Tess | Motueka, Tasman

“It was a heart-to-heart with my sister. Me and my sister own Muses café, in this little beautiful town of Motueka, and we’ve been in hospitality for 15 years, and Covid hit, and that was it. End of our world as we knew it, for seven weeks, but once me and Sarah got over the fact that we had no money coming into the café, we actually enjoyed having seven weeks off.

We painted our house. We walked our dogs. We slept in. We re-charged our very tired batteries and we joined the SOS Café which was absolutely amazing. The beautiful people of Motueka and abroad actually donated about $1600 to our café cause. So, that helped us greatly the money coming in, it’s absolutely incredible. Our aunty in Brisbane, who I haven’t seen in 22 years, donated us $500 to get our stock back, gave me a $500 loan the week before lockdown had finished to buy some stock, because she knew we were struggling. Lockdown has brought out just some niceness. The locals in Motueka are just gorgeous. We love our locals, I call everyone Darlin’ that comes in. They’ve come back and they’ve showed us support, and they’ve treated two little Motueka girls, and they’ve made us believe we can actually carry on through Covid, and we do need the tourists to come. The locals are proving that winter so far hasn’t stopped them.

We had a gentleman come in the other day and he’d just had a massive growth taken off his side, and he’s had skin grafts, and he’s looking in a bad way, and I went up to him. I said, what has happened to you? I said, tell them it was a shark, that you got into a fight with a shark protecting your wife. And, he got a giggle. I try to make people laugh. We usually sing in the café, too and someone asked me the other day why I’m so happy? I said, well I spend 12 hours a day here, I may as well not be grumpy. I’ve got to be happy in my job.

We just like making people smile. It makes them feel special. I think I call everyone Beautiful Lady, as well. Hello, Beautiful Lady, or hello Beautiful, and a lot of ladies turn around and say, I think you’re the last person in 20 years that’s actually called me beautiful. Someone should tell you you’re beautiful every day. If you don’t talk to yourself and tell yourself you’re beautiful, well there’s not much point. They’ve got to be feeling special when they come into my café.

I’m born and bred in Motueka. We grew up here. We went to school here, me and my sister. My sister’s four years younger than me, and this has been our hometown and we’ve never really left. I’ve got a fourteen-year-old daughter. That can be challenging, but that’s all good. She’s a pretty cool kid. I turned 40 a couple of years ago and I decided to take up boxing. I’ve always been a big lass. At one stage I was 130 kilos, and I took up boxing and I got into the boxing ring, and I’ve had two fights, and my first fight was down at the local hotel when they put on a great big boxing gig, and there were about 1200 people there, screaming my name. So, that was pretty incredible. So I’ve done two fights and I’ve won two fights, so I might get in the ring again in case I’m too old. We’ve owned Muses for five years. We were at the local RSA for 10 years prior to that. So, this is our home. This is our town, and it’s a pretty cool place.”