The Puketapu Oral History Recordings
Alf Bell - heritage recording
Arthur Driver - heritage recording
Doreen Dunckley - heritage recording
Betty McGregor - heritage recording
Bill Lester - heritage recording
Keith Fleming - heritage recording
Doris Ford - heritage recording
Ross Harvie - heritage recording
Margaret Puddy - heritage recording
Alice Pile - heritage recording
Neil Roy - heritage recording
Margaret Sheat - heritage recording
Noel Sheat - heritage recording
About the Puketapu Trust Oral Histories
The Puketapu Community Trust decided that there was a wealth of human experience residing in the Waihemo ward and believed that this is best preserved through oral history recordings of notable identities who have a long association with the Waihemo area. With the expert assistance of Rob Webb, broadcaster and oral historian of Wellington, we now have thirteen completed interviews, with plans to carry out more interviews in November 2022.
The criteria for choosing interviewees is simply their involvement through work or community interests in the Waihemo area. The Trust has attempted to select as wide a range as possible, but naturally there is more towards agricultural and farming businesses.
Listeners will learn how, 80 years after the event, World War Two still has a strong effect on families, especially if loved ones were killed or wounded, physically and psychologically. Even World War One trauma lingers in the grandparent or even parent generation of the interviewees.
The Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s blighted lives as opportunities for further education were lost to the urgent need to seek work and provide additional income. Even in the 1950s not all farms had access to electricity or phone services.
In the mid 1980s Palmerston had three banks, a large post office, a manual telephone exchange, two butchers, two service stations and workshops, two hotels, a cottage hospital with two resident doctors, and a railway station with freight and passenger services — all this has almost disappeared so that even those who have only lived in the district for 40 years have now seen great changes in the services a junction town like Palmerston can offer.