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Somewhere south of somewhere

What was it like at the beginning, on the land? In terms of post—European farming that is. Obviously it wasn’t about evolutionary creatures crawling out of the primordial ooze wearing the beginnings of black singlets and gumboots and making prehistoric noises that sounded a bit like a sharemilker saying, ‘G’day.’

But farming had to start somewhere. And farmers. The tale of James and other members of his family, who immigrated to New Zealand in the 1870s, is fairly typical. After landing at Napier they moved south to Woodville where an existence was carved out, often literally, from the bush-covered land. The new settlement was named Woodville because there was a lot of wood and woods around. Land was cleared, whares erected, children were born. James set up as a shoemaker and later as a commission agent, after carrying out the obligations of a bush-felling contract.

In 1876 there were only two women in Woodville – Mrs J. Murphy the publican’s wife, and James’ wife Elizabeth. The Murphy’s two children and James’ daughter were the first Woodville children. As the town grew and the bush receded, Woodville became a thriving service centre. Dairying was developing to the point that, by 1883, it had become the most productive enterprise in the area.

It wasn’t easy passing up a settled existence in Woodville where you and your family had already done the pioneer breaking-in-of-the-land thing. Obviously Woodville wasn’t Metropolis, but it did have a growing population. The trains were now calling from the south, not that the building of the line through the Manawatu Gorge made much progress.

Perhaps James heard the call of the wild. Felt the pull of pioneering ancestors. But in the late 1890s he and his brother and sundry offspring honoured a pledge to break in a backwater of Taranaki, with a view to reaping the profits of eventual fertile, workable belts.

Tongaporutu on the coast of Taranaki is little known, even today. Back in the 1890s the main road – today’s extension of SH3 to and beyond New Plymouth – was still coming through. In the back of Tongaporutu lay a stretch of rugged, bush-covered New Zealand, the sort of unforgiving backwater that only the stout-hearted would confront.

Farms were allocated on land that was leased with the right of purchase, and James and his kin set out into the wilderness in 1896. The area in the back of Tongaporutu was known as Makarakia. There was no road access. Supplies were either pack-horsed in once a year or the Tongaporutu River was used as a means of conveyance into a hinterland that was speculative at best.

Family members, after the pilgrimage from the south – and it was a grim passage from the relatively broken-in and settled Woodville – were allocated 100-acre blocks. Whares again went up, immediate bush clearances made. Members of James’ family eventually occupied six of the seven sections on Makarakia Block 8.

Over the years land was cleared, and lower, more level reaches supported dairy cows. On the flanks cattle and sheep did their best to find fodder and foraging rights. A surfeit of rain was a problem. Streams and rivers flooded, inconveniencing the pioneers. The region had its very own Great Flood, a time when waters rose to cover river bridges and threaten low-lying areas. The point was made, perhaps unhelpfully, that ‘we reap what we sow’, which was less about failed potato crops and corn, and more about the impact on the land of flood plains denuded of vegetation. Watercourses began to spread and endanger settlements.

In such a setting the Great Flood of 1902 came through. Old man James, the patriarch, sprang into action. Although only 4 foot 10, he didn’t want for authority. That, after all, was not as piffling a statistic back in the early 1900s as it is now. And then there was the business of James’ beard. It was waist-length in the days when beard size rather dictated a man’s mana. His sheer seniority and booming voice added to his sense of importance.

James was very much in charge as the river rose, obliterating the bridge. The only option was to evacuate the area, turning a felled log which came down across the river into a bridge for those who were trapped. Alfred, one of James’ sons, lived with his wife and kids on one side of the river. Another, Harry, lived on the opposite side. It was deemed necessary to evacuate Alfred’s family. However, Alfred was away at the time and Harry prepared himself to carry Alfred’s family to safety.

Harry was a bachelor and in terms of the protocols and prudery of the day, James deemed it undesirable for Harry to carry Alf’s wife across. So James the patriarch stepped, literally, into the breach. Despite his diminutive stature, he planned to carry the helpless woman to safety. The long beard may have snarled on flotsam. Alf’s wife might have been heavier than she looked. The upshot was that James, the perfect gentleman upholding a woman’s honour, attempting in fact to uphold her, overbalanced and both plunged into the raging waters. Whereupon Harry the bachelor dived in and saved them both, providing some kind of moral to the story.

