My father, Donald, was born on 23 December 1924. When registering his birth, his father forgot to include a second name. He always wanted to be called simply Don all his life. His father Isaac William, known as Son because his father was also called Isaac William, was a builder. His mother, Lilian Agnes, had been a domestic and a waitress before their marriage in 1923. They were a working class couple who brought up three children, Don, Bruce and Colin, in Patea. Patea was a small town that served rural South Taranaki. The dairy factories in the district exported milk and butter through the port and the town’s freezing works was its major employer.
Don had an early memory of climbing on to the roof of their home in 1928 to watch Kingsford-Smith fly the Southern Cross over the town as part of his triumphant tour of New Zealand after crossing the Tasman Sea. It may have been this episode in his life that sparked his lifelong interest in aviation.
He began primary school in 1931 at the age of six: because of economic depression, the Government had increased the school starting age by a year to save money. His first day at school – 3 February 1931 – was memorable because it was the day the Napier earthquake struck at 10.47 in the morning. His Patea classroom shook violently.
The school roll at that time was predominantly Maori, as there were two Maori communities in the town, one on each side of the river. Much later Don was interviewed by a researcher about Maori – Pakeha relations when he was a child. He said that he was not particularly aware of differences of ethnic identity; the major difference in his mind was how children came to school:
“What I was much more aware of was that the Maori children came to school on ponies. We didn’t have ponies. We walked to school about a mile and a quarter, but they had to come from greater distances. Some of the Maori children came from a village about three miles north of and over the river. They came on ponies. They didn’t have saddles or anything like that. They just had clean coal sacks. They threw a coal sack over the pony and just hopped up. They were mostly bare-legged. And they were magnificent riders of horses – both girls and boys. They raced one another up the hill, through the main street to the school where there was a pony paddock. The ponies were tethered there and grazed during the day. At night the children rode them home again…”
Reading was to become an important facet of Don’s life. He was forever grateful to his teachers for being taught to read at primary school. He was not brought up in a house of books, but the Presbyterian minister in Patea, Rev. Eddie Farr, who lived two doors away, had a quite large personal library and gave Don access to his books. Don treasured books; throughout his life, wherever he was, he had a book in his hand.
There was no secondary school in Patea, so Don attended the Hawera Technical High School. He had to travel north to Hawera and home again by local train. This was a slow train, so slow that he had time to jump off the train and pick apples from trees beside the track and still jump back on. He particularly enjoyed his English class, because his teacher taught him English literature.
After just one year of secondary schooling, at the age of 15, he left school and became a cadet in the New Zealand Railways; he worked at the Patea railway station for three years. In 2006 when Michael turned fifteen, Don wrote a card to him about being fifteen:
“I wish you a happy birthday, Michael. May this be one of the best years of your life. Being fifteen was one of the best years of my life. I left school, went to work, became a railwayman, qualified as a morse code operator, got chased on a jigger by a freight train, passed my first exams in signalling, learnt train-running, and received my first pay. And from my first pay I bought the first important book for my library, it was called The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy.”
Having completed his cadetship, he left the railways and found a job as a shipping clerk in the Patea freezing works. He was by now 18 at the start of 1943. This was to be a critical year in his life: he had reached the age of military service and decided he wanted to train for the ministry.
The Second World War had been waged for just over three years at this time, many young New Zealand men had departed to fight in Europe and the Pacific, and no doubt there was some pressure on those remaining to register for military service. Don recalled:
“I decided to sign up for air force training, in particular for air crew training. I preferred to be a pilot but I realised that there was only a slender chance of that happening because I was already a qualified morse code operator, and I knew that the air force would turn me into a radio operator promptly… Anyway, nothing came of all that for me because, when I was called in for medical examination, I was informed that I was a bit short-sighted and therefore unfit for air crew training. Instead I ran a morse school for local young men who wanted to get into air crew; they had to be morse operators up to a certain level of proficiency before the air force would accept them. In all, I trained eleven young men to be proficient in morse. They all got into the air force as pilots, navigators, wireless operators, and gunners.
