Gary Mullings - The harder you work the luckier you get

Gary Mullings is a busy man.

He may have supposedly ‘retired’ at 49 after working in multiple careers and successfully launching and selling multiple businesses, but somehow Gary’s entrepreneurial eye never closes.

Best known locally as a self-taught Arrowtown jade and opal cutter, Gary was born in Temuka in 1947, and raised in the Hakataramea Valley on a post-World War II rehab dairy farm, his Navy dad fresh from combat.

Primary school years were spent at Ikawai, before his dad sold the farm to pursue fishing in Gisborne where Gary left high school at 15.

At 14 he’d become the first schoolboy to make the Poverty Bay Men’s Hockey Team and was set to tour Australia with the New Zealand U21s until he broke his tibia. By now a Post Office radio telephone technician, Gary had just been accepted to become assistant communications officer at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, but the broken leg put paid to that.

He was also a champion swimmer and springboard diver. But fishing and surfing became his thing, serving a pastry cook apprenticeship by night before working in a cake kitchen then starting his own full-scale wholesale bakery in 1969.

Son Lee-Roy was born about the same time, followed by daughter Vanessa, Gary starting at 2am and finishing around 4pm or 5pm. It was a work ethic instilled by his parents, so much so that during his baking apprenticeship Gary ‘daylighted’, chopping firewood and cleaning windows. “I’d be three storeys up with no ladder, hanging on to the frame,” he grins.

GD Bakeries grew quickly, supplying baked small goods to supermarkets, school cafeterias and coffee lounges all over Gisborne. Gary sold up and opened a small cake kitchen, converting it into Gisborne’s first pizzeria in the early 70s.

At the same time, he’d become a ‘part-time’ professional hunter, hunting export quality deer for the German market, but in typical Gary style that grew to 12-hour days.

In 1979 it was time for a Mullings holiday in Queenstown where Gary visited friend Dennis Lynes who convinced him to come and manage his Shotover Street jewellery manufacturing team.

A fast learner, Gary taught himself to cut precious stones, selling them through Dennis’s Jade & Opal Centre, then sold up to Dennis in 1981. The pair soon launched their own jade factory in the old Upstairs Downstairs Restaurant building in Shotover Street.

“In the early days we bought greenstone from West Coast jade miners,” Gary recalls. This involved some clandestine trips in the middle of the night in what was an extremely competitive industry.

“We always had a big Japanese market, and Americans – the Gabardine Brigade, as well as Kiwis earning big money in the Aussie mines.”

An overseas couple once paid for a $2800 carving and promptly left the country without it.

Several years after Gary, carver Rob Lynes and Ian Caldwell bought the current Arrowtown Jade and Opal Factory business off the Wins, Gary retired, at just 49.

The trio then joined Tony Sparks, buying the iconic Mountaineer Hotel in the late 1980s, turning it into a massive retail store, with a backpackers’ hostel attached. Gary worked seven, 14-hour days until he’d “had enough” so he took wife Lois on a two-month hunting safari and holiday to South Africa. They drove 11,000kms in a Toyota Starlet, dodging mini wars with semi-automatic rifles firing and staging a hasty retreat as armed robbers approached.

Back home Gary just hadn’t been quite busy enough. He also worked his 100-acre (40.4ha) deer farm on Malaghans Road. “I’d be out there at 4am before work at The Mountaineer putting posts in.”

Prior to that, winters had been “very, very tough” and he’d also taken private hunting clients to Glenorchy in the early 1990s.

Fortunately, Lois, now wife of 55 years, and a good Poverty Bay farming girl, is a patient woman. Another of Gary’s ‘part-time’ ventures baling hay for Ian Hutton turned into 14-hour days, so Gary imported the region’s first baleage wrapping machine from Ireland. That arrived while he was hunting moose and deer in Alaska and Canada in minus26degC. “Lois had to do that first contract. She’s a great woman.”

Son Lee-Roy became the star carver, earning his stripes as understudy to Rob Lynes so Gary bought the Arrowtown business outright in the late 1990s, Lisa Marshall and Bev Feinerman a big part of the team.

Gary still doesn’t really know when to retire, usually in the shop helping Lee-Roy, his wife, Nicola, and grandson Bradley. “My dad always said the harder you work the luckier you get. I’m a lucky man.”

But he’s ticked most things off the Bucket List, including a hike to Everest Base Camp, becoming stranded in Nepal during the Covid lockdowns. “We finally convinced the Australian ambassador to fly us out in their plane, but no Nepalese plane had ever landed in Australia, so the Aussie Captain had to fly with us to make sure they knew where it was.”

As for that trip to the South Pole, that’ll keep.