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After a lifetime in the education sector, retired principal Neville Johnson laments the decline in the profession’s mana. He believes this trend has resulted in fewer men choosing teaching as a career, with school environments the poorer for it. These days, Neville and his wife Margaret run a successful B&B business in Matakana, a place he has grown to love and where he expects to live out the rest of his days. But before he shuffles off this mortal coil, he sat down for a chat with Jannette Thompson …
When I went to training college there were 70 men and 300 women, so things were changing even back then. Teaching has become a high-risk job for men – they can’t afford to do anything that can be misinterpreted. It makes it pretty hard. For instance, if a child is hurt, your natural instinct is to pick them up and try to make them feel better. But male teachers don’t have that freedom. The downside is that a lot of boys are growing up without strong male role models. Even when I was teaching, the make-up of the school community was roughly one-third conventional two parent families, one-third blended families and one-third solo mums.
The complexities of parenting in this modern era put a lot of pressure on both parents to work. I think that is where grandparents and the wider family can really make a difference. There needs to be strategies to provide support for children when Mum and Dad aren’t there. Maori in rural communities do this brilliantly with that whole wrap-around support. In our case, we found the church helped when our three daughters were teenagers. I have had a strong call to be part of the Presbyterian Church and am currently one of the team overseeing the development of a new church complex in Mansel Drive. Through the Mahu Vision Trust, I’ve been involved in the annual Mahurangi Pasifika Festival for the benefit of Kiribati, Tuvalu, Tongan and Samoan migrants. It is such a pleasure to see how appreciative migrant minorities are of any initiative that helps them retain and promote their cultures.
My parents were both children of migrants – Mum’s family from Scotland settled in Timaru, while Dad’s family came from Lancashire. They met in Whangarei, where Mum was working as a housekeeper and, as was the custom of the day, Dad had to go to Timaru to ask her father’s permission to marry. They started life together as sharemilkers in Kawakawa where I was born, the fifth child of seven. Later, they bought a small dairy farm in Ngunguru where I attended primary school. We lived a subsistence lifestyle relying on the garden, the chooks and the animals we kept on the farm. Although it was a good life, I knew farming wasn’t for me the day a calf suckled on my pants and I had to go to school with them all wet and sticky. After finishing at Whangarei Boys, Mum suggested I join a bank or take a trade. Neither really appealed, but when I told her I could go to teachers training college and be paid, she said that settled it! It was a two-year course, initially based at Waikowhai Primary in Auckland. The college was very paternal with its first-year students to the point where it would even vet the suitability of our accommodation. I ended up living above an uncle’s music shop in Rutland Street where the trolley bus cables were attached to the building. This meant that the whole building would shake every time a bus went by.
I did a probationary year at Titoki District High School, west of Whangarei, where I had a class of seven-year-olds – I can still remember their names. It was a bit of a sink or swim arrangement, but it did help us to sort out whether teaching was what we wanted to do. I then spent four years at Onerahi Primary before deciding to further my own education with a Bachelor of Education in Palmerston North. Margaret and I were married by this time, and we enjoyed living in a university town. The Vietnam War was nearing its end, but it was a pretty volatile time with strident opinions on both sides. I was a bit on the fence – I could see the ugly side of the war but I also didn’t want to see communism moving any further south.
The degree gave me the impetus to advance through the education system and my first sole charge was Parakao School, north of Titoki. I was responsible for 13 students, aged from five to 12 years, as well as 22 ewes and an occasional ram. There was a boy at that school who was of above average intelligence, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not teach him to read. I had to accept that sometimes I would fail. It was an important lesson. Onerahi was followed by a teaching exchange to Redcliffe in Brisbane and then a move to Leigh, where I was principal for four years. Leigh is quite a diverse community – farmers, fishermen, tradesmen, retirees, and those associated with the marae and the marine laboratory. It was a challenge at times pulling all these sectors together. The swimming pool, which involved the very controversial closure of Totara Street, was built during my time there. It was a bit of a battle, that required coordinating five different government departments, but we did it in the end.
My next, and final, move was to Matakana where I spent 23 years before stepping down in 2009. In that time, the roll went from 120 to 412. The nice thing about education is how you get to know the communities the schools serve. Projects come along and you find yourself negotiating, fundraising and working alongside parents, many of whom grow to become friends. Tomorrow Schools, introduced in 1987, was a real game changer in terms of governance, management and administration. Matakana took up the challenge, with first Ralph Nevill (head of the school committee) and then Scott McCallum, the first chair of the Board of Trustees. We bought adjoining land from Logan Campbell where the basketball courts are now and then started further negotiations for land at the back of the school. The swimming pool was built under Scott’s watch, a new library and 12 new classrooms were added. Scott is a real ‘can do’ sort of person who seemed to be able to find a solution for any obstacle that came along. Perhaps the biggest project we tackled was the new assembly hall, which again was driven by an enthusiastic committee. It’s lovely to see it fulfilling its purpose as both a school and a community facility.
Many of these projects were underwritten by the infamous Matakana School Gala. These were a lot of work, but also a lot of fun for parents and the children. However, it had probably run its course by the time the school moved to an internal auction. At one of our early sales, someone donated a genuine German helmet. When word got out, five collectors from Auckland came to our auction night. The audience was transfixed as the bids kept going up until finally the hammer came down on $200, which was big money for one item in 1988! At its peak, it took 180 adults to make it all happen – we used to rope in friends, family and even grandparents. People would swarm in for Raewyn Whistler’s plant sale and it got to the stage where people would camp outside the school so they could be first through the gates on Saturday morning. The entertainment varied from country music to belly dancers. Miss New Zealand even made an appearance one year.
Pet Day was another highlight on the school calendar. I remember when Brodie and Glen Campbell brought their cattle dog along and it decided to cock its leg on me while I was in the middle of some announcements. Some parents found that very amusing! Another year, the fire siren went off on Pet Day morning, scattering animals in all directions. One child’s cat went under a building and it took us six weeks to get it out. I tried to retain those rural events for as long as possible. At its height, we had 40 lambs in the show, but in the end this had dwindled to five.
One of my passions is history. I’m currently writing a family history and I was honoured to write the foreword for David Grant’s book on Matakana, We Gathered Here. I loved helping orchestrate the return of St Andrews Church to the Matakana Country Park from Snells Beach in 2007. John Baker did us all a huge favour by paying for it to be both re-sited and restored.
I’m finding that retirement is more about shifting gear than slowing down. I enjoy community involvement, whether it’s the community group, the hall committee or the choir. I was involved in building the walkway from Jones Road to Matakana, which was great fun because it was done without crippling compliance issues. A very enjoyable part of that was helping to run the Fruit Loop, a fun run that raised significant money for the pathway metal and the footbridge. I have two unfinished projects still running – one is the establishment of a heritage trail around Matakana village and the other is the planting of a native tree border around Jubilee Park. Other than that, you can sometimes find me on the golf course these days, fishing in Kawau Bay or maybe even building yet another shed.
