DAVE DOBBYN'S 'THIS TOWN' # Look how long it's taken you # to arrive in this town. # From the dawn into the dark, # I will hold you deep in my heart. # Look how long it's taken you to arrive in this town. # Queenstown, uh, is a town that's nestled in amongst the mountains here on the shores of Lake Wakatipu. This is my workplace, my playground if you like. I sometimes say to people, 'This is the view I get from my office window, and I see this every day.' I've done 32 seasons now ` 32 consecutive years. Me being from the North Island ` Whakatane. I've spent most of my life down here now. So looks like I'm here to stay, and I just love the South Island. The beautiful mountains ` that's probably one of the main attractions and why I decided to stay here. A lot of people coming here from overseas often say to me, 'This is like the Swiss Alps.' I love looking at their faces, the way they look and go, 'Wow.' And it makes me learn to appreciate just how beautiful our country is. It's a` I-It's a beautiful place. I'm very very passionate and proud about Queenstown. Just a lovely place to be. ZIP LINE WHIRS Ziptrek Ecotours is a flying-fox activity to see amazing views framed within trees whizzing past you. It's meant to get people excited about being outdoors and, hopefully, build some sort of connection with that place that they're in. That represents the sustainability model that I aspire to. Sustainability is, uh, living within the earth's capacity to support life, very simply. In any place that we live in, we can actually leave it in a` in a better state or at least the same state as it was before. A lot of people from around the world have these memories of being on a flying fox, and that's good. That` That helps people to understand what we do and sort of relive that moment. It maintains the, sort of, romantic ideas of tree houses and flying foxes. We're trying to spark embers that were there before. there's 12 tree houses, and every one's completely different, and I think that they just represent the romantic notion of the tree house. I was born in Melbourne, grew up in the big city and pretty urban life. With Asian parents, I didn't go outdoors very much. I didn't go camping or the beach, and we just did different things. So I actually started studies in architecture. I felt like they were bending rules to try and create environments, um, when I could just take people into a world that's already out there. You can bring people into a place where they can reflect; connection can happen. They see a cycle, and they can see how that's clever. That's good design. I'm not really a city person any more. Now it really is important to me to be able to get in the outdoors easily. It makes a huge difference to my life, and that's sort of how I fell into Queenstown. The natural environment is beautiful and generally extremely clean. That lake is so unbelievably pure but I think that it's not by design. It's by default. For me, as a architectural person, I don't know, that's` that's my purpose of being on this earth, you know? It's to design a better future. ZIP LINE WHIRS ZIP LINE WHIRS Whoo-hoo! INTRIGUING MUSIC SLOW FOLKSY MUSIC MUSIC CONTINUES I have lived in Becks. Well, my` my parents lived in Becks, and they were working on farms here. So, yes, I've lived within this duck-shooting area for all of my life. Duck shooting happens in early May. It's very traditional in Central. Everybody starts gathering on Friday afternoon here at the` at the White Horse Hotel. People come from far and wide. This is, um, Terry, my brother from Christchurch. Yeah, Terry's been shooting 15 years with us. And Graham, our brother-in-law. He's actually our ex-brother-in-law now, but he's still very privileged to come to our` ou-our duck pond, and Graham and I have been shooting over 20 years together. So, um, yeah, that's the make-up of the crew, but within the property where we shoot, there's another 15 shooters. So, yeah, so they all get together here as well. Karen and Gary from the Becks Pub ` where would we be without them? ALL: Aw... It's their big weekend as well of the year, but everybody appreciates what they do over the weekend. They make sure everybody gets home safe. They even come and pick us up on the Friday night, take us to their pub. They make sure we all get home. We run the van the whole weekend. Keep people off the road so they're not drinking and driving, and we look after them. Would be the biggest night of the year for the... for the pub. Depending on how things go tonight, might get two or three hours of sleep before we're up for breakfast in the morning. They treat it as the big reunion