Auckland slapped me in the face. They had parades for all sexual styles! More than just classic Dad meets classic Mum!

Everyone on Great Barrier has a Helen O’Shea story. For a quarter century she was a fixture on the Great Barrier Island County Council and later, in Super City times, chaired the island’s community board. A flame-haired force of nature, she’d sometimes take the Sealink ferry to Auckland, five-and-a-half hours on a good run: she’d alight at Wynyard Wharf, march up Queen St in her crocs, bowl into the office of whoever was mayor at the time, and issue decrees. Once she was giving then-Mayor John Banks what-for when he noticed a curious badge on her lapel. ‘‘Is that my photo?’’ he asked. ‘‘No,’’ Helen replied, ‘‘That’s Gerry Adams.’’

I met this formidable woman in late-2012 when photographer Chris Morton and I began researching a book on Great Barrier. With just 1004 permanent residents, you might think we’d scrabble to find enough interesting subjects, but the character per capita count on the island is second only to Siberia.

Among the 12 featured in the book are a Black Ferns lock, a former British Empire wrestling champion, the world’s foremost Chevron skink expert, and a roguish sea dog in his late-70s (who regaled us with outrageous stories as a five-week old kitten sat on his lap).

And then there was Helen, then 80 and ailing. She arrived at our meeting in the family’s dirtsmeared Isuzu Pathfinder, oldest son Mickey at the wheel, husband Michael – aka Mick – sitting in the back. It took her an age to get out of the truck; her left leg below the knee was heavy, swollen, like it no longer belonged to her. Mickey, who lives with his parents and ran the family farm, politely demurred when asked inside. Husband Mick smiled sweetly and also stayed put. He has Alzheimer’s, already far-advanced. But if he had trouble remembering who he was, then his wife very gladly, very proudly remembered for him.

This was Michael O’Shea from Bantry Bay in county Cork. He’d served in the Suez with the British Army, then moved to Sydney in 1961 where he became a concreter. At the time, Helen was a psychiatric nurse at Kingseat Hospital. With constrained romantic horizons, she placed an ad in an overseas newspaper for ‘‘a fit active male, any denomination’’. Two letters (and no photos) later Mick boarded a plane to Whenuapai. First impressions? ‘‘Very nice-looking but so thin. When I saw him, I thought, ‘Oh my, this poor bugger’s got consumption’.’’

They married four months after meeting. The following year – 1964 – they bought 222 hectares just past Awana Beach on the Barrier. It was cheap land, rough land – soggy, pockmarked with rushes and reeds. No matter how hard they worked, this farm would never make them rich, not with the family’s black, polled Angus cattle an expensive 60 nautical-mile barge ride from their markets.

There were other issues: the island’s old settler families, by Helen’s recollection at least, were bemused at the presence of an Irish nationalist. For years, for decades actually, she felt an outsider on an island seemingly on the edge of the earth. The O’Shea whanau – now numbering four with sons Mick and Sean – turned inward. ‘‘We were a unit unto ourselves,’’ said Helen.

The following day, there was a crumpled white flag flapping on the front fence of the farmlet where I was staying (there’s no post box). It’s actually an envelope, fastened to the front gate with twine. Inside, a letter from Helen worried she might have been too negative the day before.

‘‘I want to say how grateful we are to those who help for the work they do for everybody,’’ she said. She then mentioned the police, Ivan Howie, the island’s doctor and the ‘‘miracle’’ of the Great Barrier Community Health Centre.

Now this is some story – and Helen’s written a memoir about it. You judge any society, she writes, by how they look after their vulnerable – the young, the old, the sick. And by that measure, the Barrier by the late 1980s was struggling. While Dr Ivan Howie, along with nurses, Leonie Howie (Ivan’s wife) and Adele Robertson, performed heroic feats from a battered converted caravan clinic, it wasn’t quite cutting it.

There are challenges to being 100 kilometres from the nearest hospital. Some are amusing: the bloke who brought his sick wife along in a wheelbarrow, the baby delivered by torchlight in front of a blazing fire. Others are frightening: the time a guy pulled his foot off in a generator; another ripped his arm off in a windlass.

So a health centre was an idea whose time had come. Nothing flash, just basics like minor surgery and x-rays – just something more than that old caravan. Except there wasn’t any money, and health panjandrums didn’t think it could be justified for such a small population. To get this one over the line, you’d need someone capable of arm-twisting and battling the bureaucrats to a standstill. There was really only one contender.

‘‘Will you take this on?’’ one of Helen’s fellow councillors asked. ‘‘My oath,’’ she replied.