Interviews with characters of Cambrian - Bob Berry and Trevor Shaw

The broad slopes of the Dunstan Mountains separating the Wanaka and Manuherikia Basins lean to the south-east against the tussocky haunches of the Cambrian Hills. And at the foot of these is the one-road village of Cambrian which, despite having very few inhabitants, has a high proportion of very interesting people.

That shingly, single road takes the visitor past – to mention but a few - the gatepost of artist Grahame Sydney, the front door of former All Black captain now eco-warrior Anton Oliver and the hawthorn hedge of Trevor Shaw’s house before ending in the Common Forest of Bob L de Berry.

Today you’ll meet these last two – lesser known but nonetheless fascinating Cambrian residents – former schoolteacher and planter of the Cambrian Common Forest, Bob L de Berry, and one of the region’s longest-term, if not oldest, residents, Trevor Shaw.Words: Kate Coughlan; Photos: Jane Ussher

Bob L de Berry, who upgraded his moniker (Bob Berry) to reflect his warmth towards the often-maligned but prolific elderberry tree, lives in a cottage behind a sign which says BEWARE OF THE HUG. Visitors are well advised to take note but as NZ Life & Leisure enjoys a good hug almost as much as anything, we’re not warned off. We want to know about the Cambrian Common Forest, which the sign proclaims and the eye enjoys, especially during the spring bloom when a carpet of bluebells spreads under the tall trees almost as far as it can see. It is a sight divine – and that’s not the half of it. Before the bluebells there is a sea of snowdrops, then a raft of fritillaries, followed by a showing of daffodils and grape hyacinths gorgeous enough to gladden even the hardest heart. Then there are the tulips and crocuses and in the autumn the beautiful colchicums.

So why this generous-spirited planting for all to enjoy? “Gardening is a better use for being down on your knees than going to church, in my book,” says the mischievous Mr L de Berry, who also enjoys sharing a drop or two of his renowned home-made elderflower champagne. “These plants and trees will last a long time but if you have a sheep and it dies, you’ve got nothing. These plants and trees will still be here in 500 years. It’s the right time in my life. You’ve looked after your kids and then you do something for the planet.”

He shows us his sequoia circle planted for the long, long term. This planting of Californian redwoods will outlive his children’s children and possibly his children’s children’s children. Even perhaps 120 generations. The former teacher began planting here in 1980 after deciding that his goats and sheep were plant eaters and not much use to him in his goal of being a plant planter and helping Cambrian on its way to becoming the Village of Trees. He plants with a Gimmel ice pick his brother bought for him in 1964 from Tisdalls in Queen Street for a climb with the Auckland Catholic Tramping Club. Digging in this terrain is a challenge and every year, aided by a vital supply of Woofers (Willing Workers on Organic Farms), he lifts all the bulbs to divide and replant. It is a huge job made somewhat more do-able by the effective Gimmel which, despite half a century of hard labour, has yet to see the top of a mountain.

It is a harsh environment with low rainfall, high summer temperatures and very, very cold winters. But to Bob it is all part of the great and mysterious ways of the planet. “Spring is the payment you get for living here through the winter and autumn is the payment time for having to go into winter. And why do I do it? You have to think about what you are leaving for the next generation. I want people to come up the road and stop and go for a walk in the forest. And I plant with humility. There – that’s the trouble with humility; the moment you think you’ve got it, you’ve lost it. It is a difficult virtue.”

Retired farmer and Cambrian resident Trevor Shaw grew up in the Cambrian-St Bathans district and has lived there most of his life.

Early years

“I was born in 1927 and went to school in St Bathans – the old school is just stone ruins now. The Mortgage Relief Act broke my father overnight and it was the Great Depression. Jokers were jumping out of windows and there were suicides everywhere. I was the youngest of six kids and my father was lucky because he got a job in the goldmine at St Bathans and we moved there. I did all my schooling in the shadow of the Great Depression and nobody had any money. If you wound the clock back to that time, you’d find people had nothing.

“The goldmine at St Bathans was very successful though. The main lead where the top of the lake fanned out was the richest lead in the world. Work on the second lead was stopped because it was endangering the town by undermining it – that was in the 1930s after the Depression. As a kid I was sometimes allowed to watch the wash-up, when they collected all the gold out of the big tank. No adult man would be allowed to watch that as it was too risky for theft. I remember two or three men sitting round the main tank and there’d be tonnes of gold. I saw it as a kid. There were a few hard cases round in those days and thieves might do away with the gold.

