COLTYN Mackenzie will celebrate part of his seventh birthday on the Piopio school bus.
Two Piopio children were born a century apart: and both are part of education history.
Mona Mills of Te Mapara turned eight the day New Zealand’s first school buses rolled into Piopio. On April 1, 1924, she marked that milestone with 29 other friends, “packed like sardines,” on the Model T bus from Te Mapara.
Many years later, she described the vehicle’s insides as “tolerably dry, but dark and claustrophobic,” to the New Zealand Education Gazette.
Her journey took one-and-a-half hours each way, over the rough – albeit metalled – roads of the 1920s, and in a bus without heating. The distance was six-and-a-half miles.
Previously, children’s only options were to walk or ride a horse, but the buses ushered in a new era of larger schools, providing what was believed to offer a better education than the old one-room, one-teacher institutions.
One hundred years (and two days) later, Coltyn Mackenzie of Ngātamahine will turn seven – the date giving his birthday its own claim to fame.
On April 3, 2024 he will catch a Go company bus into Piopio with his two older brothers.
Coltyn’s trip will be a quick one, 10 or 15 minutes. But travelling home still takes much longer, because in that direction, his is almost the last stop.
Like Mona, he doesn’t love the bus ride. The six-year-old has been known to get into a debate or two and is told by his mum, Anita Jayne Mackenzie, to “stop causing drama on the bus”.
Still, Coltyn said he’d rather catch the bus than ride a horse.
But it makes Anita’s life more straightforward. As a self-employed hairdresser and beautician working from home, she appreciates having time to feed the household’s “too many animals,” in the morning, or work longer in the afternoon.
Mona’s birthday present a century ago is not on the record, nor whether her family had a tradition of giving gifts or the money to do so.
But Coltyn, whose request for a cockatiel was declined, will be getting a smart watch.
