Overview Donny is one of a handful of residents in the Te Anau basin who can provide first hand accounts of the life and times of the district as far back as the 1930s. As he said off-tape, it is difficult to give a complete picture of events in just a couple of hour’s conversation. However, his comments and come of his early photographs illustrate much of a bygone era.

Overview George's introduction to Te Anau coincided with his involvement in the development of the Te Anau glow worm caves in 1948. The town was still village-sized when he and his wife Alma decided a year later to set up a small grocery shop amid the handful of cribs that existed between the manuka scrub on the lakefront. George has been a founding member of a few organisations in the town and instrumental in forming the Te Anau Volunteer Fire Brigade which in 2004 celebrated its 50th anniversary. In...

Overview In this interview John talks at length about his family origins in Estonia and the lives of his forebears who came to New Zealand in the 1850s. John was born in Otautau and moved to Dunedin after he started primary school. John’s family later moved to Waitati and it was here that John’s involvement with deer hunting started. John started with the Forest service in 1959 and in the early 1960s John and his wife Aloma moved to Te Anau. As well as hunting, John describes his role in search and...