You’d think we were on Alcatraz, watching Ray Simpkin break stones, or carry a backpack of shingle up the hill, but for the 82 year old man it’s called retirement. “Well, it keeps me fit. I am not one to just sit around.”

Listening to Ray tell stories from his travels, it very soon becomes clear that he is not a man to just sit around. The stories take us around the globe several times, visiting North and South America, crossing Africa from North to South, and East to West and stopping of in Europe along the way.

And all that was just looking for tractor parts. “Back in 1960 I had the opportunity to buy New Zealand’s first imported cherry picker.  We became specialists in that kind of equipment for 26 years. I used to train and certify operators. And it allowed me to often go overseas in the winter, looking for suppliers, following up a lead, visiting somebody I met along the way or just taking a look around, after I got my business done in the capital.” As a Gideon International member, he had acquaintances from New Orleans to Cameroon and made many more along the way.

“Living on Great Barrier Island takes me back to my childhood. We grew up a farm in a Brethren community without electricity and running water. - I’m a country boy. I feel at home living with a wood stove.”

Although Ray has been a widower for 21 years and his children remain in Auckland, he has not become a recluse and he is often seen at the airfield going back to town. There are old friends that need looking after, and Ray is always ready for them. That readiness to offer assistance, after all, is what brought him first to Great Barrier Island, when he wanted to help out an old friend.

Andy Hulme smiled. ‘I have always been trading, always noticing where people are looking for something that I can find for them. I remember a long time ago when I was a hunter in the South Island earning money supplying venison to Queenstown restaurants and fresh meat to the Wellington Zoo. When I noticed the demand that existed by tourists for mounted trophies, I got a taxidermist to prepare the heads and skins, and sold them myself.‘ He laughed. ‘At least these days I trade in less spectacular goods.’

These days that involves looking for bargains on the internet at trading sites in the US and Europe, New Zealand and ‘pretty much anywhere else in the world.’ Andy has effectively been at forefront of internet trading boom since before trading online became as popular as it is now. ‘It all started when I managed to find some specialized medical equipment that Sarah needed, much cheaper on the Internet than we could have obtained it otherwise.’

In many cases he ends up dealing in goods that never actually arrive in New Zealand, having found purchasers in another country. ‘My online reputation is so good these days that purchasers rather deal with me than go looking for hard to find bargains outside their own country.’ What it takes for this profession is to know where to find products at a good price and where to advertise them. In this way, for example, he has bought VHF radios in the US and resold them in the UK. ‘Simple really.’

‘Yeah, it could be a viable alternative livelihood instead of building. But I suppose it will have to end when the retail market, supported by more extended state control, adjusts to stop customers from bypassing established retail channels and their middlemen.”

And building is really Andy’s trade. Thirty years in the trade has seen him build, and not necessarily in that order, houses and commercial facilities around Christchurch and on spectacular sites in the Marlborough Sounds, London and even on remote Pitt Island in the Chathams. Looking for a holiday home, the cottage restoration project in the French province of Normandy, of course also became a small business sideline supplying local builders with imports from Spain.

Along the way Andy met Sarah when she was working as a doctor in London. And that is how he ended up on Great Barrier Island. When following a brief spell as locum substitute a few years earlier, a full-time post with the team at the Claris health centre became available in 2003, the two did not hesitate to leave Chistchurch behind and become part of the Barrier Folks.