Flight of fancy — at 100

Press, 10 December 1983, Page 3

Flight of fancy — at 100

Just taking things as they come has got Mrs Bella McElligott through the last 100 years, and she is determined not to change her philosophy. Mrs McElligott, a former Kawarau Gorge resident, who celebrated her hundredth birthday on November 28, flew out of Christchurch yesterday to visit Westport, Greymouth, and Hokitika for the first time.

"People keep asking me if I’m excited, but I’m not at all. I just take things one day at a time, as they come. Everyone says, how did you get to 100? It is just because I take things as they come,” said Mrs McElligott. Mrs McElligott’s trip to the West Coast is by courtesy of Air New Zealand, the Westport Tourism Committee, and the Greymouth Public Relations Office. Just before her birthday she told “The Press” that she had not visited Westport or

Greymouth, and Air New Zealand offered to fly both her and her niece, Mrs Gay Truman, to the Coast for a week-end.

Mrs McElligott, who now lives with her niece in St Albans, is a seasoned traveller and the flight held no worries for her.

“They said they might loop the loop and I said I didn’t mind if they did. It would be something different.” She had no fears either about the pilot for yesterday’s flight. Captain John Murray is the son of two old friends and grew up in Cromwell — ‘I can remember bouncing him on my knee,” she said. Mrs McElligott was to meet the Mayor of Westport yesterday and this morning will visit a woman, aged 102, who lives in the town. Tomorrow she will be driven to Punakaiki where the staff of the Greymouth Public Relations Office will

meet her and take her to Greymouth for a day. She will then be driven to Hokitika for the flight home on Monday. One place she would like to see is the site of the Brunner coalmine disaster of 1896. As a girl of 13 she weatched her mother and neighbour set off by waggon from Kawarau Gorge for a fund-raising social to help the wives of the 67 miners who were killed in the explosion. Mrs McElligott lived most of her life in Kawarau Gorge. Mrs McElligott followed her father, working as a cook in several hotels in Arrowtown, Queenstown, Cromwell, and at the Grand Hotel in Invercargill. She speaks with warmth of her time spent working in and around the Kawarau Gorge area, and of her sodwall cottage home she left five years ago to live in Christchurch.