for the year. Some come down from Hamilton, Auckland. We've got a family that the... the boys both come back from Australia. Yeah, it should be a fairly busy night later on in the night. UPBEAT FOLKSY MUSIC I'll just keep cooking all night, so if people want a feed at 11 o'clock, they'll get a feed at 11 o'clock. You just do your best and feed everyone as quickly as possible. Friday night's when everybody meets. An annual event where you meet everybody again, you know, the first time since last year. I started shooting since I was 16. I've been duck shooting in the area, on the` in the same property, actually, for over 50 years. It's a reunion. They come here once a year, and 70% of those people in there are probably townies. Town versus country. Country are better shooters. Local shooters do better. I'd be a local. Yeah, no, I've shot every year here, so... Generations. Just passed on by generation, by generation. And, um, it just carries on. The old man. Uh, actually, Granddad had the pond first. Dad followed on, and we are now following on. I was 6. I went to my father's maimai when I first went out there, and I've still got the photos. It's not about ducks. I'd take it as 90% socialising, 10% shooting ducks. You see those people once a year, and that's tonight and over the weekend. It's a get together. Doesn't matter how many ducks you get. The less you get, the less you have to pluck, so` The less you get, the less you have to pluck, so` Yeah! > You could shoot nothing and have a good time. You could shoot nothing and have a good time. You could not shoot one duck. > A lot of people think we're a bit odd because it's minus-3 and it's half past 6 in the morning, but it's more about being out with your mates and having a really good time, and yeah, we do. We do. QUACK! QUACK! QUACK! When we do get together, there's a great friendship. There's a great camaraderie. You only see them once a year. My older brother, he's just turned 51, actually. Graham split with my sister years ago, and we still treat him as our brother-in-law, and we always will. He has probably had a lucky break actually. (CHUCKLES) Yes, dodged a bullet. Yeah, give each other heaps. Yeah, it's quite funny. In the maimai, it's very informal, and it's hard case. Terry and Graham and I do have a good rapport. So we` we have been shooting together for a long time now. While you're there, it's` it's a great time. Bugger that. He's coming in. GUNSHOTS GUNSHOTS GUNSHOTS GUNSHOTS CARTRIDGES CLICK GUNSHOTS GUNSHOTS Ooh! Ooh! GUNSHOTS Ooh! Ooh! ALL LAUGH Our maimai faired very well this year. We were the top pond this year, which we're happy about. That was for the weekend, so very very happy with our shooting and our maimai this year. Final tally for us, uh` 102. 102. 102, I suppose, if everything was counted. We got three figures, which is a first time for our pond. So we're really happy. Everybody here at the end of the weekend, plucking the ducks, and camaraderie again and that sort of carries on, but you seem to wait a whole year for this, and within two days, it's over, you know? So, um, yeah. The duck plucking that we do here has been done traditionally for years and years. It's never changed. We take the larger feathers off their back and chest and off their tail feathers. They get put into a boiling wax in two coppers, uh, for 40-odd seconds. And then they get put into two cold baths of water, where they set, and then you just peel them like an orange. Good weekend, Colin? Good weekend, Colin? Yeah. I-In a lot of places, duck hunting has become illegal. In my heart, I hope it never does i-in NZ because it` it will take away a great tradition. Duck shooting does catch the imagination of people in Central Otago. It's bigger than Christmas. It's all about the duck shooting. It's` It's about family an-and friends an-and the meeting of the people, and everybody hangs out for it. SLOW FOLKSY MUSIC Roxburgh is a village of about 750 people. It's probably what NZ was like 40, 50 years ago, and it's, um... it's a very close-knit community. I studied, uh, pharmacy at Otago University. I was a typical Dunedin scarfie most of the time, but, yeah, it's a good time in your life. Um, I did my internship in Dunedin and eventually ended up in Roxburgh, and I'm still here. Uh, it's 15 years coming up, I think. Yeah. It's a nice place to live. Well, my parents are Scottish, so I guess I've always had a passion fo-for things Scottish. Yeah, I've branded the pharmacy Highland Pharmacy to identify with the area. There's a connection to the old times in Roxburgh because the European settlers were` a lot of them were descended from