<&>Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English Version One <&>Copyright 1998 School of Linguistics & Applied Language Studies <&>Victoria University of Wellington <&>side two <&>12:50 hello in today's programme we hear how the BACK country came to town inhales tut yes that's quite literally what happened during RECent hard TIMES when <&>13:00 indignant country folk left their farms to protest at a succession of threatened mortgagee sales of rural properties inhales heavily involved for some years in helping hard pressed farmers is collis blake and a network of people throughout the country devoted not just to organising protest but also to helping farmers and their financiers get together to sort out their problems <,> we pick up collis blake's story back in the eighties at a time when farm sellups were becoming commonplace a fellow not far from us er i saw him on the side of the road and he was having a mortgagee sale and it looked totally unfair to me and i discussed it with him and um <,> tut yeah we thought it wasn't on so um we decided to protest it we ran er a fence along the neighbour's put up for nothing the wire was going for nothing um <,> we electrified it with electric units on each er <&>14:00 wire which was er hidden so we guessed er anyone would get a shock FINally that was pulled off voc and cancelled and that was the first <.>t time we had actually beaten the system i think it was palmerston north coliss er when you had one of <.>the er <.>th the big confrontations it was <{><[>quite early on <[>mm mm inhales that was the only REALly big confrontation <&>pronounced confrontration we've had and it proved that the community were behind us <,> now we had this young fellow who hadn't been given a fair go in <.>our in our opinion <,> er we tried all the legal moves er and that didn't work we asked the people to back off and that didn't work we made it public to the police and advertised it in the paper and <,> that we were going to do this so everybody knew what was going on you were going to do what we were going to stop the sale mm so er we get there and there were a lot of <&>15:00 people there we had er loudspeakers and that sort of thing we had the national party candidate er paul curry and he was er on the radio or on the er loudspeaker sitting on the back of the truck a very nice young man um swallows tut i don't think it was too well received by some of the hieRARchy of the national party but any rate in fact i know that he was told not to do it the night before but he chose to do it inhales any rate we went round the back this is round the back of the office where <.>the the sale was going to take place is it yes it was <{1><[1><.>i it was in palmerston north <{2><[2>and there it was and er inhales er there was a courtyard round the back carparking anyway when the people went round there gee it was pretty full <,> tut and er things got a bit hot and i was interested my er er my <.>ei eighty year old parents were there <,> there were TWELVE people that I knew who'd been honoured by the queen there <,> um it wasn't a <,> just a rabble mob it was thinking citizens you <&>16:00 know any rate that was okay and they started to chant and all the things that went with it and er one thing and another um <,> swallows tut i was standing alongside the policeman and he wasn't very happy with me and he told me to get the hell out of it and i said look if you tell me to get out of it i think we're going to have problems you know and um i could see from a slightly elevated height over the back fence was about thirty of these red squad guys just jogging along up to it batons out and the whole caboosh you know but the rest of the community couldn't see that and i thought <.>g i don't know what's going to happen and any rate i held my <.>hei hands up and the noise stopped <,> and i thought it was quite tremendous these people they were determined they were conscious they were good members of the community and yet they were totally under control it WAS not going to be a problem inhales um <,> and at that stage this thing was called off um the sale <&>17:00 was stopped er shortly after that a couple of er young fellows came along er and er i met them in wellington and i thought i knew all the answers and you know was a bit full of myself perhaps but um tut when i MET them in parliament grounds they had an unregistered unwarranted motorcar without enough petrol to get home to masterton tut so you know i thought okay fine you know i know about it we sailed up to the minister of social welfare's office er and they said go here and there which worked <,> i was in the room when the interview was made with these people <.>and and i will never forget this <,> the man said how much money have you got and the young fellow said i haven't got any and he said i don't mean how much money have you got <.>in on the farm he said how much have you actually got in your pocket oh is that what you <&>18:00 want said the young fellow <,> he said i've got twenty cents <,> and they had a three week old child <,> and we worked the system through and got some money for them but that was the situation they were living on possum meat er and um we did certain things that enabled the er children's er hospital things to be paid for and <.>every but any rate that's one of the success stories it might sound a bit otherwise but <.>it but it's one of the things that really pushed us into action <,> just <.>to to talk about the sad things and i don't want to HARP on the sad things the CANcer rate is the disaster <,> er we have four times the cancer rate of er the standard with the people i deal with and it's a bit of a shocker very largely on the women breast cancer is something like eight times what one would expect <{3><[3><.