Sad to see that one of TRM’s most colourful inmates has passed on. He leaves many special memories on the Tongariro River.
Many of TRM’s more mature anglers remember his lime green XJ6 hidden out of public view in the studio carport next to the fish cleaning station. That was many years ago before he built his own house further along Taupahi Road. They have some intriguing tales to tell – most of which we cannot repeat. They confirm their long close association with TRM and the Tongariro River enjoyed by so many but now their numbers are sadly dwindling.
We do have one amusing tale of his early involvement with editing TRM’s “mockumentary” plot – TONGARIRO Skulduggery – which required a complete rewrite at the time. This shall be posted on TRM at a later date.
In the meantime as TRM’s blogs had mentioned him many times, the following will bring back many memories… You might need a strong cup of tea to absorb it all…
Sir Bob’s Tongariro tales
After noticing Sir Bob still featuring on TV1 prime time on 23 June after all these years, most famous for bopping a TV journalist on the Tongariro rive rin 1985, TRM just have to repeat previous reports featuring him:
Recently TRM was trying to record all the most famous anglers on the Tongariro River. These included all manner of “celebrities” (?) from the Queen Mother to the Queen to her Son Charles to American President to Zane Grey to the original Bob Jones of Tokaanu Pub fame over 100 years ago. And you can guess who won – Sir Bob. He did more for the promotion of trout fishing on the Tongariro River in about 1985 than all the others combined. How? By bopping the nosey rude TV journalist. TRM’s version of the story is as follows:
Without doubt the most well known Tongariro trout angler in recent years is the successful property magnate, Bob Jones (Now Sir Robert Jones). Before he built his own home on Taupahi Road he was a regular “inmate” at TRM. He earned his fame (or notoriety?) in a most unusual but more memorable manner.
In his successful attempt to unseat the existing Prime Minister in July 1985, Bob Jones formed his own party. Then after splitting the vote during the election, he announced to the astonished nation that the third most popular party was taking an eighteen month recess. Anxiously seeking comment, TVNZ chartered a helicopter to track down Jones who was seeking privacy and tranquility fishing in the remote parts of the lower Tongariro River. After searching his property from the air they followed the course of the river down towards the delta where he was identified wading in the river. After circling him they landed close to where he was casting and completely ruined the peace and quiet that Bob Jones was seeking.
This was a memorable moment in Turangi’s short history. Bob Jones established his popularity and notoriety amongst anglers forever with his reaction. Before the TV journalist could interview him he was filmed charging out of the bushes and after throwing his rod aside he attacked and punched the TV interviewer/journalist followed by the cameraman also being thumped for good measure. Great footage.
Naturally, it was the top of the news on the TV that night. The punch-up with a blood-spattered journalist suffering a broken nose trying to report back was repeated many times afterwards. Kiwis love a good stoush. Eventually, the matter ended up in Court where Bob Jones was fined $1,000 for assault. His fame increased forever among Tongariro anglers and the public when he asked the Magistrate if he paid $2,000, could he punch him again?
Priceless!
From TRM library of reports:
NZ’s version of Donald Trump?…
Continuing the series of anglers own reports on the Tongariro River, but with a ‘twist’ to enhance your Easter Sunday reading enjoyment…
TRM has taken this opportunity to introduce Bob Jones (particularly for Australian readers who may be unaware of his contribution to Tongariro angling folk lore) as he is one of the enduring controversial characters who made more headlines for the Tongariro River than most other TRM inmates combined. As such he deserves his own special report, but as he has never stayed at TRM he was not asked…
Nevertheless TRM acknowledge his considerable contribution to the colourful history of the river keeping many anglers entertained and amused for the last 30 years – in particular from the following incident:
In July 1985 New Zealand Party leader Bob Jones and president Malcolm McDonald surprised many by announcing the nation’s then-third most popular party was taking an 18 month recess. TVNZ went searching for comment, and after chartering a helicopter, found Jones fishing on the Tongariro Delta, near Turangi.
Jones was not amused; he infamously punched reporter Rod Vaughan, arguing later he would fight any charges in court, since the journalists had subjected him to intolerable harassment.
