Jeanette Voyce and Catherine Hannagan

Camp leader, camp mother roles launch couple’s French connection  

Words Jill Nicholas

Pictures/video Stephen Parker

“We really are very ordinary.”

 If Jeanette Voyce and Catherine Hannagan told us that once they told us a hundred times.

Well, maybe not that many, but they did repeat it a lot.

By In Profile’s reckoning they are anything but ordinary in the usually accepted sense of the word.

For starters, their shared mission statement is helping people. It’s something they’ve done in abundance for years. 

Since settling in Rotorua 18 months or so ago, they have become volunteers at the Waiariki Women’s Refuge op shop and at Owhata’s Aspen Place community garden.

That may not be particularly “un-ordinary” (yes, we made that word up) but how many other couples hereabouts share a fascination with bridges, have owned and sailed a canal boat in France, overseen volunteers in prisons (Jeanette) or been named a Knight of the Order of Academic Palms* by the French government (Catherine)?

Their latest pursuit is learning to play the ukelele “for a bit of fun - joy.”

Camp leader – camp mother

 It was, in part, their love of the French language that brought these two together. They met in Noumea at an upskilling course for teachers of French in New Zealand primary schools.

From a scenario that comes straight out of the Topp Twins play book Catherine was “camp leader” and Jeanette “camp mother”. 

At the time Jeanette was instrumental in introducing French to a decile one school in the Far North with a roll of predominantly Maori pupils. She was its principal. Bringing it into the curriculum is indicative of this woman’s concern that  those from lower socio-economic backgrounds have the same opportunities as those at more affluent schools. Learning the language was the foundation stone for several  of her school’s trips to French Polynesia.  

When Catherine and Jeanette met Catherine was contracted by the Ministry of Education as its national French advisor, overseeing those teaching the language in schools throughout the country. 

Four years on they became partners and have been for almost 20 years.

The obvious question must be what it was that drew them to each other at a time they were approaching their middle years?

Catherine was single. Jeanette was the mother of three, whose marriage had, as she puts it, “gently ended.”

Bolt from the blue

They agree being attracted to each other was a “bolt from the blue”, something neither of them expected or anticipated.

“Our interest in maths and languages, in sports, in particular water sports such as snorkelling, swimming and kayaking, a love of bridges, a mutual respect for each other’s work and way of dealing with other people.

“Also having complementary skills, a similar sense of humour,” is how Catherine defines their relationship’s lynchpin.

“We are very lucky because our families and friends have been very good about it. We haven’t had any issues which is nice.”  This from Jeanette

With that aspect of their union established we take a tiki tour through the years that went before.

Fiji coconut cracking pathway to Girls’ High job 

Jeanette is first out of the blocks.

She has taught from the far north to the deep south, including 12 years at Rotorua Girls’ High, starting there in 1979.

It was a quirk of Fijian fate that brought her this way.

“We were on holiday in Fiji when we met up with a family who were having trouble opening a coconut. My husband was born in the Solomon Islands where his parents were Methodist missionaries so he showed them how to do it.

“That started a friendship, the woman was teaching at Girls’ High here [Rotorua] and I was teaching in Gisborne.  I said we were keen to come to Rotorua for the sailing. 

“She said to ring the principal the first day after the school holidays. I rang on the  second day to be told  ‘I was waiting for you to ring yesterday’ .

“I didn’t even have to apply for a job, I got one there and then, teaching maths across the forms, including the Maori immersion class.  

Sailing away from the sea

In Gisborne the Voyce family had bought a trailer-sailer but found Poverty Bay wasn’t exactly yacht friendly.

“You had to sail down the river with the mast down to get out to sea then deal with the tides. We were looking for a good place for yachting which made the Rotorua Girls’ High job ideal.”

The family did a lot of sailing on Rotoiti and joined the yacht club.

“We bought a place at Parkcliff by the lake. The kids had a number of craft between them, Optimists, Flying Cats. Our oldest boy built his own wind surfer.  They’d be out on the water until it was time to come home for tea.

