Working Class Heroes

Their jobs are dirty, dangerous and often overlooked. Peter Malcouronne meets the people with some of the toughest jobs in town.

The Sewermen

You notice the smell first. It comes and goes in waves; sometimes it smells like freshly-dug wet clay, sometimes like a long drop in midsummer; sometimes it just smells like shit. “You never really get used to it,” admits Howard Hereora. “I’ve been doing this job for 26 years now and sometimes it just overpowers you, eh.”

An enormous Maori grandfather of three, Howard is leading a gang of a dozen men — two-thirds of Watercare’s sewer workers — who’ll work through the night to clean out the Carlaw Park grit chamber, part of the city’s Orakei line. They’re a close-knit crew: “An Irishman, two Pakeha — Mike and Wayne — and the rest of us horis,” according to Howard. As his men suit up, Howard leads me over to a concrete viewing shaft, surrounded by a waist-high mesh fence.

“How’s it lookin’ boys?” asks Mike Langdon, an avuncular barrel-chested man in his fifties. Mike leans over the fence, flicks on his cap lamp, and peers down the shaft. Ten metres below us churns an oily, black river. “Fuck, I’ve gotta go down there?” Mike mugs. Still he reckons it’s not as bad as it looks. “The flow’s deep, deeper than I thought it’d be,” he says, “but she’s running slow.”

The crew work quickly: they want to be out of the tunnels by 6am, when the flow starts to increase. “You can hear it building up,” Howard tells me. “Like a river after rain.” Under no circumstances do you want to be down there at nine on a Saturday morning, the morning after the big night out.

“There’s a lot of grit in there,” Howard notes. “That’s why it smells.” In fact there could be as much as 50 tonnes of grit — heavy sludge and chip from resurfaced roads. Twice a year, they clean out the Carlaw Park chambers: left alone the grit would build up and spill over into the general system.

Howard continually talks about “the system.” It clearly means a lot to him that he, and the men working with him, know more about Auckland’s 306km sewerage network than anyone else. He likes to tell a story of how he spread out the Auckland City Council’s sewer plan on a pool table and then showed their engineers all the mistakes they’d made. “They had pipes running the wrong way,” he says, shaking his head. “Running uphill!”

Howard unfurls a detailed drawing he’s done of the planned operation. “That’s me, the biggest guy, in position over there,” he says. “That’s Mike — I should’ve put a little puku on Mike. Sometimes I put little captions in. But I have to be careful — the boys will go and add something cheeky if I leave it lyin’ around.”

He talks me through his picture. The grit’s been driven down the line and then into the chamber by a plough, he explains. The plough acts like a bulldozer and is forced, by water pressure, through the egg-shaped tunnels of the 94-year-old Orakei sewer-main, the city’s oldest. “See here how the main pipe splits into two lines for about 30 metres?” he says. “See how it rejoins there and becomes one again? That lets you re-route the flow down one of the two lines and isolate the other side. Pump the water out from there and you’ll be left with a pile of grit which we’ll suck out and take off to the tip.”

You want to be out of the tunnels by 6am when the flow starts to increase. Under no circumstances do you want to be down there at nine on a Saturday morning, the morning after the big night out.

Wayne Ridley, 55, a gentle bear of a man with tattooed forearms, lowers a walkie-talkie-sized gas detector down one of the manholes. Poisonous gases, especially hydrogen sulphide, are the greatest danger a sewer worker faces: in 1999, three men, working without gas detection equipment, were killed by hydrogen sulphide on Fanshawe Street. The gas detector reveals oxygen levels of 20.7 per cent, while the hydrogen sulphide level is six parts per million. “That’s very low actually,” says Wayne. He’s seen it as high as 80 parts per million. And the oxygen level’s okay. “Under 19.5 is too little,” he says, “over 21 is too much.”

So it’s safe to start. Wayne tells me that Mike usually decides which of the men are going to go down since “he’s the oldest at this game. But he doesn’t need to say much, doesn’t need to. We know when it’s our turn.”

