Women's health advocate DR BEV'S INCREDIBLE GIFT

The Kiwi crusader won't stop until cervical cancer has been eliminated

- Elisabeth Easther

My family moved from Hamilton to Wellington when I was six. My father sold insurance and my mother trained to be a teacher when she was 40, which might not sound like much now, but in those days it was amazing. I'm so grateful to my parents because they worked hard and were always supportive, but it wasn't until I saw examples of how other people lived that I realised how I was.

My parents were big believers in education. When Mum was young, school wasn't free, and she and her brother were lucky to have a relative pay the pound a year for them to go. Dad also valued school because Ngāti Porou has always been education-focused. Although people did sometimes ask Dad why he was educating his girls when they were just going to get married and have children.

From an early age, I wanted a job where I could be helpful. I thought about the police, but I was too short. I didn't know any police people either. I also liked the idea of being a mathematician, but we didn't have any maths friends in our whānau. Yet somehow I became a doctor, even though we didn't know any doctors.

One in seven homes in our Paparangi subdivision was a Māori Affairs house, so being Māori was part of growing up, but there was little experience of tikanga [traditions]. My dad left the East Coast to go to war and when it was over, he didn't return to his turangawaewae [ancestral home]. Going from a rural setting to the city, some things were lost, even though whānau was still central to our lives. I think about Mum and Dad all the time, the questions I didn't ask, which is why I enjoy Tolaga Bay as an adult, to go there and walk in Dad's footsteps.