Ron Law - Rural Mail Man
by WALTER HIRSH
photographs by Gordon Burns

Ron Law is a friendly man. He lives with his wife and children in Palmerston North.
Their house is large. The garden has no fences, so Ron's children have plenty of room to play.
Here is Ron's van. There is an important notice on the front.
Ron is a mail man. No one calls him "the postman" because his job is not like that of the city  postman. He spends most of his 
day in the country, what we call rural New Zealand.
Because of this we call Ron a rural mail man. He delivers mail and goods to farmers and other people 
who live in the country and have built their homes in the quiet, open spaces.
To some of these people, who live far from anybody else, Ron may be the only person they see for 
days. He always toots his horn and waves to the people on his mail run. If anybody is
at the mail box he has a chat with them.
Because the people of Ron's run live far apart, he has to deliver their mail by van. He does two mail runs daily. This means 
driving over 100 miles every day. That is why he doesn't walk or ride a bike, as city postmen do. He has too much to carry and 
too far to go. His little van is almost like a small store on wheels.
Ron has to get a lot of things ready each day before he leaves. He gets bread from a bakery. He delivers this to farmers who don't 
live close enough to the shops to buy their own. Mrs Law helps him get things ready. She often wraps and labels the loaves, 
putting the right names on the parcels.
Crates of milk have to be picked up because some country people do not have their own house cows. If they are not on a milk 
run, it is the mail man who brings their milk.
Next, Ron might go to the Country Library Service, to load some books for one of the schools on his run. A farmer has some dry 
cleaning for him to collect. He gets it from the shop.
At the post office, Ron gets his mail. He sorts it into the order of the homes he visits, just the same way a city postman arranges 
his mail. This saves a lot of time on the run. It also helps Ron make sure he gives 
people all of their mail.
He gets any parcels as well, and then he is almost ready to leave. But, wait. He has to visit the 
newspaper office.
Most people want to get their daily newspaper as much as they want to get their letters, bread and 
milk. Ron gets a
big bundle of papers, just as they come off the press. Then he leaves on his afternoon run, which is 
called Rural
Delivery Number 1. Most people call it R.D. One.
Ron leaves the city soon after two o'clock each day, and is on the open road a few minutes later.
He has been on this run for several years. He knows it well. On a still day it is very quiet and 
peaceful in the country.
Most of the roads are good. Ron only has a few miles to drive over some rough dusty roads. Some beautiful views make R.D. 
One a very pleasant round.
Sometimes, Ron is held up at the old one-way bridge, just south of Ashhurst. He crosses the Manawatu River and heads for 
Aokautere and Tiritea. As he drives slowly over
the bridge he looks at the men building a new, wide bridge.
"I'll be very pleased when they finish that," he says to himself.
Forest Hill Road is rougher than most. From the top, Ron looks at the fine view. The Aokautere store is the only one he 
passes in the country. It is about four o'clock when
he gets there, so he often has an ice-cream on a hot day.
Sometimes, Ron may not have anything for a farmer, but he still stops. Country people have a flag on their mail boxes. If the 
flag is up, it is a sign to Ron that there may be
letters in the box for him. They are not written to him. Country people don't live near a post office. They post their letters in their 
own mail boxes and put up the flag. The mail man takes their letters and posts them in the city.
Ron meets a lot of children on his round. At some places, people have very big mail boxes. They have 
room for bread, milk, parcels, newspapers and letters. There might be a child
sitting on the mail box and waiting for Ron.
Sometimes there are children waiting for the school bus at Aokautere School. Ron gives them parcels 
of films, records, books or journals to take in.
It's an interesting job, having your own mail run. And it is an important one. Country people need 
men like Ron Law. He is their daily way of meeting with the town. If something is
wanted very badly, the farmer rings Mrs Law. She tells Ron, and he brings it to the farmer's mail 
box that same day.
"It's a good service we get," say the farmers. "It's a good job," says Ron.
It seems everyone is very happy on R.D. One.