>th <[1>yeah <[2>yeah <[3>this is people who are in financial difficulties yes people that i am dealing with or i and my friends are dealing with yep yes <.>it <.>its it's as high as that <.>it <{><[>it's er a REAL problem <&>19:00 <[>mm you must have had confrontations many times with um er people trying to foreclose the banks er and so forth financial interests oh yes yeah people do silly things i walked into one of the bank's er head offices here and er a fairly high guy came out and said out out out go down the corridor don't want to know what you're here for don't want anything to do with you and um <,> he really didn't have the authority to do that um and i er wandered over the road which happened to be to the beehives and said to one of the guys there and let's face it we do get on with politicians inhales um <,> i was back having cup of tea out and club sandwiches with the er general manager of the bank about twenty minutes later laughs um we don't have a problem with HIGH management top management fine inhales er bottom workers who just are <&>20:00 sweeping the floor fine the MIDdle management er and i guess it's er a sign of what the times have been <,> we've HAD the problems where people have had more authority than they're able to handle <,> and they're chasing for a position and they <.>w <.>w won't just sit down and talk it becomes an eye to eye situation over the thing er very difficult to sort out with them that's fortunately getting less and less it's a compromise that you're looking for usually look <.>all all agreements are compromise can you give me an <{1><[1>example of <,> when things <.>gets get tough when <{2><[2>things get rough <[1>mm <[2>when things get tough well there was a fellow up <.>in in um well in the waikato actually and i'd worked with him for a long time and we had a pretty realistic arrangement and this guy had um he had um flattened a fellow with <.>a me shovel who legally was entitled to do what he did but <&>21:00 didn't have enough brains to do it decently um laughs well i don't know that he flattened him actually he <{1><[1>held a shovel up in front of him the guy fell backwards over a motorbike and it was <.>a you know what the hell um BUT the lawyer and their friends would not stay away i begged them to stay away i said stay away for a week that's ALL i want you just to stay away and i will fix it but no they were entitled to be there and be there they would and they sent <.>down and they goaded this guy beyond belief inhales one morning at eight oclock in the morning i got a collect call from a phone box from the waikato my husband has left for so and so but i said we took all the guns off him and he said yes but he's got a killing knife he WILL kill that man <,> it takes forty minutes to drive there he left five minutes ago what can you do about it now um and this is important i RANG the police i <&>22:00 identified myself and they said okay we'll fix it i never heard another thing there were no charges i would have presumed the car was just stopped and the guy was just quietly taken home <{2><[2>and that was that <[1>voc <[2>mm it was diffused yeah he was diffused yes and er of course sometimes we've diffused it ourselves er some of my friends have diffused things er what kinds of things have they had to <{><[><.>dif <[>oh well one particular case near <.>he in the middle of the island really er we actually er rammed a car into a side of a bank and took the gun off a guy and took him home he was heading for a <.>stock a station manager um the things that got me down at that time and THANK goodness they've STOPPED <,> well pretty much stopped were the suicides <.>and and i refused to even acKNOWledge that they existed in the end um how do you <{><[>mean by that <[><.>be <&>23:00 well <.>i they were coming over and they came over my desk at ONE a week on average the worst day was three for eighteen months <,> i HAD to totally shut off <,> a person very CLOSE to us actually committed suicide and my mother got very upset because i wouldn't discuss it look at it <,> do anything this was having a VERY bad effect on YOU <{><[><,> psychologically <[>oh yes i <.>cou couldn't live with it <{><[>mm <[>mm i couldn't live with that so <.>i i shut it off rightly or wrongly i just SHUT the door on it <,> one of the er <.>h funny things that really happened was at er shannon <.>w near where i live and it was in the middle of the election <,> tut and somebody at the pub suggested that collis blake might send a thousand bulls down the road as mister lange was coming to address shannon and this was taken seriously er and er of <{><[>course <[>of course you're a bull farmer er of course i'm a <{1><[1>bull farmer <{2><[2>AND i had a i had thousand bulls AND i was at shannon and when this got around i couldn't see any <&>24:00 point in stopping the rumour or doing anything about it so i just laughed inhales tut finally the police came along and said what are you going to do and i thought well i'd better actually tell THEM i wasn't going to do anything so what we did do we took along a lot of utes and about a hundred dogs and tied them on the back of the utes and when mister lange came we were <.>spok spooked the dogs up and a hundred dogs make quite a lot of noise and it's really quite good <{3><[3>and they were all competing and that was that good humoured and whatever and um <{4><[4>laughs <[1>yeah <[2>laughs <[3>laughs <[4>laughs collis blake talking about his WORK as part of a provincial support group who help hard pressed farmers well that's all we have time for this week we'll be somewhere out of town again at the same time a quarter to one next sunday <,> i'm jack perkins join me then <&>24:50 <&>end of interview