Scots or who were Scots. There's a lot of Scots influence. On Fridays, I come to work dressed in my Highland kit and play a few tunes to entertain the passer-by. I've always had this interest i-in bagpipes an-and, uh, Scotland. Apparently, I used to wander around in my bath towel, pretending it was a kilt, pretending I was playing bagpipes when I was a-a wee boy. I went to Scotland with the City of Dunedin Pipe Band. We played a-as part of the Edinburgh Tattoo. Good piping, for me anyway, almost makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. It's someone who's` who's captured that rhythm and got the emotion going really really well. I've got a keen sense of duty to keep the Scots spirit and heritage alive because of what I've had out of playing bagpipes and pipe bands. Bands, like a lot of other organisations, ar-are seeing declining membership. So my Thursdays involve me being an itinerant bagpipe teacher. I drive from Roxburgh to Alexandra to Cromwell, and I've got 11 students. They range in ability from children that have just started learning bagpipes to, uh, adult students, cos if we don't invest in teaching more people pipes, then we won't have a pipe band in Central Otago. You got lost in there somewhere. Want me to show you again? That's` That's why I'm doing it. So, yeah, the kids are generally pretty excited about it. To start with, when you learn, you learn on a-a practice chanter. Brilliant. Nothing wrong. There's a lot of practice involved in playing the bagpipes i-if you want to do well at it. Um, pretty easy to make it sound bad. It's definitely more difficult to get it to go well. (PLAYS DISCORDANT TUNE) But, after the tattoo, we went north to visit all of my mother's family, whom I'd never met. Carry on. You'll fix it. I-I felt a` quite a connection with the place, too. Even though I've been born in NZ, I've got this very very strong, um, tie to being Scottish. BAGPIPES PLAY One of my students is a chap by the name of Les Riddell. He` He runs, uh, his own, uh, manufacturing jeweller's business in old Cromwell Town. We sit there, and I teach him bagpipes as the customers come in and out. All right. I've put a battery in this watch. You have to shake it to make this one work. Make sure you're wearing it the next time you're chopping wood. 'I was born in southern Ontario.' Thanks very much. Thanks very much. No problem. My grandmother and grandfather both of Scottish descent and, uh, she always wanted me to play the pipes. I moved to NZ to be with a teenage sweetheart. She lived here in Cromwell. When I was 19, I phoned her up and asked her to marry me, and I never heard from her again until I wrote a letter. We were apart for 14 years, um, before getting back together. And she begged me to come and visit, so I did, and we were soon married. My children are Kiwis. Rudy is 8 years old. Um, Arlow is, uh, 5 and, uh, they're just really fantastic, bright, smart kids. My first piece of jewellery I made when I was 8. Um, I was asked to go and buy a Christmas present for my brother, and I didn't want to spend my allowance. So I took one of my mother's old forks. Made him a ring for Christmas. My forte is taking old jewellery that people don't wear any more, turning it into something they'll love and enjoy. A couple came in last week and asked me to make some wedding bands. Their uncle gave them some nuggets of gold, and so th-they're almost pure gold. They're going to look really really beautiful when they're done. My workshop is, um, from the mid-1800s. Um, it was initially the workshop of Edward Murrell, the mayor of, uh, Cromwell. Edward Murrell was a watchmaker, as well as the tooth puller. This building was his man cave. Um, he used to come out here to get away from his 13 children. Uh, it's beautiful, ancient architecture, um, and an original... original building. It's very very inspiring. BIRDS SING I-I do agree with many, many people wh-who say that, uh, Central Otago is just absolutely beautiful. Artists and photographers flock here. St Bathans is a living goldfields town, which is very close to the mining area. Your first view is of where the miners mined, which is now called the Blue Lake. I've been here 28 years. My partner, Sharon, ha-had a dream to own an old pioneer's cottage. If I wanted to be with her, well,... (CHUCKLES) I was in St Bathans as well. It's an 1863 miner's cottage. We know it a` know it as Fahey's Cottage. Sharon died December 2008, and, uh, miss her dearly. She, uh, was a well-known heritage advocate fighting for heritage in Central. Most of this is her collection that, uh, I've kept i-in some ways in memory of Sharon. Uh, Victorian