Pauline Samways: natural scientist and SeniorNet co-ordinator

September 3rd, 2010
By David Armstrong

Pauline made time for our interview during the busy days leading up to the "Welcome to the Godwits" celebration, her current big project. Her work with "birding" and conservation, along with her years teaching at Lower Moutere School and her heavy involvement in organising SeniorNet have made her well known in the Motueka community.

She's been here for 40 years now, making her pretty much "a local". She moved here for her second year as a primary school teacher, aged 21, at Harekeke School. Here she met husband Dave and they've stayed here ever since. They've had 3 children who between them have now given her 3 grandchildren (in Christchurch) and counting.

One of 6 children herself, Pauline was born into a family that had strong conservation values back when no-one thought much about what humans were doing to Planet Earth. "I got a lot of my conservation ideas from my father," she says. "He was one of the original organic gardeners, though they didn't call it that in those days. We used to go out into the bush getting bags of leaf mould or seaweed for the garden and compost.

"I've also had an interest in natural sciences - a subject I did at school and training college - and when I was teaching it became my area of expertise. I loved doing things with the children - the beach, and plants and trees and so on."

Her teaching career was broken while she raised her family, though she did do some training in early child care in the meantime. She also developed an early interest in pottery, and she was involved in the early days of Potters Patch for 17 years while working part-time.

Throughout the family-raising days Pauline Samways became involved in many of the community activities that centred on her children - Plunket mothers, kindy, school galas, brownies and cubs, and various sports clubs.

Pauline is one of those people who always seem to find themselves on committees and service organisations, making herself available to do something more than just be a member. "I used to try to limit myself to three meetings a month, because if you got too involved you found yourself never at home, but it hasn't quite worked because now I'm at SeniorNet it's at least 3 meetings a month on its own, let alone anything else."

How and why does she get involved so heavily? "I tend to go with the flow and if something opens up and an opportunity is there, I just take it. I'm not one to plan my life. But when it comes to being on committees, there are so many organisations out there and many of them have lots of members but they just don't have the people who will take office. They can struggle to keep from closing, despite the large memberships."

Pauline's interest in birding (ornithology to use the official word) came from her schoolteaching days. In 2003 an opportunity arose to take up a Science, Mathematics and Technology Teaching Fellowship offered by the Royal Society, enabling her to take a year's paid leave from school to work with DOC and study and monitor the ecology and birds on the Motueka Sandspit.

"I chose that area because I was wandering down there once and found a dead oyster catcher chick, and I just wondered how come the chick had died and what's happening down here," she says. "I found that it wasn't all that simple. There were a whole lot of factors and reasons."

During that time she joined the Ornithological Society, and now she takes part in tracking projects where birds are identified with coloured bands and flags, in order to learn about their movements and behaviour. And part of the year-long fellowship award was that she had to speak to your community about what she was doing, and this has since continued, raising awareness of the threats to the birds and how important they are to the area.

"I found that you can't force people to stay away and not take their dogs there, rather it's a matter of education and awareness. I did a survey of people down there and one-third of the people didn't know that there were any birds of importance that nested there or about the godwits arriving in summer."

Arguments about dogs on the spit have raged at times, and Pauline believes that rather than a total ban, dogs should be allowed on the first third of it but not the end two-thirds beyond the sign. This has been well adhered to, she's found.

This year's celebration welcoming the godwits in two weeks is the first attempt at a prominent community event. For the past two years Pauline has held her own little welcome viewing event at the Motueka Quay, but a request by the Arts Council, and Eileen Stewart in particular, led to the expanded version this year, with its competitions and displays and involvement of other groups. Pauline has been heavily involved in organisation (on the committee, of course) and promotion over the past few months.

"These are our godwits. They come back to the same area each year from Alaska. The same ones come back to the same area. So this is their place as much as it's our place. So we have to keep the estuary clean and the sandspit a safe place for them to roost, if we want them to keep coming back."

Pauline finished teaching four years ago after 14 years at Lower Moutere, and she quickly got stuck into several activities for herself including art, dance classes and exercise classes, but that grand plan fell apart as SeniorNet (computing for the over-55s) took over a lot of her spare time. Husband Dave was already a member, and Pauline was the "go-to person" at school for matters regarding new technology, so it was obvious that SeniorNet would seek her services.

She did a SeniorNet course first, then was asked to teach one, and before she knew it she was on the committee and made Course Coordinator, a busy job scheduling courses and looking after tutors. She enjoys looking at new technologies that could become new courses - the current one under consideration is Facebook.

Pauline has been involved in several other community initiatives, including RDA (carrying on from her schoolteaching days with children), coastal plantings at the Raumanukas, and field trips to the Flora/Mount Arthur wildlife area, and she is responsible for organising people to help on the Big Beach Cleanup for half of the Motueka foreshore.

But Pauline got ovarian cancer last year, which involved four months of chemotherapy, so she had to cut back on these activities for a while. It was a time to reflect on looking after herself a bit more, and deciding the things that she would like to keep doing and what to let go. But her interest and activities around the sandspit have remained and she still spends plenty of time there doing checks and maintaining the six predator (rat and stoat) traps.

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