Hore, they then moved and settled on her land, which is the land we now know as Te Rehunga. He was followed down here by a number of his relatives and began allocating them land. He didn’t have the right to do this and was told by the locals not to give land that was not his. Despite the warnings, he continued to allocate land to his people. As a result, Rangitāne decided to banish him and sent him back to the Heretaunga area.

One of the Rangitāne chiefs, Tireo, erected a post on the northern banks of the Manawatū River, at Tuhimata, (close to today’s Ormondville), naming it Puakiteao, after his mother. This was to demonstrate that the lands so allocated were Rangitāne land and was not to be given up lightly to outsiders.

Te Rehunga, hearing of the erection of the post, had it cut down. Tireo in retaliation reinstated the pou and prepared for war.

There were several skirmishes with Te Rehunga and his people through the Central Hawke’s Bay area. Tireo returned home, hoping that would be the last of Te Rehunga.

Sometime later Te Rehunga assembled a war party and headed south, however, Rangitāne anticipated this move and met the war party of Te Rehunga at Piripiri just north of Dannevirke where a huge battle took place with many casualties on both sides. Defeated, Te Rehunga and the remnants of his war party returned to Heretaunga.

Te Hore was to remain in the Tamaki nui-ā-Rua district. Many of the descendants of her union with Te Rehunga, including myself, still reside in the district today.

• by Stephen Paewai, (who I suspect I went to school with).

How much richer our childhood appreciation of our local landscapes would have been with knowing such stories.

Hawkes Bay Automobile Association

When the petrol station was built, our house was removed and incorporated into a house being built (cobbled together) at the bottom of the hill off Cemetery Road. You could say that Mum and Dad are still keeping an eye on it!

The section in High Street was long and narrow, with a large macrocarpa hedge down the southern side. The house was set back, with the office facing the road, and an old wooden garage in the front, with large wooden doors opening onto the footpath.  Behind the house was a back yard with a clothesline and hen house. Along the other side was a narrow strip between the house and the fence between us and the Hargraves house. As Tony remembers it, the house was large, cold, and hard to heat. On frosty mornings the water pipes would freeze and there would be no hot water until the chip heater in the kitchen had been going for a while. When the wind blew, the wallpaper, which was many layers thick and attached to scrim, would balloon out from the walls while we huddled over the inadequate fireplaces. No wonder we lived in the kitchen over winter.

Perhaps my earliest memory is playing under a large kaka beak bush in our back yard and watching the activity in the transport yard next door. At that time, it was run by Bill Hargraves (Snr). His wife (who seemed old to me at the time) was also a kind neighbour, who I would often go and visit. I must have had a tendency to wander (or even run away) as a small child, as my mother used to put me in a harness attached to a long leather lead (they were called reins) to prevent me from disappearing altogether. Sometimes this was attached to the revolving clothesline, allowing me movement around the yard – but not too much.

Such restrictions may well have been justified, as when I was four years old, I did run away. Not that I considered it as such; I just decided that I wanted to start going to kindergarten and there happened to be one just up the road on the other side of York Street. So, I bowled up and joined in. Mum had no idea where I had gone, so naturally she was in a blind panic. She had all the friends that she could muster plus half the drivers from the transport yard out looking for me.  Eventually the kindergarten teacher made contact, and I was returned home oblivious of all the fuss I had caused.

I remember that there was a coal box set against the house on the northern side, because I can remember Tony hiding from Dad in it, on one occasion when he was due for some behavioural adjustment after Dad got home.

Both of us were handfuls when we were kids, and we would fight constantly. Not because we didn’t like each other, but because we liked fighting! As an extra bonus, our parents hated it.

It is a strange thing, but of all the memories I have as a child (and they are not that extensive), memories of birthdays simply don’t feature as prominent events. We were a traditional family of the times, and I’m sure that we celebrated my birthdays in a traditional fashion, with presents and a special dinner with birthday cake, etc. but they are not what has stuck in my mind. I don’t even remember having birthday parties outside of the family when I was young, although we may well have had them.

We were more likely to have got new clothes and books than a lot of toys, so I guess that my earliest birthday memory was getting a Hornby Train set. I was probably 4 or 5 years old, and it came in a large cardboard box with tracks you could set up and trains and carriages to run on them. I can definitely remember playing with it on the polished wooden floor in our High Street house and getting under my mother’s feet. It is crazy to think of the prices they fetch these days.

Prior to that there was a large grey stuffed woolly dog which I carried around everywhere with me and played with. It was probably an earlier present, but I simply remember it always being part of my life.

The garage at the front of the section was the scene of my first (but by no means last) introduction to medical care in the town.  Back then, Dannevirke was fortunate to have a large (up to 180 beds), well equipped hospital, built during the Second World War to treat soldiers wounded in the Pacific War. It served the town and surrounding district well until it was closed in 1997. But, back to the garage.  Tony was working on his bike at the back of the garage, when I went out to tell him tea was ready. Whatever he was doing involved a heavy pair of tinsnips and a lot of effort. Somehow, they flew out of his hand and collected me on the forehead as I poked my head around the door. That produced a superficial cut that required a few stitches to close, but nobody thought much more about it for a few days, until it became obvious that I wasn’t getting any better. So, I was carted off to hospital where they found I had a compressed skull fracture, with fragments of bone pushed back into the brain (yes, I know, it explains a lot!) It is a huge testament to the GP (Dr Stephenson) and that rural hospital that I survived what by then had become emergency surgery, where basically they lifted the top of my skull up and removed the offending bone fragments.

I spent a long time recovering from that in hospital but only remember glimpses of it. One of my more vivid memories (I must have nearly recovered) was of the Thursday line up. They used to schedule tonsillectomies on a Thursday and there would be a row of kids admitted for the day. I would watch them wheeled off one by one, then come back and get woken up. Most of these kids were straight off farms from around the district, and their language when they woke up again was colourful, to say the least! A feed of ice-cream was administered to calm the tempers and sooth the throats.

Later on, that macrocarpa hedge would feature again too.  As I have said, we weren’t the best behaved of kids, and Mum was known to have a leather strap handy to threaten us with, and on rare occasions to use on our legs. She gave up on that idea after she found a succession of them, chopped them up with the kindling axe, and the pieces nailed to the macrocarpa hedge trunks. She took to using a long handled wooden cooking spoon after that, but it didn’t take us long to work out that if you let her hit the bony bit at the top of the knee; it did more damage to the spoon than to us. After she gave herself a fright by breaking one of her spoons, she gave up on that idea as well.

Another memory I have of High Street is sitting at the top of a large tree we had in front of the office. I would often climb up there, but I remember this day because we had been listening to the Queen’s Coronation on the radio (no TV back then), when news came through that Hilary had conquered Everest.  He had done that on May 29^th, 1953, and the Coronation was on June 2^nd.  I sat up in the top of the tree looking directly over the houses across the road at the dome (Takapari) on the Ruahine Ranges, trying to imagine the scale of what he had achieved.

Sometime around then, on a road trip back from the Hawkes Bay, I must have got my first inkling of an unknown past family history. I had always associated my family with Wellington or the Hutt Valley. That’s where my relatives lived, and that is where my parents came from. My maternal grandmother (who I only ever knew as Nana) had always lived with my mother’s sister’s family. That it was a result of the untimely death of the mysterious grandfather who I never knew, didn’t really register. Neither did the fact that she had been born and had lived elsewhere. But it seems that her parents, John and Elizabeth Morley, had lived at Otane in Central Hawkes Bay. It was obviously mentioned as we drove back down State Highway 2, and as kids, you simply accepted that. There is (or was) a very distinctive old farmhouse in a paddock on a hill, on the left just south of the township itself. I always associated it with where I heard of them as a child as we journeyed back to Dannevirke, although the actual house they lived in was on a sideroad at Otane itself.

Somewhere about this time, Dad contracted Tb. Whether it was M. tuberculosis or M. bovis I’m not sure, but the primary lesion was in his leg, and it spread to the bone. There was obviously a weakness there, as he had osteomyelitis as a child. Dad was packed off to the Pukeora sanatorium just south of Waipukurau. Antibiotic treatment for Tb was still in its infancy back then, and pretty savage. It seemed to me that he was there for a very long time. I remember playing in the grounds on top of the hill, and I remember mum driving us there and back. We had an old Citroen car (traction avante?) complete with front-wheel drive and the gear lever mounted in the dashboard.  Mostly I remember Tony and I sitting in the back seat on the journey home, fighting like cat and dog because we knew mum couldn’t do anything about it, and driving her to distraction!  It is a wonder we got home in one piece.

Tucked away among the mementos of my parents that I kept after they died, is a poignant letter that Dad wrote to Mum from the Sanatorium. Although undated, he had been there for six months, and had just been told that he would be there for at least another 3 months, taking Streptomycin and INS. It gives a hint of the huge stress that my mother must have been under, coping with two young boys and an uncertain future, with a sick husband far removed from their home. It is also a reminder, in this age of instant electronic communication, that back then even a telephone call was an expensive luxury reserved for periodic or special occasions, and that to communicate with someone, you wrote them a letter. Consequently, they were actually very good at it, and adept at expressing their thoughts and feelings.

The only plus to all of this is I must have been exposed to Tb at an early age and built up a natural immunity. So, when all the other kids were lined up at school for their BCG vaccination (they still did that back then), I was exempt, as my Manitou was positive. It probably didn’t hurt later on either when I was working in a laboratory where you had a 1:8 chance of catching Tb by growing it from cultures. I’m sure that my microbiological technique was impeccable, but having a natural immunity was definitely an advantage. These days, with the knowledge of disease aetiology we now have, it is certain that I was exposed and probably colonised by the disease, and like many others it is tucked away shielding somewhere in my body, kept in check by a healthy immune system.

Dad and the AA parted company in 1958, and we moved to a bungalow at 42 McPhee Street. It was there that I grew up and ‘blossomed’, (as much as I ever grew up or blossomed – I was still a pretty introverted naive kid when I left). Compared to High Street, it was large, as far as both the house and section went. I remember Dad completely renovating the back (kitchen and dining room), and of course the sitting room and rest of the house needed paint and wallpapering as well. We ended up with three bedrooms and a ‘sunroom’ (which became an extra bedroom); but the wash house was still separate from the rest of the house via a covered back porch, and boasted a large copper bowl set in concrete with a gas fire underneath, to do the actual laundry in. It was only later that it was joined by an archaic electric washing machine, with the meanest wringer you could imagine on it. (Oh dear, today’s youngsters won’t know what that means).

