This photo shows the Hikurangi farm as it was in the 1960s, when Colleen and Keith were managing it. Cliff and Dorothy lived in the house that you can see top left. The original property extended up the hill to the fence line, just in shot, and to the near side of the road you can make out heading roughly left to right near the top of the shot. We had two more paddocks where the road takes a sharp turn in the top right of the photo. Cliff was rightly proud of his local body efforts to drain all this flat land, the upper reaches of the “Hikurangi Swamp”. Colleen and Keith, and later Heather and I, lived in an older house up the hill and to the left of this picture. This was on a separate property, a later purchase that we always called the Pig Farm after a big abandoned piggery.
For a time life on the farm was bliss. Our little old house was tucked up under Hikurangi Mountain past a line of trees where I used to collect pine cones as a kid for pocket money. Our kitchen, bathroom, lavatory and wash house had all been added later, as at my grandfather’s place, but we had two fire places, beautiful old sash windows, a front verandah, a back porch for gumboots and rain coats, an empty hen house, and an overgrown garden with a few fruit trees, including a gorgeous plum. Lots of kikuyu. Blackberries growing wild in tangled scrub. Heather tried to start a garden in the claggy ground.
One lunch time Mum came up to find us busy perpetuating the family name. She called a melodious “hello” as she came through the back gate, spotted us through the bedroom window, whispered a quiet “oh” and went back home.
One day Heather drove all the way to Auckland to buy some chooks. They turned out to have spent their lives in cages, and never got the hang of laying eggs or the relative freedom of our hen house. You live and learn.
A friendly young Māori boy called Pat boarded with us, and milked and worked the farm with me. We watched Star Trek and The Frost Report in black and white on a little green TV. The TV was on a trolley with rabbits’ ears, so we could even watch in bed. For someone who hadn’t seen a television until four years ago this was all very new.
But then came the rain and a flood of almost biblical proportions. The cash dried up. Pat and I had to come off the payroll, and Dad out of retirement. Heather learned how to milk cows — and stand up for herself against my highly stressed father.
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After the flood I got a job working for the Coca-Cola bottlers in Whangarei, loading trucks with a forklift at night. I got my Heavy Vehicle license so I could park the loaded trucks across the street. Fanta became my favourite drink.
I’d hate you to take any gross generalisations out of this, but over the course of the next few months there were a few accidents.
I dinged the building a wee bit when I forgot to lower the fork hoist driving from one bay into another, I poked a hole through a door panel on the boss’s new Chev Impala while backing a truck, and — my pièce de résistance — I neglected to tie down a truckload of soft drinks packed in the old glass bottles and wooden crates. This was during the busy Summer holidays, when everybody’s focus up North was on ice cream and the beach. The load predictably came off on the busy, narrow, winding, gravel road to Russell, and blocked the way with smashed crates and broken glass. This apparently took quite a while to clear, and wasn’t popular with motorists or their scratchy children.
The driver and I shared responsibility. He was supposed to check his load before heading off. I have no idea why I wasn’t sacked, but it did seem there was no long-term future for me in this kind of work.
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Fortunately Heather was becoming insistent that I get a Degree. I wasn’t fulfilling myself intellectually, she said, or some such. And despite my misadventures at Coca Cola, hard work, domestic bliss and a tan had grounded me. So, feeling the need to erase a failure, I was happy to agree. This time things would be different — with no career or ideological axe to grind I was simply going, as Ed Hillary put it, to Knock The Bastard Off.
That said, having dropped out of two universities already it wasn’t easy to complete the trifecta and get entry to a third. Certainly the government wasn’t going to support me. I’d have to pay my way, including course fees and textbooks etc.
Mum and Dad gave us a small loan to help us through the first year, after which I took out a 2-year teaching studentship. That would entail finishing my BA and at the same time attending Teachers’ College, after which I’d be bonded to teach for two years.
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Back on the farm we’d been driving my mother’s little yellow Mini, my cute wee Renault having given up the ghost, so when we left for Auckland in late 1968 we bought a big, old, black Austin A40 (I think) from a man in Hikurangi. He wanted $200 for it. Dad had instructed us in negotiation techniques, having been coached himself by his father-in-law, but no negotiating was necessary.
I offered the man $100 and he immediately accepted — which meant that we drove around in constant trepidation for the next year, expecting it to break down any minute. We eventually sold it for a song to a big bloke I was working with. My trepidation continued, especially when he went on holiday with a carload of his mates; but he returned to work full of enthusiasm after driving it around the entire North Island and back, trouble free.
Anyway, in early 1969 we drove to Auckland, found a new home for our dog Tiger and moved into a caravan alongside Heather’s mother’s house in Glenfield. Heather was already pregnant. One alarming night an ambulance called on the caravan to take her to hospital. She was threatening to miscarry, and spent the rest of her term in National Women’s Hospital in Green Lane. Stephen was born on July 4th 1969.
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Ways that Auckland has changed keep surfacing.
To be nearer the hospital I rented a flat in a house on Ruapehu Street in Mount Eden — an area largely divided into flats back then but now thoroughly gentrified. That’s how I got to vote for my History Professor, Keith Sinclair, when he stood for Parliament in that electorate.
Besides working on my Stage 1 papers I had a part-time job in a gloomy basement of Auckland Hospital. The IVS department, where I worked, produced intravenous solutions for the hospital, primarily saline solution. I was part of a small, fairly diverse bunch, shall we say, whose job was to inspect the glass bottles in a light box, looking for impurities and the reflected glitter from glass fragments.
It was a busy life, and fraught for us both, especially Heather — stuck in National Women’s for a few months and then housebound with our new baby. But I’d discovered how to succeed as an undergraduate. Study what interests you. With no other motive. No career in mind. In my case that meant history, philosophy and politics.