By Rhonda Bartle
Sawmilling in their blood
In 1909 Henry and John Bartle balloted for two sections of land at Arawhata Road, Opunake, in order to start a sawmill. Milling was in their blood as their father William Bartle had been one of the first millers in the district.
After leaving Stibbard in Norfolk and sailing with his family from Southampton in 1890, William farmed land at Koru. Later, he bought a sawmill on Kahui Road, Rahotu. When he died, his sons carried on the business.
The 1890s were the boom years of Taranaki, when the population grew at a faster rate than any other region. Farming swung from the coastal plains up into the hills and rattled down the valleys back to the sea.
The number of farms rose from 2,500 to 4,235 and the cattle count doubled from 108,000 to 211,000. By 1896 there were no less than 46 dairy factories in the district.
Five years later saw 95 butter factories and 21 cheese factories operating, as well as 40 sawmills cutting wood from the fast disappearing bush.
An arduous task begins
As soon as they won the ballot for land at Opunake, the Bartle brothers dismantled the existing machinery, buildings and wooden tramlines and began the arduous task of transporting it 32 kms from Kahui Road to upper Arawhata Road.
They would have to clear the bush and lay a tramline in order to haul the large steam boiler and engine onto site, close to the mountain, way up on the west bank of the Oaonui River. Soon the mill was operating, with worker accommodation and a stout, square house of pit sawn timber built near by, which would be added to over the years.
The mill flourished, with timber trolleyed down to the timber yard and hauled onto a wagon pulled by five stout horses. The horses followed the winding coast road to Opunake and Manaia where the wood was sold.
A fine new business
Henry married Mary Morris and raised eight children. Their son James (Jim), who was born at Mrs Dudley's Rest Home in Opunake in 1917, put many of his early memories down on tape before he died in 2002.
'The sawmill was running right beside the river. First of all, we had to get that sawmill from the Kahui Road, which is 6 miles around, down to the sea and back up the other road. I don't know how my father did that, as there was hardly any road, but he shifted that sawmill.
'He and his brother, they laid a mile of tramlines, wooden rails, to set the mill up in the bush before they could cut any timber. That must have taken them a fair while.
There must have been some great hardships to get the mill started as some of the machinery that was taken into the bush weighed tons. Big boilers, steam engines and trains…'
Riding the mill track to school
Life was hard at Arawhata Road, with constant bad weather in winter and bush fires in summer. The Bartle children rode horses to the single-roomed Arawhata School, nearly 6kms away, which had been built in 1920 with timber from the mill.
Pupils on ponies: Arawhata School children - probably with Bartle children amongst them - on their horses in front of the school house in 1922
'To get to school, we went down the road, which was just a rough track in the scrub for the first mile, and there were hazards and things we met on the way, especially in the wintertime. Some of the swampy pieces, the horses would just about get bogged in them.'
Finding enough feed for the team of seven or eight mill horses plus an extra four ponies was an added worry.
'We had to buy in feed for them, chaff, because there was no grass, there was only bush, but gradually we got enough to keep the horses going but it took a bit of hard work, all done by hand,' Jim said.
'We always seemed to manage, but I think we missed a lot of school days through the weather. But the schooling was always a hard one, because they had to have enough horses for the mill teams and the forestry.'
Workers with odd pasts
While the mill employed many workers, they were often interesting men with odd pasts. One old Irishman, Mick Mulverhill, became the target for the Bartle children's tricks.
'We had all sorts of different characters. One or two were very funny and some were very disturbing, but we had quite a lot. A lot of men had lost money in the 1919 depression – and their farms – and they came to work at the mill.'
'Old Mick used to sit in the corner of the kitchen in his hobnail boots, wriggling his feet up and down and making marks on the lino. One day we had a water pistol and we would give him a little squirt through a little hole in the steel chimney, and he would wonder where this water was coming from. And then he would rush out shouting, 'You colonial hoodlums!'
Milling around in the river
As a child, Jim Bartle spent many hours under the mill, which was built up so the water ran in one end, taking the sawdust out into the Oaonui stream and all the way to the sea.
'It was a great playing place for us. We would dam up the sawdust and I remember once, my two sisters had some girlfriends to stay and they went for a swim in the river. We were banned from going anywhere near the place. It was pretty cold and we let the sawdust go on them and all this red sawdust went down and got tangled up in their hair, and of course, we were nowhere to be seen!'
End of an era
Sawmilling was a way of life but when the industry levelled off, the Bartle family turned to farming for an income. After stocking the land with dairy cows, they became self-supporting in butter, milk and cheese. As more cleared land was developed into pasture, they added to the herd.
Eventually, along with one block of land, the Arawhata Road sawmill was sold. Jim and his brothers became logging contractors, paid to clear land for more farming and for a while they supplied three dairy factories with wood for their boilers.
'I don't know how my parents managed to survive two depressions,' Jim said later. 'But we always had a good garden and we lived on vegetables. We had a few cattle and sheep and killed those to survive.'
Today, nothing is left from the sawmilling days except a worn bend in the Oaonui stream and the main frame of the original homestead that still stands on the old Bartle farm.