By Amelia Bury

Imagine having so much free whitebait you end up feeding the leftovers to the chickens - this was a reality for 90-year-old Keith Sutton.

The New Plymouth man, who lived on the Mokau River more than 50 years ago, remembers catching kerosene tins full of the tiny fish.

"We caught stacks of whitebait; we got sick of them. People used to feed the chooks with them - you couldn't sell them."

However, other aspects of life at this time were not so idyllic. "It was a pretty rough sort of place, pretty primitive," remembers Keith, who moved to Mokau in 1929.

This was the beginning of the Great Depression when the eldest Sutton son, Don, made the decision to give up his academic life for an uncertain future up the Mokau River. Keith and another brother, Roy, went with him.

Keith refers to their time in the house as "baching", although he was only 16-and-a-half at the time.

The brothers "were keen on farming", and they milked 70 cows, learning as they went. They separated their milk to produce cream, which was hauled down the river to the Mokau Dairy Factory every other morning.

'Primitive' party line

This creamboat, the Cygnet, was the Sutton's link to the outside world. It delivered groceries, mail and was transport for the boys. Their only other link to the wider community was their party line, which had nothing to do with dances.

Telephones in those days had five or six people connected to one line, and there was a set protocol to making a call. "You had to ring it up and the first thing you would say was 'working'. It was primitive but it worked," Keith says.

The boys could ring the store in Mokau and the creamboat would deliver their groceries to their farm jetty the next day - similar to how people order supermarket food off the internet today, and probably faster!

Out in the wops

Being geographically isolated was one of the main drawbacks of river living. Although boats chugged up and down the water on a regular basis (the river was a designated highway), road access was limited.

While the lower Mokau was spanned by a large bridge, the upper river didn't get its crossing until 1957.

This posed problems for the young farmers. "It was hard," he says. "Working on a farm was a very difficult job because we had no access. By this time there was a road put in from the Awakino Gully over to the river, but we had no bridge. So everything was put on a punt or a wire rope. We had a wire cable across the river with a flying fox on it. That's how we crossed. The kids went to school that way."

Even animals were transported that way.

Trolley Transport: Crossing the upper Mokau River by flying fox are, from left, Irene Sutton, Dick Philpott, Don Sutton (Irene's husband). Jill and Frances Sutton (Keith's daughters), plus Diane (Irene and Don's daughter).

Pigs can fly

Keith smirks at memories of flying porkers: "Getting pigs off properties was a terrible job."

A boat called the Kapui used to run from Waitara to Mokau, bringing fertiliser and taking out stock from the backblocks.

"It took out pigs and they were carted down to the riverbank in a sledge with a frame around it and they were slung on board this boat by a sling round their tummy," Keith says.

A penned sled would carry about six pigs down to the Kapui, where workers would winch them on board, then head for the Waitara freezing works. "That's how they went out for a long time. Pretty primitive. Everybody would do the same sort of thing. Everybody was in the same boat in those days."

The lack of access also limited the range of farm equipment the Suttons had. Big machinery couldn't be transported up the river, so the men only had a small, four-wheel tractor - and this had to be brought across the river on a barge. "They (the farmers) were pretty limited in what they could do."

There were certainly no diggers or bulldozers available to the Mokau River farmers. "Everything we did we did by hand - for years. It was very hard work."

But these young men were fighting fit. Literally.

Bachelor brothers

If Mr Sutton has one piece of advice it is not to go into partnership with family, especially brothers.

"It's not a good scheme to have siblings work together; it's the worst thing out. You know what brothers are like, they argue and fight - and we did."

Sutton Brothers: From left, are Roy, Donald, Keith, Alton and Frank.

But these bachelor brothers did agree on one thing - keeping house. They could cook and clean, and even had a tablecloth made out of flour bags, which they would starch and iron. As a result of not having daughters, Keith's mother told her boys they all "had to darn well learn to cook".

And cook they did. "We always had two-course meals. We could cook cakes and all sorts of things before we went up there. Rice puddings and bread and butter custard."

In fact, Keith was such a fine baker that he continued making his daily bread until just a few years ago.

