Dairies in far-flung communities are not just the corner shop. In many places, they are the cornerstone of the community. Andrea Vance and Iain McGregor investigate.

This series was first published in January 2021. We are republishing it after the recent fatal stabbing of dairy worker Janak Patel and subsequent nationwide protests.

CHAPTER THREE
CORNERING THE MARKET

With long sweeping sands, an exposed break with consistently good surf and an ocean-views golf course, Riversdale Beach is a dream in the summer.

But after the Easter holidays, when the weekenders pack up their baches, this tiny settlement on the southeastern corner of the North Island transforms. 

The sea is a pale blue, and salt spray hangs over the Pacific rollers. As the afternoon sun drops behind the Tararua Ranges, local young surfers haul their boards from the water and fishers trudge up the deserted beach.

The streets are quiet, and many of the weatherboard beach houses are empty. But as dusk settles over the resort, the lights burn bright in one corner of the settlement.

Tradies’ utes and mud-splashed farm trucks are parked up out front. 

A hubbub of chatter drifts out from the front of the Riversdale Beach Store. 

On the forecourt, longnecks of Tui and bowls of hot chips crowd the bar leaners. The dress code is high-vis or gumboots and there’s a dog under every table.

Riversdale’s working men like to finish the day knocking the top of an icy cold lager and warming their feet by the fire pit. And for the last quarter of a century, they’ve been doing it on a Thursday night at the local dairy. 

The get-together is known as the Rat Run Club. It started 23 years ago, when Marcus Percy popped in with a friend for some beers.

“It was a pouring wet night, it was shocking,” he remembers. “Well, we bought a dozen each, and we were just sitting here in our yellows, and next thing a rat came along the power line.”

The following week, roughly the same time, the rat re-appeared, tight-roping along the wires to reach a date palm. 

“We let other people know and Thursday nights grew we used to run sweepstakes on what time it would run… if you got the correct time you had to shout a dozen.”

The story was picked up by the Reuters news agency and travelled around the world, even making the pages of the London Times. Members even had ‘been there, done rat’ t-shirts. 

But a payout was elusive as outsiders poured into the town, looking to have a crack. “I'd have two watches on this arm and another watch on that to make sure nobody got the correct time,” Percy, 66, explains. The money went to the local surf club, with a little left over for a party.

“There's still Thursday night drinks from about 5pm to seven-ish. We light the fire in the winter and it's just good camaraderie to get together in a week.

The rat is long dead, but the legend has continued. Hayden Meads and his wife Amy took over the store more than three years ago. “The first question we got asked was: are you going to continue with the rat run?,” he says. “It was a no-brainer to say yes.”

Meads lays on a spread, free of charge. If he’s been hunting, it might be a roast of wild venison or pork. If the fishing’s good, there could be ceviche or smoked fish pate. Some weeks, it’s just snags and white bread.

“People that were here when the rat was here still come... have a yarn, chew the fat, talk about the changes. 

“People are sorting out work, they are figuring out what's going on. It’s sort of slowly built into this grassroots, little community thing and got everyone together.”

It’s the highlight of the social week for a store that is the focal point of the community. 

On Monday mornings the local ladies meet for coffee, and a book club. They also have their own Thursday night drinks, taking turns to host, before drifting over to join the men.

The Meads struggle to list all the services they provide. “We do wear many hats,” Meads says. “We're a post office, a library, groceries, tackle and local fishing knowledge, general hardware store, a bottle store.

“We're bakers, baristas, cooks, grocers. Amy and I are also first responders and part of the volunteer fire brigade. So we hold AGMs here.

“We’ve inherited an information centre as well. So, if the power goes out, we plug the cordless phone in and then it's just going flat stick for an hour. We post up on the Facebook page but they like that phone call.”

The couple also caters for the local surf club carnivals and meetings, and once a fortnight take lunches to the local Whareama School. “It’s a give and take situation,” Amy says. “I'm quite happy just helping people and trying to make their stay here as good as possible.”

The Riversdale store has stood on the corner of Blue Pacific Parade for close to 70 years. Tyre merchant Basil Bodle bought 40 acres of land, on the mouth of the Motuwaireka, in 1953 with dreams to establish a resort and campground.

The local farmers thought he was a lunatic: “Who would pay all this money for barren sand dunes when it would only carry two sheep,” one was reported as saying.

A caravan on the site sold icecreams, until two Dutch brothers Johannes La Grouw Snr and Johannes Van Loghem constructed a shop: it was one of their early Lockwood buildings.