Puketoi Range from the Tararua Ranges.

Holidays, particularly trips away, were usually purposeful, social occasions for my mother. They were used to catch up with friends and family. There would be trips down to see her mother and sisters’ family, either at the farm out from Martinborough at Christmas, or their house at Lower Hutt, and later Carterton. There would be trips down to see Dads parents in Wellington, or his family, particularly his brother Norm’s family who we were close to. Visits were also made to their friends from Wellington such as Lorna and Jack Higgins at Tawa. One memorable holiday trip was to visit the Moats family at Taupo. Gwen Moats was a long-time friend of Mum’s; I think from when they both worked at the Ford Motor Company making munitions during WW11. Her husband was working at the Wairakei Geothermal Station just north of Taupo, and we had a very impressive tour around the geothermal field, including the ‘rogue bore’ that had swallowed up half the previous road through the field..

Another very early Christmas holiday was spent at Pourerere Beach with the Hendy family, Rowena Hendy being a friend of Mums. They used to live in Dannevirke, up by the showgrounds, and I always had a lot of respect for their four boys, who went on to excel academically. Back then, Pourerere Beach was pretty primitive, and the Bach was down by the old Whaling Station, with plenty of huge old whale bones still lying around. You could only get in and out by driving down the beach, and you had to time the tides just right to do so.

So, holiday trips away, just for the sake of a holiday, were very rare and only two stick in my memory. There were a couple of trips up to Hastings, where we stayed in cabins at the Kennedy Park Motor Camp. While there was a swimming pool and swings and stuff to play on (my brother was much more enthusiastic about swimming than I was) my main recollection was that it was pretty boring, despite the trips up to the Napier foreshore.

The other was a trip up to the Crystal Hot Springs, about 7km out of Matamata. This was a holiday park with motel accommodation and a couple of thermally heated swimming pools surrounded by native bush. We spent a lot of time either swimming in the pools or tripping around the Waikato. This was before anyone knew about the dangers of amoebic meningitis which ultimately closed the pools in favour of the nearby concrete lined Opal Hot Springs, although in a strange twist of fate, I was working in Microbiology at Waikato Hospital when it was discovered, in the most unfortunate of circumstances.

It is only with the knowledge and vision of hindsight that this trip becomes more unusual, and which also perhaps throws some light upon it. It was the middle of winter, and rural Waikato in winter is not a particularly appealing place. It was cold and wet, and a seemingly unusual choice for a family holiday. And it wasn’t until January 2021, that it began to make any sense. That was when I received an email from a Margaret Lines (who I didn’t know from a bar of soap at the time), who had discovered a close DNA relationship between her family and ours, and a half-brother, as has been described previously.

Malcolm, the half-brother we never knew, lived and died in 1993 at Waharoa. He and Margaret owned and ran the dairy opposite the Waharoa Dairy Factory (both of which have since been demolished), and later he was a roofing contractor. The thing is, Waharoa is just 23 km up the road from Matamata. Did Dad know this, and was he looking to make contact? And did Mum know also, and was she supporting him? These are questions that I’ll take to the grave, as all of those involved had died before my brother and I knew anything about it. If so, it was a remarkable secret to keep from us for so long, but as I have said before, social acceptance and appearances, and what others thought of them, were very important to my mother.

Gradually, formal education and the school system played a larger and larger influence in my life. It went from something that you just accepted, to something that you tolerated, to (eventually) something that you appreciated. I started Primary schooling at Dannevirke North School, which is now called something completely different (Ruahine Range School).

North School didn’t leave a huge impression on my memory, with one exception. It obviously had some infrastructure issues because around standard two, our class got to have our schooling at one of the produce halls the Dannevirke showgrounds just up the road. I don’t think that it made a significant difference to our schooling, but being away from the main school seemed like a bit of a holiday to us.

After Standard 4, I switched to South School for my last two years Primary schooling. I think that it had a much better reputation academically. I enjoyed it. During my last year there I even got to be organiser for the School Patrol, which supervised a busy pedestrian crossing across the main road just up from the school.

Then it was off to Dannevirke High School to complete my education. The DHS was a large school serving not just the town and environs, but also further afield by virtue of having a boarding school attached. Country kids either came and went by bus daily or stayed at the boarding school if they were from further afield.

You have to bear in mind that schools back then were very different places to what they are today. They were much more rigid and rule-bound for a start. And from a very early age, corporal punishment was not just accepted, it was expected. If you broke one of the myriads of rules, you could expect to be punished. Getting a rap over the knuckles with a ruler progressed to getting the strap in front of the whole class, where you had to extend your hand out, palm up, which was then hit forcibly several times with a leather barbers’ strop. Once at High School, corporal punishment also progressed to ‘the cane’. While not used as often as the strap was at primary school, its impression and effects tended to be a bit more long-lasting. If you had a difference of opinion with one of your fellow pupils, you were expected to sort it out in the playground or behind one of the school blocks. Given that a lot of them were fairly big lads straight off the farm, some with a well-developed sense of privilege, one of the early lessons that you learnt was who not to annoy!

The other very different feature of High School back then was compulsory military training. This involved every boy at school dressing up in military uniforms and marching around the sports fields on parade. Believe me, we had some teachers who were natural born sergeant majors as well. One of the things that it also involved was rifle drills, where you learn to strip down, clean and reassemble very real Lee Enfield 303 rifles. I can’t see that going down well in today’s education curriculum.

Other compulsory activities involving the whole school were sports (additional to PE classes) which mainly involved cross-country running, and singing assemblies. The periods where the whole school came together in the assembly hall for singing (mainly hymns) were interesting too. Mostly they were fairly chaotic, and when various factions of kids decided to play up, largely out of control. But just occasionally, as if by some unspoken agreement, the whole school would decide it was going to sing. Then it would almost literally raise the roof and leave the music teacher shaken.

Sport was interesting in what it taught me about both myself, and those who played it. The DHS was a very traditional place, as exemplified by the ‘school song’ which was ‘Forty Years On …” which I also hated. If you were a boy you were expected to play rugby in winter, and cricket in summer. For girls it was netball or hockey and softball. The jocks in the rugby 1^st Fifteen were exulted at school and tended to be held up as a shiny example of what to aspire to and featured prominently as Prefects and Head Prefects. You didn’t have to be a genius to work out that a lot of them were academic dullards and to put it mildly, bullies. Consequently, I avoided rugby like the plague and was lucky enough to be able to play hockey instead, as we had a couple of teachers who were pretty proficient in the sport. I used to play on the left wing, not because I was particularly talented, but because I could run faster than the others. The biggest problem with playing hockey at that time was a lack of competition (everyone played rugby), so we used to compete in the town’s senior competition. There were a number of country teams we would travel to and play, which sometimes involved chasing the sheep off the paddock in places like Norsewood before we could compete. Generally, sport at school reinforced what I was learning about myself academically. It was not about a lack of ability, but a lack of competitiveness. If I did something it was because I was interested and wanted to, not because I wanted to be ‘best’ at anything. Another reason why a rigid academic pass/fail system left me dissatisfied. Even back then I realised that no matter how good I became at something, there would always be lots of people who were better, and that was good thing because you could always learn from them. But throughout my life I have been continually tripped up by people and systems that judged you for being ‘better’ than others (or not, as the case may be) and made everything competitive.

Despite being mediocre academically, I was streamed into the top science classes. There I struggled with chemistry, physics and maths, as much because most of the curriculum lacked relevance to me and involved a lot of rote learning, as anything else. My saving grace in science was being able to switch physics (which I hated) for biology (which I loved). I was also a dead loss at French and managed to abandon that in the fourth form. I was still pretty immature at the time and consequently missed getting School Certificate on an aggregate pass in my first year of fifth form and returned to repeat it the next year. That year made a world of difference, and I suddenly discovered a love of critical thinking which made things like English comprehension (literature) a breeze and a delight. I still had issues with maths as well as the examination system, but back in those days there was no such thing as internal or cumulative assessment, you had one crack at a formal examination, and you either passed or failed.

So, I drifted through the school system. I enjoyed English because it led me deeper into the analysis of literature and books, which I had always liked. It also gave me an opportunity to express myself through the written word, and I found that I enjoyed that. I appreciated art and music, although I was not talented in either. I loved biology because it related to and explained the natural world, and I had a deep love and respect for the natural world in all its forms. I grew passably good at sport (hockey) despite struggling with a lack of competitiveness. Everything else was something to be learned, regurgitated, and forgotten. I was cognisant enough to realise that, apart from the jocks of the school, there were two types of achievers. One worked really hard and maximised their knowledge. The other just seemed gifted and achieved with the apparent minimum of effort. I had friends who fitted either description. I also knew that I was neither, I wasn’t going to set the world on fire or be a captain of anything. And that was just fine.

As the inevitable end of my secondary schooling came ever closer, the question of ‘what did I want to do next?’ became more insistent. From my point of view, it was more a question of what I didn’t want to do. I was quite sure that I didn’t want to become a teacher, like my mother and brother. And I was sure that I didn’t want to go to university without a clear and pressing goal of what I wanted it to lead to. Even though back then it was basically free. Somewhere along the line, it was suggested that I have a chat with the technologist running the laboratory at the local hospital (Ray Gibson?) He was a nice, approachable guy (and it annoys me that I am unsure of his name) and certainly encouraged me to look further into making medical technology a career. Although not in a position to offer training himself (the lab was too small), he suggested that I apply to Waikato Hospital Laboratory in Hamilton, which back then was a large teaching establishment taking on more than 30 trainees a year. The idea appealed to me on several levels. It was biological science based. There was the concept of helping others, without the arduous prospect of training to be a doctor. There was the prospect of being paid while you trained for a qualification. And then there was the prospect of leaving the small-town confines of Dannevirke behind, which as a teenager seemed really attractive.