Harry was a man of some distinction. He was a skilled axeman and once went to London to compete in an international wood-chopping competition. He came third and won a jewelled bracelet, which he presented to his fiancée Renée. He later married Renée and thus became eligible himself to carry other men’s wives across flooded streams.

The contingent at Makarakia had survived ‘the New Zealand death’ at a time when drowning was far too common. And old James wasn’t always that proper anyway.

He had developed a small orchard on his property and Harry’s pigs would occasionally sneak across the stream on the lookout for apples. It was bad enough that the out-of-bounds pigs snaffled windfall fruit, but when they were seen nudging the trees to coax the top fruit down, James would start swearing loudly. In a close-knit community, what goes around comes around. A three-year-old grandson heard the swear words and committed them to memory. It became a standing joke to try to get the grandson to repeat ‘what Grandpa said to Uncle Harry’s pigs’, but the swear words only came out on special occasions.

James’ first wife had been a professional chemist in the old country, where she had three brothers who all became doctors and later all died of consumption. She also had three surviving sisters, who were well-heeled and ‘grand’. They paid a visit to the wilds of Makarakia to meet their deceased sister’s family.

Everyone was instructed to be on their best behaviour when the three great-aunts arrived from London, but several reprobate uncles urged the grandson to come out with the swear words. Airs and graces counted for little in the lives of the pioneers and a robust colonial sense of humour was beginning to emerge. The grandson remained tight-lipped until someone in exasperation tugged at the kid’s long curly hair, which like his Grandpa’s beard was waist-length. And just like his Grandpa, a fusillade of swear words stunned everyone but the smirking uncles.

Grandpa James was in the wars again some months later when he suffered a broken arm and a severe abrasion over his right eye while gouging out a six-foot passage through papa rock. This was no laughing matter. James and his two sons William and Harry had been using explosives to persuade the papa rock to part. James, though he later denied it, was standing too close. His tirade was suitably explosive, set off by a combination of pain and frustrated awareness that the community was suffering because of its isolation from the outside world.

The general wretchedness of roads and tracks into the area was always a problem, and never more so than when medical dramas unfolded. An eight-year-old slashed his foot on a broken bottle and had to be transported out by buggy, along a slippery track to Urenui in the south, and by taxi from there to New Plymouth. The same fate befell one of the men who cut his leg with an axe while clearing trees that had fallen across telephone wires. Some years later another eight-year-old fell on a rusty garden rake and ended up with osteomyelitis, an infection of the bone. The roads might have been better by then but it was still a long, winding and painful trek to the district nurse at Mokau.

The isolation had fatal consequences for a seven-year-old girl who caught pneumonia and died before medical assistance could arrive. She was laid to rest in Tongaporutu cemetery, in a plot overlooking the Tasman Sea. On a fine day you could get a wonderful view of Mt Egmont from the gravesite, but the sadness of the girl’s sudden passing consumed the valley and it must have been a long time before anyone enjoyed that outlook again.

At times like that, the damned rain never stopped; neither did the drudgery of farming the backblocks, the lack of schooling for the rest of the children, and the absence of adequate roads. And the unexpected could lie just around the corner of those muddy tracks that should have been roads by now. On one occasion a family on horseback was waylaid by a fearsome old Captain Cooker; would the pig charge, panic the horses into bolting and injure their riders (who included women and children)?

But the horses stood their ground and the pig thundered off into the bush. One of the men tracked it down with his dogs and it ended up on the table, minus its impressive tusks. Mounted and on someone’s wall, they became a conversation piece whenever people gathered.

And despite the hardships, people did get together. The community didn’t want for excuses to celebrate. And if the bright lights of Tongaporutu – all two of them – became too alluring, you could always ride out to dances on a Saturday night. One young woman often did so on her own, albeit with a packhorse and dogs, and was permitted to stay overnight. Given that the ride out took several hours, there was no inter-generational haggling over the violation of curfews and so on.

Meanwhile, back in the valley the oldies gathered to mark milestones where ‘the best of viands were in ample supply and had such justice done to them as certifies them to have been pleasing to the eye and palate and satisfying to the inner man’.

