Continue reading »]]>

Country Calendar sound recordist Don Anderson (standing) and cameraman Richard Williams wasted no time feasting on the oyster farm.

“I’ve got eagle eyes,” trilled the farmer in a most unfarmerly fashion while strolling down the hall and waving something small and shiny.

“My watch!” I’d spent ages scouring the gravel road several kilometres from home where I was sure I’d lost it months earlier while moving bulls.

Remarkably, it was in perfect condition which was odd after weeks of weathering rain and vehicles.

I was having this thought when I noticed the farmer’s sheepish smile. Turns out he’d found it in his ute which he was cleaning, an event as rare as the times he arrives home after a hard day on the farm and says, “Don’t move a muscle. I’ll cook dinner. White wine or red?”

His domesticity was inspired by the impending arrival of a crew from Country Calendar, the television show that’s central to our Kiwi culture. It’s the country’s longest-running TV series, and is probably only pipped as the world’s longest-running show by Coronation Street which started in 1960, six years before Country Calendar.

Anyway, we were all of a dither, mowing, weeding, dusting and cleaning. And when you’re going to be on television and you’re female, you realise you own no suitable clothing and, in my case, hats.

After rushing out and buying a merino top, two friends immediately said it didn’t suit me and I returned it. I know my hats didn’t pass muster because I was wearing my favourite when the farmer said, “You look dorky in that hat.”

Fair enough. I’d told him he looked dorky in a particular pair of shorts the day before. These frank exchanges surely stemmed from pre-Country Calendar angst.

Some months earlier Kerryanne Evans, a director and reporter for the show, visited and we’d had another frank exchange while enjoying the farmer’s oyster fritters, answering more curly and personal, but gently put, questions than anyone else had ever asked.

She’d become interested in life at Batley after reading Love at the End of the Road about life on the shores of the Kaipara Harbour with the aforementioned not-so-eagle-eyed farmer.

Kerryanne visited when the harbour was bleak and wind ruffled. The next day was so glorious I took photographs of the bright blue harbour reflecting puffy cottonwool clouds and surrounded by electric green hills.

Soon after the filming dates were confirmed, things fell magically into line. The Mangawhai Garden Club planned to visit and agreed to do so while the crew was here, an Ohope Beach oyster farmer serendipitously timed his arrival to coincide, and some Otamatea High School students were to have a shearing lesson at the Country Club where Rex often helps at shearing time.

We located accommodation for Kerryanne, a cameraman and a soundman who’d spend five days here, then got busy tidying and straightening the house, farm and ourselves as much as we could, which in some respects, wasn’t much at all.

When Kerryanne asked if the Kaipara Harbour was always so grey and windswept, I emailed my blue-sky photos and she was most heartened. Then the week of filming turned out to be grey and windswept, perfect moody Kaipara Harbour weather.

Country Calendar, Saturday 11 August, 7.00pm, TV1.