In the end I wrote away, asking to be considered for their next training intake; as well as sounding out several other government science establishments, mainly based in Palmerston North. I almost immediately heard back from what was then DSIR Grasslands, based in Palmerston North, who were looking for a trainee technician. While botany wasn’t my overriding passion, it was a good opening and was soon followed up with an interview and an offer of employment. No sooner had I accepted this, than a letter arrived from Waikato Hospital offering me a place in their next intake – sight unseen! Such are the twists and turns of fate that shape our lives. It really was a ‘no contest’. I cancelled my acceptance of the Grasslands employment and made a quick trip up to Hamilton, was interviewed by the Senior Pathologist and Technologist, and accepted into the following years intake as a trainee medical technologist.

So began the end of my childhood, and a major chapter in my life. I secured boarding with a nice family in Hamilton, within walking distance of the Hospital. My brother Tony, now a qualified teacher, had been teaching in various country schools from Mauriceville to Foxton, before returning to the local Hillcrest school in Dannevirke. There he met and married another local teacher, Marlene Kelly, whose family farmed on Topgrass Road at Te Rehunga.

My interests had already started to coalesce. Apart from the normal teenage interests in contemporary music, dances and girls, there was still a love of reading, an abiding interest in the natural world including its geomorphology, and the beginnings of a passion in freshwater angling. I was becoming fascinated by the landscapes that surrounded me, from the dappled textures of a forest canopy to the way the early morning or late afternoon light picked out and accentuated the valleys in the surrounding hills.

Hamilton is a plains city. It basically sits in a huge basin surrounded by hills or mountain ranges. The basin drains either into the Waikato River which flows through it before eventually turning west into the Tasman Sea, or to the north-east where peat and swamplands drain into the Firth of Thames.

It features three major river systems, the Waikato River itself, New Zealand’s longest river, and its major tributary the Waipa River to the west, while in the east the Waihou River drains the Kaimai and Mamaku Mountain Ranges, flowing north into the Firth of Thames.

In 1967 I began a whole new chapter of my life; away from home, away from family, and plunging headlong into a career as a Medical Technologist. There are a couple of other contexts that this needs to be seen in.

Firstly, although part of a large work intake (over 30 a year for the first-year intake), Medical Laboratory Technology at Waikato Hospital at that time was an all-consuming apprenticeship. You worked, studied, attended lectures, learnt, and were tested all in the same place at the same time. And there was a lot to study and a lot to learn. It took 5 years full time just to qualify with the academic equivalent of a Master’s degree. Almost as soon as you started, you were rostered on to shift work, and then later on to on-call work. This involved working weekends and night shifts, then being on-call until the next day shift started. And almost as soon as you started you were involved in visiting patients in the various wards, collecting specimens or observing procedures. So, you were always grounded in exactly why you were there, and the importance of what you did and doing it correctly. But in context, if you were on shift or call and needed to get to the lab (or home again) at any time of the day or night, you simply called a taxi, and the hospital took care of the rest.

There wasn’t much time for anything else, certainly not regular team sporting activities, which I guess was one reason that there was a significant drop-out as the years progressed. And as you learnt, became more proficient, and were approved to perform more tests, so your responsibilities grew while working alone and unsupervised.  It was then your role to teach them to junior trainees. There were four major disciplines to come to grips with, Blood Bank/ Immunology, Haematology, Biochemistry and Microbiology. There were major national examinations in each of these after three years (usually held in Palmerston North) comprising three three-hour written, then oral, and then practical examinations for an Intermediate qualification. That was followed by either a further full year’s study and examinations in each of two of the disciplines, or a further two years advanced study in one of them, resulting in resulting in a formal qualification (and a scroll signed by the Governor General) which allowed you to put ANZIMLT after your name. It could be hard and unforgiving work and was absolutely the best way to learn. Given my loathing of examinations, and a precocity to freeze up during them, simply completing such a regimen was a huge achievement for me.

The other context was the times in which this occurred. I suppose everyone thinks of the period in which they matured as a special time. But during this period of the 1960’s and 1970’s society really did change considerably. And we were part of that. Again, you need to appreciate what the situation was in the ‘50’s to appreciate the depth of rebellion and change that subsequently occurred. There are many ways that you could illustrate this, but perhaps one of the easiest is through music, which I was just beginning to take an interest in. The music of the 50’s, such as ‘swing’ music was a bit like my life as a child growing up. It was easy, safe, controlled, orderly, predictable, unassuming, and inoffensive. Not necessarily bad, but some would say very boring. It fitted in with a lifestyle that accepted that your hair was short, your back was straight, your dress was modest, politeness and diffidence to your elders was mandatory, and nobody blinked an eye about youth being compulsorily shipped off to train, fight and indeed die in foreign wars that were meaningless to them. Like aspiring to the 1^st 15 rugby team, it was considered an honour and a duty.

Suddenly, along with the newfound freedom of living on my own or with similar flatmates, we were introduced to Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and a whole new protest movement, closely followed by the complete anarchy of rock music from the likes of Cream, the Rolling Stones, Jimmy Hendricks and many, many others. Even before that we were familiar with the culture shift coming out of Berkley Campus and Heights Ashbury in San Francisco, preaching love, peace, and sexual tolerance, other than the current societies ‘norms’.  And then there was Woodstock, like nothing that had ever been heard or seen before.

Of course, the establishment fought back, as it always does. And it was far better equipped, as it always is. The student anti-war ‘riots’ in Boston and Duke Campus were ruthlessly put down with young people shot out of hand. Closer to home we had the anti-apartheid movement, the South African rugby tour, and the infamous police ‘Red Squad’ with their long batons and riot tactics. Yes, I was in Hamilton the day the test was cancelled because of the pitch invasion. My abiding memory of that was of that night, when the hospital grapevine kept us up to date on the casualties coming in, as gangs of alcohol-fuelled frustrated football fans roamed the streets looking for ‘hippie’ people to beat up. And suddenly the huge police presence that had been there to control them was nowhere to be seen. I learnt a lot about my fellow man that day, both good and bad.

But, like living life pretty much on your own terms, most of the changes we experienced were liberating. Personal growth and learning might not have been structured, but it was expansive. Suddenly, not only was my non-work time my own, but I was earning money that allowed me to follow my own interests. The first couple of years were pretty wild, living in cheap grotty flats with alcohol and noisy parties featuring prominently, but I wasn’t going to suddenly switch from being an introvert to an extrovert, so my path remained set. And there was always plenty of studying for work to be done. But along with an interest in hard rock musical record albums, came a similar interest in folk music and classical music. Along with the compulsory work textbooks (which we bought) came an interest in classical writing, contemporary and science fiction and non-fiction, which I also bought.

Back in those days, a lot of the wetlands surrounding the city, especially to the south around Rukuhia and the peatlands to the north-east, had yet to be drained for farmland, and in winter, that meant fogs. Thick, heavy, cold, damp, cloying fogs. I can remember some days when you would wake up in thick fog, go to work in thick fog, it would lift enough to be able to see where the sun should be at just before midday, then by three o’clock in the afternoon it would start to come down again. And the next day would be exactly the same. How we survived in those cold, damp, draughty, poorly heated flats I’ll never know. But we did.

And as much as what was happening externally, there were a couple of people who made a huge difference to my life back then. The first was Ross Richards, a fellow trainee from my year’s intake. When I look back on it, you couldn’t get two more diametrically opposed people if you tried, and yet, we became firm friends. Ross was a confident, exuberant extrovert. He wrinkled me out of the comfortable boring family I was boarding with, and we went flatting. We drank, played loud music, and had frequent parties. He bought a car (an old Morris Eight) which was handy because I didn’t even have my driver’s license. Having come from a fairly restrictive family and a single-sex education he had a mission to bed as many young women as possible, something he was remarkably successful at. Unfortunately, this tainted view of the opposite sex was to play a major part in his latter life. But back then we were happy and carefree, and the world was our oyster. For a couple of years, we were simply young, irresponsible working students.

Luckily (for me) all this was tempered by another young trainee who started a couple of years after me. But again, perhaps some scene setting would be helpful in terms of an introduction. When I first started, the laboratory was in the old main building, on the second floor above the main entrance, and one floor below the operating theatres. It was an old, run-down, dimly lit place of narrow corridors, painted concrete walls and linoleum floors. The lab’s leading off it weren’t much better. It was a typical institution of its day. Just to the right of the top of the stairs to the floor was the Laboratory Reception, and in front of the desk, was a fridge.  This was where specimens collected from the theatres or the wards during the night, which weren’t urgent, were left. For those of us who started early (and I used to be one of those) the first order of the day was sorting these specimens out into the disciplines and ‘booking them in’. Like a box of chocolates, you never knew quite what you would find in there. Along with the routine blood, faecal and urine samples you sometimes got things left there from emergency surgery during the night. Two things that stick in my mind were an amputated gangrenous thumb in a jar, and a right leg complete from the knee down. Again, there was little chance that you forgot why you were there.

One of the Pathologists working at the Lab was a Dr Stephenson. A large, florid man (which may have been due to the whiskey he drank), he would nevertheless take a friendly interest in young trainees and provided what could be described as a right-of-passage. Dr Stephenson specialised in treating leukaemia’s, especially childhood leukaemia. Back then, just as there wasn’t the number of antibiotics available today to treat infections, the treatment of leukaemia was also rudimentary. Acute adult leukaemia was pretty much a death sentence, and the childhood diseases was only better by degree. The disease was diagnosed and monitored by performing bone marrow examinations, involving punching a hole in either the sternum or femur bone with a very tough needle, sucking out some bone marrow, and examining it microscopically. This was performed under local anaesthetic and was particularly painful.

Dr Stephenson would suddenly appear in the lab, grab a first-year trainee, and whisk them off to assist with the slide preparation during the procedure. Not only did it serve as a graphic reinforcement of exactly why you were working in the lab, it provided an interesting insight into the trainee’s resilience. There was a sort of unofficial competition over who would faint, and who would not. Often it was the burley guys who would slide first! Despite this, some patients became familiar faces around the lab, and it was hard not to develop an attachment to them, especially the kids. There was one young boy, who fought stoically and bravely. When he finally succumbed, the whole lab went into mourning. I also remember taking blood samples off another brave little Māori girl who had caught measles. With little immunity, she also succumbed.

One of the more intriguing aspects of Dr Stephenson’s work was to try and work out what might be precipitating the disease. It appeared to be less than random and would often present as a cluster of cases. There was one particularly striking cluster of cases at Netherton, a small rural settlement on the Hauraki Plains. No causal link was ever identified, but I sometimes think that if we knew back then what we know now, maybe that would have been different, and a whole lot of human suffering may have been avoided.

