Wacker Anderson was a legend in Marlborough, long before I arrived in 1979.
A generation older than me, Wacker lived and sort of farmed at Mount Patriarch, at the end of the Northbank Road in the Wairau Valley, Marlborough’s most substantial catchment.
We would occasionally be called to do something on his farm, TB testing cows or castrating a colt. More often Wacker would arrive in his genuine old London black cab to purchase something at the vet club, where I worked for three years when I first arrived in Blenheim.
He was a man of medium build with jet-black hair slicked back, and his swarthy skin had all the hallmarks of a heavy smoker. In short, Wacker looked like a bit of a rogue, and readers may recall Private Walker, the character in the TV show Dad’s Army, who he closely resembled. Walker was always on the make. As was Wacker.
Legend had it that he’d been in the New Zealand Army in Italy during World War Two, where he engaged heavily in the black market. Petrol, cigarettes, food, army vehicles of all sorts, including tanks, and army stores were all traded with who knows whom. Wacker had returned after the war with a bulging bank account, however he’d achieved it, and bought Mount Patriarch, a pretty tough place in the shadow of the rugged Richmond Range. The flats were fertile but unmaintained and the hill country was rapidly reverting to scrub when I first visited. A few rangy cattle and some ragged-looking sheep grazed quietly about the flats.
In Blenheim, Wacker was famous for his past, but he’d done a few dodgy deals in town too. He was particularly famous for raffling the same Christmas turkey around numerous pubs. He and his mate would travel from pub to pub in the old London cab, selling a two bob raffle for a turkey.
‘Fifty tickets, to be drawn tonight.’
At each one he’d read out the winner, who just happened to be there at the time. It was Wacker’s accomplice, unknown to the patrons, and he won it at each of at least 10 pubs.
It was probably small change to Wacker, but that was the man. If there was a bob to be made, he’d make it.
Like most rogues and conmen, Wacker had a gentle side. He really did love his animals, and he took in a lot of young men who had been either in prison or in trouble with the law. He would give them lodgings and a small stipend in exchange for work on the farm. And he might even get them to be his accomplice around the pubs.
When I arrived at work at the vet club one morning, I looked at the workbook. There was a very unusual entry: Mount Patriarch, vaccinate 15 cats.
Now most people brought their cat to the clinic for its annual, or more often triennial, cat flu and snuffles vaccine. We would examine the cat, check it was healthy, and give it a subcutaneous injection of the vaccine in the scruff, behind the neck. Most cats never know they’ve had it. But a vet visit is a stressful time for a cat. They don’t like leaving home, travelling in a car, or meeting strange people, as a rule.
So to go to someone’s home for multiple cats was a reasonable request. But 15 cats? At Mount Patriarch, 60 kilometres up an unsealed road? It was certainly novel, so I put my hand up for the job. I’d been to the farm before, and it was always an adventure to see Wacker.
I loaded up the rather small Ford van the vet club committee had decided was suitable for their new vet. (It wasn’t. It was too small and light for rough country road, and I was very pleased after a year to hand it on when a new graduate arrived.) I took off up the valley to Renwick, along State Highway Six to the Wairau Bridge, then turned left up the valley once over the river.
The North Bank is very different from the rest of Marlborough. It’s made up of a series of steep streams running out of the very rugged forested Richmond Range, which divides the Wairau catchment from the Pelorus to the north and west. It’s a rough and magnificent range rising to Mount Richmond at over 1700 metres and is nowhere less than 1100. The underlying geology is schist and semi-schist, and when the forest cover is removed it’s very erodible. In the nineteenth century the Richmond Range was the centre of major gold rushes, mostly on the Pelorus side, but some on the Wairau.
The North Bank, lying under all this, is shaded from the sun, particularly in winter, and the frosts are harder, the rainfall higher than the land to the south of the Wairau. Over 150 years it’s proved to be a bad place for farming on the hills, just too tough, demanding and unproductive. So the hills are either reverting to native, or adorned with Pinus radiata, another issue. Forestry has stabilised the hills, but after harvest, that geology is susceptible to the effects of heavy rain. (Part of my life as a rural councillor, that is years after this story, has been to try to convince foresters to think more about environmentally friendly harvesting and planting methods.) The flats are better, but are now being rapidly covered in grapes.
However in 1980, the time we’re discussing, the North Bank was a serious, if minor part of Marlborough’s pastoral farming community.
As I sped up the winding unsealed road, past the bushed headlands and into each successive narrow side-plain of farming, I thought of the farmers and the gold miners of the past. I wondered and mused about the very tough pioneers who had trekked these valleys and made their harsh lifestyles here.
After Top Valley, the last of the series of side streams, the road became even rougher as it wound for 45 minutes up the tight steep bank, never far from the Wairau River. Eventually I broke out onto the rather scruffy plains under Mount Patriarch and before long the old homestead was in sight.
The day was a bit dismal, misty and grey. There were some nice cattle in a paddock by the homestead as I pulled into the yard. Wacker emerged from the house to greet me.
‘Gidday, young man.’ He was brusque but friendly. ‘Grab your gear and come inside.’ His brilliantined hair shone in its ebony blackness as he led me inside. ‘Watch your head, mate,’ he called as he went through the back door.
Hanging from a meat hook in the middle of the doorway at head height was a huge ox liver, quite fresh, and dripping blood onto the concrete floor. I eased my way past this curiosity and entered the kitchen.
A tough-looking young man sat at the table, and a multitude of cats roamed the old room.
‘Shut the bloody door, mate. Don’t want to let the cats out.’ Wacker was slicing strips from the liver and placing them on a plate. The cats gathered. Feeding time.
And then I noticed there was something odd about the cats. Each one had a small neatly shaved patch on the back of its neck.
‘Hygiene, mate,’ said Wacker. ‘Don’t want them getting infections from the needle.’ Using a safety razor he and his man had carefully shaved a 2 centimetre square patch from every cat, down to the skin. It was all very neat and tidy.
I’ve never seen that before or since. Wacker had learnt something from the army: neatness, order. And as Wacker and his mate brought the 15 cats to me, one at a time, and I carefully vaccinated each one under their watchful scrutiny, I mused what a rich and wonderful life I was exposed to in rural Marlborough.
