They asked what an 89-year-old woman was doing tramping in the bush at the tip of Cape York Peninsula, Miss McKellar says with a laugh.
The former William Evans executant lecturer in singing at Otago University, stalwart of the Performing Arts Competitions Society and other Dunedin musical and theatrical groups for the past 40 years, and still a keen walker and golfer, celebrated her 90th birthday last month. Miss McKellar says the only time she actually feels 90 is sometimes in her lower back after gardening, or when she encounters "wardrobe stretch" as a result of having grown shorter in the past few years.
Age has not slowed her down.
During our interview she kept getting up to fetch a photograph, an old programme or other piece of memorabilia.
After 15 years in the university's music department, she retired in 1985 at the age of 65 - you had to in those days, she says regretfully.
Although she continued to teach until recently, she says many of her young friends have never heard her sing, so she enjoyed playing her old tapes at her birthday party.
"I'm always doing something - whatever comes along and I do the best I can with it.
"Who knows what might come along next? The fact I've just had a 90th birthday makes you think about your age instead of just firing ahead," she says.
She may not sing any longer but she is busy, and not only with the competitions society, which she says needs lots of help as it is run by a handful of people who organise the tap dancing, ballet, instrumental and vocal sections, including the ODT Aria Competition.
"A friend of mine in Australia said I should be reading talking books, using my voice, so I rang the [Royal New Zealand] Foundation of the Blind and they said that's mostly done in Auckland, but would I help reading parts of the newspaper, so I do that.
"It's a very small task on Monday and Thursday mornings.
"On Thursdays I read the editorial and other days I read the death notices and so on.
"You do it through your telephone and somewhere it's recorded and then the blind person dials in a certain number and it's played to them, which is a great system."
She has been paired with a blind woman, to whom she reads parts of the newspaper once a week, she delivers meals on wheels and attends and sometimes leads "Steady As You Go", the falls-prevention class, and takes t'ai chi balance classes for elderly people at the Maori Hill community hall.
"There's an enormous amount goes on there.
"You can lead an interesting life just going to the Maori Hill community hall," she says with a laugh.
"I'm intrigued by the amount of work that Age Concern does.
"Until you look into it, you don't realise what's going on.
"There's a whole life there. I could do still more, but I have to keep some time for golf."
She plays 18 holes at Balmacewen at least once a week, but although happy to reveal her age, refuses to divulge her handicap.
MISS McKellar was born in 1920 and brought up in Dunedin.
Her parents married in 1918 when her father was in his late 40s and her mother in her late 30s.
Because her father retired before she was born, he had time to devote to the young Honor and her older brother, Ian, but there were also disadvantages having elderly parents as they were a generation behind in some things - her father strongly disapproved of makeup, she says.
Her parents instilled a love of the outdoors in her and her brother, and her mother saw they had the best education, which, from the age of 2, included music, eurhythmic dance and singing, and attending concerts and other events.
"I used to love it but as my brother and many of my friends went through the same training it doesn't necessarily turn them into musicians," she says.
"Mother was musical and I know she sang as a girl because she said she used to lead the choir in Gloucester Cathedral, but I can never remember her singing or playing the piano, not once."
She does have a set of Beethoven sonatas her mother won as a music prize at school.
Miss McKellar's first memory of music was the maid singing.
She was an Irish woman who came out "after the troubles" and was like a second mother, she says.
After a Montessori kindergarten and primary school at St Hilda's, she transferred to Columba so she could study with music teacher Ida White.
Then she studied music and modern languages at the University of Otago.
Immediately after World War 2, she sailed on a coal burner around Cape Horn to study at the Royal Academy of Music, in England, arriving in 1946 in time for the victory celebrations.
Three years later, she returned singing very much as she had when she left, she says.
"It's so important getting the right teacher when you go overseas and this is an example - the amount of time I spent on exercises that really didn't danything for me.
On the other hand, we were surrounded by music and went to orchestral rehearsals."
The problem with singing in the days before tape recorders was that you couldn't hear yourself, she says.
For three years she toured New Zealand, giving school and public concerts and broadcasting, often working with New Zealand baritone Donald Munro, who became a good friend.
Then she returned to Europe to study with Pierre Bernac, in Paris, and then with Roy Henderson, in London.
That was the turning point in her musical life, she says.
"Roy said `I can't teach you anything musically, but you'll never get anywhere with that wobbly little drawing-room voice'.
"He gave me the technique and ability to `put it over'.
He said however clear the words were, however clear the diction, the audience found it hard to follow words, and they needed all the help they can get."
Shortly afterwards she joined an Arts Council opera troupe of six singers and a pianist touring around Britain.
"I suppose that was the favourite bit of my life.
"It was only a year but it was just like Priestley's Good Companions.
"We were chosen to get on with each other.
"One of the Arts Council rather succinctly said `you weren't chosen for your singing so much as getting on with the others and ability to drive a car and mend a fuse'."
In 1957 she returned to New Zealand and did much the same thing with Donald Munro, who had established the country's first opera company.
They played in large and small centres, including the tiny Dunrobin Hall at Moa Flat in which they had problems getting everyone on stage.
Her next visit to the UK, in 1964, saw her sing in the chorus at Glyndbourne, join the John Alldis Choir, work with composer John Tavener and teach singing at Chiswick Polytechnic and the City Literary Institute in London.
But feeling homesick for New Zealand and the bush, and not wanting "to grow old and frail in London", she applied for the lectureship at Otago.
Prof Platt wanted to have performers on the music department staff.
Previously, they had engaged singing teachers part-time as needed for students, she says.
"Peter advertised and cast his net wide.
"After all, he knew me - whether it was the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know - but I got the job, which disappointed some people in town because there were plenty of singers in town but not many instrumentalists.
"There was no full-time pianist for me to work with, and I went in tears to Peter, and this is when they appointed Maurice [Till].
"Eventually, they appointed a violinist and we began to have a complete staff.
"'So I was the first full-time executant lecturer."
Over the years, she has had several students who have gone on to make careers for themselves - Patrick Power, Jonathan Lemalu and Matthew Landreth.
The most important advice she gives is the necessity to communicate with the audience.
"You can hear beautiful singing that doesn't convey anything.
"You think you are doing your best each time, but there's something in the spark an audience gives.
"That's one of the reasons why every performance stands to be different - it's what the audience is giving back to you.
When people come off stage and say it's a terrible audience tonight, you really have to think is it the audience or is it me?"
Next year, she plans to go on a walking tour of Provence and Dordogne.
It's easy and lazy, she says, as she can't commit herself to walking long distances now because she doesn't want to hold other walkers back - although, she says with a laugh, it's not that she's going slower, rather that other people are walking so much faster.
