'Mrs Easter' is almost 90 and still providing top chefs with first-class fare

To some she's 'Mrs Easter' to others she's 'the rabbit lady'. Either way it seemed the perfect time of year to share a cup of tea with this unstoppable 89-year-old of Pukekohe. By Indira Stewart.

New Zealand’s top chefs know her as “Mrs Easter” while to the locals in Pukekohe she’s “the rabbit lady”. Eighty-nine-year-old Glenda Easther (pronounced Easter) estimates she’s supplied about one million rabbits to New Zealand’s food industry over the past four decades. This June, when she turns 90, she may finally hang up her gloves and retire.

That’s kind of the plan but don’t hold your breath.

When I walk into the Easther family home, I can hear her on the phone vigorously talking to a client about an order. She waves her hand, motioning for me to come into the office and abruptly ends the call.

“Work, work and more work!” she says. “Stop the world, I want to get off!”

I laugh and take a seat next to her desk, immediately turn on my phone recorder and open up my laptop. From the first minute, I’m rushing to keep up with the legendary rabbit lady.

“I was just saying to this woman over the phone, I’m thinking of starting a union of over-workers – would you like an unpaid job of vice chairwoman? And she’s refused it,” she jokes.

Her son Mark is busy in the abattoir – or rabbitoir as she calls it – down the driveway, packing all the orders they need to get out before the Easter holiday break.

Easther, a Gemini who religiously reads the horoscopes in her weekly TV Guide, tells me there were signs I’d be visiting. “It said ‘you’ll be having an unexpected visitor or a call or something’,” she says. "I never really got into this kind of thing – but the TV Guide ones seem to match up with things that happen.”

Easther and her late husband Ray started Eastherbrook farms in 1982 and they’ve been a key link in Aotearoa’s food chain. Renowned restaurateurs and chefs such as Tony Astle, Michael Meredith, Connie Clarkson, Peter Gordon, Simon Gault and more, still call her for supplies.

Beyond the food industry, Eastherbrook farms has also provided rabbits and game meats to the lions at Auckland Zoo. For years she packaged rabbit blood and scooped out rabbit brains and exported them to overseas pharmaceutical companies. Rabbit skins were sent to an Auckland business who used them to make slippers. No part of the animal went to waste.

One unique request the Easthers received came from the New Zealand Military’s Special Air Service, which regularly ordered rabbits but once asked if the Easthers could help provide pig skins so the soldiers could practise stitching wounds. “Well they weren’t allowed to practise on each other so you know, you get asked to help with different things and you just do it,” says Easther.

It’s been more than a decade since the family business actually farmed rabbits – the business has long since branched out into duck, beef, lamb, pork, emu, ostrich and quail, only occasionally selling a little wild rabbit meat – but Mrs Easther’s reputation as the rabbit lady has endured.

“You’ve got to come see my rabbits,” she says, standing, so I quickly follow her across the hallway. On the way I glimpse a ceramic rabbit in a kitchen cabinet and another rabbit sign elsewhere. But nothing prepares me for the stunning sight of her collection of rabbit figurines in the next room she enters. Hundreds of rabbits are lined up on 12 shelves in two glass cabinets. Almost a dozen other larger rabbits sit on a wooden shelf by the window.

“I think I’ve probably got more than 500 here and there are more around the house,” she says, unlocking both cabinets.

Gold rabbits, white rabbits, lots of Peter rabbits, a trio of rabbits playing string instruments, rabbit trinket holders that open up...

“Lots of people over the years still think I’m the rabbit lady really so they keep giving them to me and I just keep them.”

Glenda Easther (née Tadnan) was born in 1934, the middle child of nine, all born at home on East India Dock Road, in Poplar Dock, London.

Her grandfather was a butcher and her father, an upholsterer. With nine children in the family, the popular Giant Flemish rabbits were bred at home and kept as pets to entertain her and her siblings.

At 19-years-old she married Ray Easther and in July 1961 at the age of 26, she and Ray, with their three children all aged under three, boarded the Johan Van Oldenbarnevelt ship and headed for New Zealand.

Their first years were spent in Papakura where Ray, a trained carpenter, worked as a builder and then later took on a job managing the local SPCA.

“I didn’t have time to miss England, I had three young children to take care of and we just kind of slotted in and got on with it,” she says.

They both became heavily involved in the community – Mr Easther was the chairman of the local school board, and Mrs Easther moved up the leader ranks of the local Scouts club, eventually becoming district leader for Papakura and then a ‘Geriatric Scout Leader’ staying on as a founding member of the Baden-Powell Guild up until just a few years ago.

In the early 1970s, the Easthers sold their Papakura family home and moved south to Pukekohe.

“We bought ten acres for $5000 back then and we knew we wanted to do something with the land and we were surrounded by a couple of poultry farmers at that time and a hatchery. So we started Eastherbrook Farms in March 1982 with the intent to farm rabbits.”

“Back then we were dealing with MAF [Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry] which is now MPI [Ministry of Primary Industries] and I would call them the MAFia!” says Mrs Easther.

