Family connections

Three families from the Pokeno region in the northern Waikato share a social and business relationship extending two centuries and four generations, and now centres around a large resource of local greywacke.   BY ALAN TITCHALL 

The view from Clark McRobbie’s house and office from the south side of the Bombay Hills takes in the Franklin flats as far south as Huntly. Below them, State Highway 2 snaking east and State Highway 1 stretching south look like mere ants tracks, almost lost in an Arcadian landscape that features the attractive settlement of Pokeno, with its red-roofed church standing proud in a patchwork of farmland and trim hedging.

The region didn’t always look like this. A hundred years ago these flats were mostly swamp and hard shrub. The pioneer families who settled in the area and changed the landscape included the McPhersons, the Dowlings and the McRobbies. These tough pioneers took on whatever local work put food on the family table – a mixture of farming, forestry work and road contracting.

On the wall of Ean and Janet McRobbie’s (Clark’s parents) house in Pokeno there’s a series of black and white photos capturing the history of the family’s contracting businesses. At the top right of the collection is great grandfather McRobbie sitting on his cart and its team of hefty Drysdales. He never did take to those new, mechanised trucks that appeared later on the scene, according to family lore, but his five sons did.

By the end of WWII, contractors in the Waikato district were using bulldozers for everything from forestry to road works, and the McRobbie bothers (Sandy, Cliff, Clark, Charlie and John), also made good use of the plethora of ex-army trucks that came on the market, putting them to work on drainage and roading projects in the Franklin region – when they weren’t transporting the local rugby team to a Saturday afternoon game.

The brothers also invested wisely in some enduring big D14A Cats for seasonal forestry work that were still in use when

Sandy McRobbie’s sons Peter and Ean took over the business in the 1960s under the new name of P&E McRobbie.

In the old days, most of the aggregate used in local projects was hauled straight out of local rivers by drag line and loaded onto trucks with a shovel. No one can remember who first noticed the resource of greywacke buried into the southern side of the Bombay Hills on the McPherson farm, but it was the McRobbie Brothers who figured they had the big Cats to rip it out. In the 1950s, they closed a royalty deal with the McPhersons on a firm handshake, and the Pokeno/McPherson quarry was born. Between forestry contracts and swamp reclamation the business grew and, when work slowed down, the bulldozers were utilised in the quarry, ripping out the softer rock.

Around 14 years ago, the verbal quarry contract was put in writing – hand-written on a single side of an A4 sheet. In 2000 Clark McRobbie and Bob Dowling (McRobbie Dowling Ltd) took over the quarry operation and that hand-written contract from Ean and Peter McRobbie.

Bob Dowling and Clark McRobbie are old mates, just as their fathers and grandfathers were, bonded by social life, the rugby field and now work. An ex Gough’s mechanic, Dowling takes a       >>> hands-on management approach to operations while McRobbie takes in the bigger picture which includes quarry consulting work.

The pair got together in 2000 over contract roading work in various Northland forest and quarries and did ‘alright’ until the tough times for forestry came a few years ago.

“We spent four years up north, but by 2006 forestry in general was in decline. It was a good time to consolidate and concentrate on the Pokeno Quarry so we didn’t renew our contract and got out,” recalls McRobbie.

Before heading north, he had picked up his shot-firing ticket and polished up on some basic training he had learnt from his dad in the Pokeno quarry.: “I can remember hiding behind the crusher with him, waiting for the “pop” from our bulling – stuffing 20 sticks of jelly down a 15 foot hole we had hand-drilled. Times have certainly changed.”

He learned and improved his skills from contract work on the quarries up north. “They all had a different resource and our brief was to extract it the most efficient way we could. We weren’t worried about specs as the aggregate was used on temporary forest roads that are only used every 25 years, so we built up a lot of knowledge getting the best value from these operations and getting the blast right the first time.”

Being accountable for every blast from an economic sense, McRobbie says they studied each quarry and blast “very carefully”. The experience led to the pair securing other contracts. “There’s a niche for designing quarry blasts. We found we could save the owner a lot of money blasting rock to the correct size for the crushing equipment,” says McRobbie, with plans to extend these consulting services.

Meantime, the Pokeno operation is in full swing using a Komatsu 350 jaw crusher and custom screen and Cat 950 loader to produce a range of aggregates for local sale. One of the bulldozers used at the quarry is an ‘original’, bought back in the 1963, kept going by Mike Dowling and his Caterpillar mechanical expertise. As he says, “that machine is older than I am.”

The original crushing gear and the cable ripper that the McRobbie brothers used in the old days is still sitting on site, like a family memento that no one has the heart to throw away. Robbie Dowling also uses a range of portable modern crushing equipment that allows them to quote on other jobs all over the North Island.

Pokeno has a good future – the size of the greywacke resource is huge, and extends way back into the hills where there’s nothing but scrub and hard farmland. There’s a mixture of soft rock and blue stone, and there’s not much soil to strip off. The quarry could probably double in size before the neighbours started howling.

That hand-written quarry contract expires next year, and the key to the future of the Pokeno quarry is in the hands of the McPherson brothers, Mike and Steve, who also represent the fourth generation of a family that has lived in the area for almost a 100 years. Mike McPherson lives in the original family farmhouse over looking the quarry. During the week he contracts to Orica as a blasting expert, while brother Steve works as a diesel mechanic for Porter Hire.

There’s an antique International dozer sitting in Mike’s backyard that he starts up at least once a year. His grandfather used it to haul big natives from the King Country forests. He looks admiringly at the rusting metal like someone looking at an old family photograph album, then jokes, “we used Internationals and the McRobbies used Cats – that’s probably why they are bigger than us now.”

He hasn’t decided what he and his brother are going to do with the quarry after the lease expires next year and says he is currently happy, ‘blowing up things’ during the week while consulting for Orica, and ‘playing’ with the quarry machinery on the weekends.

Clark McRobbie is also noncommittal when I put the same question to him.

“We would like to renew it, but understand that Mike and Steve are also in the industry and could take it over themselves. Still, if that was the case, we would like to keep our machinery in there, and work in with them.”