But back at the lab change was foot, and it was planned to knock the place down and build the country’s first clinical services block in its place. This huge megalithic building would have a whole floor of purpose-built, state of the art laboratories, all in the one place. Obviously, it would be a huge improvement on the old labs (anything would) but suffice to say that the original plans came back from the architects without a window in the entire five stories of the building. “Why do you need windows?” they reasoned. The whole building is completely air conditioned and artificially lit. Now anyone who has worked in labs would know that there are times when there is simply no substitute for natural light, and eventually we got windows – narrow features that didn’t open and which were too high up to see out of, but at least they let the light in!

While this was getting sorted out and built, the lab moved into temporary quarters in a new wooden, almost prefabricated building down beside the old Ward Seven (the dementia ward). What a breath of fresh air that was! The windows opened, it was light and airy, and the building was surrounded by open space, grass, and trees. As additional entertainment, we could look out the windows and track the old guys (they were almost always guys) making a break from the dementia ward, hotly pursued by nurses and orderlies. When we eventually moved into the new clinical services block it was almost an anti-climax, with artificial light and air conditioning that meant that when labs like Microbiology and Biochemistry (which had a lot of heat producing equipment in them) got too hot and turned the temperature on the floor down, the other labs and offices froze.

But one fine summers day in January, Ross and I had just returned to work in the New (temporary) lab after being on holiday. We got through the morning okay, but the main business of the day was organising a water fight at lunchtime when all the Heads of Dept’s and Pathologists were away at lunch. These were a quite regular occurrence and usually started between Roger Leach, Dennis Jones, and us, and they could occasionally escalate to the stage of using buckets to deliver water, rather than large syringes. And suddenly, there they were. New girls, part of a new intake of trainees, looking wide-eyed in disbelief at the mayhem. Among them was a tall girl with long dark hair, who would eventually change my life completely. She was Sharon French, a dark eyed, hugely intelligent dairy farmers daughter from Paeroa.

While there was attraction, there wasn’t any immediate inkling of what was to come on my part – I was still a bit naive and immature, although I suspect Sharon was a bit more certain of her feelings. Gradually we went from being part of a group that hung out together, to a couple who hung out together. There were others who came and went, but we always ended up back together. And out of acquaintance grew respect and friendship. And out of friendship grew love.

It is hard to describe how that dark haired, dark eyed girl changed my life, and continues to do so, except to say that it was like the dawn. It started gradually and kept building. It was exquisitely beautiful. Eventually it coloured and flooded through everything I saw, was, and did. Today (some 55 years later) there is no part of my life that isn’t seen through the lens of us, rather than me. I have been so incredibly lucky.

We became a couple. That wasn’t so unusual when you had a large group of young adults working together in an intense, demanding occupation. And the very nature of the job and the fact that most of us were away from home meant that you socialised together as well. So, there were lab parties, Nurses Balls, and organised events like car rallies, tennis tournaments, and even raft races in the Waikato River. Many of the couples we became firm friends with were also ‘lab-couples’. They were fun times, and for a while there, we were young, carefree, and bullet-proof.  But reality has a habit of catching up with you, and back then, it was often work related.

Compared to today, lab work back then was pretty primitive. But that was part of the attraction. Things weren’t cut and dried, and there was no automation. If you wanted something done, you did it yourself. If the answers you came up with weren’t ‘textbook’, then it was up to you to figure out why. If you were using equipment back then you had to know how and why it worked, how to take it apart, fix it and put it back together again, and calibrate it so that you knew it was accurate and precise. In Microbiology, if you wanted to grow organisms, you made up the growth media yourself, so you knew what it contained, why, and what it was supposed to do. Because you not only made it but tested it on target organisms before using it on patients’ samples.

But there were risks, and that too was an accepted part of the job. They wouldn’t be acceptable today, but they were back then. We used to pipette body fluids (including blood and serum) by mouth with only the most rudimentary of precautions. We used some pretty dicey chemicals, also often with only rudimentary personal protection. And of course, we were growing some pretty nasty bacteria, because that was how you diagnosed the diseases they produced and also tested whether they were sensitive or resistant to various antibiotics.

I have already mentioned that working in Microbiology meant that you had a 1:8 chance of catching Tb. While I was lucky, and probably already had some immunity thanks to my family history, others I worked with weren’t so lucky. And it is fair to say that its clinical prevalence out in the community was far greater back then as a result of social conditions. When I was still a first-year trainee, I went to a lecture by a visiting Auckland specialist respiratory physician and still remember him saying (to a bunch of doctors) ‘if you have a patient who presents with a fever (PUO) and no other obvious symptoms, they have tb until you prove otherwise.’

But that wasn’t the only danger. Apart from other nasty bacteria, glandular fever would regularly sweep through the lab, and hepatitis was always a possibility. Today we know a lot more about subclinical exposure and latent and post-infection manifestations of such diseases, but back then it was just an accepted risk.

Which brings me back to Sharon and me. Sharon came down with hepatitis and was packed home to her parents to recover. That isn’t the sort of illness that you recover quickly from, and she was stuck in Paeroa, and I was stuck in Hamilton for a couple of months with no way of seeing each other. If I ever needed any prompting, that certainly brought home to me just how much I loved and missed her. Our only real form of communication was by letter. When she finally returned to Hamilton and work, we had some serious catching up to do. But then I came down with it as well. I was as crook as a dog, and there was no chance of going home to get over it, so the Pathologist admitted me to the Medical Ward. And there I stayed for over a month, although the first couple of weeks are pretty much a blur. Slowly things got better, and I had plenty of time to contemplate what was important in my life. And at the top of that list was a dark eyed, dark haired girl called Sharon French.

So began a new, deeper phase of our lives. There were 21^st Birthday celebrations (a coming-of-age ritual that probably no longer exists), friends’ weddings, and then our own engagement and wedding. I got to know, like, admire and be accepted into Sharon’s family, and she into mine. There were many similarities, but also many differences between the two. One of those was the fact that I came from a small family without many close ties to relatives and family members. Sharon was just the opposite. Not only was her sister Olwyn living in Hamilton with husband Wynne and three kids, but her extended family stretched across the Hauraki Plains to Paeroa, Thames, Whakatane and beyond. Just how many there were, was bought home to me not long after we were married, at a Miller/French family reunion. Marg and Eric, Sharon’s mum and dad, used to organise one of these events every 10 years in Paeroa, and the only place in town large enough to hold it was at the racecourse. I remember walking into the venue and seeing a huge sea of faces, and it struck me – I am now related to all of these people! That was a challenge for an introvert like me, but they were all so nice and easy to get along with, it was not at all a problem. But I am getting a bit ahead of myself.

Our circle of friends still revolved mainly around work colleagues, although as I mentioned, Sharon’s sister Olwyn, husband Wynne and young family, Raewyn, Robin and Grant, lived close by and gradually became a bigger part of our lives. We were still flatting in town, and I still didn’t have my own transport and had only just got around to getting my license to drive. Luckily, Sharon had bought a car, a little white Ford Anglia, so we went everywhere together in that. A lot of the time (when we had time away from work at the same time), that was over to Paeroa to see her folks. Initially they had a house in Flora Street in town, but then they moved back out to the farm on Rotokohu Road, next to the golf course. It was there I sort her parents blessing and popped the question, and we got officially engaged.

We eventually moved into a flat in Nixon Street in Hamilton East and upgraded the old white Anglia car to a shiny yellow Datsun 120y hatch-back.

Preparations for our wedding carried on with minimal input from me. Sharon’s family were pretty traditional, and a traditional country town wedding was planned. Ross was to be my best man, and it was perhaps fortunate that the bout of hepatitis (and consequent danger of further liver damage) put paid to any excessive alcohol consumption. We used to drink a fair bit of our discretionary cash when we were younger, reckless, and flatting, so it is an ill wind (as they say) that blows nobody any good. My parents came up for the wedding and on the morning of January 15^th, 1972, along with friends and family, we made our way over the now very familiar road to Paeroa, and the small wooden church we were married in.  Once things actually got underway, I could relax and enjoy myself and the occasion, - I don’t even remember being particularly nervous. Sharon, in a traditional white lace gown, looked absolutely amazing, and everything else was just pomp and ceremony whose main importance was the public affirmation of our love and commitment to each other.

With the ceremony and formalities over, we went off to get our photos taken, before returning to the hall in the main street where the wedding breakfast was held. Word of our return got about, and I remember watching a stream of new Aunties (and a few more new Uncles) streaming out of the pub across the road and into the venue. It was perhaps my first introduction to the size and strength of Sharon’s larger family. The breakfast was a happy, relaxed, engaging occasion and it was quite late before we finally made our farewells. Luckily, we had anticipated this and booked into a motel not too far away, before continuing on to a honeymoon on Pakatoa Island. We returned back to our flat in Nixon Street, to find that our friends had been busy ‘decorating it’ to welcome us home.

It was about this time that my training was coming to an end, and I qualified as Medical Laboratory Technologist. My interest in Microbiology had really started while we were in the ‘temporary laboratory’ where one of our pathologists was a Dr. Mandal, an affable and extremely knowledgeable Ceylonese whose international experience in infectious diseases (which he readily shared) caught and held my attention. It was always the discipline closest to my interests in natural systems, and I followed my Intermediate qualification with an ‘O’ level, then an ‘A’ level in Microbiology.

Life wasn’t all about work however, as much as it impinged upon everything else. We bought a house in Cricket Place, in Melville, not too far from the Hospital, but far enough away to be able to forget it when we weren’t there. This was a major revelation to me. We both had steady jobs and were making reasonable money, and there was a Credit Union associated with the Hospital that was only too happy to lend us the deposit and arrange a favourable mortgage.

The section was down a right-of-way and backed on to a reserve, so it was nice and peaceful. We were happy homeowners! We had a well screened section complete with a large Para pool. This was great on hot summer days but tended to get a little bit neglected over winter, turning green and soupy, but great at growing up frogs. Unfortunately, our cat grew quite adept at catching these and bringing them inside to either dispatch with loud squeals, or to release so they could play hide and seek with us.

