A Tauranga Family Court decision overturning a mother's will has been upheld by the High Court and means her 75-year-old son has $700,000 to buy a house.

Clive Harwood and his wife Raewyn live in temporary accommodation at a Russell oyster farm and use the kitchen facilities in the oyster shed.

The Brain family farm at the Kaituna river mouth

He's living on superannuation and hasn't been working the oyster farm because he's been ill.

'I'm not doing oyster farming at the moment because of a health problem,” says Clive.

'I got pretty down to it, but I am recovering. The doctors are pleased.I'm recuperating. I had terminal written on my records when I was in hospital, but I've decided I'm not terminal. I can't afford to be.”

He hopes to hear in a couple of weeks when the court's orders are to be carried out.

'I'm just not sure when the dollars are coming through, or when costs will be awarded or what,” says Clive. 'It's just an open field at the moment.

'And I had an excellent barrister through Grant Brittain down there in Tauranga. I chose the local men down there to do the job for me, him and Ross Abernethy at the Mount, good straight guys.”

When his 101-year-old mother Violet Brain died in 2011, she left the farm to her other son Alan Brain, leaving Clive with $180,000 from a $3 million estate.

In her will, written in 2002, Violet Brain says she made an unequal distribution because Clive Harwood ‘disowned his family name over 20 years ago after a severe disagreement with my late husband'.

Clive challenged the will in the Family Court in Tauranga, and Judge Annis Somerville ruled Violet Brain ‘breached her moral duty' to make adequate provision for Clive Harwood.

Violet failed to take account of Clive's significant contribution to the farm, including improvements he had made in the expectation he would inherit it. She wrongly took into account as ‘disentitling conduct' the name change.

Judge Somerville considered the estate large enough to enable further provision for Clive and awarded him $700,000.

Alan Brain appealed to the High Court and lost. Justice Gilbert of the High Court says Clive spent many years as a youth working on the family farm and as the older son had expected he would inherit it.

Mrs Brain failed to take adequate account of the fact that Clive made a significant contribution to the value of estate through his work on the farm in difficult circumstances and the improvements he made to it in the expectation that he would inherit it, says the Judge.

Secondly, she wrongly took into account as disentitling conduct the fact that Clive changed his name following the rift with his father.

Third, by making a specific bequest in a will prepared 10 years before her death, she failed to recognise that inflation would erode the value of the provision she intended to make for Clive.

The origins of the family feud lie with historic arguments over the administration and management of the Brain family farm at the Kaituna River mouth.

Clive was born in 1939 and contracted polio in 1948, which left him with weak legs and poor lung capacity. Despite that, he worked on the farm in the early part of his life with an expectation, as the older son, that he would one day inherit it.

He worked every day after school milking the cows and attending to other farm chores. He also worked on the farm without payment during school holidays, slashing and clearing drains, cross cutting blown gum trees and harrowing.

He received worker's compensation for an injured hand when he was 15 or 16, and used the money to buy a pedigree heifer for the farm.

Clive studied pasture and stock management at Massey University and returned to the farm, again working without pay. He later drove bulldozers during the week and continued working unpaid on the farm at weekends.

Clive married in 1962 and moved to Western Australia. His parents called him back in 1965 because his father Oliver Brain's health was failing and he needed help with the farm.

Clive and his wife lived in a caravan with their son David for three years. They were still living in the caravan when their second child, Alison, was born. Clive worked as a contract 50/50 sharemilker and was initially unpaid while funding a number of capital improvements on the land, including a new cowshed, new haysheds and a farmhouse, without recompense.

The farm was seriously damaged in the Wahine storm in 1968. Saltwater flooding destroyed the low lying pastures and it took several years for them to recover.

Oliver Brain insisted on keeping the herd, against the advice of farm advisors. It meant Clive was sleeping in a car and grazing them on the long acre until he was able to relocate them to other farms.

Over the next three years Clive remediated the farm, repairing stock banks, floodgates and building new fences. His wife returned to Perth taking the youngest child with her and leaving the two older children with their father.

The relationship between Clive and his father broke down over Clive's decision to build a new herringbone milking shed, along with differing religious beliefs.

In 1971 Clive was ordered off the farm and served a trespass notice. In 1972, Clive sued his parents for losses as a result of the eviction. He walked away from the claim after two years because of the effect it was having on his mother.

The marriage failed and Clive changed his named from Clive Harwood Brain to Clive Harwood. He remarried in 1974, and partially reconciled with his parents in the late 1970s.

Clive was bankrupted about 1980 over a modest fuel debt he claimed to have paid. He believed his brother Alan Brain pursued the debt, which he refused to pay on principle. His second marriage failed about this time.

Clive remarried in 1984 and lived in Russell. He visited his mother once or twice a year and telephoned her on birthdays and other special occasions.

Oliver Brain died in 1991. Clive attended Violet's 90^th birthday but not her 100^th.

He says today he is interested in renewing interests in the Bay of Plenty.

'I went to Te Puke high and that did the farming down there. I'm still keen on the Bay of Plenty,” says Clive.

He originally began oyster farming in the Maketu estuary.

'But the estuary filled up with sand, it just was not economical on that arm. With modern technology, techniques and methods of growing today it could be economical again. But it needs a younger generation to do that.”

He's in favour of the Kaituna River being diverted back through the Maketu Estuary. Ford's Cut divides the Brain family farm.

'I know that's against the family grain, but having farmed there and seeing the hydraulics of the area, I think it's the right thing to put the water back down to Maketu.

'I think it will probably end up going back down there. With modern engineering and computer science, the engineers have got a lot more data available to them today than what they had in ‘56 when they put the cut through.

'All the hard work was done by Andrew Murray, footslogging it through the swamp with a slasher, cutting survey lines and taking measurements like that.

'Planet earth has moved on since then and I think it will actually help Maketu.”