Jane – Torbay
“I sent a text this morning to my friend who’s just been to Australia and we’re going to catch up this weekend in Mangawhai.
She lives in Browns Bay, and I just welcomed her home! We’re going to have the weekend with them at their holiday home in Mangawhai. I know; very lucky.
My parents are Dutch, and they immigrated to New Zealand in the early ‘50s to a little place called Ōpotiki. It’s actually a wonderful story if you’d like me to tell you about my dad?
He was a teenager during the Second World War, in Amsterdam, and after the war he joined the Dutch Army. He went to Indonesia for three years and when he came back he didn’t want to live in Holland anymore, because, you know, Europe was pretty devastated after the war. He wanted to immigrate, and he had a cousin who had a holiday home in an island called Terschelling off Holland.
During the war, a pilot had washed ashore and he was buried on the island and they had looked after his grave. After the war, they wanted to find his family to let them know that he was buried there. He was a New Zealand boy who came from – where did he come from, David? Waimana, which is just out of Opotiki in the Bay of Plenty. They were very thrilled to hear where he was buried, and they said if they could ever help with anything they would. They told my Dad, we have a place that you could go to. So that’s how my dad immigrated to New Zealand.
He was a motor mechanic with a truck business, and he was engaged to my mum in Holland. She came out a year later. He saved up for her. So I was born in Opotiki. I grew up there and left there at 17, went to Auckland to train at college to be an early childhood teacher.
I worked in Kindergartens, and we relied on parents to help us with the children. A lot of parents really enjoyed that. I think that it’s still quite similar to when I first went teaching. I do agree with not smacking, though. I think that a lot of people think discipline is hitting children or being negative. I think discipline really means showing your child what’s right or wrong in life and you can show that through example or discussion. I think you need to spend time with your children and show you’re the example of what you want your child to be like.”
