Country Calendar Director’s Pick, TVNZ. DVD approx 183 minutes. ISBN 978-1-908397-32-4. Now available from Old Pond at £17.95 inc. VAT.
Originally released by TVNZ in 2010.
For over 45 years TVNZ’s Country Calendar has brought the best of New Zealand’s farming and countryside to the screen: over two thousand programmes. In 2010 veteran presenter Frank Torley was asked to select his twelve favourites. This is the result – three hours ranging all over the country from 1974 to the present.
We know New Zealand is one of the most beautiful countries in the world, and this selection contains some wonderful filming. There are plenty of cattle, sheep, dogs and horses on view, as well as items on deer, land management, wine-growing and bee-keeping. But it is the people you will remember, outdoors men and women full of energy and enterprise from the couple producing wine with no experience to the fifteen-year-olds running 3,500 up-country acres.
The episode shown are:Class 8 Country: restoration of over-grazed land
Deer Capture: 1970s capture of wild stock for farming
Snow Raking: livestock rescue in high-country snowstorm
Sweat, Steam and the Straw-Walloper: steam thrashing and horse-drawn binder
Orange Roughy: follows research into stocks of the fish species
Blind Bee Farmer: Bryce Hooton’s new enterprise after accidental blinding
Twins: fifteen-year-olds with big-station responsibility
Wild Cattle McGarrie: an exciting muster along the coastline and into the sea
Branches Station: an autumn muster of cattle and sheep in high country
Wild Cattle: helicopter round-up
Vines on the Hill: how to succeed in wine-producing with no experience
Dunstan Downs: an artist inspired by hard-country Merino work.
There is a catch-up on each story and, where available, there are captions for the hearing impaired.
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