Robbie Shearer (right) and her great-grandson Fin Zerner. Shearer remembers playing with David Attenborough (inset) as a child.
Sir David Attenborough has been telling the story of life on Earth for more than 70 years. This week as he marks his 100th birthday, a New Zealand connection stretching back to his childhood and revived this year has emerged. Tom Eley reports.
Sir David Attenborough‘s voice has carried across living rooms and continents, bringing distant worlds into view and shaping how generations understand nature.
But behind the global figure is a quieter, more personal story. One of connection, loss, and small acts of kindness.
It is a story that has intertwined with that of a now 100-year-old Taupō woman, who was a childhood companion of his in Leicester, England.
Robbie Shearer turned 100 in January, marking the milestone with the same independence that has defined her life.
Rather than gathering her 27 family members who are living in Australia for a celebration in New Zealand, Shearer boarded a flight to Noosa, insisting it was easier for her to go to them.
Little did she know, her family had done something special for her, too: Shearer’s daughter, Di Cush, wrote to Attenborough, explaining her mother’s childhood connection and asking if he would send her a birthday card.
Cush told the Herald she was unsure if the letter would ever reach him.
But two weeks later, a reply arrived - handwritten, personal, and wishing Shearer a happy 100th birthday.
Cush said her mother was delighted to receive the special birthday card and had since sent him one in return.
The exchange comes in a special year, with both Attenborough and Shearer reaching 100 years, their lives tracing separate paths from the same beginnings in Leicester.
Born just four months before Attenborough, Shearer remembers playing with him and his brother, the late, acclaimed film director, producer and actor Richard Attenborough, as children, a fleeting connection that stayed with her as she followed their lives from afar.
Her own life would take a very different path.
During World War II, as an 18-year-old in Leicester, she met and married a Royal New Zealand Air Force bomber pilot.
Four months after their wedding, her husband was shot down and killed.
Honouring a promise she had given her husband before he died, Shearer travelled alone to New Zealand to meet his family.
What was meant to be just a visit became a much longer journey.
She later remarried, built a life and brought up a family here.
At Shearer’s birthday party in Australia, her great-grandson Fin Zerner, an up-and-coming guitarist, singer and live loop artist based on the Sunshine Coast, played some of her favourite songs.
At one point, Shearer pushed aside her walker and danced with her son to Nat King Cole’s L.O.V.E.
Zerner, a longtime admirer of Attenborough’s work, said he was stunned to see the handwritten letter arrive for his grandmother.
As part of The Life of Birds, filmed in the late 1990s, Attenborough turned his lens to some of New Zealand’s most distinctive species, from the nocturnal kiwi to the alpine kea and the now-rare kākāpō.
The series highlighted not only their unusual behaviours and evolution in isolation, but also the fragility of a birdlife found nowhere else on Earth.
While filming parts of The Life of Birds in New Zealand, he was called back to the United Kingdom after his wife, Jane, suffered a brain haemorrhage and fell into a coma. She later died.
In a 2024 interview with the Daily Express, Attenborough said through the loss of his wife, the focus of his life, “the anchor”, had gone and “he was lost”.
Speaking about New Zealand, the country represented both wonder and warning, a place where evolution’s creativity was on full display, but where that uniqueness was also under threat, he told the Daily Express.
Attenborough was born into an academic family, with his father serving as principal of University College, Leicester, where he spent much of his childhood.
During World War II, his family took in two Jewish refugee girls as part of the Kindertransport. .
Attenborough has often spoken about the importance of his early years collecting fossils and natural specimens, many of which were gathered from the grounds around his childhood home.
Despite decades of global travel, he has remained closely tied to London, living in the same home for many years.
He once said his favourite animal was a sloth, because of its calm, “unhurried way of life”.
Over more than 70 years with the BBC, Attenborough’s voice has become one of the most recognisable in the world and his documentaries, including Zoo Quest, Planet Earth and Blue Planet, set the standard for natural history filmmaking.
Yet for one New Zealand family, it is not the scale of that legacy that matters most.
It is a handwritten letter. A small act of kindness that has connected two lives across continents and across time.
When approached by the Waikato Herald for comment on Shearer’s story, a representative for Sir David Attenborough thanked the publication for its interest, but said Attenborough had chosen not to take part in interviews around his 100th birthday, including responding to written questions.
Attenborough turns 100 tomorrow.
Tom Eley is a multimedia journalist at the Waikato Herald. Before he joined the Hamilton-based team, he worked for the Weekend Sun and Sunlive. He previously worked as a journalist at Black Press Media in Canada and won a fellowship with the Vancouver Sun.