Love of art fostered at holiday hideaway
In her 21st year Hawera-born Barbara Jean Thomson finished her third year at the Canterbury University College school of fine arts and looked set to travel overseas to further her studies using a small inheritance that had come her way.
Then two things intervened: war broke out and Barbara met Southlander Stuart McKerchar, who was teaching at St Andrew’s College in Christchurch.
They married on the first day of 1942 ahead of Stuart’s Navy radar posting to Ceylon and the tropical heat of the Maldives.
While he was away Barbara returned to her family home in Hawera, where she, the fifth child in a family of five girls and two boys, was warmly welcomed back.
But sadness came with the death during 1942 of her father Malcolm, a GP in Hawera.
Then came joy with the birth in early 1943 of her first child, Sheila, who was on her feet and quite independent before her father met her on his return to New Zealand late in 1944.
He was assigned to the Devonport Naval Base where their first son Alistair was born.
When the war ended the little family headed to what Stuart, in the heat and hostility of war, always recalled as ‘‘the infinite coolness of Southland,’’ and to his first teaching at the Southland Technical College, precursor in its Tay street site of the Southern Institute of Technology.
Like many war time brides Mrs McKerchar remembered the struggles with housing shortages and could mark the years of baby births along with the acquisition of their first home, and 1.2 hectares, on Bay road in 1947, and a washing machine and spin drier when John was born in 1951 and with Allan in 1957 came a Prestcold refrigerator.
When famed motorcycle rider Burt Munro took up residence in a garage over the road, he became a welcome guest, the children enthralled by tales of his exploits and adventures in the United States.
There was little time for art in those years but when she was 40 and her last baby Mary had arrived, Mrs McKerchar did use that inheritance with which she was to further her art studies and bought a holiday home for her family near Queenstown.
She loved being there and with free time at the crib developed a number of painting styles that included included landscapes, portraits, and still life studies in both oils and watercolours.
She did some excellent landscape paintings in the Queenstown area and showed them at the Southland Art Society.
A portrait of Mary features in the Anderson Park art gallery collection. The Eastern Southland art gallery in Gore holds a spectacular portrait that Barbara did as a student.
Over the years Mrs McKerchar taught art history courses at schools and in night classes.
She also worked on watercolour paintings of native flowers.
Finding and identifying these flowers in alpine regions meshed well with her husband’s interest in botany and together they would travel into Fiordland.
The subsequent series of printed cards with these paintings sold so well the artist had to register for GST.
In the 1980s, after Stuart had retired from teaching, they travelled overseas together visiting relatives and war time acquaintances and places from where their various Scottish forebears had emigrated. Stuart McKerchar died in 2004. At her passing, at the end of a life lived with a strong personal faith, Barbara leaves their six children – Sheila Irwin in Wellington; Alistair in Christchurch, brothers Bruce and John in Invercargill, Allan in Tauranga and Mary Mason in Ashburton.
She leaves 20 grandchildren and 12 great grandchildren.
And she leaves that wonderful body of art produced over a lifetime, pieces from student days at Canterbury University, paintings done on family holidays in Queenstown, paintings of native flowers found in Fiordland, that God-given talent bringing lifelong satisfaction and joy.