Another advantage of living in Melville was that we were close to Olwyn, Wynne and their family, and could spend a lot of time with them while the kids were growing up.

But things were changing, and our friends were moving on. Ross had completely self-destructed. He had paired up with Miriam, a lovely girl from the lab who worked as a histology technician. They became engaged, then married. I was Ross’s best man, just as he was mine. If Ross and I were from divergent backgrounds and personalities, his marrying a quiet Presbyterian minister’s daughter seemed even more incongruous. We remained friends but eventually the inevitable happened. She was a gorgeous doe-eyed junior trainee, and the now married Ross fell for her heavily. They ran off to Australia where they soon separated. The last I heard of Ross he had obtained a degree and was working at a University hospital doing research in haematology. He had apparently found God and renounced all of his former acquaintances.

Interestingly, I kept in touch with Miriam on social media. She was living in Australia also, and had remarried, but this unfortunately also didn’t last. She reached out to Ross (who she still carried a torch for) but was rebuffed. That might sound harsh, but I can understand that if you have drawn a line under one chapter of your life, reopening it may seem fruitless.

Also interestingly, Ross wasn’t to be the only highly intelligent male friend who ‘found God’ and lost everything else. One of my bosses at MAF did something similar after losing a son in a tragic road accident. In Ross’s case, it served as a loss of innocence for me. The complete reversal of values and beliefs seemed incomprehensible. But I was to come across this again on several occasions in my working life when people I had known and worked with in a dedicated service setting, suddenly developed highly capitalist behaviour, to the point of abandoning friendships and loyalties, when it was advantageous to them.

Lyn Cresswell and Gavin Hoggard (also close friends and colleagues) had married, then after qualifying they had travelled to Canada and were working as Med Tech’s there. Merilyn Tait had gone over to visit them, met another friend of theirs called Bob (also an American Med Tech), married him and they were living and working in Los Angeles. They asked us to come over for a trip they were planning together, and that was how we got to spend 3 months touring and camping in landscapes in the USA. Both couples eventually returned to New Zealand. Both eventually separated.

It was still an’ age of innocence’ in terms of my awareness of the ecological, social, and political consequences of our actions, (that probably didn’t start to happen until the mid-1980’s).  As alluded to earlier, I was still coming to grips with the social landscape of my new extended family. And there was a lot to discover.

Marg and Eric French (Sharons parents) lived in Paeroa. I like to think of Paeroa as a ‘transitional’ town. It sits beside the great plains and wetlands of the Waikato basin, nestled against the hills and mountains of the Coromandel Forest Park. It is connected to the ocean by the Karangahake Gorge to the east, and to the Firth of Thames to the north. It is close to the junction of the Waihou River and Ohinemuri Rivers. There are lots of different landscapes going on.

Sharon’s family was large and inclusive. When we first became a couple, her parents were still living in in Flora Street, in town. Later, before we married, they moved back out to the farmhouse on Rotokohu Road, not far from the Golf Club, (which they were enthusiastic members of). So, the road between Hamilton and Paeroa became quite familiar to me, with frequent trips across to visit them. Usually taking the ‘backroad’ across the undulating peat country (as it was then), the 77km car trip took just over an hour.

As outlined in later accounts, there were plenty of reasons to make the journey, apart from just escaping to the peace and quiet of the family home. Family Reunions, life milestones, new grandkids and weddings all drew the wider families back together again. There were trips through the Karangahake Gorge to Waihi Beach and to visit Gordon and Stella and their family, first in Edgecombe and later in Whakatane. Sharon even dragged me out on to the Paeroa Golf Club a few times for a round of golf (we had actually joined the new Ngāruawāhia Golf Club, at that time still only 9 holes and just 10 minutes’ drive north of Hamilton city.) Sharon had been a representative golfer whilst still at school.

Later, after we were married, Eric and Marg moved back into town, to a house in Taylors Avenue. This was subsequently also to become a familiar destination, as trips up to see them from Palmerston North with Leile were a frequent occurrence.

In an amazing coincidence, I had just scanned this photo in when we were alerted by a cousin to a television program of this place being bought again (and people wonder why I don’t normally watch television). Apart from a bit of a spruce up inside, very little has changed since it was grandma’s house. Structurally, it is the same. And the outside hasn’t changed a bit, except Marg’s large vegetable garden behind the grapevine wasn’t there. What has changed is the price, it was selling for well over 10 times what it sold for after Marg died. For what is essentially the same house, that is ridiculous. I remember that it had a great view from the back porch of the black escarpments on the surrounding hills.

By 1978 we were both qualified Med. Tech’s. I was 2IC of Microbiology and Sharon had specialized in Serology/Blood Banking. Out friends were also settling down and starting families, and in what spare time we had Sharon took up Bridge while I rekindled an earlier interest in trout fishing, roaming the rivers and lakes of the Waikato.

There were plenty of choices when it came to this, some of which I’ll cover in the chapter on fishing. An interest in this activity had been kindled before I left home, with occasional visits to the Manawatu River with a spinning rod and lures. They were not successful at catching fish, but they did spark an interest in how water flowed through and changed the landscape, as well as the creatures that lived within it. With the gradual increase in discretionary time, and discretionary income that came after I was qualified, I was keen to revisit this interest.

Initially, I used to go out with Gavin Hoggard, and together we explored the rivers, lakes, and dams of the Waikato Basin. The rivers were quite different to the middle Manawatu I was used to, and were either rainbow trout, or mixed rainbow and brown trout fisheries. Draining a basin as large as the Waikato, most of these rivers were larger, longer and deeper than I had previously encountered. Many flowed through peat land, and there were even hydro lakes to sample. And I even started catching fish in some of them! Almost accidentally at first, but gradually I started to figure out what worked, and why, and could repeat those successful strategies on other rivers and lakes. I must have been a bit more enthusiastic about it than Gavin, as increasingly I went out on my own. That was the beginning of the activity becoming an immersive experience, with just myself, an everchanging river, the environment it flowed through, and the life it sustained. And if I was lucky, some of that life ended up sustaining me!

We fished the Waihou and its tributaries under the Kaimais, The river was quite pastoral and could be heavily weeded, but we enjoyed success fishing it. To the west and south the long Waipa River provided many different fishing opportunities, from its headwaters to the junction with the Waikato at Ngāruawāhia. To the southeast, the Pokaiwhenua River was a personal favourite, with its rocky gorge holding good fish before it too flowed into the Waikato River. And I fished the Waikato River Hydro Lakes, especially Karapiro, Arapuni and the Waipapa (another personal favourite).  And of course, when visiting Paeroa, the Ohinemuri River offered great fishing opportunities.

I fished the fast-tumbling headwaters and gorges, the slow, deep pools on the plains, and the brooding stillness of the lakes; from limestone country to peat plains and everything in between. Without even realising it, I became absorbed in the countryside and its waterways.

But we were both getting restless. Despite the family, the friends, the fishing, the bridge, the golf, and having a place of our own. We were both well qualified in our respective disciplines, with responsible positions, and there were always conferences and seminars to go to, with socialising as well as learning. But the nature of the work and the qualifications were changing. University trained scientists were accepted as equals, at least up to Intermediate level. This was great for pay parity, but their medical knowledge and experience was woeful. They simply lacked the grounding in patient care that we had been given. And pathology privatisation was beginning to appear. Many of our friends embraced this change as an opportunity. To me it felt like we were in danger of losing something really important. It was all about picking and testing the low hanging fruit using the least skilled (and therefore paid) staff you could get away with. And at that time I simply couldn’t see the opportunity of advancement past where I already was happening anytime soon.

There was definitely something missing from the Landscape we lived in. It seemed a good time for a change of scene. Sharon and I, both from small rural town backgrounds, were starting to feel that even Hamilton was getting too big, too fast, and too much like Auckland. I can’t even remember how I even heard of it, but there was a position of Charge Microbiology Technologist going with the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in Palmerston North. It seemed a great opportunity to keep learning and developing in a very similar field of study, but without the urgency and demands of human health. And Sharon was open to the idea as well. I applied for the position and was accepted. We were off to Palmerston North!

In 1978 I applied for and got a new job running the Microbiology Lab. at the MAF Animal Health Laboratory in Palmerston North. It was a very similar set up to the Hospital Lab, except the range of diseases and infectious agents was greater and less familiar. But as a bonus, there was no shift or call!

It was never our intention to settle in Palmerston North for a long time. Our previous experience with the city, apart from visits when I was young, was to fly down in mid-winter to sit national examinations, then fly back to Hamilton. This may well have influenced how we perceived the place!

But Palmerston North was where the diverse elements of our landscapes merged into a place of comfort and belonging. Beside the Manawatu River that I had grown up with, under the ever-present peak of Whareti in the Ruahine Ranges that I had known since a lad, the city sprawled out on the river’s floodplain.

The floodplain basin was rather like the Waikato, but on a smaller scale and with the rivers flowing south and west rather than north and east. To the north the plains quickly transformed into undulating hill country, pushed up by land movement against the main mountain range and ultimately culminating in the towering protective volcanic peaks of Taranaki to the west, and the central plateau to the north. To the east the Ruahine and the Tararua Ranges towered above the plain, split by the Manawatu Gorge, one of the few places where a river transected the country’s main ranges. To the south, the plain was squeezed into an ever-narrowing gap between the mountains and the sea. And to the west lay the huge sweeping ocean curve of the South Taranaki Bight, with its relatively shallow sandy waters.

Within this basin the competitive dynamic forces of the rivers transporting shingle and soil west from the eroding hills, and the encroaching sandhills from the sea, produced a large, wide, low, flat floodplain that once contained vast lowland forests and even larger swamps. Both of which had been cleared and drained, then transformed into rich grassed pastures.

The city was smaller and less bustling than Hamilton but had everything we needed. It was flat and easy to get around. It was somehow cheerful and more personal.

Early History.

Manawatū, a name that means “heart standing still’, is a place where fertile plains nourish, where the river carves its own path forward and the mountain ranges - Ruahine and Tararua - stand tall. First settled some 400 years ago by Māori, the region is home to many iwi; Rangitāne o Manawatū, Raukawa and Ngāti Kauwhata. At Kākāriki, Tokorangi and Te Reureu are Maniapoto and Tūwharetoa.