Marriage soirees, twenty-first (and twenty-second) birthday parties rolled around. In return for the rollicking gatherings hosted by the married folk, the bachelors of the valley engineered a joint ‘do’, or more precisely a sumptuous meat supper at half-past six one Friday evening. Twenty-one bums on seats were counted and at about 10 o’clock, although it could have been later, a secondary spread of ‘all the delicacies imaginable in cakes, confectionary, jellies and beverages of a non-intoxicating nature’ was trundled out. Obviously, intoxicating beverages had already been part of the mix of revelry, recitations and readings. Raucous laughter upset the house cows and disturbed the peace of the entire pitch-black valley.

There was no KFC, just Uncle Harry’s chooks. No TV, just the songs of the ‘born comedian’ Mr G. Shalton, who had ‘no control over his facial muscles, which is very rarely met with’. No stereo, just Mrs F.J.A. Hutchins singing, in a very nice voice, ‘A rose of red and a rose of white’. Then the bachelors sang a bawdy ballad or two, which signalled time for the clearing away and washing up to commence, and time for the womenfolk to acknowledge among themselves that Mrs G. Hutchins had provided most of the cutlery and crockery. Further thanks and cheers were due to Mrs L.M. Hutchins, who was instrumental in preparing the wondrous repast.

No doubt the bachelors found countless reasons to call for three cheers, if only because they remained the scoundrels of the valley, the reprobates from whom witty one-liners, fulsome yarns and hearty guttural oaths emerged, obliterating the lonely sound of the morepork and the steady drumming of heavy rain.

‘To the King,’ a bachelor chanted.

‘Hip, hip, hip – hooray,’ the others thundered.

A lone, distant ‘hip, hip, hip’ was heard. The morepork? Or some stranded traveller out there on the trail to Tongaporutu?

‘To Hutchinsville,’ another bachelor proposed.

‘Hip, hip, hip, hooray,’ the rest retorted, accepting the toast.

‘Here’s to our butter that ends up in New Plymouth.’ The calls for three cheers were becoming more commodity-conscious.

‘And our first wool clip that may one day soon be transported out of the valley.’

‘And our very own post office here in Hutchinsville, for which we will soon petition.’

As the crockery and cutlery were seen to by the women in the kitchen, the men – bachelors and all – celebrated triumph over privation and the recognition of a new district that would carry the name of the dominant tribe.

What was hitherto known as Makarakia was now mooted to become Hutchinsville. The numbers stacked up. Out of a population that numbered 16 souls, 13 of them bore the name Hutchins. James, the patriarch, was the only original settler remaining in the district by 1906, but sons and relatives bearing his surname had made the valley their home.

It was disappointing to learn that when a post office was finally opened in 1909 it was named Rerekapa Post Office. That decision, taken in Wellington, dictated that the name Hutchins would fade, almost beyond human recall, in the hinterland, just as the geographical barriers to the rural valleys beyond Tongaporutu would seal the area off altogether.

There’s nothing there now, apart from the farms. The post office has long gone. There’s no KFC outlet, although the TV reception’s good enough. The roads are much improved. The rain still falls. A lone morepork continues to call.

James Hutchins, the original pioneer, was my great-grandfather. His son Lawrence, who followed him into the wilderness, was my grandfather. Someone asked me about my credentials for writing a series of farming stories. Fair enough, I said. Despite living for 27 years in the country on a rural section, I was never a conventional farmer. But I interacted, and I observed. And now, with the discovery of my link with ‘Hutchinsville’, I can plead something like a racial memory of farming life.

It’s sobering to reflect that after 20 years on the Makarakia Block, all the family members had moved on. It was not that they hadn’t tried to make a go of it. The isolation was a huge disadvantage. It wasn’t until 1914 that a road into the Makarakia Block enabled better transit. It was a long drawn-out process of construction and even required a tunnel. They called it the Kiwi Road, a fitting title for a family of Kiwi battlers. Infamously, the Kiwi Road is still regarded as one of the most challenging in New Zealand.

