“Oh I’ve got so many different stories.”

Stan’s family moved into Runanga in 1958 from Gladstone (“same name as me!”) just out of Greymouth. His father was an instructor in the army at Burnham, then foreman at the Gladstone mill and then went to the mines at Runanga.  He also worked in the Strongman followed by Stan, as well as the coke and coalmine at Ruinui.

Stan was a very vigorous protestor when the Government stopped logging in the ‘80’s. “I do a bit of stirring, I’m known for it, you’ve got to show your disapproval to certain things.”
He made a point of disassociating himself with the Labour Party by handing in both his and his fathers 50 years of service badges to the Regional Council in Greymouth. He was disappointed that others didn’t join him in protest.

“I’ve been outspoken very definitely, all my life, either with my tongue or my fists.
I used to box, for five years. I started at 17 until I was 22. I went through to the NZ Championship, and the joker that beat me actually won the featherweight title. My father, he was a boxer, from England. He trained over there with a chap called Jimmy Wile who was a world flyweight champion.  I was fortunate enough to be a bit more scientific than some of my opponents; I worked out my punches.  I’ve got a book about Jimmy Wile, his movements; I just copied some of his style, it was new in NZ and that’s what gave me the edge. I ran out of opponents my own weight, so I had to fight jokers over a stone heavier than what I was. And I cleaned them up too!”

All the hard manual work that Stan did working at his first job at the Mill was great for body building. He would be sent to the big Bundy dredge out at Camerons, and would pick up the biggest heaviest stones and lay them on the truck, then offload them back at the Mill into a big hopper, so they could be used as fill. The chap that trained him for the first few fights, a great axe man on the Coast, said before the first fight, “You know there’s only one man more muscley than you Stan. Samson!”
These days he trains young aspiring boxes and also mentors them on the art of the sport. “I’ve been going with the gym about 8 or 10 years now I suppose, training others, three nights a week.”

Stan is a collector too, of a very expensive Italian porcelain called Capita Monte. He is also a stone carver himself, using a stone called Waiumu made from the sediments formed in the bottom of lakes, for which reason it often contains fossils in the form of freshwater mussels, ferns and leaves. Stan had been a jeweller by trade and was interested in this new material. It is similar to soapstone although harder, but he could not use machinery due to the amount of dust it made, so the detailing is all done by hand with the help of home made tools; a sharpened three inch nail and a machine hacksaw blade sharpened down into a point. Because it was a hobby while Stan worked in the mine, some pieces took up to a year to finish. These days it is very hard to get because much of it is only about the size of coal.
“My cobbers, when I was working in the mines, they’d throw a big hunk of stone on top of the coal box for me, and the boy who was calling out the numbers, he’d put it aside so that I could take it home. They looked after me.”
Brass pins are used to hold the pieces together. Getting wet can turn this stone back to mud so a protective coating is put over it which gets absorbed. “Nobody else has ever done this before with this stone. I would get this stone from inside the mines; sometimes from on top of the coal, but generally from the floor. It’s really the sediment of the lake; as the trees fell into the lake, all around the area they  turned into coal.”

“I used to do a lot of gold assaying. They send you samples of gold after going down every metre, to determine how much gold is in the ground. When I was melding gold for one company they’d get 100 ounces in a day. They would make small bars of it. But you lose that “oooh its gold” sense of feeling, you know?”

For about 15 years Stan ran the Harriers Club. He was the first person to run from Hokitika to Greymouth after a wager from a mate to do it in 3 hours. The run took him 3 hours and 5 minutes!. The following year the Hokitika Marathon began although unfortunately for Stan he never took part, especially as he considered many entrants were very slow, taking three and a half or four hours to complete it.

Stan was also once a rally driver.

These days he is in his second term as President of the Greymouth Working Mans Club. His friend asked him “How did you get on at the elections?” He said “Not bad. I just scraped in.” I got 101, and the other two got 16 each!”

“I was a very quiet boy.
One time when I was about 5, my father and I went fishing at Camerons Bridge and we caught a 30lb eel! It swallowed all the bait, so Dad tied the line onto the bar of the seat of the bike and the eel towed us all the way back to the hall where they had community evenings every Wednesday night, and Dad takes the bike into the hall and rides round the floor towed by the eel!

