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MAORI SHEARERS In the early 1900s we employed a gang of Maori shearers consisting of shearers, fleece-ohs, pressers, and some wahines who did the cooking as well as fleece-oh work. Many of the Maoris still had tattoos in those days, both men and women. There were plenty of children, for the gang brought all their families. All shearing was done with the blades. No machines those days.
One time there was a lull in the weather and the Mangamahu pub was not far away. They had come back from the hotel and it ended with a fight between the tribes. They were all camped in our big whare of one room. Half the scrappers were inside and the other half outside, and they were trying to get at each other. Some of the kids inside tried to escape and got jammed in the door between the opponents. In the finish the hinges gave way, then a couple of wahines bashed all the windows in with brooms. I was only about six years old then, and rushed home to tell Dad. The Maoris seemed to treat my father like a chief. They listened to what he had to say, and had to pay for repairs, mainly foregoing some of their pay.
The vehicular bridge on the River Road over the Mangamahu Creek was washed away by a big flood in 1904. Just over the bridge was our main gateway to the homestead. We were marooned while they built another bridge which took about six weeks. There was a little one-at-a-time bridge swinging on number eight fencing wire which was very high off the water. I was quite game to cross it by myself, but if one of the family came they used to scare me by making the bridge sway from side to side. This little bridge was a shortcut from our home to the store, hotel and blacksmith's shop. Being a little fellow about three or four years old, I used to cross over to see all the goings on! I well remember seeing many strange and weird things happen. The store and hotel did big business those days. especially on the weekends. There were saddle horses and packhorses every where, tied to hitching rails and fences. I thought the store-keeper might give me some lollies but there was not much doing so I went over to the hotel and looked into the billiard room. I found the room filled with a lot of inebriated bushmen and others all scrapping on the floor with highfalutin language flying everywhere: they were harmlessly drunk. I leaned onto the window-sill to get a good look but some bloke gave me a cuff behind the ear. I got away post-haste, making for the rickety swing bridge and Mum.
Men with pack horses used to come from as far away as Waiouru to pack stores when the Main Trunk Railway had been built as far as there. They used to take a day to ride to Mangamahu and a day to get back, and of course they put the night in at the pub. The owner of the hotel in my time was a Mr Lacy, with a wife and family. I went to school at that time with their family. Mr Lacy had a building at the back of the hotel which everyone called the morgue. This was the place where he put the drunks when their big cheques failed. He would wean them off the grog until they became sober then tell them that their cheque had cut out. Sometimes they got a job sowing grass seed and track-making on the bush burns. More than half the bushmen never got past the pub when they came in with their big cheques and didn't see daylight for about a fortnight or so. One of the men fell in the river, I remember his name was Mick: they never saw him again, but they found his hat and walking stick above the very high papa cliff that overlooked the river, close to the hotel. Many funny incidents happened around the Mangamahu Hotel, mostly by inebriation. One day I remember a groggy man with a horse and gig was to leave for home. Someone thought he would do this man a favour, so they harnessed his horse, put the shafts of the gig through the fence nearby, then hitched the horse into the gig on the other side of the fence. The owner came out of the pub with a whisky bottle showing out of his pocket, got into the gig and said "Get up you B...." The horse gave a lurch, the fence creaked and all of a sudden the horse freed itself, tearing away with a broken shaft of the gig. The horse was caught afterwards with no damage to itself. The owner was terribly distressed because his bottle of whisky got broken and lost its precious contents. I can remember when we made our own candles and soap. For the candles there was a mould that made six candles at a time. It had a tube for each candle and a wick was fitted down the centre, then boiling fat was poured in.
All families milked some house cows, put the milk into a huge, flat, round, low-sided pan and in the morning they would skim the thick cream off the top with a skimmer, then put it into a round wooden churn with a handle. When the handle was turned it made the cream into butter and liquid whey was left over. That whey was most times made use of for cooking or fattening the bacon pigs.
