By the time I finally arrive at Howard Croker’s Oxley Island farm the sun is low and precious light fading fast. I catch the 76 year old, fit for his age ’though he reckons not, just as he is preparing to spread fertiliser on new rye.
However Howard is polite and gregarious and puts off his task until it’s too dark too see, instead giving me a tour of his family’s remarkable production facility. There’s two sheds full of tools and brand new oars situated by the banks of the lower Manning River, where some of the 16 employees ride their bikes to work and others take their dogs for company.
Oxley Island remains home to some of the largest dairy producers on the North Coast but when Mr Croker relocated his business here in 1977 the industry was in a slump. Remaining farms were amalgamating and the oar maker found 36 acres available from a bloke by the name of Bill Greenaway, who financed the purchase of his farm over a two year period. It was an old fashioned sort of arrangement.
Mr Croker fell in love with the district because the environment was ripe for rowing. “We used to come up here for holidays,” he recalled. To this day he uses the quiet morning space of the river to reacquaint himself with the vagaries of technique which, like golf, take a lifetime to master.
As an ambitious manufacturer of precision Olympic class equipment Mr Croker was not the least bit concerned about resuming his career in the bush. “When you make something of quality,” he said, “the market will always find you.”
School never held much interest for Mr Croker, who left at 14 to work in his dream job – shaping oars for George Towns at Gladesville.
At the age of 20 he went into business for himself and within a year his oars were in the boat that won the Kings Cup. Five years later his oars took an Olympic gold in Mexico and orders have come thick and fast ever since.
The critical conversion away from timber to moulded composites was tricky and oh so crucial to business survival. His first gold with a fibreglass and carbon oar came in 1994 in Atlanta. Rio delivered four gold medals. Needless to say business is booming.Today’s current factory output is 60 oar blades a day with plans to increase that to 90.
But the business grew organically. A lot of specialised tooling was self funded and created in-house. Constant refinement remains a goal adopted by everyone in the sheds.
The pink plastic sleeve was a revelation in that it proved hard wearing and locked into position smartly. The outrageous colour was put forward by Howard's wife Kaye and has proven a marketing coup. Any photo of Olympic class rowers holding Croker oars taken anywhere in the world highlights the brand even from a great distance.
Computer aided design drives the factory now and there are plans to use robotics down the track. Carbon cloth and precise foam cores are cut and carved by machine before being loaded into hand-finished moulds which receive an injection of epoxy glue. Shafts are milled to fine tolerances, handles are calibrated and marked with a burning laser beam.
But in the beginning there was just a pole shed, a shave bench and a draw knife, with the fit young athlete capable of carving up to eight oars in a day, with light weight and delicate balance their selling points.
Years later, after the trade in timber faded, he was tasked with carving just two oars for a specific American buyer and recalled complete physical exhaustion at the finish. “I had lost all fitness for the job,” he said.
Oxley Island gave Mr Croker room for expansion, but it also allowed the young family man an opportunity to explore a passion for draft horses which was first fanned as a boy.
“My first draft horse, which I bought off Skip’s cousin Bill Greenaway, was 21 Years old and had been worked his whole life. He taught me,” recalled Mr Croker.
“I find ploughing with a horse similar to rowing, you have to be patient; the blacksmithing work is a bit like rigging a boat; even the movement of the plough shearing the soil is like the blade of an oar through water.”
As Mr Croker improved his skills he started taking part in draft horse competitions.
“I had to modify my style,” he said. “At the elite rowing level competitors learn to carry an air of authority and try to psyche out their opponents both on and off the course, but with draft horse competitions the people are very casual, not up themselves. at all.”
Cattle are also part of the Croker family’s enterprise on Oxley Island, with three sons, one daughter, and a daughter in law living almost adjacent to the production farm. Black Angus are the breed now, with bulls gleaned from an old rowing mate through Kinross College stud at Orange, but before this there were Brangus – a worthy bull with vigour but which was so large it failed to fit in the crush. Before that there were Murray Grey.
The whole family help run the business and a full ‘farm’ succession has been enacted with Mr Croker’s second youngest, Darren, now the owner.
“Let me tell you there were tears in the night over this,” admitted Mr Croker. “But the job’s done and it’s something I can be proud to say is moving in the right direction.