Stan and his wife Val had five children and are heading for their Golden Anniversary. Val is 82 and Stan 81.
He has said to his family, “I’m not going to retire until I’m 102. It’s a good age. I’m going to take up my favourite hobby. I’m going to chase young girls. If I catch them though, I’ll have to ask them what to do next!”

Molly was second born and the only girl of three children. Her mother went to New Plymouth for the birth. “She probably had to come home by sea. I’m glad I wasn’t able to know about it. I never wanted to go out over that bar, not Molly.”

Molly was a tomboy, the ‘third boy and from an early age rode around the farm with her brothers on the old horse Mary, who would stop if they fell off. When her older brother was 2 he became asthmatic and was sent to live with an aunt in a drier part of the country, and Molly and her younger brother grew up on the farm and would walk 2 miles to school each day.

“When it was fine and the tide was out, off came the boots and we’d cross over the mudflat. I like the Maori people; I had good Maori friends at school. In those days there were a lot at my school and every now and then they’d speak in their own tongue. I thought it was very cruel, the teachers would smack them; I didn’t think it was necessary. They’d go home and teach what they’d learnt to their parents who could then order things at the shop and so forth.When I was older I didn’t go to dances, mother didn’t believe in that sort of thing. Occasionally if I was staying with somebody else and they were all going to a dance, well of course Molly went too. Mother was quite strict in a way, but she was lovely. She didn’t do much on the farm; it was a partnership between the two brothers.

Even though the old kauri homestead is now long gone and the farm sold Molly still has many memories of life as a child in Mokau.

“We had chooks on the farm. Oh, my grandmother had given my mother 6 hens not long before, and mother had to go out this particular day to collect my grandmother who was coming to stay. And there was my older brother Don and I; I held the chook on the block while Don cut his head off, it was a little tomahawk he had, and I held again, and he cut another ones head off!  I think we did 5 of them! And we had them half plucked when mum came home!  He would have been 4 and I was 3. “What have you done?”  Great excitement you see! “Come and see what we’ve got for Grans’ dinner.” What we didn’t know was these chooks we had killed, they were all nice brown egg ones you know, and easy to catch.  And we’d killed them!

Molly, like her father, never learnt to drive. Her father used a sled and horses on the farm and her Uncle drove a dray.
In the early days, Molly’s mother owned one of the first motorcars in Mokau which automatically made her and car the ambulance and driver as well as the school bus! “She did all sorts of things that other women didn’t do, no-one bossed her. She did what she wanted to do. And she was happy. She stayed in Mokau until she died, they both did.
She’d come down in the car to the roadway which was just mud at the time especially if it was a very wet season. She’d drive out onto the mudflat with chains on and then go back up on the road. She never got stuck; she just drove at a normal speed.  That strip of road was awful, it would be that deep in mud – then when they eventually metalled it, it was wonderful, she could run right down it.”

The farm overlooked the small river island of ……. The brothers leased the land adjacent to the island from the local maori to run cattle.

“That island has a little history. It was the only place around here where the Maoris could go if there was a war on, and the tide could go right around it, and there was water on the island, a spring – they could live there for as long as they liked.”

Today there is a small urupa or Maori cemetery on the island which can be accessed at low tide.
Molly also remembers the small Maori village down by the bridge near the old cream factory. “There was a log on the side of the river for many years. It’s gone now but no one was ever allowed to put an axe into it. Do NOT put an axe into it! You could walk on it and do anything else you liked but you couldn’t chop it or cut it or hurt it in any way. The shadow of a chief went across it and it had become very sacred.  But of course there had to be someone put an axe into it, and I think about 3 days later, he drowned! I was a little child but I knew of it happening.”

