West Coast’s Sandhill Creek schooldays
Edna Campbell-Heath with a 1931 photo showing the hut at Sandhill Creek that was later converted into a schoolhouse. Photo: Gerard Hindmarsh.
Few schools that ever existed in this country were as remote as the one near the mouth of Sandhill Creek, five kilometres down the coast from Paturau on Golden Bay’s wild western flank.
Edna Campbell-Heath, now of Pakawau, attended the one-room schoolhouse for nearly 10 years, from 1935 to 1944, and remembers it well. Poring over old photos at her table brings back all the memories.
“We didn’t have desks, rather one long table made from pit-sawn timber. 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. All the elder children attended Sandhill Creek School along with the Cowin children, who lived further up the valley and who got to school by crossing the creek on a rope and wire before a narrow swingbridge was installed. The schoolhouse was originally 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 Paturau. Cecil and Vida’s house was sited where the woolshed now stands by the mouth of Sandhill Creek, only 20 or 30 yards from the school.
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 the 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.”
Ken Harrie lived at Paturau, and walked 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 Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, he would teach the Richards children at his Paturau schoolhouse. Only two schools in New Zealand ever practised this two school/one teacher routine. Pupils were expected to make up their two-day shortfall with a heavy dose of homework, and they could expect to be in big trouble if it wasn’t done.
“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, and 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 largely the children were free to roam their great outdoors. “One of our favourite things was catching crayfish. You could just snare them with a noose of flax off the rocks everywhere then. 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.” They also collected “Maori currants” or nightshade berries, which which Vida Rhodes would make into jam, before it was classified as a poisonous plant. The heart of nikau palms 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. He was known for his skill with horses, and had 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 was 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, he reckoned, too. It was a real mystery.
Running rough had its pitfalls. Edna badly staked herself when she slid down a grassy hill aged 13, and had to be driven to Nelson Hospital in a taxi from Collingwood driven by Claude Wilkens. Her extended absence effectively closed the school down, and Ken Harrie was transferred to teach at Mangarakau.
Edna spent a year learning by correspondence before her parents sold their Sandhill Creek property to Phil Win in 1948 and they all went to live at Pakawau. Edna helped her parents there until she got a job housekeeping for the Mansons at Wainui Bay, aged 17.
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 enough.”
Gerard Hindmarsh