When fined $1000, Jones asked the judge if he paid $2000, could he please do it again?
So how could SWMBO not include him in these stories on the Tongariro…?!!!
He still features regularly. In last week’s ‘Herald on Sunday’ – in the editorial & comment page 38 – their columnist Rodney Hide wrote:
“New Zealanders shouldn’t struggle to understand the phenomenon that is Donald Trump etc…. – think Bob Jones.” He goes on to say, “Jones is a successful and flamboyant businessman. He entered the 1984 election with his freshly hatched New Zealand Party to win 12 percent of the votes. He came from nowhere, won no seats, defeated National and propelled Labour into office, which proceeded to implement his New Zealand Party’s free market policies.”
And to keep TRM’s readers informed (?) is Jones’ opinion on the Government’s current water claim?…………
……….. For example, the Mighty River Power company’s principal assets are eight hydro electric generators on the Waikato River. In 1840, the river provided eels and transport for Maori villagers in the vicinity. But today, like everyone else, Maori buy their food from supermarkets and have substituted cars for canoes. To argue that the river was vested to them in 1840 and claim water usage money is simply opportunistic twisting of the original objective. If that proposition had validity, why is it only now being raised? Why have they not claimed against the power company hitherto?
The answer is blackmail, specifically that via the threat of delay through litigation of the Government’s sale plans, this action could secure taxpayer millions in yet another bogus settlement.
His solution to the constant blackmail?
The Waitangi Treaty is redundant. It need not be formally annulled but like many other outdated laws, be simply ignored as a historic relic. Claims such as illicit land seizures can be dealt with by the courts.
(Photo on right of Bob Jones cautiously navigating across Veras Pool below Tongariro Lodge)
For TRM’s Australian fishos we add an appendix – an obituary from Metro Magazine – as the opening paragraph refers to trout fishing on the Tongariro…
First published in Metro, November 2013.
Illustration by Daron Parton.
Sir Robert Jones, the world’s oldest man, is dead. He was 194.
A shy fellow, Jones was happiest alone in the Tongariro River tickling trout, emerging from time to time to present his cherished beliefs about sunglasses, grey shoes, cellphones and unattractive feminists.
For more than a century and a half he wrote a column for the FoxNZ Herald; a record bested only by the fictional “Shelley Bridgeman” character.
Born middle-aged, Jones was teased at school for wearing a smoking jacket and pipe, but the taunts fell away as his capacity for a left hook developed. By the age of 17 he had read every book ever written — twice — and owned 5700 investment properties.
Sunning himself in the warm glow of his success, he resolved to spend the remaining years of his life dabbling in property and sharing his wisdom with his fellow man. Women were also welcome to listen.
He became a talkback host, a columnist, an author, a commentator, a knight of the realm, a brawler with TV reporters.
Decades came, decades went. Politicians came, politicians went. New Zealand, once prosperous, grew poor. Foot and mouth disease liquidated the country’s 200 million dairy cows.
Through it all, one constant remained: Sir Bob Jones and his opinions on sunglasses, grey shoes, cellphones and unattractive feminists. His popularity never ebbed. For every old curmudgeon who breathed his last in a retirement home, another dudebro would pick up a newspaper for the first time and chuckle at Jones’ dyspeptic musings.
Nothing, it seemed, would ever change. But in Jones’ 12th decade it did, a little. He decided his true calling was the law.
The courtroom had long been his second home — a boxing ring of a softer kind — and he enjoyed the company of barristers. He admired their arrogance. He admired their bravado. He admired their talent for going about their business fortified by wine.
By the time he was 142 he was sitting in the Wellington High Court.
Although he had to be carried to and from the courthouse in a litter, and a factotum was required to lift his papers and hold his hand steady for signatures, his pronouncements from the bench were invariably those of a much older man, as they had ever been.
Legal scholars called his florid and discursive judgments the best sport since Lord Denning. “Ten days ago,” one judgment began, “the sky fell in Auckland, judging by the hysterical over-the-top reaction.”
