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SOARINGNZ • ISSUE 58
CONTENTS FROM THE EDITOR JILL MCCAW
When I first started gliding with the Auckland Gliding Club, back in the early ‘80s, it never occurred to me to think there was anything unusual about being a girl and taking up the sport. At the time that I was training there was another girl from my nursing class, Christine Hicks (if anyone knows what became of her, please let me know – our nursing class has been trying to track her down for years), Rosemary Gatland was one of my instructors and there were quite a few women pilots around: Ann Barbarich, Liz Read, Brenda Tunnley, and much to my surprise, Shelia Alexander, the head tutor of my nursing school. Teenagers Kerrin Williamson and Vivienne Brynner were daughters of pilots and part of the club scene. I think they were both pilots by then. Ann Johnson was doing some amazing flying at Piako and Yvonne Loader was setting records down south. To my mind there was nothing odd about women flying. I remember being quite surprised one time when an instructor told me, “You fly quite well, for a girl.” I didn’t know what to make of that and realised that the instructor meant well but I was left feeling puzzled (was that a compliment?) and quite put out by it. The
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fact that I still remember him saying it, more than 30 years later shows that words can unsettle and stick. After travelling for a few years, I came home, returning to flying at my home club - my happy place. I made friends with Kerrin Williamson and the two of us tripped south to crew for Lindsay Stephens at a South
Island Regionals. I met John McCaw, we married (at Omarama) a couple of years later and produced some awesome gliding kids of our own. Sometime later I became the editor of SoaringNZ. I have very rarely encountered any of the problems that Clare Dickson talks about in her article, but I’ve seen some bad stuff happen to other women.
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