Pip can remember as a 12 year old her father coming home from a Rotary Meeting and driving his car through the end of his garage. This story sounds awfully familiar as some of us will remember that Harold Tuson did ta similar thing, pushing his wife's car through the garage wall, may not have been coming home from a Rotary Meeting though!!
Her father was a professional photographer and she at the age of 8 started working for him, and followed in his footsteps. She gained work at the Taranaki Daily News rising to Chief Photographer earning $20.00/hour!
She left there and went travelling overseas to Australia, Iceland, National Gallery in London, Oman (working for the Police Minister mainly photographing Doors of The Rich in the mid 90's?
Working in a male dominated society didn't suit eventually being kicked out of her job and banned from returning to Oman.
She came back to New Zealand via Australia 25 years later and starting her own business in Photography.
She has been contracted to photograph gardens for Virginia Winder's daily News Garden Festival articles.
One of her recent contract 's has been with Port Taranaki. Engaged to take photos of the Demolition of the New Plymouth Power Station. She set up 12 Go Pro cameras to take 2 Million photos 24x 7. There is a: New Plymouth Powerstation Deconstruction / Demolition on You Tube.
She commented that a visit prior to the demolition was a bit like the Marie Celeste everything left as it was, there is still a control room operating for power distribution in and out of New Plymouth. An interesting discovery was boxes of photographs in a cupboard that her father had taken for the Power Station Construction.
Pip talked about the many challenging tasks removing asbestos, metal, concrete, boilers etc from the site particularly because the reclaimed land had tidal challenges. $20M of metal was shipped out of Port Taranaki from the site. All concrete was ground down and asbestos taken away and buried.
She also had a contract to do something similar on The Cambrian Engineering demolition.
Pip really enjoys Industrial photography and more recently has bought the old Moturoa Cafe (now Tiger Town Cafe) specialising in Pie Making.
Geoff Harding Thanked her for a very interesting talk.
Other Notices:
Sally acknowledged and thanked Gary and Marie Brown for hosting a very successful social night (October 4th) of about 20.
Harry Duynhoven gave an update on the latest Habitat for Humanity Home completion in Waitara. A very worthy family will be the owners. They've worked tirelessly over the construction period, Rotary was acknowledged at the opening ceremony.
He also took part in a Riparian tree planting project for The Mount Messager Bypass. 2000 trees planted in 3 hours in conjunction with Ngati Tama. The project will eventually require 250,000 trees all to be provided by Ngati Tawhirikura. They will be employing 7-8 people full-time to provide an enormous number of native trees to be planted in Taranaki in the next 20 years.
