Waikawa dream now a reality

It started with a holiday home. Bruce Richards was in his 40s when he and his wife saw a patch of land go up for sale in Waikawa, on the edge of the Marlborough Sounds. It had stunning views across the bay.

At the time, the pair worked as live-in teachers at the exclusive St Peter’s School in Cambridge, south of Hamilton. He taught physics and she taught English. But they were wanting somewhere to escape to during the school breaks.

‘‘We’ve always loved the Marlborough Sounds . . . We came to realise the top of the South Island has so much going for it.’’

The couple bought the plot in 1999 and spent their first visit at a holiday park listening to Waikawa’s New Year celebrations. Each time after, Richards would build a bit more of their home, knowing it would be their third and final.

It wasn’t long until the neighbours came knocking.

‘‘This used to be a very sociable street. There used to be parties that went on until the early hours of the morning . . . and a number of our neighbours were involved in the local association, so our involvement sort of grew from there.’’

The couple started attending Waikawa Ratepayers And Residents Association meetings during their school breaks.

Their attendance picked up after they made the permanent shift to Waikawa five years ago for their retirement. Before long, Richards’ wife Robyn was the association’s secretary, and he was the ‘‘offsider’’ she floated ideas past.

This changed last November. Richards was made acting chair after the association’s former president of eight years, Graham Low, moved to Christchurch to be near his family.

The position became permanent after no-one threw their hat in the ring for president at an association meeting in March.

‘‘It’s history repeating itself,’’ the 66-year-old said. He and his wife had been chair and secretary of the Kainga Settlers Association four decades ago, when living in Christchurch.

But time had changed local democracy. Richards believed it had become ‘‘bogged down’’ by consultation and paperwork.

‘‘Democracy is a wonderful thing, but it’s actually quite hard to implement. If I had one great ambition, it would be to make decisions and move forward in a timely fashion. I find the modern world a little frustrating on that front,’’ he said.

He recalled making a submission to the Marlborough District Council’s annual plan in 2019, asking for work to start on a cycleway between Picton and Waikawa, after seeing one mentioned in the region’s new walking and cycling strategy.

Richards, who owned three bikes and cycles once a day, thought it would be a good idea – a small step towards the ‘‘monumental changes’’ needed to address climate change.

The council agreed to have a consultant work out the cost of building a cycleway along

Waikawa Rd, between the towns. That was two years ago. The report came back in February.

‘‘We seem to be bogged down in an era where there’s so much consultation, so many feasibility studies, that we struggle to actually get things done,’’ he said.

‘‘It’s partially my generation’s fault. We were a generation that came from working class backgrounds, got a university degree and learnt how to push paper around the place, to put it bluntly.’’

Richards was the first in his family to go ‘‘anywhere near a university’’. He spent most of his youth yo-yoing between the North and South Islands, before growing up in the Hutt Valley.

He was one of six children. His mother didn’t know where he was most days. Richards said it was a different time. ‘‘I came home at night, so there was no point in her worrying.’’

His father, a train controller, expected him to follow in his footsteps, leave home at 15 and get himself a job.

‘‘I was a bit pig-headed and didn’t do that,’’ Richards said.

He enrolled in a science degree at Wellington’s Victoria University, started dating

Robyn, and became a milkman.

After failing a few exams, an idea struck — he could be a physical education teacher. But fate had different plans. He was a year into his first graduate job at a school in Christchurch when he was asked to be a science teacher.

He was taken with physics and continued on as a physics teacher at Cambridge’s exclusive St Peter’s School, where he and his wife spent the rest of their careers. Richards even made head of the physics department, then head of science, before ‘‘retiring’’ back to a class teacher.

During his last day of teaching, in late 2014, three of his students presented him with a slide show of the things he ‘‘should not have said in class’’. Every Year 13 student came to watch it. It was the highlight of his career.

‘‘When you look at a class, sometimes they look bored, and when you’re teaching, say, thermodynamics, you’re not surprised. So you just say something that wakes them up

. . . ‘thermal equilibrium sounds salubrious and sexy’.’’

He and Robyn moved to Waikawa after their retirement. Five years had passed, yet Richards was still St Peter’s School’s go-to when it came time to building production sets for school plays each year.

‘‘I’ve always made stuff. It’s an out for me.’’

He was hoping one of his two sons, both in their 30s, would build a house so that he could help. But, until then, he was working on a challenge issued by councillor Nadine Taylor.

‘‘She put to us that a lot of people aren’t involved in the association because it seems to be focused on the [Waikawa Bay] boat ramp, because that’s where it makes its money and that’s where most of its money is spent. ‘‘I’d like to see a broader approach to what we do.’’