“There were 30 to 40 kids at school in St Bathans. There were two schools; the Catholic school was at the other end of town. It wasn’t just the miners’ kids but there was also some public works at a hydro construction job at Falls Dam and those kids came to school too. Oh, that was a harsh place and a tough way of life. I remember going up to Falls Dam once and conditions were not that good. They did all the work with a pick and shovel and a horse-drawn dip-tray. They lived in tents; well, their huts were half-board at the bottom with canvas on the top. Man, it was cold up there and I remember thinking it wasn’t fit for a dog.

“I am just old enough to remember the original Vulcan Hotel in St Bathans and the night it burned down. There was a fire-bucket brigade; every man was there. The publican, he’d gone with [Ernest] Shackleton [on the voyage to the South Pole] and he torched the place. Things were a bit slack in those days and he didn’t get charged or anything. And it was a pity because the old Vulcan was a far better building than the one called the Vulcan now. That used to be the old Ballarat Hotel – now it’s the Vulcan.

“There were two grocery stories in St Bathans when I was young, Pile Brothers and McConnachies Store. I used to like going into McConnachies as a kid because there were big rolls of bacon hanging from the roof, cheese in big mesh cloths and they’d get a big knife and cut a piece out, big strips of bootlaces still on the hide which would be cut to the right length for the size of your boot, 40lb of flour in hemp bags and you’d get smothered in a dusting of flour every time you shifted them. It was a lovely store but I don’t know what happened to the fittings in that store. There were six big kauri counters. They were lovely but the buggers probably broke them up for firewood. They didn’t know what they had, that’s for sure.

“That’s something that annoyed me over the years. People would pull down or take buildings away and they pillaged all the property. All that stuff that was interesting all went. I have seen different publicans come and go over the years and they all take the history away. We used to have good big old photographs and antique furniture but it’s gone. One day I rescued a book that was about to be burned on a fire. It was the old Scandinavian Mine ledger book… a beautiful old leather-bound book. That’s what those idiots used to do because they didn’t value anything.”

Social

“We had a dance hall; dances were the highlight, in the old hall, the mainstay of the outfit – the township. We’d get there by shanks’ pony [walking]. There were always more men than girls, always been that way in New Zealand. When I was a kid there were one and a quarter million people in New Zealand. I didn’t marry – was there no Miss Perfect… [a gentle laugh] … I think it was more the other way… I wasn’t Mr Perfect. There were always more men than women.

“We left St Bathans when the war broke out and moved to Dunedin. If you walked down the street then everyone had long faces, everyone was scared stiff that they’d wake up and the country would be full of the German or Japanese armies.

“Those hard-case young chaps from the hill mines round here, they enlisted straight away and before you could say Jack Robinson off they went to war. I trained as a carpenter when I left secondary school and I worked for a while in my apprenticeship on shop interiors in Dunedin. Then, at 16, I got hauled into manpower [compulsory work] and worked on the Liberty ships. The idea was that the Liberty ships were necessary to get the troops into Europe so they really only had to survive a few ocean crossings and could be welded instead of riveted together. It was all desperate; they needed the ships to get the forces to fight Hitler in Europe. My job was driving the steam hammer to test springs for Bren gun carriers.

“Actually, it was a most uninteresting job to do all day… feeding a spring into the steam hammer and giving it about six blows with the hammer and sometimes the springs flew apart. I felt lucky to get away from that job. Sometimes the pressure was on to get the ships to sea as quickly as possible and we’d still be working on the ships as they sailed up the harbour. Then the steam tug would follow the ship to take us off at the Heads.

“I was working on the steam hammer when they brought in all the wrecked train carriages from the Hyde Rail disaster [21 deaths and 47 injured victims], all of them covered in dried blood from the accident – it was not very nice.  It was a busy weekend as it was Winter Show and the races at Forbury Park [Wingatui] so it was a full train [pre-Queens Birthday Friday passenger steam train from Cromwell to Dunedin with 113 passengers].There was one army joker who was home in Ranfurly on leave and he missed the train so he got the taxi to chase the train. That was one train that he should not have caught. It was grog that did it. The driver had stopped at Ranfurly and gone to the pub. And the bad thing was that the bugger wasn’t hurt at all. [The inquiry found the driver, who survived uninjured, was drunk. He received a three-year jail sentence.]

“The Railways were shockers in those days. It was an institution and all their bludging used to make you so mad. You’d take lambs down to be loaded on to the train at Lauder and the driver and stoker would waddle over to the pub at every stop and the train would be half a day late and you’d be sitting there with a yard full of sheep in the hot sun. They’d make you mad.