The Manawatū region takes its name from the mighty river than runs through it. The great Manawatū River was named by an explorer named Haunui-a-Nanaia who had travelled down the coast from Taranaki, chasing after his runaway wife and her lover. Haunui-a-Nanaia had already crossed other big rivers, naming them as he went. Whanganui (meaning expansive mouth), he splashed through the waters of Whangaehu (cloudy waters), felling a tree to cross the Turakina (turaki - to throw down) river, he looked upon the Manawatū river with great apprehension. His heart stood still when he saw it because of its size and beauty and so it was named Manawatū River. Manawatū meaning ‘Heart Standing Still. Manawa meaning heart, and tū meaning standing still.

The traditional history of the Manawatū begins with the arrival of Whātonga. Whātonga was one of three chiefs on board the Kurahaupo waka, which journeyed across the Pacific Ocean to Aotearoa, New Zealand, possibly as early as the 12th Century.

Whātonga was the father of Tara, the eponymous ancestor of the Ngai Tara people, and grandfather to Rangitāne (also known as Tānenuiarangi), from whom all Rangitāne descend. He lived near Te Matau a Māui (Cape Kidnappers in Hawkes Bay), where he built a meeting house called Heretaunga, but he was also a great explorer.

On one expedition, he sailed along the Wairarapa coast to Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington) and across to the Wairau Region at the top of the South Island. Eventually, he sailed up the West Coast of the Lower North Island, entering the mouth of the Manawatū River. Whātonga paddled on upstream where he eventually encountered vast forests and bountiful food resources, which he first viewed from a high point on the Tararua Range just south of Te Apiti - Manawatū Gorge. The forest at the eastern end of the gorge he named ‘Te Tapere Nui o Whātonga’, meaning ‘the great district (or food basket) of Whātonga’.

This expedition by Whātonga triggered an expansion and migratory phase for the Ngai Tara people, who made their way south from Heretaunga to Central and Southern Hawkes Bay, the Wairarapa and Te Whanganui-a-Tara. The Rangitāne people went on to settle in Central and Southern Hawkes Bay, the Wairarapa, Manawatū, Horowhenua and Wellington Regions of the North Island, and the Wairau Region of the South Island.

The lower reach of Kapiti Island was the boundary line between the two tribes, giving rise to the full name for Kapiti Island – Te waewae kapiti o Tara rāua ko Rangitāne.

Until 1866 Palmerston North was a clearing, known as Papaioea, in the forest that stretched from the main ranges almost to the west coast. It was an area of significance to Rangitāne with pā sites at Awapuni, Te Motu o Poutoa and Te Wanikau.

The land was sold to the Crown in 1864 and in 1866 a township, designed by J. T. Stewart, was laid out in the clearing. The township stagnated until the revival of immigration and public works in 1871. The first European settlers were Scandinavians. They, and later others, worked primarily at roadmaking. For many years Palmerston North relied on public works and sawmilling. But by 1886 its future was assured. The west coast railway from Wellington was built, and pastoral farming was underway.

We moved down from Hamilton and rented a house at the top end of town in Conway Place, near the PN Golf Club. I started to come to terms with veterinary pathology, while Sharon started working for the local Medical Lab. At that time, the AHL was in rented laboratories on the 5^th floor of the Veterinary Tower at Massy University. Microbiology had a staff of three, plus me and Barry Stevenson, the veterinary pathologist. There was also ‘Chappie’ Peter Chapman, the Head Technologist, a most affable Australian.

It was a great time for me. The work was new and interesting and there was a lot to learn – including new pathogens, new ways to diagnose them and new host species they interacted with. The university environment was great fun, and the pathology team approachable and helpful.

A significant difference back then was that most of the specimens we received were collected in the field by veterinarians (often at autopsy) and mailed to us in wooden boxes. They came from all over the country, a journey which may have taken days, and there was no refrigeration or overnight couriers back then. Consequently, in midsummer, specimen reception was a very ‘interesting’ place, and the smell when the boxes were opened was not for those with weak stomachs. There was much that was simply far too autolyzed to be diagnostically useful at all.

It was an ideal work environment for me. There wasn’t the stress of doing continual shifts and callouts in a hospital situation, but it was still a public service in the true sense of the words. There were heaps of new and interesting things to learn and plenty of knowledgeable people eager to teach me, but I could apply all the skills and knowledge I had already accumulated. There was an explicit expectation that as well as applying what knowledge I had, I would make the time to develop more, and further to that, research areas of interest and investigate how they could be applied in a veterinary setting.

As described elsewhere, before I knew it, an infectiously friendly guy called Colin Potts had recruited me into the Massey Angling Club, so there was no problem filling in the extra discretionary time I had outside of work with something I really enjoyed. The club was a collection of professorial and technical staff from within the veterinary science and wider university, so it was not only great fun but also a great way to meet and relate to the wider university environment. And best of all, I got to learn, explore, and know the landscapes, rivers, and fisheries within the wider Manawatu, Tararua and Wairarapa regions.

The Animal Health lab continued to grow, and just like there had been with the Waikato Hospital lab, there were great plans afoot to build a new, state-of-the-art laboratory complex that could house all the functions in one place. As a start, we moved to a temporary laboratory building just below the university beside the old original Batchelor homestead. This grand old building had unfortunately deteriorated beyond repair, so the plan was to knock it down and build a large new laboratory complex, combined with the MAF regional office, which was currently housed in town.

Much like the temporary new lab at Waikato, the MAF temporary new lab was a great experience, and a happy time. It was light and airy, I was doing work I loved and which I considered useful, I had autonomy and freedom in my decisions, was still learning, had great staff and support, yet along with the responsibility and work, there was still the capacity to have fun.

We bought a house on Maxwells Line, Awapuni, on the southern end of the city. It was one of the original houses in the area and had been built by the racehorse trainer Trevor Knowles after he won the Melbourne Cup, using heart Totara and Rimu milled from Wanganui. If you wanted to nail something into a stud, you had to just about drill a hole first, the bones were that tough. There were paths out the back that used to lead to stables, a horse paddock next door, and we could look out of the kitchen window straight across to the racecourse. One of the features was a sliding glass door separating the lounge from the dining room, with the winning Melbourne Cup horses etched on it. Not that we were racegoers, but the house was homely and comfortable. I could bike the 7 km to work and back on the bridle path beside the river, which I really enjoyed.

It was well fenced, and when we bought it there was a ‘paddock’ down one side of the section that was being used to graze a sheep in. There were also 3 heritage apple trees and a large apricot tree, and I gradually increased ‘the orchard’ with newer apple trees, plums, pears, mandarins, limes, grapes, elderberry, raspberries, and even a mulberry tree (I had no idea just how big they could get!) We also ripped out and remodeled the kitchen, which was about the only thing that needed doing to make the whole house comfortable.

Meanwhile, I continued to learn as much as I possibly could about Quality Management. I got to be the Regional Quality Coordinator, and part of a National Quality Management team. It was fun and I got to learn a lot about the various 'business streams’ within the organization whilst helping them with their service delivery.

Around this time, I suffered my first major health scare. A perforated diverticulum resulted in my being admitted to hospital for an emergency laparotomy, a bowel resection, and a colostomy. I spent a long time in hospital and at home recovering from that. Perhaps fortunately, Sharon was overseas for the worst of it. Even luckier, they could reverse the colostomy when I had recovered sufficiently. While I understood that it was lifesaving and absolutely necessary, it wasn’t something I in any way enjoyed. But major surgery like that does tend to focus you on what is important in life. 

Back at work, I picked up another couple of projects. The first was developing an organizational-wide intranet with Grahame Walton, another manager who used to be responsible for apiarists. I was developing a keen interest in the use of computers in the workplace, and there was a plan to have all employees with access to one. If you think that this wasn’t (a) necessary, and (b) revolutionary, consider this. The Regional Office (in town) had a pool of about 40 typists. If you wanted to communicate with a client (or even another manager/employee) other than by telephone, you wrote out a letter and sent it into the typing pool. They typed it out under an official letterhead with an addressed envelope and sent it back. If it contained mistakes, you corrected them and returned it to the typing pool. Once it was returned mistake-free, you could send it out.

Communication was not a speedy process! So, in conjunction with Geoff Haworth, the local IT Manager, we developed a system whereby any employee could communicate electronically with any other employee, or by email to any external clients. Or they could type and print their own letters (oops, sorry typists). The results were interesting. Most people took to it like ducks to water. But a significant number of employees refused to have anything to do with it, seeing it as not part of their jobs. Of course, the speed and ease of the system sold itself, and even the most recalcitrant eventually came on board.

Another job I picked up was that of Regional Resource Coordinator for Biosecurity. At that time, MAF ran a ‘standing army’ of people, either MAF employees or industry employees that were trained in biosecurity responses, such as tracing, trapping, and spraying. When there was a biosecurity incursion they could immediately swing into action and were usually rotated on a two-week basis, which was my job. To many meat industry employees with repetitive or unpleasant jobs this was like a paid vacation, and finding volunteers was not usually a problem. Of course, the industry managers hated it and the disruption it caused, but even they could see that if their industry was on the line, it would be a different story. While in this role, we had the Avondale fruit fly incursion, which ran for exactly 12 months, so it was a fair chunk of my work. These days the ‘standing army’ is no more, and such work is ‘contracted out’. I hate to think what the cost of that is, but I’m sure that it is sold as ‘saving taxpayers’ dollars by costing taxpayers dollars.’

I started running an internal auditing system over the regional businesses, putting my quality management skills into practice. Again, this threw up some interesting results. While senior managers were generally appreciative of these findings, some of middle managers weren’t, preferring to ‘shoot the messenger’ for pointing out ‘failings’ rather than embracing them as opportunities. Fortunately, all the training and studying I had done had both warned me and prepared me for this.

But it did reveal a rather fatal flaw in the implementation of the quality management system within the organization. While it was embraced by most senior management as a way to enhance organizational performance and client satisfaction, most middle managers (and the ‘new commercial public service’ had spawned a lot of middle managers) saw it as something they could get others to do while grabbing the credit for any results. The political climate and messaging at the time was that “if you are providing a public service, you had better be doing so at a profit” and MQM and Asure were desperately trying to fit this model. Wave after wave of restructuring was trying to achieve that while creating fear, resentment, and despondency among the staff. Also, a lot of these middle managers were commercially trained and oriented. It was a bit like telling a bunch of sharks to ‘play nice and gentle’.