Molly never went to secondary school. She was taken to Auckland when she was 17 and began nursing training which she liked but which came to a halt when she realised she had to do  theatre work as well. Then she learned dressmaking for several years.  “I did mostly men’s work, and other peoples work. If someone made a mistake it all came to Molly’s desk. Nowadays you have every opportunity to do all sorts of things. I don’t know what I would do if I had another chance – you had to think only of the things you could do. The best thing out was some other firm had made thousands of pairs of trousers – and they’d made them all without pockets. It was great. We made the pockets; you could make $30 a day doing it. We fixed up hundreds of pairs of trousers in a day!

Nursing was a job where Molly could get into mischief. “You weren’t allowed out. This particular night I went out without leave, and I came home late to the nurses’ home.  I got almost across to the nurse’s home when I saw the night sister – she didn’t see me, but I happened to see her. And between the nurses home and the sister there was a tree just here with Molly inside it. And I saw sister come into the home – and I’m still in the tree; she went upstairs (I could see the torch see) and she came out the front door and she went along that side of the garden and poked around down there and she went along that side and poked around down there. But she never saw me!
We used to climb out the window. There were one or two nurses who abided by the rules but I don’t think I had as much fun as I did nursing.

“I haven’t lived here all my life.  But I’ve lived here in this cottage for the past 30 or so years. I was born in 1920. I’m knocking 90. I have kept good health but I’m starting to go a little bit deaf; I do have a hearing aid.  I still have got a memory, but I think it beginning to slacken a little bit. I do think these stories should be told.  Everyone has got a different story.”

Molly remembers only one shop when she was a child, then another was built around 1923, and then the tearooms once the road had been metalled. She was 7 years old when the bridge opened in 1927,a time of great importance for the community and a highlight in her own life. She was on the last historic barge trip across the river.

“The first car that came across, they decided it was about 13 or 14 horsepower. 13 horses would cost 13 pennies to go across. So the ferryman charged him 13 pennies to take his car across. It would be one penny for a horse. The cars were only a few horse power in those early cars.“

Molly was married for 62 years although she never had children of her own. Her husband had been the 9th child in the family and Molly believes was so spoilt that he thought he could boss her around. “No-one bossed me around. That wasn’t what Molly intended! After a year or two of quietly doing my own thing he saw that I was very determined and he had better straighten himself up!” They lived in Auckland for many years before Molly came back to Mokau “about 30 years ago”. She lives in an old cottage on the main road, where she spends her leisure time sitting out in her sunny back porch in the fresh air playing hand games which she says teaches her all sorts of new swear words and keeps her brain active. Her house is filled with many antiques treasures and memorabilia that she intends to eventually donate to the local Tainui Museum.  She has also created and collected a wealth of hand made textiles that are imbued with history, having squirreled away fabrics and wool over many years. These have been made into appliqué wall hangings that took the best part of six months to make, patchwork curtains of ancient fabrics, knitting and  crochet and endless other creations.

“Most of the work of that type of thing now is done on the machine, but I like hand work.  Those fabrics are at least 40 or 50 years old.” A fire screen completed by her mother in 1930 is an intricate tapestry of a New Zealand scene all made with the last bits of darning wool she had used for her husbands socks.

“I’m not clever myself but I do get the odd bit of inspiration.  I’m quite good with my hands. And I love tiny little things, so I thought I’d fill my cabinet with them. I’ve got little crystals and there’s a lot of old stuff in here so I thought the whole lot could go to the museum eventually. This is what I am. The house has to be walls, but it’s what you make of the inside of it.”

“I feel I have just come through one of the most interesting periods that anyone could go through. I came through the time of horse and cart, the first cars, the first roads from metal to tar-seal – I’ve seen everything.  I mostly walked around. The horses used to tip me off, it was safer to walk. I saw the primitive before I saw the space travel. I’ve seen it all.”

When he was called up for service he was underage although he was sent to the Pacific in the air force, but being an apprentice carpenter they put him into the army engineers and consequently became separated from the rest of the West Coast boys,  most of whom he knew and went into the 2/3 Battalion. “I wanted to go in the army with my mates. If you were just a labourer you ended up in the foot soldiers and if you were a driver you ended up in the ASC (the army service corps). Whatever your trade was when you went in they’d pick you up. I was in the air force, the blue orchids. Then I went in the army – I did three years in NZ in the army.”
During that time they were posted in Nelson along with the Nelson boys, the ‘Cider Suckers’, and camped at the Richmond Racecourse with the Canterbury Yodelling Cowboys and their horses. Jochs time as a trainee soldier was filled with new experiences and hi-jinx, with galloping races to Appleby, and many sessions in the Postboy, the Rising Sun. “Being coasters we liked our beer!”