“When it’s cold up here,” Howard says, chuckling, “they can’t wait to go down.”

Mike, leading from the front, decides he’ll descend first. He tucks his arms in tightly, then vanishes down a manhole. “He’ll be here now,” says Wayne, stepping out on the grass the path that Mike is taking 10 metres below. It strikes me as incredibly brave to be the first man down, on your own, in the dark, not entirely sure what you’ll find. A few minutes later, Mike appears at the bottom of the shaft, where he waves up to the watching crew. “Shit, looks like the flow’s up a bit,” Wayne says. “It’s high, fuckin’ high.” In fact the water is up around Mike’s chest. “Yeah, he’ll have to swim across,” says Wayne. He’s not joking. “Usually I walk across the water,” Mike yells from below. The boys laugh.

Gary Dolan, a shaven-headed 28-year veteran, heads down to help Mike. Several six-by-two planks are lowered down and Mike and Gary build tongue-and-groove plank walls at either end of the grit chamber. It’s improbably simple, but it’s all that’s needed to hold back the wall of water and divert it through the other tunnel.

Once the grit chamber has been isolated, a submersible pump is lowered down and the water pumped out. By 3.45am, 15 minutes ahead of schedule, as Howard points out, most of the water has gone. A heap of what looks like coal slag is left behind, covered in a mushy brown carpet. “Tampons,” Howard explains. “They’re the bane of our existence.”

Two six-inch wide hoses are dropped down and Gary and Mike, waist deep in sewage, get to work. They heave the hose up to their shoulder then hurl it down. Again and again. “They’re trying to rip through the tampons,” Howard explains.

Eventually they’re able to slash their way through so they can start working on the grit. The great hoses sucking the grit into the tankers thrash about wildly. “Watch out for the hose,” Howard warns. “Don’t walk over it. If it kicks up, you’ll be singin’ soprano!”

An old iron bucket’s lowered for the larger rocks and broken bricks. “This is cruisy,” says Gary, who’s popped up for a break. “The other week we were about 400 metres down the line and we had to dig everything out by hand. No pumps, just these little buckets that we’d winch along the line and then hoist up. Now that was hard work.”

After the water’s gone a heap of what looks like coal slag is left behind, covered in a mushy brown carpet. “Tampons,” Howard Hereora explains. “They’re the bane of our existence.”

I’m ready to go down now. Wayne and Gary help me climb into my waders and overalls. Gary recommends putting on a paper suit, then your waders, then another paper suit. “It just keeps you a bit cleaner,” he says. “Three days later and you can still smell it,” he continues. “It permeates into everything. It gets into the pores of your skin,” adds Wayne. “You become very aware of it. We shower and shower and shower… we’ve got a sauna at work where we try and sweat it out.”

I follow Gary down the manhole, stalactites of loo paper fighting my hands for space on the ladder. It’s hot down here. Fetid too. We walk through the grit pit where the men have nearly finished their work, then scamper up a slimy 45° slope to where the plank wall re-routes the flow. One of the ploughs has forced its way down to the wall, its prow adorned with a hundred condoms and a tampon quilt. Gary draws a diagram of the plough on the sludge on the wall with his finger. “It’s cleverly designed,” he says. “Held together with pins that just slip out, no tools required.”

“Whoever invented it is a bloody genius,” adds Wayne. “It can be assembled and broken down again in the dark, underwater.”

We clamber over the wall, wade waist deep through water. A couple of turds float past, but that’s nothing to worry about Wayne says. “Doesn’t compare to Pump Station 40, Bell Avenue, Otahuhu.” That’s unquestionably the worst of the 51 in the Watercare network. “It’s a prick of a station,” Gary says. “A dirty, fucking, stinking hole.”

“All the crap from Auckland Meat Products goes down there,” says Wayne. “It’s like a river of blood — offal, off-cuts of meat… a lot of fat too.” The fat of dead beasts can be up to a metre thick. “It’s all compressed,” Wayne says. “You can walk on it.”