There was no power in the settlement until 1959: the ices were brought over from Masterton in canvas bags.

As the resort grew - with wealthy Wellingtonians snapping up coastal property - the shop became a post office. Bodle’s eldest daughter Paulene introduced lilos and sunhats to the range.

The family continued to run the store into the 1960s and it was rebuilt later in that decade.

Hayden Meads was milking cows when he heard about a job going at the store. 

“My ears started ringing: that was always a goal of ours to live on the beach. [I] went home for breakfast, spoke to Amy... we literally rang up at lunchtime, rocked out that night after work and boom we're here.”

It was Amy who took the job, while Meads stayed at home for 12 months. Within a year, they’d bought the store.

“We took over just after Easter. So we had all winter to figure out what we're doing. We thought we're going pretty good. And then boom, summer hit. And it was: Wow.

“We basically just faked it through that summer.”

The days are “really full on,” he says. His day starts at 5.30am, baking scones and other goodies out the back with his sons Hunter, eight, and Lewis, seven. The boys decide the menu: “whatever the kids have suggested, we find a recipe.”

Amy sweeps, wipes down tables and lays out 100 chairs. The store opens at 8am (later in the winter) but the customers start arriving by 7.30am.

“We start the day on the back foot right from the start. Nippers with the surf club start around eight o'clock. So the parents are coming in, grabbing a coffee.”

The couple and their staff are rushed off their feet cooking, making coffees, taking orders, filling shelves and fridges, and clearing tables.

“And then once that five o'clock hits into dinner, it rolls into another beast of just burgers and burgers and fish and chips just flat stick,” Meads, 38, says.

On a busy summer day they can whip up 360 milkshakes, make between 300 and 500 coffees, and get through a 20-metre lolly roll. On one recent pizza night, the couple cranked out 95 pizzas in two-and-a-half hours.

“Everyone's in togs, shorts, wetsuits. Everyone's just having the time of their life on the summer holiday. 

“I remember doing that as a kid, going into the local shop. Queue up for 10 minutes for an icecream or find 50 cents in the couch and whip down and grab a 50-cent mix.  

“And meeting these kids through the summer and watching them grow… cracking some awesome waves or catching a fish off the beach.

“You're so focused on trying to keep the shop running, but trying to enjoy that customer service with the kids and the parents and the adults.”

On wet days, the tables are crowded with bored families trying to escape cabin fever. Amy, 36, lays on colouring competitions, for all ages. 

When the couple lock up, teenagers are hanging around the entrance, phones glowing in the twilight as they suck up the free wifi.

The family makes their money over summer. “That's the backbone of our finances through the year so you’ve just got to grind.

“We are definitely glad we did it. Amy and I were pretty money-orientated before we got here, trying to chase that million dollar dream and that wasn't a healthy place to be. 

“We were trying to raise a family, trying to run a farm, just banging heads. So when we came out here the money wasn't about it. It was actually spending some time with our kids.”

Amy says the boys - who love to help out in the shop - are thriving in Riversdale. 

“The location's made it so much easier to enjoy life.

“You've got the best of both worlds...you feel like you can just go out there and escape on the beach.”

When the boat club closed its doors last year, Port Fitzroy lost its gathering place. 

Built and paid for by the locals in 1926, it had been a church, community and school hall, and for the last 15 years a bar-bistro where gossip was exchanged over beer and freshly caught mussels.

Some residents feared the loss would hollow out the tiny settlement already isolated at the end of a twisting fern-fringed road in the north of Aotea, Great Barrier Island. 

But in the year since, the Port Fitzroy General Store has been the glue that holds the place together.

“It's definitely not just a dairy,” says Casey Fisher, of her family-run business.

“It's a social hub for a lot of people. [They] come out once a week for their petrol or for their mail or for the doctor or whatever. And they'll stay in most of the day and just sit outside for a coffee and chat with whoever comes and goes and get their social fix. 

“But also when something nice or something awful happens, if there is a baby born or if someone's passed [you’ll] often see them coming through with not really any purpose in mind except just to connect. 

“Which is nice. Because a lot of the time we do choose to be on our own, sort of loner people.”

Casey understands the shop, owned by her mother Mary, is Port Fitzroy’s centre of gravity.

“All year round, six days a week, we're here,” she says.

“We're here for someone to say hi to or to have a grizzle with or whatever.”

