Aotearoa in 20: Peter McMillan's wonderful world of a life well-travelled

Monday, 7 September 2020

After winning a prize to travel to America in the 1960s, Peter McMillan was determined to show his family the world.

Store-owner, salesman, goat farmer, traveller, father and devoted husband of 64 years, Peter McMillan, 89, said he’s seen “the most wonderful world”. He shares his story for Aotearoa in 20, a Stuff special project.

I’m approaching 90, and I’ve seen the most wonderful world. I think it was a wonderful world.

When I selected a lady that I was going to spend my life with, Erica, my wife, I was only 19. That started off a 64-year relationship.

In my life, I experienced so many things. I’ve not only had a trade, I’ve diversified, I went into store keeping, I’ve been a commercial traveller for big American companies, I’ve travelled the world.

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Peter McMillan is approaching 90 and says he’s seen the most wonderful world.

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Winning a competition in 1968 took Peter McMillan on a trip across the world, sparking his passion for travel.

When we moved down to Auckland, we didn’t know what we were going to do. I went door-knocking selling Electrolux – vacuum cleaners – what an experience that was, to go knocking on the doors of houses and talking to ladies. You had to be very careful about how you asked them if you wanted to buy a vacuum cleaner.

I guess I had a very smooth approach – you learn the attributes of a true salesman. You maybe touched the heart of some of the ladies you were dealing with. You’d knock on the door on a nice sunny morning and a lady would come to the door and say, with a growl on her face, ‘what do you want?’ And you’d say, ‘I’m just amazed at the lovely geraniums at your door, they’re so beautiful’. It sort of worked every time.

From that I branched into another job, I didn’t want to be selling Electrolux all my life. I kept applying for jobs and I joined a big American company and I became part of a sales team. The company was just starting up in New Zealand - a company called Johnsons’ Wax. Consequently with my sales I won a competition with my team.

That competition took me over to the headquarters in a place called Racine, Wisconsin. Being a country boy I had never travelled, and what an experience.

Peter McMillan was photographed from a Covid-safe distance at Springlands Lifestyle Village, Blenheim.

The journey was expansive because when I was in Racine I won another award which got me into the top five per cent of the international sales force. That gave me a prize to be able to travel home the opposite way to which I had travelled. I’d come up through the Pacific, and I was allowed to go home from USA over to London, to Rome, to Bombay, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney and home. That was just amazing.

So when I got home I said to my dear little wife ‘honey before we’re much older, as a family we’re going to travel the world’ and of course you could just about appreciate the answer: ‘you’ve lost your marbles mate’.

I said ‘we’ll do it – it might take us three or four years’, which it did. At the end of 1972, we sold the dairy and embarked on a journey around the world that lasted two years.

We went up through the Pacific and we had eight months wandering the highways and byways of America and Canada. When we finally got to New York, we had pre-arranged to buy a car in Germany, so we flew straight into Stuttgart and of all things we bought a seven metre caravan. And for seven months we wandered around Europe and North Africa and down to the Sahara Desert.

I knew the world as it was in the 1970s. We met nothing but kindness, we met no trouble anywhere in the world. I always felt that I came back to New Zealand richer than I left it.

For 15 years I had put up with a very troublesome ankle. I damaged my ankle in a fall and I had to go through a series of reconstructions that took me into hospital on three different occasions and virtually rebuilt my ankle.

I was always limping, I was always having to get hospital boots made, always having trouble. My surgeon said to me one day ‘I don’t quite know what I’m going to do with your leg Peter’ … I said ‘Brian, be sensible. Cut the bloody thing off … just cut it off.’

I didn’t need psyching up, I was quite adamant that I wanted my leg to go. The moment they cut it off, I tell you now I was liberated. I could still go for a walk in the bush, I could still do all the things I liked doing.

Losing a limb is an attitude thing. It’s no good being sorry for yourself or getting down in the dumps. You’ve got to have the right attitude. That’s the only way one can go.

Particularly now that Covid is with us … I see troubles ahead of us. There're no roads back to yesterday and the world that I knew – we can’t travel, we won’t be able to travel internationally for quite a long time, if ever.

I just feel sorry for my grandchildren. But we got through our struggles. I suppose they will be inventive enough to get out of their troubles too.

Now I’m in a rest home. I made the snap decision that I better start being looked after. I used to fit so many things into my life. My life here now is very strange, it’s very different.

And above all … I miss the company of that wonderful lady I had for 64 years. I miss her terribly.

As told to Sophie Trigger for ‘Aotearoa in 20’, a Stuff project.