James Hutchins was a two-time pioneer and patriarch. After whacking Woodville into shape, he was the prime mover in wresting farming life from the foreboding backblocks of Tongaporutu. He was larger than life, but no larger than his first wife Ellen, who was also only 4 foot 10. She died in her forty-fifth year and was associated primarily with the Woodville phase. James’ second wife’s vertical statistics are not known, although her surname was Little. She was another Elizabeth, at a time when that name was very common. Indeed, names starting with the letter ‘E’ were exceptionally popular for females. Of James’ six daughters, five were E-types: Elizabeth, Ellen, Eva, Ethel and Edith. Only Hilda broke with tradition.

James and his first wife had six sons, too: Edwin, Alfred, Thomas, John, William and Henry (Harry). The first five appeared annually during a fertile six-year period between 1876 and 1882. James had a ready-made labour force of boys growing into husky men when the time came to consider returning to the wilderness.

James lived to be 71, a good age for pioneering stock. His beard would have been down to his knees you would imagine by 1922, the year of his passing. He was a true pioneer, with his feet on the ground, indeed very close to the ground, with the low centre of gravity ideal for remaining upright on the rugged terrain of ‘Hutchinsville’.

When he arrived from England in 1873 James had brought an indomitable spirit and evolved sense of fair play with him. There was none of this crawling up out of the primeval ooze, making prehistoric noises, although the day in 1902 when he crawled up out of the flood, assisted by his son Harry, the analogy would have been appropriate and the oaths and swear words he uttered may have sounded prehistoric to the untrained ear.

My grandmother, who had spent several years helping to turn ‘Hutchinsville’ into a productive farming region, ended up operating the home cookery in Te Kuiti that my parents inherited. A significant proportion of their clients were farmers or farm-service people. Colin Meads’ mother used to supply their egg needs. Mrs Meads used to favour Mum and Dad’s small goods. Perhaps Colin, in addition to three mutton meals a day, snacked on my folks’ Cornish pasties between lugging a sheep under each arm around the rugged ramparts to the south of town. Perhaps my family played a small but vital part in ensuring that Colin Meads became New Zealand’s greatest rugby player.

Most Kiwis live in towns and cities now. Many regard farms and farmers as elements of a vague parallel universe somewhere out there. They concede the critical role of farming in New Zealand’s economy, but how many consider that their antecedents might have crawled up through the primeval ooze, hosed themselves down and set about turning virgin backblocks into productive, primary-producing farms keeping us afloat in the southern ocean?

Often it’s only when townies and city-slickers travel into the backblocks to play in town and country sporting fixtures that the lifestyle of the people on the land becomes apparent. Then most townies go home. But others stay on to become part of the rural fabric.

Phil O’Shaughnessy became so enamoured of shearing that he made a lifestyle choice, one that did not sit favourably with his town-based parents – at first. But Phil, up in Northland and further south in Wairarapa, found that shearing got into his blood – and his back. Eventually he became afflicted with shearers’ back, a condition that curbed his ability to work, but didn’t douse the passion.

So Phil became one of the world’s leading commentators at competitions, a logical progression of his love of shearing. You’d think that shearers in general, after all that backbreaking work on sheep stations, would be only too pleased to lay down their clippers when they’d achieved their tally. In fact shearing competitions like the Golden Shears, where shearers can really reveal their love of the craft, have burgeoned in New Zealand.

Phil went along with the burgeoning and his commentating skills became more widely known. He popped up in countries as diverse as Ireland, South Africa and Scotland to call world shearing contests. The Royal Welsh Show and the World Champs in Toowoomba, Australia, both featured his commentating skills. His microphone died in Ireland, and his mind went blank when introducing a well-known dignitary somewhere else, but Phil rose above such glitches. Even when a crucial shearing final was in jeopardy because the organisers had run out of sheep, Phil was able to produce ten minutes of patter while enough unshorn animals were rounded up to complete the event.

And to think that Phil was the guy who lived just up the road from us as we were growing up. It was a discovery similar to finding out that my great-grandfather had been associated with ‘Hutchinsville’. Phil was a townie who felt the pull of the land and quickly appreciated life in the parallel universe. Others first felt the call during rural-based town and country rugby games. My own first encounter came via a spectator’s vantage point at a town and country cricket match.