Lambing Time at Devon Downs

THE DALE FAMILY are up early this morning. It is
 September, and lambing time is starting on Devon Downs farm. Everyone is pleased it is a fine day. Lambing is hard work in 
bad weather, and more lambs die.
 A good breakfast starts the day. Then everybody goes to work. The farmer and his wife, their sons Gerald and Anthony, even 
the visiting girl cousins, all of them will have to help.
The girls think this is fun. There is so much to
see and do. When they are not making tea for the workers they can play with the puppies and the new lambs.
Gerald goes off with Craig, the best working dog on Devon Downs. In the picture they are moving some ewes into the lambing 
paddock. The sheep have been shorn. This stops the wool
getting thick with mud if it rains during lambing time.
An early lamb plays at its mother's heels. They will be put into the paddock kept for ewes and their babies.
Taking the ewes that have lambed from the rest of the sheep, is called "shedding". It must be done every day. This
stops lambs getting lost and going to other ewes instead of to their own mothers.
Sometimes a ewe dies while lambing. The new lamb has no mother. The shepherd and his dog look all over the farm
to find these lost ones. Devon Downs is a farm of twelve hundred acres of flat and hilly land. It is a big job to search
so much ground.
Gerald is carrying a shepherd's crook. It is made of light metal and has a soft rubber tip.
The shepherd uses the crook to lift lost lambs from places that are hard to reach. The lamb in these pictures was
found almost drowned in a muddy stream. Where is its mother? Perhaps she died in the night, or she may be
somewhere looking for her lamb.
How lucky this lamb is! Craig found him with his sharp eyes and ears and nose. They tell him things that we would not notice.
Safe under Gerald's arm, the lamb will be taken home and fed like a baby, 
from a bottle.
The warm milk will make it feel better, and it will get up on its four 
tottery feet as its strength comes back. Soon it will be
skipping along on the green spring grass.
A mother will be found for it - a ewe that has lost its own lamb. She may 
not like this strange lamb at first, but Mrs Dale
will hold her still while the lamb sucks her milk. The ewe will get
used to her new baby, and before long the two
of them will move off together, mother and lamb.
Finding mothers for the lost lambs is a big job.
Whoever does it must be patient and careful.
They must love the work. The way the shepherd
looks after his flock has not changed in many
thousands of years. Many things have changed
but this work has stayed the same.
See how his mother licks her new-born baby
clean. It is his first wash. His eyes are not even
open yet. He looks so weak and helpless lying
there - but not for long.
There is plenty of work to do, but there is always time for a laugh. Just 
look at this proud old mother ewe. No wonder
she has her head in the air. She has triplets, three healthy lambs, only a 
few hours old, but look how lively they are.
They have frisky long legs for such little bodies.
Next year the woolly white coats of the lambs will be as thick as mother's. 
The fleeces from them might even make
up the wool your mother will knit into a jersey for you! Or, maybe, a girl 
or boy in France, or England, or Russia, or
Japan will be kept warm with wool from Devon Downs sheep.

Here is a poem about a shepherd and his sheep. It was written a long time ago.

Weather Forecasts

TODAY WE LISTEN to radio or watch TV to find out what the weather is going to be.
These three poems come from the days before radio and TV. There were no weather forecasts then, and people sometimes made 
up little poems to help them remember what happened last time the sky looked red or black.
Red sky at night The shepherd's delight. Red sky in the morning The shepherd's warning.
The names of the people who made up the rhymes are lost. Probably they were never written down. 
Children would
learn the poems from their parents. Because we don't know who wrote them, we say the poems are anonymous.
Rain before seven, Fine before eleven.
Saint Swithin's Day, if thou dost rain For forty days it will remain: Saint Swithin's Day, if thou be fair
For forty days it will rain no more.
Saint Swithin's Day is the fifteenth of July. An old, old story says that if rain falls on this day, then forty days of rain will follow.

Something to Make

Here is a game you can play inside the classroom on wet days.
THINGS YOU WILL NEED:
To make this game you will need a shoe box and six marbles.
HOW TO MAKE IT:
Cut holes along one edge of the box. Make them of different sizes. You will find it easy if you look 
at the picture of the box.
Turn the box upside down and write a number above each hole. Put a 1 over the biggest hole and a 2 
over the next
biggest, and so on. The smallest hole should have the biggest number
over it.
HOW TO PLAY THE GAME:
Stand the box upside down on the floor so that the holes make little tunnels to bowl your marbles 
through. Each
player has a turn at trying to bowl the marbles through the tunnel and into the box.
If you get a marble through tunnel number 3, you get 3 points; if you bowl one through tunnel 1 (the 
widest tunnel) you
get only 1 point.
When you have bowled your six marbles, add up your score. The player with the biggest score: wins the 
game.
Fruit Basket
HERE IS A GAME FOR YOU TO PLAY:
The class must be divided into groups of four, with one player over. He is the leader. The other 
players sit round in a
large circle. In each group the first child is a lemon, the second an orange, the third an apple and 
the fourth a
banana; and the players must sit in this order.
The leader stands in the centre of the circle and calls the name of one of the fruits. If he calls
Bananas, every banana must jump up and run across the circle to change places with a banana in another group, while the leader 
tries to get to 
one of the empty
banana places first. The player left without a seat now becomes the leader.
If the leader calls Fruit Basket, everyone must jump up and change places with another of his own 
kind. In the
scramble the leader tries to get to any of the empty seats.

