‘‘Hawera? Go north from Bulls and you’ll find it...’’
CATHERINE GROENESTEIN speaks to parks boss John Sargeant as he steps down after 22 years.
The idea of kids gathering walnuts and chestnuts from trees planted decades earlier by a long-forgotten parks manager pleases John Sargeant.
He’s just signed off from a 22-year tenure as head of South Taranaki District’s parks and this is one legacy he’s particularly proud of.
‘‘I had 50 trees planted in 1997 and 1998, chestnuts and walnuts. They’re trees for future generations,’’ he says.
‘‘In 20, 30, 40 years’ time, kids will be gathering chestnuts and walnuts and they won’t care who planted the tree, but it’s my job done. It’s a case of passing on the baton.’’
John Sargeant arrived in Hawera intending to stay two years. It was May 1995 and he had been out of work for months, but a phone call from an employment consultant suddenly changed everything.
‘‘They said ‘Good news and bad news. The good news is we’ve got an interview for you for parks manager in Hawera. The bad news is we don’t know where Hawera is. Go north from Bulls and you’ll find it.’ That was in ‘95, I came here for two years and I’ve been here ever since.’’
As you might have guessed, Sargeant is a gardener by trade.
He arrived in New Zealand from the UK in 1973 and took a job in the gardens of the Wellington Hospital Board.
After 16 years he was the regional head gardener, but changing times saw him move into marketing.
‘‘I went to Massey and did a degree in public relations and was working with the Wellington Health Board bringing in sponsorship to promote causes like sun protection, melanoma awareness and obesity,’’ he says.
More restructuring meant he was made redundant in 1985 and spent the next two years looking for work. ‘‘That wasn’t an easy time. Then TVNZ were looking for people for a programme they were making about long-term unemployed who were looking for work. So I put my hand up for that. I was the tall skinny European representative.
‘‘Through that I got a job as a skills tutor for jobseekers, because I was well-qualified in looking for work. Then the subsidy for that went and I was unemployed for another year.’’
These were hard times and he credits the support of his wife Teresa and their two sons Doug and Tim with getting him through.
These years were ‘‘a bit of a scenic railway, some flash times and not flash times,’’ he says.
‘‘There were times when we were grateful to see a food parcel. Sometimes we’d come home and there’d be a big box on the back door that said, ‘from a friend’.’’
So when an opportunity in a town called Hawera came up, he grabbed it, even though he didn’t know where Hawera was.
‘‘It’s funny where life takes you as you follow things. The skills I had learned as an apprentice gardener in the ‘60s came to the fore here. They wanted a parks manager and I also had the PR skills.’’
One of his main briefs when he first arrived was to encourage people to make more use of their parks.
So one of his first projects was setting up the Arts in the Park festival, which is still held each year, and the Scale Ships Regatta, another longstanding event.
There was also a pumpkin festival and a lakeside concert that has become an annual event.
‘‘The whole thing has been about leaving a legacy. To pass the parks on in as good a nick as I get them in. I’ve always had good people around me to help and as a team, I think we’ve done that,’’ he says.
He’s hugely proud of his two sons. Tim is a doctor in Adelaide and Douglas is a property developer in London. Both attended Hawera High School. ‘‘There’s two sorts of kids in the world, yours and other people’s.’’
Retirement will finally allow Sargeant more time to write. For the past three years he has spent Saturday mornings in a New Plymouth coffee shop working on a story about a family living in Mokau. It covers 100 years and several generations.
He’s looking forward to having more time to finish it. The book will end up either as a Tolkeinlength blockbuster or three separate titles, he’s not sure yet.
Although the story is fiction, the events of the time and the setting are based on fact and hours of research.
‘‘I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time in Mokau, in the Tainui museum, and at Puke Ariki. I’d need to find out about dairying and farming in that time, what breeds of cows they had, which pianos were imported and where they came from.’’
Retirement also means he’ll have more time to paint.
Sargeant paints in oils and watercolours. He’s president of the Taranaki Arts Society but with his novel taking most of his free time he’s looking forward to getting the brushes out again.
‘‘I’ve joined up with the arts trail. I’ll be painting at the Gables during the trail so people can come in and talk,’’ he says.
‘‘Like this job, it’s not just what you do, it’s all about the people. That’s what I’ll miss about this job. I’ll miss the connection to the people in the communities and having some influence in the community.’’
Sargeant stood for the New Plymouth District Council in 2016 and in his own words, ‘‘got my arse kicked’’. His strong opinions on subjects such as euthanasia and dangerous dogs expressed in newspaper columns probably didn’t help, he says. But he might give it another try.
‘‘I don’t know what I’m going to do. There’s a lot of day to day things. This job I leave for at six in the morning and get home at six at night,’’ he says. ‘‘That’s a 12 hour day and it’s not going to be filled up by painting and writing.’’