Local identity Skeet Barnett’s 80th birthday
East Takaka identity Skeet Barnett, who turns 80 this month. Photo: Neil Wilson.
Lawrence Arthur Barnett can’t remember the first time someone called him “Skeet” but it was a long time ago.
“It would have been in my early days at East Takaka School,” said Skeet. “Back then, in the 1930s, the sole-charge teacher would have had 20 or 30 kids of all ages to look after on their own. No wonder there was a fair bit of flogging…On a cold day up East Takaka your bum would stay warm for quite a while after you’d had the strap.”
Skeet turns 80 on the 15th of this month and has had trouble with his birthday party invitations. A wholehearted and respected contributor to so many organisations, he is worried he might neglect an old friend.
“When I sat down with my daughter Paula to sort it all out, I thought I might just as well put an ad in the paper and invite the whole district,” said Skeet. “I can’t do that, so I’d better say sorry right now to anyone who feels left out.”
Skeet was born in 1929 in a nursing home in Commercial Street. He was already a fourth-generation Golden Bay local; his great-grandfather “Heavyweather” Barnett had come into the Bay by sea during the 1860s.
“That makes my grandchildren, Sam and Elizabeth Miles, sixth-generation East Takaka locals,” he says with a fair bit of pride. “My mother was a Bickley and her mother was a Byrne, so, when you start including the families we’ve married into, I guess I’m related to a fair few locals.”
Being the only boy in a family of seven children shaped the way he grew up. “I was right in the middle—three older sisters and three younger sisters. I was browbeaten from an early age.” A “very ordinary scholar, more interested in getting home to help on the farm,” he graduated from East Takaka and spent two years boarding at St Patrick’s College in Silverstream before returning to Golden Bay.
“I got a job at the Post Office, starting as a telegram boy,” he said. The war was on, and he boarded in Takaka, biking home in the weekends to help on the farm. “My dad developed a heart condition and couldn’t work all the time so when I was about 18 I took over. I took on mustering and shearing work around the district as well…With one thing and another there’s not an inch of this bloody country I haven’t been over numerous times.”
Skeet’s first shearing job outside the family farm was in 1948 at Sky Farm, the property of Donald Edmondson. “They were half-breed Lincoln/Merino wethers—all wrinkly and about the size of small ponies,” said Skeet. “I shore 63 of them that first day and I’ve never worked so hard before or since.” In those days, he said, before Godfrey Bowen revolutionised the entire shearing industry, the gear and shearing techniques were “nowhere near as good.”
He had a little experience of blade-shearing too. “Ray Baigent and I would take a day off school and go up to help our neighbour, Rupert Spittal when we knew he was shearing. He had about 600 sheep,” said Skeet. “One time Ray and I had a race for the day. He managed ten but I could only do nine, so he had crowing rights. I suppose it was 19 sheep that Rupert didn’t have to do himself.”
Skeet played plenty of rugby and tennis and managed to fit in some social life as well. In 1950 he met Shirley Bishop, who had come to Takaka from Taranaki to work as a hairdresser in her aunty Doris’s salon about where the Village Green is now. Skeet and Shirley were married in New Plymouth in 1952 and returned to the farm in East Takaka. They had four children, Larry, Paula, and the twins Cushla and Catherine.
Skeet was a stalwart of many organisations: rugby at club and provincial levels, the Nelson Harness Racing Club, the Golden Bay County Council, Lions and the Golden Bay Dog Trials. “I played 14 years of senior and rep football, coached the Takaka club team, the Golden Bay-Motueka reps and the Nelson Bays team,” he said. “I had some great days in football. I remember winning the Seddon Shield when I was playing and, another time, defending it as a coach against Marlborough in an ugly game. I remember a North Island tour I did in 1971 as coach of the Nelson Bays team. We played Poverty Bay, Hawkes Bay, Wairarapa/Bush and Wellington. Takaka used to have plenty of players in the Nelson Bays team in those days and we weren’t disgraced on that tour, even though Hawkes Bay were right at the top. They only beat us 14-3.”
Skeet’s interest in harness racing began in 1975 when he bought a yearling called Madame Gee. “She was bred to be a trotter but she couldn’t trot an inch, but boy, could she pace,” said Skeet. “She was a great brood mare too.” Madame Gee became the cornerstone of a trotting and pacing enterprise that took Skeet to high-ranking meetings at Addington in Christchurch and Alexandra Park in Auckland. His most successful horse was Eastburn Grant, who won 13 races, including the prestigious Rowe Cup in 1997.
“Madame Gee left 37 winners in all,” said Skeet. “She was great. Oodles of people try to breed winners and have one or two or none at all. At the moment I’ve got one from her called Be Artful. He’s won three races already and he’s not finished yet.”
Skeet was a County Councillor for nine years, serving as deputy chairman to Harry Riley for six. “This community owes a huge debt to Harry Riley,” he said. “A lot of the infrastructure that’s here today came about through his work on committees and boards.”
His time in local body politics gave Skeet definite opinions about how Golden Bay could progress. “I reckon there are two or three big things that we’ve lost because of the actions of vocal minorities. The first is the Collingwood-Karamea road,” he said. Part of a delegation representing the Buller and Golden Bay that took the case to the then acting Prime Minister, Hugh Watt, he came back confident. “It got to be a bit controversial through a televised debate that they shot in the Telegraph Hotel one Sunday night, and the government dropped it. It’ll never happen now and I think that’s a shame. The whole cost of the road back then was about $13 million. You wouldn’t put a bridge over Big River for that today.”
The proposed stopbank around Takaka, voted out in the 1980s, is another of Skeet’s regrets. “Today’s council with its ‘bureaucracy gone mad’ seems to be obsessed with water—either too much of it or too little of it. The stopbank proposal would have seen a bridge at Waitapu on a different angle and a bypass road along a stopbank from there to the Waingaro junction. It got voted out by ratepayers who thought it was a bit too dear, and now you can’t build a house in Takaka town because of the risk of flooding. Crazy.”
In 2000 Skeet’s beloved Shirley died of cancer. He thinks he was lucky to survive that period himself, and credits the support of his family during Shirley’s illness and during the grieving time. “It was a very tough time and I didn’t cope well on my own,” said Skeet. Later he became friendly with fellow-harness racing enthusiast, Janice, and says that without their friendship he doubts that he would be alive today.
His long and eventful life has been a collection of stories and Skeet is justifiably famous for the length and quality of his yarns. Inexplicably, there are some who doubt the absolute veracity of everything Skeet says, even when he prefaces his remarks with, ”Now this one is a true story…”. Readers can judge for themselves by two samples.
Skeet claims that, with Brian Reilly, Frank Soper and Eric Page he pioneered white-water rafting in 1954. On an expedition to the Leslie and Karamea Rivers via the Mt Arthur tablelands, the party carried in an air force two-man life raft and rode it down the Karamea River to the sea. It took a lot of carrying, though, and Skeet says that when it was on top of his already enormous pack he had to be helped to his feet by his companions. The intrepid raft pioneers were apparently met by a large crowd of curious onlookers at Karamea and didn’t have to buy a beer all night.
And, in a crucial rugby match Skeet played in, the result hinged on a last-minute conversion he had to kick. The try had been scored right in the corner and the angle was so narrow that, as the ball flew over the crossbar it got wedged between the uprights.
True? Better than true.
Neil Wilson
