Intrepid spirit

Christine Fernyhough pours her formidable energy into projects that capture her heart – helping struggling youngsters, reviving a high-country station and a new book celebrating 1950s-60s collectables. These days she’s busy sharing her passion for adventure with her beloved grandchildren.

Not many people have a full-sized moa skeleton in the front room, but then Christine Fernyhough is not most people. Her home is full of surprises. There she stands, a female stout-legged moa, smaller than the giant fortunately, in a big glass enclosure at one end of Christine’s vibrant turquoise-coloured Parnell living room.

Christine is a collector. For more than three decades she has been haunting second-hand shops and auction houses the length of the country in an effort to preserve what she sees as a golden era in New Zealand. The 1950s and 1960s were a time when New Zealand came into its own. A simple, uncomplicated time when we made things ourselves, before manufacturing was outsourced to China. Her collection includes furniture, toys, Crown Lynn china and a vast array of Kiwiana. Much of it is displayed in the old family bach she bought with her husband John Fernyhough at Mangawhai, north of Auckland.

They called the bach The Butterfly House and, yes, as befits its midcentury origins, there is a splendid butterfly on the wall near the front door. Now she’s published a book of the same name to immortalize the collection and the bach. It’s a delightful, visual, nostalgia fest. Entertainingly written by Chrissie and with vibrant photos, it is both a memoir of seaside family life and a vivid account of our social and cultural history.

“I didn’t start out to make a collection, the collection made me,” she explains. It is also a revealing study of the spontaneous, passionate woman who wrote it.

Christine is the second of three children. They grew up on the classic Kiwi quarter-acre section. Theirs was a happy childhood, full of people and fun. “We had lots of pot luck dinners and Uncle Jim would play Tiptoe Through the Tulips on the piano.”