Robin | Muriwai
“A random and often repeated kindness that I do is, I live at Muriwai, and we have artists come to stay there from all over the world as residents, and they’re there for a month, and during the month I often phone them and say, hey why don’t you come round for a tea or a plate of scones or something, and then if we get along, I invite them for dinner.
These are people that I’ve never met before. There’s some who are returning to the States as, today and Wesley the guy came out to further his artistic interests, and has been sitting in Muriwai, filming the gannets and drawing bears and wolves, which is his hobby. He’s an art teacher from East Texas.
Well, I don’t currently have a, a loved one as a partner because I’m in a situation where I live with my ex-partner and we have young children. So I don’t have heart to heart conversations with her.
Connected with your culture?
Yeah, my culture being um, Pākehā or Māori? My culture I guess is, one of having been an adventurer most of my life, and I’m currently writing books about those times. So I guess that’s the main contact I have with that. I was born in Lyttleton, the Port of Christchurch back in 1933, and ah, at the age of 12 I entered a classroom and there on the wall was a picture of Captain Scott at the South Pole having arrived there to find that the Norwegians had arrived before him, and I decide there and then that that’s something I wanted to do. So that’s one of the few achievements in my life that I’ve managed.
I worked out a plan of how to get there, and every year back in the ‘60s, 1960s, the New Zealand Government invited applications from people to spend a year on Campbell Island which is 400 miles south of Bluff, and I used that as a stepping stone to get to be the leader of Scott Base, and when Sir Edmund Hillary died in 2008, I became the oldest surviving leader, and I’m still that today. So it was a great year in Antarctica and one of the beauties of the modern age is that all of us that were together nearly 50 years ago keep in touch by the internet. So, they’re all around the world now, so that’s a wonderful thing.
I’ve been an adventurous sort of a guy, and ah interested in wildlife, and I’ve carried that on somewhat because I’m part of a nature group in Muriwai, that take an interest in the natural habitats and I’m currently the nursery manager of a nursery we have out there, to cultivate natural plants and so it’s a continuation of that. Another part of my culture is, you can see from my hat, I belong to a surf club in Christchurch years ago, and that was from 1949 I’ve been a lifeguard, and I’m still lifeguarding at Muriwai today. So that’s another part of my culture.”