Nostalgic trip up Mauao for Freda, 89

Freda Barrett will venture to the top of Mount Maunganui this week with her granddaughter Michelle Barrett. Photo / Ruth Keber

Freda Barrett climbed Mount Maunganui 65 years ago - on her hands and knees.

This week the 89-year-old will make the journey again for the second time in her life to recreate a photograph taken of her all those years ago.

The then 24-year-old nurse had ventured down from Auckland with three girlfriends and hired a bach for four days for 10 shillings.

"We looked up at the Mount but we couldn't see any track so we just went up ... Straight up the side on our hands and knees.

"It wasn't until we almost got to the top we saw the track. There were all sorts of gorse prickles and blackberries, it was so rough, we literally climbed up on our hands and knees," she said.

The image, taken on a Box Brownie camera, shows a very different scene from what exists today with baches scattered throughout the Mount.

"There was nothing in Tauranga except the most gorgeous beach, even at that time we went out in the water. I don't think we felt the cold that much. We went out in the surf and thought it was beautiful."

Coincidentally, Mrs Barrett was to find a permanent home in Tauranga after she returned to Auckland after the holiday but has not been up the Mount since.

Originally from England, she had arrived in New Zealand after seeing a notice hanging in one of the main streets in London. "'Come to New Zealand, the land of milk and honey' and it has always been the land of milk and honey for me, I loved it."

Ten pounds and a six-week journey later, Mrs Barrett was working as a nurse at Middlemore Hospital in Otahuhu where she met the man who would become her husband.

Graham Barrett was in hospital getting a cyst removed from the bottom of his spine before he was allowed to go deer hunting, but he never went as he found another type of dear, she said.

"I was treating another patient and with a syringe in one hand and bed pan in the other, he came into the sluice room. It was Christmas time, and he had a piece of mistletoe and he held it over my head and I got my first kiss. He asked me to marry him."

She finished her two years of service at the hospital on January 11, 1950, and the couple were married January 25.

They were married for 50 years.

In 1949. Mr Barrett's family bought a store on what is now Barrett Rd in Whakamara and when the couple were married they were given a piece of land on the same road.

Subsequently through the years more Barretts took up residence on the stretch, which became Barretts Rd.

Mrs Barrett said she had never ventured up the Mount since that first time.

As a 90th birthday present her granddaughter-in-law, Michelle, has arranged for Mrs Barrett to make the journey up the Mount this week where they will recreate the photo taken almost 66 years ago.

"I'm very excited," she said.

Mount Maunganui's history

According to legend the mountain once lay inland. Spurned by the beautiful mountain Puwhenua, it begged the fairy-like creatures of the forest to drag it into the ocean. As they neared the water's edge, dawn broke, and the fairies fled, leaving the mountain caught forever in the light of day. Thereafter it was known as Mauao (Mau - "caught", ao - "light of day").

Later it was renamed Maunganui in memory of a similar mountain in Hawaiki, the Polynesian homeland of the Maori.