Islands of the Gulf - Great Barrier

Television news, interviews and documentaries were skills nobody knew anything about when the medium arrived here. Shirley's background in radio and theatre, combined with her extreme intelligence, helped put together groundwork which has remained a benchmark lasting to this day as the industry has flourished.

– Max Cryer remembers Shirley Maddock in The Sunday Star Times, 14 October 2001

Great Barrier is hard country; it offers no easy life. It accepts the storms as it does the good weather and measures the years by the inexorable pattern of the sea and tides, and the season passing.

– Shirley Maddock muses underneath Barrier’s pohutukawa clad cliffs

Ranger Fuller had a very encouraging way of saying ‘it’s only another 10 minutes’, in case I imagined that the two hour climb seemed too hard a prospect. At this point we were up to our fifth or sixth 10 minute stint.

– Shirley Maddock, en route to the kauri dams

Apart from Shank’s pony, a Land Rover is the best way to travel on The Barrier.

– Shirley Maddock

Not all, perhaps, remember that when European settlers first came to Great Barrier survival meant self-reliance to a daunting degree . . . Now, when radio can summon helicopters in minutes to whisk you back to the workaday world, permanently avoiding the mainstream is harder than you think.

– Shirley Maddock, in her foreword to the 1983 edition of her book Islands of the Gulf

Immediately apparent are all the holiday homes sprung up on the hillside behind the beach. The aircraft took off again, with its customary exhilarating splash, and made short work of the remaining stretch of coast . . . where old Barrier-ites would always tell you was big enough and deep enough to accommodate the British Navy.

– Shirley Maddock, in her foreword to the 1983 edition of her book Islands of the Gulf

In those days, too, I was able to talk to men and women born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, who, like Uncle Ted Day, the Reg Coopers, Toby Davies and old Tom Dawn, were not only blessed with phenomenal memories, but were born raconteurs. Like the storytellers of old, you could sit with them, as I loved to do, while they yarned away about the old days.

– Shirley Maddock looks back on the series, in her foreword to the 1983 edition of her book Islands of the Gulf