The army engineers were proposing to build a huge barbed wire fence right around the back of the race course, the back of the freezing works all the way to Tahuna Beach to stop the Japanese landing. The barbed wire was on hand and the stakes ready, cut from hundreds of bluegum trees from 88 Valley. “The idea was that when the Japanese landed, the boats would strike the bottom, they’d have to step out of their landing craft, then they’d have to get through this fence and then, we’d shoot them! And another thing we did, between Nelson and Blenheim on the Wakapuaka Road, we built these great big buttress things to stop the Japanese transport. They really thought they were coming.

Some of this time many of them were camped at Ruby Bay and some of the orchards had asked them to help load the apple boats at Mapua Wharf. Some of the soldiers were asked to pick the apples, and others to load the heavy sulphate of ammonia for the apples onto trolleys and drag it across the Mapua Wharf for the apple orchards. This was before the JPB (Joint Purchasing Board) when they were all bought for the Americans.

When the war started, Jock gave away the carpentry because of his damaged thumb and went truck driving for a while, working for carriers in Hokitika.  When the Labour Govt started  the aerodrome, Jock put the first load of gravel on the runway and did the most ever loads, 103 in total on the road from the great pit to the runway. As the first runway got longer the MOW boss opened another gravel pit to save time and money.

“Irvine and Stevenson from Dunedin had a whitebait factory in Beach Street. One year the season was so bad for whitebait they canned pears instead; the pears came down from Nelson and every afternoon I used to drive for Camerons in the horse and cart days, in old Hoki here, it was called Camerons Horse and Cart livery Stable. Johnny Cameron got a truck later on. We’d go to the whitebait factory at half past 2 and load up all these cases with the cores of the pears and tailings – and we’d drive halfway over the big Hoki bridge and stop and throw them into the river and come back with the empty boxes ready for tomorrow.

Mr Wood was first, Irvine and Stevenson came after. When we were kids we used to walk along under the Hoki wharf at Revell Street. Woods whitebait factory was there and they used to make their own tins and there was all this sheet tin under the wharf with round shapes cut out – they were all rusted together.
We used to cart the whitebait in all these kerosene tins but outwards so it didn’t damage the whitebait. The tins had to have the holes punched in them so the whitebait would drain and it all went over to Ferrins Company in Christchurch. This is before Irvine and Stevenson came over, they said that they got better money by auction and we used to cart it to the railway station. Later on the guards wouldn’t accept it because the cans were rough like nutmeg graters and hurt the railway guards hands loading them. They protested about it.
There was a man here in town called Barger Shaw, a boat maker. He got Johnny Cameron and I to mix this white powder stuff into the whitebait he’d bought, in a big tin bath. He’d get 2 or 3 kero tins of whitebait in that and he got this white powder off Williams the chemist. We were only kids and we’d have whitebait up to our arms mixing this powder up in the bath. He’d send it to Townsend and Paul in Wellington for auction. The powder must’ve preserved the whitebait long enough to get to Wellington. They used to weigh everything and measure everything, Billy Williams who was an old style chemist.

. They commandeered two brewery trucks from here and some of the boys saw them over in Egypt. When a wars on they commandeer whatever they like.

There were always 3 channels in the Hokitika River and the drag netting people used the third channel and the middle channel was for stands, and the first channel the wharf was there in them days and the boats came in so you only used a drag net from the wharf.

I can tell you about the thirties when they fished in the middle channel there, china men and all. They weren’t called stands, they were called trenches in the old days, and they used coal sacks filled up with riverbed gravel. There was about 12 bags filled up with riverbed gravel – they stood about 12 in a row then they left a gap for a net. They had about 5 gaps, they’d set about 5 nets.

