Sylvia Gazzard - Small but mighty - Don’t mess with Mrs Gazzard

She may be small in stature but even the tallest and bulkiest of Wakatipu High School Year 7 boys knew not to mess with wee Mrs Gazzard.

A Year 7 and 8 teacher at the old Gorge Road school for 18 years Sylvia Gazzard had learned to outsmart kids in her 40 years or so of teaching in New Zealand and Australia, finding good humour and embarrassment worked well.

Her infamous ‘threats’ that young male troublemakers would be punished by having to sit on her knee, endure a hug, or have fresh lipstick kisses planted on their cheeks never needing to be carried out. “I still have big guys in their 40s say how scared they were of me in case I actually did that,” Sylvia, now 80, retired and armed with a lightweight weed-eater to deal to her garden, chuckles.

Teachers didn’t order in resources then, instead using what was around them, Sylvia’s persuasive, fun personality coaxing artists like John Parson and Mark Thomas to help her teach art. Optician Graeme Cole came to talk about eyes and movie director John Mahaffie about film.

Kids were always entertained from boy-girl sock wrestling at Twelve Mile Camp, which the girls won due to their fingernails, to her discos raising money for netball uniforms and calculators that the Education Ministry refused to supply.

Teaching had its heart-breaking moments, from super-stressed mums and kids with dads away fighting in Vietnam while teaching in Australia’s Puckapunyal Army Base School, to trauma at home. Conscripted soldiers’ families sat at one end of the staffroom and officers at the other. Sylvia exercised her mid-60s Women’s Lib muscle when the principal classed Mel as an ’officer’, instructing her to sit in the officers’ section.

She and Mel narrowly escaped alive when their Melbourne train bound for Mildura hit a petrol tanker, flames leaping from their carriage, four large petrol storage tanks close by. “Everybody yelled, ‘Run!’ We had to jump from quite high.” She improvised teaching English to her Italian-speaking class there. “There were little Italians in the playground with Kiwi accents which visiting Monash University professors, looking at my reading programme, found hilarious.”

Raised on a Southland farm in Drummond, Sylvia was a fresh, baby boomer, an idyllic life, biking two miles to and from school, before the not-so-fun boarding school days at Columba College.

“I’d pluck dead sheep for money in the holidays.” A Southland primary school basketball (netball) rep, Sylvia later organised Wakatipu High’s Year 7 and 8 netball competition for years.

Career options were slim – “teacher, nurse or secretary”, Sylvia heading to Dunedin Teacher’s College at 17, teaching by 19.

“Our flat of four girls had a brothel on one side and good Catholic family on the other, with a pub across the road – a bit of an eye opener,” she laughs. If they had a hangover day off the tutor would come to the flat to see why. “We always said food poisoning.”

She and late husband, long-time Queenstown Primary principal Mel Gazzard got together in her second year teaching, marrying after a short romance. “The kids in my Invercargill South School class gave me a rolling pin for our engagement to ‘hit my husband on the head with if he didn’t behave’,” she grins. It was close when Sylvia took delivery of the telegram notifying Mel that he’d been appointed principal of Te Anau School. His application was all news to her, but he escaped unscathed. “Our two boys had grown enough that I could take my first fulltime teaching job in New Plymouth, which I loved,” Sylvia says. “We shifted house 19 times in 21 years, moving into a schoolhouse then buying a house, every 18 months or so. Mel got a job in Waitara so went to Massey to finish his BA, leaving me with two kids under three to pack up the house!”

There were stints at Bluff School where a five-year-old, who’d misbehaved, turned up with Bluff oysters sent by his dad who made him apologise.

In Dunedin Syliva worked on the famous Dunedin Study on human health, development and behaviour, testing how the children understood and learned. She was also a weekly volunteer on Alison Holst’s School Lunch Programme making free lunches around 1980 when it was discovered children weren’t getting proper lunches.

No wussy old lady, Sylvia loves driving jetboats, four-wheel driving, sailing and fishing. My language isn’t very lady like if that wind comes up,” she grins. “I told the boys in my class who sail, ‘What you hear on the water stays on the water’.”

She’s loved sport, and after retiring in 2005, she and Mel ran a B&B that Mel added onto their home, also taking more than 20 overseas trips. These days she also enjoys her weekly ‘Knit and Natter Group’.

Teaching’s been tremendously satisfying. “Some have struggled and some were very talented, but they’ve all gone on to develop their skills in many areas.”