The best station is just a couple of miles south. “The sweetest smelling station we have is Remmers,” says Gary. “Fragrant!” Wayne says, smiling.

It’s nearly 6 am. The flow’s starting to lap over the top of the plank wall, and when we climb out the manhole, the sky’s inky-blue. Howard, busy cooking pancakes in the crew’s mobile kitchen, is well pleased and makes sure I know that they’ve finished exactly when he said they would.

“Wash ya hands and get in there,” he says. “Gonna give you some soul food. Put some lead in ya pencil.”

Wayne and I join Howard around a caravan-style table and work our way through three pancakes each. “You guys are hopeless,” Howard says. “Usually the boys go through 10 of these. Each!”

“Don’t listen to him,” scoffs Wayne. “Howard always talks a load of Sierra Hotel India Tango… Shit!”

Howard laughs, flips another pancake. And then the mood turns sombre as we talk about Darren Skeen, 19, Eddie Rihia, 30, and Ken Karu, 47 — the three men who died at Fanshawe Street five years ago.

“They worked together. They drank together. They died together,” says Howard. “That’s what a guy said at their funeral and he was exactly right.”

Hydrogen sulphide poisoning is the sewermen’s greatest fear: “One of the men went down the manhole and just fell over down the bottom. The guy watching up on the ground raced down there and, boom, he collapsed, died on top of his mate. The third guy went down to rescue them, but passed out halfway down and died hanging in his harness.”

No one knows quite what happened, though there are plenty of theories. A source, who didn’t want to be named, gave me this account: “One of the men went down the manhole and just fell over down the bottom. The guy watching up on the ground raced down there and, boom, he collapsed, died on top of his mate. The third guy, I think it was the young fella, went down to rescue them, but he passed out halfway down and died hanging in his harness.” According to this source, whose story I’ve been unable to corroborate, a fist-fight ensued between the first two men to arrive at the scene: one wanted to go and rescue the stricken men, the other man tried to stop him.

The three men had succumbed to hydrogen sulphide poisoning, the sewer worker’s greatest fear. It was the worst single industrial accident in New Zealand in 25 years. While the men worked for another company and were contacted to Metrowater, Howard and Wayne knew them well, especially Ken Karu, a 20-year veteran.

“Ken was one of the greatest guys you would meet,” Howard says. “We’d be working down Newmarket Gully and he’d just turn up, have a cuppa with the boys, talk about what was happening down Ayr Street. We’d spend hours talking about the system.”

Wayne still finds it hard to accept, “Howard told us, ‘You know Kenny’s dead?’ I couldn’t believe it — I’d spoken to him the Thursday before he died. We went there [to Fanshawe Street] a couple of weeks later. A pastor came down with us, we had a short service, then we cleaned it out.”

The two men fall silent. Wayne pushes the remnants of his pancake around his plate. “We’re a very close family,” he says. “We’d have to be for me to put up with this bugger for as long as I have.”

The Steel Roller

“When you’re working next to hot steel,” says Harry Corns, “it just saps the energy out of you. You work for half an hour and then you have a spell for half an hour. Just sit there and drink copious amounts of water. You can’t do it continuously. It’s just too hard.”

Before emigrating to New Zealand in 1962, Harry was a ‘steel catcher’ in Motherwell, Scotland. Like most of the men in the town, like most of their fathers and grandfathers, Harry made steel for the Glasgow Shipyards, then the largest in the world. “I caught the steel as it came out of the rolls,” he says. “It was very hot — about 1100° C. We’d catch it with tongs, throw it up, twirl it round, then feed it through another set of rolls. It was very, very physical work.”

An affable man with the face and eyebrows of Ernest Borgnine, Harry won’t tell you his age. But given that he served in the Allied Occupation Force in Germany after the Second World War, he must be at least 73. He’s worked at Pacific Steel’s Otahuhu mill since it opened in 1962, though he took a few days off three years ago after a quintuple heart bypass. He has several mates who’ve been at Pacific Steel for 20 years or more. As he takes me around the 53-hectare plant, he seems to know every one of the company’s 500 workers; even the newer workers here get a “Morning Jimmy.”

