by Fleur Beale
Phil describes her as an amazing mother. She read to her children every night, and sang to them. When they did wrong, she was decisive with their punishments, then gave them a hug. All her children knew that she loved and adored them.
Money was tight and often Gloria had to make a little food go a long way. Phil recalls the tasty soups she made from practically nothing. If Neville arrived home with five or so visitors, Gloria never complained – she just added more water and a few more vegetables to the soup pot. To Phil’s mind it was a magic pot that fed everyone and never ran out.
By 1965 Neville had moved his family to Cairns from where he conducted tent campaigns throughout northern Queensland, taking his vision of a God-centred society to people in remote areas. Gloria benefited from the move because her mother-in-law was now close enough to make regular visits. She would bring baking and sewing and would help Gloria with the housework and childcare.
Neville threw his energy in to his evangelising. Home movies made at the time, even though they have no sound track, show something of the impact he must have had on the isolated communities he preached in. Captured on film, people walk through the bush, or arrive in cattle trucks to the outback cattle station or tiny community where Neville has set up his base. He pilots his own plane, bringing with him helpers and the big marquee with its large banner reading, VOICE OF DELIVERANCE EVANGELISTIC CAMP. Smaller tents are set up near the marquee – possibly accommodation for Neville and his helpers. The plane, too, has VOICE OF DELIVERANCE painted boldly on the fuselage. The people come dressed for the occasion despite the tropical climate. The women, Aboriginal and European, mostly wear Sunday-best hats; the men are tidily dressed, some in suits, most at least wearing a tie with a white shirt. Shots of the congregation show them singing, clapping, and waving their arms in the air. The full immersion baptisms take place in streams nearby.
Footage taken at Port Douglas shows Neville’s plane where it has landed on the beach. Cars in which the congregation have arrived line the grass at the edge of the sand. The whole Cooper family runs hand in hand down the beach towards the camera: Neville, Gloria and all their blond-headed children in a row from tallest to shortest. This is a high day, a holiday – a holy day, with a service on the beach followed by baptism in the ocean of the converts who all wear white.
Neville’s reputation as a vital and dynamic preacher overshadowed any dissension, and the invitations to speak kept flooding in. In 1967 he accepted another request from New Zealand to give a speaking tour, and decided to take the whole family, possibly with the idea that he would live there permanently. Gloria packed up the nine children they had by then, including her new baby, named Miracle by Neville in thanks for his survival when he crashed his plane in the outback. It had taken searchers several days to find him and this sixth daughter was born shortly afterwards.
It was winter when he drove his family out of Cairns, heading for Sydney where they would board the ship for New Zealand. Neville heated bricks to keep the children warm during the long car trip.
Phil was five when the family arrived in New Zealand but he remembers the planes towing the banners across the sky: HEAR NEVILLE COOPER TONIGHT. His father was big news, drawing crowds comparable to those who flocked to hear the American evangelist Billy Graham. People responded to Neville’s charisma as much as to his message. He preached of a new utopia where the individual sacrificed his will to God, where people gave up the selfish life and lived instead for the glory of God, where they put others before self, and God above all.
While he was on tour, Neville settled his family in the small North Island town of Feilding. It was there that Stephen, the child born between Phil and Miracle, contracted diphtheria and died. He was five years old.
After a year in Feilding, Neville moved his family to the Canterbury town of Rangiora where he continued to preach, collecting followers who were attracted to the idea of living a Godly life and who saw him as somebody they could trust, who had knowledge and wisdom and would lead them in this new way. Decades later, Faith still meets people whose lives her father transformed through his preaching. They speak of him with awe and gratitude for the way he turned their lives around. They speak of him with love.
In Rangiora, the family joined the City New Life Church. Neville easily found work to fit in with his evangelising and, as always, was an energetic and hard worker for whom earning money was secondary to his driving vision of creating a Christian utopia.
Life went on much as before for Gloria, except that now she didn’t have the help of her mother-in-law. In the years from 1968 to 1971 she had four more babies: Michael, David, Daniel and Christian.
True to form, Neville fell out with the pastor of City New Life and in 1969 broke away. This time, instead of moving his family away from Rangiora, he gathered his followers to him, and continued to preach his vision of life according to the word of God. Without a base from which to preach, he simply hired the local St Johns Ambulance Hall down the road from the City New Life Church. Lack of a proper venue didn’t put people off and he continued to draw followers from all over the country, with many settling in Rangiora or its environs in order to attend his services and take part in the ministry he ran, helping those less fortunate.
Naomi and Judah Benjamin came with their children, joining Neville’s ministry in 1974, when their oldest daughter Sandra was 16. They were recent converts to Christianity and had left army careers in Australia to attend the Faith Bible College in Tauranga. They were looking for a place where people lived according to the word of God, and Neville’s Christian philosophy of working together for the good of all seemed to be exactly what they’d been searching for.