About 1905 they held an agricultural show at Mangamahu, with clowns in the side-shows which very much amused me because I had never seen clowns before. There was horse-jumping, chopping, running and all sorts. Of course, lollies galore.
When ploughing the river flats my father dug up some Maori axes and they looked like greenstone. The Maoris gave my father three exceptionally long wooden spears, which they had used for spearing the pigeons with. Also we had a little wooden trough the shape of a Maori canoe which was put up in trees, especially the miro, that has a mass of berries. In these troughs they put water, nooses were set from each side of the trough, so when the pigeons drank and lifted their heads they lassoed themselves, fluttering from the sides over the edge and hung themselves. The Maoris collected them when necessary.
I used to make bows and arrows for birds. For the bow I used a springy wood from the bush - not lancewood, it was too bendy. Arrows were made from toi-toi with a binding at each end to hold a sharpened nail and a feather. I could send an arrow out of sight up in the air. They were not very accurate but I could shoot a bird with them once in a while.
I also used to make darts. One day I was throwing darts around when one stuck in a fairly tall cabbage tree. I shook the tree hard to make the dart fall, and while I was looking up the dart came unstuck, came down, and stuck in on the bony place between my eye and my nose. I didn't go near the house for a long time, for my eye and face had swelled up badly. When I did go back, I didn't tell them how it happened, but I think they knew. I also made shanghais, with a forked piece of branch and thin strips of rubber cut from bicycle tubes. My brothers had bicycles to ride and I used to ride theirs, not for great distances, the roads were too rough.
At the back of our farm at Rush Flat was the junction of the River Road and the Ridge Road, where the Ridge Road started from the flats and climbed a long incline up onto a main ridge, which it followed well on the way to Mataroa, near Taihape. The Ridge Road could only be used by the wool-wagons and other wheel traffic in the summer and autumn, and it was exceedingly narrow and winding, especially for the wool-wagon s with their five-horse teams. When the wagons were on the higher altitudes, their dust could be seen from miles away, like a huge cloud rising in the sky, for none of the old road was metalled. On the bad corners the leading horses had to sidle over the bank where not too steep, or else the leaders had to be unhitched and let the shafters do the pulling around the extra-sharp corners.
When our wagon carted the wool in the summertime, it was backloaded with the necessary farm stores for our large family. It was to see us out until the next summer or autumn. Flour was bought by the ton in fifty pound bags, sugar also was brought in at nearly a ton at a time in seventy pound bags. The quota for our family was about two tons of flour and about three quarters of a ton of sugar. When ordering it was always better to order too much than too little. We had a large pataka which stood on long tin-covered legs to keep rats and mice from entering. It was used as a storeroom, especially for flour, rice, cornflour and anything the vermin liked.
Sugar got a great run because of jam-making and preserving fruit. Most farmers had large orchards with heaps of fruit going to waste or fed to the porker and bacon pigs. Spraying the fruit trees was practically unheard of in those days and all kinds of fruit trees had prolific crops. For the jam and preserves they always had heaps of shelves to keep them on, especially in the wash-house and any building outside. The sugar bags were not wasted when emptied, they were made into aprons, etc, which looked very smart when made with a little 'do-da' of coloured thread sewn on to imitate birds and animals. The flour bags, they were made into blouses and shirts and used to look wonderful with designs of flowers and all sorts of scenery. Most women were extremely good with the needle and made dresses all embroidered to go tatas with.
We had quince trees, pears, 'pears for our heirs,' and a very tall mulberry tree that grew in the fowl run. It was laden with mulberries. People could tell when any of us had been at the mulberries because we would be stained with the purple juice. We had peaches, different kinds of plums and quite a number of apples though not the same varieties you have today. We used to keep the apples quite a long time. Some went bad fairly quickly, and some kept almost right through the winter.
There was the stray fig tree though no-one seemed to have grapes. There were raspberries of course and gooseberries too. We had a few blackcurrants, they were fiddly to pick, but some were used for jam, although the kids used to go for them first. Walnuts did well, there were quite a few walnut trees in the valley, but very few apricots, it was the wrong climate for them.
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