times and Edwardian times, they were a beautiful time. A-At present, i-in the township it-itself, there's only four people live here ` myself, two at the local hotel an-and a person down the road as well. Sometimes I might be the only person in town. You have to be happy with your own company. Yeah, I often get visitors, um, but I do enjoy my own company as well. Living alone now, um, it's definitely not boring. My job, I-I'm a stonemason. I just deal with, uh, heritage work ` uh, repairs, restoration. With my stonework, I do have an artistic talent. I-I do do sketching of, uh, historic buildings. I do have an interest in horse racing, so I'm doing a sketch of some paces, um, at Addington, I think they were, um, and the, uh, uh, th-the Ji-Jimi Hendrix that's on the wall. I'm more into music than words. I, um, started playing Deep Purple ` this is when I was young ` Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin. I only started into slide guitar because I cut a curtain rail for Sharon, and that was a piece of brass pipe, and the piece I cut off fitted on my finger, and I started slide guitar with that. (STRUMS GUITAR) My pride in Sharon will never diminish. I mean, Sharon's, uh, stood in front of a D6 bulldozer, fighting once again for heritage in Central. Definitely because of her passion and, uh, with my stonemasonry, th-that really got me interested wi-with, uh, saving the history. It does upset me to see that, um, buildings just get bowled over, just for some small reason, and gone forever. Th-These sort of buildings are part of the landscape, ev-even as ruins. Uh, yo-you'll see parts of, like, a stone chimney, and it's not just a stone chimney. It's where, um, a gold miner lived, and it's all part of the cultural heritage, etc. SLOW FOLKSY MUSIC I feel quite proud that I-I'm repairing a lot of the buildings, which were temporary. They were just there while they're looking for gold, but of course, they lasted 100 years. So they were built well. Otago was built on gold. There was 2000 people living in St Bathans, with a courthouse, butchers, carpenters. There was 14 hotels, and the only one left now is the Vulcan Hotel, which was originally The Ballarat. St Bathans is a national treasure, which in my opinion, should stay like this. It's a lovely, peaceful place to live in, an-and I`I enjoy it, eh. I've got no regrets about staying here. I do admire the stonemasonry work on the rail trail, and I've worked on those structures, and that's where I noted the amazing skills of the original stonemasons, probably Irish and Scottish again, but far more skilled than myself. The rail trail, that's a very very good thing that's happening to Central Otago. The rail trail is a 160km bike ride. It used to be a train track, and they've changed it into a bike road on, like, gravel. I'm from Alexandra, Central Otago. This is my sister, Elizabeth. We have a lot of tourists come because we're near the start of the rail trail. It's got am-amazing, like, sights. There is the giant clock on the hill, and there's Leaning Rock. Awesome scenery. Awesome scenery. We used to have a pie cart, but it exploded a couple of months ago. It burst up in flames. It, sort of, blew up. It, sort of, blew up. Yeah. By an oil fire. It was sort of funny, but not really good. At the same time. At the same time. Yeah. (CHUCKLES) SERENE MUSIC Millers Flat is halfway between Queenstown and Dunedin on State Highway 8. I was born in Brisbane, the northern suburbs of Brisbane, which were quite dire in the '60s. It was a lot about you get a job, get married, have children. This tradition of working-class Australian families. 'Don't stand out. Don't do anything different.' You know, I've never felt I fitted in my community or my society, which has driven me out to go and search my own way, which is, in the end, proven to be a great thing, really. I always wanted to be a writer from early on. My father's never read a book, but he didn't have to. That's his... his quote. He's never read one of my books because it's a book. (CHUCKLES) He doesn't do books. So, um, I didn't have any support for that, and I started writing poetry and short stories while I was travelling. I decided to travel the world and went to Europe, and then I met, um, my wife, Marion, in, um, Ireland. Kyle was on his big OE and, um` and so we, um, got to know each other, and he came to visit me in Germany four weeks later. I decided to stay after heading off for a couple of days. (CHUCKLES) I got two days down the road and thought, 'No, I do want to go back and see what happens.' We fell in love and got married in Germany, lived in Germany for a