Spectrum was a long-running weekly radio documentary series which captured the essence of New Zealand from 1972 to 2016. Alwyn Owen and Jack Perkins produced the series for many years, creating a valuable library of New Zealand oral history.
In this episode Spectrum visits Picton, the transport and communications centre of the Marlborough Sounds. Its waterfront and the people who live and work there reflect a character and variety found nowhere else in New Zealand.
Jack Perkins speaks with a number of people in Picton who reflect on their work. (Many are unidentified.) The show opens with a woman recounting how she would row a dinghy to go and pick up her supplies, and thought nothing of it.
A man who takes fishing parties out during their holidays, tells Perkins that to get really good fishing you need to go out to where there are tidal streams. He describes how he and similar operations have other business as well. He also acts as a taxi taking people and freight to their baches.
Bill Kenny comes from a family who ran a barge delivering freight around the Marlborough Sounds. Kenny will hand on the business to his son. Many years ago there were no roads so farmers relied on the barge for moving large or bulky freight. The barge that Kenny operates was also central to the whaling industry. He has carted a lot of whale oil, whale bone and bone meal from the whaling station to Picton. When Kenny was younger he would transport cattle.
We hear from a man collecting samples of water from mussel farms for the Department of Health. He’s made 43 stops today. He gets around in a floatplane. In the summer months he’s busy taking scenic flights and taking passengers from Wellington to their baches. He sometimes deals with emergency accidents.
Perkins speaks with a mother and her children who live on a yacht. She is marking her son’s maths homework which he does through correspondence school. Her daughter, Sandy, reflects on her education through correspondence. The mother talks about the community who live on yachts, talks about how they all make use of the ferry terminal having wash basins and toilets and how they use the colour TV there.
We meet a man and a woman who restore boats. While they’d prefer to sail them, doing up boats is a way of making a living. They speak of the particular and fiddly nature of boat repair.
We hear from an older man who having come from Wellington has been living on his boat for the past 8 months. He’s struggling to paint his boat and is impatient with Perkins.
A woman who lives Furneaux Lodge in Endeavour Inlet has caught the launch in to town to come see the doctor because she’s pregnant. However, she’d rather be out on the water.
Lastly, Perkins speaks to two middle aged women who are not so happy with life in the Sounds. They’re farmers but don’t feel that farming has a future anymore. They believe that trade has all gone to tourism. Nevertheless, they’re largely self-sufficient.