I had a hunch about it for years. Each time we drove along the peninsula road from our home in Rosyln, I’d find myself sensing, as we swung into Turnbulls Bay: this place. Then I’d forget it. 2015, we’d finished a three-year stint of house-sitting in the north (roughly orbiting our small grandsons in Akld) having agreed that if we moved back to Dunedin, it would be to the peninsula. Houses for sale were few and so we kept alert….
‘Best house site in Broad Bay’ was how the previous owner Gordon Ogilvie described it when we purchased his Cowal Street land and tumbledown cottage. ‘You can call this spot Dunoon if you like.’ He was talking about the small but iconic arm of volcanic rock – a mini peninsula that creates shelter from the pesky nor’easterlies for Broad Bay’s recreational craft. It’s better known as Yellow Head. Dunoon is a small Argyllshire town on Scotland’s Cowal Peninsula, once a…
For almost 50 years the bookbus has made its way ‘down’ the Peninsula, wending alongside the scenic harbour to make weekly stops at Portobello, Broad Bay and Macandrew Bay, providing reading material, along with a chat, to local residents. For more than 25 of those years I have been the librarian on this run, with a colleague. For the last five years Gretta and I have relished our Wednesday ‘trip to the country’ that the Peninsula run represents. Residents of…
We arrived in Dunedin April 18th 1987 along with our two children Helen and Richard and a month later Ceinwen gave birth to our little girl Rosemary. I had been working as a Film Editor for the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol and had been invited to join TVNZ to work on their expansion into 50-minute wildlife documentaries. Ceinwen secured a job as the supervisor at Portobello Playgroup. In June 1987 we bought 43 Waikana St from Don and Lori…
We made our home in Broad Bay in 1997. Coming from the North West of England where our view was a row of identical red brick semi-detached houses across the road, moving into a wooden villa overlooking Otago Harbour was heaven! The first weekend there was a regatta. We sat on our balcony overlooking the boat club and had to pinch ourselves to remind ourselves that this was our new life! Living on the Otago Peninsula is very special. There are not many places in the world where you can work in…
My father was from England and my mother from Japan, so I have always liked to think that they settled between those two countries, in this lovely harbourside village, Broad Bay. My father was possibly one of longest residents of Broad Bay, living there for almost 60 years till his death in 2022. He bought the house for about 1,000 pounds on what was known as Harbour Terrace. All the roads were gravel then. It was a tiny cottage with…
1981, we had just arrived in Dunedin from the Netherlands with our two children and one of our first trips out was to explore the Otago Peninsula. It was a beautiful drive with the harbour on one side of the road and wildflowers blossoming along the other side. Driving through Broad Bay, we first set eyes on 687 Portobello Road and said to each other, ‘That is the house we would love to buy one day.’ 1991, ten years later,…
Six generations of my family have lived in Broad Bay. I’m fourth generation. My grandparents, Lenard and Jesse, moved to 679 Portobello Road (on the corner of Matariki Street) from Naseby with their family and my great-grandparents. Years later, after the great-grandparents passed away, Lenard and Jesse moved to 2 King George Street where my mum, Noeline Jopson, lived until she left to marry Stuart Blacklow at the Catholic Church in Broad Bay. Stuart was from Macandrew Bay. They had…
Our bookclub has been meeting on the first Friday of the month since 1991. One of the twelve women is a founding member and we have had only about a dozen members come and go over the years. Many of us live in Broad Bay. Ours is one of 50 groups in Dunedin that belong to the Book Discussion Scheme. The BDS was set up in Christchurch in 1973 and has 1,300 groups throughout New Zealand. Each year groups choose books…
I am from Tanzania. I met a New Zealand fisherman in Tanzania in 1999 and married him. It was an African wedding with lots of dancing, but Neil was not very good at that! He returned to New Zealand on his fishing boat, but not me; I hate boats, you woudn’t see me doing that! No, I came by plane as I cannot swim. It was my first time on a plane. Neil met me in Auckland and brought me…