Clive Petterson: a treasure of Hamama
Clive Petterson in the doorway of the whare built by his grandfather in 1868. Photo: Neil Wilson.
Clive Petterson’s earliest memory is of his family’s homestead burning down in 1920. That’s 90 years ago, when he was nearly four years old.
Clive has lived his whole life since then on the family property at Hamama, so he has a unique understanding of the history of his family at that place. Still standing on the property, and in use as a sleepout, is a whare built by Clive’s grandfather, John Petterson, in 1868.
“Grandfather came here in 1857 as a Swedish sailor on a vessel taking timber out of Waitapu,” explained Clive. “But he jumped ship and started work at East Takaka before making his way up to Hamama in 1868. We’ve done a bit of fixing and patching up on the whare he built, so it’s not original, but it’s still there.”
Clive’s grandparents bought one of the very first cars in Golden Bay—a 1922 or 1923 Oakland—for £500, and Clive can remember the occasional family expedition to Nelson.
“We’d take our lunch and the billy and boil it on the top of the Hill. The Newmans’ service car was running at the time and Dad didn’t want to meet it on the bad bit of road between the top and Kairuru. It was a bit of a dirt track.”
A 1920s childhood was very different from one today. Clive’s mother used to make the family’s soap from fat that they saved from the animals killed for the table.
“I remember that she added caustic soda. It didn’t have a sweet perfume like today’s soap,” said Clive. “Bath night was once a week. Dad would light the copper and bring in two kero tins of hot water and pour them into the big galvanised bath in front of the range fire. That was when there were four kids and we’d all have a bath, one after the other.”
Clive was the eldest of six children; he had two brothers and three sisters. He attended Hamama School, which used to be near the corner of Waingaro Road, about 3.5km down Hamama Road from home. There was also a little post office nearby, run by the Byrne sisters, Sis and Liz, and once a week Clive would go down to collect the family’s mail. Clive remembers that the mail was delivered to the post office by Daddy Holden with his horse and trap.
“We walked to school and back every day—not always in boots because we went barefeet as much as possible. There were 22 pupils there at its height but that dropped down to nine, so they closed it.”
The teachers at Hamama School were young women not very much older than their oldest pupils. They boarded with local families and they seemed to cope with the great range of ages and skills of the pupils they taught, according to Clive.
Clive remembers two major events during his school days—the Murchison earthquake and a massive flood, both in 1929. “We were at school when the earthquake happened but we couldn’t get outside because the desks were being heaved around all over the place,” Clive recalled. “But the flood later that year was absolutely massive. The one in 1983 was only a pup compared to it,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “There was a mill in the Totara bush on our farm. It was driven by an old five- or six-ton traction engine. The flood wrecked the mill and washed the traction engine about 400 metres downstream.”
Completing his Proficiency—a rigorous exam that qualified those who passed for free education at a secondary school or district high school—Clive left school aged 14 and went home to help his parents on the farm.
“When I’d been home for a while, my father said I was old enough to look for extra work around the district to bring in a bit of extra money,” he said. “I did a fair bit of shearing with other blokes around the place, like Bernie Simpson from Puramahoi. We got one pound [two dollars] for shearing 100 sheep in those days and I could do 200 on a good day. I remember we’d bike up to Kairuru, past the top of the Takaka Hill, at shearing time. We’d stay there for as many days as it took to finish the shearing and then bike home again. The best days I did were at Eric Sparrow’s. He had an old two-stand Lister machine that’s still up at Ricky Page’s. I went up and had a look at it a while ago. ”
In the 1930s there was a minor gold rush in the Waingaro and Clive remembers men working near the family farm at that time. “The government subsidised 20 or 30 gold-diggers to work through the Depression. They just got survival rations and they worked in very tough conditions.”
Clive was a great hunter and his expeditions took him all over the hill country. The trip into the Cobb was a particular favourite.
