Was your town lucky enough to have a giant chook birthing ovoid chocolate treats on demand every Easter?
It began, as far as we can tell, with Meg. Or was it Eggo?
The year was 1958; the location, Hay’s, Christchurch’s “friendly store”. Meg was a giant hen who would appear in the lead-up to Easter and heave out a chocolate egg for any child with a sixpence to spare. If the below newspaper ad is anything to go by, Meg was accompanied by a “real LIVE EASTER BUNNY” that was in turn carried by a terrifying Donnie Darko-esque figure in a rabbit suit.
Further south, Eggo was similarly delighting the children of Invercargill. Due to the Southland Times not having been digitised beyond 1945, it’s not clear exactly when she first became a fixture at H&J Smith. But, if Acton Smith’s account in the recently published H&J Smith history book is accurate, Eggo was already well established in the late 1950s, when the then 11-year-old got his first job rolling Easter eggs down a chute to emerge from the chook into the hands of awaiting children. Smith, part of the H&J Smith dynasty, later spent 30 years as managing director of the long-running department store. Eggo had impressive staying power, reappearing every year until the closure of H&J Smith in 2023, when she moved to the Invercargill Central mall.
The Spinoff reached out to Invercargill Central to see if Eggo was still in action. A spokesperson revealed that sadly, the mall didn’t have the storage capability to keep the massive chook, so she was given to Toot Sweets, the lolly shop across the road, which unfortunately faced the same problem. The spokesperson said she believed Eggo had ended up at Invercargill’s beloved Bill Richardson Transport World – “hopefully she’s still clucking away somewhere in town!” – but The Spinoff was unable to confirm Eggo’s whereabouts by the time of publication.
As for Meg, Eggo’s rival for the title of Aotearoa’s original Easter-egg-laying hen, there’s no record of her after 1967, but by that time the idea had well and truly caught on. Thanks to Papers Past extending its Evening Post collection just a couple of weeks ago, The Spinoff can reveal that Clucky (“you’ll love her realistic cackle!”) first appeared at Wellington’s Kirkcaldie’s in 1961, much earlier than has been reported previously (though, to be fair, we can’t be 100% sure it’s the exact same chook).
Then there was Henrietta, who showed up at Christchurch’s DIC store in 1963, laying eggs for the bargain price of threepence (with DIC taking a frugal approach to advertising to match: see below). By 1965, Henrietta’s eggs had doubled in price and the ads were slightly fancier, but she was never mentioned again. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that Christchurch was graced by the presence of another big chook, fittingly named “Big Chook“, who laid eggs at Christchurch’s fourth-best mall to raise funds for a local school’s soccer team. Just like her Cantabrian poultry predecessors, Big Chook’s reign was short-lived, and she was never mentioned again.
In Wellington it was a different story. Clucky endured, appearing every Easter at Kirks until it closed its doors in 2016 and she moved to Wellington Museum, where she resides to this day. In 2019, Clucky was still in working service, though eggflation saw her offerings now fetching the hefty price of a gold coin (Eggo’s eggs, meanwhile, remained a bargain-basement 50c until the end of her H&J Smith tenure). As of last year, Clucky was “enjoying some quiet time“, no longer birthing chocolate ovoids on demand.
Another long-lived hen is Hetty of Whanganui. Sadly, no Whanganui newspapers from the second half of the 20th century have been digitised, but according to reports, Hetty first appeared at DIC’s Whanganui branch in the early to mid 60s, then moved to the Londontown department store. When Londontown closed in 1989 she was given to the Whanganui Regional Museum, but made annual appearances at the Trafalgar Square shopping centre, before being fully retired to the museum in 2010. She was still laying Easter eggs for museum visitors a decade ago, though they were plastic ones that could then be swapped for chocolate eggs by a staff member. Hetty then moved around a couple of Whanganui libraries, but hasn’t been heard from since 2021.
So how did these remarkable fowl actually work? Most children believed they were fully automated, or perhaps magical, but the truth is more prosaic. As Acton Smith revealed in the H&J Smith book, an egg was simply rolled down a chute by a human hand. On learning the shocking truth about Eggo in 2023, Stuff’s Hamish McNeilly lamented that his “whole childhood was a lie“.
In a chilling reveal that casts Acton Smith’s tale of child labour in a less wholesome light, Spinoff member “Martin from Kilbirnie” (commenting on our recent marshmallow egg ranking) claimed that up north at Kirks, Clucky’s egg roller “was an SJS student stuck in an unventilated unlit hen hell for a couple of weeks every year. Possibly recruited for size and/or clucking ability.”
It wasn’t all bad everywhere, though: former Hetty workers from Whanganui reminisced about the job in comments on a 2024 Facebook post, sharing tales of scaring annoying children, hurling eggs down the chute at high speed, and having to “interpret the chicken sound when they lost the recording”.
Do you know of any other animatronic Easter-egg-laying chooks from New Zealand’s past? Did Auckland really not have any? Why were Christchurch’s magical hens all so short-lived? Share your memories/theories/hot takes in the comments below, or email info@thespinoff.co.nz
