Penny Clark - Still trailblazing for women

She’s been trailblazing for women since bravely setting off on her OE from Britain, riding solo around part of Australia on her 125cc Suzuki motorbike.

Camping alone in the North Queensland outback with the threat of snakes and fighting off giant cockroaches, Penny Clark assures “you wouldn’t want your daughter doing it now”. “But I’m a great believer in travelling on your own as you meet people,” the hospitality legend says.

Since those early 70s adventures, Penny’s been showing women how it’s done, as Australasia’s first female hotel manager, finally settling in Queenstown where she became one of NZ’s most respected in the industry. Somehow in amongst her 24/7 duties and 11-hour days, she “made a baby” in 1990, parenting Richard solo too, with help from a nanny, regularly blocking out quality family time.

Fondling truckie hands got a quick shift from Penny while hitching in Mexico during her travels there. But she then had to fight sexism of a different kind, fending off envious male egos when other more accepting male managers convinced her she would be good at their job. She also held her own around the Queenstown Lakes District Council table as councillor for six years from 2016.

Retiring from a 50-year career in hotel management in 2016, Penny, 74, is still breaking ground for the girls, now ‘Caretaker Extraordinaire’, mastering the weed-eater, trapping possums and stripping paint back to the 1920s. She’s helping restore a beautiful Central Otago heritage building – Earnscleugh Castle, living in her caravan on site.

Raised in the great outdoors on a 350-acre (141.6 ha) estate in North Devon, near Clovelly, one of four kids, Penny had an “idyllic childhood” riding ponies as the Milky Bar Kid, her brother the Indian accomplice. “Mum painted war paint on our faces.”

Penny was in demand during school House Sports meets at her Catholic boarding school, outrunning and outhurdling the others by a country mile.

She learned silver service from an Englishman, who’d previously worked at The Dorchester, at Perth’s five-star hotel before working two jobs in Sydney to head to Japan. “It was Expo ’74, not long after the Americans’ historic landing on the moon and the Japanese had the Apollo 11 space capsule from that landing on display at the Expo.” Wearing traditional Japanese wooden footwear, an already tall Penny was towering above everyone. “They thought I was American, so people wanted their photos with me and autographs in front of the space capsule.”

She then set off on her motorcycle from Sydney. By Townsville she’d acquired two spare petrol tanks on the back.

Penny dipped sausages in batter at a Darwin fair and cocktail waitressed in a glittery, gold mini skirt, before being told she was “too qualified” to peel shrimps.

An Aussie chef eventually called off their road tour to Ayres Rock after she brought red wine, salami, pate and blue cheese… no water!

Arriving in New Zealand as the 1974 Commonwealth Games started Penny impressed at the Christchurch Travelodge, improvising with no staff during Prime Ministers Gough Whitlam, Norman Kirk, and the King of Tonga’s visits.

The Queen came too.

She ‘hitched’ the Pacific on a banana boat living with families in Samoa and Tonga, rowing right on board a cruise ship once with a guy for a banquet lunch, after posing as guests.

Penny landed a job as assistant food and beverage manager at Travelodge in Tahiti, later ending up “stone broke” in Mexico, sleeping on a family’s mud floor, travelling done.

Scoring a job at Napier Travelodge she later became the first female in Australasia to become a general manager in Wellington, after proving her worth setting up Rotorua Travelodge – a huge task. “We’d have 300 eating in one restaurant and 300 having a hangi in the other. Nobody knew service,” she says. “The waiter stood with his foot on a crate of beer, flicked the top off and sent the bottle down the table.”

Travelodge even named their ‘Penny’s Restaurants’ after her.

While managing City Travelodge in Auckland she took just two weeks off for Richard’s birth, breastfeeding on site, thanks to her “brilliant secretary”, before managing Queenstown Gardens Parkroyal from 1993.

From there she managed Kakadu Hotel in Australia where she was named ‘Northern Territory Businesswoman of the Year.

Penny then turned Christchurch Heritage around from 18% to boomer occupancy before becoming regional area manager for Heritage in Hanmer and Queenstown. A short stint in Auckland followed before turning around Goldridge Queenstown - in trouble post GFC, where she stayed seven years.

Travel continued with hiking trips around Mount Blanc, South American adventures climbing Machu Pichu, and exploring Sri Lanka.

In 2022, while running her Airbnb management company, Penny saw an article about the Earnsleugh Castle project: “I thought, ‘I should be there!’ and now she is.

She’s helping the businessmen owners turn it into a private hotel-wellness spa. “I give most things a go. My first job was to kill possums and rid the place of vermin.”

Those rabbits won’t win either.