“Like the warmth of the sun And the light of the day, may the luck of the Irish shine bright on your way.”

On the 29th of February (Leap Year 2024), I visited a Deaf elderly with poor mobility chap (91 years old) at the Waikato Hospital for a visiting routine over three weeks under my role as a deaf liaison person/Advocator. I kept in touch with his Waikato family regularly over many years. I have known him and his two late Deaf brothers and one Deaf sister-in-law in Waikato through the Deaf Community for many years. 

From his bed, a new patient was sitting by the Hospital window, and the patient was reading the newspaper next to him. The scenery outside caught my eyes on a bright, sunny morning.

The mountain is Mt Karioi, which surrounds Raglan and Whaingaroa Harbour. This mountain is a 2.4 million-year-old extinct stratovolcano. On a sunny day, it was an excellent, gracious display of the mountain where the lands lay. I decided to take a couple of photos and showed the Deaf elderly chap. He enjoyed seeing the photo but needed to figure out which mountain it was. There was another mountain further away from Mt Karioi called Mt Pirongia.

“Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity.”

Many years ago, there were Waikato Deaf Society events held at Raglan where other Deaf Societies met them each Summer Day. 

A bit of the small township – Raglan- is a coastal town, and the popular attractions are black-sand Ngarunui Beach and the long surf break at Manu Bay. The travelling distance is 34km from the city of Hamilton (which was ironically dubbed “City of the Future” in the late 1990s, also earning the nickname of “The ‘Tron”, short for “Hamiltron”) and 160km from the city of Auckland (City of Sails).

Kathryn and Jacek told me about the Sport and Family Day at Raglan in the 1960s and 1970s. One year, they think it was 1972, the weather was awful, and The Waikato Deaf Society decided to leave until later. In the meantime, I will have to recheck with them over the correct years during the horrible weather for the book/website about the History of the Waikato Deaf Society Inc – Dissolved in 1999.

Today, several Deaf people and Deaf with disabilities live/hang around Raglan, and their friends I know, like David, love to go down there for fishing. Mary (an artist) and her husband used to live there but moved back to Hamilton. Note that my mother and a young brother have lived there for over 18 years, and my partner and I visited them often when I was not working too hard. 

“He loved mountains, or he had loved the thought of them marching on the edge of stories brought from far away; but now he was borne down by the insupportable weight of Middle-earth. He longed to shut out the immensity in a quiet room by a fire.”

― J R R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“All mountain landscapes hold stories: the ones we read, the ones we dream, and the ones we create.

-from the Editor’s Note, The Alpinist (April 1, 2010)”

― Michael Kennedy