Andy on his way to meet the Fonterra tanker. Photo / Tim Collins, RNZ
By RNZ
Milk tankers were Andrew Oliver’s favourite thing in the world. Local tanker drivers knew that Andy – as he was known – wouldn’t go to bed until they had made their nightly visit to his parents’ Te Rapa farm, near Hamilton.
Back in 2019, RNZ’s First Up reported that when this routine became unmanageable for Andy’s parents, the world’s biggest dairy exporter stepped in to help.
Fonterra changed its milk tanker schedule in the entire Te Rapa district of Hamilton so Andy would go to bed on time.
Andrew Oliver was one of about eight people in the world living with Fryns-Aftimos syndrome and the only one in New Zealand to live with the condition. He was the longest surviving person with the syndrome, making it to the age of 41. He died on July 16, 2025 at Waikato Hospital, after having pneumonia.
The extremely rare syndrome was the result of a mutation in one of his chromosomes, which meant that he had the mental age of a 6-year-old, with other physical symptoms. He also had five types of epilepsy.
For 20 years, he had a special relationship with Fonterra tanker drivers.
His father, Ken Oliver, told RNZ that Andy discovered the tanker when the farmer went on to the night shift for milk pick-up.
“[He] learned what it was, came out to see it occasionally and once in a while would talk to a driver. But then with Andy, the normal thing is with something like this – it would become a habit. And so he had to be out to see the tanker. That became part of his nightly routine.”
Andy’s nightly routine consisted of a list of things he had to tick off.
Every night he drew a picture to give to the tanker driver, he had to watch the weather report on the 6pm news, then have dinner and a bath.
But the last thing to tick off was the tanker.
Ken Oliver said that if the tanker hadn’t come, Andy wouldn’t go to bed. For him, waking up at 5am to tend the farm, it became a struggle.
“We simply didn’t know when the tanker was coming. You might get 2am in the morning or something like that and he wouldn’t go to bed until the tanker had come.”
For over a decade, Andy’s parents managed his tanker visits until one day, Ken came to a breaking point.
“Deirdre had just been diagnosed with having had a minor stroke, I was absolutely out on my feet trying to keep the farm going. Surviving on three or four hours sleep and I’d just run out. I’d hit the wall and so I phoned the call centre and actually started crying on the phone, I was just so shot.
“I just said ‘look, my life has just become impossible and just explained what was going on. I need sleep and I can’t get sleep until this boy’s in bed’.”
The person at the call centre decided to help. After hearing about Ken Oliver’s call, the company changed its entire milk tanker schedule to make sure Andy could get to bed on time.
Te Rapa district tanker drivers were briefed on health and safety procedures and what to do if Andy had a seizure during a tanker visit.
“A lot of us guys that have been here before, we know what to expect and we have an in-cab screen which has a warning along the bottom to make sure drivers are reminded to be careful going down the track just in case Andy’s floating about,” tanker driver Kevin told First Up.
These drivers meant a lot to Andy, but Kevin said at the time that Andy meant a lot to them, too.
“We had one of our drivers come out and he noticed that Andy’s bike was looking a little bit dilapidated and he came back and sort of ran past the idea at a team brief meeting and we all thought that was a very good idea.”
The district’s tanker drivers held a sausage sizzle fundraiser to buy Andy a new bike and staff from all around the world pitched in to help.
Riding his bike was one of the few things Andy could do independently, which made visiting the tanker a huge part of his life.
The tanker drivers supplied Andy with a uniform – a high-vis Fonterra shirt and a hat – and gave him a model tanker, which was part of his treasured truck collection.
Ken, who has a PhD in chemistry and has been a dairy farmer for 40 years, said the change in pick-up time meant a lot to the family.
“A big outfit like Fonterra doesn’t have to do that. They simply could’ve ignored the request but no, they came through. And we’re very grateful.”
Kevin said the 15-minute visit to the farm to drain its milk vats every evening was a special treat for the tanker drivers on that shift.
“We like to come out here. You realise that you’re lucky, how lucky you are that we’re able to do this. If we can make Andy’s day well, hey that’s the icing on the cake.”
Over the past year, as Andy’s health worsened, he struggled to make it down the driveway on his tricycle to make it to the tanker on time in the evening.
He began leaving drawings inside a box by the milk vats for his tanker mates, 1News reported.
Drivers would leave him a note, sometimes a treat, and blast their horn so Andy knew they had been.
When driver Kevin Healey visited the farm last week, he looked inside the box to find Andy had left behind one final drawing.
“We’ve had time to look back and we now recognise that things were winding down, that he was coming to the end of his life,” he told 1News.
Andy’s mum, Deidre Oliver, said, “Looking back now, his body was starting to have had enough.”
Over the weekend, Andy was laid to rest in a custom-made coffin covered in pictures of a tanker, a fire truck, a digger and his trike. He was dressed in his high-vis shirt and cap, and his trike sat in the foyer of the Salvation Army City Corps, where his service took place, 1News reported.
As his coffin was carried into the venue, the opening theme song from the classic Thunderbirds TV show rang through the church speakers. His family and friends sang songs Andy loved to sing himself, including Silent Night.
His siblings, Daniel, Jared and Kimberlee Oliver, along with their spouses, carried out Andy’s coffin to Hakuna Matata, from the Lion King, one of Andy’s favourite movies.
As a final farewell from his tanker driver mates, Healey followed behind the hearse, as it carried Andy’s coffin down Hamilton’s Harwood St, in a milk tanker.
– RNZ