Lindsay Jackson - Wildlife warrior

Her cousin is an internationally renowned Kiwi movie icon, and she’s been private nurse to wealthy British aristocracy, but you wouldn’t catch retired Queenstown nurse Lindsay Jackson skiting about all this.

Instead, you’re more likely these days to find her deep in the bush up the West Coast voluntarily trapping possums and rats in pursuit of her retirement passion, protecting our native birds and wildlife, or pitching in at planting days.

A nurse for 43 years, some of that time during her OE in London, Lindsay’s cared for many locals, first at the old Lakes Hospital in Frankton then the present hospital which opened in the late 1980s, on duty in A&E, general wards and in maternity. 

It was a far cry from her early graduate Middlemore Hospital days where she trained, fresh out of Wellington’s Newlands College.     

Lindsay’s family had emigrated to New Zealand as ‘Ten Pound Poms’ when she was 7 in 1964 sailing out by ship, leaving extended family scattered around England, a huge adventure for Lindsay and her brother. “We didn’t have to go to school, and the ship was where we learned to swim.” She still has the old menus and slides from that journey, sailing through Panama Canal. “We got a certificate for crossing the equator.”

They moved in with her dad’s brother, Uncle Will, Auntie Joan and three-year-old cousin Peter Jackson, who’d go on to become an internationally acclaimed, Academy Award-winning director and writer putting New Zealand film on the map in Hollywood. “We went to school in Pukerau Bay, then various parts of Wellington. Peter’s interest in films all started very young. He’d have latex things and heads with posts on them and masks downstairs in the basement. He started making films early in life with Uncle Ron and Henry’s Super 8 camera.” Family were roped in to dress up as extras in ‘Brain Dead’.

“Dad brought the transistor radio out from England, sheets, shoes, transistors were all expensive here, and I’d listen to the Top 20.”

Lindsay was a teen when her dad got their first car. Tragically, while she was studying nursing in Auckland her dad was killed in a car accident near Taupo, her mum thrown out of the car but surviving. Their dog died and cat on board disappeared. Lindsay was 20 and had to return after the funeral to sit her third-year exams and do night shift at Middlemore. “These days you’d get help and counselling, but you just had to get on with it,” she says.

Lindsay enjoyed working on the plastic surgery ward with burns patients, hitching to the South Island with friends before excitedly heading off on their OE. 

LA, then hitching across Canada wintering over in Sioux Lookout, wolves on the prowl outside, Lindsay then nursed in London, the agency paying so little that she went private nursing. Twelve-hour shifts in wealthy homes paid for summer European travel, Lindsay caring by day for former British Ambassador to Greece Sir Clifford Norton, a lovely man she read poetry to. 

She and her friends became ‘squatters’ in London’s infamous Bonnington Square one winter before Lindsay, by now dating ex-husband Duncan Smith, lived on a beach in Crete “with no clothes on”. “You couldn’t drive there. We dug a hole with a fresh river of running water under it. It was a rest. We were travel tired.”

After five years’ travel and a six-month stint at Aussie’s remote Mount Isa, they headed to Queenstown for Duncan to pursue his ski industry career, marrying here in 1987, friend Toni Okkerse’s Rottweiler the bridesmaid.

While renowned hospital matron ‘Brem’, as she was affectionately known, ran a strict ship, Lindsay won her over after six weeks relieving for nurse friend Nicky Pearson. “At the end of it she gruffly said, ‘Oh, you’ll do’, but by then I’d found a job as a ski nurse in the Coronet Peak and Remarkables patrol rooms for Mount Cook.” 

Lindsay also endured the solo night shift role, sleeping over alone at the old Sydney Street Maternity Home for a mere $6 a night, an hourly rate if she had to get up for a delivery. She’d work by day as a postie to top up her income. “It was quite scary there with no patients, so I’d lock myself in at night and go to bed in my uniform,” she laughs. “One night there was this huge bashing and banging on the door and I was terrified to open it, but I had to. It was a father who was desperate for a dummie for his new baby and knew we kept them,” she grins.

After their kids, Anton and Paige, were born, Lindsay eventually ran outpatient and specialist clinics at the new hospital, also working for the visiting surgical bus.

While still on ward duty in 2006 and by now separated, she had an intruder break into her Frankton home sneaking into her bedroom – a harrowing experience. “I leapt out at him like a mad thing, shouting, ‘Get out of my house’ and he ran off but I spent most of the night at the Police Station. It was a horrifying experience so I rang my hospital manger to say, ‘I’m not coming in today’ to which he said,’ Can you please arrange your replacement!’” Lindsay says.

Nursing through Covid was a challenging time, Lindsay retiring in 2021.

For years she was secretary and is still membership officer of the Wakatipu Tramping Club. She’s a devoted Wakatipu Wildlife Trust trapline volunteer, monitoring rodents around Tucker Beach, Frankton Track and Lake Hayes where she helps with bird counts.

On any given day you could find Lindsay up Ben Lomond helping Skyline or Wakatipu Tramping Club pulling out wilding pines at their plots.

She’s even done four stints as summer ranger on Ulva Island in the south. “I’m passionate about the environment and our wildlife now that I’m retired and have time.”

Those two local grandkids are right up there too.