By Rhonda Bartle

Pungarehu in 2007: Surf Highway 45 forms the main street. Image Puke Ariki CollectionTS2007_1120.

A lahar-studded landscape

One of the coolest things about driving Surf Highway 45 between New Plymouth and Opunake is passing through the small townships which have mostly seen better days.

Pungarehu lies 40km southwest from New Plymouth, and visitors know when they're getting close because they find themselves in a lahar-studded landscape.

These small round hillocks formed after Mt Taranaki erupted in ancient times, and because of the huge boulders inside, often make farming and roading in this district difficult.

The area once boasted a thriving flax industry when the father of celebrated scientist Sir Ernest Rutherford decided to open a flax mill here.

At the height of the 'boom or bust' years, his mill employed many men, and was so successful he would eventually operate two more mills, one at Warea and one at Opunake.

Flax workers at Rutherford's mill, on the corner of Parihaka Rd, Pungarehu, wash fibre in the mill lagoon: Image Puke Ariki Collection N.5.2, LN2150.

All about farming

But these days Pungarehu, like most of the Taranaki Bight, is all about farming. As early as 1883, cattle grazed the narrow strip of land along the coast by the sea. Milk churned at home was made into butter, before being carted into town to be sold.

In 1885, a group of 35 Opunake farmers set up the Co-operating Dairy Company and opened Taranaki's first cheese factory.

This was followed by Crown Dairy factories and in 1897, the newly formed Cape Egmont Co-operative Dairy Company took over the Crown Company's Pungarehu factory, and began operations that same year.

Unfortunately, it was destroyed by fire in 1909. Though a new factory was built, eventually the amalgamations that saw Fonterra becoming the national dairy giant resulted in the closure of the smaller factories.

Another era in Taranaki farming began, that of sending milk to Fonterra's massive central collection point in Hāwera.

A long-time resident

Doreen Pollard has lived in Pungarehu all her life, and she'll be the first one to tell you she's always been anti-Fonterra. "The ruination of New Zealand," she calls it.

"We got all the news at the factory. When it closed down the butcher shop went, the draper shop went, grocer shop went, the post office went, the garage has gone and the school has gone too, now. Nothing left here now."

A farmer since she could walk, she's more than entitled to her opinion. Her record of 83 years of milking would attract few challengers!

Still living in the house where she was born, with son John running the farm and living next door, she recalls a useful life of farming labour - and the love of farm animals.

"I've just given up milking this last week or two," she says, at the age of 88. "Cows are easy. I don't know why people say they're hard. I was five when I started. I love it.

"I'd go up to the shed for a billy of milk for my cats and me, and if John was getting the cows in, I'd give him a hand. That was right up to this last week or two."

A shakey start

Born in 1918 during New Zealand's terrible Spanish Flu epidemic, Doreen was probably lucky to survive. "Dad worked at the dairy factory then," she says. "Many people got the flu."

Her earliest memory is of walking down to a house, on land that was being balloted for after the war.

"My sister Jean was just born, so I must have been around two," she says. "It was all toetoe and bush, and swamp and fern, and I remember listening to the ducks giggle in the water."

Doreen's English mother, Lillian Flack, had come to New Zealand by ship with new husband, returned serviceman, Sidney Armstrong.

"My mother was a World War One bride. My father was a soldier. When he got wounded, he was sent to the hospital at Brocklehurst.

"One Sunday he went to church and my mother was playing the organ. Granny said, 'seeing there are two New Zealand soldiers here, we'll take them home for tea.'"

A short period of happiness

Love blossomed and a match was made, which sadly, fate cut short. Doreen's mother, who had suffered rheumatic fever as a child, died from a stroke at 34, leaving her two little girls behind. For Doreen aged seven and Jean aged five, life was irrevocably changed.

When her father remarried, life changed again. A new stepmother, who also had a daughter, made things very difficult. "She used to tell my father we'd done awful things, and we hadn't.

"If my Granny in England had known what was going on, she would have come and got us. She would never have let us stop here."

Times were hard down on the farm, though the Armstrong girls were uncomplaining. "We used to have to work. Sometimes we'd get up at 3 o'clock in the morning. We'd have five hour's sleep.

"We milked cows, walked to school, walked home and milked again. Teachers were tough. Our teacher became more sympathetic after his house burned down and he moved into a little whare across the road.

 "He found out what us kids had to do. It opened his eyes. One day, my sister told me he said, 'Do you feel tired, Jean? Go up the hill and have a sleep.' And there was a little bush, and she laid there in the shade and had a sleep."

Doreen says a good memory made it relatively easy to gain her proficiency at twelve, though the only career ahead of her was farming.

On the wagon: Jean, Doreen and a cousin. Image supplied.

