Voice of Gore: 3.30am alarm, the flood, and the pain of leaving
Luke Howden arrived in Gore with firm advice ringing in his ears that he should stay for just a year, or he'll 'stagnate'. A decade on, he calls Gore home and is sad he will soon be departing.
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Most mornings Luke Howden’s alarm sounds at 3.30am. It has done so for a good chunk of the past decade.
Howden is Hokonui’s breakfast radio host in Gore.
Despite doing it for so long he admits to still being a slow starter to the day. The perk is getting to have an afternoon nap, he adds.
The early start could be worse if his commute to work was longer, he says.
“Let’s just say if a song starts when I’m pulling out of the driveway at home, I won’t hear the end of it when I pull up to work.”
Howden will finish up with Hokonui in Gore on March 31. An opening has come at Hokonui’s sister station Hokonui Ashburton. Long-time breakfast radio host Phill Hooper has decided to finish up after a couple of decades.
Howden grew up on a farm in Mayfield near Ashburton and still has lots of family there. With him and his wife Amber now parents, the prospect of being closer to family was appealing.
But Howden stresses the decision was difficult.
“It’s really hard because Gore feels like home now. But to have those unconditional baby-sitters makes it a big help.”
The statement that Gore now feels like homes is a bold admission considering when Howden took up the job in December 2012 he’d never travelled past Dunedin before.
He first discovered Gore when Lee Piper called him one day to offer him the breakfast slot at Hokonui.
“I chucked Gore NZ into Google and up comes Bunny Burgess holding up a tree and a photo of a wagon wheel. That was before the GoRe rebranding.
“So, I thought, shit here we go.
“I thought a breakfast show is a breakfast show. Everyone else at broadcasting school was plugging into that promotional internship stuff, and I thought, no, I’ll be an on-air superstar, let’s go.”
Fresh out of broadcasting school, Howden told himself he’d be in Gore, in that job, for a year max.
At least that was the firm advice he’d been given.
“The tutor at broadcasting school said, ‘you don’t want to stay in Gore for longer than a year or you’ll stagnate’. He said, ‘you need to get out after a year’.
“Eight years later I was still there…And then I came back for a second go. If Hoops wasn’t moving on in Ashburton I’d still be living the dream in Gore, I love this gig in Gore.”
When he arrived in Gore he knew no one. Problematic you’d think for a breakfast radio slot that’s all about local content.
Howden quickly emersed himself in the community. He didn’t want to be that person who knew no one and spent his downtime eating a meal for one watching the Chase on TV.
There were a couple of reasons he needed to quickly immerse himself in the community. Firstly, it’s his personality.
The other was he felt if he was going to make a good go of the local breakfast radio slot he needed to get out and about and gain some “street cred” and become relevant.
After eight years in the job, he felt like he had lost a bit of that spark that you need in such a role. He was tired and in need of a change.
Howden landed a role with the Palmerston North City Council as an events manager and he and Amber departed Gore.
He admits it was a unique experience going from arriving at an empty office, as was the case as a breakfast radio host, while largely working solo, to starting the day with an office full of people.
Howden returned to radio when he took up a promotions job with Mediaworks in Palmerston North before returning “home” to Gore to take up his old breakfast radio slot at Hokonui in 2021.
While Howden’s job is essentially to attract listeners and in turn advertising clients, the role has been bigger than that. Especially when operating in a small town where information is king in uncertain times.
The 2020 flood in Gore is a prime example.
Howden recalls being at his Gore home when he saw a large puddle start to emerge in his backyard.
He jokes he’s always wanted to live by a lake, so in true light-hearted fashion, he started paddling an inflatable boat around his backyard while filming it.
However, when the water continued to rise and started to turn a muddy brown colour he knew it was a bigger problem than initially thought.
Howden was scheduled to travel from Gore to Dunedin for an Elton John concert that day. He delayed the trip to keep an eye on the house and soon after the fire service arrived telling him and others in Ontario St they needed to evacuate.
Howden dropped some belongings off at a colleague’s house, knowing his own house was probably going to be lost in the flood, before then heading into the studio. That’s despite Howden actually being on leave.
From that point, he played a vital role in keeping the community informed by connecting authorities’ key messages to listeners.
“You have this sense of responsibility, it’s a privileged position to be in as well.
“What I found through that, particularly on that day when everyone got the message that other parts of town were being evacuated, and the bridge was closing, people get pretty scared.
“To be able to tune in and have this reassuring local voice at the other end saying, ‘it’s going to be okay, here’s the services that can help you, here’s the places to go’.
“I got some powerful feedback from that.”
Howden was recognised with an award from EMPA for excellence in emergency communications.
There have been some flashbacks this week as much of the upper North Island has been hit hard by a cyclone.
Howden believes it has yet again hammered home the power of radio in such an event.
Hokonui has survived the upheaval in radio, and media in general, in recent decades, where a lot of focus has switched to national content.
While not wanting to lump praise solely on himself, he is proud Hokonui is in a much stronger position now than a decade or so ago.
“Our ratings were pretty low. I had to go out and encourage them to give us a go,” he says of the situation when he joined the station.
“We are [now] rating the highest we ever have. It’s a seven or eight percent share, but in terms of radio that’s really good.”
His March 31 finishing date will be the second time he has departed. He’s hoping for a bit more of a bang this time around after his first departure in 2021 coincided with a Covid-19 lockdown.
“I’m sitting there by myself, I finish up, I locked the door, I slide the keys under the door, there is no one else around because it’s level and then I walk off into the sunset like a fart in the wind. It was kind of sad.
“I’m owed two leaving doos now,” he jokes.
You deserve it, Luke. Thank you for making Gore your home and going above and beyond in the job to connect the community.