Holidays from History
Dusty roads, dangerous practices, murder, and summer sun
As we head back to work under threat of Cyclone and Volcanic destruction, the summer days only truly starting, I remember my holidays as a child on the farm in Puketitiri. The halcyon days of the 1980’s when we would take every opportunity to escape the city and spend time working on the farm.
Let’s take a nostalgic trip back to that time that feels so long ago now but in a geologic time was a blink ago. Two entire generations have been created since the 1980s, and both generally wouldn’t have a clue what a farm is, having been lured down the Internet rabbit hole from birth, disconnected with the dirt.
“You know, farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.” - Eisenhower
Getting to Puketitiri was always a well-organised ritual that ultimately ended in chaos. Getting multiple children to the farm from Wellington involved a nearly 400km trip, and in those days, the speed limit was 80kph, and the last 50kms were gravel roads.
Because of our number, a trailer was employed to take all the various things we’d need, including food, for stays of sometimes a few weeks. This was a Tricky Operation that my father was in charge of. Everything had to be packed just so, and an early morning start saw his blood pressure ever increasing as he attempted to load the trailer in the Correct Way.
Once the packing ceremony had been completed, the family Holden set off on the journey, which was largely uneventful, broken into two parts by traditionally stopping at Dannevirke for fish and chips. Dannevirke, as you know, is a very strange town on account of it thinking it is a Viking settlement. Despite the fact that it is nearly 18,000kms from actual Viking country and a very long way from the sea.
From Dannevirke, you drive across the Hawke’s Bay plains, sometimes down state highway 50, through many small and weird towns, to arrive on the edge of Napier, at Fernhill.
From Fernhill, usually dark by now, all you could see was the sweep of the headlights across farmland and over gravel roads, dust trails glowing red by the taillights. Past paddocks, with house lights becoming further apart, rushing down dark corridors of black trees looming on either side of the road.
Finally, the farm gate glares brightly in the headlamps to the cottage, dust slowly drifting past and up the lawn to the cottage itself, lurking in the dark. Opening the door and walking in, the smell is one of age, old wood smoke, and within seconds the faint stale air is replaced with the clean and cold of the country.
Fires are lit, there is no hot water otherwise, tanks turned on, power activated, the Great Trailer is unloaded into the correct places, children fed and sent to beds and bunks. All you can hear is the silence, the most notable thing after living in such a noisy city, with perhaps the wind sounding like a river where it blows through the shelterbelts down in the valley.
The cottage was built initially on Napier hill. While my great grandparents had their house built, they lived there. When the house was finished, the cottage was dismantled and moved to Puketitiri, where it was reassembled.
Don and Joan Ramage were my grandparents on my mother’s side. They spent a great deal of time at Puketitiri when not working in the city. World War II greatly influenced Don, and he observed the rapid industrialisation of the world and the destruction of environments very early on. It became a cornerstone of his art; he was eventually a renowned New Zealand artist.
As I understand, they spent their honeymoon at the cottage and helped establish natural tracks through the large expanse of native forest across from the farm known as Ball’s Clearing, which escaped land clearing and the large fires in the area in the 1940s.
The story goes that Don would walk the likely tracks to be cut, and Joan would leave a trail of flowers so that they did not get lost. Ramages Track still stands today and offers a unique look into some of the oldest natural podocarp forests in New Zealand. It is also home to New Zealand’s Long-tailed Bat.
Matthew Wrights, “A walk in a Jurassic forest”, is an excellent piece on the reserve.
Over the years, the family grew; the photo above shows four of us kids, which would increase to six in future years. My brothers and I were constantly in trouble, and I admire parents who have boys. At that age, wanton destruction, chaos, hijinks, and accidents are all part of the daily recipe. There was no such thing as danger.
Someone had left a genuine Australian boomerang at the cottage one year, which became a toy of terror and delight. We three would stand in the paddocks and throw it as hard as possible. Sometimes the boomerang would disappear in a straight line into the lair of Ivan the Bull, who was always lurking amongst the stands of native trees.
