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When Brian Styles was still in a cot, he would dream of carving out a life on the farm. Looking back on more than six decades of farming, he can emphatically say that dream came true. From growing up in the isolated valleys of the Wairarapa, turning scrub into pasture near Otorohanga, to retiring on a 57-hectare block near Te Arai, the farm has been the epicentre of Brian’s life. But when his health started to fail him in his restless retirement, he picked up a pen to help other people see paddocks through his eyes. He spoke to Mahurangi Matters reporter George Driver about the journey.
From the time I milked my first cow when I was five or six I knew I wanted to be a farmer. That’s all there was, but that’s also all I wanted. As a kid, my ambitions were to be a good shearer, drover, fencer and bulldozer driver. I was born on my parents’ sheep farm in the Wairarapa and grew up in a tiny community, cut off from wider New Zealand. It was a two-hour trip to town and we only did it once or twice a year. It wasn’t until I went to boarding school in Fielding that I realised how different I was. It was a big culture shock. I had never learned to swim, I couldn’t throw or kick a ball – I didn’t know a thing about cricket or rugby. Coming from a school of only seven students, academic life was a bit of a mystery too. I left school when I was 16 to start my career.
My first job was a one-year apprenticeship on a Romney stud farm, getting paid £2 10 pence for a 70-hour week. The guy I was working for was pretty rough – I was told the softest part of him was his teeth – but he was probably 30 years ahead of his time in sheep breeding. He was focusing on profitable traits that would increase production, rather than just breeding for looks, like most people at the time. I would compare him to Wellsford farmer Gordon Levet, who I think is one of the leading breeders of his time. I took the knowledge I gained in that year and set to work on a breeding programme on my father’s farm.
My dad was also a pioneer. He was the first to start cultivating the hard, hilly country in the Wairarapa and the first farmer in the region to have a tractor. Back then, farming was highly physical – we used to cut hay with a scythe, and stack it into piles with pitchforks. When I was 21, I went thirds with my parents in a 140-hectare block in Otorohanga and got a foothold in my first farm. The land was mostly scrub and we had to carve out pasture from scratch. Six months later my dad died of cancer and I found myself running the farm by myself. I had a lot of ideas and I missed having an older person to bounce them off. But I loved the work – it was like a dream come true.
If there is one thing I would change, I would farm organically. We know a lot more now about the effects of pesticides and fertilisers. We used to use DDT and Dieldrin on everything – it’s highly toxic stuff, but we didn’t know it was bad. We used to use Dieldrin powder on the sheep to control fleas and lice, and I must of inhaled buckets of the stuff. It’s probably behind some of the health issues I’ve encountered. We also used 24,5-T to control gorse – that’s one of the main ingredients in Agent Orange which was used in the Vietnam War, and has been found to cause birth deformities and cancer. We were using that stuff like dishwater. One hot day I saw a boy I was employing to spray gorse, spraying the chemical all over himself to cool down.
I worked on that farm for 20 years before I sold it in the interests of ‘matrimonial harmony’. We had been married for 10 years, but we were never right for each other. You convince yourself that you can change people – but you can’t. She wasn’t happy and she wanted to be on a cow farm, so we bought a dairy farm in Ruawai. I convinced myself it was time to move on, too. Oil prices were skyrocketing and the farm lived on oil, diesel and phosphate. I had also been through four or five big droughts in seven years, so I got my tail down and left. But I became very depressed. I felt like I had parted with my life ambition of breaking in land and breeding stock – 30 years later I was still farming that patch of land in my dreams.
Dairy farming wasn’t for me. I remember standing in the wash-down sheds thinking ‘there’s got to be a better way to live than this’. Not long after, my wife took off to the South Island with our two children and I had to fight through the courts for a year to gain custody. At that stage I just wanted to walk away from everything and become a hippy. Fortunately, I found the right woman to take me through it.
I had never had to look after myself – I joke that I’m probably one of the biggest slobs in the country – so I put an ad in the Herald for a homemaker. I had three criteria: someone who could help raise my children, look after me and help cook, and who I could have a conversation with at the end of the day. I got a reply from a person who said, ‘I’ve been on my own for seven years and I have four kids. I suppose I’m too old and have too many kids, but best of luck. Love and laughter always’. I thought, ‘who signs off a letter like that?’. Curiosity persisted and I drove to the Coromandel to meet her. Jan moved in soon after and we lived together with our six kids. Within two years we were married and we’ve been happy ever since.
I always liked telling yarns. I must have become renowned for it, because people kept telling me, ‘you’ve got to get those stories written down – they are too good to loose’. That’s how I came to write my first book, Farming and Yarning. I self-published the book and we sold it ourselves. People seemed to like it and we’ve sold over 1000 copies.
I was asked to write a second book but my health started to give out – I had a triple bypass and an aorta transplant and I lost enthusiasm for writing. It wasn’t until last year that I finally sat back at the word processor. We got a new doctor in town and he changed my life. I was practically living on painkillers for back pain and my body wasn’t working right. The doctor reviewed my medication and said the combination was making my kidneys shut down. I changed the pills on his recommendation and within a week I felt five years younger. I started writing from my imagination for the first time and creating bush poems. I thought creative writing would be the last thing I would do. I’ve just released my third book, Talk of the Town, which is virtually all made up, based around tales told in a fictitious pub. I’m heading to Melbourne for a family reunion over summer. I’ve got 17 grandchildren now and six great grandchildren – half of them in Australia. Getting to meet them all is really special. I’m very fortunate when I look back. All the things I dreamt about as a kid came true.
