Wanaka’s lake-edge wedding venue The Olive Grove became the focus of national and international media attention last month when former All Black captain Richie McCaw and Black Sticks hockey player Gemma Flynn, dubbed New Zealand’s royalty, were married there.
Dr John and Mrs Jill Blennerhassett, who are both in their 80s, started the Olive Grove wedding venue business just three years ago but it was only another chapter in their extraordinary lives.
Kerrie Waterworth backgrounds the lives of the two individuals who created the Olive Grove.
Dr John Blennerhassett describes his childhood as nomadic with both parents teachers in some of New Zealand’s remotest rural communities. One of his earliest memories was being invited to sit on a veranda with Maori elders and chatter away in fluent Maori.
It was 1938 in rural Matauri Bay and there was only one other Pakeha family in the area.
"I was 4 or 5 years old and occasionally my parents had to remind me to speak English at home."
During World War 2, although over age, Dr Blennerhassett’s father joined the 2nd NZEF and was posted to the western desert. His mother moved to Kopaki in outback King Country where she taught in the old schoolhouse (now used as a community hall) and 7-year-old John was sent to board in Hamilton for two years.
When his father came back from the war the family moved to Te Awamutu where his father returned to teaching at yet another remote school, this time in Te Kokuru, 11km from Dargaville. Teenage John decided on a career in medicine when he was at Dargaville High School but when he was in the 5th form a teacher took him aside and told him if he was serious about getting into medical school, Dargaville High School would not give him the background he needed.
His father used his connections and John found himself boarding at Mt Albert Grammar.
"I was as lucky as can be to be given that opportunity and I just thrived at Mt Albert Grammar. It was brilliant."
Dr Blennerhassett did his undergraduate medical degree at the University of Otago Medical School in Dunedin where he met his wife, Jill, and they were married two days after he graduated. As a house surgeon in Wellington and training to be a physician he realised it was pathology — the science of diagnosing disease, its causes and effects through laboratory techniques, organs, patient specimens and autopsies — was what he wanted to do for the rest of his career.
"The way the body reacts to things like trauma, poison and microbes was totally fascinating to me, I just loved it."
In 1962, John and Jill and their four children headed to the United States where John took up a 12-month residency in pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston. Finances were extremely tight but a £1000 Bank of NZ centennial fellowship helped make ends meet. In the second year, John was appointed chief resident and senior trainee, two years later he was given a postgraduate fellowship administered by the hospital.
"There were people there on the senior staff who were world leaders in gastrointestinal cancer, thyroid diseases, gynaecology and many other areas. It was professional heaven."
After four years in the US, Dr Blennerhassett’s J2 postgraduate visa had run out and the family, with the addition of two "little Yankees", moved to Montreal in Canada where John was appointed Associate Pathologist at Royal Victoria Hospital and Associate Professor of Pathology at McGill University.
After three years in Canada, John was invited back to MGH as half-time Head of Surgical Pathology and half-time Assistant Professor of Pathology at Harvard University.
"Teaching, if you really enjoy it, is stimulating, intellectually challenging and the most satisfying thing you can possibly do. If I’d had independent means, I would have done the job for nothing."
A short time later, the Head of Pathology at Otago University resigned and two of his friends wrote to ask if he would consider returning to his alma mater.
"It’s pretty cool to go back as head of your department to your old school."
Dr Blennerhassett had to stay on at MGH for another six months and chose to work from 7am to 10pm every day. In the meantime, Jill took the six children and the Labrador dog and drove around Canada and the United States in a brand new Ford station wagon towing a tent trailer before heading to San Francisco where they shipped the car to Port Chalmers and flew to New Zealand to set up home before Dr Blennerhassett arrived back in Dunedin to take up his new academic post as head of department and professor of pathology at the University of Otago.
"The Otago University years were steady as she goes shall we say, the wild ride had been up to then. I had a wonderful time at Otago University, it’s an excellent department, but it’s hard for New Zealand universities to compete with universities like Harvard that receive huge bequests. For example, I remember when I was chief resident at MGH the CEO took me to one of their posh private wings and said ‘in there we are looking after five widows, we are taking very good care of them, we are looking after them as though they are wrapped in cotton wool, and we don’t care if they live to be 150, but when each of them dies we will pick up $250million in endowment."
