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Cliff wrote about most of the farmers he worked for in the early and mid- 1930s, some at length, but others briefly or in snippets that can be hard to put into chronological order or to construct as a narrative.
Much of the following is in the first person, written by Cliff; some in the third person, written by me based on his notes. The names have been changed. ~Ian
Cliff left Charlie and his wife to work for Dave, about whom he says little except that Dave’s farm was regularly in the news when the Hikurangi Swamp was in flood. It was convenient for reporters, who could sit out Whakapara way in the comfort of their cars, take photos of the water lapping around the verandah of Dave’s house — his whole farm inundated — and go back to the office with a good story about the rigours of farming on the Hikurangi Swamp.
One of Cliff’s dreams was to Drain the Swamp, and Dave’s place was front of mind. He wasn’t complaining about the reporters, as they did a good deal to make the case for the drainage scheme. But that was forty years into the future.
Most of the farms Cliff worked on were in the swamp area west of Hikurangi, which flooded regularly. It was certainly a challenging area to farm. He recalled one place with what appeared to be a pigsty built on the cowshed roof. When it flooded, cattle could be evacuated quite readily, but not pigs.
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One of Cliff’s jobs at Dave’s was to help pour a concrete yard for the cowshed, and his description demonstrates again the enormous productivity that resulted from the spread of simple mechanical implements, like hay mowers and milking machines:
”Without power or a concrete mixer,” he says, “making concrete was a laborious job. The dry ingredients of sand, metal and cement were first shovelled together in the right proportions in a heap. This heap was then shovelled backwards and forwards three times to mix everything together reasonably well. Water was gradually added, shovelling the heap backwards and forwards another three times to work it through. The wet mix, by then ready for placing, was shovelled into a barrow and wheeled to the site. If you add that up, the mix has been handled at least 8 times by shovel. One didn’t need to go jogging for exercise in those days, and we slept well at night.”
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Cliff moved on from Dave to another place nearby. Bob was a hard man who’d got his farm through the First World War Servicemen’s Rehabilitation Scheme. It was a hard place to farm, and here too floods would leave it completely under water except for the cottage, cowshed and piggery.
Bob smoked pipes, always short-stemmed. The story was that when he got angry he bit them off. He employed a young unmarried mother as a housekeeper. She was very bitter about the father of her child, a well known resident of Hikurangi who denied all responsibility for it, although she claimed he was the only man she’d ever been with.
Bob’s cottage was 3km from the cowshed, and it was a long trudge there and back morning and night.
Cliff was a tough rooster in those days. Winter and Summer he wore little other than gumboots, dungarees and a black bush singlet. Plus an oilskin when it rained. He talked about comparing complexions with a Maori boy who worked with them for a while. They decided Cliff was darker. Regardless of the merits of that, he was deeply tanned long after he quit farming in 1969.
Cliff left Bob in 1934 to take up his first mining job back in Hikurangi, as I’ll relate later. His mother was always keen to have him home, and while he was sometimes reluctant to leave a job he liked, this wouldn’t have been one of those times.
After Cliff and Dorothy bought their own farm on Jordan Valley Road in the 1950s, Bob visited to buy an army hut they had for sale. After he’d met Dorothy, Bob asked Cliff, “Are you married to her?”
Cliff saw him often over the years, the last time as a very old man. Even though the flooding affected him so badly, Bob never thought the Drainage Scheme would ever be of benefit to him, and he complained about paying the rates for it.
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I can’t work out exactly when Cliff worked with all these people, but Tom and Gwen seem to date from 1932. Gwen was Joe’s daughter, the girl who’d made her Dad a grandfather at age 30.
The two of them were in an almost constant state of warfare. Tom didn’t own the farm, so one day when Gwen lost her temper and hurled a bucketful of “strippings” — the creamiest of the milk — across the cow yard, there was some frantic washing down when they saw the boss coming.
Gwen would leave early to cook dinner, but sometimes after a fight she’d be gone from the house. Cliff would be sent to find her — generally she’d be sitting on the side of the hill, on the way to her Mum’s, nursing her child, and in tears.
Cliff wondered whether Tom felt trapped by getting her pregnant. Their bed was on the other side of a thin partition from his, and he’d hear Gwen cry out, “Don’t Tom, don’t Tom.”
I’ll leave to your imagination two stories, one about an exploding egg and another about two dogs that Tom, in a fury, tied together and hung over a fence before killing one of them with an axe.
But another incident, where Cliff embedded an axe in his own shoulder while cutting ti-tree for firewood, ended on a lighter note. If you recall, Clive had expected him to keep working after he’d dislocated his finger, and Cliff was concerned Tom would be similarly unreasonable. So he was relieved when Tom let him cycle into Hikurangi for the Doctor to stitch him up and administer an ant-tetanus injection.
When it came time to get the stitches out Cliff was allowed to take the boss’s horse and sulky back into Hikurangi, where he could also bring back the groceries. It was a lively horse — so fine fun for Cliff — but with one serious fault. Now and then it would get into its head to go backwards instead of forwards.
