My Account
Would you trust your health to a man who periodically appears in public wearing pink lingerie and fake bosoms? Fortunately, plenty of people do. Warkworth osteopath Richard Moon tends not to take life too seriously, but that doesn’t make him any less committed to helping people enjoy the rudest possible health. As Vice-President of the Osteopathic Society of NZ, he is perfectly capable of lobbying ACC and doing his utmost to raise the profile of his profession, but the singing, ceroc dancing, horse riding car buff is never far from view…
I was born in a small industrial town in the Midlands. My folks moved to North Wales when I was about nine in an attempt to save their marriage – it didn’t work – so I spent my early teens in some pretty small Welsh villages. I moved to London when I was 16 and joined the Police. I left at about 21 and bummed around, then had a go at retraining in the legal profession, which was a desperately bad move. By a convoluted route I came to osteopathic college as a mature – well, older – student, and that’s where I first set eyes on this vivacious 18-year-old called Mandy. It had always been my intention to come to New Zealand for a bit of adventure. I came out in 1989 six months after Mandy, for a six-week holiday, and figured if I wanted to keep this lady I’d better stick around, so I forgot to go home.
For a while we lived in Auckland and I commuted to Whangarei, so I bought the biggest, hairiest motorbike I could find. Then we moved to Whangarei and rented a house by the water for $50 a week. We had no dependants, no overheads, and painted, fished and played guitar in our spare time. I’ve no idea why we ever stopped doing that, but we decided to go and build an empire and plotted a military campaign to decide where to live. We got a map and put pins in the towns we thought we might like and where there wasn’t an osteopath, then drove around to look at them all. On the way back north after visiting Nelson, Wanaka and Queenstown, we stopped in Warkworth for an ice cream and thought ‘this is nice’. Warkworth didn’t even feature in our plans because it was too small. We thought we’d give it six months and bought a small house on the corner of Lilburn Street; we stayed there for about 15 years. After six months we were financially self-sufficient and as osteopathic practices go, Warkworth has been very good to us.
We bought a block of land, built a shed and lived in that for three years before we built a house. Mandy had always wanted horses but I was attacked by a horse when I was seven and it damn near killed me, so Mandy and Becky rode horses and me and Chris rode motorbikes. I made a rash promise – possibly after one whiskey too many – that I’d ride a horse but only if it was a certain kind of horse plus a whole lot of other conditions. Of course Mandy set about fulfilling all the conditions and found the perfect horse for me – George is half Shire and looks like a knight’s charger. All the girls love him. He’s like the Monty Python horse, all style but hardly going anywhere. I can hardly read the writing on my first dressage test because the judge was laughing so hard, but I got a high score because of his beautiful canter.
Somehow I got into making knives – I was just attracted to the whole steel thing and the potential for personal harm. I tend to be drawn to things that are a bit silly. When we were in Nepal we bought one of those Gurkha knives and then I gave it away and got in a bit of trouble because it wasn’t really mine to give. So whether making a forge was some kind of penance, I don’t know, but it turned out really well. I’m a secret TradeMe junkie and I bought an anvil then went on a course to find out how to grind knives. That produced a very antiseptic looking thing but I prefer something a bit more piratical and that’s where the forge comes in. My most spectacular knife is the one I haven’t made yet; it might be a bit spooky for some people. The one I have made that I like most has been nicknamed Titanic because it’s large and heavy. I made it for riding George – all the other horses go under trees no trouble, but George is so big I’m likely to knock my block off so I use Titanic to lop off branches as we go. My children think I’m weird.
I could sing when I was a pre-pubescent child then one day when I was about 12 and my voice was breaking, I was being forced to sing while my mother played the piano, and she broke off halfway through the song and said, “what’s that dreadful noise?” From then on I sang in the car and the shower but never in public until this year, when I finally threw off my maternal shackles. I was the drummer of a band, but then the guy doing the vocals moved to Britain so I got chucked up the front. We ended up having another drummer come along who’s played with everyone – Ray Wolfe, Ray Columbus, Midge Marsden – he’s a drumming god and there was no way I was getting my job back. We started as ‘Full Frontal’, doing three or four rock n roll numbers for the Kaipara Flats Performing Arts Society, then someone suggested backing singers so we got the three chicks and called them ‘The Shambles’ – Mandy is one of them. Now we’re a nine-piece rhythm and blues band, ‘Full Frontal and the Shambles’, kind of Commitments meets Blues Brothers meets Diana Ross and the Supremes. We had our first paying gig last month and the road to stardom beckons.
I spent most of my youth sliding down the road on my arse and after spending a few days in hospital I decided if I kept riding bikes I would definitely die, so I started smashing up cars instead. Now I’m trying to find ways to expose myself to danger without being physically at risk, and that’s where MC’ing comes in. I entered the Mr Kaipara Flats contest in the 1990s and dressed in women’s clothing for a couple of the categories. In the bedroom-wear section I wore a pink negligee and big boobs, and I wore the same costume at the Matakana Biggest Loser weigh-in last year. At the Kaipara Flats Performing Arts Society we have open-mike nights every other month and we get all sorts of people you would never dream of. The emphasis was on kids but there are some big kids around here.
I’ve just sold my 1961 Studebaker Hawk which I’ve restored over the last 10 years, a splendid folly. I still have the 1937 Oldsmobile that I came to Warkworth in, and one day I’ll turn it into a limo for the band. It’s in semi-restored splendour in someone else’s shed. At one stage I had six cars, including a 1956 Plymouth station wagon that could tow anything. When Mandy was driving she couldn’t decide whether to look over or under the steering wheel. Its interior was tri-coloured vinyl – metallic blue, orange and green – and whenever it rained it smelt heavily of vomit. Its selling point was that you could get 23 sheep in it and at one stage someone obviously had.
An osteopath finds out why you’re not returning to normal health and then tries to remedy that, whether by recommending changes in work habits, manipulating your back or tweaking your toe. I fix it and then leave it alone, and if I can’t fix it I’ll send you to someone who can. Statistically we’re awesome; statistics from ACC show we outperform the other medical professions. We’re poorly represented in NZ and probably under-utilised because there just aren’t enough bums on seats. There are only about 200 practices in NZ and Unitec is the only training establishment; it produces 10 to 15 graduates a year, painfully few. Fifteen years ago anyone could call themselves an osteopath, and it’s only seven years since regulations were introduced to protect the public. In a small community, though, you’re only as good as your last month’s work.
