Colin

I was born in Masterton and I lived my first six years in various towns around the North Island. My mother was a trained nurse during the war.My father came back from the war in Egypt and Italy; we came down to Christchurch because my mother’s family was from here. We briefly lived in New Brighton. I still remember as that six year old, taking a tram with my mother into town, across the Pages Road bridge, looking out and seeing salt marsh. I’ve still got some picture in my mind of the marsh ribbonwood, which of course was later filled for the lower Bexley housing; then got destroyed by the earthquakes and evacuated. Will it become salt marsh again?

My first two names – Colin and Douglas – were named after my mother’s brother who was killed in the war; Colin was a Wellington bomber pilot, shot down over the Netherlands, (I’ve been to his grave); and Douglas was my father’s brother, who leapt into a trench in Egypt to rescue one of his mates who stood on a mine, and stood on another. We found out quite a bit about how these – young kids essentially – were killed in the war. And it’s in my being, I’ve even recently wondered if I might characterize it as kind of survivor guilt? Because I think, how could I have ever endured that myself? Of course, it’s contributed enormously to my humanitarian instincts.

Colin’s brother, Bruce, was pretty smart;  he was always a bit of a mentor, actually. He used to buy me books, one of which was the Autobiography of Peter Scott, the son of Robert Falcon Scott, who subsequently set up the world waterfowl trust.

My uncle had, I guess, identified something in my interests and started feeding me these pictorial books on evolution and ecology, which was fairly novel for that time. I became intrigued with the holistic, ecosystem-type view of the universe. And it didn’t ever seem like clear choices. I just drifted towards something that obviously, I’ve become increasingly passionate about.