In 1989, Dr Blennerhassett resigned from the University of Otago to become director of pathology services at Dunedin Hospital (although he continued to teach undergraduate students and continued to be an examiner for the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (RACS) and teach basic science to surgeons which he did for 24 years).He said the one case that "sticks in my mind as well as my craw" was the Dunedin psychiatrist Dr Colin Bouwer who was found guilty of murdering his wife, Annette.
"It was such a whodunnit because Dr Bouwer was a tricky fellow. He had been feeding his wife oral antidiabetic medication plus psychotropic drugs from prescriptions signed by him using false names from 15 different pharmacies throughout Southland and Otago. The senior pathologist in charge of the autopsy (of Mrs Bouwer) Associate Professor Han-Seung Yoon and I were asked to do repeat autopsies and we both concluded we couldn’t find a natural cause of death but eventually more careful examination of specimens showed up the antidiabetic drugs and the microscopic changes in various organs of Mrs Bouwer’s body which were consistent with prolonged hypoglycaemic effect, typically described as an antidiabetic drug overdose. I found personal satisfaction in him not getting away with this dreadful thing he did to his wife."
In 2002, Dr Blennerhassett left Dunedin Hospital, finished his undergraduate teaching and he and Mrs Blennerhassett moved to Barn Pinch Farm on Wanaka’s western lakefront from where he continued to do occasional locums at Dunedin Hospital and conduct postgraduate courses for the RACS until 2011 when he was awarded the RACS Heslop Medal for outstanding contributions to basic surgical training. Barn Pinch Farm was originally part of Wanaka Station owned by Jill Blennerhassett’s grandfather, Sir Percy Sargood. After Sir Percy died in 1941, part of the station was bought at auction by Mrs Blennerhassett’s mother and given to the community by the Wanaka Station Trust in 1977 and the land containing the homestead ruins and large trees at Homestead Close were given in 1997. Mrs Blennerhassett’s mother gave half each of what remained to Jill and and her brother Rolfe Mills who established the first commercial vines at Rippon in 1982. Dr and Mrs Blennerhassett continued the tradition of sharing the land among the family and, after keeping 34ha back to create Barn Pinch Farm, gave their children 20ha each.
They have also shared some of their land with the Wanaka community, creating the 2.4ha Blennerhassett Kanuka Reserve between Waterfall Creek and Rippon Vineyard that is protected from development in perpetuity by a QEII covenant.
Mrs Blennerhassett can remember visiting her grandparents in Wanaka as a child in the 1930s and ’40s when the Wanaka township comprised of a pub, the square and a garage.
"There wasn’t a light to be seen along the peninsula and Pembroke Park was a piece of dirt for most of the year."
The development and urbanisation of much of what was once Wanaka Station does not bother the Blennerhassetts although there are a few aspects that do concern them.
"There’s been some good planning and some bad planning," Dr Blennerhassett said.
"We’ve been disappointed with some of the change in contours of the land that have been implemented and I remember protected trees were cut down in the rain and at night once," Mrs Blennerhassett said.
When the Blennerhassetts built what was then their holiday house at Barn Pinch in the 1970s there wasn’t a tree to be seen. Mrs Blennerhassett decided to plant olive trees.
"I’ve always been a member of the New Zealand Tree Croppers Association so I’ve tried to have pockets of this and that and I happened to plant the olives in rows and now they’re in the most perfect place," she said.
Three years ago, a friend who was also a marriage celebrant suggested they turn the grove of olive trees into a wedding venue. Always keen to share their property with others they jumped at it.
"And it was great to start something new when you’re 80," Mrs Blennerhassett laughed.
The first inquiry from the McCaws came through an intermediary but once it was confirmed the Blennerhassetts were sworn to secrecy.
"We only told our daughter who lives in a cottage on the property near the Olive Grove because we had meetings down there. Richie could come in the gate and drive down to the cottage and no-one noticed, she said."
A few days before the McCaws’ big day, Mrs Blennerhassett mowed the grass in the top paddock to create a crop circle for the helicopter to land.
On the day itself, Mrs Blennerhassett and her daughter, Robyn, drove around the perimeter of the property handing out Thermoses of hot drinks and biscuits to the security guards.
A week after the wedding, the new Mr and Mrs McCaw came back and visited the Blennerhassetts and presented them with a bottle of wine and a huge bunch of flowers as a personal "thank-you" present for hosting their wedding.
"Both sets of parents and Richie and Gemma were so lovely to deal with," Dr Blennerhassett said.
The Olive Grove has bookings for weddings into 2018 but the Blennerhassetts are already thinking about other ways to develop the property for the public and future Sargood descendants to enjoy.
