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Flowering manuka and kanuka cover the
hillside of Moewai Farm outside Whitianga.
Owner Nicholas Murray-Leslie harvesting
freshly pruned manuka branches.
Bee hives at the ready for the blossoming of
manuka trees and production of the honey.
25 years distilling New Zealand’s manuka and kanuka oils
NZ COROMANDEL MOUNTAINS
TEA TREE OIL
Coromandel ‘Oil’ Man ‘Talks Story’
T
he Coromandel never ceases to surprise
and delight, not only for its stunning natural
beauty and magnificent vistas around every
corner, but also for the variety of entrepreneurial
enterprises tucked unassumingly away in the
landscape.
At Moewai Farm, located on a picturesque
hillside just outside of Whitianga, you will find
one such enterprise utilising our native tea trees
(manuka and kanuka) which grow abundantly
in natural groves on the property, for the
production of organic tea-tree oil.
The antibacterial and healing properties of
manuka honey are well known, but tea-tree
oil, extracted from the leaves of both kanuka
(
Kunzea ericoides
) and manuka (
Leptospermum
scoparium
) trees, also has potent therapeutic
properties: antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory and
pain relief properties. Apparently, their healing
properties have been long known to the Maori.
This relatively small scale home-grown industry
was pioneered 25 or so years ago by Nicholas
Murray-Leslie, with expert contributions from
neighbour Professor Dick Mertz (formerly of
the DSIR) and Dr Cedric Hassall (FRS), who
hailed from “just up the 309”. The business
grew into a commercial operation trading as
NZ Coromandel Mountains Tea Tree Oil
Company
, and was awarded BioGro (organic
standards) certification in 1998.
Today the product is mainly sold domestically,
as pure oil or incorporated into soothing soap,
but it also enjoys a global reach, bottles of oil
being sent to Tokyo twice a year, and there
is also an annual shipment of oil to a dental
clinic in Milan. “We’ve sent it there for the past
20 years; they use it for dental surgery,” notes
Nicholas. “One drop on a cotton bud applied to
the tooth and the pain will go!”
NICHOLAS TAKES TO THE SKIES, FINDS LAND
Nicholas, now an octogenarian, is a colourful
character with a great deal of interesting history
to relate. Born in London to Scottish parents
(clans MacKenzie and Leslie), he won a 3-year
scholarship to La Brosse in France just after
WWII, to study agriculture, viticulture and
horticulture, acquiring knowledge no doubt
useful for his later tea-tree oil venture.
Back in the UK he worked as office boy for
Belgian Airlines (“I wanted to learn to fly but
they wouldn’t take me seriously”), followed by
two years in the British Army, serving with the
Middlesex regiment (the Die-hards) at Mill Hill
London.
Having contemplated emigrating to Canada
(“too cold”) or Australia (“too hot”) he thought
that New Zealand sounded “just right”, so
60 years ago he sailed into Lambton Quay,
Wellington on the T.S.S
Captain Cook
(he
proudly displays the ship’s menu from the last
night at sea), and was promptly transported by
bus to New Plymouth where he was employed
largely as a dairy herd-tester, testing the butter
fat content of milk.
This was followed by a spell as a bulldozer
driver at the Huntly coalmines, where “the good
pay” enabled him to pursue his passion for
flying; at Hamilton Airport at Rukuhia, he began
training towards a commercial pilot’s licence.
When the coalmines closed, he took up a
job cleaning cement mixers (“using a sledge
hammer”) but very soon afterwards his career
in flying took off in earnest. His trajectory to the
skies is impressive.
“I flew as an instructor for the Tauranga
Aeroclub as a starter,” he says. He then worked
his way up through Bay of Plenty Airways
and NAC, finally (and at the tender age of 34)
graduating to captaincy of 747s for Qantas,
where he remained for 20 years or so...apart
from a year’s stint at Singapore Airlines.
It was while he was based in Singapore that
Nicholas developed an interest in herbal
medicine, another foreshadow of things to
come. Nicholas first flew into Mercury Bay as
a 22 year old trainee on his first cross-country
flight, landing his Tiger Moth – “lovely plane,
it gave the British a big advantage over the
Germans in the war” – at Renfells Strip, the
original Whitianga landing site.
But it was later, as a seasoned 747 pilot with
Qantas, flying regularly back from Tahiti across
the Coromandel peninsula (“Kuaotunu was the
reporting point – still is”) that he used to look
down on Mercury Bay and think “I would like to
own a farm there one day”.
Not many of us get such a bird’s eye view
opportunity to choose our future slice of
paradise! Nicholas has many fascinating exploits
to relate about his time in the skies, and it is
testament to the calibre of the man that he
volunteered to fly into Vietnam to evacuate
Anzac troops at the fall of Saigon. This under
enemy fire, a feat for which he was awarded
numerous medals.
As a comparative youngster (23 year old) he
had already been awarded honorary Maori
status by the Tuhoe kaumatua for saving the
life of a pregnant Maori woman (and her baby)
by emergency airlifting her from Motiti Island
to Tauranga (and hospital). It was a dramatic
and highly risky rescue mission in a small Piper
plane. “The weather was dreadful, it took five
attempts to land at Motiti Island; I kept getting
blown off course”, says Nicholas.
Adding yet further to the rich tapestry of his life
Nicholas muses “I used to play bowls with the
Shah of Iran you know, when our flights were in
stopover in Tehran. He just wandered across to
us one day….”
DOWN ON THE FARM
After retiring from civil aviation Nicholas
and his family bought the 360 acre Moewai
Farm property and – according to one of his
impeccable pilot log books – moved in on
December 18th 1986.
He first cut firewood from the land as a living,
a friend trucking the wood down to Whitianga
to sell. Then came 500 sheep, which gave way
to cattle after 2 years because the logistics of
transporting and shearing the sheep “was a
helluva job”. Nicholas also introduced 40
Nicholas Murray-Leslie was a Qantas 747 pilot
before moving to a valley outside Whitianga. His Tea
Tree Oil business came after retiring. “We had read
a bit about the tea tree”, he recalls, “and when we
looked around we realised that’s all we’ve got really”.
Coromandel’s essentials...
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COROMANDEL LIFE 2016 LATE AUTUMN / WINTER
by Kate Palmano
by Kate Palmano