Alice | Ōamaru, Otago

“So, when I was a teenager, I got this border collie. It was kind of second-hand. It was about a year old, and I didn’t know enough stuff, and it was on the farm, and it was just out of control, probably from its previous lack of training, and its previous home, and it ended up being too hard basket, and I’m pretty sure that dog was no more after that.

I think I’ll always remember that because I always felt like I failed that dog, and over the past 10 years I don’t know how many foster dogs I’ve had but I keep ending up with the absolute munters of society dogs. At the moment, I’ve got a deaf one at home and so I guess I looked at that regret, and through my life turned it into something where I’m trying to make up for that.

I grew up on a farm in the Mangatoto in the High Country, just out of Naseby. I travelled a bit in my 20s, worked in Summer Camps in the States, worked in a lot of hospitality. I’ve been a muso, as well. I just kind of do whatever turns up in front of my face. It’s not really like, ‘I want to be that with my life’. It’s like, ‘oh that popped up, I can probably do that, I might do that’. I think it’s less about what you want to do with your life, and more about what you do with the opportunities that turn up in front of you.

I just have two at the moment. I did recently have to put one down, he was actually a pound mutt, and he was about three years old and he was at the point where he just had this aggression that was uncontrollable, and he was borderline dangerous. His name was Hank Williams, I loved that bloody dog, he got me up and going. I had to work out a way to give him a job, and I’d stick him on the front of my mountain bike, and he’d tow it and Hank Williams made me go, ‘oh I’ve got to make this dog manageable, alright well I better get off my arse and go and do activities with him’. So his existence made me get out there and do activities, and do things, and so now with this other dog that I’ve got who’s actually deaf, all the things I learned from Hank Williams, I’m now applying to this dog as well, who’s also challenging but in a very different way. So, they just sort of force you to do the best thing for you.

I think sometimes when you miss out on something, you might miss out on a job, or you might not do something and later on you might go, ‘oh man, I wish I’d finished that, I wish I’d done that’, but then you look at it and you go, ‘well if I had finished that and had done that, then I wouldn’t have gone that direction and maybe I would have missed out on that, and maybe I would have ended up in a completely different place that was not necessarily better, it might have been worse’. Might have been better. Who knows, but you can’t do much about it. 

I sing a lot. Play a bit of guitar. Here’s a Gillian Welsh song. I love this.

Oh, me oh my oh, look at Miss Ohio
She’s a-running around with her rag-top down
She says I want to do right but not right now

Gonna drive to Atlanta and live out this fantasy
Running around with the rag-top down
Yeah, I want to do right but not right now.”