Long-time local Graham Taylor was a member of the Wanaka Promotion Association 30 years ago, when there were only two annual events held in the district - the A & P Show and Warbirds.

He’s lived here almost all his life, witnessed enormous change and played his part in it as well. Graham sat down with the Wanaka App recently to talk about the joy he takes in the progress of his community and the pleasure he finds in restoring things.

Known as something of a mechanical wizard, Graham can turn his hand to constructing, repairing and restoring just about anything that has a mechanism. Repairing things seems to be in his blood so it’s no surprise he joined the family business as soon as he finished high school.

He and his family have lived in the district since the late 1940s, and the family business, Taylor’s Implements, manufactured farm machinery at Lake Hawea for decades before the economic downturn of the 1980s forced Graham to relocate the business to busier Wanaka.

After more than 50 years in the business he’s now “semi-retired”. “I still do repairs and maintenance for customers,” he said. His wife Cheryl says he works many hours every day but he reckons he couldn’t quantify exactly how many hours he works “because every week I do stuff for myself, I do stuff for other people, and I do stuff for the community”.

“I’m not interested in tracking my time. As long as I can pay the bills at the end of the day and have some fun that’s all I’m worried about.

“My first hobby was vintage cars and that started when I was about 11 years of age with a 1925 Model T pickup,” he said. He “picked up” a second Model T, his 1923 Ford Model TT Ton truck, when he was a teenager but restored it only recently - in time for the celebration of the centennial of Luggate’s Red Bridge in 2015.

Graham Taylor in period costume on the set of "The Light Between Oceans" at St Bathans in 2014. PHOTO: Supplied

He takes particular pride in the 1923 Model T as, although he owns a number of vintage and classic cars, this truck is his only vintage vehicle with a traceable New Zealand history. “It’s a genuinely historic motor vehicle which used to collect people and goods from the wharf at Makarora and trundle them up to Makarora House, which was the only ‘establishment’ in Makarora in those days. It transported a lot of very important people in its day.”

“Nowadays it doesn’t go on the road, but if people want to drive a Model T, I can teach them how to drive on the property here,” he said.

“The reason I like the older cars is they’ve got those few quirks and things; they’re more interesting to drive and if you have the odd breakdown there’s usually a mass of people around you like a swarm of bees to get you sorted.”

An estimated count of the many vehicles on his property near Luggate provides a conservative total of nine, eight of which are currently operational, but only five are registered for the road. He’s had a 1959 Morris Minor for the past 25 years but the vehicle he currently uses most often is a 1972 Austin 1300 which, like most of his vehicles, is a hybrid modified with parts from other vehicles.

“I’m not a big spender on these cars. I don’t have bottomless pockets but I do like them to go properly,” he said.

As a younger man he was a member of the New Zealand Vintage Car Club (NZVCC) but by 1985 “I’d been there and done that for a while, but my family weren’t too interested in vintage cars then”, so he gave it away. His interest in vintage vehicles was ignited once more by the chance to restore a 1923 Overland four-seater touring car.

His friend Doug Wilson said his kids “didn’t want the old car sitting in his shed. Turned out it was a 1923 Overland and I thought I’d enjoy bringing her back to life. So I bought it and fixed it up,” Graham said.

The Overland has since featured - ever so briefly - in a Hollywood movie. Four years ago, Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks filmed “The Light Between the Oceans” at various places in Otago. It’s set in the early 1920s and a call went out through the Central Otago branch of NZVCC to those with suitable vintage cars to help out.

Graham and fellow branch member Murray Pryde “spent a whole day in St Bathans, getting dressed up and being filmed”. It was a typical movie shoot in that the film crew was running all day but he and Murray spent most of the time in ‘hurry up and wait’ mode. “All we saw in the final film was a 10 second scene,” he said.

While vintage vehicles might have been his first love, Graham also spent 18 years in the aviation world. In the early 90s, he and a friend built their own kitset aircraft, an 80hpw rotax turbo engine, two-seater, highwing, Kitfox. 

“I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of building and flying my own aircraft. There’s nothing like getting your pilot’s licence just to learn things about navigation, trigonometry, mathematics and the weather,” he said. “So when I look at the weather now I observe it with quite a different eye and have a lot more appreciation for it.”

Another friend, Ernie Colling, mentored him and they would go flying together. “We had the same sort of aircraft but his technique was just that much better that I’d chase him all over the sky and I’d catch up by cutting corners.

“I did have one emergency landing. I came down in the Cromwell Gorge and didn’t put a scratch on anything,” he said. “I have a very strong sense of self-preservation, believe me."

Since he moved to Luggate eight years ago, Graham has thrown himself into a variety of community projects. “I’m really enjoying living at Luggate. We’ve got a great little community association here.”

He’s the coordinator for the Red Bridge restoration, a 10-year staged project to turn the once overgrown wasteland adjacent to the Red Bridge into a recreational and historic reserve.

“The work at the Red Bridge is proceeding slowly but steadily,” he said. “It’s a big job. The recreational reserve has a lot of potential and it is a privilege to be the guiding hand so to speak.”

Graham’s happy to be a part of the Luggate community and says its population now (estimated at 400) is roughly the same as Wanaka’s was back in 1960 when he was starting high school.

Having longstanding roots in the district has given Graham a certain perspective on its growth. “All I’ve seen since I’ve lived here is change,” he said. He reckons 90 percent of the change is positive as the increased population has resulted in better facilities, improved schools and more employment options.

“The most you can ever hope to do with growth is keep a guiding hand on it. You’re never going to stop it and, if you try, you just end up creating more distortions.You need to allow it happen - but with a fair degree of common sense,” he cautioned.

“If I were to sum it up, I’d say the problems of growth are infinitely better than the problems of decline, and you need to have people to make things zing.”