After 22 years in a family partnership Brian and his wife Dale sold most of the place and pursued a life of adventure, including climbing the highest peaks on seven continents.
“I owned the place and now I’m having a look around so I suppose I’m doing it the other way round.”
He always felt there was life outside farming.
“You know what it’s like at school, you change your mind every 10 minutes. I was going to be a vet and then, I thought, a pilot. I got to do both those things. I work with animals and I get to ride in helicopters and in planes.”
Dagg has always given things a crack. In the 1980s he fronted Speights ads, riding horses into bars and the like for the Southern Man campaign. He says now he put himself forward for the job because no-one else wanted to do it.
“The Southern Man thing started coming in around about ’85 and they couldn’t get guys up in Canterbury to do it. They wanted dry, hard country so a mate of mine who’s a rep said ‘send them down here’. So we did, got paid very little … but it morphed into other things and I started doing appearances.”
The brewers bought him a horse float and he started doing wine and food festivals and opening ale houses.
The profile led to television commercials for Nissan and Toyota and ultimately speaking at conferences and community functions.
At some events he has dressed up as Gandalf from Lord of the Rings and arrived on his white horse.
“For Amway I shore a sheep and worked a dog. It was pretty simple. It’s a nice wee sideline anyway.”
In the spirit of why-not he also jumped into mountaineering.
“I’m not a big procrastinator. I decide something and just do it.”
Now he’s learning Spanish because he always wanted to learn a second language and it’s so widely spoken.
Dagg does casual mustering on about seven stations, allowing him to take the winter off for other pursuits, including mountaineering.
He works mainly around the Wakatipu area but as far north as Waitaki and down to Te Anau.
“They’re all good people I work for … it’s something different every day. I work with deer, cattle, goats, sheep and it’s a lot of fun.”
He cherishes the long musters with horses, camping out under big skies.
“You don’t come home until you finish the muster. It’s great.”
The mustering gave him ingrained fitness, which prepared him well for the seven continental peaks of Carstensz Pyramid (Indonesia), Vinson Massif (Antarctica), Elbrus (Europe), Kilimanjaro (Africa), Denali (North America), Aconcagua (South America) and Everest (Asia).
“I haven’t done a lot of extra fitness. Prior to Everest I only spent two or three weeks on a rowing machine at night, rowing about 5km to 10km, just mainly to loosen up my body and put on just a bit of muscle bulk, but that’s about it.”
But the part-time rugby coach always operates with an attitude of prepare for the worst and hope for the best and sometimes wonders whether people could apply a bit of mountaineering-thinking to everyday life.
“Nowadays, when you see a rugby player kick the ball out on the full they just stick their hand up and smile – that’s their acknowledgment of a mistake. But I wonder if they’d kick the ball out on the full if their mistake could cost them a leg, a finger or their life.”
New Zealand peaks can be just as demanding as those overseas. There are parts of Cecil Peak and Mt Crichton that are steeper than anything he traversed with crampons and ice axes.
Dagg considers himself lucky to live such a varied life and realises it took him a long time to get there.
Coronet Peak had been in the Dagg family for two generations when he sold the place. At the time it ran only wethers so the cost of hogget replacements was pinned on the price of wool. But then meat works came in and started buying Merinos, which hiked the price of wethers.
“It would take you two years to get your money back off them instead of one and you had a death rate so it was all things to weigh in.”
He also considered his parents’ attachment to the property, his own age and stage of farming and the fact his boys weren’t interested in being farmers.
“The time felt right. I have no regrets, put it that way.”
Looking at his position now, he’s content he put plenty in that part of his working life.
“A lot of urban people don’t understand that you work all those years and have very little apart from an asset because 90% of your income goes back into your farm. They see the figure for the farm sale and think ‘oh, these guys have done well’. But what about a lawyer who’s charging $250 an hour since he gets into practice?”.
What counts for him is having a hunger for daily work and new challenges.
“I mean, how many people can get up in the morning and say they look forward to going to work every day?
“I do something that I enjoy and people pay me to do it. I don’t think there’s a better job in the world for me personally.”
