Joan Allan - Acting The Goat
The daughter of a Swedish journalist and Kiwi miner, Joan Allan, was born near Greymouth, moving with the family to Dunedin, aged three.
Hijinks and hilarity have always been who she is, ordered off the Otago Girls’ High School stage for hysterically laughing while reading a Greek poem. Sadly, Joan’s parents parted when she was 12 and Joan and her brother grew up around the Evening Star newsroom in Dunedin. Her mum covered many a Royal Tour, getting to know many famous people, including Princess Diana’s father.
A year into her nursing training Joan switched to dental nursing. One summer a fellow student brought her home to Cloverdale farm, in Lower Shotover, for a holiday, aged 20, where she met husband Jack. They married in 1956. “We’d go to balls at the Shotover and Arrowtown halls, stagger home exhausted, get changed, fill up with coffee and head straight out to milk the cows,” recalls Joan. A ‘city girl’, Joan had to learn fast. “A farmhand was away once and I went to help, leg-roping the ‘cow’ in for milking, when the other farmhand said, ‘That’ll be a dry argument. I’d leg-roped the bull,” she laughs. The Allans milked for the town supply, their Chevy truck laden with milk cans, usually filling old beer bottles for the campers at Queenstown Camping Ground. Everybody seemed to be related back then. “I didn’t dare say a word about anyone,” she says. Jack’s mother Jessie Allan hailed from the first family on Crown Terrace. Her mother, ‘Granny Mackie’, had the same boarder for 67 years – King Butler. “He had only one canine tooth left and I itched to take it out,” she grins.
A great debater, Joan was a foundation member of Queenstown Toastmistress Club. She loved a prank, pulling one over the audience at a community debate arranging for former deputy mayor Margaret McHugh to stride into the hall in anger at the stench of Joan’s pet goat, Thelma, on stage. Joan would regularly perform as ‘Mrs Abominable’ at shows, giving the council a ribbing in jest, and more seriously on political issues at meetings when required.
Ever the hostess, Joan was the first to host home stays and farm tours locally, during the 1980s. A delegation of high-ranking Chinese officials arrived by bus once, but Joan’s fiercely protective pet goat Mace holed them up in the bus. “Another time Arrowtown Fire Brigade came to check our water supply and Mace charged them, sending them racing up trees and hiding behind buildings.”
She’s hosted famous people from around the world, including renowned White House journalist Connie Lawn, and NASA science greats, brightening many a day. There have been emergencies too, like the Jewish group that arrived after she’d prepared bacon and egg pie and ham salad for lunch.
Her spectacular, expansive gardens attracted many Japanese weddings from the 1990s. “My son’s father-in-law turned up with bag-pipes one day and they wouldn’t get out of the car they were so terrified,” says Joan.
The last of her four pet donkeys, Barty, only died recently at 26, and years earlier her huge pet pig, Delilah, produced so many piglets, they had to be topped up with milk and a drop of whisky then wrapped in Jack’s old underwear. “I’d pop them in the coal range oven to keep warm. One day the minister arrived and said, ’I can’t stand it, Joan. Whatever you’re cooking is still alive!’”
The three Allan kids rode horses and each year in the 1970s they’d rise early to trek with the local Pony Club to New Year camp on Mount Creighton Station. “I’d leave a freezer full of food for Jack and the workers and do so much baking, then Bill Dagg made us all rise at 4am before the traffic.” A young Brian Dagg learned his lesson after sneaking an eel into Joan’s sleeping bag once, hauled in front of the class to speak while Joan taught communications skills at the high school. They’d ride on to the Glenorchy Races on New Year’s Day, where Joan once won the Barrel Race. “We’d ride all over the hills – the Sparys, Daggs, Allans, Thompsons and others, marching through town on the way home with people out on their balconies waving.”
At a fashion show and horse-racing event on the Allan’s farm, Joan pipped Barry Thomas by a nose in the VIP Race, which she says he’s never forgotten.
A judge for the Lake Hayes Show Baby Competition in the 1960s, Al Spary was a clear winner, she says. “He was a big, cuddly baby, the biggest most beautiful baby ever. I was walking along singing ‘big ones, fat ones, thin ones’, then realised the speaker was on, sending that all over the showgrounds. I nearly died!” says Joan.
A bad stroke in 2003 affected her speech for a year, but Joan persisted with speech therapy, regaining it fully.
A former Arrowtown Golf Club captain, she’s still active as founder of the Wakatipu Garden Club, in Inner Wheel and the Queenstown and Districts Historical Society, and loves U3A and Book Club.
