Jane Shaw - Queen of the sticky bun

She’s launched three successful local food businesses and one of Central Otago’s most iconic fresh produce markets, her sticky buns still legendary years after she retired.

Jane Shaw has cooked for everyone from Kiwi shearing gangs to wealthy UK estate owners, but somehow as a young woman Arrowtown’s Jane Shaw always thought she should have a “proper career”.

Born in Kuala Lumpur in 1962, her dad among a team of post-war Kiwis surveying the jungle, Jane was very small when they moved back to Christchurch. “But my dad was a great storyteller, and I grew up around the legend of his Malaysian jungle stories.”

Jane got a telling off on her first day at Westburn Primary for picking flowers from the garden to “take home to Mum”.

The family moved to Hawkes Bay when Jane was 15, where she was strong at athletics and netball, all the while loving to cook with her mum.

Otago Uni then seemed like the most faraway option from her strict Catholic upbringing and a friend suggested dentistry - a bad choice, so Jane did a psychology degree. “I should’ve studied Home Science, but I thought that was just for girls,” she smiles.

Cooking saved the day on her OE, Jane cooking for wealthy London families through an agency and for an Irishman who owned a 13^th Century castle in Galway, Ireland.

“Back in New Zealand I thought I should get a real career and I liked writing.” After paying off the credit card cooking for shearers, she spent a post graduate year doing the Wellington journalism course, offered a job at the Levin Post. “I thought I was far too sophisticated for that,” Jane laughs, “so I opted for PR.” She handled publicity on NZ’s first pandas at Auckland Zoo, then became publicist for TVNZ’s ‘Gloss’ series, the last of the Top Town series and the hugely popular ‘It’s In The Bag” with broadcasting legend Selwyn Toogood.

After meeting husband of 35 years, Hal, both keen skiers, they managed a ski lodge in Dinner Plain, Victoria, Jane running the kitchen. “We liked tourism and hospitality and worked well together.”

A tour around the South Island looking for jobs saw them based in Milford Sound for four years in the early 1990s managing Fiordland Travel’s operations, Jane just 29. “Bryan Hutchins and Noel Walker took a punt on us. We were very young managers.” Tourism had really taken off and they were exciting times, Fiordland Travel building new boats. “I got to help design the galleys and new menus, introducing new customers to the changing facets of tourism.”

Three weeks was the longest they were cut off there with the roads out due to snow. “I loved the road closures and avalanches as nobody could get in so we got to take the staff out fishing,” she grins.

If the road was out too long fixed wing and helicopter tourism operators would fly them in KFC treats.

That was until their first son, Angus, was due in 1994, Hal super keen to obey instructions bundling Jane into the car with a storm brewing. “At my last doctor’s appointment in Queenstown he gave Hal an umbilical cord clamp. Two weeks before my due date when the avalanche manager told us we had half an hour to drive out or the road would be closed for the next two to three weeks Hal bundled me into the car very quickly,” she grins.

Hal ran the Te Anau Glowworm Caves for a year, and they then moved to Queenstown, by now with daughter Harriet in tow.

Jane worked briefly for MP Gavin Herlihy, then Destination Queenstown, before she and foodie friend Pauline Murphy hatched a plan to launch Provisions of Central Otago in Old Cromwell Town over a family picnic in Glenorchy.

“There was all this amazing wine, orchards and creative, talented people but no one was doing anything value added with all that beautiful fruit that was rotting on the ground,” she says. Orchardists soon began ringing to invite them to help themselves. “It was amazing, a really creative, exciting time.”

Farmers Markets were emerging in a few larger centres and they launched the first in the Central Otago-Wakatipu region. In no time they’d become the local bakers too, making sourdough, Pauline the ‘bagel queen’.

It was here Jane’s famous sticky buns were born. “It just took off. People would buy at a Sunday market over summer and clean us out of hundreds of sticky buns and preserves.”

At times it was a real juggling act making it back to collect the kids in Queenstown, especially with Hal travelling in Asia a lot for his work.

“It was really tough on Hal and the kids,” she says. “I was always in the wrong town.” On one occasion they were closing the Kawarau Gorge during heavy snow, Jane forced to abandon her Subaru halfway and hitch back to Queenstown to collect the kids.

By 2010 they’d leased the beautifully restored Romans Cottage, an 1870s miner’s cottage in Arrowtown, launching Provisions of Arrowtown when there were few cafes there. “We just did it at the right time. People already knew our sticky buns and jam.” Jane bought Pauline out around 2015, selling up herself in 2023 after nearly 14 years.

By then she also owned Boat Shed Café in the Frankton Marina, which she started in 2012 in another beautifully restored historic building. They were lucky enough to be offered the lease by the Wakatipu Maritime Trust when it was first opened. “At that point I was running three businesses. Hal was such a supportive husband and gave me amazing help and advice.”

She sold the Cromwell operation to Benger Juice Company in around 2018, 2019 in Queenstown “crazy busy”, so much so that Jane sold The Boat Shed in late 2019, just prior to the Covid lockdowns. “I felt so fortunate about the timing!” Provisions was closed 45 days that year.”

Jane says while she was lucky to have fantastic staff, including managers Barbara Griffin and Rebecaa O’Malley who stayed with her from start-up to selling, it was a time of enormous staffing challenges .

“Staff would ring at 8am and say, “Uh, I can’t come to work today. It was at this point that our daughter took herself off to boarding school as I was working 24/7.”

They’d close up early and make 100 cottage pies though to donate to Baskets of Blessing for the freezer.

By 2023 she’d turned 60 and “decided hospitality was for the younger ones”. She hung up her apron after making thousands of sticky buns and sold up. “I do miss it all, my lovely team and customers.”

Jane’s always been a strong Arrowtown community supporter, sponsoring fundraisers for the likes of the rugby club and school. “This is such a great community. I’d be no-one without them.”

She served for several years on the Arrowtown Business Promotion Association, is still on the Plunket Garden Tour Committee and together with the Shaw pet springer spaniel cross, Taika, enjoys volunteering for Canine Pet Therapy at Remarkables School.