The manager told him he would send the truck in to pick him up the next morning. Dan was destined for Huanui, 45 kilometres inland from Tolaga, a station of 12,000 acres, some 75,000 sheep and about 8000 head of cattle.
His older brother had already taken up work on the station. Dan ran home to tell his mum: “I’m away.”
Not a stranger to the outlying stations of the district, Dan and his siblings used to pile in the back of their mum’s Mark III Zephyr, skidding over country hills.
“When we were kids, we’d get a phone call at 7 or 8 o’clock on a Saturday night. ‘Can you take a dozen bottle of beers out to a certain station?’ We’d pick up the goods from the back of the Tolaga pub. She’d take us for a ride — sometimes it would be a four-hour trip.”
Roads back then were metal, rough, but “always in good condition”, Dan remembers.
“Council had a good work ethic, keeping the drains clean, the side of the hills, so water ran freely and culverts were clear.”
Most of the work was done manually.
Day one saw him so excited he couldn’t sleep, bunkered down in a four-bed room. They were upgraded to a single later on.
The station employed about 20 people, with about 12 young guys. Docking was his first job; jumping on a tractor, crossing the creek, shepherds would be bringing in the stock — 2000 ewes and lambs.
“That was my first day. I worked about eight hours docking. I was knackered — came back, had a wash and went straight to bed. I slept for about 14 hours. They had to wake me up,” he said.
Cooks, Blondie and Wallace Carr, provided plenty of food — roasts and big breakfasts of chops, bacon and eggs for the rousies. Dan remembers a new cook was hired from Auckland at one stage, who hadn’t been on a station before. Things started off OK.
“Not too bad . . . The bell would ring for smoko and morning tea was brought down to the stables.
“We started getting everything made out of rhubarb. There were 10 or so fellas there all throwing it out. ‘Not rhubarb again.’ But nobody would tell her.
“After a few weeks of this, the head shepherd had had enough and marched over and told her: ‘We’re not eating rhubarb again. We want some biscuits or cake’.”
This episode turned Dan off rhubarb for life.
“Huanui was quite big. It had street lights and its own shop where an old fella sold smokes, alcohol, chewing gum — that kind of thing.”
A daily mail run saw regular correspondence arrive.
Tauwhareparae school was 20 minutes away, and a golf course — it was its own community.
The station was one of the first to be sold into forestry in the early 1980s.
“All the buildings, the school, have gone now. I had a look at the old homestead years later — there was nothing there.
“It was quite sad for me to see that. They had stripped the whole thing.
“Huanui had so much history, prior to forestry taking over.”
Time off from work included visiting nearby stations — Puketawai, Matanui and Tauwhareparae, all substantial in size.
“There was always something to do up there. It was full of life — hunting, horse riding, dog trials, rodeos.”
A highlight was when the local vets came to visit, often with young female trainees.
“You’d get a whole lot of fellas with a lot of testosterone.”
Huanui bred their own horses. Horse work was part of a range of skills Dan acquired during his three years there. Others included fencing, killing, stockwork and counting sheep. “You’d scratch a mark on the board, yell out a tally — they’d be thousands of sheep.”
Pig hunting was another activity they did.
He said they hunted pigs differently back then: “We used to go by horseback, whereas now it’s all utes.”
Europeans had introduced the large white pig in the 1920s. The Captain Cook or wild black pigs were widespread. Interbreeding of the two produced “quite clever pigs”.
“If you got on to a big pig, they wouldn’t fight the dogs — they’d head straight for a creek, sit their ass in the creek, so the dogs wouldn’t get them; whereas the Captain Cookers would just keep running until they couldn’t run any more.”
Sheepdogs were the only dogs used on the farm, “not bull mastiffs or anything fancy like that, Huntaways. A pig used to fart and they’d all jump out of the way,” he joked.
“Some mad guys would jump on the pigs, wrestle them with a knife. I wasn’t like that. I didn’t want pork that much.”
At the peak of the working station, there would be 150 dogs.
“You learnt to appreciate them,” said Dan.
With a pay packet of just $40 a week, after three years he had his sights set on moving closer to Gisborne.
He was surprised when he landed a shepherd’s job at Kiore Station with a substantial pay rise of $180 a week.
He said he learnt work and life skills up in the hills. He also attributed his later achievements in life to his good work ethic.
Dan received the 25-year United Fire Brigade Association Gold Star Service Award. He has been a volunteer firefighter with the Tolaga Bay Fire Brigade for 30 years.
