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Sheila Cunningham conquered many a peak in her climbing career, including the Matterhorn, which contributed to her ever-lasting passion for all things Swiss. One of her finest conquests, however, was capturing the heart of Ashley, who she met in 1952, when he was working for the NZ Forest Service as a young graduate and she was a fresh arrival in New Zealand from the UK. She was inspired to come to this country by John Pascoe’s book Unclimbed New Zealand. The pair met at the Tararua Tramping Club and were engaged by June the following year. Sheila and Ashley were well-known to the Hawke’s Bay tramping and forestry community, but it wasn’t until the publication of the enormously popular Hawke’s Bay for the Happy Wanderer, in 1983, that the couple came to the attention of the wider public. Sadly Sheila died in June 1988 leaving a huge gap in Ashley’s life so it was fitting that when he was led to believe he was going blind he decided to publish his wife’s collection of watercolour paintings. “I asked myself what would I most like to do with my sight while it remained,” he says. He decided to publish his late wife’s water colour paintings of New Zealand wild flowers and, as he worked on it, it was found that his failing sight – a rare complication of cataract surgery in the 1990s – was able to be cured by laser surgery. New Zealand Wildflower Portraits by Sheila H Cunningham, was finally ready for publication last August, just before Ashley suffered a minor stroke. He oversaw the printing of the book locally, but decided not to distribute it himself and arranged for Nationwide Book Distributors Ltd, of Christchurch, to market it for him. Ashley recalls in his privately published and circulated book Sheila, Happy Wanderer, which he told her he would write for her just before she died, “she believed almost any information could be found in books”.
“Not content with her meticulous house plans, Sheila also made a cardboard model of the house, which helped ensure the loan for it,” Ashley says. When the couple took the risk of mortgaging their beloved and highly personalised home to finance the publication of Hawke’s Bay for the Happy Wanderer, Sheila was yet again at the library and borrowing books on salesmanship before taking the book to bookshops. Ashley writes in Sheila, “a mathematical analysis of the books in Sheila’s library seems cold and impersonal, but can nevertheless be used to emphasise her interests. There are now well over 1000 books stacked around various shelves in Edelweiss. Most are about travel (153), mountains (149) art (124) or trees, plants and gardens, (121). There are 57 books about animals, 38 history books and 34 children’s books, which she kept to herself because she loved the illustrations. “Significantly there are only 17 novels, but that was because many of her fiction books were given away or deliberately left in local mountain huts in the hope they would provide alternative to Penthouse or Rod and Rifle magazines.” Sheila was a diarist from an early age. At 15 she went on a trip to the Wye Valley, in Wales, with a school party. She recorded the event and the photos she took in a little book that she gave to her mother. Ashley says it was the first and smallest of more than 60 “trip diaries” she compiled. From 1938 to 1987 Sheila produced 83 albums She was a compulsive recorder of events, not only as a diarist but as a photographer and collector of mementoes. One of
Sheila’s projects resulted in the great Edelweiss Book, which
recorded not only the building of the house, but also the development of
the seven acres of land that surrounded it. Whereas most people would
begin with their own arrival, Sheila didn’t. “She decided to start right back with the first occupants, some 800 years ago and prefaces her history of Edelweiss with 17 pages of local history prior to 1959,” Ashley says. “Using her camera she was able to copy old newspaper articles and reproduce ancient photographs borrowed from local identities.
“Several decrepit photos of early buildings were re-created by delightful pen and watercolour sketches. Aerial photographs were obtained and the earliest is dated 1936. The text was hand-written in Indian ink on large sheets of white card. “The section on early history is followed by a further 73 pages detailing the development of Edelweiss and its inhabitants during the 20 years from 1959 to 1979.” The Great Edelweiss book, which weighed more than 7kg was Sheila’s Christmas present to Ashley in 1979. Because of the historical value, a photocopy of the book was deposited in Napier’s Berry (Historical) library in 1990. Sheila completed the paintings of wildflowers featured in New Zealand Wildflower Portraits over a period of six years in the 1980s and the final collection totalled 174. Experts were called in to help identify the plants correctly and the Botany Division of the Department of Science and Industry Research also took great interest, as wildflower distribution was a neglected area of study in New Zealand. New Zealand Wildflower Portraits is a charming and informative book, and Sheila’s delicate and beautiful watercolours make you look again with fresh eyes, as Ashley was able too, at some of the most common and often ignored flowers around us. Reprinted by kind permission by The
Napier Mail.
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If
a New Zealander asks if you're feeling crook should you be insulted
or touched at his consideration? And why is going to bed with a hottie
no reason to get excited in the Land of the Long White Cloud?
When
Edelweiss, their Swiss chalet-style house at Bay View was to be built,
Sheila haunted the architectural section of the Napier Public Library
until she knew enough about building to present the finely detailed and
drawn house plans to Ashley on his birthday, on April 12, 1960. The plans
were of such quality that one of the builders wanted to employ Sheila.