Photos: Jane Ussher, Todd Eyre.
Over the past 10 years (aka her “menopause decade”), Weekly readers will recall Wendyl Nissen left Auckland behind for a quiet country life in the Hokianga.
The media personality and her husband Paul Little bought a remote, two-hectare plot overlooking the picturesque harbour, where her parents lived in a cottage attached to the main house.
It was a season where Wendyl wanted to soak up some serenity and remove herself from maybe harming others, she half-jokes, while battling hot flushes.
So she embraced flowy, cotton frocks to collect fresh eggs from the chickens and preserve fruit from the trees. The former Weekly editor wrote five books and also helped care for her late mother, who had Alzheimer’s disease.
Living in a bucolic setting had been Wendyl’s childhood dream. Turns out, though, you can take the girl out of the city, but you can’t take the city out of the girl.
The 62-year-old has now said goodbye to the land and livestock – their Hokianga property is currently on the market – and returned home to Point Chevalier in Auckland Central. So, what changed?
“Both Paul and I grew up in Auckland,” she explains. “Moving to the country was always my dream – not so much his. But he was happy to go along with it.
“And we absolutely loved it! We had cows and 25 chickens, vege gardens going and baked our own sourdough. When Covid hit, everyone else’s lockdown was just our life.
“But we had a new granddaughter, Goldie, who was born in 2021. That hit us hard because we had been really involved in our other two granddaughters’ [Lila, 16, and Emmie, 13] lives as babies. We realised we were totally missing out on Goldie.”
In fact, their Auckland-based children, aged in their late thirties, basically staged an intervention.
While the pair was visiting the city for a family party, Paul went round for coffee the next day and all the kids were there. They asked, “Could you two come back? We really miss you!”
Knowingly, Wendyl and Paul, 67, looked at each other and said, “It’s time.”
However, she was worried about leaving her fiercely independent father Cedric, now 92, who wanted to stay on in Hokianga.
“Dad was living alone up there for about six months. We were going back every few weeks to be with him,” she says. “One day, he said, ‘I’m so scared I’m going to have a fall. I think it may be time to go into a rest home.’ I told him it had to be his decision.”
Cedric, a former journalist for the New Zealand Herald, is now happily settled in a care home in Mount Eden and only 10 minutes away. Both he and his daughter were pragmatic about the upcoming move.
“We’ve had our time in the country and got as much joy as we’re going to get from it,” says Wendyl. “And I don’t want to be one of those people who has an empty house all year except summer.
“Part of the reason I wanted to leave Auckland in the beginning was because I was so busy and in menopause, and couldn’t stand being around people.
“I was trying to do it naturally for five years. It was a nightmare. I was quite angry. I watched Paul simply open a letter one day and wanted to kill him!
“After one hour’s sleep because I’d been sweating all night, I remember waking one day. I turned up at the doctor’s office at 8am and said, ‘Give me HRT – I can’t do this.’
“I was whacking those patches on,” she laughs. “Hokianga did heal me. But I don’t need that isolation any more.”
Since moving back to the city, writer Wendyl has reinstated Sunday night family dinners – “Paul loves cooking for everyone” – and they babysit Goldie, three, every Wednesday.
“We have so much fun with her. She loves our garden and going to the zoo. It feels like we’ve made up for lost time.”
Once a week, Wendyl also volunteers at the Auckland City Mission with Orange Sky, a charity which connects people experiencing homelessness through a free laundry, showers and conversation.
“It was something I decided to do after seeing some homeless people in our neighbourhood who were being given a hard time by the residents,” she explains.
“I love getting to see them every week and to see them getting better. I’ve had some of the best conversations of my life with those people. It’s inspiring how they help each other.”
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