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David Green has lived in Greens Road, Matakana, all his life; long enough to have seen snow on Mount Tamahunga, a flood that inundated the riverside site of the Matakana Cinema complex – both in the same year – and the rise and fall of the local dairy farming industry. The steamers that plied the Matakana River, providing passenger and cargo transport to Auckland, stopped running in 1936, five years after David was born.
Grandfather Green bought this property in 1892 and there wasn’t a blade of grass on the place; it was all scrub. The original house was down closer to the Matakana River. This house was built in 1939 by Percy Smith and some of the timber from the old house was used in this one. My father Fred and his brothers, Arthur and George, owned three farms and three-quarters of Greens Road.
My elder brother Allen, along with Audrey Barnes and Albert, Roy and Jim Richards, went to Sandspit School for a few years and the teacher would row across to the point at the bottom of Greens Road and pick them up. Later they transferred to Matakana School. I walked to school until I was 11 and my parents could afford to buy us a bike each. We never wore shoes until we started high school and my feet used to be black on the bottom about a quarter inch thick. I can remember in my first year at high school, playing sport mostly in bare feet, I was lying on the grass and one of my mates took out his pocket knife and started cutting chunks out of the soles of my feet, and I didn’t even feel it. My feet didn’t really start to get soft until I started working on the farm and wearing gumboots.
A few people used to ride their horses to Matakana School, and every Friday as soon as we’d finished lunch, a group of us boys would dig a hole in the horse paddock, then in the afternoon we would empty the jerry cans from the toilets into the hole, along with the rubbish. We quite enjoyed that because we used to get a shilling each for doing it. Old Fred Clegg, who used to be the baker in Warkworth, would come to the school on a Friday and we would use our shilling from the week before to buy a couple of meat pies and a sultana bun for our lunch. I was on that duty for four years because the class ahead of us only had two boys. They always picked farmers’ sons for the job, and that happened until some time in the early ‘50s when the septic tank went in.
I left primary school in 1945 and went to Warkworth District High School for two years. 1947, when I left, was the year of the polio scare when a lot of people were getting polio, not just children, and the school closed early; we never even had exams. That was the same year my father took me shark fishing and we caught 55 school sharks.
I used to play rugby and would ride my bike to the Whangateau Domain for the games. It always took me half an hour.
I’m what you might call a historian and I’ve got every telephone directory that’s been printed since 1940. The 1940 Auckland phone book, which covers from Mercer to Wellsford, has 266 pages and Matakana takes just over a page. Only about half the people in Auckland had the phone on but everyone in the country had one because they couldn’t just go to the neighbours if they had to ring someone in an emergency. I didn’t set out to collect them but there was no such thing as a paper collection in those days and one day I saw them all in the shed and it just clicked that someone should keep them. When I’ve finished with them, they’ll go to the Warkworth Museum.
My father had a Jersey herd but it wasn’t a stud. I took over the farm in 1954 and that’s when my brother Leo and I started the Holstein-Friesian stud. At that stage the Holstein-Friesians were out-producing the other breeds in the district and I thought it’s time we did something about it. Greenvale Stud was established in 1954. My father died in 1955 and my mother lived with me until she died in 1966. We had 142 acres then and we’ve only got about 80 acres left, which is only a fraction less than the farm my grandfather bought.
I was the one that was interested in the stock and Leo did his apprenticeship in Rodney Motors and when he came into partnership with me he did all the mechanical side, so it worked out very well. Of course we both milked in the shed. I was sort of the carpenter because we built our own cowshed, and Leo did all the welding.
In the late ‘70s I bought Leo’s share of the cows and sold all the in-calf cows at the end of the 1979-80 season. Production that season from 116 cows was 5342 litres of milk, 4.3 test, and 232kg milk fat in 286 days. It was the only herd that had produced over 227kg milk fat on three different occasions in the Matakana, Warkworth, Wellsford area, with a top production of 236kgs.
People used to come in droves to buy replacement calves at four days old, and farmers bought the bull calves for beef. We never put any bobby calves on the lorry. Greenvale Flaxon Felix was one of the sires we bred and it was phenomenal; the fifth highest rated bull in NZ of all breeds in the 1967-68 season. I’m proud of that. They were judged on the production of their daughters and he had 44 daughters producing 514lbs milkfat.
In 1933-34 the Matakana Dairy Company had 165 suppliers producing 504 tons of butter. The number of suppliers started going down after the war but the butter production went up because farmers started buying out their neighbours. During the war years one wee chappie who lived in the village used to bring his billie down to the factory and he was classed as a supplier. In 1951-52 the number of suppliers had dropped to 118 but the butter output was 656 tons. In Greens Road there were five suppliers but by about 1970 I was the only one left, and now there are none. Today, as far as I know, there are only seven dairy suppliers in the Matakana area.
I had to take a break from farming in 1980 because I had bad arthritis in my back. I had it very bad in my hips at one stage when I was only about 35, and it would take me 10 minutes to get down three steps at the back door. The osteopath said he didn’t know if he could cure me but he put me on a strict diet and said if I stuck to it I would probably come right – and I did. I used to live on red meat – roast beef one week, leg of mutton the next and pork the next – but since then I’ve kept off red meat, including pork, I have no salt and I live on fish and chicken. I like pork so twice a year I might have some at the men’s bowling club in Warkworth. I’ve known all these younger farmers getting hip replacements and now I don’t think I ever will.
Mr Lysnar subdivided Rainbows End round about 1964 and I think the real estates or whoever was developing it saw a rainbow down there one day and thought that was a good name for it. It took a long time to go ahead down there. Keith Hay Homes were put on sites at first then, eventually, when there was a shortage of sections around Rodney – probably around 1970 – it took off. It was a 45 acre farm originally.
