New Zealand Seven - Text
The subject is a 48 year-old Caucasian female. She was born and raised in Christchurch, N.Z., although she has lived in Tianaru, Garston, and Porto Alegre, Argentina. She is the principal with her husband at a primary school in a rural area south of Queenstown.
TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH
Right-o. So we’re from the seaside at Christchurch. It’s a place called New Brighton. Okay. Nothing very beautiful about it. Um, just long, gray beach. That’s its most distinctive feature. Its gray (laughs). With a pier that juts out from the, um, from the middle of the beach. What brought us down? We don’t live in Queenstown. We live further South. We were looking for a change of lifestyle, so we’ve come down here for a rural life. And, uh, it’s all been good. It’s certainly a lot slower. No. Um, we live in the schoolhouse in a rural area. No, no, it’s our home, I’m the principal of the school, so that’s what we do for a living, hmm. Well, it’s immense, we’ve got twenty-seven children at the moment (laughs). We’re bursting at the seams, and there’s a threat of a couple more coming in, and we just don’t know what we’ll do about it. They come from a, um, a huge drawing area, actually, because over the years little schools have shut down, and this is a school which has been formed from three schools. Including ours. So they come in busses, um… yeah, um, up to about 30k. They come from beautiful, big valleys in the back country some of them, others come from little townships, along the state highway. It’s the highway that runs straight down from Queenstown. As if you’re going to, yeah, you turn off to go to Te Anau. It’s going to Invercargill.
Recorded by David Nevell. 2007. Running time: 00:03:50