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Roundup Spotlight: Jessie Munro
A Life of Belonging and Stories
Published in Edition 450, October/November 2026
For Jessie Munro Clevedon has never simply been a place on a map. It is family, landscape, community and memory – a place that shaped her childhood and, many years later, called her home again to tell its story.
Although Jessie now lives in Wellington, she describes herself as “Clevedon through and through, from newborn baby to now”. Born in 1946, she was the second of four children and grew up surrounded by generations of family and neighbours whose connections to the district stretched back to the earliest years of Pākehā settlement.
Her great-grandfather bought the family farm on Monument Road in 1857, and her grandparents and aunts continued to live there. Neighbours on either side had similarly deep roots.
“I’d be going to school with kids whose parents had gone to school with my father, and their grandparents with my grandparents,” Jessie recalls.
Family connections were everywhere. Her great-grandmother was born Janet Sutherland, and her brother Hugh Sutherland’s family lived close by, along with their elderly parents. Jessie’s grandmother, Jessie Luke, was also from a local family. Her father Harold was developing a sheep and cattle farm on steep bush country near Luke’s Bridge, in an area then known as Whakatiri, before leaving for more than four years of service during the Second World War. He returned to the farm after the war, where Jessie and her siblings grew up.
2003, on the R Tucker Thompson, researching French history in the Bay of Islands
1946, with father Harold, sister Jennifer and Dave the dog
It was a childhood shaped by the land, family and the wider community. Jessie remembers the women who looked out for the children, including her mother Florence, Agnes Dow and her aunt Ruth Munro. One particularly vivid memory is of Agnes rowing a dinghy in a wide arc from McCallum’s shore, paying out the fishing net while the children helped haul it in.
“In a way we were brought up by a whole ‘village’,” Jessie says. “It meant encouragement and clear guidance. It was 90 percent positive, ten percent a bit daunting.”
There were also the long school-bus journeys over Clevedon’s unsealed roads, with the council grader smoothing out the ruts, and clouds of dust rising from convoys of army vehicles travelling down the coast for exercises. The Kawakawa Bay bus children had their own identity, as did the North Road cohort.
Jessie’s love of history and the landscape developed early. At Papakura High School, where she was deputy head girl and dux in 1963, her geography teacher Ann Richardson took her class on a study of the wider Hūnua–Wharekawa area. At university, Jessie studied New Zealand history and wrote a paper examining the effects of the 1860s wars on the district.
From language teacher to writer
Jessie’s career began with her love of languages. She studied French and Latin, and Italian – “Altea Luke, from Italy, lived on the neighbouring farm and I’d hop through the fence and learn so directly”, Jessie remembers.
“The 1960s was a dynamic era for French literature and politics and activism. Learning French meant more than just the language”, opening the door into a much wider world.
In 1969 Jessie and her husband moved to Montreal to do postgraduate study. “It was a good place for both our study areas and I’ve kept a soft spot for Canada, especially Québec province”. Then came three years in the south of Switzerland, with a baby by then.
Returning to New Zealand in 1976, Jessie trained as a teacher, settling in Wellington and discovering that she loved teaching teenagers. In 1980, after the birth of her second child, she transferred to the Correspondence School.
Teaching students scattered across the country, from rural Southland to the far north, also gave Jessie an opportunity to help develop new courses. It was here that her two great interests, French language and New Zealand history, began to converge.
The result was Voices of Belonging: The Story of Clevedon–Te Wairoa, a substantial history that brings together the many strands of the district’s story.
Jessie is quick to emphasise that although her name is on the book, it was very much a community effort.
Warren Shaw was, she says, “the backbone of the project”, while historian Fraser Murray became an important mentor. Ann Richardson was a sounding board for ideas and worked tirelessly alongside Jessie, including helping with grant applications and the painstaking photocopying of historical material.
The Roundup committee, including Jessie’s sister Jennifer Kelly, provided free access to its photocopier and also made a generous contribution towards the publication of the book.
There were countless other contributors. Linette Morgan, Ann Shaw and Jessie’s sister Charlotte Millar helped transcribe old cassette recordings of talks and interviews dating back to the early 1970s. Sandra Gorter brought Fraser Murray’s Yesteryear columns from the Roundup together in book form. Jess McKenzie rescued old photographs, while Jessie’s brother Duncan created the maps.
Jessie also worked alongside Ngāi Tai historian Nat Green, who was researching the Ngāi Tai cultural heritage of the area while Jessie was preparing the European Heritage report for the Auckland Unitary Plan.
Together, these contributions helped reveal what Jessie had begun to sense years earlier: Clevedon was home to an epic story.
2026, presenting her seminar ‘The Valley that fed a city’ at McNicol Homestead as part of the Auckland Heritage Festival
2026, cutting the ribbon at the opening the Clevedon Village Heritage Trail at McNicol Homestead. Jessie’s 2016 book ‘Voices of Belonging’ was the basis for many of the stories told along the 8km trail.
Ten years on - Voices of Belonging
Now, ten years after the book was launched, Voices of Belonging remains an important record of Clevedon–Te Wairoa and the people who have shaped it.
For Jessie, the most meaningful part of the project was perhaps the people themselves. Old documents, photographs, maps and recordings brought forgotten voices back into the present, while conversations with local families revealed the stories behind the names and places familiar to generations of Clevedon residents.
It was also a deeply personal homecoming.
“I moved up in winter 2008 for what I thought would be a few months and stayed for over two years, among the happiest times of my life,” she recalls.
She remembers the extraordinary warmth and support of the community, and the generosity of those who opened family collections, memories and personal archives to her.
Jessie reminisces: “everything came together miraculously in producing what became a big book telling an important story. Thank you, Clevedon–Te Wairoa.”
Perhaps that is fitting. Voices of Belonging is ultimately a story about connection – between people and place, between generations, and between the past and the present.
Jessie may now live in Wellington, but her connection with Clevedon remains strong. Her brother and his family, including two further generations, still live on family land, as do her sister’s Kelly family, across the skyline in Ness Valley.
And, fittingly, Jessie’s Wellington home is surrounded by native bush reserves, steep hillsides and flowing creeks – landscapes that echo the countryside of her childhood.
For someone whose life has been devoted to language, history and stories, perhaps there could be no better legacy than helping Clevedon remember its own.
Thank you Jessie Munro.
If you would like to read Voices of Belonging: A History of Clevedon–Te Wairoa, copies are available from Clevedon & Districts Historical Society, at the McNicol Homestead, preservingthepast@xtra.co.nz, or at Acorns in the village.
Read more local stories like this in our treasured community newsletter, the Roundup
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