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This is a teenage
university student's half-belittling, half-awestruck account
of his first experience of the factory worker's life, working
as a freezing-worker in a small rural New Zealand town during
the Vietnam war era.
Audio needed
Mataura,
Southland, Godzone Land
Godzone
Land - the Mataura River
headwaters
Guitar Chords
C We don't
drink Martinis in Mataura
Fancy city clothes are never G
seen
We don't have no comforts in Mataura
'Cos we like living rough and being C
keen.
We don't have no rock-band-playing hippies
We can't tolerate their kind at G
all
You can hear the music of Mataura
Slim Dusty at the Gore Young Farmers' C
Ball
And I'm proud to be a scourer from Mataura
A place where life is good and living's G
free
A bloke can wear his singlet in the lounge bar
Singing God Defend New Zealand and
Dee C Bee
D
We don't have intellectuals in Mataura
Encouraging the usage of the A
brain
The folks here can't afford to do much thinking
They always end up crippled from the D
strain.
And I'm proud to be a scourer from Mataura
A place where life is good and living's A
free
A bloke can wear his singlet in the lounge bar
Singing God Defend New Zealand and Dee D
Bee
E
We don't stand for poofters in Mataura
Our men are weak on brain but big on B7
brawn
We like to keep our women in the kitchen
And weekends let them out to mow the E
lawns.
And I'm proud to be a scourer from Mataura
A place where life is good and living's B7
free
A bloke can wear his singlet in the lounge bar
Singing God Defend New Zealand and Dee C
Bee
E7
Singing God Defend New Zealand and Dee C
Bee
E7
In Mataura, down in Southland, Godzone E
land.
- From the Taieri
High School Songbook
- (Taieri Print,
1984)
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Mataura
The Mataura River flows from the Garvie Mountains
and across the Southland plains between Gore and
Invercargill. A waterfall on the river supplied
electricity and rinsing water for a paper mill built
in the 1870s on the east side of the falls.
In 1893 a livestock butchering and export freezing
works was built on the west side of the falls. The
small town of Mataura grew up to service these
industrial plants and to house the men working
there.
The paper mill closed in 2000 and its workers moved
to a new medium-density fibreboard plant nearby, but
the freezing works has been rebuilt and enlarged,
and is now huge.
Alliance
Freezing Works, Mataura
Scourers at Mataura
One of the hardest jobs at the freezing works is
wool pulling, removing the fleece from the pelt so
it can be washed clean. The pelts are painted with a
mixture of sodium sulphide and lime on the skin
side, and left overnight for the solution to destroy
the roots of the wool. The word puller is
a misnomer as, in fact, the wool is pushed off the
skin as it lies over the curved 'beam' board. Apart
from the physical effort required, the man's
importance lies in his skill at accurately classing
the wool. Unfortunately the photos below do not
capture the smell or noise in that concrete tomb.
Wool-pullers, Mataura
Freezing Works, 1984.
Mike Jones, Les Palmer, Gary Phillips, Don
Sutherland, John Coster, Dale Cameron and
Kevin Williamson.
Kevin
Williamson, (closest to camera) John Coster,
Les Palmer and Don Sutherland.
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Jon Gadsby
John Gadsby was born in Derbyshire, England, in
1953, and when his family migrated to New Zealand,
he went to school in Invercargill. In 1971 he went
to Dunedin to study law at the University of Otago,
and in the university holidays he worked at the
Mataura Freezing Works.
Scourer in Mataura was a boastful but
bemused account of his time at Mataura, and he sang
this song in the university Capping Revue
in 1973. It was later recorded (by John Hore?) and
played on the radio.
Finding more satisfaction in writing, communication
and comedy than in law, Gadsby dropped out of
university part way through his final year, and went
to work at Radio Otago. He entered television with
David McPhail in the comedy A Week of It in
1977-79, before the pair went on to the
successful and long-running political satire McPhail
and Gadsby.
He wrote many more brilliant songs (and sketches,
articles, children's books. etc), but the
best-remembered is his very early Scourer.
He died of cancer in 2015.
A Scourer From Mataura
Gadsby's Scourer is a New Zealand
adaptation of Merle Haggard's Okie
From Muskogee. In 1969, at the height
of the anti-Vietnam War protests, Haggard and his
band members passed by Muskogee in their bus, on
their way to a concert for army officers at a
military base, and after cracking jokes about the
place ("I bet they don't smoke marijuana in
Muskogee, eh! Heheh"), they composed Okie From
Muskogee as a spoof in about 15 minutes.
But when they sang it to the soldiers that night,
their audience started whooping and cheering, and
came up on stage demanding they sing it again,
...and again, ...and again. The Silent Majority were
no longer silent. It was songwriter Haggard's worst
ever song, and his biggest ever hit. Telegraph
Young Jon Gadsby would have been influenced
by the same songs and similar protests in New
Zealand. He was still an Invercargill teenager and
Dunedin law student when he began earning money to
pay for his studies by working in the scouring plant
at the Mataura freezing works, where he would have
been teased for his dress and attitudes by the
full-time workers there.
Like Haggard, Gadsby wrote his verses for the
university capping revue as a joke, mocking their
anti-intellectualism, but as an acute observer and
communicator, he caught the factory workers'
lifestyle perfectly, showing how sacrificing 2000
hours a year in a noisome concrete tomb (where they
had to close off their brains to stay sane) gave
them access to a simple communal lifestyle, and a
home in a beautiful land amidst wonderful rivers and
mountains. God's own land indeed.
Consequently Scourer from Mataura became
an anthem for small town factory workers, has stayed
the best-remembered of Gadsby's works, and is why
its lyrics were printed in a South Island high
school’s songbook.
And unwittingly, it is also the proud boast of a lad
who has done the hard graft of a real money-earning
adult job for the first time, thus becoming a real
man.
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