Helen Jeffery - Bred tough on the Terrace

They bred country girls tough on the Crown Terrace in the 1960s. Helen Jeffery’s life of global adventure, courage and resilience is testament to that.

Helen’s dad, renowned local pilot Jim Jeffery, was a stickler for education. “He’d get us to school no matter what,” Helen grins. They’d arrive on the tractor on snow days, often the only ones there. The Terrace Zigzag was rugged gravel and the Arrowtown School bus wasn’t initially allowed up there, deemed too dangerous. Jim got permission for it to take Terrace residents only and became the driver.

At 11, Helen’s nagging finally earned her a pony. Jim, a former musterer, declared: “You can’t ride a horse properly until you can canter bareback with one hand behind your back and roll a cigarette with the other.” When the ex-Moonlight Stables rodeo horse bucked her off a seventh time, landing her in hospital with a broken leg her dad came to visit. “He left me his rollies to practice, but the matron took them off me,” Helen laughs.

Helen didn’t enjoy team sports but loved Queenstown Districts High School teacher Ian Daniel’s Outdoor Pursuits Club. She recalls a tramping trip across the lake being somewhat spoiled when Jim circled overhead in his plane checking up on them!

Sixth form (Year 12) saw Helen on a Spirit of Adventure voyage from Auckland to Whangarei, beginning a long volunteering association for her and Jim. “Most years I still do one trip.”

Leaving home at 17, Helen trained as an occupational therapist in Wellington - a big leap from the Terrace. On graduation she was bonded to the government for two years. Asking for ‘somewhere small in the south’ she was sent to Kaitaia. “It was fantastic, the best thing for me. I was fully immersed into Māori culture. They really embraced me.” Sent to fit an elderly woman for a wheelchair, she didn’t know she was meant to take an overnight bag to sleep on the marae. “I received the full powhiri.”

A seven-year OE followed, starting with work in an Aussie outback hotel, 900kms from the ocean - “The Surf Lifesaving Club met around a paddling pool on the Police Station roof.”

She then became cook for an indigenous work gang at isolated Lawn Hills cattle station, part of which was being converted to national park. “We had freshwater crocodiles and bull dust. They towed a caravan in for my kitchen and the washing machine stood in the dirt, a cable connecting it to a generator.” The freshly slaughtered meat was salted to preserve it, Helen learning to slice off the outer fly-blown rim.

Small sailboat crewing began with a hair-raising sail from Papua New Guinea to Australia’s East Coast. “In most villages the children had never seen white people so were mesmerised by us.” They crossed the Coral Sea in wild weather, navigation by sextant, three very seasick crew taking turns on deck.

She then backpacked from Bali to England over 18 months and worked in London as an occupational therapist. Helen had her pick of jobs, funding multiple ‘boat packing’ sailing trips over the next few years.

Back in 1989 she worked in Nelson where she helped establish the ‘Women on Water’ group and built on sailing, whitewater kayaking, rock climbing and bush navigation qualifications before working at Outward Bound as an instructor from 1993.

Helen scored a husband there in fellow instructor Ian Douglass - a challenging sailing trip around the Pacific in a 26-foot (7.9m) boat passing the relationship test.

They then became beekeepers in Bluff, selling honey to Airborne and at local markets, Helen also working with the mental health team at Southland Hospital.

The seven-year itch returned, and they sailed off in an 11.6m yacht, enjoying and enduring tropical and high latitude sailing including the Arctic and Northwest Passage. Helen’s promised 50th birthday blissful two nights of sweet sleep anchored off Taz Island in the Gulf of Alaska turned into a boat-threatening battle, the anchor dragging in horrendous, freezing Arctic winds. Hard work getting the emergency anchor out, diesel fumes stinking the cabin, anchor watch all night… “Ian had to cut my wedding ring off - my fingers were so swollen with chilblains,” she says. The final straw – Ian couldn’t find the birthday cake mix he’d packed!

Back in Queenstown, where she works online for the Occupational Therapy School in Dunedin, Helen’s very involved with Adventure Therapy Aotearoa, a field helping troubled young people back on track through outdoor activities and connection with nature. “Research has proven the physiological relationship we have with nature, which helpfully reduces our cortisol levels,” she says.

Narrowly avoiding Ian’s bid for them to join the Bowling Club, Helen, who’d had flying lessons with her dad in a Piper Cub at 16, distracted Ian with a paragliding class. They both became hooked and it’s now a favourite past-time.