Lessons along the way

"As soon as I left school, I had to go to work on the farm. I just had to. I washed cans and scrubbed off the cowshit and scraped it up with a shovel. There were no centrifugal pumps and no high pressure hoses to clean the shed with back then."

During a drought in 1928, Doreen remembers having to haul water out of the well for the cows. "It was hard, that drought was."

But she says the Great Depression of the 1930s taught her sound lessons that have stayed with her all her life.

"It made people, you know. You were friends through it. There was no pension, no dole in those days. You wondered how people lived. Even if you asked for a writing pad for school, they'd go crook at you.

"A penny would buy a lot of biscuits and 3d would buy a whole dinner. I knew what it was like to be hungry. I think that's why I became a gardener.

"Even after I married, I grew all the vegetables. I might have bought an onion or two, but mostly I grew those, too. I had chickens and ducks and I'd sell the eggs to the factory. I had geese I sold, too. I couldn't kill them myself," she says with a small smile. "But I did pluck them."

But describing herself as a gardener is something of an understatement. Not far from the original homestead she maintains a huge, lush, essential plot - nothing 'hobbyist' about it.

A life of hard labour

Despite pulling her weight from a tender age, Doreen speaks without bitterness of busy days that ran into night.

"There was a lot of ploughing, a lot of draining done here. It was just bush and fern when my father got it. Horses did the ploughing. This road along here, there were no bulldozers or things. Horses worked on that too. The crusher was down the Lower Parihaka Road."

Perhaps her enduring love of animals got her through. "It was my job to catch the horses and put them in the cart, and then later, to put them in the wagon. I did that for many years.

"We had Spring Carters and half-draughts. I loved the Clydesdales with the fluffy feet, and I always rode them. They were so quiet they never bucked me off. I can still hear their feet going clop, clop, clop…"

She retains a palpable fondness for the milking herd. "I had cows I used to play with and sit on their backs. Cows have all got numbers now. I used to give them names."

Her elderly eyes light up when she describes a cattle dog, Don, who belonged to her father but would do anything she asked.

"I could send him right down to the big hill down the back and if there was a cow asleep on the top, he'd know what I wanted. My brain and his seemed to…well, he just knew.

"Even a cattle drover, who used to watch me round the cows up, would say, 'Gee, I love that dog.' Don was well known around here."

Today, eight cats dot her yard and doorstep, and sleep under her trees.

A chance meeting at Opunake

Aside from functions at the local hall, which stood between the local butcher shop and where the current hall is now, there wasn't much to do for fun in early Pungarehu.

Occasionally, the Armstrong family would go to Opunake to watch a movie at the Everybody's Theatre.

It was through a case of mistaken identity that Doreen met her husband. "I thought it was Harold Pollard, but it was his brother, Albert. They were very much alike. So, I didn't go the movie in the finish.

"My sister and I stopped outside talking while our parents went inside. We were still there talking when they came out!"

Albert came from a farming background so when they married, it seemed only natural to stay on the farm, allowing Sidney Armstrong to move onto land he owned near Parihaka.

"My father got us to stop here. He knew if I went he was finished. He moved up to his other farm and Albert and I stayed here."

Work was still a constant, with a busy tribe of six kids; four boys and a girl. "There was such a lot to do, calves and chickens to feed. Cut the wood, get chips, though I loved the coal range." Sadly, Albert died of a heart attack 17 years ago.

A productive person

There's not much about Pungarehu that Doreen doesn't know. She recalls nights of haymaking using horses and stackers, where she'd haul sandwiches in suitcases out to the workers in the fields.

And the old local bachelor characters, like George Nobles and Charlie Forrester, who was a 'remittance' man, sent 'in exile' from England.

"He was a great worker, but he liked his booze. Several years after he returned from WWI, his parents sent him money to build a caravan to live in, but I think he drank the money. He had a photo of a mate's caravan taken to send to them, and pretended it was his."

There were the Hermans and the Marshalls, who lived where the old Post Office stands, and the old Drillers Hotel that burned down before she was born.

"It was just over the bridge. When my father ploughed the land, he found all this burnt glass. And of course that road was metal. There weren't many cars when I was young. They tarsealed it when I was 12."

There were picnics at the Pungarehu Domain, and dances, card parties, gift evenings, wedding receptions, meetings and twenty-first birthdays in the hall.

And while it often surprises Doreen that she's still alive and kicking and living on the original farm, she's happy with her lot in general, while acknowledging the pleasures and pain of the past.

Now headed for a late retirement, she'll miss milking all the cows she calls Love and Pretty - supposing John can keep her out of the shed.

An aerial view of the Pollard farm, with lahars clearly visible in the background: Image supplied.