Richard ran his family’s dairy farm in partnership with his brothers John and Bob from when he left school until he retired 42 years later. Given his time over, he would do it all again. He can recall the names of long-dead cows and their milking shed stall numbers. He says that he inherited his love of cows from his mother. Margaret Spark agreed to move from Blenheim to Canterbury with her husband on condition that she could bring her dairy herd with her. This involved Richard’s father, Charlie, and a mate, with a horse and dray, driving a herd of 28 cows and a goat, without dogs, from Riverlands on the outskirts of Blenheim to Sheffield in inland Canterbury, a distance of 270km. It took three weeks, averaging about 20km per day.
1930s messages delivered by bus
The men camped on the roadside or in a farmer’s barn at night; the cows grazed on the grass roadside verges. This happened in the middle of winter, when the cows weren’t producing milk. This period is called ‘the dry’ in dairying circles. The roads were nearly empty. Messages were sent back and forth between Charlie and Margaret, back in Blenheim with a baby, by the daily Newmans bus. The family rode out the Depression of the 1930s on leased land before moving to Rangiora in 1942.
They bought, for £2K, a 45-acre dairy farm called Rossburn, which lies close to what is now a wetlands reserve between the North Brook and South Brook streams on the edge of Rangiora. This is ideal dairying country, but the main industry in the early days of European settlement was flax harvesting, with five flax-mills operating in the immediate area.
Like cutting sugar cane but without the snakes
The mills used waterwheels to drive machinery that stripped the fibres from the flax, which was then dried and pressed into bales. The bales of flax fibre were exported to Britain to be turned into rope for sailing vessels.
The harvesting of the
