Tracy McLean - Taking it all on

A community fundraising powerhouse and dedicated volunteer, no task is beneath local nurse Tracy McLean from decisions in the charitable trust boardroom to cleaning loos.

She’s pitched in for PTAs, at local swimming club meets and led and fundraised for a huge downtown church redevelopment.

The versatile and proud mum of popular, homegrown TV presenter Matty McLean, Tracy has even found herself starring on the cover of Woman’s Day.

The daughter of a Welsh immigrant from the 1950s who’d fallen in love with a Kiwi on her OE, Tracy’s never shied away from a new challenge.

Desperate to escape high school on Auckland’s North Shore after the family moved there from Wellington, Tracy set off alone at 16 for a year’s Rotary Exchange in Eastern Cape, South Africa. Her dad was an Air NZ Cargo manager which had its perks, Dad calling in favours to get Tracy to South Africa via multiple stopovers.

“It was the most amazing year of my life.” She arrived back in NZ with a South African accent in 1981 – the year of the controversial Springbok tour, none the wiser about the politics of it all. “I just wanted the rugby boys to play rugby and win,” she says.

Keen to return to Wellington where she’d spent many happy years at Titahi Bay and Mana College, Tracy trained as a nurse at Wellington Hospital. “Those were the days of scary matrons.” So scary that a friend rushed down the fire escape during a Nurse’s Home fire alarm, leaving her boyfriend locked in her wardrobe. “She said to me outside, ‘I hope this isn’t a real fire!’” Tracy grins.

That year she met husband of 43 years Steve, who was studying quantity surveying at Polytech. Steve and his carpenter dad launched Rilean Construction, the couple marrying in 1983, a ski honeymoon in Queenstown proving a strong lure.

Tracy initially worked in hospital paediatrics. “We buried 10 kids the first year after graduating. I was young and it was hard.” She switched to practice nursing working at John Street Doctors – actor Ginette McDonald’s father one of the GPs.

With Matty arriving in 1986, Tracy moved to accounts at Rilean in the midst of the transition to GST, starting back a week after Matty’s birth.

She returned to casual hospital shifts once second son Rob was born in 1989. Then in 1993 they enjoyed a surprise ski holiday back to Queenstown for Steve, after he had been seriously ill and hospitalised. “Once Steve recovered he was asked to price Rob and Marjory Boult’s house at Alpine Retreat, six months’ work in Queenstown.” The work kept coming so they stayed, Steve launching Rilean South Island with Gary Dent in 1994.

Tracy threw herself into numerous community roles – chair and secretary of the Queenstown Primary PTA, one of its star fundraisers along with Kaye Parker. “She was an absolute advertising machine. We did the community phone book, Classic Street Race and annual apple crumble stalls at Winter Festival Mardi Gras nights.”

The boys, eight and five when they arrived, Tracy was a cub leader until 1997 when she decided, ’I don’t think I’m done with kids’. Mikaela arrived, Tracy by now already an active member of the local volunteer Babysitting Club.

She then managed BONZ in the Mall through the notorious 1999 floods. “Luckily, we had an upstairs gallery to keep stock dry. Our stores in Auckland and Sydney would call looking for stock and I’d put on my wetsuit and go in.”

When Queenstown Medical Centre moved to Isle Street she was asked to be a practice nurse, where she stayed for 20 years, also working alongside doctors in the new sexual health clinic. “That was my passion, a non-judgmental environment. I took that role very seriously. I’d talk to the new intakes at QRC on navigating the health system and warn them that Queenstown may seem idyllic, but it was like any city after 2am,” she says.

She’s also worked part-time as practice nurse for Dr Hans Raetz at his skin clinic since 2004, Skin Institute since 2008.

Mikaela was christened at St Peter’s and since 2000 Tracy has been heavily involved with the Earl Street Charitable Trust, leading fundraising for the commercialisation of the historic vicarage land, necessary income for church work. It was a huge job. “We had an Op Shop and the old hall facing Earl Street, which had to be moved. The vicarage was on old kerosene tin piles, and we had to fund a $20,000 archeological dig, which only turned up old bottles.” Tracy did all the funding applications for the necessary $500,000, the trustees then faced with the GFC and multiple tenancy challenges.

For 10 years she’s cleaned the St Peter’s Hall and toilets weekly to save funds. “It’s my community service,” she says.

Also host Mum to seven overseas Rotary Exchange students over 20 years, she and Steve spent 10 years looking after Rotary’s lower South Island Youth Exchange programme. “It’s my way of giving back.” All three McLean kids did their own Rotary exchanges following proud Mum. “I don’t know of any other family that’s done that.”