The story behind the herringbone milking shed
A deaf man was bashed, had a tyre slashed and his windscreen smashed during a pitched one-on-one fight on a suburban Hamilton street.
The man who did the bashing, smashing and slashing, Gavin Winslow Thompson, was sentenced to nine months of home detention for his part in the battle when he appeared in the Hamilton District Court on Wednesday.
Thompson had earlier admitted charges of wounding with intent to injure, intentional damage and escaping police custody.
While parts of the summary of facts on his case cannot be reported without leading to the identification of the victim, that person is described as a deaf man who is not verbally fluent.
Despite this, he and Thompson engaged in what the summary describes as a “verbal” argument on the road outside the latter’s home in Enderley, soon after the victim arrived there at 10.20am on May 29 last year.
Thompson’s rebuttal in that argument came in the form of smashing the windscreen of the victim’s car with a bat, and slashing a tyre on his trailer.
The summary does not identify whether the bat involved was a softball, baseball, cricket or some other kind.
Things quickly became physical, with “both parties actively fighting each other”.
During the exchange, Thompson used the orange bat to strike his opponent once to the back of the head, causing a large, six-centimetre laceration. He continued to bash the man another four times to the left hand side of his body.
The police arrived at the scene, but Thompson was still agitated and aggressive and began yelling at them. He took a step towards his victim raised his arms and got into a fighting stance.
He was told he was under arrest for disorderly behaviour. He replied: “F... off, for what?”
Instead of putting his hands behind his back, as instructed, Thompson ran up his driveway, closing a large metal gate to keep the police officers out as he did so, before running inside his home and locking the door.
Although the summary of facts does not say when, some time later he was arrested.
He told police he had never used the bat on his victim. Rather, the deaf man had hit his head on the concrete curb, he said.
Thompson, who was represented in court by Russell Boot, was given a starting point for his sentence of 32 months in jail by judge Noel Cocurullo.
A 20% deduction for his guilty plea, a four-month reduction for his time spent on electronically-monitored bail and further reductions brought the jail time down to 21 months, which the judge converted to nine months of home detention.
The judge also granted a request by the police for the destruction of the bat.
Car parks inspired a milking shed design that took off around the world and became a piece of Waikato District history.
A hundred-year-old church and gravestones from the 1880s will also feature as the district turns the spotlight on its past for its first Heritage Day.
It’s exciting for district councillor Crystal Beavis who’s “got a real interest” in history.
“Look, I really don’t know everything and I’ve got a long way to go learning the history of the Waikato area. But I think there’s a growing interest in, where did we start and where has it led us? You really get an understanding of where we are today.”
Waikato District Heritage Day will have its debut this weekend on April 20. The day will involve the whole district, with guided tours and information sessions happening at historic sites in Tuakau, Pōkeno, Te Kauwhata, Huntly, Ngāruawāhia, Gordonton, Matangi, and Tamahere. It’s inspired by World Heritage day, which takes place on April 18.
There’s a “lovely story” about how the herringbone milking shed was invented near Gordonton after a farmer visited Hamilton, Beavis said.
“He was looking at the way everyone was [diagonal] parking on the main street. And he thought, ‘gosh if I could park my cows that way, milking would be so much easier!’” The shed doubled the size of a herd that one farmer could have, Beavis said, and the idea “spread like wildfire all over the world”. Old churches will also open to the public for heritage day, including St David’s in Matangi, built in 1933 as a settler style church, and St Stephen’s in Tamahere, with one of the oldest graveyards in the southern hemisphere.
“The church celebrated its 140th anniversary last year. It also has one of the earliest cemeteries, the earliest grave there is from 1888,” Beavis said. “If you go in there, you’ll see the names of people who have left behind names of streets, and the names of areas.”
The ugly side of history features too, like a straight piece of the boundary line between Waikato District and Matamata/ Piako
“That is part of the confiscation line, where so much of the Waikato District was confiscated from local iwi. And they literally had to abandon their land and flee into the King Country.