I was 20 years a psychiatric nurse up at Tokonui.
I used to go and get all the broken crockery from the cook at the Red Lion Hotel and put it in the fishermen’s Creek at the back of the old Hokitika Aerodrome. And Des Nolan used to come up from Okura in his plane and he used to twist two wires together to start the aeroplane. And Camerons in Hokitika used to be big carriers and they kept all the whitebait cans in their big stables down here in Revell street. They were stacked up to the bloody roof, these empty whitebait tins and Des would take so many back each time he went back in the plane. We said to Des “You’re not bloody taking off in this weather.” But out he goes, yeah, it didn’t worry Des.

And I left that and I went psychiatric nursing. I did that 34 years. Two years here in Hokitika and I transferred to Tokonui – it had over 1000 patients there at one time. Henry Bennett was the fire captain at Tokonui.

The wifes one of the Maoris out here at Arahura. Her name was Tainui. She used to fish but they got sock nets. She won’t use one. She was working at the Westland Hospital laundry. She came up north with me and we had three children up there. Then we both come home cause Arahura was where she was born. You always come back to Hokitika.

To get back here I had to work 6 months in Ngawatu. I used to get a months leave from the mental. At Tokonui there were murderers and all. It had a 1000 acre farm. They’ve shut them all down now.

Me hips buggared. It’s had it, and they said that me heart wont stand an operation on me hip.

I was a member of the Working mans Club here in Hoki and there were 6 of us used to go down with diesel trucks and stay at Neils Beach, there’s a fisherman’s hut there, beautiful bach too, stove and all. We used to go down and surf cast and fish.

When they used to drive the bloody Hereford cattle up from South Westland they would drive them past the blowhole, they’d put a mouth organ on it, there were roadmen in those days and this blowhole, they’d put two sticks each side of it and tied the mouth organ to it and the wind used to blow the mouth organ and they couldn’t get the cattle to go past. Then later on (they had tobacco tins in those days) they made a kind of propeller and they put a nail through it and the wind used to blow this propeller. Its still there apparently between the Puke Pub and the Kakapokau Bridge. The roadmen  designed certain area of roads, Like Mick Maloney, he did the Haast. There’s a photo of old Mick down at the Haast Pub with his wheelbarrow. Old Mick when they put him in Seaview, not because he was mad but because there was no one to look after him, he was an Irishman and an old road man and they used to get him a bottle of whiskey whenever he wanted it.

Babe : Born and bred here,  then we went up the north island for about 18 years then came back and been here ever since. I’ve got a lot of whitebait photos. But if you’re out the pa just go and see Jason. Hes got all my brothers photo album.  We used to fish halfway out across the river, you could have five, 6,7,8 screens across and as many nets.

In my time when I was a kid they were all trenches not stands – no spotted boards, sock nets and that all came in later. My day it was all supeljack and poles we got from the mill – rimu red pine. You needed them  that long cause you had to start on the wharf. That’s why the poles were so long and we kind of walked over the third channel. The wharf went from nearly the bridge right out to sea. But from Revell Street the wharf finished and it was a wall, about a meter wide and you’d walk along the top of that.
Levitts had a big mill at Hari Hari and they used to mill all the white pine and they’d make butter boxes out of them. There a part of the river Mary refers to as the ‘boxes’ – they used to fill the butter boxes with rocks.
BABE :: Pigsty the boxes and the little river – the little river used to run down by the shed nearest the pa and the whitebait was that plentiful that we as kids used to get the condensed milk tins, put holes in the bottom and sit them in the river.

I was out at Stan Grahams shooting. The Home Guard we were building Ken Reeces shop. The boss Amuri King, he was a carpenter and boss put me on as an apprentice. He said “Go Jock down on your bike to get the saw set.” So on me way down at the police station there was a big picket fence. There was a great big notice on the fence of the police station, it had “All the Home Guard report immediately to the town clock!” So I turned the bike around and I shot up to Muri, he was in the Home Guard too. I said, we gotta go down to the town clock, something’s happened. So when we got down there old Bill Eastgate he was the commander, he was  strutting up and down and then we found out that Graham had shot a policeman – so they put us in taxis and took us out to….each of us had a gun and 5 rounds of ammunition. Anyway one of the farmers suggested Graham might be in the hut so we had to go into this hut and he wasn’t there, so then we come back to the front of his house again they thought he might be up the top of the Hoki Gorge. We went up there, he wasn’t there and night time came and they said the Home Guard will be relieved by the Kaniere HG you see, so 5 rounds of ammunition to the Kaniere HG. And I gave mine to Maxi Cole and the poor buggar got shot that night.