I made a decision not to be a railways clerk or a shipping clerk in a freezing works, but that when the war stopped, I would become a university student…and have a go at becoming a Presbyterian minister. This was a decision full of risk because I had been at secondary school for no more than one year. The leap from Year 9 to first year university is a big one…”
Don decided to leave the Railways because he could earn more money at the freezing works and stay in Patea. The Railways were about to post him elsewhere as a trained operations manager. His family, however, were grateful to have him at home. The money he earned was needed to maintain the household, all the more so the following year when his father died, leaving some debts. His mother then received only a small widow’s pension to raise the two younger brothers. Don was keen for both of them to continue their education. Until 1946 he contributed his earnings to the family and studied in the evenings by correspondence.
The war having ended the previous year, 1946 must have seemed like the beginning of a new era for many New Zealanders, including Don. He had just turned 21, his age making him eligible to enrol at the University of Otago rather than through a university entrance qualification. This moment was a turning point for the family; he was its first member to embark on a tertiary education. He lived in Knox College, which was both the theological training centre for the Presbyterian church and a student hostel, joining there a large number of young men who had just returned from wartime service to begin or continue their studies. He enrolled for an Arts degree.
His fear that university studies would be difficult for a person with so little secondary education was justified. He studied English, history, philosophy and Greek, the latter required by the Presbyterian church for entry to the ministry. He found languages difficult, Greek initially and later Hebrew. But with great determination and dedication he completed his undergraduate degree in four years.
He came to love university life. He spent the summer holidays earning his keep in the Patea freezing works, but looked forward to returning to the university atmosphere in Dunedin every year. He pursued interests outside of academic work: he was a harrier in the university club and a member of the Student Christian Movement. Here he met Anne Steven, who had also begun her studies in 1946. They became engaged in 1949 and spent a year working in Timaru which was Anne’s home town, Don as a builder’s labourer and Anne as a nurse’s aide, to earn enough money to get married. They wed on 18 November 1950.
The following year they returned to Dunedin, Don having been accepted by the church to train for the ministry. I was their first-born in July 1952. In his third year he was an assistant minister at Knox church and president of the theological students association. At the end of 1953 Don was invited to become the minister of the parish of Te Aroha and at the end of the year we moved to the Waikato.
Don would serve four parishes in the course of his working life in Te Aroha (1954-1961), Christchurch (1961-1973), Auckland (1974-1976) and Hamilton (1984-1989). Each parish was different: Don chose each because they all provided a different challenge and an opportunity to be innovative.
The parish of St David’s in Te Aroha suited Don very well as a place to learn the practice of being a minister. Like Patea, Te Aroha was a small provincial town serving a farming community. He felt he was in familiar social surroundings. He focussed on developing his pastoral skills: building a community, caring for its members, and developing social and counselling skills.
Don and Anne’s second child, David, was born in Te Aroha in 1955. Don managed to find time to participate in the life of the town as well. In 2006 he described to Helen his involvement in theatre:
“Te Aroha had a very active and successful drama society and I got hauled into it. My first part was that of Banquo in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, where Banquo is the only decent chap in the entire play. Poor Banquo is murdered off-stage before the end of the first act, so I was able to sit in the front row and watch the rest of the play. That suited me fine because I was as nervous as a cat anyway. I also played the second tempter in Act I and the second knight in Act II of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral.”
But above all, he was driven by an enduring interest in and concern for other people. In 1969 Don wrote a short story, entitled Loneliness, for a radio programme, Open Country. Open Country featured each week a story about rural life in New Zealand. Don’s story is set in the Waikato, is based on an experience he had while living in Te Aroha, and illustrates his care for others. He was asked to read his story for broadcast in 1970 and it was included in a published collection called Our Open Country in 1971.
The family shifted to Christchurch in 1961, where Alison was born two years later. The parish of St Stephen’s posed a very different challenge. It was a large, urban parish in a growing area of the city; it became in fact the largest Presbyterian parish in the country by the end of that decade. Its size forced Don to think about ministry in a new way: he developed teams of parishioners, using their skills to share the organisational and teaching work of the parish.
At the same time, he maintained a huge workload of pastoral work along with the routine work of conducting worship, preaching, officiating at weddings and funerals, and administering the parish. A member of the community said of him: “He was a good man. He was a scholar and a thinker, a thoughtful preacher and a dignified leader of worship. His was a truly pastoral ministry. His family might have had every reason to feel that he spent more than enough time with his flock, and that they saw far less of him than was their just due.” Anne would have silently agreed with that, and by 1972 Don too recognised that he was tired and in need of a new challenge.