Fetching it necessitated a military precision to ensure the massive beast did not charge us. Of course, it was hot in summer, and Ivan was happy to stand under the trees and keep a watchful eye on us.
Boomerangs do come back if you get it right, and when the slow arc of the weapon changed back towards us, it came in at great speed. There was no attempt to catch it, only running for cover as fast as we could, hoping it didn’t clout us in the back of the head. As I recall, more than one window was broken.
Bows and arrows were also present and used to hunt rabbits. Or, to fire arrows directly into the air followed by more running and scrambling to find cover in case their return pinned you down.
Echoes of the war remained. The cottage contained mysterious artefacts that my grandfather had bought back from his time overseas: canvas backpacks and satchels, canteens, binoculars, and a handheld spyglass. Expeditions were mounted into the native bush for hours with these artefacts, returning hot, thirsty, scratched, bruised, and exhausted.
Growing up more rural than the city, I’ve always had a fondness for farm girls. Strong, independent women who can wrangle stock, ride horses, fix a tractor, and swear along with the worst of the shearers. It’s one of the reasons that I fell in love with K; she was a farm girl hiding in the city when we met.
The neighbouring farm was a large sheep station run single-handedly by David full-time and Pam, his sister, in the weekends and holidays. Thankfully, Pam was a nurse; you can see her handiwork on one of her girls in the photo. Broken bones, cuts, bruises, head injuries, sprains, and dislocations became a speciality.
As I recall, one day, my mother dislocated one of her knees playing a vigorous game of swing ball. Pam was summoned and the knee realigned to great shouts. Within minutes of that my mother was back in the thick of another round of swing-ball only to dislocate the other knee.
The family often shared duties and worked on the farm. Hundreds of sheep would be periodically bought into the yards for drenching, shearing, docking, and all the other things you need to do with the complicated beasts.
Dust would rise in the heat, dogs working the sheep into the right places, we close behind, the noise of hundreds of sheep hooves a constant white noise. In the sheds, shearing gangs would work dawn to early afternoon while we kept the decks clean by sweeping at the same time as staying out of the way of the wool packers. I can still feel the lanolin on the wood in the sheds and on my hands.
It was hot, dusty work, and the shed had a rhythm. A sheep would appear on the deck; wiry shearers would upend them and begin the process of removing the wool, sweat dripping, the fleece would come off, picked up, and flung onto tables to grade and clean, we would sweep the detritus away. The sheep would disappear down a chute back into the yards with a clatter of hooves.
The other side to the operation was the cooks. Food appeared at intervals, and tea was the primary drink in those days; coffee was a rarity. Scones, sandwiches, fruit magically arrived along with Raro (look it up, millennials, it’s good for you.)
You started early because the temperature climbed and climbed through the afternoon to hit mid-thirties in the summer months often. Like many rural areas, the hottest part of the day comes late afternoon before the sun finally settles behind the mountains.
We’d pile into the car and drive even deeper into the ranges to swim at the Mohaka River. The family had access through a farm, but we always asked permission each time, which necessitated a visit to the farmer, Jack Nicholas.
The deeper you drive into the ranges, the narrower the gravel road gets. Hot air would pour in the open windows, and the dust would stretch back into the distance as you drove down another valley to the river.
I don’t remember the Nicholas’s that well. It was always a perfunctory visit and one that was about respect. Jack had a lot of farm in the area on some wild and dangerous land. Poaching was a problem from hunters who felt entitled to enter the farm without permission, and in later years cannabis growers were known to be in the area.
I understand that Jack was a gruff, but fair individual who got on well with the family. It may be that us working David’s farm up the road and the family having been in the valley for decades gave us some leeway on accessing Jack’s land.
On a cold morning, August 27, 2004, Jack Nicholas got up and left the farmhouse. Minutes later, he was shot. His wife heard three shots, and when she got up, she noticed sheep wandering in the home paddock, putting on a jacket and going outside; she found Jack.