while. And then came to NZ in 1990. Marion was the first one who suggested we stay here. I always had this, um, romantic idea about living in a little hut by a waterfall in the middle of nowhere. And then` And here we are. (CHUCKLES) Millers Flat. We saw this piece of land. Had a pile of timber, but we don't have enough money to hire anyone. Would make my woodwork teacher very surprised to know that I'd, um, built a house. It was way beyond my capabilities. I was terrible at woodwork. Can't cut a straight line, but it's not as though I had options to do otherwise. The steepest grass roof i-in NZ, potentially the world, we think. It's, um, 38 degrees, and 22 years later, it hasn't moved an inch. Well, it's moved about half an inch, actually. The windows were, um, self-made. I made them just with a circular saw. That was all I had. My semi-circle window at the top was quite a challenge. I'm quite proud of it. It's very, um, character building, really. You, um` In the winter, it got very... very hard living in the van, our van. You know, we spent a year in here. You'd have` wake up with frost inside the windows and, um` and the original roof would drip as well with all the conden` condensation of your breath would just start dripping on top of you. So it wasn't ideal, but it's all right. (CHUCKLES) We... We survived. It's a beautiful place. It's a lovely, quiet place, but the quiet is a double-edged thing because there is nothing happening, especially in winter. The trees lose their leaves, and the poplars along the creek there cast these long shadows like prison bars, and you start thinking you could want to be out of here. Can be quite grim. Everyone just hunkers down, puts on their fire. It was actually me who pushed for the, um, living here, and I was the one then who could not handle being here. Marion's very social and into doing stuff. I am a people person compared to Kyle. I retreat into myself, and it's sort of a writer thing. You need to be able to be by yourself, within yourself, for several months at a time. It was just, um, to-too lonely for me. So I left Kyle to it, and I went to the city. We were apart for about three years, more or less. Marion went to the city and discovered pottery, did a three-year course in ceramics. So this is when I touched clay for the first time, and I loved it. Suddenly, all of these opportunities opened up. 'Ooh, look what I can do with a little lump of dirt.' I wrote novels for seven years, and nobody wanted them, so... (CHUCKLES) And, finally, I stumbled into picture books, writing picture books, and, um, I wrote one in one morning suddenly an-and sent it off. Got` Got accepted immediately, and I thought, 'Wow, this is easy. I should have been writing children's books for seven years.' Teapots is my favourite thing to make, I would say. Um, it's sort of an obsession. It was what I wanted to do from the very first moment. I remember asking my teacher, 'When can I make a teapot?' And she was, like, 'Oh, please.' (CHUCKLES) And, uh, 'Just learn to centre the clay first.' And, um, I just, um, got obsessed with, um` with teapots. In the beginning, I was` well, I was here and she was there, but then it was` I was there in the winter, and she was here in the summer, and we decided to both move here full-time. By that time, I had my job, of course, which, you know, filled the days. On a good day, it is incredibly romantic. We are so free to do whatever we want, you know? That's a good thing about being in the middle of nowhere. You can do whatever you like and loud music. ROCK MUSIC PLAYS Peace and quiet for me is great because that's how I work. I can't work if there's noise, whereas Marion, sort of, she has a totally different set of requirements. When she's making pots, she has, um, Rammstein blasting away in the studio. You can hear it from, sort of, a kilometre away. Rammstein is a German heavy-metal band. It's really weird because I make these little pretty things, and they are anything but little pretty. I seem to listen a lot to German music. It doesn't matter if it's traditional German drinking songs, which is really embarrassing to admit, but, um, I do like that. I've always made stuff. Mm. When I'm making stuff I can totally live in the moment. Yeah, being a writer is` it's great to find your niche, somehow. Picture books are my passion. It comes from somewhere deep within, really. Tapping into that wellspring of childhood. A lot of children are reading my stories, and it's touching them somehow. I've got all these ideas popping out of my head, and if I don't get rid of them, I shall go mad. Now and then, I get sick of it, and I have this