We start up by the steel plant where grappling cranes tear into mountains of scrap: old washing machines, broken-down old boilers and the carcasses of 60,000 dead cars. The scrap’s dumped into a giant bin, which slides off into a furnace that never stops burning. It’s melted down into billets — one-and-a-half tonne steel rods, eight metres long — which are then trucked down to the plant’s rolling mill, a vast aircraft-hanger-like building, 330-metres long.

This is Harry Corns’s world. It’s very different to those early days in Motherwell: there are no shirtless proletarians toiling beside great vats of molten steel. Times have changed, he says. “This mill is highly automated — it’s run by television cameras and computers.” It’s also much more efficient. In Harry’s first year here, the mill’s 235 workers produced 25,000 tonnes of steel; last year 80 workers produced 230,000 tonnes of steel.

The mill runs continuously, producing almost all of New Zealand’s concrete reinforcing steel and fencing wire. Harry talks me through the process. The billets are loaded into a gas-heated furnace, heated to 1100° C. Two hours later they emerge, white-hot, and slowly slide along a conveyor belt until they hit the first set of rollers. Put simply, these rollers squash and stretch the steel billets. As the billet passes through the mill’s rollers (depending on the product, it can go through as many as 27) it stretches and picks up speed, so by the end it’s going 100 metres a second. That eight-metre billet becomes a 6.7km long roll of 5.5mm steel wire.

Harry Corns: “When you’re working next to hot steel it just saps the energy out of you. You work for half an hour and then you have a spell for half an hour. You can’t do it continuously. It’s just too hard.”

Harry no longer works out on the floor. His job, these days, is to train the workers, inculcate into them the virtues of safety and efficiency. “In all my years in the rolling mill, I’ve picked up a lot,” he says. “I don’t kid myself that I’m still here cos I’m good looking! I’m just good at passing this knowledge on.”

Harry knows better than anyone how important it is to monitor and maintain these machines. Carelessness leads to cobbles, kinks and bends in the steel that render it useless. Moreover, they’re potentially dangerous: a bad cobble could even lead to a break-out where the steel’s spat out onto the floor at speed. Production would be slowed, targets not met.

Workers at the mill are constantly exhorted to work harder. A whiteboard in the middle of the mill lists the record shifts for each product. And a ‘redeye’ sign in the middle of mill reads: ATTENTION TO DETAIL IS THE KEY TO OUR ACHIEVING ZERO/250K. Harry explains: “This year we want to make 250,000 tonnes. We also want no serious injuries.”

Posters on the wall of the mill’s lino-and-formica smoko room urge workers to be careful. “Please come home safely tonight,” reads one. “No job is worth dying for.”

“It’s dangerous work,” admits Harry. The backs of his hands are scarred from his steel-catching days and two of his close friends back in Scotland were killed. “I saw one of them die,” he says, looking down at his coffee. “It was gruesome. A red-hot bar went straight through his chest. You see, the steel didn’t go where it was supposed to go — it deviated from its path. We don’t know what happened to the other guy. He had an injury to the back of his head from the hot steel — he was very badly burned.

The backs of Harry’s hands are scarred from his steel-catching days. Two of his close friends back in Scotland were killed. “I saw one of them die,” he says, looking down at his coffee. “It was gruesome. A red-hot bar went straight through his chest.”

“We’ve had some horrific injuries here,” he continues. In fact, five workers have been killed at Pacific Steel in the last six years. In 1998, maintenance fitter, Jim Kelly, 60, died after being crushed by a mechanical arm. Later that year a worker died of a heart attack after being overcome by carbon monoxide fumes, while another worker lost his arm in a roller in 1999.