A Holiday on D'Urville Island
by John Pascoe

ONE YEAR MUM AND DAD chose D'Urville Island for a holiday.* We went in the 
Saint Michael. It had sails and
engines. The crew was two men and a boy. They loaded our camping gear and 
we were ready to leave Wellington. It was a calm morning in Cook Strait. I am standing and holding the rope. 
The others are Sara, Martha, our friend
Penny and Mum.

*You can read another story about us in "Holiday at the Sounds" (School 
Journal, Part 1, Number Five, 1961). I am Jane in that story. See map inside back cover.

It took us 14 hours to reach Port Hardy on D'Urville Island.
Unloading the Saint Michael was a big job. There was no wharf, so 
everything was rowed ashore. Dad is wading ashore with a box of food.
We had enough supplies for two weeks, and arranged to get milk from a 
farm along the coast.
Our camp was among some karaka trees. The big tent kept our food and 
spare clothes dry, and we hung our bathing suits on the tent
rope.
We made our fireplace from flat rocks, gathered firewood, got our water from a little stream, and did the washing-up in a plastic 
bucket.
The trees kept the wind off the tent, and the sea was close for a swim.
Sandflies bit us during the day. We had a first-aid box in case of accidents.
The butter kept hard in a bag hung under a tree. The other food was kept in packs because there were wekas at the camp.
From our base camp we walked over the hills to other parts of the island. We stayed at Greville harbour one night after a four-
hour tramp, and looked at the shells and fish-bones in a Maori midden there. The midden may have built up over hundreds of 
years as Maoris ate their food and threw their rubbish in this place.
Penny and Martha held a measuring tape for Sara. She took notes about a food pit
that the Maoris dug long ago.
 Sheep farms now cover much of D'Urville Island. They have airstrips for topdressing
A mail launch runs round the island once a week from French Pass. Some farmers have built roads to 
their neighbours' homesteads. They are narrow winding roads and can only be
used by Landrovers.
D'Urville Island is a lonely place, but the farmers like it. There is no hurry there.
One morning, while I was still asleep, Dad called, "Jane! Jane!" I sat up and he took my photo. 
Penny, Sara and Martha woke up too. I don't remember now, but
I'll bet that we went back to sleep. Two of our packs are on the bank above.
We built a second camp about a mile from our base camp. This one had bush about it, so we built a 
high fireplace to stop sparks setting it alight.
Camp life is good fun, but you still have to wash, and brush your teeth. The plastic bucket was 
everybody's basin. The black billy was used for making tea.
Port Hardy is a sheltered place. Our second
camp was at the left of this photo. Some Maori friends lived in the house. They had no road, but you can see the horse-track 
running across the hill.
Te Momo Rene, one of Dad's friends, 
took us fishing. He showed us how to clean and skin blue cod quickly, and told us tales of the sea. We ate raw cod liver and 
cooked the fish. Both were good.
Te Momo's boat had a small engine. It went "put-put" round Port Hardy and we called it the "popper".
The water was so clear that we could see the shells on the bottom. Te Momo
 had a full load in his boat which he steered with an oar.
When the Saint Michael came back for us, we took the Renes for a cruise in Port
Hardy before we left. Taiea and I looked at the camera but her brother was busy
watching a seagull.
We rested in a sheltered cove of the
Chetwode Islands on the way home. There were lots of wekas. One stole Dad's sunglasses while he was 
sunbathing.
Perhaps it is still wearing them.
We cruised on and spent a night in Ship Cove where Captain Cook used to anchor. Next day we sailed to 
Wellington.
It was a great holiday. There were other things on the island that the photographs don't show: giant 
sting rays,
porpoises and king shags. Some trampers called at one camp to yarn with us. We watched a farmer dive 
for crayfish. There was no rain so we didn't need our parkas. We slept in the open almost every night. 
We watched Te
Momo hunt deer from his boat at night.
We saw a male weka peck a female till she swam away from him. I never knew before that wekas could 
swim.
The Renes were very kind to us and sometimes gave us wild pork and fish.
Looking back on that holiday after a few years is a jumble. Some things seem so clear.
Other things are puzzling. I can remember hearing a more-pork cry at night, but I do not remember at 
which camp it
was.
The Maori children played "hunt the pakeha" in the bush. That was how I made friends with them.
When we tramped over the hills, Dad and Mum carried billies and food. We carried our own sleeping 
bags and warm
clothes. Most of the time we wore our bathing suits. None of us were ill and we were brown and fit 
when we
returned to Wellington.
Sometimes I see the Saint Michael in York Bay as I go to Wellington in the bus, and it often makes me 
think of that
holiday on D'Urville Island.


