Michael Lulich served with her on the Petone Community Board and was impressed by her work ethic. “She was a strong independent woman who dedicated her life to nursing and the community.”
Vera Ellen with Lieutenant Colonel Maree Sheard, then director of nursing services for the Defence Force, when Ellen received the New Zealand Defence Service Medal for non-operational service, at Parliament House in 2011. Her mother, Edna, came to New Zealand on a scheme to bring young women to the colonies, and married John Thomas Jabez Ellen. Ellen was born in the Te Puni Street Nursing Home, Petone. Life was tough for her family in the Depression, and she would later talk about the help received from the Salvation Army.
What is the best way to measure Air New Zealand s commitment to sustainability?
The national airline’s chief environmental adviser supports price hikes which would put some people off flying here and curb “thoughtless, heedless tourism”, David Williams reports Hiking the price of international flights to pay for greenhouse gas emissions, putting some people off flying here, would be a good thing, Air New Zealand’s chief environmental adviser Sir Jonathon Porritt says. His comments follow a suggestion from Simon Upton, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, for a distance-based passenger tax – adding as much as $155 to an economy class fare to the United Kingdom, or $25 to the cheapest seats to Australia – to fund climate-based initiatives. Such a fund might raise up to $400 million a year.
Eugene Hoshiko/AP
A senior member of the International Olympic Committee has said he “can’t be certain” the postponed Tokyo Olympics will open in just over six months because of the surging pandemic in Japan and elsewhere.
ANALYSIS: There’s just more than six months left to the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. After being postponed last year amid the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, the Games are still more up in the air than a 10-metre springboard diver. So let’s peer into the crystal shot put to see what may unfold.
This is Japan s second lockdown after the first emergency was declared in April last year.
Bejon Haswell/Stuff
Patricia Gordon at her 95th birthday party held at Timaru South School hall last year. She died on November 17.
Timaru great-great grandmother Patricia ‘Pat’ Gordon is remembered adoringly by her 14 children, and by her many other descendants, for always making time for people, despite running around after such a big family. Pat died at the age of 96 at Margaret Wilson Rest Home, her residence of the past seven years, surrounded by family on November 17. Pat was born in 1924, the year the USSR leader Vladimir Lenin died, the first trans global radio transmission was sent from New Zealand to London by Frank Bell on his family’s sheep farm in Otago, and Kiwi Arthur Porritt won the bronze medal in the Paris Olympics 100-metre sprint.