Sandhill Creek days remembered
Iheard a rumour that the first millennium-generation recruits coming out of Police College are proving a rather timid lot.
Their computer and phone skills may be excellent, but some are certainly needing coaxing out of the patrol car by senior colleagues when things get heated.
Doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. It’s a harbinger of things to come, a direct result of our Health & Safety culture of reducing risk.
This generation has been the first to be brought up playing on soft plastic playgrounds with safety nets, tree climbing at schools not allowed.
Oh how boring! Now I fear we must pay the price of a mollycoddled mobile phone-obsessed generation! And it won’t only show up in our up-and-coming police force either.
You only have to research old schools to get an idea how much has changed.
Fay Wallis (nee Wilder) of Takaka recently told me how, as a school pupil of Mangarakau School back in 1944, the teacher got wind of the sensational news of a strange craft washed up a few kilometres away at Paturau beach, ‘just in front of the Prouse paddock’ near the river mouth.
The country was paranoid that a Japanese invasion was imminent. The school’s pupils were instructed to run and hide in the nearby coal mine if the invasion actually happened.
So news of the mystery wash-up instigated an immediate school trip to inspect the craft, which the local Home Guard arranged to pull up with a bulldozer.
Recalls Wallis; ‘‘We went straight down there and found it be a kind of punt, probably about 40-feet long, with a wooden planked deck all over.
‘‘It had no cabin at all, just a big hatch. It had high sides but we were all allowed to climb up all over it, even go in for a look. It was completely empty inside.’’
Years later they found out that the punt had come adrift off a passing freighter, which was towing it up the coast.
But those kids had been positively intrigued by the spontaneous outing and it created lifelong memories.
It would be an impossible scenario today with school trips so sanitised, at best restricted to a local campground for a sleepover, or banned completely in some cases because they aren’t worth the risk, or the god-damn paperwork.
There were four schools back then down the west coast of Golden Bay, the most isolated being the one that used to exist just near the mouth of Sandhill Creek, five kilometres down the coast from Paturau.
I had the privilege a few years back of interviewing Edna Campbell-Heath, now of Nelson, who attended the one-room schoolhouse there for nearly 10 years, from 1935 to 1944.
Poring over old photos at her table brought back all the memories.
‘‘We didn’t have desks, rather one long table made from pit sawn timber,’’ she said.
‘‘My mother enrolled me before the age of five because it only had four pupils and needed another one. Schools with less than five pupils got shut down.’’
Her parents, Cecil and Vida (nee Flowers) Rhodes, had 11 children, although one died at nine months old.
All the elder ones attended Sandhill Creek School, along with the Cowin children who lived further up the valley and got to school by crossing the creek on a rope and wire, before a narrow swingbridge got put in.
The Rhodes’ children couldn’t have been closer to school though, their house (roughly where the woolshed stands now by the mouth of Sandhill Creek) was only ‘‘20 or 30 yards’’ from the schoolhouse, which had originally been built as a small dwelling by Cecil’s parents Jack and Ada Rhodes, who had sailed down from Levin to work for Prouse and Saunders flaxmill at Patarau.
Edna described the morning routine. ‘‘As soon as the clock struck nine we’d rush out the door of our home and over to school, straight into assembly.
‘‘Mr Harrie our teacher would always be waiting for us and he took no nonsense. If we played up, he’d make us stand in the corner or hit us with the ruler, not with the flat side, but the edge so it hurt more.
‘‘We were only a small class, but there always seemed to be someone in the corner. One day I pushed someone off the seat and ended up in the corner myself.’’
Teacher Ken Harrie lived at Paturau, walking down the beach if the tide was right (or over the hills if they weren’t) on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays to teach the children at Sandhill Creek.
Then on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, he would teach the Richards’ children at his Patarau schoolhouse.
Only two schools in New Zealand ever practised this two school/one teacher routine, the other being in the North Island. Pupils were expected to make up their two-day shortfall with a heavy dose of homework, and if they didn’t do it, they could expect to be in big trouble.
‘‘One Monday morning we hadn’t finished our homework,’’ recalls Edna. ‘‘So my younger brother John stood up on an apple box and got the schoolhouse key which Mr Harrie used to keep above the door and hid it. My brother fell through the apple box in the process and cut his leg, but it kept us out of school all day and stopped us getting in trouble.
We put the key back that night and no-one could figure it out.’’
Every fifth Sunday the Anglican minister from Collingwood would come out to give a religious service in the schoolhouse, which all the families around would attend.
Edna recalls her parents being very strict, reminding them to ‘be seen and not heard’ in the company of other adults. But outside, the children were largely free to roam.
‘‘One of our favourite things was catching crayfish, you could just snare them with a noose of flax off the rocks everywhere then,’’ she said.
‘‘Once we’d filled a big sack we’d go and get Dad who’d bring a horse down and cart them back. We’d eat the lot too.’’
Other food they collected to eat were ‘Maori currents’ or the berries of nightshade, which Vida Rhodes would make jam from, before it got classified a poisonous plant.
Nikau palm hearts were relished as a tasty salad, but none of the children were allowed to go whitebaiting in Sandhill Creek because of the common belief that the dark tannin-stained waters would taint the fish.
Edna’s dad grew crops of potatoes on the river flat, swedes and parsnips too, and was known for his skill with horses, including a team he used to shift logs.
The family didn’t have a bathroom and washed in the creek every day.
One day their cow got washed away in a flood. Edna went looking for it with her dad along the coast, but instead of finding it, they came across a human skeleton in the sand.
The policeman from Collingwood came out and took it away, not all that old either he reckoned – it was a real mystery.
Running rough had its pitfalls, like when Edna badly staked herself when she slid down a grassy hill at age 13, and had to be carted off to Nelson Hospital in a taxi from Collingwood driven by Claude Wilkens.
Her extended absence effectively closed the school down, and Ken Harrie the teacher was transferred to teach at Magarakau.
Edna spent a year on correspondence before her parents sold their Sandhill Creek property to Phil Win in 1948 and they all went to live at Pakawau, where Edna helped her parents for a while before getting a job at age 17 housekeeping for the Mansons at Wainui Bay.
Looking back on it all she says that her childhood and schooling didn’t seem at all remote at the time.
‘‘It was the only life we knew and there always seemed to be something happening. We didn’t have much, but we were all happy. I guess it taught us to be the resourceful people we all became from living out there.’’