Renowned for her friendly, caring nature, she moved to Queenstown with her husband Ron in 1965 — and only left two years ago when she shifted to Cromwell’s Golden View Care Centre.
Ron, who died 10 years ago, aged 84, had come here to run the then Frankton service station.
Judy, who’d become a registered nurse at Timaru Hospital in 1954, initially pumped gas for Ron before the matron at Lakes District Hospital (LDH) offered her a job.
She then spent 27 years as a registered and then senior charge nurse at LDH and never took a sick day.
For 20 of those years she was also the on-call transfer nurse, accompanying patients by ambulance, plane or helicopter to Invercargill, Dunedin and Christchurch hospitals and even Hawaii, Fiji and Australia.
She tried to quit LDH three times ‘‘before I finally got out the door’’, she told Mountain Scene.
After a big farewell she was asked to become a caregiver at the then-adjacent, later-named Lake Wakatipu Care Centre — initially working for a week, but eventually 20 years, often on a part-time basis, after again failing to resign any sooner.
Famously, she frequently cared for residents younger than her.
In 2016 she was awarded a mayoral citation and a year later then-operator Bupa New Zealand made her a ‘Personal Best LEGEND’.
Judy only pulled the pin for good in January, 2022, as she was having an operation to remove a basal cell from her forehead — ‘‘I didn’t want to come back to work with a big bandage on my head’’, she told Scene.
Then, for her 90th, her aviator son Grant took her up in a 1950 De Havilland Chipmunk owned by her sister Robyn’s husband, Dick Fraser.
‘‘I think nursing was her whole life, it was an absolute vocation for her,’’ Robyn Fraser says of her sister.
‘‘She was very good at it, I think she just loved that caring side of it.’’
Grant says the hundreds of messages and likes he’s received on his Facebook page since last week make him very proud of his mother.
Judy, who was cremated last Friday, is also survived by her daughter Bronwyn and other son Brent.
A memorial service may be held next May when her next birthday was due.
