NOTED AUTHOR ON NEW ZEALAND FARMING AND COUNTRY LIFE REMEMBERED

Ian F. Grant recalls his old friend.

David Yerex, who died, in his 81st year, at Masterton Hospital last Wednesday, will be remembered as the country’s pre-eminent author of books on farming and country
life.
He was, of course, many other things as well. He was a reporter on Wellington’s Evening Post and The Listener, a syndicated agricultural writer in Britain, editor of the NZ Journal
of Agriculture, Director of Information at the Dairy Board, frontman on TV’s ‘Country Calendar’ and other programmes, and writer of radio plays.

David Yerex also headed his own successful PR company, began the farm holidays concept, and set up the NZ Guild of Agricultural Journalists.
Perhaps most significant, and certainly most enduring, were the 22 books he wrote – most
of them on farming topics and rural living. He wrote the definitive book on deer farming, Deer: The New Zealand Story and the first book on smallfarming in New Zealand, The Best of Both Worlds.

It was my pleasure to work with David on the smallfarming book in 1988 and most of his subsequent ones. I suppose I became particularly aware of the two rather contradictory passions in David’s life while editing the last book he wrote, his memoir Word Imperfect. There was the passion for words and writing. But there was an equal passion for the world outside, away from his desk – for fishing, tramping, camping out, rafting, for conservation and preserving native bush..

My wife Diane and I had, smallfarming aside, much more to do with David’s writing life.
As an editor and publisher you get to know someone very well – their enthusiasms, ambitions, insecurities. Writers are notoriously insecure about their writing and David more so than most despite his success, skill and talent.

It was entirely fitting that David’s last book was his memoir, launched last October. David was a compulsive even obsessive writer. He was not at peace, the world was not spinning on its right axis, if he was not writing something. But he was more than a little embarrassed writing about himself. He came up with several rather convoluted approaches to writing something autobiographical that wasn’t about himself at all. It took some time to convince him that his life and story was sufficiently interesting and significant to start at the beginning and work through the 80 eventual years.

David is survived by his wife Pauline, and their children Sue and Steve and three grandsons. A celebration of David’s life is being held held at the Carterton Memorial Club today, Tuesday 4 March.

And from fellow writer and journalist Gordon McLauchlan:

About forty years ago, I first met David and we had a great deal to do with each other for a couple of years until our paths diverged. I went to Auckland and he to the Wairarapa. But in that short time I came not only to like him a lot but to admire him; so over the years, haphazardly I confess, we kept in touch.
Dave was a doer. He did things. If anything new happened in the world of his primary focus -- that is farming or country life of any sort -- he got involved. And before long he knew as much as any expert and wrote a book about it. He wrote a lot of books about a lot of things.
And that’s because he was, above all other things, a writer. He was lost without having something to write, just as I am, because it’s what we’ve done since we were kids. I have long been convinced his best work never received the kudos it deserved. His style was direct, relaxed and fluent, and that’s the writing that looks as though it’s so easy but -- as all of us in the business know -- is very hard to pull off.

Mervyn Cull, for many years respected as one of the New Zealand Herald’s finest staff writers, now retired and living in Northland, phoned me two weeks ago for Dave’s phone number. He’d borrowed Word Imperfect from the Kaikohe library and wanted to tell him how much he enjoyed it, and how much he admired it. And I believe he did call.

I admired it too. So why wasn’t David more widely respected as a writer? Well, probably because he was not in the mainstream urban literary clique, members of which review each other’s books and award each other prizes.
But what he did earn was the unstinted admiration of many of us who have worked for more than half a century as journalists and know the realities of professional writing. We know a good one when we see one. I was pretty chuffed when Dave sent me a copy of Word Imperfect. On the title page, he’d written: “To Gordie. From one journo to another.” I was very chuffed by that.
I didn’t see a lot of Dave in recent years but I’ll miss him both as a bloke and a fellow practitioner.