My Account
Warkworth’s summer festivals have become an important part of the district’s identity, but they wouldn’t exist without the dedication of volunteers like Ian Ferguson. Currently A&P Show Society president and previously Kowhai Festival chair, Ian has given thousands of hours to community projects over decades. He is equally at home preserving the district’s past through work with Warkworth and Districts Museum or setting the pace as a drummer in the Warkworth Pipe Band, as he is grappling with the future, by tutoring on the latest technology at Senior Net. Ian believes keeping busy is the key to staying alive. It’s no wonder that he was surprised at a recent medical appointment to discover that he was actually 74 – one year older than he’d thought. As Adele Thackray discovered, age has yet to catch up to this constantly moving target.
When Dad was president of the Warkworth A&P Society, we used wind-up, wooden telephones stuck on fence posts to keep in touch with each other, running our own wiring around the showground and connecting to an outside line with a quick twist of the wires. We always had a few sideshows, but people mainly came to look at tractors, cows and horses, which typically were just working horses from the farm that we’d take to the show to jump over hurdles and take part in events such as the trotting races. Few show horses these days would actually be used for work, stewards use two-way radios and visitors expect loads of entertainment.
The A&P Society once used to run the rodeo as well, but it got too big and was given to the cowboys to run separately. A pile of hay would be thrown into a big tin shed at the showgrounds for the cowboys to sleep in the night before. Stubbs Butchers would provide a whole lot of sausages, Dad would get eggs and Mum used to boil up a heap of potatoes that they’d serve as breakfast. Once the bread was out of his huge brick oven in the morning, local baker Joe Noyer would put in a whole lamb, which would later be sliced up and served with cups of tea for the cowboys’ lunch and Warkworth got a really good name for looking after the fellas that drew in the crowds.
I’ve been going to the Warkworth A&P Show since about 1945, ever since my father, Jim, bought a dairy farm in Woodcocks Road. In those days the cream was collected at the gate and taken to a factory in Kapanui Street, where The Farmhouse Café is now situated. We used the milk for our own pigs and calves, or on-sold it to another small farmer. I was about seven when we moved to Warkworth and the only school was across the road from the Catholic Church, in Percy St. There’s nothing left of it now, except the old headmaster’s house, although the original scout den and the band room were part of it. Because of the local cement works, we had a big concrete swimming pool – one of the first school pools in the country. The school was a bit small though and some classes were held in a gymnasium by the town hall and others in local church halls. The new school built in Hill Street was also too small by the time it was finished so some classes stayed at the old school. The following year, two marquees were put up in lieu of classrooms. With the sides up in summer, it was marvelous, but in winter it was a bit rough and if you dropped your pen it disappeared through the cracks in the slatted boards of the floor.
I left before the college was built and went to work on the family dairy farm, before Dad swapped it for a section and a heavy engineering and blacksmithing business on the current Mobil Service Station site. Initially, I did blacksmithing and shod horses, but after an apprenticeship at a local garage I got into fixing cars, tractors and trucks. After years filling up a gully between our house (where the chapel is now) and the Mobil site, we built what was then the Atlantic Petrol Station.
My wife-to-be, Jennifer, lived just along the road and we went to the same school. We married in our early 20s and went to London where we teamed up with a few girls we knew to buy a Bedford dormobile for £100 and travelled around Europe for a few months. By sharing expenses, the whole trip only cost us about £80 each. In London, I drove heavy transport trucks while Jennifer worked for an aeroplane factory making parts for Concorde. I also took the chance to get in touch with my Scottish heritage and I am now president of the Auckland branch of Clan Ferguson.
The Kowhai Festival started in 1970, about five years after we returned from overseas, when Warkworth teacher Jack Keys and Dad decided we should have something like the popular South Island flower festival. The idea was to give a leg-up to the fundraising efforts of small groups and sporting clubs such as scouts, guides and netball. Jaycees, Rotary and Lions ran various activities including raft races, the trolley derby and the festival ball. We used to close the town off for a 10km running race which attracted some quite well known athletes. Festival days were held in each area around the district including Kawau Island and community groups provided entertainment like the theatre group’s rowdy, interactive vaudeville act. The community input meant we were able to run the festival on a shoestring. Now it’s harder to get people to help organise it, the public expect a lot more and quite major sponsorships are necessary to pay for it, but I believe it’s still one of the longest running festivals around.
I got involved with the Warkworth and District Museum in the 1980s. They didn’t have anyone fixing the machinery at the time. The volunteers were using a workshop in Percy Street, where the car park is now opposite New World, for repairing small stuff after hours. The museum now has its own workshops and lathes, and volunteers can go up there and work whenever they like. Wednesdays are a working day for whole museum and we bring our lunch and share morning tea with 15 to 20 volunteers from archives, textiles, artifacts, machinery and cleaning. After about 12 years as president, I recently handed over to Brian Randell, but I still work in the machinery shed and help in a long-running project to digitise the museum’s collection records. Everything donated has been registered in a book, card indexed and stored, but with some 56,000 items in the collection, it is getting too big to manage efficiently. Thanks to Susan Simmons, we now have appropriate museum software, running on custom-built computers and a training manual specifically for our museum. Now we’d like a lot more people to help complete the project, which has already been underway for the past five years.
At the same time, volunteer photographers are taking photos of in the collection, everything from a Girl Guide badge to a truck or tractor, and we’ve started scanning more than 15,000 black and white photos, dating back to 1860, so we can link the images to the system. Manuals have been developed to ensure reference consistency, because it’s no use having all the information in the world in your computer if someone else can’t find it.
The private museum is owned by members operating as an incorporated society. Although it costs around $200 a day to run, it doesn’t take any regular government or council funding, because we realise those funds don’t come from council but from people who are having enough trouble paying their rates and keeping the town going. Instead, we seek community grants for big projects or capital works, and raise money through a monthly market day in town, the museum op shop in the old Warkworth Mitre 10 building, plant sales at the museum, open days and voluntary contributions. If we didn’t, all that local history would be in the dumpster.