This was no better illustrated than by ‘Safebase’, which I was also involved with. Safebase was a quality management system specifically designed for the food industry, especially meat works. It was developed by a guy from Assure who could set up excel spreadsheets and spit out integrated charts like a firecracker spits out sparks. But he needed a hand turning it into a Food Safety Assurance program which they hoped to sell to the Meat Industry. The thing that sticks in my mind about this guy was when he told me “Do you know that these meat workers might only work for part of a day, until the stock runs out, but they get paid for a full day? We are going to smash those bastards, and their ****ing union.” This was not a particularly unusual attitude towards industry workers, but a very informative one. There were at least two other managers apart from myself involved in getting this commercially ready, at who knows what cost. Then a senior manager in head office sold it in its entirety to the Meat Industry Association – for the princely sum of $1.

The waves of restructuring continued, with few clear goals evident. I managed to duck the redundancies of the next two, but the third one got me. That was because they closed the regional offices all around the country. The wastage was appalling, in terms of people, of public good, and of assets. How the concept of public service had changed from so many highly trained staff, including pathologists, veterinarians and industry experts supporting farmers, to a few so-called managers in Auckland and Wellington asking industry how they could help them, mainly by changing the laws, rules and regulations. The whole Batchelor Laboratory complex: a new, modern, purpose-built suite of buildings, was simply abandoned and the functions taken over by a private laboratory in town. I’m glad that I had left before then. All except the Seed Testing lab. They couldn’t find anyone willing to buy that, and many exports depended on it.

Apart from the waste of human lives, if there was one metaphor that summed up this decision, it was the regional library. The regional reference library was huge, taking up half of the upstairs wing of the new regional building. It contained countless texts on all sorts of subjects and employed two full-time librarians. It served as a reference library for not just allof MAF but many other libraries and institutions nation-wide. It was a favorite place of mine that I used frequently. The two librarians were made redundant, and several very large skip-bins placed below the exits and balcony. Every book and paper in the place were then thrown down into the bins and taken away to the dump. As far as I know they didn’t burn them, but they might as well have.

And now, two and a half decades later, exactly the same thing is happening all around the country, as we lurch into the same political philosophies that private enterprise is inherently superior to public service, and that the people caught up in that decision are expendable.

Then, with the help of Gill Presland, whose daughter Helen was a close friend of Leile’s, I got a job at the local Polytechnic, auditing the delivery of their educational programs. Whilst I was quite familiar with the principles of what I did, the context was completely new and therefore a delightful opportunity to learn, despite having once vowed never to follow my mother and brother into the education system. Again, it was fun at first while I was learning and supported. But people kept disappearing, including my boss and my colleagues. And eventually I came up against the very same issue that I had in MAF. Senior management saw themselves as quite distinct from everyone else, with completely different behaviors and expectations. In fact, they were so different that they shut themselves away from the rest of the institution behind locked doors! If you wanted to talk to them, you needed a previous appointment. Naturally, what tended to happen was that they talked to you (when they wanted to) rather than the other way around. Then eventually in 2009, more Government ‘efficiency’ reforms caught up with the Education sector, and my job disappeared. It was hugely ironic that my job was replaced with a version of the exact same quality management system that had been implemented and failed at MQM. And given the exact same commercial expectations and management being imposed on the education sector, one could confidently expect the results to be the same. I wish that I could say that my departure was harmonious or pleasant, but it wasn’t.

At the age of 61, I fully expected to find another job, perhaps one without any grand expectations, but which could keep some income rolling in. What I found instead was one of the paradoxes of modern employment. While people are expected to work until they are 70 or 75 years old, very few employers are prepared to employ people after about age 50. So, albeit unwillingly, I retired.

So much for the bleaker landscapes of my later working years. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom.

Our little girl grew up into an equally remarkable woman. Quick to learn, academically gifted and with a remarkable memory, she managed to combine that with a sensitive and empathetic nature. Schooling led to a degree in psychology at Massey University which she decided was not a career she wanted to pursue, so she switched to law prerequisites and enrolled in a law degree at Victoria University in Wellington. Successfully completing that led to a job with Chapman Tripp until she decided that, despite the many skills she had acquired, she wasn’t enjoying the rat race and wanted to return home, so she came back to work in a law firm in town. Quickly deciding that wasn’t a good fit either, she took a job working for the Employers and Manufacturers Association, where her interest in Human Resources blossomed. That led to a job with Fonterra, New Zealand’s largest company, which she enjoyed at a local level, but she was eventually pushed up their corporate ladder to a point where her HR values became incompatible with their corporate values. So, she left and joined PowerCo, an electricity supply company where she was able to build up a culture of inclusivity that she enjoys and thrives in. But even that succumbed to relentless commercial and political pressures and seeing the writing on the wall and her job in jeopardy, she has switched to a new government super ministry.

She grew up as a strong, independent, and intelligent woman, whom was patient and loving when she challenged my preconceptions and expectations about personal life. Her ability and determination to map out her own future is no better illustrated than by her marriage to a local partner and then having two fantastic sons, raised in a stable family unit which we have been able to be a part of.  As a result, the most challenging aspects of raising children have become the most rewarding.

In September of 2008 we moved houses. Despite having reroofed the place in Maxwells Line, it was starting to show its age and was too big for just the two of us. It was cold, draughty and a bit damp in winter, and the grounds were getting too big to maintain properly for a couple whose recreational focus was elsewhere. It was going to need some major renovations soon. Sharon had her eye on a place just down the road off Maxwells Line that had been on the market for a while, that she used to walk past on her training walks around the racecourse. I couldn’t see much point to moving such a short distance, but we went and had a look, and it was difficult not to be impressed.

It was a relatively large 3-bedroom house on a small section, which was well planted out as the previous owner’s wife worked in a local nursery. It was also brick with a steel roof, so maintenance of the house and grounds would be significantly easier. It was built to catch the sun, with large windows and French doors allowing plenty of light and warmth in, while looking out over a courtyard. There was a spacious open-plan kitchen, dining and living area, and compared to Maxwells Line, the fittings and fixtures were of high-end hotel status. Piped gas fueled two heaters and an infinity hot water system, so not only was there an endless supply of hot water (to fill the spa bath in the main bathroom) but there would be no more sourcing and chopping firewood! The gas heaters were eventually replaced by a ducted central heating system that warms the whole house on even the coldest days.

There was a built-in double garage with internal access, and unlike the grounds at Maxwells Line, it wasn’t going to flood in winter storms. It was an easy sell in the end, and thanks to Leile who had arrived back from Wellington with lots of negotiating skills particularly in real estate, we bought it at a reasonable price, which was far less than what it was on the market for.

That just left the small matter of dealing with 30 years of accumulated ‘stuff’ at Maxwells Line and trying to shoehorn what we wanted to keep into a much smaller space. It is amazing what you can accumulate in that time, and we had to be quite ruthless about discarding things (particularly me). Lots of stuff was sold, lots more went to the Red Cross, and for the rest we hired a large skip bin, and it went to the dump. And at least when we did move, there wasn’t far to go, unlike the move down from Hamilton.

It was gratifying to see that the old place on Maxwells Line was sold to a young builder, who did all the things that we would never have got around to. He completely gutted and remodeled the interior, cleared all the trees off the section, refenced the section and replaced all the drainage, bulldozed the garage and replaced it with a new one around the back, split off the orchard into a separate section and put a house on it, which his family lived in while he did up the other house, then sold off both as separate units. It is great to see that the old place is once again a family home.

Like my brother Tony, I have enjoyed photography and recording the landscapes I have visited or lived in. Today, there is so much to feel happy (and more importantly, contented) about, right here, right now. Just being here, in this moment, when many of my contemporaries haven’t made it, is a huge gift. Being at a stage in life where I don’t have to get up each morning to fulfil somebody else’s expectations and where my time is my own is hugely liberating. Being able to watch generations of my family grow and develop is another wonderful gift that wasn’t always a possibility and will never be taken for granted. Being able to live comfortably but not materialistically, is something not given to everyone and something to be thankful for. To still be curious, and more than any other generation to have the means and the time to pursue that curiosity is wonderful. To be able to live in the moment and celebrate the small gifts of the day, such as the warmth of the summer morning sun streaming through the kitchen window as I enjoy my morning coffee, or the gentle stillness of the sunset. To know that while things could always be better, and you could always have and do more, you and they are sufficient, just as they are.

If the weather is fine and my energy levels are good, there is always the lawns and gardens to contemplate and work on, or even better, a bike ride along the river trail at the end of the street. What a luxury and a pleasure that is. Once upon a time, I would have been up and away into the riversides fishing or exploring the countryside and beaches. While the medical conditions that have accompanied the advancing years may preclude that these days, a lifetime habit of photographing where I have been along with online access to those of others, means they can be revisited at will.

Music.

And now for something completely different. They say that there are two times in life when music is most important. Once when you are young, and once when you are old. Safe to say that when I was growing up music didn’t feature much on my radar. Firstly, because it was bland, controlled, safe, and generally very white. Secondly, the only exposure I had to it was either at school or on the radio/tv. It seemed to me that popular music consisted almost exclusively of songs from musicals or songs sung in harmonics. I really didn’t appreciate classical music at all. I have already written about singing at school. I would just add that it included a couple of musical productions put on by the high school and played publicly in the town theatre. I featured in the chorus, and it certainly didn’t spark any desire on my part to tread the boards further or even listen to vocal music as a form of relaxation.

Music started to change for me in the last few years before I left Dannevirke. The 1960’s changed popular music forever, and I was not immune to those changes. Apart from seeing early performances from bands like the Beatles on television and the rise of the folk ballad, the local church started to hold dances for teenagers on a Friday night where local bands introduced me to classic rock. Back then it seemed like a brutal rebellion against all that I had considered music to be.

By the time I arrived in Hamilton in the mid-1960’s and started working, music was definitely an important part of my life. Interestingly, it took two different turns. Perhaps as a follow-up from those Friday night dances, on Friday nights in Hamilton I went to the Hamilton Folk Music Club. I’m not even sure how that came about, but in an upstairs hall in Garden Place on a Friday night I got together with other folk song enthusiasts to listen to, and sing along with, musicians performing folk songs. You must remember that at the time, along with the emergence of rock music, folk ballads and songs had become the commentary and protest vehicle of societal changes being driven everywhere, but particularly in the USA.