Radio hosts stood by each morning to find out “who Bob’s going to stick it to today”.
“You’re not some kind of feminist girl are you?” he would ask witnesses, “because you sound like a very silly one.”
“Life is full of risks, which is why we buy insurance, wear seat belts, lock our doors, don’t holiday in Somalia or, as plainly needs to be said, walk alone through dark parks at night,” he would invariably remind assault victims.
His Friday afternoon sentencing sessions became a Wellington tradition. Spectators would eat popcorn as Sir Robert rasped: “You will now reside at our expense in prison for 70 years where hopefully some awful fate will befall you. Take his cellphone away, but let him keep his grey shoelaces.”
Sir Robert will be buried at his holiday home on Mars.
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The news caption for photo on right reads “Wealthy property speculator and developer, Bob Jones, responds to an anti-tour demonstrator before starring in a National Party fund-raising night.
Last, nothing at all to do with fishing the Tongariro but just to amuse you, (?) a NZ Herald article.
As wage parity is in the news at the moment with SWMBO, Jones’ comments on women’s rights etc. are timely?
Bob Jones: Female directorships – careful what you wish for
Tuesday Apr 8, 2014
In the early 1960s, to widespread disbelief, a woman lawyer hung out her shingle in Lower Hutt. I recall with colleagues gazing awestruck at this madness. Who would possibly use her? We asked. “I will,” promptly asserted an industrial building investor mate, noted for his extreme eccentricity, and so he did, but no one else followed and she soon vanished.
Women have come a long way since New Zealand, rated last month by the Economist in the top five nations in its glass ceiling index. Prime ministers, Cabinet ministers, the chief justice, judges, the Ombudsman, government departmental heads, bishops, boxers and bulldozer drivers, mayors, company CEOs and entrepreneurs, doctors, editors, farmers, commercial pilots, governors-general, soldiers, ambassadors, professors; there’s no field where they don’t play an equal part and no one notices gender any more.
Moreover, this is particularly praiseworthy given women’s innate irrationality handicap, such as driving in the right-hand lane or pushing golf carts before them, despite their being designed for pulling.
And as for law, women now outnumber male graduates and are also progressing splendidly in equality terms with law’s flipside, namely, crime.
Despite some recent strong performances they still lag behind men on the murdering front but make them mere pikers in the theft as a servant stakes. Scarcely a week passes without another mid-40s divorcee company manager or accountant before the courts, having nicked a few million from her employer.
All of this has been achieved in a relatively short time. Half a century ago, women were married at about 20, thereafter fulfilling their prescribed role as mothers and home-makers. Two decades later, with the children gone, they often devolved into dullard appendages to their husbands.
Here’s an example. Back then my girlfriend and I (she was the only female I ever saw fishing) would walk to the Tongariro River’s large Major Jones pool parking lot, cross the swing bridge and head upriver seeking pools to ourselves. In the parking lot would be up to a dozen cars containing middle-aged and older wives of the anglers working the Major Jones pool out of sight down the river.
There they sat, immobile, not reading, not talking, instead just staring blankly ahead, awaiting their husbands’ return, often as much as eight hours later. We called them the clumps. Such non-participating lethargy is inconceivable today.
My initial puzzlement about women’s lib after it arose in the 1960s, abruptly ended when I read Frank Sargeson’s 1969 novel The Joy of the Worm, which awoke me to women’s plight, epitomised by those Tongariro clumps.
Now feminists in Britain, Australia and New Zealand are again on the warpath, agitating to overcome what they describe as the last male bastion, namely public company directorships. They should think again, for it’s a most ignoble and parasitical ambition.
The importance of public companies is grossly exaggerated, as they comprise only a small part of the economy. Remove the top five and the remainder are insignificant in the overall scheme of things.
Public company boards of directors are required by law, but for all their prescribed roles of policy-setting and watchdog shareholder protection, history repeatedly shows they’re utterly ineffectual. So, too, with the many dozens of government boards, which merely provide sinecures for political mates. Having been on both public and government boards I know what a total waste of time they are and now won’t have a bar of them.
