Ruatoria

So a lot of that money has gone into community organisations that that can find their way to the kids, get the kids involved and being able to strip out a lot of that cost that was sort of barriers for them before maybe and participating.

How difficult is it, Mark, talking to Mark Mitchell, our current Minister of Sport and Recreation, how difficult is it, I'm talking about population drift or population mass, to give an Auckland Grammar School kid the same opportunity as an Inglewood kid or a Ruatoria kid because Auckland kids have access to a far range of facilities where someone in Manaia and Taranaki, they may have one sports field, no indoor courts.

How do we address all of that?

We've got great sporting stories throughout our country's history as a nation of some of our best sports people coming out of the back blocks of the East Coast playing on the local sports fields.

And then after that, was lucky enough to have four season heartland games kind of all across the northern region territory, I guess you could say.

So a nice trip down to Ruatoria for the first time.

And where did we go? Up to Whitianga, across to Taupo.

thames so yes bit of fun um and then lucky enough to ar for a couple of two npc games at home which are both cracking games when steam has just lost to manoa too and we beat north harbour well kurt's technically last game not that he played but um last one being in the squad i guess so um yeah cracking season really um i've ripped footy for for um i guess the bay bay team and um yeah real enjoyable couple of months how about you mate

Barb Edmonds said she wanted to come and visit the northern end of the electorate.

So I took her all the way up to Ruatoria.

So she drove about two hours of State Highway 35 because I want to see, you know, people in our party, you know, she...

Eventually, she's going to be the Minister of Finance.

Yeah.

Isn't that Ruatoria, not Gisborne?

Oh, sorry, Ruatoria.

Ruatoria, yeah, you're right, you're right.

That's where I want to get up to.

It looks like a good stadium.

I don't know if the Wellington Orcas have trademarked the Orcas name and the logo.

I don't know.

Yeah.

I'm going to do a shout out to my bro, Frank Cooper, who was from Ruatoria.

He gets out of the bus and all he's got is a pack and save bag, one pair of undies and a toothbrush.

I said to him, hey bro, would you like me to help you with your bags? And he responded by saying, I thought they give you clothes here.

From 1987, Herbs and the title track to their fourth album, Sensitive to a Smile.

The video for that, from memory, was shot in Ruatoria, which was a town under a bit of controversy at the time because there'd been all these firebombings going on there, and it was shot by Lee Tamahori, who's the director of Once Were Warriors, and went on to direct one of the James Bond movies.

Factoids for you.

Radio Without Pictures on Radio Southland has been featuring artists from both sides of the Tasman for part six of my feature on 100 Music Icons from the '80s.