crisis. I want to do sculpture and do non-domestic things and be creative and, you know. And, um` And then I always come back to teapots. I just can't. It's got me in its grip somehow. Mm. Lately I have tried to introduce the people of NZ to having wheels on teapots. (CHUCKLES) Uh, some woman, she said, 'Oh, my husband, he said it's like having wheels on a tomato.' (CHUCKLES) I thought that was very funny and very true in a way, but I still think it's a cool idea, and I'm sticking to it. And I've discovered that having furniture on wheels is, um, incredibly handy, and I put everything on wheels, and now I can just pull everything around, and I love it. The picture books give me a great sense of fulfilment. My latest one is about, you know, a mule who clop-clips instead of clip-clops. All the herd clip-clops around and he clop-clips, and he goes and searches his own path, and so it's sort of my life's story, really. You know, I'm a clop-clipper, and in my story, when he turns around and goes the other way, the other mules say, 'You can't go that way because the sun will melt your eyes, and you will die.' But that's, uh, how I've felt all my life, I think, is that, yeah, going the opposite way and feeling, like, if I can tap into children like myself. That's what motivates me, really ` that sense o-of contributing to some children's life. OK, you don't fit in, but head off in your own direction, and you will find the glittering green sea that you can splash in... (CHUCKLES) and green pastures to run across. I think he's very very clever and funny, and I love him. I was, like, 'Yes, I want to live beside the waterfall.' But as much as I do like this countryside, it's a thing for me I struggle with now and then. Mm. I need to go to town and dress up and, you know, see and be seen, sort of, type thing, as silly as that sounds. Mm. I would like to take the house. (CHUCKLES) I'd like to have a house on wheels. That would be really handy. (CHUCKLES) As long as we keep making each other laugh, I think that's the main thing. We'll be these 100-year-old people. I mean, we'll be arguing to our grave` to our grave, I think. No, we won't. No, we won't. BOTH CHUCKLE SLOW CURIOUS MUSIC INTRIGUING MUSIC Yeah, electricity came to me quite early in the piece. Batteries and fiddling with things, cos I've always been a bit of a fiddler with things and such lot, you know? Dad had a big workshop, so I was always in the workshop, learning how` how things worked. When I had a pushbike, it had, um, a headlight on the handlebars like most pushbikes in the old days did have. It had dynamos which were run off the wheel, so as the tyre went around the dynamo, it used to power the light. I left school and, uh, I, uh, finished up getting a job at the power board as an electrician. Sue and I, when we got married, we shifted to Roxburgh. Yeah, we lived at the, uh... at the house above the power station ` the Teviot River power station ` which was a power-board house. We used to look out the window over the substation. Apart from working there, you used to see it all the time. And, um, if you worked on a farm, a lot of people aspire to own a farm. Having worked on a power station, I always thought, 'Jeez, it'd be nice to build one for yourself, so..' We're, sort of, right beside the machines churning away and, uh, he always said, 'You know, oh God, I'd like to do one of those.' The idea's been there right from the word go. It's not something you wake up one morning and decide you'll do it. We didn't have a five-year plan. We had a 25-year plan. The kids were at university age, and they always thought, 'Dad's dream to build a power house.' At an early age, they knew we were going to build a power station. They both did degrees in, um, in` in the sort of stuff that, yeah, we would be needing. Paul took a hydraulics course cos it was` it was applicable to power stations and all of these sorts of things, so they... they did the things that were hopefully going to fit into` to learning the sort of things that we needed to know for it. I studied physics at` at University of Canterbury. I guess the ultimate driving goal was always to end up with a power station, so we all had our role, and we filled it. Geoff was the driving force, and Paul, my brother, was the engineer who... who designed around the problems and the solutions for them, and I was the person that implemented them. Nearly a year and a half ago, we got Talla Burn generating, and it's been generating pretty much ever since. Yeah, Central Otago, I suspect in NZ, has probably got the largest number of power stations. It's got the big ones. It's got, uh, Clyde