Do-it-yourself lifestyle

Press, 28 September 1984, Page 24

Do-it-yourself lifestyle

There is more to Gary Joll than hunting, fishing, and shooting. Although living in isolation he makes sure that his aims, interests, and knowledge do not become too insular.

Physically, he is 40km from the nearest town, Tekapo, and several times in the spring the Macaulay River will be impassable, trapping him at Lilybank, but this remoteness does not curb his thirst for knowledge or his interest in current affairs.

As a former school teacher, the author of two books on hunting and with, another two in the pipeline, and the managing director of a burgeoning tourist safari lodge, he ensures he does not become oblivious to the outside world.

He is not a regular subscriber to a newspaper as the paperman does not call at this lonely outpost. Therefore, it is to television that he must turn to give him a daily diet of news and current affairs. His one regret is that he can only pick up one channel which cuts his portion of current affairs pro-

grammes by half. This ration is subsidised in many ways by the foreign guests who pass through the lodge, bringing with them news from all points of the globe. Lilybank is a well run, professional operation but it does not matter how sophisticated it becomes: there are many quirks which allow it to keep its uniqueness.

Because Gary has to leave his car on the other side of the river, a simple task like cleaning the family vehicle has to be done at a neighbour’s or when he stays at a motel in the city. It is during these visits to the city that he indulges in one of his greatest pleasures, one that most of us take for granted — being able to pick up the morning paper and return to bed to digest the contents. Small things like this will never change at Lilybank. Everyday happenings on the station still bring out the best in his Kiwi ingenuity. “If something goes wrong with a toaster or some

machinery you have to fix it yourself. There is no mechanic or electrician around the corner.”

Although he was a teacher, Gary leaves most of the education of their two young children, Stephen, aged 12, and Julie, aged 10, to his wife, Sue, and a live-in helper who assists Sue in the lodge and the school room.

The children do their correspondence lessons in probably the smallest schoolhouse in New Zealand. They once did their lessons in the bunk-house but were convinced they never really went to school because they did not have a proper classroom.

So Gary converted an old single man’s hut, which was used by the shearers, into a classroom. Before being moved to Lilybank, the hut was part of the accommodation for the building of the Lake Tekapo dam and power project. Such quaint surrounds for education and its closeness to family life does not enthrall Sue, who finds the task of disciplinarian in the school room most difficult.

“There is nothing that Stephen or Julie do that I do not hear about, being this close together all the time does have its problems,” she says.

Living in such a close environment all the time does make the

family very much a single unit, - Gary believes. “You do so many things together and you rely on each other much more.” Such a closed lifestyle has had different effects on the children. Whereas they may miss out on some of the things other children do in the city and are sometimes diffident and tentative in large

crowds, their skill on horseback

and their large collection of pets would be the envy of many. Few 12-year-olds would match Stephen’s knowledge of ballistics and rifles. While the. priorites of the children will undoubtedly change in the years ahead, the upbringing among the pets and animals in the microcosm of Lilybank will always give them delightful memories of a unique childhood.