The reality is that executives run companies and make policy decisions and the directors are simply Christmas tree decorations. “A Lord on the Board”, sneered the British entrepreneur Tiny Rowlands decades back, mocking the image value of public company boards, but nothing has changed since.
In his 1980s heyday, Ron Brierley controlled dozens of public company boards here and abroad. He refused to pay non-executive outside directors, first because they contributed absolutely nothing and second, because there was always a queue of useless public figure sad-sacks, the male equivalents of yesteryear’s Tongariro clumps, incapable of ever starting a business themselves, who viewed directorships as prestigious – God only knows why.
In recent years, some honest men of good repute who accepted finance company directorship baubles found themselves facing criminal trials because of an ill-considered law, namely strict liability.
Nevertheless, in prostituting themselves through accepting these free-ride pretend roles, they in part deserved their fate.
During one of those trials, at day’s end, the prosecuting QC, a lessee in my building, turned up and flopped into an armchair muttering his disbelief. The following exchange had occurred. “You accepted the chairmanship of a company engaged in property development finance?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know anything about property development?”
“No.”
Women should think again about directorships, for far from trailing men, it’s greatly to their credit that so few are debasing themselves in this way.
(The above comments on Bob Jones are a reminder that in terms of publicity, (good or bad?) he has arguably achieved as much promotion for the Tongariro as all the other inmates combined. As such, he deserves his own TRM opinion below… As SWMBO suggested, how could we not include him? Her advice to inmates – when reading this, keep your tongue planted securely in your cheek.)
Colonialism Nonsense
Try and imagine the carry-on in Britain if its government announced special privileges for the original Anglo-Saxon and Celt citizens.
Nearly 40% of today’s Brits are of non-traditional ethnicity. Take those of Indian ethnicity. They have the highest educational standards of all Britain’s diverse ethnicities. They also have the highest incomes and are the least likely to be in prison. The current cabinet is dominated by Indian ethnics, many of four generations back and most pundits are picking the current, (Indian ethnic) Chancellor as Boris’s successor.
But here in New Zealand the government’s posture, if in charge in Britain, would be that you citizens of Indian ethnicity, must step back and allow special privileges to the poor suffering original Anglo-Saxon and Celt inhabitants.
That is a parallel of what is happening here in New Zealand with maoridom.
We’re told maoridom is bearing the awful toll of colonialism, two centuries back.
I’m of Welsh and English stock and have also suffered this. My ancestors had to endure the bloody Roman invasion. Just as we were finally getting over that, bugger me if we then had bloody Vikings turn up and run all over us. My how we suffered from post-colonial stress but with the passing of time we were beginning to stand on our feet when in came the bloody Saxons. My God, the pain. How we lashed out at our wives and children as a result. But with no other option we hung on in and were just starting to gain some confidence when in 1066, the bloody French bowled up and it started all over again. And so it went. The agony of this constant post-colonial stress was unbearable.
So you will understand why maori beat up their wives and children, dominate prison statistics and every other negative measure. It’s all down to colonialism. Only by giving them special privileges will we solve the problem, or so the government asserts.
Being well meaning is no excuse for the racial division the government is promoting with its endless excuses for maori failure and maori privilege.
One of my best mates is maori. He endured the standard jailed father, the batterings and all the baggage that goes with it. Add to that dyslexia and gullibility leading to a short prison sentence but he was blessed with a typically strong willed maori mother’s influence, urging him to forgo excuses and look ahead and not backwards. He’s become a huge success as a human being and wants no truck with excuses. He’s self-employed and hugely liked by all and sundry as a terrific human being. Further, to his great credit, he scorns maori privilege.
I have maori children, no surprise there as I have them by a rich variety of races. They all get on with their lives and couldn’t give a stuff about their ancestry. It’s 100% irrelevant. Not only that but as most of them are girls, they’re all naturally stark raving mad but still overcome that handicap without proffering bogus excuses.
Meaning well is no excuse for causing harm. The government is causing enormous divisive damage to our social fabric by catering to the dying Stuff’s type maori wonderful nonsense. It will be a key reason they’re run out of office in two years time.