and Roxburgh, which are about 320 megawatts and 500 megawatts roughly, and then you've got the smaller ones, which are run usually off an old mining claim. After the gold was over, a town sprung up where the gold mine was, and they used those water races for local power. One thing followed along from the other, and it's the same for us at Talla Burn. We've got 22km of power line ` about 20km overhead, and there's about 2km underground. Our poles are different. You normally have a wooden-cross arm. Most of ours are just bolted straight on the side of the pole. They look a bit like a Christmas tree with three little insulators on the top, so... Jim and Paul did the water study. We didn't pay consultants to do anything. We did all these things ourselves. I'll show you the intake of the water. This is where the water comes out of the creek, into our water race. In our case, we pick up the water from the same place out of the Talla Burn Creek that the gold miners did. We've got a bit bigger intake than they had. Um, it comes out through there, and it goes around the side of the hill for 4.8km, and it goes into a storage pond. A 2ft pipe drops, um, 840m down the hill to the power station, where the water runs through the turbine, which generates electricity. Where the power comes out into this transformer, then it goes on to the overhead power lines and away from here up to Ettrick. As well as running a business, you do this in your spare time or after hours or in the weekend. A lot of people feel a passion about doing something. Not everybody just goes to work to eat their lunch and receive their wages. It might have been my idea, but it was all those other people that made it happen. Most of them have gone out of their way a long way, cos they got caught up in it. I-It's something you get caught up in doing a job like this and you need big balls ` massive balls. There's doers and there's not doers. We are all doers. All the people on the ground that got their hands dirty, we remembered them all and kept a book full of their names so we could invite them to the opening, and I think it was about 250 people come to the opening. Bill English came out and chopped the ribbon, and we pushed the go button. (CHUCKLES) There were all these people there, waiting, and you think, 'Oh my God. Is it going to go?' Ticked over like a clock. Great. Real proud moment. It's good that it's running. Um, but yeah, for sure, bittersweet. That's the word. Well, they've called it the Paul Wilson Generation. The morning Paul died, we had a line fault and were called out. We noted that the river was dirty through... through sluicing of the, um, spillway, and Paul decided he was gonna investigate the effect the spill had on the spillway, take some photographs, I think, and maybe take a water sample. I think he wanted to get a sample from beside the station, but Paul being how he was, he followed his nose a bit further up the river, and at some point up the river, he's` he's, um, slipped or fallen into the river, an-and he didn't ever get out, so, um, that's why it's a bittersweet day. It was something that all of us had worked really really hard on for, sort of, all of our future, but,... um, it's` it's pretty sad to know that Paul's not going to see or get any benefit out of that work. Um,... so definitely bittersweet, yes. POIGNANT MUSIC I've only got one regret, and that's I lost a son on the job, so... Yep, that's the regret I've got, and I can't change that now, so... I've just got to live with it, so... SERENE MUSIC Water flowing past in a creek or a river to make it into something like electricity that can power people's houses, I look at it and think, 'To actually make something out of nothing, you've done some good.' Most of my working life, I've been sort of trying to get here. When you want to do something that seems a bit big, if you don't try, you never know. It's definitely not for the faint-hearted. There's a shitload of hassles. It takes all your money and all your energy and all your time, but we'd like to do more. I'd like to do more. I'm getting a bit old and grey, but the thought's still there. So, yep. UPBEAT FOLKSY MUSIC I live here because it's so, uh, beautiful. It's heaven on earth, and who would go anywhere else? We've cut down so many trees that we're in danger of wiping ourselves out in the future if` if we don't get back to trees. Uh, Mother Nature really wants to cover the earth. The land is not good farming land, so I thought trees... trees will be the answer. It will be like a little oasis in the desert with a bit of luck. I-In here is a little cottage, and the man was, uh, Francis