Phil, then 12 years old, was intrigued by the bubbly teenaged Sandy. She was a Christian, but not like those he was used to. He saw that she had a bit of attitude – not rebellious or in any way disobedient. It was more to do with the mystique of the outside world, symbolised to him by her hippy-style leather bag with Jesus Loves Me carved into it. Neville banned the bag – it was too worldly – and Sandra gave it up willingly. To Phil, she had an exotic edge. She was out-going, laughed easily, and he would hear her singing as she went about her work. She was a friendly, open young woman who loved kids and he’d often see her comforting a crying toddler or playing with a group of little ones. Phil found it slightly puzzling that this girl fitted in so easily to the group of his father’s followers when she’d come from the world where she’d been free to be whatever she wanted. She was a talented swimmer and could have gone on to compete internationally, maybe even at the Olympics – but instead she had chosen to live an austere life of service to others for the love of God.
The Benjamins joined the group at a time when Neville’s followers were by-and-large respected and admired in the local community. They were easily recognisable by their modest dress: mid-calf-length dresses for the women and sober garb for the men. The Cooperites, as they became known, would gather together to work for the good of others, doing up old cars to give away, helping establish gardens, and extending help and fellowship to those in need. The local mayor spoke of them as a tremendous asset to the district. Naomi and Judah, along with hundreds of others, found in Neville’s community a wonderful example of true Christian living.
Phil’s eldest sister, Faith, married her teacher husband Alan in 1970. The young couple settled on his parents’ small farm at Springbank, between Rangiora and the small township of Cust, purchasing the property from Alan’s parents soon afterwards when they wanted to retire. The young couple were happy to agree to Neville’s proposal of establishing a religious school on their property, where parents could be confident their children were being taught sound moral values. The school at Springbank, one of the first religious schools to be set up in New Zealand, started off with 12 pupils but quickly grew. Demand was so great that a secondary department was soon set up, staffed by teachers from among Neville’s followers.
Life became more curtailed for Phil in 1976 when his fa
ther decided to move his family from Rangiora to Springbank, to live in the big old farmhouse recently vacated by Faith and Alan who had built a new house on the property. Faith looked forward to having her mother and the rest of the family living closer to her, but for 13-year-old Phil, there would be even less freedom than he’d had in town because it was impossible to go anywhere without his father’s permission.
The Cooperites were highly visible in the small community and admiration of them was not universal. As they became more closed off from the world, workers who went into people’s homes used the opportunity to preach their leader’s gospel. They’d criticise wives for not being submissive, husbands for not being head of the household, and both of them for the way they raised their children.
Judith Graham who lived with her husband Reg in Cust at the time remembers the Cooperites being viewed with suspicion by some. Neville would evangelise to recruit people on the weekends, targeting unsophisticated people who would trust him, projecting himself as a father figure who would provide shelter and security.
Judith’s own contact with the Cooperites didn’t encourage her to view them positively. She and Reg contracted two of the men to install a wood stove, with the work to be done in their absence. The workmanship was excellent and they were pleased with the result. Then Neville rang Reg to ask if he could borrow their television. Reg wasn’t happy about the request and said so, whereupon Neville snapped, ‘Why not? You’ve got two.’
The second set was upstairs where the workmen had had no call to go.
On another occasion, some of their tradesmen came to ask if they could look at the renovations the Grahams had had done on the house. When they came to the master bedroom, one of the Cooperite men made an inappropriate remark which shocked Judith and she left the room. Reg quickly showed the men the door.
Judith also remembers one of the sons running away.
It would have been Phil. He hated the lifestyle his father imposed on him and his siblings. It seemed to him that Neville always had time for others but not for his own children who had to work at his community projects whether they wanted to or not. His father was proud of his large family and always included a photo of them in his pamphlets, something Phil found hypocritical even then. The incident at Queenstown was always in his mind and he couldn’t understand how a father who was proud of his children could threaten to disown his son.
In 1976, a couple of months before his fourteenth birthday, he ran away from home, walking out to the main road where he hitchhiked north.
At Kaikoura a priest picked him up, was concerned for the welfare of his young passenger, and invited him home to have dinner and stay the night. Phil was starving and glad of the hot meal. The priest showed him to the spare room where he’d made up the bed. Phil’s lucky day: food, bed and board. Running away from home was a piece of cake, or so it seemed until the priest came into the bathroom while Phil was in the shower. Later he came and sat on Phil’s bed. Phil didn’t grasp the possible implications, but he was scared. Once the man left the room, Phil crept from the house and ran. He walked around the town all that night, too frightened to sleep.
After the longest night of his life, home didn’t look so bad and he went back. The upshot of his burst of rebellion, though, was unexpected: Neville decided his son needed a change of scene and took him and Gloria to Australia for a holiday. They stayed in Coffs Harbour north of Sydney with a friend, a man Neville had converted during one of his campaigns. He’d been a reluctant convert, punching Neville to the ground the first time he went to a meeting, but he had come back for more.