In 2009 the parish of St Stephen’s celebrated its fiftieth anniversary and Don wrote a small article about his ministry there for a booklet to mark the occasion.
“St Stephen’s I shall never forget. This is the church that broke my heart twice.
The first time was in 1961 when St Stephen’s persuaded me to leave the parish of Te Aroha and move to Christchurch. Te Aroha was my first parish and I had been there for about eight years. I had learnt to love those people and leaving them hurt like hell. I made the move and arrived at St Stephen’s in a state of abject misery, missing my flock in Te Aroha, and hating myself for leaving them.
The second time St Stephen’s broke my heart was in 1974 when I made the decision to leave and move to a church in Auckland. Our thirteen years in St Stephen’s were magnificent. It was the kind of place where a minister could grow and discover what a minister is called to be and do. In St Stephen’s I learned to live with overwhelming demand and the stimulation of working amongst talented and impressive people. After thirteen years I knew I had to go. I was exhausted, utterly used up. St Stephen’s didn’t do that to me; I let it happen to me simply by being at St Stephen’s. So I screwed myself up to make the decision to go. A second time it broke my heart.
I have recovered from those two broken hearts, but only just.”
In the parish of Hobson Bay in Auckland Don developed a team ministry, working with a colleague, Bruce Patterson, as a result of the amalgamation of two parishes in Remuera and Parnell. He recognised that the traditional church had to adapt to a growing social trend toward secularism and, in this parish, a depopulating inner city. He also sensed that Auckland is the city where change in New Zealand often occurs first: “I have said rude things about Auckland in the past, but in more recent times it has seemed to me that it is the place where we win or lose, and if one wants to know the result early, this might be the place to be.”
Don had a strong social conscience and a commitment to social justice born of his working class background. He took a liberal stance on the key social issues of the time and was willing to express his views in a forthright manner, even when those views created controversy among his parishioners. He participated in protest marches against the Vietnam war between 1968 and 1974, and encouraged parishioners to do likewise. In 1976 he made a submission to the Royal Commission on Abortion and Sterilisation, in which he argued that people of strong Christian conviction could also support liberalisation of the abortion law. He expressed his opposition to the Muldoon government publicly, especially over the 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand.
Over the course of his working life he had kept up his study of theology by reading widely in the field. He had a large theological library which filled our house. On the register of Presbyterian ministers it is noted: “He was the best read minister in the Presbyterian church.” He also continued to believe that his work was fundamentally pastoral. These two aspects of his work – the theoretical and the practical – made him well suited to a training role. The Presbyterian church recognised this strength and he was asked to become the Professor of Pastoral Studies at the University of Otago in 1977, where his principal role would be training parish ministers. He described to me how he saw the role:
“…the answer lies in a significant blend of the serious academic and the essentially practical. I don’t want to see serious theological reflection go from preparation for the ministry, but I do want to see theology applied and to get students to see that theology is our business and that it has more day to day uses than they ever dreamt.”
He, Anne and Alison returned to Dunedin for seven years. Don adapted to his teaching role with relish, he participated in the life of the university, and greatly enjoyed the company of his professorial colleagues. In 1982 he was granted sabbatical leave, studied at Princeton University in the United States, and travelled in Europe. This was his and Anne’s first trip overseas.
It seemed that he had found a niche for which he was perfectly qualified as both a scholar and a pastor, able to influence a generation of trainees for the ministry. But his conviction that the parish ministry was his true calling was demonstrated again when he received a call from the parish of St Francis in Hamilton. He had long been committed to church union and this parish offered leadership of a team ministry – five staff – in a parish that unified three protestant denominations: Presbyterian, Methodist, and Anglican. It was the pastoral aspect of the work that he could not resist:
“They are wanting to hire a pastor… and that’s why I want to go back to a parish. Getting around the flock in a routine, unspectacular way is what builds community and puts steel into a parish community. So I have six years to prove what the students won’t believe – that the evangelical arm of the church is the visiting minister.” (1983).
At the end of 1989 he left Hamilton for Auckland where his first grandchild, Robert, had just been born. Though 65, this was not to be retirement. In addition to being a grandparent, he continued taking church services, ministering to vacant parishes, working as a hospital chaplain, and supervising students’ theses and doctorates until near his death. His availability became widely known and he was quite incapable of declining any request.
