An old boat propped upside down and wrapped in wire netting made an excellent house for the chooks. The Olliver kids spent many hours lying up on top on the warm wood.
A house cow provided milk and turns were taken to lead it to and from the grass around the lake.
Pigs were slaughtered and scraped with the sharp edge of a tobacco tin.
And every day a pound of butter was collected from Morris's store. 'I remember coming home for lunch on a cold day and you'd get to the top of the cliff and sniff: Pancakes!' Joan says.
Power to the people
At the beginning there was no electricity until Skelly, who knew in advance when the power was to be turned off, decided to do something about it.
'When Dad was with the power board,' Bill says, 'we had the washhouse outside the bathroom and one day Dad connected the power to the house straight off the pole. The whole time we were there, we had free power!'
On the sand: An undated photo of Hilton and Mabel with the first of their 12 children. Image Puke Ariki Collection P.2.3251, LN 5221.
Long drops and short drops
But it's tales of a non-existent sewage system that make old eyes twinkle now. The long drop sat around the corner from the house and emptying it was usually done under cover of night.
Colin: 'We used to sit the tins in the wheelbarrow and take them to the tailrace at the south end of the beach to empty. One night Roy and I - it was our turn - were pushing thw wheelbarrow and it kept going eek, eek, eek. It was making a hell of a noise. We laughed so much we tipped the barrow over. It took about six loads to get it all into the tail race!'
Old Charlie Cameron, the town's night-watchman, once tipped his whole truck over in the sand with a full load on.
'He used to collect all the tins in town and he'd tip it all out in the tail race. He turned a bit sharp by our place one night and tipped the whole lot onto the beach.'
Opunake Beach from the top of the cliff around 1915, perhaps with an Olliver child in the foreground.
Safer by the dozen
With safety in numbers, the Olliver clan roamed Opunake beach at will, until not a single rock or boulder went unexplored.
They played hide-and-seek in the swamp where they built huts and forts. Sometimes they fried bird's eggs up in the gorse nearer town.
But when it came to swimming, they stuck by the rules. 'Mum was a tiger for rules. We were pretty well schooled up. Mum would come down when people swam in the wrong place and tell them not to swim there, tell them it was dangerous.
'One fellow said, 'I know what I'm doing.' And he drowned. But we'd had it instilled in us from the start. Don't ever swim by the tail race. And we never did.'
Entertainment and excitement
Talk around the table turns to the excitment of the circus coming to town or of going to the occasional film at Everybody's Theatre.
Colins spins a yarn about tripping over something on the way home in the dark.
'It was during the war. Black Out. No house lights. No street lights. We came out of the pictures, a war film, some creepy Japanese thing and we were walking up the street. It was all metal and our feet would go crunch, crunch, which made it sound like some bugger was chasing you.
'We went onto the grass so we didn't make any noise and suddenly we fell over something breathing heavily in the dark. We were home in two seconds flat. Panting on the verandah, we realised it must have been a cow asleep on the grass verge.'
Everybody's Theatre as it looks today. Built between 1912 and 1914, it was orginally Thorpe and Callahan's General Store. The building was converted into a theatre in the 1920s and later bought by local residents as a community asset. These days it's run by volunteers.
A load of old bull
The memories continue to flow - of the day no one went to school because Sam Peter's bull escaped from its paddock on Longfellow Road and how Sam Feaver, vet, chemist and valued photographer, rode up on his horse to help look for it.
'They tried everything. They called dogs. It ripped open the horse. It was a wild one, that bull.'
There was the time Aunt Daisy visited Opunake in the wake of her popular radio show.
'You'd have thought it was the Queen,' Owen says. 'They lifted her up on the back of the bus and she couldn't get off, she was that small.'