Moira married Harold 'Jack' Ammon in 1948, their three sons were Mark, Don and Carl.
Moira Ammon died on July 15 at Hillview, days before her 96th birthday.
The Te Kūiti writer, historian and storyteller loved fast cars and drove a Triumph GT6 – and nieces and grand-nieces remembered her dyeing her hair purple and loving miniskirts and knee-high boots.
She could skin and butcher a deer, had encyclopaedic knowledge of digger parts and was “parts man and valve grinder” to the family contracting business.
Hers was a life of tractors, Government work and logging – clearing bush mainly for Māori Affairs and the Lands and Survey departments with husband Jack, and three sons including former Te Kūiti mayor Mark Ammon.
The story starts during the gold rush.
After mining in the South Island, Moira’s New Zealand born grandfather Joseph Dollimore and Australian wife Annie were balloted a farm at Āria in the early 1900s, reached by the Mōkau river, a coach to Piopio, then a long walk.
Their daughter Grace married James McArthur and moved to Wellington where Moira was born in1928. They separated, and Grace came to Arohena, 40km from Te Awamutu where Annie then lived. Only child Moira grew up among her cousins.
She attended Hamilton’s Sacred Heart for secondary schooling and spent World War II enjoying life on stepfather Charles ‘Steve’ Stevenson’s farm, mainly dairy but also sheep & beef.
There, she met 25-year-old bulldozer driver Harold John “Jack” Ammon; they married in 1948 when she was 19 and had three boys – Mark, Don and Carl.
As well as parts expert, Moira was camp cook and lunch courier, driving a Land Rover over rough country.
“Our houses were tractor drivers’ camps, just huts joined together, with no electricity and a wood stove.
“We’d clear 1400 acres in one summer,” Mark remembered. “It would be six to eight months from Manuka to grass.”
They worked across the central North Island including Maungatautari, Tīroa, Benneydale, Taupō and the Aotearoa block, near Arohena.
Her boys loved Moira’s stories, songs and sense of fun: “She still did things that kids do, like cooking wild apples over a fire.”
Their diet included wild venison and pork, and Jack once shot a deer late in the evening.
“It was just on sunset, too dark to do anything. We came back the next day and Mum butchered it herself.”
Later in life, Moira had time for writing.
She published a poetry book about the Coromandel, and articles like, “To Arohena from Chunuk Bair,” published online by the Auckland war memorial museum, about stepfather Steve.
Visceral detail was her talent:
“Sometimes, if Tom Kelly’s truck was home a bit early from Te Awamutu, he crammed us all on to the canvas covered deck, among empty cream cans and groceries, barbed wire, beer crates and batteries, and sometimes even a coffin, and gave us a ride,” she wrote.
She remembered a pet sow following her everywhere.
“It was very embarrassing as I was almost 15 and didn’t want to be seen in public walking with a pig.”
Later, Jack and Moira worked at Kaiaua on the Hauraki Gulf, where he bulldozed for mineral companies, and lived at Te Puru north of Thames.
Moira “wrote more, painted, helped Dad, and fossicked for old bottles in the abandoned Thames goldfields,” Mark recalled.
After Jack died in 2014, she moved to Te Kūiti for the friendly community.
On her 90th birthday, Moira told Waitomo News that her long life wasn’t explained by hard work, but by the love of humanity.
“People are what interests me.”
But also, she advised that we “don’t control other people’s lives” they are theirs, to do what they want with.
After her death, she requested her ashes be spread in the bush and left a poem for family and friends – reflecting her view of the connections between all beings.
“You’ll find me still, in moss a fern a tree,” she wrote. “Know I am with you in another guise.”
