Musical interlude for dryland arable operation

• Published date: 30 March 2022
• Publication title: Central Rural Life

Wairangi Farms can be traced back to four generations with its 120-year-old homestead nestled in between established trees and implement sheds built long ago

Husband Gary leads the grain and seed operation, while wife Charlotte is the creative force behind Cee Bee Teatime and her farm-inspired ‘‘music and movement’’ for children.

Daughter Emily, an Auckland University student, provides the vocals, son Oscar the musical production and Gary the hand-on-chin final critique.

They all seem to play at least one instrument. Charlotte and Emily — a former member of the New Zealand Secondary Students’ Choir — both sing, play the piano and flute, while Charlotte also plays some ukulele.

As well as being a dab hand with production software, Oscar plays the drums, guitar, bass and can also turn his hand to the piano and keyboards, while Gary prefers the acoustic guitar.

Equally talented is middle son Louis, who has yet to be involved in the songwriting process.

He has gone from playing the guitar and French horn to become possibly the only baptised Sikh in the army and now plays the sitar, tabla and rubab.

The songwriting for mainly pre-schoolers evolved from English-born Charlotte performing weekly music and movement sessions for many years for Temuka Plunket.

Initially, she would turn up with a playlist of music from New Zealand and overseas childhood creators.

At each session, the under 5-year-olds enthusiastically bounce, weave and carry out the many arm and leg actions to music. The demand led to more sessions at Timaru Plunket and a special programme for babies.

And then COVID-19 came along.

‘‘My first thought when COVID stopped everything is maybe we should put something online so the children can still have their weekly sessions and funnily enough the people at Plunket were thinking the same thing,’’ Charlotte recalls.

The music went on a Facebook page, and she was delighted when the live sessions were warmly received. Before long, though, invisible algorithms by the online giant put silencers on the posts to avoid running foul of copyright breaches.

That was the catalyst for her putting pen to paper, with words accompanied by her own music.

‘‘I thought, how am I going to get around this? I realised the way was to make up my own songs. I’ve always had rhymes and words in my head so that came quite naturally. I play the ukulele and some basic songs came on to paper.’’

Fully expecting no reply back, she contacted well-known children’s entertainer Suzy Cato, who...