Floods, battles, but most of all the community
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The Marlborough Express' Picton and Sounds reporter Dee Wilson leaves the job today. Maike van der Heide reports on her colleague who sailed into town more than 25 years ago.
She's reported on floods and fire, seen a Picton councillor marooned on a campervan in a torrent and watched a strong community rally successfully against fast ferries that were devastating coastlines.
But after a quarter of a century as Picton's Marlborough Express reporter, Dee Wilson has decided it's time to retire.
Today is Dee's last day in the job.
After 25 years in the reporter's chair, Dee has plenty of stories to tell, from the railway strikes of the mid-1980s to the floods just a few years ago that tore through Picton and threatened to collapse a dam.
There was the fire that sprinted over the hill from Shakespeare Bay and came close to engulfing the town were it not for the Picton's firefighters.
There was, of course, the sinking of the cruise liner Mikhail Lermontov, which now rests 35 metres below water in Port Gore, but Dee missed that one: she was in Blenheim working on the Saturday Express newspaper.
All the excitement of disaster and tragedy aside, Dee says stories like the ones found in the Saturday paper, full of community yarns and profiles, are what made her job worthwhile.
Dee says she feels privileged to have been allowed entry into people's homes, lives and stories. She says what makes a community tick are the personal stories: the wedding anniversaries, the personal accomplishments.
"The 45-year anniversary stories and the like are the essence of a small town. You sit there in their homes and have a cuppa, and they talk about what it's been like, and this is what it's really about."
Dee arrived in Picton in 1983 aboard the 40-foot yacht Pounamu she shared with her late husband Peter Wilson and two cats. Originally on holiday from their home in Magazine Bay marina in Lyttelton Harbour, Dee and Peter fell in love with Picton and stayed. They gave up their jobs in radio in Christchurch to make the move.
Moored up in West Shore, the practicalities of moving between boat and office proved adventurous for Dee, especially on the day a big squall snapped the mooring and floated Pounamu across the harbour.
At that time, deadlines were based on the arrival times of the newspaper delivery men, who would take Dee's typewritten copy to the Marlborough Express office in Blenheim.
She remembers the day she was introduced to a computer for the first time.
"Someone came in with something and said, this is a computer. I said, `What is this?' He showed me all this stuff and I just thought, `I'll use it once,' because he was just going on about it. But I never went back to the typewriter."
Photographs were taken on film and sometimes took days to develop. Now, Dee faces instant deadlines as information heads straight to the internet.
When she first started, Dee walked straight into the railway workers union strikes that began in the 1970s and would continue sporadically until the early 1990s. The strikes left ferry passengers stranded at peak times including Christmas, sleeping rough in terminals at both ends of the strait as unions and managers clashed.
"It was a hostile feeling," Dee remembers.
Then came the fast ferries and in their wake, literally, public uproar. Dee covered stories of Marlborough Sounds gardens being swept away by the waves, damaged jetties, even a child plucked from a mother's arms at Waikawa by a huge wave.
A ministerial party from Wellington experienced the wake first-hand when, standing on a jetty, they were soaked by the waves.
"We all just stood back, we knew it was coming. The suits were soaked," Dee says.
Dee is proud of the newspaper's coverage of the fast ferry issue, proud of a community and seasoned campaigners such as Peter Beech who stood up to the companies to protect their patch. It also came at a time when a ferry terminal was mooted for Clifford Bay, an issue that divided the community.
It was many years later when, after persistent rain, Picton's Waitohi Stream became a torrent in February, 2004. Arriving at Alexanders Holiday Park, Dee found a scene to behold. There, in the muddy brown flow, was Picton's councillor Cliff Bowers, perched on top of a campervan which in turn was perched on a car. He was trying to confirm that nobody was inside and Dee captured a great photo.
It's experiences like that she remembers as she heads into retirement but Dee says most of all she'll miss the stories of the ordinary people. "That's what it's all about – the people."
- The Marlborough Express
