Eleanor Doig poured everything she had learned in her life and work into an audacious retirement project: to help save South Dunedin.
Along with several other locals Eleanor created and then chaired the South Dunedin Community Network as a way to keep her community together and push for solutions to the area’s mounting flood problems.
After retirement from a long career as a teacher and community worker, Eleanor was on the spot when in 2015 South Dunedin was struck by major flooding, damaging 1200 properties and displacing hundreds of people.
One of those locals was Steve King. He said: "the network came into being at the end of 2018, following community consultation led by Eleanor in the wake of the floods.
"She quickly became widely admired for her warmth and positivity, and her determination to work for a better world."
Mr King said she also became known for her honest tongue, and "her ability to insert the f-word perfectly into a sentence that left you in no doubt as to what she was thinking."
"In the wake of the floods there was a lot of community anger towards the Dunedin City Council. Eleanor’s vision was to create a channel of communication between South Dunedin residents and the council, to allow that anger to be expressed.
"But she wanted to turn the negative emotions into a more co-operative and positive way of engaging, in order to improve the experience of people living here. Eleanor saw that the stronger and more connected we were, the better the outcomes would be."
The network quickly grew to a full-time labour of love which consumed her next seven years.
"Setting up the network was a massive learning curve for those of us on the organising group. We were managing staff, doing facilities planning and paperwork — it was and still is an ongoing work in progress," Mr King said.
Summoning all her mana, and her formidable powers of persuasion, Eleanor helped pull together a network of community agencies and local residents. It has become a vital partner for the council programme, South Dunedin Future, that will finish a long-term plan for the area next year.
For her leadership, Eleanor was named Otago Volunteer of the Year in 2021 and later awarded a Queen’s Service Medal.
Her life had started humbly enough. Eleanor was born in 1949, a second child among three brothers.
She was of solid Dunedin stock, coming from several generations born and mostly raised in Mornington.
When she was 5 her father bought a pig farm in Opoho. Eleanor had two strong memories from this time: that of the accommodation on the farm being quite rough, akin to living in a camping ground, and of she and her brothers raiding the sacks of broken iced biscuits that had been bought from the food company Griffins to feed the pigs, getting caught and into some trouble.
But when the pig farm went bust the family went back to Mornington. This was the start of a long connection with Mornington School.
Over 30 years Eleanor was a student, then teacher, PTA member and finished as Board of Trustees chairwoman.
At Kaikorai Valley High School she was a prefect and head girl. It was during one of her teenage years she had sorted out her Uncle John’s stamp collection. As she did so she looked up the countries on stamps in the atlas and dreamed of travel.
Eleanor would often reminisce that in the evenings she would lie in her bed upstairs at the house in Elgin Rd with curtains open and stars shining and think about life a lot.
She decided she wanted to be wise rather than rich or famous. And she decided she didn’t want to die with any regrets so needed to get busy living.
As soon as she finished school at the age of 17 she went to Samoa with Volunteer Service Abroad and the life-changing experience led her to train as a teacher.
She represented New Zealand at a United Nations Junior Assembly. The inter-relationship between US history and politics enlivened her, the poverty and drug addiction of New York at night affected her deeply.
She met her future husband Ralph at a tramping club party. He had travelled overland across Asia from London to Calcutta and they walked all the way back through Dunedin from North East Valley to Mornington swapping travelling stories.
Ralph was planning to return to the UK overland again and Eleanor was very keen to join him. Her parents forbade the trip unless they got married first.
Eleanor’s thirst for adventure was equal to Ralph’s. The trip became an eight-month odyssey of island-hopping, hitchhiking and flights on tiny aircraft from Bali to London via Mandalay, Nepal and Iran.
While working in London, she and Ralph bought an old London Black Cab and travelled around England using it as a campervan.
Returning to Dunedin in 1974, Eleanor took a break to have her three children, Dan, Ruth and Gareth, but getting back to the workforce a decade later was very difficult. In the 1980s teaching work was hard to find, and she recounted getting 37 rejections before securing a combination of part-time jobs.
She loved the work but increasingly saw her pupils’ home life getting in the way of their education. She retrained as a counsellor.
After 17 years together Eleanor and Ralph separated by mutual consent. Ten years later in 1998 Eleanor met her beloved partner, Anna.
For the rest of her life Anna, their dogs, children and grandchildren were the centre of Eleanor’s world, and she was so much the centre of theirs.
They lived and worked in Australia for four years where Anna was studying. Eleanor managed a team of 90 counsellors in the Central Queensland city of Rockhampton and designed a groundbreaking suicide prevention programme for gay young people in Adelaide, braving a hostile press and suspicious public.
Returning to Dunedin, Eleanor worked to prevent elder abuse and neglect, at Presbyterian Support and then setting up a new programme, Community First, aimed at keeping vulnerable older people in their homes.
There were stints in Wellington with the Council for International Development, Wesley Social Services and work to de-escalate conflict between gangs especially Black Power and Mongrel Mob.
When flooding came to South Dunedin in 2015 she was ready, carrying a lifetime of learnings in social justice and community building.
There is a whakataukī that is true of Eleanor: Kāore te kūmara e kōrero ana mō tōna ake reka. The kūmara does not speak of its own sweetness.
Eleanor never boasted of her gifts. She simply poured them into her community, into her friends, and her family.
She was a natural leader who had a vision of how things could be better, and the wisdom and knowledge of people and systems to see her vision through.
She loved deeply, laughed whole-heartedly, embraced completely. Gave generously, swore robustly, and challenged herself as she challenged us.
And she did achieve the challenge she set herself as a teen — a life of service, travel, joy and great wisdom.
All those of us who were lucky enough to share her life are better for it. — Ian Telfer with help from Eleanor’s family and friends.
