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Tuesday January 17 2017
NOR’WEST NEWS
Our People
Geoff Harrow
Love of nature and adventure From climbing with Sir Edmund Hillary to walking on his own to the South Pole, Geoff Harrow spoke to Caitlin Miles about his achievements and receiving a Queen’s Service Medal
HONOURED: Geoff Harrow received a Maori cloak when he retired from the Shearwater Trust. PHOTO: GEOFF SLOAN
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Firstly Geoff, congratulations on receiving your medal. I was quite astonished, it was quite a surprise. Really? Did you know that you had been nominated for it? I was told someone had nominated me at the end of October. I’m not sure who it is but I was a little embarrassed because, while I had worked hard for mountaineering and conservation and skiing, so have a hell of a lot of other people. There should be a couple of thousand other people that I know of that should deserve it just as much or more than me. How did you get started in conservation work? Well, I was always a bit of a wanderer. We lived in Upper Riccarton near the airport and we would go up around the countryside setting rabbit snares and collecting, dear I say it, terrible things like collecting bird eggs! I even
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I climbed Mt Oxford when I was about 12 and when I got to high school, I met up with other like-minded kids interested in tramping and one of them, his father, was a member of the mountaineering club and we went up to the Waimakariri in the third form (year 9) and we were right up there and it was quite something. We saw these back country huts so they were places to stay and the people that owned the huts said you kids should belong to the club because you’re using our facilities and very shortly after that I joined the mountaineering club, in 1945 I think it was. Did you work in the conservation sector? No. This was purely just a hobby. I worked for medical supplies’ companies. The whole of my life was spent in the marketing of research medicines to doctors and chemists. I’ve been retired for 32 years now.
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collected bird eggs from the main runway at Christchurch Airport. I’ve always been interested in birds. I started off making a birds’ egg collection, which is a terrible no-no these days, but a lot of kids did when I was at Riccarton School. I’ve always looked at the Port Hills and tried to get my brothers and sisters to take me there and they rarely would but, as I got older, I went with school friends and I could see the mountains way out to the west. We had a school trip to the West Coast and we came right through Arthur’s Pass and I saw snow up on the mountains and glaciers and thought, oh, isn’t that amazing and that I’d love to get up in that country, but I was a bit small to do that at that stage. So I had an interest from a very early age, but I’ve been a member of Forest & Bird since 1938, and I’m 90 now so 79 years. You’ve also been interested in the mountains for a long time?
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