Pacific Steel was fined heavily and the company lifted its game considerably; over the next two years, it cut lost-time accidents from 300 a year to 10 and won an ACC Safety award. But then in July 2002, Gareth George, 55, and Raymond Wilson, 56, were crushed to death when a two-tonne bundle of reinforcing steel fell from an overhead electro-magnetic gantry crane. Then a few months later, Danny Thompson, 47, died in hospital from head injuries after a fall.

“Gareth (George) was a very, very good friend of mine,” Harry says. “Welsh guy. Very popular. I was talking to him 20 minutes before it happened.”

He heard the news in the smoko room. “The manager stopped the mill and called everyone in here,” says Harry, his voice trailing away. A young man, hands in pocket, walks past us whistling. “In fact, that’s Gareth’s boy there,” says Harry through watery eyes. “He still works here at the mill.”

Harry finishes his coffee. Time to get back to work. We go back inside the rolling mill that is his second home, where another ‘redeye’ sign flashes up the performance for this shift: “Cobbles 4. Losses $2800. Lost time 52 mins. Last LTI 101 days.” There’ll be no records set today.

No matter. As Harry and I watch kilometres of orange-glowing steel wire spiral down on to a giant steel cone he says, “I’m proud of the achievements of this place. You go up to one entrance and see the piles of scrap going in. You go down the other end and see prime product coming out.”

The Construction Workers

Marty Nuhilagi lights a Rothmans Red, rubs his dreads through his hard-hat, and contemplates his next move. His gang of four workers, including two of Marty’s teenage nephews, are building a 15-storey steel fire escape down the side of the Scene apartments, an upmarket development off Britomart Lane.

It’s not a difficult job explains Marty, a stocky 31-year-old Nuiean New Zealander once likened to The Predator of alien warrior fame. He’s done dozens of stairwells in the 11 years he’s been working for the Avondale-based construction company, Enterprize Steel. Certainly it doesn’t compare to the SkyTower job; for two months Marty worked on an open platform, 250 metres in the air, bolting and welding together the “crown” underneath the SkyTower’s observation decks. He could never quite decide what was worse: being up there on a fine day and seeing how far you had to fall, or working on foggy winter mornings, where you couldn’t see your mates, just hear their voices in the clouds.

But even a simple job like this one, Marty tells me, can become a mission. The sub-contractor who built the concrete foundation base for the fire escape finished two weeks behind schedule, which means that Marty and his crew won’t be able to use the site’s massive fixed crane to lift the 200kg-plus steel landing-tread plates into place. Instead he’ll try and lift the plates — there are eight of them on a pallet — with a five-tonne truck-mounted crane. He needs to shift them just five metres to the base of the stairs and then he can attach a cable to each plate and winch them into place. But Marty can’t get the crane as close as he’d like: there’s a pile of dirt and broken concrete blocking the way, and when he extends the boom out as far it can go, the weight of the steel plates, now splintering the wooden pallet, starts to lift the crane off its blocks. He lowers the pallet to the ground. “Better safe than sorry,” he says. “Don’t wanna take any risks.”

He’s wise not to. Look around the city’s towers and buildings and you see monuments, memorials to the workers who built them. Last year 11 construction workers were killed and 368 seriously injured on building sites around the city. Remember these names. Mangere father of one, Te Rue Talaria Tearetoa, crushed to death on Parliament St when a retaining wall collapsed and a slab of concrete fell on him. Tipene Taite killed building the SkyCity casino. And Anthony Kiernan, steeplejack, who fell to his death from Auckland Town Hall clock tower in 1997.

“It’s a dangerous game,” says Marty. He’s never had a serious accident but he saw a mate fall six stories at a site in Penrose a couple of years ago. “Snapped both his legs here,” Marty says, pointing at his ankles. “Never yelled or anything. He was pretty strong fella — didn’t realise he’d broken his legs ’til he tried to stand up. He was in hospital for six months, off work for a year.”

The plates are also icily cold. “That’s the thing about steel,” Marty Nuhilagi says, rubbing and clapping his hands together. “In winter, everything you touch is cold, in summer, it’s too hot.”

