Campbells Bay campus 1975
Early School Bus, Campbells Bay 1974
K R I S TI N H ER I TAGE - ME MORI E S OF
The first Kristin School picnic Lynn Williams was one of the foundation staff and parents of Kristin School, from its early beginnings in Campbells Bay to establishment of the Albany campus. Lynn visited school this year on the day of our Summer Carnival, which inspired her to share her memories of the first summer picnic held in Albany in 1974. Kristin opened, against all the odds, in 1973, in the old Campbells Bay Health Camp. It had not been easy to get to that point. When Kristin took it over the place was a shambles, as it had not been used for some time. The inside of the buildings was filthy and the rooms were full of old mattresses and rubbish and the blocked gutters and downpipes dripped. The grounds could have been mistaken for an unused tip as they were full of over grown bushes, brambles and well-established ‘cutty grass’ - toitoi, rusting corrugated iron and broken glass, tangled wire and old containers, but this did not stop our excitement as we, parents of newly enrolled students, got together for weekend-long, hard-working working bees to clear the site and clean the buildings so that the school could open there. Day after day we scrubbed and painted, carried away rubbish to the real tip in Rosedale Road and hacked at the tangled masses of kapok vines, prickly gorse and thorny legcatching tendrils of blackberry bushes.
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Doing all this hard, manual work, side by side, we built strong family friendships, many of which have lasted through all these years to the present day, as all of us were united in the excitement of helping the new school to open on time for our children. We were all committed to making the school a success story even though many people - perhaps most of the Auckland community - were sceptical about its chances of survival. Private schools were not well known or popular in New Zealand at the time and there was a strong feeling in the community that the local school should be ‘good enough for anyone’ and there was no need for anything else. There was also a large number of people who were actively against the idea of private schools opening in New Zealand. The freshly painted, clean and tidy school opened with some areas of the grounds ‘out of bounds’ because they still had dangerous rubbish in them like barbed wire and broken glass. OSH would never have let us open, had they been in action at that time!