Without thinking Cliff tethered the horse at the Dairy Company Store to pick up the groceries, facing out ready for the drive home. After loading up, with the reins in one hand and a stick in the other he yelled “Giddup” and tapped the horse lightly on the rump. The horse went rapidly into reverse, backing towards the large shop front window.
“Alert for the sound of breaking glass,” he says, “I was vigorously applying the stick when everything came to a juddering halt.” The wheel of the gig had hit the window frame rather than the glass. It was his lucky day.
Cliff kept a newspaper clipping of Tom and Gwen on their 65th wedding anniversary. The photographer had them sitting arm in arm with a message from the Queen, smiling at each other. No Time Left to Argue, the headline reads. “They don’t argue much these days, they say, in case they die before they finish it.”
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Down the road from Tom’s was a Public Works camp where John, Cliff’s father, and his Uncle Jack Corness were among those working. They were employed to clean out creeks and dig drains by hand.
The men lived six to eight in a tent.
“Paid the princely sum of 30 shillings per week,” Cliff writes, “they had to find their own transport home at weekends and back to work on Mondays. They had to provide their own food and cook their own meals, each tent doing its own in the most primitive conditions over open fireplaces. Most had been coal miners until the Hikurangi Mine closed down. Their families at home had to fend for themselves as best they could. I remember my Mum would put a teaspoon full of tea into the pot and make it last all day.”
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Then there was Rob, whose farm suffered more than most from flooding. He owned only a few acres of land above flood level, on which were his house and cowshed.
Rob liked his beer and arrived home more than a little under the weather at times. He had to pass the Hukerenui Pub, something he found hard to do.
Cliff says, “I remember milking the cows on my own on several occasions. Rob used to go across the swamp on horseback, a shortcut that brought him out well on the way to Hukerenui and saved a much longer trip by road. On this occasion we were very concerned. A flood had come up when he was due to arrive home. It was well after dark when he did arrive, very drunk. The horse had negotiated the flood, almost certainly without Rob’s guidance.”
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During one big flood several cattle became isolated on an area of dry land down by the riverbank. To prevent them starving they needed hay. How else than by boat? Fortified with a bottle of rum, for there was nothing else to keep them warm, they set off in a rowing boat.
“It must’ve been a sizeable boat,” he writes, “for I remember there were three of us and of course there had to be room for the hay.
“We rowed up to the stack and forked as much hay onto the boat as we could. Two of us sat on the hay while the third rowed. The cattle were very pleased to see us. More than one load was required and we ran into a further complication when we found about six cattle on the other side of the fence, which was almost completely underwater for its whole length. We rowed up alongside it, and two of us climbed over and carried hay by the forkful to the cattle about 50 yards away. We were very wet and very cold and needed that rum.
“Joe provided some much-needed amusement. He was forking hay onto the boat when he yelled, grabbed the side of his upper thigh with one hand and began to remove his trousers with the other. A mouse, looking for warmth and comfort and protection, had run up inside his trouser leg. Many weeks later Jock and Dan were cleaning out a drain, up to their knees in water, when an eel followed the example provided by the mouse.”
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Cliff rode home on his pushbike one Sunday, and, as frequently happened, something broke on the way. He walked through Hikurangi and arrived home feeling very frustrated. No shops were open on the Sunday, so he had to ask his father to buy the necessary part the following week, and meanwhile to take him back to Rob’s farm by motorbike.
The following Sunday, still without his bike, he decided to walk home across the swamp. It wasn’t far is as the crow flies and he reckoned he could do it in half an hour easily. There was the river to cross, but it was summer, the water level was low and it wouldn’t hurt to get a bit wet.
“The first part across Rob’s flatland was very easy-going,” he writes, “and I was soon at the riverbank. I looked for what appeared to be a good crossing place and entered the water. The water wasn’t very deep, or so it appeared from the bank, but the mud came up above my knees. I seemed to keep sinking deeper as I pulled my way across, and I began to feel that I wouldn’t make it. It was a great relief after fighting my way up the far bank to sit down for a spell. My clothes were absolutely filthy and Mum wasn’t going to be at all pleased to see me arrive home in that condition, but nothing could be done about it.
“But I hadn’t reckoned on what was to follow either. I had to fight my way through about half a mile of tangled Ti-tree, blackberry, flax and all sorts of rubbish until I reached the lower slopes of the Hikurangi mountain. There I found myself having to fight my way through a mass of gorse to reach Mountain Road. Never again.”
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Cliff spent another interesting day or two with Rob splitting Kauri fence battens. The main trunk of the tree was long gone, and they were working on the huge branches. They used a cross-cut saw to cut the limbs into batten lengths, then drilled holes for gelignite, detonators and fuses. After they’d exploded the timber into more manageable sizes they split them into batten thicknesses with mauls and wedges, and then into individual battens with axes.
Kauri was “beautiful timber to work with’” he says, “and so easy to split. No wonder there’s so little left.”