“I grew up around boats which was to become very useful with canal boats in the future.”

That future was still some considerable way off. Before we go there we turn to Catherine for an insight into her earlier life and times.

Love of schoolgirl French

She’s a born and bred Dunedinite.

“I went to a tiny Catholic high school where you were either in the classics or commercial classes. 

“My mother enrolled me in the latter. She thought it would come in handy in the future.

“Sister Albert, to whom I shall be eternally grateful, suggested I should be in the academic class. I had this most astonishing French teacher. Every one of us passed French. I just loved it.”

Despite that Francophile fondness she went to Otago University with the intention of becoming a maths teacher. It didn’t take long for her to switch her major.

“I found maths made less and less sense and vice versa with French.”

During her teacher training she joined a reciprocal programme between French and New Zealand students. It took her to Libourne in France’s south west.

Wine drinking lessons in Bordeaux

“It was the last stop on the train before Bordeaux. I was an English language assistant delivering students a variety of New Zealand English.

She had a lesson of her own to learn. It was how to drink red wine.

“In New Zealand in 1983 I was drinking white wine because it was cheap. In Bordeaux you didn’t drink cheap white wine. You had to learn to like red wine. I admit I didn’t find that a very great hardship.”

Did her time in Bordeaux turn Catherine into a wine connoisseur, we ask? 

She flatly denies it. Jeanette interjects with a resounding “yes.”

Catherine offers a clarification: “I like wine but I still probably don’t drink very expensive wines. I would like to but I can’t see the justification for the additional cost when I can buy a bottle of good wine for $15.”

Bordeaux wasn’t her only pre-Jeanette time in France.

Some years after Bordeaux she was back for a year’s post graduate study at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Fontenay St-Cloud on the outskirts of Paris.

It was what she describes as learning to “teach the teachers” as preparation for her position as national French advisor. 

But it wasn’t all lecture hall study. 

“There were many field trips to discover some of the lesser-known parts of Paris and week-long trips to Alsace [close to the border with Germany] and Poitou-Charentes [on the south west coast].

“It was a year of learning, adventures and discovery -  magnificent.”  

Doing jail time

After their initial Noumea meeting the two kept in long-distance contact before Jeanette moved to Lower Hutt where Catherine was living.

Jeanette was working with the Ministry of Education in Lower Hutt when a jail-related  advertisement caught her eye. Corrections were looking for someone to co-ordinate volunteers in the region’s prisons.   

 She applied and got the job which was spread across Arohata Women’s Prison, Rimutaka and Wellington prisons.

She loved it and the prisoners she had face-to-face contact with.

“I was never in a unit with hardened, dangerous people.”

One prisoner she did meet up with was a former pupil from way up north.

She suggested he join the Toastmasters group from Wellington which she’d invited  to  mentor pre-release inmates in Rimutaka’s reintegration unit.

“The first time he spoke he spoke really really well. One of the Wellington ladies said ‘you didn’t say um once’. He looked at me, smiled and said ‘You wouldn’t let us say um when you were principal at our school. He was right, I didn’t.”

One of the reasons Jeanette had taken the job was because it was only for 12 months.

That made it a perfect fit for plans she and Catherine had to travel to Europe.

Canal boating through France 

On an earlier trip to France they hired a canal boat to give them a close-up look at bridges. This is a couple who are fascinated by their architecture that’s spanned the test of time across the centuries.

‘It’s their perfect blend of form and function, their coming together as science and sculpture,” Catherine enthuses.

That trip was the start of an enduring love affair with canal boating.

But there was no way they could afford to hire a boat each European summer – the solution; they bought one.

The vendors were Kiws and it was called Erewhon (nowhere spelt backwards – well, almost). It was borrowed from Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel of the same name.

Unusual as it was, the craft’s name met with international recognition. 

