Lynda Thomas - Legendary local teacher - She just can’t leave

She’s watched the hair on the principal’s legs catch fire, had a parapenter land on the library roof while teaching and been reprimanded for putting beer in the fish batter on an alcohol-free school camp. Despite all that, former Queenstown Primary School teacher Lynda Thomas went back for more soon after retiring from that 30-year career.

“I wanted to retire from the pressure but not the kids,” she smiles, promptly re-entering last year as a local reliever, and now a part-time teacher at Hanley’s Te Kura Whakatipu o Kawarau.

Lynda’s career began at the tender age of 19 after being accepted to Dunedin Teacher’s College straight from Form 6 (Year 12).

Born in Invercargill she was a sporty kid, loving netball, basketball and softball, despite her height (just under 5 foot – 1.5m).

In her final 6th form year at James Hargest High Lynda was chosen to deliver a heap of Bluff oysters to the Gold Coast for the Invercargill Lions Club. “Instead of freighting them over they chose a student each year.” Billeted out with a lovely Gold Coast Lions family she had a great summer, rolling ice creams on the corner of Cavill Ave.

Too late returning for the usual Dunedin student hostels she boarded at YWCA making lifelong friends. “It was very strict. Men, boys and dads weren’t allowed to visit our rooms. We met in the lounge. There was no phone after 7pm,” she says. “If we wanted beers or drinks, we tied our dressing gown cords together and hoisted them up through the window.” Flatting with seven of those girls above London Street they were called ‘The Smorgasbord’, as not all students.

About then she met husband of 40-plus years band keyboardist Lindsay (‘Thomo’) Thomas at a party, carrying on the legacy with two brothers in bands. “We were the only two short people there,” she grins.

Married at 20, Thomo 21, he worked as a builder and Lynda took on several extra jobs in addition to teaching to build their first house in Concord after they won a ballot section.

“Teaching was different then. You arrived, had a cuppa, taught, had a cuppa and left.”

Lynda taught at multiple Dunedin schools but once pregnant with the first of their two kids, Sarah and Tim, she had to leave. “You weren’t allowed back once you had kids then as there was no maternity leave.”

A short building stint for Thomo in Arrowtown in 1987 had them yearning to return but the sharemarket crash delayed that until 1994.

“I went to see Queenstown School principal Mel Gazzard to enrol our kids, and he said, ‘I like the cut of your jib. Do you want a job?’” Lynda chuckles. It was a big change from her Decile 1 Caversham Primary job to a Decile 10. “I said to our kids, ‘Where do you lock up your lunches?’ and they said, ‘We don’t!’”

“I loved Queenstown Primary. I taught with the most wonderful teachers. Everyone was so positive.” Long staff meetings were held at Avanti over dinner.

From Stewart Island camps to the school’s legendary Outdoor Education Week: “I remember teacher Mairi Kirk getting knocked out of a raft. It was quite safe, but we were on a wing and a prayer with some things back then,” Lynda says.

“Then Mel was pushing his boat out to take us to Pigeon Island and something had gone wrong with the fuel pump or something. The kids called ‘Mr Gazzard the hairs on your legs are on fire!’”

Lynda was also in the school library once when there was a loud bang on the roof. A parapente chute appeared in the windows on both sides. “I said, ‘Stay here kids! There might be blood, and we all ran out to see the parapenter on the roof. He urged us not to ring anyone but the whole town had seen it.”

‘Morning talks’, now disbanded, kept the teachers informed “about everything going on in the community”, and there were the moving moments too as kids with disabilities made small victories, the other kids championing them. “The hardest thing was watching the kids whose families were struggling financially with the high cost of living in Queenstown.”

Lynda and her own kids had good boundaries – great mates walking to and from their Ballarat Street home to school, then they’d go their separate ways. Very independent as downtown teens, if they weren’t at the letterbox outside a party by midnight, Mum was coming in. They usually were.

Lynda and Thomo became heavily involved in local sport, Lynda also coaching school netball and helping with after school cricket.
Still loving her job at the Hanley’s School, Lynda, a keen embroiderer and sewer, gets to be sewing teacher too. “There’s still not a day that I don’t throw my head back and laugh five times at what the kids have said,” she grins.