Landscape - Friday in a Country Town (Tūākau)

Television (Full Length) – 1968

Friday in a Country Town offers an evocative portrait of small-town Kiwi life in the late 1960s. One Friday morning in 1968 a train coasts into Tūākau Railway Station, kicking off the "busiest day of the week" for the Waikato town. Bread is delivered, shops open and farmers chew the fat at the weekly stock sale. There's one hot topic in Tūākau: "what are you doing in the weekend?" Friday night means late night shopping on George St, pub singalongs and teenagers hanging out, smoking and spinning records at the milk bar. Narrated by Philip Sherry, this was part of an NZBC series capturing everyday New Zealand life in the late 1960s.

Well, it was just this way this morning when I was getting these sheep in, they were um...I had to go out in the car in a hurry to get them in, so I put the dog in the back and let him go out around the sheep, and as I was coming back it cut in front of me and I had to swerve and go into a drain.
– A local farmer talks his mechanic through the damage to his Zephyr Six