Despite Marty’s best efforts, several of the plates are going to have be lifted, by hand, across to the bottom of the stairwell. Three of us lift a plate, which is about the size of a double bed and 8mm thick. The edges tear into your hands and as we clamber over the pile of dirt, the weight constantly shifts, leaving deep furrows in my fingers.

The plates are also icily cold. “That’s the thing about steel,” Marty says, rubbing and clapping his hands together. “In winter, everything you touch is cold, in summer, it’s too hot.”

Smoko time. I sit on an old nailbox and share a two-litre Coke with Leroy Katu, a shy, honey-skinned 18-year-old who likes to talk, though he’s so softly-spoken he’s hard to hear. He’s been working at Enterprize Steel now for seven months. “My Uncle Steve hooked me up with a job,” he says. Leroy’s usually paired up with his uncle, the man he calls his “teacher”. “He taught me how to stand up on beams when you’re high up,” he says. “Walk along them. My uncle can do stuff no one else can. Cos he’s got the body strength.”

Back up on the tenth floor, I see what Leroy means. He and his uncle, Steve Tipene, position a plate roughly in place. There’s some slag on the side so the plate won’t fit: Leroy whacks it off with a hammer. Then with a Podger’s Bar — a sort of mini-crowbar — they jimmy the plate into place so that they can line up the hole in the plate with the holes in the beam, then push a bolt into place. “You gotta fight the hole,” Leroy says.

But this particular hole is proving tough. The plate is slightly bent; it has probably spent too long in the galvanisers. In most instances, they’d be forced to cut another hole with a gas torch but Steve’s unusually strong wrists enables him to “rip the hole” with his pry bar, allowing Leroy to force a bolt in.

“Woah!” shouts Steve, doing a mock muscle-man pose.

“You know what the best part of the job is?” he asks rhetorically. “Seeing the progress at the end of the week. You drive home on Friday and there’s a building standing there… something a lot of men have put a lot of time into.”

I ask Steve if he’d like to live in one of these apartments he’s building. He laughs some more. “Nah, we just build them, mate.”

The Inorganic Rubbish Collector

First he lifts a double bed-base above his head and tosses it nonchalantly over the truck’s four-metre high-side. Then he slings a dryer, a washing machine, and a couple of car doors up over the side like he’s passing a ball. When he wrests a concrete post off a feckless journalist and throws it through the air like a javelin, I realise inorganic rubbish collector Lee Brown is probably be the strongest man I’ve seen.

“I call him Superman,” says Maryanna Matthew-Phillips, a 39-year-old Maori woman from Massey. “Things fall on him,” she says, “and they don’t even dent him.”

He taught her how to throw microwave ovens up on to the truck. “You have to hold it like this,” she says, an oven resting on her shoulder. “It’s a push not a throw. When you let go, you make the ‘umph’ sound. That’s very important. Lee taught me that. ‘Umph!’”

The admiration is shared. “Mary’s a good girl… my friend,” Lee says, hoisting aloft a Welsh dresser. “I like working with the Queen.”

Maryanna Matthew-Phillips: “How do you throw a microwave onto the truck? You hold it like this. Now, it’s a push not a throw. When you let go, you make the ‘umph’ sound. That’s very important. Lee taught me that. Umph!”

A 62-year-old Samoan with white hair and matching moustache, Lee has a reputation for being hard on his co-workers. “A lot of the young fullas don’t like working with me,” he says, “cos I no buggering around.” Neophyte palagis, he says, are lucky to last one day. Don’t eat enough taro he says. “Can’t hack it, fulla. Can’t hack it.”

“He gets quite frustrated with the younger guys who can’t keep up,” says Don Makea, branch manager of Onyx who manage Waitakere City’s kerbside waste collections. “He doesn’t realise his own strength probably.”

We watch as another washing machine is thrown into the air. “He’s a strong ox,” Don continues. “Got very good upper body strength. Last year at our Christmas function he started doing one-armed press-ups on the dance floor. Just kept pumping out sets of 20, 30 at a time.”