Coffs Harbour made a big impression on Phil; he loved the sea and he loved being able to run on the beach whenever he wanted to. The Cooper children rarely went far beyond their Springbank home and so he’d had little experience of the seaside. When the holiday was over he returned to school and to being a disaffected student.
During this period Neville was still travelling each Sunday to the hall in Rangiora to preach. He continued evangelising with the result that more and more people were drawn to him, with some like Naomi and Judah Benjamin moving to the Springbank property to live near their leader. The atmosphere was one of cooperation, where members worked together and supported each other, all with the purpose of living according to God’s word. They held Christmas camps during the summer break when all Neville’s followers would pitch tents or set up caravans on the farm at Springbank for the two week duration.
Phil found the lack of personal freedom and Neville’s insistence that the family join the community working bees increasingly stifling. He found school boring and he was glad to leave the moment he turned 15 in 1977, to work for the builder Neville apprenticed him to. Phil enjoyed the work but, even better, earning money of his own. With money, he could escape from the community and his father. He would go far away where he could be free of his father’s control, free to live as he pleased. He saved his pay until he had enough money to book a plane ticket to Brisbane. While he saved, he studied the road code because sitting his driver’s licence would give him the excuse he needed to go into Rangiora. From there he would make his escape to Christchurch Airport.
On the appointed day he shoved his passport and ticket into his jacket pocket and went off to Rangiora to sit the licence, passing easily because he’d been driving machinery since he was a kid. Coming back in from the driving test, he glanced into the office and saw his father waiting for him.
Phil didn’t know how Neville had found out he didn’t intend coming home, but he didn’t hang about to ask. He was determined to escape, to get away from his father’s rules, and to find out if the outside world was as wicked and evil as his dad preached that it was. He took off around the back of the building. A taxi! He flagged it down and asked how much the fare would be to Christchurch Airport. Thirty dollars? Good, he had fifty.
It was a nerve-wracking ride. He was sure Neville would follow him but he didn’t want to make the cabbie suspicious by turning around and staring out the rear window.
There was no sign of Neville at the airport. Phil boarded the plane with no luggage and just 20 dollars to his name. Would his father come storming down the aisle of the plane, demanding that he get off? Phil sat tense and watchful until the plane lifted off the runway.
When he got to Brisbane, he hitchhiked out of the city, getting a ride from two Mormons who took him in and helped him find work. While he was living with them he converted to their faith, even though he knew Neville would have disowned him for embracing what he considered a false religion. Phil, though, was prepared to do whatever it took to survive on the outside. The question of whether to believe his father’s religion or that of the Mormons didn’t worry him too much. Death was a long way off and meanwhile there was a whole new world to experience. He bought forbidden things with the money he earned, and delighted in their ownership: a digital watch, a tape recorder and worldly music tapes that he listened to with enjoyment made greater by knowing that his father would disapprove. The freedom of being able to do exactly as he pleased was heady – he could turn on the radio, go to the movies, go to the beach whenever he had time off work, and swim in the sea. But all the time, he felt the overpowering loss of his family.
Back in New Zealand, Neville hadn’t forgotten his son, and set in motion enquiries that would eventually discover his whereabouts, but in the interim he was busy, working at various jobs to support his family, and preaching. Although his followers also contributed money to help with expenses, Neville was never interested in accumulating money for his personal aggrandisement. He was a true man of God: moral, upright and unflinchingly honest. But gradually his vision of a religious utopia was changing as he became convinced that communal living was essential if people were to worship God with the whole of their hearts and minds. When young couples married, he encouraged them to live near him on the Springbank property. This was a major step and signalled the beginning of the complete separation from the outside world that would come in ju
st a few years. His followers embraced the idea of community life and made financial sacrifices to enable the dream to come to fruition. Men with trades continued to work on the outside, with their pay going towards the building project. Women stopped shopping for all but the most essential items – those that couldn’t be made or grown on site. Possibly some of the members sold property and donated the proceeds because, in accordance with his beliefs, Neville didn’t approach any institution for a loan for the proposed building. The men also contributed their labour, which often meant working on the community buildings during the weekends and evenings. Life was hard, but working for a common goal created a climate of loving cooperation. There was a sense that they were building a Christian island in a Godless world. The women particularly loved the companionship and valued the strong friendships they formed.
Neville designed the accommodation blocks so that each family had two small bedrooms and shared a lounge and bathroom with two or three adjoining families. There were segregated dormitories for young unmarried men and women, along with single rooms for newly married couples or older couples whose children had their own families.
The only kitchen was large and – as money allowed – well-equipped, so that the women could provide meals for the whole community. There was a single large laundry capable of handling all the personal items as well as sheets, towels and work clothes.
The face of Springbank changed. Neville and his family continued to live in the original farmhouse, and Faith and Alan in their new home. However, locals travelling along the road could now see the two large accommodation blocks, as well.
Lack of money pressed the community to become as self-sufficient as possible, and during the Springbank years they produced all their own food, even growing and milling their own flour. The farm was small, but supported a piggery and about 15 cows which kept the whole community in milk, cheese and butter.