So, I was introduced to Woody Guthrie and Pete Seegar, and from them to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. And along the way there was Peter, Paul and Mary, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Scott Hamilton, Donovan, Gordon Lightfoot Mary Hopkins, and Ario Guthrie.

The folk-rock and folk-blues genres produced groups such as Jefferson Airplane, the Mamas and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, and the Moody Blues, to name but a few.

To put this in context, the 1960’s and 1970’s were times of major social change, and the music of the time reflected that. Musically, these changes tended to focus on the USA, but you could debate whether it was because the problems were greater there, or the music industry was centered there, or whether the media tended to focus there. But where America went, the rest of the world went also. My awareness, like many others, began with the 1960s counterculture movement, starting in the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco. This was a direct rebellion against the accepted expectation that young people would go to college, then either serve in the military or services, get a job, marry, have kids and repeat the cycle. And of course, if you weren’t Caucasian or were poor, then your access to this cycle was difficult to unlikely. The Hippie movement said ‘Nope, ain’t doing any of that. I’m not working for the man to make him rich; I’m certainly not going to fight in your dirty little wars, and I am going to love freely based on who, not what, somebody is. You can take your current society norms and stick them you know where’.

Of course, this was provocative, and I have covered this elsewhere, but San Francisco gave us genderless and inter-racial free love, flower-power, musicals like Hair and events like Woodstock. The songs and music of the times were anti-war, anti-establishment and full of love. There was so much pent-up resentment to societal control, compulsory recruitment for foreign wars and racial inequality that it held and spread. Society did change, and it was remarkable to see that change blossom. It is even more remarkable to see that change continuing to be dismantled today.

At the same time, music was being revolutionized in other ways, and it was impossible to ignore them, even if you wanted to. Rock music came of age, and for us it was a huge release from the demands of medical laboratory work, study and its relentless shift and call schedules. Once we started flatting, Saturday night was party night. Our lab parties were well attended and well lubricated. The emerging rock music featured prominently. One of the first LP records I bought myself (with my own money) was by the Cream. It was joined by Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd, the Who, the Beatles, and of course Jimi Hendrix.

Eventually our lifestyle and our music became less frenetic and softer. Perhaps as a counterbalance and an escape from the pressures of both work and peer lifestyles I bought a portable record player which I could keep in my bedroom in our flats and play my own music. And I discovered classical music. Not exclusively, but Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin were joined by more contemporary composers such as Gershwin as part of my recreational listening. This has persisted to this day, with access to music streamed from my computer including both orchestral and violin performances.

Of course, the rise and fall of human rights has been paralleled in New Zealand. The opposition to the Springbok Tour saw the legitimization of a major shift in race relations in the country which saw Māori culture start to flourish. Despite vociferous opposition from right-wing and conservative politics this continued until about 3 years ago. Then our human rights started to come under sustained attack, funded and organized partly by far-right organizations and money from the USA and Britain feeding into far-right politics and fringe organisations here. In terms of race relations, the inclusion Te Reo into the national language, the dawning realization of the depths of the effects of colonization and the move towards co-governance have sparked a massive pushback from both them and capitalist industries. In terms of gender equality, we have seen (along with Finland and Scotland) a woman Prime Minister widely regarded both here and overseas as one of the best, hounded from office by male toxicity. Coincidence? I think not. Like most of the rest of the world, we have seen a transition from acceptance and tolerance to a complete preoccupation with the self above everyone else. As the saying goes, ‘this will not end well.”

Interestingly, with the availability of almost unlimited music on demand electronically today, my tastes have become much more eclectic. While the roots described above form the backbone of my collection, I find that it has expanded to include strong male and female vocal singers such as Bocelli and Barbara Dickson, Sarah Brightman and Elaine Page, and classical violinists such as Steinbacher, Hahn and Fischer. There has even been a little bit of Country creeping in, with Artists such as Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris and even Crystal Gayle, perhaps a nod back to the folk music where it all started.

But what is very interesting to me is that today, fifty or more years later, the young ones are rediscovering what are now regarded as the musical ‘classics’ that we cut our adolescent teeth on, supposedly hearing them for the first time (although how you could get to be an adolescent without hearing the likes of Jimi Hendrix is beyond me). The overriding impression they give (other than astonishment) is ‘They don’t make music like that anymore’. And the concept of producing or playing a rock song backed by a full orchestra and choir, rather than canned electronic computer-generated sound, just blows them away.

Then there is the tendency, particularly in America, to analyze it to death. Listening intently to the lyrics to ‘discover’ their meaning. Sometimes, there isn’t any. As Gary Brooker of Procol Harum once said of a Whiter Shade of Pale, “I wrote the lyrics, and I don’t know what they mean. I wrote them to evoke an emotional response’. Sometimes, analyzing a song or singer is interesting, but pausing it mid-song to give a ‘recon’ simply destroys it.

The other reaction I find interesting is a lack of contextualization. “Oh, it is an anti-war song. Yes, war is bad”. No, not the point. How could the youth of America be unaware, or have forgotten, that their grandparents who wrote and sung these songs lived at a time when, on any day, a letter could arrive telling them they were being drafted to fight and possibly die in a war in a far-off land that they had absolutely no connection with, and no right of refusal? The ‘protest’ was as much about their own leaders, who were organizing and supporting those wars, as it was about the war itself.

Art

There has been such a seismic shift in my perception and appreciation of art during my lifetime. When I was young, I knew two things about art. Firstly, I was not exposed to much of it, but I liked it as a storytelling medium. Secondly, I was not very good at it. That didn’t stop me from scribbling away, as I started developing an interest in landscapes, by trying to reproduce what I saw and admired.

When I started work, I met and befriended a couple of laboratory workmates who were quite accomplished artists and photographers. Dennis was an enthusiastic and accomplished photographer, who was also a passable artist. Roger was simply an artist. What he was doing in a medical laboratory, I have no idea, although he was highly intelligent and capable. But he was a passionate and talented artist, who seemed to think quite differently than I did, and who was fixated on Salvador Dalí’s paintings at the time. That tied in quite nicely with the emergence of psychedelic rock during that period. But that exposure was about as far as it went back then, although lately I have come to see that there is a juxtaposition, or even a synergy between art and science, especially at a cellular level.

The fact that Roger had no difficulty bridging the gap between art and science is probably best exemplified by his hobby of making homemade fireworks. These became quite legendary. He would often turn up at parties and functions with containers of his chemical creations, entertaining everyone with dazzling multicoloured displays as they went off. This seemed to culminate at a Guy Fawkes party at Gus Schick’s house. Gus had recently married, and moved into a house in Melville, with a terraced garden out the back leading down a gully, with no houses on the other side. A perfect site for a Lab Guy Fawkes party! And so it proved. As a piece d’ resistance, Roger appeared with a long piece of bamboo, which must have been a good 8 cm in diameter, packed with who knows what. It was duly placed at the bottom of the garden and lit, providing a many coloured spectacle as it shot flames and sparks high into the air. As it burnt down to the end there was suddenly a huge explosion, the shock waves of which were enough to blow anyone standing close enough off their feet. I suspect that only the isolation of the site, and the date, prevented a visit by the local constabulary.

So, my continuing interest in art was confined to photography. In the pre-digital era this was slow, laborious and prohibitively expensive. Carrying the equipment around to take decent photographs in the landscapes I was interested in, such as tripods and large frame cameras, was simply impractical. And I lacked the patience and expertise to do my own developing, as Dennis and Roger did, that step that can turn photographs into art. That changed completely with the advent of digital photography. Although initially the cameras were large, expensive and clunky, and the software rudimentary, that has progressively changed until today most smart phones are capable of taking high quality, large file sized photographs and videos. Finally, I was able to wander round the country landscapes of my home and capture their essence in photos.

That same digital revolution also brough us the internet, and an exposure to art that I could have never imagined. Just as I could wander the landscapes of the world through the eyes of other photographers, I could also conjure up images of art from around the world and all through time as well. Obviously, landscape art became an abiding interest, but so did sculpture and portrait art. I suspect that the reason I hadn’t taken an interest in that previously was because I couldn’t draw figures for nuts. But that was about to change. Sophisticated software allowed anyone to reproduce landscapes, scenes and people with a detail, ease and accuracy that gave rise to a whole new genre. Making digital art was accessible to anyone, the only major limitation being the computer grunt necessary to produce it. The genie was finally allowed to escape completely from the lamp when overcoming this limitation became available online, coupled with artificial intelligence that meant that, if you could describe it, ai could produce it. While I don’t think that this genie is going back into the lamp anytime soon, it does have its downsides. Apart from the large amount of resources it requires, the combination of ai and digital image manipulation today means that there are no images that you can see, that you can assume are ‘real’. But the enthusiasm with which the whole world has embraced this technology suggests that this doesn’t matter.

The next step was logical, I guess. Anyone can now produce a stunningly realistic 3-dimensional image of anyone (or anything) they can imagine, turn it into a video, make it talk realistically and say anything they want it to, put it into any setting or scenario they want and post the resulting clip on social media. They are good enough to be indistinguishable from reality. The implications of this are as disturbing as they are fascinating.

I have been waiting for the holograms to become widely available, they seem to be taking their time, but it can’t be far off now.  I suspect that it requires another level of computer grunt to achieve, so it is only a matter of time. In the meantime, the genie of ai, having been released from its lamp, is showing no signs of returning to it. It is ubiquitous and everywhere. Like its use in art, it promises great benefits and great dangers.

Just as the widespread ability to make artificial images indistinguishable from reality became popular as soon as it was available, there is a certain humanoid logic in now making artificial models (robots), which may also be indistinguishable from reality. Powered by ai, able to speak, move and react, capable of self-learning and even self-direction, the line between what is real and what is not becomes even more blurred.

The attraction is obvious, but so too are the dangers. For perhaps the first time ever, humans have created something that is faster, more powerful, more organized and smarter than themselves. Capable of learning, self-repairing and even building replicas, sentient machines blur the boundaries between objects and lifeforms and could already theoretically surpass human capabilities and the ability to control them. How do you put that genie back in its bottle?