“It was 14 hours from Uruwhenua past the Rossers’ place. We’d cross the river downstream from the Blue Hole and go up to Barron’s Flat then cross the Grecian and the Takaka carry on up past the Chaffey’s at Asbestos Cottage. Then we’d go on around up to the ridge and then drop down into the Cobb – there was no dam or lake then. Sometimes there would be so many deer on the valley floor that we’d chase a herd of them on horseback. At one time, when World War II was still on, there was a great demand for green deer skins and the government paid a great premium for them.” Clive thinks they were used for airmen’s jackets, but another source suggests that they were in great demand because the RAF had discovered that they were perfect for encasing Spitfire fuel tanks to prevent the tanks exploding back into the aircraft when they were hit by enemy fire. Clive says that he and his hunting mate Karl Perram would sometimes see “70 or 80 deer in a good valley”.
“We knew how many green skins we could carry out so we’d only shoot that many.”
Clive and Karl were acquainted with the Chaffeys and they had a special way of communicating with them if their route back out of the Cobb took them past the cottage.
“Henry Chaffey was very jealous, and he thought that someone would eventually come and try to take Annie back to her husband in Timaru. He said that he’d shoot them before he let that happen, so we were keen to let him know we were just hunters returning from the Cobb. We had a special coo-ee signal we’d call out when we got near the cottage. Sometimes Chaffey would come out and shout us a mug of tea if he felt like it.”
Social life for young men included regular trips over the Hill to dances at Motueka. According to Clive, “Hundreds of girls every season used to go to pick tobacco and hops there.”
Because rationing was in full force, it was difficult to get enough petrol to make regular trips, but one of his mates used to save some of his farm’s petrol ration to get a truckful of young blokes there and back.
At one of these dances, Clive met the woman he would marry, Flo Moth, who had biked from Greymouth with a friend in search of the “big money” to be made picking tobacco. She made one shilling (10 cents) on her first day. Flo and Clive were married in 1942 and were together for 67 years until Flo’s death in december 2008.
World War II interrupted their courtship. Clive was conscripted and, when the day came for him to leave, his father could not bear to say goodbye to him.
“We were all set to take off for Egypt but while I was on final leave the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour so we were sent off to Fiji. I got my foot tangled in a Bren-gun carrier quite early on and was invalided out. They didn’t want soldiers with bad feet.”
Clive returned to the family farm and took over from his father in 1943-4. He remembers the 40s and 50s with some fondness.
“We’d only go to town once a week, often on Friday night because the shops were open late. We didn’t have to go out do all our shopping, though, because some of the grocery businesses like Kirks and Ernie Wadsworth used to send vans out to call on farmers so you could get your essentials.”
The Petterson farm at Hamama is surrounded by hill country and Clive was naturally very fit from the amount of time he spent working in the hills. One of the activities routinely carried out was burning off scrub to allow grass to become established. Once, Clive put in a very big day burning on the hill. He says that the walk back home that evening was pretty hard work.
“I drank one bottle of my homebrew while I had a bath and found I was completely cast,” he laughed. “My family had to prise me out of the bath and help me to bed. Smoke inhalation, I suppose.”
One of the biggest technological advances in Clive’s farming career was the arrival of tractors. He bought his first—a Ferguson—in 1955 for £600 ($1200) including a double-furrow plough and a set of discs, and it is still in use on the farm today. “It cuts wood and, because it’s so much lighter than the big new tractors, it used to do some of the feeding out in winter,” enthused Clive.
Having such a long-term connection to a particular piece of ground is a privilege that Clive views seriously but unsentimentally. It’s a view shared by his son Larry, who farms the place now.
“It’s just home,” Clive says. “It’s the place where we make our living. Our job is to make sure we hand it on to the next generation in better order than it was when we took over. That’s the way it’s always been.”
Some of John Petterson’s other descendants still farm around Hamama and countless others live throughout the Bay and beyond. Clive has a one-year-old great-grandson, Levi Oscar Petterson, in Stoke. He is blissfully unaware of the amount of family history he will one day step into.
Neil Wilson