War

“All our news was bad news. We never had any victories, then there was Dunkirk and everything was going downhill. It was very frightening. It seemed as though Germany had everything: all the modern equipment. We were rationed and we were feeding the starving people in Britain. We had coupon books but we didn’t mind because we had been rationed before in the Depression. We had no butter on the table then, no sugar; food was pretty tight. But the thing was, we all put our shoulders to the wheel and that was how society was then. Everybody looked after everybody else. You got support and a neighbour helped. If you had a crop to get in, the neighbours came and helped to harvest it. All the neighbours would come. I have to take my hat off to the young women who worked on the land at that time because they worked very hard and they were very good at it too.

“I was on the list to go to war and I was ready to go but they dropped that bomb so I didn’t have to go. So then I came home – why? Well, you could put it down to the Dunedin weather. I wanted to get back to where I came from – where there was a bit of sunshine. They are different people down there in Dunedin, those townies.

“I played a bit of rugby at local club level at Becks and played for Maniototo for a few years, played for a few invitation fifteens but I wasn’t much good at football. It was very different from what it is today; scrums and rucks went on for a long while in those days, fellows used to grip on to one another and get away with it. There wasn’t all the fuss and bother there is today. We just changed our clothes and played rugby. My teeth and nose were broken by rugby but that’s not everything about it. I was riding a steer and had a fall that broke my teeth – pushed them backwards. My mother was going crook about that so she put her fingers into my mouth and pulled them straight again and it worked. I was only a young fellow then. But a bit later on I got a back-hander in the line-out in rugby and the teeth broke off again. I went into Ranfurly to an old-timer dentist and he lanced my gums because the broken teeth had got into a mess.

“Then I broke my nose again and went into hospital to have it operated on. I remember being in hospital when King George V died. It was the biggest crowd I’ve ever seen in my life – all the streets were full of people. Anyway, I got my nose fixed and I wasn’t home five minutes when I was horsing around with my brothers and sisters and it got broken again. Then there was a high ball at football and I leaped in the air and, just as luck would have it, the other fella jumped too and my nose was broken again.

“For a social life we had dances. Jo Brown’s Naseby Town Hall dance was a big one. He was the fellow who went on to run the Miss New Zealand contests. And he ran good dances.

“Our father (James “Cody” Shaw) bought the Cambrian Hills Station and I mustered the hills with my brothers. We lived in a stone house, a permanent camp where our father and us, and all the shepherds, worked with our dogs.

“My grandfather, old Robert Shaw, had come out from Scotland and bought a couple of dogs with him. [Jip, Trevor’s canine companion today, is a direct descendant of one of Robert’s original Scottish dogs.] She’s the last female of the Scottish collie dog that he came out here with. She is a nice-looking dog and her grandmother, Alice, was a hell of a nice-looking dog. Which is more than can be said for the cat. Now that’s a gift I didn’t require. He was called Whiskey but I didn’t like that name – so I call him Hughey after the weather man. What weather man? Well, I always called all the weathermen Hughey.

“My grandfather was a shepherd back in Scotland too. He married Annabella Gordon from Roxborough; they were the first couple in the Tuapeka area. Robert and Annabella had 17 children and they had a preference block between Highfield and Gimmerburn. That was in the 1850s. My father, James, married Hannah Rebecca Atkins from the London suburb of Rickmansworth. She met my father when he was in the UK after the First World War.

“My father’s generation were all horsemen and it was very different to what it is today. They had some fine horses too. They had one that was supposed to be the best walker in the district; that horse could cover 80 miles a day. That’s a big distance for a horse. In the big snows of early last century they reckon it took three days to get to Hyde [today a one-hour journey in a car] in a horse-drawn gig. The snow was so thick that sheep were dead standing up.

“Farming life is the best. Building wasn’t for me. It means you are inside a lot whereas with farming you get to be outside and you had a stable filled with horses and lots of dogs. We had beautiful horses. One horse bred at Cambrian Hills won the Grand National, well that’s what I was told, Loch Ella I think it was. We had no machinery then except the wagons, tip trays and horses… beautiful creatures, horses.

“It was a good life but harsh sometimes. The climate here is not always good and sometimes we get very big winds in the hills. We used to call the big gusts ‘snorters’. You’d hear the wind above you in the mountains whirling and whirling. I was up the foothills of the mountain one windy day, near the old Funnell Mine, and suddenly the tussock all started going flat in a line towards me. The dogs lay on their stomachs as flat as they could so I jumped off my horse, grabbed the stirrups of my saddle, thinking the horse would be a good anchor, and the wind gust that came was so strong it tore the leather buttons off my thick old leather coat. You’d hear the wind whipping round the rocks, cracking like a stock whip. You’d swear it was a rifle shot or stock whip but it was just the wind.