Jimmy Case was a hard case in Kumara, he made up this song:

You’ve heard of old Ned Kelly
Yet another man of fame
But now we’ve got a new one
his name is Stanley Graham.
Now Stanley was a cocky
Down on the old west coast
he was a famous shot there
and that’s no idle boast
Now on one sunny morning
he crossed it with the law
He shot 4 coppers standing outside his ranch house door
He got supplies together guns and ammo too
and headed for Mt Doughboy to hide out from the blue
Now the job of catching Stan was far too big for the law
they had to get the Home Guard and help from the army corps
They even got Bob Samples modern army tank
so they joined the warlike rank
so pick up your gun Stan and go it while you can
The coppers are all around you they’re out to get their man
You know the country over you know the bestest spots
so all you gotta do Stan is watch out for the cops
and before I end my story I’ll tell you while I can
I wish we had another to take the place of Stan
and the Japs would not be game to come within our shore
and we would live in peace for now and ever more.

See I knew Jimmy Case he used to cut silver pine with my brother in law Tills (Till Taunui) who used to be a Mason.

Building was Jim’s main trade. When they got married in 1949, Jim built the home they still live in today in Alymer Street, in the days before power, “Everything was done by hand!” He also built the Ross Motels that they both ran together until recently, and several other homes in Ross for other people. . Their home has a lovely art deco fireplace surround for an open fire that was essential for heating. This has been replaced by three heat pumps which has cut out all the dust and cleaning of fireplaces for Elsie. They spend a lot of their leisure time in the new conservatory at the front of the house which gets maximum afternoon sun. They loved the open fire but they can still sit by one at the local, the Empire Hotel, and often do.

Elsie remembers “As a young married couple we had our friends and that, and Margaret Minehans boys were the same age as our boys and they were great cobbers. They all went to the school here, up to secondary school. I had gone to the Ross School; Jim had gone to the Catholic School. The school was pulled down a while ago, but the convent building’s still there.

Jim’s parents had lived just over the road from where Jim and Elsie live now, and they had owned quite a bit of land. Elsie lived down near the beach. She used to walk from the beach to school every day. There was one bike between three so the early bird got to ride while the other two walked!
Jim recalls, “When we were youngsters there were still people working gold up the creeks; there was the ‘Muldy old’ going that brought the gold down on the horses. There weren’t many motorcars in the days of our childhood, people got about by foot or they went to town on horseback.”

Between them they have seen many changes around Ross.
“We had sawmills here you see, for native timber. I’d say that gold was still lucrative, but it was before our time. There’d been some digging going on though when we were children, underneath houses etc – our parents spoke about it.”
Jim and Elsie had three boys; two who are still living in Ross and both are also carpenters. The third son lives in Melbourne
Elsie says, “They followed Jim, building was his main trade. There are more nails in the doorstep I reckon than anywhere!”

Jim: “My son had his 60th birthday party recently and in his speech, he’s 60 years old, unreal, having both his parents at his party.”

Most people know Jim and Elsie but if strangers come to Ross and they don’t go to the pub, they would never meet. Having lived here all their lives they are local entities but are also known and loved up and down the coast. Elsie has always loved to whitebait but she says that Jim doesn’t like her going much these days for fear she might fall in. He does go down with her though, and drives in the stakes so that she can still indulge her passion.

They have just had their diamond wedding anniversary, on 18th December 2008. Elsie has been waiting for the ‘long service’ medal from the queen –“long service living with somebody, or something”! When reminded that it was probably the telegram she was thinking of for reaching 100, she replied – “that’s right that was what I was thinking of!”