My Account
A life without regrets is how John Phillips, of Kaipara Flats, describes the last 85 years. Born between the wars and raised on the outskirts of Warkworth, he is a fourth generation Kaipara Flats farmer who started out as a keen hunter-gatherer, only to wind-up a conservationist. Married for 60 years to Maureen, he believes the secret to his happy life was choosing the right partner – “she’s still my kind of girl”. He told Jannette Thompson that although he has no plans to retire, he has recently given up his life-long love of riding motorbikes ….
Riding a bike used to make me feel 10 years younger, but the old body isn’t what it used to be and the rides started to make me feel 10 years older. Maureen was still riding on the back until about 10 years ago, but two artificial knee joints have slowed her down a bit too. She was on the back just a few days before we were due to be married, when we were hit by a car. She got out of hospital on the eve of the wedding and had to walk down the isle on crutches with her father carrying her bouquet. She was in plaster for five months so we spent the money we’d set aside for the honeymoon on buying a bedroom suite. All my days I’ve loved motorbikes and used to ride Velocetts; there’s still one in the shed that’s just one year younger than me.
The Phillips family arrived in NZ on the Worldwind in 1859. My great grandfather Joseph, and his three brothers, bought adjoining farms around Kaipara Flats airfield. Not surprisingly, the place got the nickname Phillipsville. While farming was their main occupation, one of the brothers Isaac had spent some time on the Australian goldfields and for a while they took up gold prospecting on what became Mabbett’s farm. They got down to 170 feet, but the shaft flooded when they started tunnelling sideways. Apparently they were getting three to five pennyweights per tonne – I don’t know what a pennyweight is, but I imagine it was buggar all.
My parents were Ernie and Nellie, and our family farm was on Kaipara Flats Road, not far from the intersection with State Highway One. The area was known as The Briars. I’d have to say that my brother Jim, now 92, and I had a very happy childhood. There were always plenty of kids around the place to play with and some of my happiest memories were of eeling in the local creeks and streams. They weren’t hard to catch and some of them were around 10lbs. Dad would boil them up and feed them to the pigs. During the Depression, what Dad didn’t grow, we didn’t eat. Most of it was great except for the maize, which he would grind up for porridge – it was terrible stuff. Dad spent his last few years at Waioma Rest Home, at Whangateau, where they made a special area for him to garden. On the day he died, aged 94, he’d just planted 12 lettuces.
Dairying was the mainstay of the district then. Our cream went to the Kaipara Dairy Company, in Helensville, by rail from Kaipara Flats. It was around 1939 before we got a milking machine – up until then the cows were milked by hand, twice a day, in our small four-bale shed. Dad had a run-off at Sunnybrook, about halfway through The Dome, with a two-bedroomed shack on it. That’s where we were on the night of July 22, 1931, when my mother became, the first person in NZ to receive an overseas telephone call. Her brother was a reporter on an English newspaper and he had arranged the call, presumably so he could be the first with the story. The arrangements were made by letter, which took about six weeks to arrive by boat, so no firm date for the call was set. It was already night when we heard Cyril Phillips coming through the bush calling out to us. Dad put me on his back as we walked in total darkness through the ferns and ti tree, and across a stony creek, to the road. The road, now SH1, was mostly clay with a bit of metal and Cyril had to put chains on the back wheels to get some traction. We finally got to the Warkworth Post Office where the postmaster Mr Ingham met us. We were tired and hungry, and the wait seemed to go on forever. At last the call came through and mother took it as father was very deaf. A Mr Stapleton, from the Empire Dairy Company, talked to her for a few very brief seconds about butter and then it was all over. The headlines in the English papers the next day read ‘Log hut phones London. Voice speaks from the bush’.
Warkworth was full of interesting old characters in those days. The Azzy brothers – George, Peter and Dom – ran shops built of corrugated iron, about where Franklins Chemist is now. All three were bachelors and lived at the back of their shops. Mum said they were Syrian. Dom was a hairdresser and tobacconist, who always smoked a pipe and was rumoured to be the local condom stockist. He owned a Nash coupe sedan, which was his pride and joy. Peter was the tailor and I remember he gave Mum a book of suit material samples which my brother and I spent hours removing from the pages. Mother then sewed all the patches together on her Singer treadle sewing machine, backed them with an old grey blanket and transformed them into very warm bedcovers for our beds. This was the 1930s when times were hard and there wasn’t a lot of demand for men’s suits in Warkworth so Peter moved on. George did boot repairs but doubled as the town bookie and made frequent appearances before the court. Another character was Tomas Creekdale Oak who ran the Streamlands Post Office and telephone exchange, and was also the Herald correspondent. He was the son of an old sea captain who was very fond of rum, but Thomas signed the pledge and always wore a blue ribbon on his coat lapel. He was a bachelor who loved trees and would cry if he saw one cut down, and yet earned pocket money cutting firewood. Even when he was old, he would never miss our Dome Valley Sunday School. He always gave each kid three lollies wrapped in brown paper. I guess it encouraged us to attend Sunday School but he always smelled strongly of urine and unfortunately, so did the lollies.
After I left school I trapped possums for a while; the skins were worth five shillings each. I was going to do an apprenticeship with Rodney Motors, but the war came along and there weren’t enough qualified guys left to train me. Mum and Dad sold the farm and moved to Ranui and I went to work in fruit research at the Oratia experimental farm. After Maureen and I were married, we decided we’d had enough of city life and we swapped our house at Ranui for Charlie Anderson’s farm here on Woodcocks Road. Both our children – Michael and Judith – grew up here. We started off with 23 cows and then built glasshouses and grew tomatoes for the local market. We had a go at table grapes and capsicums for a while, but stuck with tomatoes. Michael did an apprenticeship with Wilmots but then decided to go in to goat farming so I adapted the cowshed accordingly. The market for goat’s milk promptly crashed and he went back to cows so we had to re-do the shed again. There’s still plenty of things to keep me busy – I still make some pocket money sharpening chainsaws and fixing lawnmowers – and retirement’s not in my plans in the immediate future.