Regal McGreggor, and so I've decided that this is the Regal Oak, but it's a beauty, isn't it? Uh, humankind comes and humankind goes, but we're just passing through, aren't we? Yeah. Somebody else planted that big oak tree, uh, and if they hadn't planted that, then I wouldn't be enjoying it. It's, um, leaving something for the next generation. S-So I've covered all this flat land at the bottom with American oaks. Got the granddaughter now, so hopefully when she's, uh, 20, she might come and enjoy it, bu-but it doesn't matter who. It's just that somebody will... somebody will enjoy it. She'll be just a blaze of colour. You can see 12 of these sequoia giganteums in a circle. Californian redwoods that could live for 5000 years, and they become the biggest living organism on the planet. A good investment for the future. I'm trying to plant trees that will live for 1000 years, and one of them is a monkey puzzle tree. It do` It doesn't look too big, but it's very healthy. I'm putting in a, um... an avenue of oaks down here. When I say 'I', I mean with the help of my woofers. Woofing stands for 'willing workers on organic farms'. It's mostly just young people travelling, uh, and they come and stay with you, and you feed an-and lodge them, and they trade off their labour. It's much, much better doing a job with three or four people than doing it on your own. For me, it's absolutely essential. I couldn't do the job I'm doing here without the woofers. The other beautiful thing is that you're getting people from all around the world. It's like friends coming to stay. If someone comes for a week, they give you their email address, and you can stay friends regardless, and so that side of it has made it really beautiful for me. Uh, hugging's important to me. I think that, in life in general, we've got too distant. W-We're not close and warm as much as we ought to be. So I tell them, 'You've been warned.' Some` Some smart character came along once and put a 'T' in front of the 'H'. I try to get all the woofers to plant a tree. Now, th-this tree, a couple of French people arrived, and they arrived in a van. Emblazoned on the side was written, 'Rainbow Warrior,' and I couldn't believe my eyes. Frank and Charlene, just last week, got a letter in the mail, and they've just had a little baby ` a little baby girl. The next one along was a Canadian girl called Madarby. Her boyfriend rang from Nelson. Things weren't good. So when I left her on the side of the road, she had tears in her eyes, but she gave me some money to buy a tree, so I thought, 'Well, because I left her weeping, um, I better buy a weeping tree.' So this is a weeping beech tree for Madarby from Canada. Uh, lots of trees have a little story attached to them. Everywhere I go, there's a tree that represents a person, and so the whole place takes on a different personality. The trees are not just trees. They're trees and they're people, and so, basically, that's one reason I could never leave the place. It'd be like walking out on all your friends. I love the word 'egalitarian', where we're just people. If we could only just keep a little bit more equal and not feel some are more equal than others. You don't need a lot of consumer goods ` just some good friends and to feel that you're doing something reasonably constructive. I go mad when I listen to the morning report every morning. By 9 o'clock, I'm ready to shoot myself. The world has got very complex and complicated. This is my bath in the summertime. I bring up a homebrew and sit in` sit in the water there and survey the kingdom, and it's just glorious. It's like a very slow painting, and you just have to be patient to wait for the end result, which should be, uh, quite a picture. If I were to build a spacecraft and I built it that it would travel at a million miles an hour and decide to go to the next solar system from ours when we've stuffed up this planet, it would take me 3000 years ` the length of time it would take one of my sequoias to grow from` from seed to maturity. We are alone in this part of the universe, and if we don't look after this planet, we might not even be here either. That's my important message. I'm no chef, but yeah, duck a l'orange ` fantastic. Central Otago ` yeah, I guess there aren't too many places where you can go and find a bagpiping chemist. I built Talla Burn to show corporates you don't need to be big boys to do these sorts of jobs. Just to show them. Millers Flat is a wonderful place to be, and I haven't gone stir-crazy yet. Country living is really nice as long as I then can go to Dunedin and go shopping. (CHUCKLES) Just a perfect place to live.