Lee wanders over to say gidday to the “Boss”. “Just take a look at the arms on him,” Don laughs. “Geez, he’s like Pop-eye.”

Waitakere City is divided into 48 inorganic rubbish collection zones, and the rubbish is collected by the contracting company Onyx. Onyx’s two inorganic trucks must clear one zone a week; Lee, having usually scared off his co-workers, has to clear half the city’s inorganic rubbish on his own.

They’re clearing Kelston this week. “It’s a heavy area,” Don tells me. “Usually the older the area, the more the crap.”

There’s certainly a lot of junk down Aotea Street, opposite Kelston Girls’ High School: busted prams, burnt-out toasters, bent slides, broken mirrors, rusted bikes, mouldering carpet, disintegrating chairs, dead Teds, Irvin Shaw’s under-rated novel Beggarman, Thief, a NZ Pocket Oxford Dictionary shorn of its cover; and numerous ab-sculpting machines bought with the best of intentions.

“Just chuck the whole lot on,” says Maryanna, “except for tyres, paint, batteries, oil, and gas bottles. Oh, and no organic garden stuff.”

Most of the piles have been picked over several times, which makes Lee and Maryanna’s job more difficult. Rubbish is strewn everywhere: Lee throws the bigger pieces on to the truck first and then corrals the scraps — brittle plastic shards, bits of wood, smashed lamps — into a box, throwing this on last.

Aside from making a mess, the scavengers also ensure there’s little left to loot. While the collectors aren’t meant to take anything, they do bend the rules very slightly: last week Maryanna gave her delighted nephew a toy machine gun. And she puts stuff aside for “the children: My entire street has got a ball for their kids.” Lee admits to purloining an oilskin fishing jacket and, today, I snaffle a reversible navy and orange bomber jacket.

I try it on for size and it obviously suits me because now a Maori woman in her thirties runs out of her house and hands me a shopping bag. Inside is a bottle of L&P, three cups, a bag of chicken chips and two steak pies.

We take a break, use a fridge/freezer lying on its side as a table. A couple of minutes later, the woman runs back out with a cut sandwich in gladwrap. “Sorry, they only had two pies left at the dairy,” she says.

“Good people here,” says Lee, smiling. “Very kind people in Kelston.”

Lee finishes his pie in three bites and then says it’s time for us to get back to work. He tears the doors of the fridge/freezer — makes it easier to handle, he says — and then, tattooed thighs straining, lifts the fridge/freezer above his head and forces over the side of the truck. “Full load now,” he beams. “Now we go to the tip.”

Lee Brown: “A lot of the young fullas don’t like working with me cos I no buggering around.” Neophyte palagis, he says, are lucky to last one day. Don’t eat enough taro he says. “Can’t hack it, fulla. Can’t hack it.”

It’s a 15-minute drive to the Waitakere City transfer station at the bottom of Lincoln Road. On a good day, they should manage four or five trips, though Lee says he once managed eight loads, two-and-a-half tonnes at a time, on his own. “No one can beat me!” he boasts.

He rolls a cigarette and tells me a little bit about his life. Born in Apia, the sixteenth of 17 children, Lee came out to New Zealand, by himself, when he was 15. “There were hardly any island people then,” he says. “You might see one a year.” He worked for Watercare for 31 years until he was made redundant in 1991.

He has always worked hard he says. “All my life — work, work, work,” he says. “Have to provide for my family.” He has five children and his two youngest boys are still at school here in west Auckland. It seems physical strength runs in the family: Lee’s 16-year-old son, who has size-15 feet, is always doing weights, Lee tells me, and keeps challenging the old man to arm wrestles. The boy never wins. “No one beats me!” Lee says.

He’s a proud man, proud of his family, proud of what he does. “It’s very hard work,” he says. “Not an easy game.”

This story was first featured in Metro magazine in 2006. The following year I was a finalist at both the Qantas Media Awards and Feature Writer of the Year at the MPA Awards. ‘Working Class Heroes’ was part of my portfolio.