Near the end of his life he reflected in a letter to Michael on his eighteenth birthday in 2008 on his decision to become a minister:
“What on earth attracted an 18 year old youth to such a strange calling? Well, I wanted to work at a job where I was making myself useful to people. I wanted to do something that had nothing to do with promotion or money or being important. Being a minister seemed to offer all that. There is no promotion in the ministry; we are all equal. We all receive the same payment and it is no more than a basic wage. I wanted to become a learner for all of my life, and I thought that going to university and a theological school for seven years would get me started. And I wanted to be an ordinary person living and working among ordinary people because they are so interesting. And I was attracted to a job in which I was expected to read and think, and share all that with others. So, for me, all that was a good decision when I got to my eighteenth year.”
The nature of the job suited Don well. The Presbyterian tradition considers its ministers not only equal but also independent. They are not held accountable to a church hierarchy, as in the Catholic and Anglican traditions. He enjoyed the freedom to create the job in his own way without direction, enabling him to define the role in new ways.
While both patient and tolerant, he did not readily suffer people within the church organisation he did not respect. He once expressed himself as forcefully as I can ever recall about a General Secretary of the church:
“He is a dangerously conservative old bugger and he has too much to say altogether… He does not like me, never has. He is a pathetically ambitious man and believes I have not given him the respect he thinks he deserves. I oppose his ideas and let the air out of his inflated ego from time to time…”
Don particularly admired Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer was a theologian by training and author of a respected commentary on the gospel of Matthew. He was also an organist, perhaps the foremost interpreter of Bach in his generation. He retrained as a medical doctor, became a missionary in West Africa and established a hospital at Lambaréné in Gabon. In 1952 he was awarded the Nobel peace prize. The phrase most associated with Schweitzer is “reverence for life”. Don shared that reverence for life: he always found good in people, he accepted them on their terms, was non-judgmental, and showed care and concern for them.
Like Schweitzer, his reverence for life extended to the animal world too. He often illustrated his talks to children with engaging stories about animals. He wrote a letter to Michael when he was 11 years old:
“I am sending you a postcard on which there is a fine picture of a weta. Some people think wetas are ugly, but I don’t. I think they are quite beautiful really, and I would never hurt or kill one. We have quite a lot of wetas at our place. They live under the creeper on our block wall beside our house. Each time I use the hedge cutters to trim the creeper I take great care not to cut a weta in half. I would feel awful if I ever did that.”
This brief story is quite simply expressed. Don had an ability to use language in a clear and precise way to communicate quite complex theological concepts and ideas in an understandable and meaningful way.
He also loved New Zealand, especially its landscapes, its physical beauty, and its historic places. Our family often spent the summer holidays in beautiful places, such as the Marlborough Sounds, the West Coast of the South Island, Central Otago. We frequently explored places that Don had been reading about and he shared their history with us children.
The Tongariro crossing became a significant place for him later in his life. When Robert and I began tramping together, Don expressed his wish to do the Tongariro crossing. At Easter 1998 we did the tramp with him, aged 74, and Helen aged 8: we likely had the oldest and the youngest people on the mountain in our party that day. Exactly one year later Don had a serious car accident. We brought him a large poster of the mountain for the wall of his ward as he recovered in Auckland hospital. He was determined to do the crossing again. After a hip replacement operation, much walking to get fit again, and eventually his eightieth birthday, he completed his second crossing in good time, telling stories all the way down.
When Michael had his 21st birthday in April 2012, the family gathered for an evening meal – Anne and Don, Alison and I, Robert and Lena, Helen, and Michael. Don seemed lively, interested, and talked with us all despite the difficulty of his deafness. This evening was to be his last social occasion out of their home. He died of cancer just three months later.
He had led a fulfilled life: it turned out to be as he had wished when he was just 18. He was at peace with his own death: he had, after all, considerable experience of death, having seen so many other people to the end of their lives. He died with great dignity, his concern at the end being for Anne. His ashes, along with Anne’s, are buried in the Purewa cemetery.
At the time of his death, one of his old friends from Christchurch wrote to us what Don’s life meant to him, and finished his letter:
“But most of all he was simply a nice, gentle, caring, good man.”