Looking back, he maintains that their rural, self-sufficient lifestyle helped them escape from the worst effects of the Great Depression of the 1920s and '30s. They had milk, butter and meat from cattle, sheep and pigs and they grew their own vegetables.

"The slump, the Depression did not hit us nearly as badly as it had so many other people."

Live and unplugged

Out of necessity, everything they ate was fresh. In those days, the Suttons didn't have electricity, which meant they had no way of storing food.

When they wanted vegetables they picked them straight from the garden, the milk was fresh from their cows and when they wanted meat they killed a beast. They ate mainly mutton, but sometimes they would slaughter a cow and share it with their neighbours.

Because they had no refrigeration, leftover meat was fed to the dogs, while surplus milk was dished up to the pigs.

Life got easier near the end of the depression, in two major ways.

"Electricity arrived in 1938, which was pretty early for the back blocks. We had to guarantee payment for the putting in of the line whether we used it or not. Awakino and Mokau were reticulated at the same time," Keith says.

Match made in Mokau

In 1940, he found himself a wife.

Prior to that, he had always been too tired to go to the woolshed dances or New Year's Day picnics looking for romance. "We didn't entertain. We'd come home after milking the cows in the evening and get tea and fall asleep after the meal, wake up after an hour, wash the dishes and go to bed."

Keith met Gwen Every at a calf day. She was a teacher; he was a farmer. It was a match made in Mokau.

But their days together were little more than a honeymoon. Six months after they wed, Keith answered the call of war.

'Interlude' of war

"People were patriotic in those days," says Keith, explaining why he volunteered to fight in World War II.

When he left to "do his bit" in Egypt and Italy, his young wife was already pregnant. In 1944, he returned to New Zealand and a three-year-old girl he had never met. "She was born after I went away."

Quietly, Keith admits it was hard coming back to a wife and child, who were practically strangers. He quickly recovers, saying it would've been worse for those left behind.

"At least we were doing something and seeing new places and such like. And all they do is stop home and worry about what was happening to them (us)."

After collecting his family from Carterton, where they had been living with Gwen's parents, the Suttons headed back to Mokau.

Restless on the river

"Well I went back to the farm; I wanted to get back on to where I was. I was a bit unstable at that time - I suppose that would be the word - I'm not too sure. A bit restless I guess. I went back to the farm and just took up where I'd left off. Milked cows."

Keith finds it easier to think of his tour of duty as merely an "interlude" in his life and it seems this proud father would much rather talk about the additions to his family after the war. "I've got three daughters.

"The eldest one, Jill, I didn't see for three years. Frances was born after the war and the third one, Rosemary, was born exactly four years after that."

Rosemary was born in Te Kuiti because the Suttons had a car by then. The only problem being that the car was on one side of the river and the Suttons were on the other! And still no bridge in between.

Building bridges

Keith remembers the excitement that turned into frustration when the bridge building finally got under way. "The bridge took about three or four years from go to woe."

He explains that because of the unstable ground on the river flats, holes dug for the foundations kept caving in.

The "hole" process sorted out the men from the boys in the construction world - and left the locals wondering if their bridge would ever materialise. "It took about four years to build that bridge because the contractors would go bust, somebody else would have to come and do it and there would be six months where nothing would happen to it. And we got terribly, terribly, frustrated."

Does Keith remember the day it finally opened in 1957? "Of course" - but not as fondly as one might think.

Stranger crosses the line

The residents should have been delighted that access had arrived in their neck of the woods, but they ended up feeling cheated when a stray businessman poached their rite of passage. "Believe it or not the first man over there wasn't somebody who lived on the river - he was a car salesman or insurance agent."

Keith has a quiet giggle about how grumpy the locals were about "some outsider" making the crossing before the locals could make their long-awaited walk to freedom!

In 1963, the Suttons sold up and moved south to New Plymouth. "I was glad to get away from it, I'd had it by then," Keith says.

The Sutton boys had farmed on the Mokau River for 34 years, "I was heartily sick of farming and being in partnership with my brother."

 In New Plymouth Keith and his wife Gwen made a new life for themselves in Fitzroy with no regrets - and absolutely no yearning for milking or Mokau.