Kathy Hulton
The then Kathleen (Kathy) Kopua may never have ventured beyond her remote Te Araroa birthplace had her step-father not kicked her out of home at 16 for talking to a boy at a wedding.
"It was purely platonic but he had it in his head we'd been up to nonsense and told me to pack my bag."
Fellow wedding guests, her aunt and uncle Oha and Alby Bennett, brought their Ngati Porou niece north to Te Arawa territory. "My auntie worked in the [Rotorua] hospital sewing room, she said she'd get me into nursing and within days I started as a nurse aid."
Two days before her 17th birthday her nursing training proper began.
Today she's one of the city's longest-serving district nurses and although she won't have a bar of it she's one patients adore. We've lost count of the number who've told Our People so, urging us to tell her story; after meeting Kathy we can well see why they're captivated by it.
She was 18-months-old when, in her words, her father 'took off into the sunset', deserting her mother, 38 weeks pregnant with her fifth child.
"We lived on a farm four hours [horse] riding from East Cape to Te Araroa, there were no roads. The only way to school was riding bareback along the beach. In winter my mother braved floods and slips to get our provisions, swimming her horse across swollen rivers."
When not at their eight-pupil school, the Kopua children worked the land "harrowing with a Clydesdale, my sister did that, I didn't like to get dirty, I milked Daisy the cow, she didn't like me and used to put her foot in the bucket."
Renowned publisher and walker AH Reed was a yearly visitor. "He was a great friend of my grandfather, the Rev Rewiti Kohere, one of the pioneers of the young Maori movement along with Maui Pomare, Peter Buck, Apirana Ngata."
With a degree in theology and an ardent advocate for educational qualifications for Maori he was instrumental in obtaining an "isolation scholarship" for his high school aged mokopuna (grandchild).
It took Kathy to Marton's Turakina Maori Girls' College. "That's when Maori girls were being trained to be domestics, we were taught how to scrub and polish, starch and iron, blacken stoves, make clothes. Compared with the girls at the posh Pakeha girls' school Nga Tawa near-by we looked like something out of the jungle."
Kathy rebelled against a career mired in domestic drudgery, transferring her scholarship to Spotswood College, New Plymouth.
She'd only been back in Te Araroa briefly when her stepfather made that decision, albeit unintentionally, that was to kick-start her nursing career as one of six trainees in Rotorua Hospital's class of 1966.
"We lived in the nurses' home, I loved it, I'd been to boarding school." Rules were strict, but broken. "We'd sneak out at night to the Soundshell dances, it was the start of the Howard Morrison era."
Training was ward-based and hierarchal. "As a nurse aid I answered to a one striper and so on up the ranks. We had a lot of old people, then you were old at 60; many patients had TB, the contagious ones were in little huts detached from the ward, that was yuck."
For Kathy the always-packed children's ward was even yuckier - "the smell of all those slimy nappies . . ."
Well into her training Kathy met husband-to-be Tom Hulton.
"My friend had her eye on him, he had his eye on me but I thought he was distasteful, common."
Time mellowed her and their relationship developed into unplanned parenthood.
"I had to get married and move out of the nurses' home, accommodation was hard to get then if you had a brown face."
Kathy's stubborn streak won out. "We went to a place in Malfroy Rd, I told the owner I wouldn't get out of the car if he only let Pakeha live there . . . he reluctantly relented, we stayed eight years."
The Hulton's daughter was born before she graduated. She credits Rotorua GP, the late Dr Dick Sill, with getting her through her studies.
"He was in hospital recovering after being thrown from an ambulance and took me under his wing. He was really, really strict, if I cried he'd say "oh stop snivelling girly, you only got 50 per cent for that test go back, learn more."
While her first child had been conceived with ease, Kathy battled to become pregnant again.
After medical intervention by now notorious National Women's Hospital's Professor Denis Bonham she gave birth to a 3lb 11oz son born eight weeks early.
"He was in an incubator next to a fat Pakeha baby who was RH negative, his parents were Jehovahs Witnesses who didn't believe in blood transfusions. There was my little baby struggling to live and they were denying theirs life."
She was still breastfeeding when she was asked to do relief, then full time, district nursing.
"That was 37 years ago, I've been here ever since. Going into people's homes is a real privilege. I often think of what [the late] Dixie Yates told me: "Look at your hands and think how many people they've looked after. I think that's just a beautiful saying."