Islands of the Gulf - Great Barrier

Apart from Shank’s pony, a Land Rover is the best way to travel on The Barrier.

– Shirley Maddock

Television news, interviews and documentaries were skills nobody knew anything about when the medium arrived here. Shirley's background in radio and theatre, combined with her extreme intelligence, helped put together groundwork which has remained a benchmark lasting to this day as the industry has flourished.

– Max Cryer remembers Shirley Maddock in The Sunday Star Times, 14 October 2001

Great Barrier is hard country; it offers no easy life. It accepts the storms as it does the good weather and measures the years by the inexorable pattern of the sea and tides, and the season passing.

– Shirley Maddock muses underneath Barrier’s pohutukawa clad cliffs

Ranger Fuller had a very encouraging way of saying ‘it’s only another 10 minutes’, in case I imagined that the two hour climb seemed too hard a prospect. At this point we were up to our fifth or sixth 10 minute stint.

– Shirley Maddock, en route to the kauri dams