If someone said " You can't do it, it can't be done, I've gone ahead and done it "
Article in Rural News Newspaper
This article was published in Rural News about the Waterwheel Historic Trust by Tony Hopkinson.
COLLECTING MACHINERY is Stan Fretwell’s life-long experience. He is passionate about showing today’s generations the technology used in times past. Fretwell, of true pioneering stock, left school aged 13 to manage a dairy farm in Pirongia district when family members went away to WWII. “I’ve always responded to a challenge. If someone said ‘You can’t do it, it can’t be done’, I’ve gone ahead and done it,” says Fretwell.
Apprenticed to a builder, he spent some years building in Wellington and Hutt Valley. Then for family reasons he set up a business, Stronghold Engineering, at Thornton, 10km north of Whakatane, where he and his wife Phyllis and family have lived 35 years.
The business at times involved all members of his family, sometimes employing eight staff. “We serviced clients from Te Puke to Opotiki to Galatea in a region where many farms were settled by returned servicemen.” Some farms had several different owners as successive floods wiped out their efforts and they just walked away. “We concentrated on service and we retained older customers and kept adding new ones.”
Over the years Fretwell realised a lot of history lay parked under trees and stored in sheds. He began to collect, store and document the ownership and how machines were used. The collection grew at Strongholds yards, the machinery save there, but documentation on settlers’ or Maori history was given to the local museum. A lot of history has been lost, Fretwell says. Only recently have New Zealanders begun to wake up to the value of this machinery.
A major change came in 1990 when the Waterwheel Historic Trust was set up, organising a band of amateurs into a more businesslike grouping. The trust commemorates a water wheel that first ran in 1860 at Braemar Hill, west of Whakatane. Its water came from a spring from Lake Rotoma which fed into the Tarawera River. Governor Grey commissioned this to grind wheat to save the cost of time of freighting to and from Auckland. It was later used to process flax. The trust now has a permanent 5ha home at Kawerau, where members have built a full-scale replica of the water wheel, powering it with water from the adjacent Tarawera River. “We’ve had great cooperation from the local district council and businessmen. We just need funding for building for displaying all our stock. Much stored material has been shifted from Stronghold Engineering to Kawerau and another property there. This entailed 108 trips with a 3t truck and two trips with a 44t truck and trailer. Fretwell foresees another seven 3t truckloads.
Sausage sizzles and the like have so far paid for all activities. Volunteer numbers have varied from 15 to 25. Phyllis at first maintained the records of the collection; recently these have gone to computer. About 30,000 items are now recorded – previous ownership, brief history and how they worked. At least 70,000 hours voluntary work is documented.
“Our aim is a live machinery park with training facilities, ‘live’ days with hands-on operation and video commentary on how things work. These and static displays will make the collection a tourist attraction second-to-none.”