“One day we were in the deepest darkest part of France when an American woman

started walking along the bank beside us. She knew the whole synopsis of the Erewhon story. That was so unexpected, so nice.

“Another time a harbour master who was Dutch pointed out it was an anagram for ‘here and now’. We thought that was much nicer than Nowhere almost backwards.”

Five years of continuous summers 

The pair kept their canal boat for five years, compounding back-to-back summers as they alternated between Europe and their southern hemisphere homeland.

“We’d come home and work like crazy to earn enough to go back again.”

Apart from one year when they crossed into Belgium, they stayed within France’s 8,800 kilometres of navigable waterways.

“We didn’t do them all,” a rather wistful Catherine says. 

“We trundled along at six knots powered by a marinized (sic) tractor motor.

“We did a good line in locks; 400 locks in 400kms in the first year. Jeanette was the pilot, she did the steering, I did the ropes.

“We met lots of Kiwis, Australians, Americans, Germans, Brits, but not many French people.
“They are only just coming to realise what an amazing resource their canals are, that they can discover their country in an entirely different, relaxed way,” Jeanette adds.

“We’d do one loop one year, another loop the next. Before we came home each year  we’d have holidays in exotic places like the Amalfi coast and Djerba Island off the coast of Tunisia.”  

Motorhoming, volunteering

Back permanently on dry land the couple worked some more in Wellington.

Catherine became a business analyst with MBIE; Jeanette managed the SuperGrans Charitable Trust until retirement beckoned.

Their wanderlust had remained unrequited. They invested in a motorhome and travelled the country. “We just followed our noses – twice to the top of the North Island, once to the far south.”

They took on voluntary work at places they stayed.

“At Momorangi Bay in Marlborough we were cleaning toilets in a DOC campground. We did all sorts of things there: tree planting, ground maintenance. We had a similar role on Aroha Island just out of Kerikeri, working with a private conservation trust.

“We did, and still do, a lot of house and pet sitting.”

They had just left a property near Tauranga with “park-like grounds looking after donkeys, dogs. chicken, sheep and pigeons” when lockdown was announced.

They hastened back. For them enforced ‘home detention’ wasn’t tough going.

“We joined a bubble of two other couples. Most days morning tea would turn into lunch.  We celebrated two 75th birthdays and a 60th, distanced by Zoom.

“It was a big property so we could do a lot of things to keep occupied.

“We painted fences, gardened, foraged for feijoas, avocados, kiwifruit

“We are active relaxers so lockdown wasn’t a hardship for us. We would see posts on Facebook of people who had no relief at all.”

Rotorua becomes home

 During their motorhome travels they bought an apartment in Rotorua’s CBD looking ahead to when they wanted a permanent home.  Rotorua was chosen because of its central location and family weren’t too far away.

Until they were ready to live in quarters less cramped than their motorhome a tenant cared for their property.

They had barely settled in when their tenant, who’d moved to another unit in the complex, shoulder tapped them with a ‘job offer’ they couldn’t refuse.

“One day she snaffled us by the lift and said ‘have I got the job for you two.’ It was helping out in the Waiariki Women’s Refuge shop because they were desperately short of volunteers. We have been there every day since, working half days.”

They enjoy apartment living but miss having a garden of their own.  Hence joining other helpers at the Owhata community garden.

Catherine weeds, Jeanette drives the mower. 

For entertainment they’ve turned to the ukelele, joining classes at Parksyde and the Arts Village.

They’ve recently graduated to tenor ukes. 

“It’s not too serious but it’s joyful, a lot of fun. Theres’ a lot of strumming, a bit of music. No one is critical about it.”

So are the Voyce-Hannagan duo as ordinary as they insist they are?

There can surely only be one response to that repeat play claim of theirs.

 It’s that great ironic Kiwi catch phrase  -  ‘Yeah, right.’      

*The order is conferred on French citizens and foreigners who have made a significant contribution to the advancement of intellectual, scientific and artistic pursuits in France.