Job Lott

There’s barely a corner of the Waiau Plains that hasn’t felt the scrape of Dave Lott’s bulldozer.   HUGH DE LACY explains.

When the Waiau River swelled to 1200 cumecs one night last October, all that saved the township of Waiau from being flooded were the willows Dave Lott had planted on the banks decades before – that, and Lott and son Bill dozing and steel-wiring them in place to stabilise the bank that night.

For half a century local contractor Dave Lott has fought to keep the unruly Waiau River more-or-less within its often ill-defined banks, and though October’s record flow provided the biggest threat yet to his little hometown, he won the battle once again.

The Lotts’ homes and Lott Contracting’s depot are right  on the north bank, where the long single-lane bridge over the river enters Waiau township, and earlier this year they were the scene of a party Bill Lott threw to celebrate his dad’s 80th birthday.  The party attracted a host of farmers and local authority staff from all over North Canterbury to pay tribute to the man who has probably done more than any other to shape the river and the Amuri Plains into the richly productive farming basin they comprise today.

And barely had the plates and glasses been washed and the marquee taken down than Dave Lott was back at the controls of his John Deere 750c clearing another farmer’s tracks or smoothing the path of yet another centre-pivot irrigator. An octogenarian he may be, and son Bill may have taken over a big chunk of the workload since becoming a partner in Lott Contracting in 2002, but Dave Lott is still working full-time with no thoughts of retirement.

Lott grew up on the family farm in the remote Lees Valley, in behind Oxford in North Canterbury, and through driving tractors developed a love of machinery, especially bulldozers.

Born in 1929, he was lured away from the farm immediately after World War II to work on the early stages of what was then New Zealand’s biggest power station, the  320 megawatt Roxburgh Dam on the Clutha River. He had a job in the Ministry of Works’ project depot, and one day the boss asked him, “Can you drive a bulldozer?”

“Of course I can,” young Lott replied, though he’d never sat his backside down on anything but a wheeled farm tractor before. “Right,” said the boss. “There’s an old caterpillar D8 down there that’s been on holiday too long. Put it to work.”

And without any further encouragement or coaching, Lott became a bulldozer driver. In fact he became so good at it so quickly that within three days he was instructing other staff on operating a dozer with a carry-all on behind, though he’d never worked with one of them before either.

Over three winters from 1945 Lott rode his D8 round Roxburgh, but by the spring of 1947 he’d had enough of freezing his butt off in Otago, so he hied himself off to the Bay of Plenty, cutting forestry tracks through the pumice-lands there for Whakatane Board Mills. Later he took a job – again driving a D8 – for a company mining coal at Huntly for barging down the Waikato River to Mercer.

When a group of his old mates from Roxburgh persuaded him to cross the ditch and get work on the Snowy Mountains hydro scheme in New South Wales, he discovered that there are parts of Australia that can be even colder than Otago. He and his mates were based at Taylor Bend, living in tents knee-deep in snow with just a hurricane lamp for heating.

They endured this for three months before escaping to a mountain ash bush-felling job near Melbourne. This proved to be no cinch either, and Lott soon returned to his beloved D8s, driving for Thiess Brothers first on a big drainage job west of Mount Gambier in southeastern South Australia, then on a North Queensland coalfield.

In 1956 Lott heeded a call from his mother, who lived in Rangiora, to come home, and for year he worked for the North Canterbury Catchment Board. Then one evening in 1957 a returned serviceman, who had set himself up as a contractor with a rehabilitation loan, offered to sell Lott a bulldozer, an

International TD9A. It was a well-used machine and the man wanted £1200 ($2400) for it, but Lott jumped at the chance, acquiring a runabout and later a caravan as well.

Along with the bulldozer he inherited track-cutting work on Wandle Downs Station  in North Canterbury. He was in business, and in 1958 he joined his local Contractors’ Association, of which he’s been a member ever since. The caravan became his home for the next 14 years and Waiau his headquarters.

Always one to prefer to be in the driver’s seat himself, Lott never let his company grow beyond a staff of two or three full-timers and the occasional part-timer. That’s what it remains today, operating two John Deere, a Hitachi and a Fiat Allis bulldozer, two Hitachi diggers, a Terex dump-truck and a transporter.

Virtually all the Lott’s gear was supplied by CablePrice in Christchurch.

“I’ve always stayed with CablePrice and they’ve been bloody good to me over the years. I’m probably their oldest client now,” Lott told Contractor.

Lott Contracting’s work is overwhelmingly agricultural, though in his first couple of decades as a contractor Dave Lott did a fair bit of roading: widening the Lewis Pass road for the Ministry of Works in the ‘60s, forming the 25 kilometre Kaiwara Road near Cheviot, and cutting the track through from the Clarence River to the head of the Waiau at St James Station.

The development of the Waiau Plains Irrigation Scheme in the 1970s switched Lott’s focus back to farming. There was a lot of push-loading of scrapers on the irrigation scheme, some border-dyking, and always a lot of farm tracking and giant discing.

Today the border-dykes have given way to centre-pivots on the Waiau Plains – at least 150 have been set up since the first arrived there in 1995 - and contouring for them is now a major part of Lott Contracting’s work. But Dave Lott still does much of his work for the Hurunui District Council and Environment Canterbury – he’s done endless hours of river control work for Ecan, some of it unpaid, and his latest job with the district council is laying a 125mm water-pipe through the Weka Pass on State Highway 7.

Dave Lott married late in life – at 26 Bill is more than half a century younger, and as devoted to his work as his father. So for perhaps decades more to come, whenever the slumbering Waiau River decides to get up and nasty, the dozers and diggers of Lott Contracting will be there to put it back to bed.