She was sure that he was gone but checked his pulse anyway. She put a duvet over him, and four years later, she would tell the court that it was because he looked cold.
“It was such a cold morning. He looked so vulnerable,” she told the High Court jury.
Despite someone being brought to trial for Jack’s murder, he was found not guilty. To this day, the killer has never been caught, and it is a death that the community not only in Puketitiri but far wider remembers well. Hunters have been in that area for decades, from all over New Zealand, and the respectful ones always paid a visit to Jack to ask permission for access.
The motive is unknown today.
The whole story can be found here in an in-depth piece by Marty Sharpe at Stuff in 2019; “It’s the memories that sustain me, says widow of farmer in unsolved murder case”
The Mohaka River is 172 km long, and over its course, it winds through canyons that are 200m deep; in places, it has a Grade 5 rating and growing up swimming there, it wasn’t unusual to see big rafts full of people with a death wish sailing by.
Mohaka, loosely translated, means “place of dancing”, and on a hot summer day in the slow section where we swam, the sun certainly danced. Where the river turned, a deep pool with a quiet eddy dropped away from the warm surface into the depths.
At the bottom of the pool was an old eel, impossible to estimate in size but giant and ancient; this was his domain. Under the watchful eye of parents and grandparents, most of learning to swim here. We are all strong swimmers, and I credit this with learning to swim in a challenging river, with freshwater having less buoyancy than the ocean.
The dogs fetched sticks, BBQs were carefully constructed in rock circles, the old metal toastie pie maker (look it up millennials, this is also good for you) was taken from the cottage to the river, and far less sunblock was needed because we hadn’t destroyed the ozone layer back then.
After dinner, the evenings were usually dominated by card games. I am sure my grandmother had a 100% win rate over the decades. There was no allowing us to win, that was off the table, and when she did beat us, she would laugh at our ineptitude to rub it in—a valuable life lesson.
If there ever was a dark sky reserve, then the farm was it. Under starlight, walking at night, at least you could see. When the clouds rolled in, you literally could not see your hand in front of your face unless you had a torch.
Sometimes the mountains would throw an unseasonable turn, that middle of summer southerly, and the temperature would drop to near freezing. The fire would be stoked those nights and the extra, coarse woollen blankets deployed. The wetback copper would burble through the night while we slept.
My grandparents passed away eventually, and the cottage passed onto several owners. For several years there was tension between the various members, and despite some solutions to keep the place in family hands being put forward, the dream collapsed, and the house was sold to one last member.
Because no one could agree in the intervening years on how the farm and cottage could be maintained, it fell into a state of disrepair with increasingly expensive options required to bring it back to standard.
In some respects, without my grandparents to be a guiding force, the glue as it were, the cottage fell apart, as did the family. For me, it became first an exercise in frustration trying to help with solutions and then simply stressful. K and I visited the cottage three years ago last. I haven’t been back since.
The new owner is to demolish the cottage and outbuildings and build afresh. It is the end of an era that stopped when my grandparents passed. This is a Sad Thing. It is no one person’s fault.
The influence that the farm and cottage had on us has been substantial. I have moved back rural to recreate what I grew up with, tired of the city and her closed in concrete spaces. The rural adventure has restored for K and me over the last two years, and there are many similarities here to where we both grew up. It has become a combined creation of childhood experiences into a single place that we now call home.
My grandfather and I did not always see eye to eye. He thought I was a capitalist, and I thought he was an old git. For many years we sent terse letters to each other. In his later years, we reconciled before he passed. He taught many many things over my life and gave me a healthy fear of the end of the world. The art he created about the end of the environment we live in, so many decades ago, has proven to be true.
I think he, and K’s grandparents, would be proud of what we have achieved so far.
As always, dear reader, thank you for listening. I shall be returning to life on our farm shortly, though before that, I am going to have a rant about trees. Stay tuned.