Lois Puklowski , above

‘‘We had a teacher who was dead against pasteurisation, he reckoned it was the end of the world. He would eat grass before he would drink pasteurised milk and to prove it he went out and started nibbling the grass.’’

cream truck called at farms every one or two days to collect cans and return empty ones.

The cream cans were used until 1951, when factories once again took whole milk and large tanker collections began.

Milk was pasteurised from the 1940s, but Puklowski says the change had some sceptics.

‘‘We had a teacher who was dead against pasteurisation, he reckoned it was the end of the world. He would eat grass before he would drink pasteurised milk and to prove it he went out and started nibbling the grass.’’

The Department of Health promoted the virtues of pasteurised milk more successfully to the rest of the population and, according to Te Ara, more milk was drunk by New Zealanders after pasteurisation was introduced.

When the milkman switched to bottles, a race was on to get to the gate first. Te Papa records the switch as happening in the 1950s.

Puklowski says, ‘‘You’d have about two inches of cream on the top and the milk underneath. Everyone used to try to get up early and get the cream for their porridge.’’

By the 1960s, Puklowski was raising six children in Avondale, Auckland. They’d leave their empty bottles and coins at the gate.

Quite often the money was stolen and the milkman would leave a note: no money, no milk.

‘‘Our money had been pinched one day and the milkman chased the kids along the road. He said their socks were full of money, they were bouncing up and down. He was laughing, it looked so comical.’’

It was thruppence for a pint of milk in her area, and Puklowski would leave three pennies in each bottle at the gate.

‘‘With all the kids, I used to get about four pints so there’d be a lot of change in the bottles.’’

In some parts of the country, aluminium tokens were left out for the milkman. By the 1980s plastic tokens were widely used, the colour of the tokens indicated the milk order, silver for cream, blue for homogenised milk. Milk trucks also delivered orange or grapefruit juice.

In 1975, the bottle size tracked in the Consumer Price Index was changed from the imperial pint to the metric size of 600ml.

Puklowski lived on a back section with a long driveway and her children used to fight about who would have to go up to collect the milk.

One day, she convinced her daughter to make the trip.

‘‘I said, take your pram up and put it in your doll’s pram. So she did; emptied every bottle into the pram. It was not a success.’’

Putting empty bottles out at the gate was a children’s chore in households around the country until the 1980s, when bottles were replaced with cartons and plastic bottles were also introduced.

It was shortly before the end of the glass bottle era, in 1989, that Puklowski’s grandson was run over delivering milk in Whanganui.

On his second night as a milk delivery boy, a car hit him as he was running his cart along a road without a footpath. Landing on the glass bottles resulted in horrific injuries and months of reconstructive surgery.

‘‘I couldn’t believe it,’’ Puklowski says, ‘‘I had no idea he was doing it, but it was usually considered safe.’’

Ian Anthony had recently started his public affairs manager role with the New Zealand Dairy Group when plastic bottles were introduced. It was 1987 and supermarkets were starting to sell milk, in cartons. ‘‘It was really a competitive move on behalf of the dairy companies,’’ Anthony says. ‘‘It was another way of differentiating your milk product.’’

The milkmen were still going around their routes, Anthony says, but there was a big shift in purchasing practices.

Statistics NZ records the 600ml price in December 1988 as being 55c ($1.71 in today’s terms) and the price for a litre was 98c ($1.91).

The plastic bottle campaign started in Hamilton and was low-key to begin with, Anthony says. People really went for the new bottles but the debate around plastic had begun.

‘‘It was criticised quite widely for the environmental consequences. Even then, it was realised plastic bottles might not necessarily be a good thing.’’

Plastic took over, despite the public debate. ‘‘I guess in the end it was just basically the commercial forces. The commercial realities won the day.’’

By the mid-1990s supermarkets, dairies and service stations were all selling milk and there were no more milk deliveries.

As people get excited about a return to raw milk, bottled milk at the gate and free milk in schools, Puklowski is still not a milk-drinker.

Her doctor recently asked about her milk intake.

‘‘I said I never use it and she started to go crazy. She said, well you need it. And I said, but I eat so much bloody cheese!’’

Satisfied, the doctor told the now 88-year-old that cheese was good enough.