Paddy Gordon

Paddy was born in Wanganui in 1942. After 3 years’ secondary education he left school, moved to the South Island where he worked on an Otago sheep station. He decided to become a deer culler…

I was sheep mustering in the Upper Lindis and the deer were so plentiful, you could see 25 deer jump out of a little gully and run away in front of you and that’s where I decided I wanted to become a Government culler and I started to put in action to see if I could become one.  They wouldn’t take me until I was 19 years of age so I joined the NZ Forest Service at Berwick, which is the coastal forest area of Otago in the Mangatua Ranges just at the back of the airport. From that time for about 12 months I learnt all about thinnings and plantings and all things that went with the earlier parts of forestry, log peeling, the lot. At that stage they were actually using horses to drag the thinnings out and one of my jobs was driving one of these big Clydesdales, it was just a marvellous experience to have of these powerful animals hooked up by chains to small logs and drag them out of the forest to the peelers.

From Berwick when I turned 19 they recommended me to Max Crawshaw who was the boss of the operation in Queenstown, so I went up and joined the Forest Service Environmental Division at Queenstown from where I was sent to Dip Flat in the Wairau Valley and I went through the hunter training course for 3 months there and it was the best and most comprehensive training I have ever received in anything. The training was superb, it took you from the earliest form of firearm safety to ranger work to hunting, to domestic duties and being able to look after yourself at camp, baking, survival skills which set me in great stead for the rest of my life and set me on a path looking after the environment as best I could. From there I was sent down to the head of the Hopkins in the Dobson Valley in the Ahiriri where I spent some 3 years hunting for the Department with the odd trip down to Queenstown when the seasons were over. The only other time I virtually came out was when I had impacted wisdom teeth and they went septic and I had to go to a specialist in Dunedin to get them taken out.

From there I left the Forest Service and went to Australia for a little while working in different jobs, but I missed the mountains and the lakes so much that I got terribly homesick and I had to return.  On my return I did some bus driving on the Ohau skifield and then got a job driving a coach on the Otago Peninsula and at that stage I got married and was living there.

A job came up at Aspiring NP which had only recently been formed and the job was for a person at Makarora, I applied for that and was successful at getting it.