Helen Hillary - Multi-tasking mountain mum

She’s milked cows, driven school and tour buses on remote dusty roads and rubbed shoulders with Hollywood elite, not to mention the four kids she’d had by age 25. For Helen Hillary, it’s all just a case of “knuckle down and do what you can”.

Now 84, Helen, one of nine, grew up during the Great Depression working hard on her parents’ Canterbury farm, milking cows for cream for the butter factory. The cream cart came by nearly every day. After a number of rural family moves south, Helen left school young and moved to Christchurch where she met husband Naylor Hillary, then a painter and decorator. “I wasn’t marrying a farmer, but I didn’t know his deepest wish was to be one,” she laughs.

However, they ended up buying out their partner in a 500-acre (202.3ha) Glenorchy farm they’d part owned while living with their young family in Gore. ‘The Priory’, just before The Hillocks and Dart Bridge, was to be home for 46 years, so back on the farm Helen was, four kids then aged from five to 11 in tow.

They saved the Glenorchy School though. “Things were bad as they had only six pupils and the Education Department was going to close it.” Two other families from an outlying station and farm took their kids off Correspondence School and, thanks to school committee chairman Jim Robie, they even got approval for a school bus van.

Initially, the Glenorchy Road was just a dirt road with grass for a centreline, but rough backcountry roads didn’t faze Helen with her farming background. Long before job sharing was a thing, she and Barb Veint took fortnightly shifts at driving the school bus, collecting pupils from the Routeburn Valley, Paradise and Kinloch. Helen drove that for 17 years.

The NZ Railways tourist bus used to bring the mail to Glenorchy once a week and the week’s newspapers too. “We’d catch up with seven days of newspapers all at once. H & H took over from the Railways and I had a bus licence so they asked me to drive that bus too.”

It was a very tight schedule that would daunt any busy CEO, finishing the school bus run then heading up the Rees Valley and down to Greenstone, initially through 18 fords, connecting with the Routeburn bus for trampers and visitors. “That was six days a week then home to cook tea, but the kids helped out a lot.”

Then in her ‘spare time’ Helen would drive the big family Ford Fairlane to Queenstown on the dirt road to collect her kids, who eventually boarded in town while attending Queenstown District High School. “Sometimes I’d have extra kids in the car that my kids had spontaneously invited for the weekend.”

Prior to that their eldest had boarded at Timaru Boys. The roof there blew off the hostel in high winds so without any parental warning Wakatipu students were bundled into a bus and sent home. “Bill Duggan rang on the party line at 4am so Naylor put the trailer on and headed to Queenstown,” Helen says. “Halfway back they all saw a wheel running downhill past them, across the road and over the bank into the lake.” It was off Naylor’s car which had just been serviced at the garage.

That car survived but their eldest son’s car, ‘Orinoko’, met its demise on the movie set of ‘Race for the Yankee Zephyr’ during filming up the Rees Valley.

A few years later Helen pitched in at the local pub to help cook for The Willow stars during local filming, including young directors, George Lucas, of Star Wars fame, and Ron Howard, from Happy Days. “I baked a birthday cake for George Lucas’s 27th birthday,” Helen recalls. “They were all in mobile homes in Paradise. They wanted snow. Come filming they got 10 inches (25.4cms). The snow was that deep that it pulled the exhaust system off my Subaru truck heading down to cook them breakfast.”

The two stars later cooked Helen a crayfish dinner in their mobile home as thanks for saving and keeping their dinners hot while they helped others through the snow. “They really appreciated that.”

In 2003 Helen and Naylor retired to Frankton overlooking the arm where Helen volunteered for Meals on Wheels, carried on with local Indoor Bowls, and, as a keen keyboardist, became President of the Shotover Country Music Club.

The view’s not the same from her Frankton home now that the old Methodist Camp has been replaced by the Hilton. “But for four years every New Year we’d sit on the Frankton Reserve and listen to the bagpipes being played from that camp. It was absolutely gorgeous with the fireworks going off beyond, a dream come true. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

Not yet Helen, too much to do.