But the nickname doesn’t seem to carry the controlling negative connotations it might imply.

“There was a man from the MAFia who came up from Christchurch to check on the poultry farms nearby and he heard we wanted to farm rabbits. Apparently he loved rabbits so he came and knocked on our door and stayed for dinner.

“A week later we got a letter from Wellington saying they had authorised the Auckland MAF department to give us all the help we needed and that was it.”

The Easthers had about 100 does and ten bucks which they used for breeding. They also bought livestock off about a dozen other local rabbit farmers.

“At peak we were processing about 1000 rabbits each week,” she says, “at best estimate yes, I think we supplied about a million rabbits over the years across New Zealand. That sounds about right.

“I did have names for all the does – you could tell which one was which by their characters. They all had different personalities, you see.

“You grew attached to them.”

After nearly two decades of thriving business, things took a hard turn. A massive export trade of wild rabbits in the South Island grew quickly out of control.

In 1997, a strain of Rabbit Haemorrhagic Disease Virus known as RHDV was illegally introduced to New Zealand by some frustrated farmers in an attempt to control fast growing wild rabbit populations.

The disease was highly contagious and spread rapidly around New Zealand. Affected rabbits often showed no symptoms until they died suddenly or within 24 hours of infection.

The Easthers realised the virus was potentially devastating to their business.

“A vaccination was introduced and we were able to vaccinate the rabbits annually. We vaccinated the breeding does but you couldn’t vaccinate the babies, so for a lot of rabbit farmers it was almost impossible to stop the spread.”

By then MAF had put out a notice – a warning to the public advising people not to pick up or eat any dead rabbits found in the wild. The notice was quickly circulated by media.

“And soon ‘rabbit’ was a dirty word. Restaurants took it completely off the menu. Many rabbit farmers went out of business.”

The Easthers’ rabbit stock survived the first strain of the virus but a second strain released by MAF years later in efforts to control the rabbit pest population, was fatal.

“That killed our stock very very quickly and got into our fattening shed first and then into the breeding shed. Once the virus came in, it was only a matter of days.

“It was really upsetting because one minute they were alive and they were alright and the next minute they were gone. You’d be feeding the does and you’d finish that and go around the other side and then you’d hear a scream from some of the rabbits and you’d come back and some of them had just dropped dead,” says Mrs Easther.

“We killed some rabbits off but in the end, we just decided to kill them all. We didn’t have an option. It was either that or watch them all die.”

“I was sad when we stopped farming rabbits because it was mainly me doing that part of the business. But by then we were also handling a lot of other game products too. So we just kept on with it,” says Mrs Easther.

These days the Easthers buy and supply duck, quail, and other game meats such as emu and ostrich. Occasionally the wild rabbit is supplied too.

“Up until Christmas we were breeding quails and probably killing about four to five hundred a week. We were able to open up a lot of wildmeat butchers to the restaurant trade because we helped with the Wildfood Festival in Greymouth each year. We enjoy dealing with game meat and whenever Ray and I would come to Auckland we always go to Cazador – that would be our favourite Auckland restaurant.”

Family-owned restaurant Cazador has a seasonal menu featuring wild food, particularly game meats and ingredients sourced from New Zealand hunters and producers.

“I’ve been supplying him [head chef and co-owner Dariush Lolaiy] ever since he was a kid! Back when his parents owned the restaurant.”

Ray Easther worked right up until he died in 2018. Now eldest son Mark is the director of the business. Mrs Easther is still very hands on with the books and orders, fielding calls from chefs all across New Zealand.

Most of them are wonderful, she says, but there are a couple who wouldn’t make it onto her Christmas-card list.

On the kitchen table she has spread out newspaper articles dating as far back as the 1980s. The local rag interviewing both her and Ray when the abattoir was being built, business was booming and then again when controlling the wild rabbit population got tough.

She offers up her family photo albums and I flick through the pages, soaking in some of the most precious moments across nine decades.

Mrs Easther says there aren’t many bad moments looking back – the saddest time, besides Ray’s death, was the pandemic.

“Covid just killed the hospitality industry, especially the restaurants in Auckland because they were closed for so long. Many didn’t survive and a lot of restaurants are still struggling to get back on their feet.

“Of course I do miss Ray, I miss him mainly because I don’t like driving. But you’ve got to carry on, really,” she says.

What is she going to do when she retires?

“Well, I don’t know when I’m retiring ‘officially’,” she says.

“I’ve got so many things that I want to do that I haven’t been able to. I’m going to help Mark get that house and garden sorted. I’ve got quite a lot to do to the gardens next door.

“I’m going to grow all my vegetables over the winter.”

If her 90th birthday falls on a weekday she tells me she will probably be working.

Before I leave I ask her what her proudest achievement is so far.

She shrugs and smiles, “Oh I don’t know. Just surviving I think! I’ve had a lot of fun, met so many wonderful people. If anybody needed a hand you’d help them and that’s it. And they were always there to help you if you needed anything.

“I’ve got lots to do.”