Couple surrounded by history at Fairfax
Colin and Anne Brown live in the old Fairfax School and have a mini railway station and an early 1900s jail on their property.
The jail, with two cells, was removed from the Queenstown Police Station about 15 years ago.
An advocate for preserving history, Colin became aware of the jail’s availability when he and Daryl McGregor jointly won the tender to demolish the Queenstown Police Station and relocate three police houses in the early 2000s. The station was coming down to make way for a new one.
Colin had a business relocating houses in Queenstown at the time.
The station Colin and Daryl took down was made in 1958 and had been built into and around the old jail.
‘‘We cut around it [the jail], lifted it out by crane, put it on a lorry and brought it here [to Fairfax]. ‘‘It was a big day,’’ he says. The base of the cell beds is a sheet of iron.
The Browns farmed in western Southland before buying the disused Fairfax School from the Southland Education Board in 1994.
The school closed six years earlier.
Colin and Anne lived in the school house for three years while they changed the school into their new home. The staff room is the Browns’ kitchen.
‘‘It’s a bloody solid building,’’ Colin says.
The school house was sold to the Ascot Park racecourse consortium in Invercargill and is now the home of the track’s manager, Warren Broad.
Anne, an ex-pupil of the school, was delighted to see the school bell still there when she and Colin bought the building and the 2.4 hectares it was on.
Anne helped coach seven netball teams at the school’s courts in the 1990s, with games played at Otautau.
A netball selector in junior grades for 30 years, Anne will use the bell to start and finish games at the upcoming Western School Zone netball tournaments in Riverton and Nightcaps.
Anne managed the Southland under-21 team in the 1980s and for the past 10 years has been in charge of Otago-Southland student umpires at the South Island secondary schools’ netball tournament. She is in her 19th year as an organiser of the mixed social grade competition at the Otautau Sports Complex on Monday and Friday nights.
Colin’s interest in steam trains began as a boy.
He went to school at Otautau and was fascinated by trains coming and going from the town.
On school holidays he occasionally visited his uncle, Alec Brown, at Balfour, and noticed trains passing through nearby St Patricks.
Colin began building his own railway station 10 years ago, modelling it on the old Otautau station which is now at Fairlite.
He bought the Orawia station’s goods shed and moved it to his property.
Four jiggers - two motorised and two powered by hand - are in his collection, along with an air winch formerly used to pull coal bins out of an Ohai mine.
An old hut used by railway maintenance staff in the 1960s was sourced from Riversdale.
Colin made a replica of an early 1990s steam engine, starting off with a boiler and building around it. It is also on his short piece of railway line.
His other historic rolling stock includes coal, log, cattle and refrigerated meat wagons, a portable winch, railway line gravel spreaders and a shunter bought from an Awarua fertiliser company.
‘‘I’d like a guards van . . . there’s one or two around but people don’t want to sell them.
‘‘I get stuff from all over New Zealand. Eighty per cent is bought off dealers, scrap metal merchants and Trade Me.’’
A boiler, manufactured in 1876 and used at a Pourakino Valley sawmill, is also on the property after being discovered sticking out of the Pourakino riverbed.
He gained permission from the Southland District Council to spruce up the old Tuatapere railway station six years ago. It took six months and Colin did the work free-of-charge.
‘‘For me, history is everything. It’s my drive to keep me going,’’ Colin says. ‘‘Railway is my passion.’’ Apart for two months of the year, a train travels past the Browns’ home twice a day going to and from the coalmine at Ohai.
‘‘When I hear it coming back [from Ohai], I always go out and give the driver a wave and he gives us a toot and a wave,’’ Colin says.