When Bruno Goedeke and his wife Sonja holidayed here from South Africa in the late 1990s, they were so impressed by this country that moving was an obvious choice, drawn initially when his eldest brother - “I’m one of four boys” - surprised the family by immigrating.
“We loved that you could put a letter in the post box and know it would be there the next day - a stable country where everything worked. After a few weeks, we decided we needed to move so we made the decision. We now have three sons, all born here ages 22, 19, 16,” Bruno Goedeke said.
On April 27, Goedeke started as chief executive of New Zealand’s biggest privately-owned construction company, Naylor Love.
Goedeke took over from Rick Herd who retired: The billion dollar boss after the company’s revenue shot from $250m a decade ago to $1b last year.
Bruno Goedeke cites his grandfather, Hubert Godecke, born 1900, when he begins telling his story, a curious one where that grandfather once had two extra Christian names and spelled the surname differently.
The two extra Christian names were dropped when he left Europe for South Africa.
The family’s roots are in northern Germany’s Gottingen area, south of Hanover, hailing from a place near Duderstadt.
The Depression prompted his school teacher Catholic grandfather to migrate to South Africa in 1930.
“He couldn’t get a job in Germany. He originally had an umlaut above the O in his surname but he also dropped that because he did not want to be called ‘God’ for short so the ‘e’ was added.”
Many Germans left for South Africa in the late 1800s, some as missionaries. Goedeke’s mother was born in South Africa “but all her life, she spoke with a strong German accent until the day she died”.
A German aunt and uncle loved visiting the South African family because those migrants retained such strong traditions from the home country, particularly at Christmas, Bruno Goedeke recalls.
The relatives were so charmed by the old ways, often lost in a more modernised Germany but so cherished by those who left, recalling their history and passing those practices onto the next generation.
Still these days, for the Goedeke family in Aotearoa, it is Christmas Eve - not Christmas Day - when gifts are given.
Goedeke attended English-speaking schools in the KwaZulu-Natal area, at Pietermaritzburg and Durban. As the first person in his family to work in the construction sector, he recalls how he was drawn to quantity surveying only when reading a career guide and is amused to remember the strange way it all happened.
“I saw an ad for quantity surveying with a cartoon with a speech bubble saying ‘earn 50,000 rand a year’. At the time it was a huge amount, although I wasn’t all that interested in money”.
Goedeke’s early career here included working for now-collapsed national builder Ebert Construction. He joined Naylor Love in 2005 and has stayed since then, praising its culture although he admits he was initially mainly attracted due to a shorter commute and being able to spend more time with the family.
“Naylor Love was relatively new to Auckland then and wasn’t as well known,” he recalls of the business founded in Dunedin in 1910 as Love Bros. Construction.
The builder has secured some of the country’s top jobs, including:
“I applied for this job late last year. I was fortunate to be made the offer,” he says of his new position.
One of his biggest concerns is construction inflation, up 18 per cent about 2022, then falling sharply and now up only about 4 per cent annually.
“How could any quantity surveyor have forecast that enormous rise and steep decline?” he asks.
As he settles into the job, Goedeke is travelling NZ, becoming more acquainted with jobs the length of this country.
Travel is not all just for work. Later this year, he and Sonya plan to visit Austria and Germany. One region south of Hanover will be on his mind, reminding him of his own family’s history.
BRUNO DIETER GOEDEKE
Anne Gibson has been the Herald’s property editor for 24 years, has written books and covered property extensively here and overseas.
'Some people can’t remember anyone in their family owning a home.'