Celebrating Queenstown’s great, good and bizarre
Duo of the year: David and Maria Cole
This couple devote huge chunks of their lives to their separate community passions.
Maria’s been the backbone of the Wakatipu Health Trust and David is a stalwart of the Queenstown Lakes Community Housing Trust (QLCHT).
Maria, who helped found WHT in 2003, has since battled tirelessly with Southern District Health Board for better healthcare in Queenstown and played a huge role in getting positive outcomes from a National Health Board investigation in August.
Maria’s drive for better health services would still be continuing if she and her fellow trustees hadn’t been forced to wind up WHT after SDHB refused to work with them.
David’s been fighting his own battles with bureaucracy – like his housing trust losing its charitable status in June and latterly missing out on affordable housing land in Arrowtown.
QLCHT, which David chairs, has helped dozens of low income families get into property.
The trust’s also trialling Rent Saver, an innovative scheme which turns tenants into homeowners within five years.
Circus of the year: Leadership saga at Wakatipu High
The school’s management team has been in turmoil since an Education Review Office report damned them in March. Subsequently, principal Lyn Cooper was sacked in September by Ministry of Education-appointed official Peter Macdonald after several independent investigations about “serious communication problems”.
Macdonald also plans to run the ruler over other senior management jobs.
Cooper, after lodging a complaint with the Employment Relations Authority, then returned to run the school alongside stand-in principal Paul O’Connor in November. She also took a week-long holiday to Australia during the final days of term – one week before resigning as principal.
A school source said two weeks ago: “It’s like a circus. Nobody knows anything because we’re not told anything. It’s like, ‘who’s in charge today?’”
Entrepreneur of the year: Sir Michael Hill
Hill – knighted this year – has secured the New Zealand Professional Golf Association Pro-Am for his private golf course at Arrowtown.
He proved the course was a visitor drawcard while hosting three NZ Opens, which he also helped to bankroll.
Despite NZ Golf relocating the Open to Christchurch, Hill worked with the NZPGA to come up with a new tournament in a new format to bring more long-term benefit to the district.
As a result, he ensured The Hills – maybe in conjunction later with Millbrook and Jack’s Point – will stage at least five successive tournaments, with a five-year right of renewal.
The tournament is likely to do wonders to promote high-spending golf tourism.
Newsmaker of the year: Jonathan Dixon
Dixon had a major hand in Tindallgate publicity – in which English rugby player Mike Tindall, recently married to royal Zara Phillips, cavorted in a Queenstown bar with an ex. The story exploded after Dixon uploaded footage to YouTube, with his bizarre moralising spliced into the footage fuelling media interest.
Coverage dominated British tabloids and national media for weeks.
Dixon continued to break through to new levels of weirdness – like appearing in court then filming reporters interviewing him as he exited.
He ended up on national TV’s Close Up in what was without a doubt the biggest train-wreck interview of the year.
Sportsperson of the year: Michael Collins
This 18-year-old local lad was the only South Islander to make the NZ Schools’ rugby side and play in a Test against Australian Schools in Sydney.
This year, he fended off a lucrative under-20 league contract with Melbourne Storm to pursue rugby.
Collins is the first player while still at school to win an Otago rugby contract – a three-year deal sweetened by support from the Queenstown-based Southern Lakes Scholarship Trust.
He also continues to succeed at cricket, this month blasting back-to-back centuries for the Otago Boys’ High 1st XI.
Adventurer of the year: Erik Bradshaw
Bradshaw became the first person to ski the length of the Southern Alps, from St Arnaud up north to Fiordland down south.
His epic run makes it only the second time the Alps have been traversed in winter.
The 43-year-old survived sub-zero temperatures and pushed himself for 12 hours a day on his three-month, 800km solo adventure.
To complete the challenge, Bradshaw invented his own ski equipment – a carbon fibre binding which fitted over a walking boot to transform it into a ski boot with crampons.
Because of his Southern Alps expedition, Bradshaw’s been to places where many New Zealanders will never dare to go – such as the remote Snowball and Volta Glaciers, the Upper Hunter and Te Naihi Rivers, the Gardens of Allah and Eden ice plateaus.
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