“I’ve seen a lot of interesting things up in those mountains. Before the shags came the streams in the mountains were full of what we called ‘brode’ trout and they had little fat tummies. The only reason they stayed around so long was that the shags couldn’t reach them under the rocks but eventually they disappeared.

“When I was just fairly young there was a big totara log found up in the hills because these hills all used to be covered with totara. But the Maoris burned it all off. Old [Captain James] Cook, he noted in his log that the hills were covered with palls of smoke. The Maoris burnt it all off for the moa. They chased that last poor bugger down and ate him.

UFO

“I have seen a UFO. This is what happened. I was in bed at about 2am [in the farmhouse at Cambrian Hills Station] and I was woken by a noise. I thought it might be an earthquake so I got out of bed. The noise was getting louder so I looked out the window towards the mountains. I saw a flying object; it went west to east. It was in our atmosphere. There was a glimmer of green at the front of it, where the heat shield was breaking through the atmosphere, a straw colour in the middle and at the back it was flaming red. The motors sounded just like diesel motors, lovely and smooth.

“I yelled out to my brother who was asleep in the house also but it was travelling too quickly and he didn’t see it. It was enveloped in flame. I thought it was definitely something re-entering our atmosphere from space. I told my brother, you know what I’m going to do? I am going to find the first person I see and I am going to tell this to them. He said they would think I was nuts. I am not nuts. It was very clear what I saw.

“So next day I was talking to Jack (one of the locals) while we were digging a grave at St Bathans and I told him what I had seen. ‘Goodness me,’ he said, ‘I believe you, crikey dick, I’d love to see that.’ I am sound as a bell and I know I saw it. The thing was so authentic, I heard it coming and it was under power.
“I don’t go along with global warming though; it has been warming up for years. These winters are hardly anything like they used to be. Mind you, everything changes.

I know where there are seashells on top of mountains; there is one place up there in the hills where debris has fallen off a big tall rock. There’s a fault line either side of it, and that’s where I’ve seen shells myself way up in the mountains. [During the last hot age 16 million years ago the Manuherikia valley was an inland sea.]
 “Our life as farmers was about growing winter feed of turnips, oats and lucerne, hay-making and planting clover, rye grass, cocksfoot, brown top, fescue and sweet vernal pasture grasses and looking after our stock. None of the Shaws were ever tempted by gold; we’re shepherds, not gold men. All those men at Welshman’s Gully burrowing into the hills for gold... they were scallywags, those miners. They were water thieves too.

“The world’s a far better place now. A lot of people didn’t even have running water in those days and now the standard of living has gone way up to billyo, no doubt about it. What we thought were luxuries are now necessities. The motor car broke down a lot of the community. People just get in their cars and drive places by themselves. It’s changed everything. Harvest time is no longer the gathering of everyone. Big machines do it all, so there’s no social side to it.

“What do I miss? I miss the birds. Forty to 50 years ago there used to be so many birds but since people started bringing their cats up here the birds have suffered. Magpies are terrible killers. I hate the sight of those magpies – they come from Norway, don’t they? I remember the arrival of the magpies; they came when I was a small boy. There were so many birds before they came. Recently I have had three birds chased by magpies and crashed into my window, poor little beggars, dive-bombed by magpies, killed by hitting the window trying to escape. Stoats kill a lot of birds too. They can skate around a tree quickly. And they change colour so you can’t see them. I hate them.

“One of the worst things in my life was that I had one brother who died of dieldrin poisoning in his 40s. That was very terrible; he went from one doctor to another to try to work out what was wrong with him – he just melted away. It was terrible alright.

The best advance I have seen in my life is hydraulics. It is one of the things that you wouldn’t expect me to say but that’s it: hydraulics are the best advance I have seen in my life. Before the invention of that, everything was done by sweat of the brow and bend of the elbow. Now it’s done by the flip of a switch. You get a great big load and you can move it.

“Another good advance is animal health. New Zealand has been leading the world in animal health. That was before Mr Lange [New Zealand Prime Minister 1984-89) closed down the Invermay Research Station. He didn’t like the agricultural side of New Zealand. He and that Rogernomics [Sir Roger Douglas, finance minister in the Lange government] ruined the country. But he’s dead that David Lange and my mother taught me to never speak ill of the dead.

“The best time of my life? My favourite time was as a young man. When you are young you have the world by the tail with a downhill pull. All days are great when you are young.”