Her school, officially a Decile 3, reflects the suburb's diversity. With its boarding hostel, it attracts farm girls; as the only girls' school in the city it attracts those who want a single-sex education; and it also attracts local girls. Some pupils experience the educational issues that go with poverty, while others "would fit into any Decile 10 school in the country".
The Wanganui East Club is a local institution. It began life in 1974 as a working men's club, but now houses a bar, restaurant, darts, snooker, gaming, petanque and a TAB. It has more than 1500 members, around 40 per cent of whom are female.
Members are a real mixture of the community, says manager Denis Dorgan. "We've got regulars most nights - people who come every Thursday, people who come every Friday."
The businesses at the local shopping centre - which locals call the Wanganui East Shopping Centre, and marketing/rebranding types try, mostly unsuccessfully, to call the Eastside Shopping Centre - also have their regulars.
"Our customers are very, very loyal, and we are so lucky to have them," says Lindsay Rehm of Lindsay's Lotto Post and More. He and his wife Sharon bought the business six years ago and are very happy with their decision. "I'll be retiring in five or six years, and I won't be moving until I retire," he says.
There is one slight downside, which relates back to the closure of the railway workshops. When times were booming, the suburb needed lots of shops. When the workshops closed, the banks also moved out, leaving vacant buildings. So while Rehm says business is very good for the variety of shops in the area, the vacant units give the impression it might not be.
Houses in Wanganui East are mostly older, with some classic bungalows and villas, says Steve Carkeek, of Professionals Real Estate Wanganui.
And sections can be large - many houses have the traditional quarter-acre (1012sq m) and some are like mini-lifestyle blocks, with 4000sq m or more.
Add to that, it's just a few minutes to town, and contains one of the country's most well-known playgrounds - Kowhai Park. "Harried parents find this a great place for kids to let off steam after a day's shopping," says Carkeek.
Dorothy Fraser and Paul Clarke: Why we bought in Wanganui East
Dorothy Fraser and Paul Clarke are the classic boy-and-girl-next-door story - they met when Dorothy was living with her mother in Wanganui East and Paul was living next door.
Now they have bought their first house together, in the very same suburb, having lived in another Wanganui East house, "just five minutes around the corner".
You could say the couple of twenty-somethings like Wanganui East, and you would be right. "It's a nice, comfortable, safe area," says Dorothy.
It's also an area where a couple of twenty-somethings can comfortably afford a three-bedroom home, on a 736sq m section, and with a semi-rural outlook.
"It's not rural, but straight behind the house is farmland, and Paul grew up in that kind of setting," says Dorothy (he grew up further along the Whanganui River in Kaiwhaiki). "It just felt really out of the way, although it's not."
Part of the reason for that is Turoa Rd, where they bought, is a cul-de-sac, meaning the only people using the road are residents or their visitors. The houses on both sides of Dorothy and Paul are owned by middle-aged women.
"It's quite quiet here, which is nice - there are not many loud, noisy people," says Dorothy, joking that they may become known as the loud, noisy people of the street when they have their house-warming party.
Affordability was another attraction. Dorothy, a physiotherapist, studied at AUT in Auckland for four years, living in the North Shore suburb of Bayswater, so she knows how expensive home ownership can be: "I would never buy a house up there."
But they bought their house, through Pam Perry of Professionals Wanganui, in the "low- to mid-200s".
Not only does the stucco house, originally built in the 1960s, have three bedrooms, but it also has a sunroom/conservatory, a "massive" double garage and a carport. That's very important for Paul, who has "hobby cars". Two at the moment, but that could change.
And inside it was all in good condition, with a relatively new kitchen and only minor redecorating needed.
"When we saw it, we knew we could just move straight into the home and be comfortable," says Dorothy.
They had been looking for several months in several parts of Wanganui, including in Durie Hill, Aramoho and Springvale, before they bought. But in the end, they came back to the area they know and love, where they're close to family and, most of all, comfortable.
"We like the house, we like the area," says Dorothy. "If we wanted to spend a lot of money we would've gone up the hill, but we wouldn't have felt comfortable."
* From the New Zealand Herald's quarterly 'Property Report' - a guide to house prices and great places to live.