“The Barrier” - named for the shelter and protection it provides to the Hauraki Gulf - is a 30 minute hop from Auckland’s airport, or a five-hour ferry ride from Wynyard Quarter.  

The population of close to 1000 people, are self-reliant and resourceful: the island is entirely off-grid, relying on renewable solar power and collection of freshwater. 

About 200 live in and around the township, although the population swells with yachties and boaties in the holidays. They nudge in the narrow Man o’ War passage, alongside Kaikoura Island which straddles the turquoise fingers of harbour. 

Up a sloping hill from the wharf at Rarowharo Bay, an information centre, nurse’s cottage, tiny library, a scattering of houses and the dairy cluster around the township.

Peak times are 11am - when the mail arrives. And after 4pm when locals gather on the picnic benches in front of the shop (they stick firmly to alcohol rules which keep them off the premises). 

Birthdays are celebrated - with messages written on a board, and often cake. 

Margaret Rose Ngawaka has sailed in from Rangiahua/Flat Island, west of Great Barrier. Her family are crayfishers and their 148-acre offshore home is accessible only by boat, 20 minutes away - or 45 if the sea is rough.

Originally from the East Coast, she’s lived there for 37 years, with husband Matthew and their seven children. “It's no more difficult than if you're living in this city. It just has different challenges.”

She visits once a fortnight to pick up the mail and some perishables. Like most other islanders, her main grocery shop comes in by air, ordered from Countdown, and they grow their own veggies.

“The shop’s very important, even though we don't use it as much because we’re so remote that we have to be pretty much self sufficient,” she says.

Ngawaka also looks forward to the social interaction. “We love our little island because we don’t hear anything until we land here and then we catch up.

“When you're off the grid and sustainable, you have to be comfortable in your own skin. But we are social creatures by nature too, so you do need to interact otherwise you’d end up with something like cabin fever.

“A lot of the locals use this as a social place to talk and chill and laugh at the end of the week. It is a service that we are grateful to have.”

Dave Braddock has been surfing off the Barrier’s dramatic east coast beaches since he was a teenager. Three years ago, he made the permanent move over from the Hibiscus Coast with wife Sarah Dwyer and their children Jessie, four, and Ali, two.

They live in the Okiwi Valley, 7km over a twisting hill road. “This is the only place that we have here, we'd have to travel 30 kilometres to the [next] nearest store...So any social life is right here.

“It’s our Pak 'n Save, Liquor King, post shop, local pub at the moment. If you need any information it's the place to find out what's going on. 

“Any gossip will be transacted across here...it's an awesome resource. It is the community, you know?”

The biggest grumble for locals is the cessation of the freight barge service earlier this year. It means the Fishers must drive to Tryphena - more than an hour away - to pick up stock. Their small shop truck makes multiple trips and they must pay a contractor to transport frozen goods.

“That's obviously going to affect costs,” Casey Fisher says. “Which is hard because things are already obviously a bit higher than they would be in the city. It adds another element of tricky to a place that can be hard sometimes.”

Mary Fisher spends long hours trying to source bargains to keep prices down, often working long into the night.  

Her daughters, Casey and Jessy,  grew up on the island, but the family moved away when they were teenagers. 

Originally from Oregon, the 66-year-old came back to the island from a teaching job in Hamilton. 

“My pie-in-the sky dream was that I would come out here and retire,” she laughs.

She runs the shop with her daughters, who both have three children each. Jessy’s husband Jackson Reed, 34, takes care of the fuel supplies.

It’s the cheapest on the island, at $2.95 a litre, 20 cents cheaper than in the central village of Claris. 

The store has always been family-run. Mike Newman’s parents Wick and Monica established the business in 1959. “We came here when I was nine, my dad got a job as a mechanic for the forestry service. After a few months my mum got quite restless,” he says.

“She wandered all around the rocks and found this area, and thought it would be a great place for a store because boaties were coming in all over summer.”

Wick would drive the local children to school in Okiwi and on the way, he’d stop off and start up an old Villiers motor under the store, to power the freezers.

It was also a telephone exchange and savings bank. “That was the backstay of the whole place,” Newman says. “Except over summer when it was really busy.”

The family sold up in 1970 and the store has since had five more owners including “Bob from Australia, and some airline stewards.”

“Obviously,  it's a bit nice for me, because all my whole family lives here. And so that's my time with them as well,” Casey says.

“Mum had to go through a lot to get the money [to buy the shop].  You are able to make a living. It's not that money's not pouring in like people might think it is.

“But the benefits outweigh the not being millionaires.”