Peter Wilson

Born in 1940 and growing up in the post-war years the attributes of persistence, honesty and integrity and the importance of caring for those around you were the fundamental building blocks of life. ;After attending a country school and the small newly established High School at Waitara he was involved in a series of moves through a Government office, the office of a private company and farming before attending Palmerston North Teachers College in 1960. After just over five years in the teaching profession he married and changed career going dairy farming for the next forty years.; During this time both Peter and his wife spent many years leading Christian Youth work and were involved with the local school especially when it came to the school jubilees and writing of the school’s history. Poring over old family diaries in the evenings became an absorbing occupation, at times realising at some unearthly hour of the night that it was 1970 not 1870 and there were cows to milk in the morning.; Thus a fascination with the history of the early settlement and their ancestor’s lives began. This quickly widened to the whole district and all the families that he could trace. There are some significant pa sites in the districts that have been written about and some stories of the early Maori have been recorded. The first Europeans in the district were mostly soldiers discharged from the Military and in some cases were family members.; On retirement from active farming he spent about fifteen years as a First Responder for St John Ambulance service as well as pursuing his hobby that was almost becoming a full time occupation of gathering and writing the stories of the people in the districts in which he lived.; This culminated in the publishing of several small booklets for the school jubilees and the publication of a major work on the district he grew up and taught in Lepperton in 2012 which was reprinted as a 2nd edition in 2020; “Even the Dogs Have Forgotten to Bark”.