Their stay was intended to be short term, the plan being to help commission Benmore Dam, after which Mr Bayliss would return to his job in Dunedin as a test room technician.
''My boss said ... when you're finished at Benmore, we'll write to you to come back to your old job here,'' Mr Bayliss said.
He worked on Benmore Dam and then Aviemore.
After Aviemore, Mr Bayliss helped establish a high capacity high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission system connecting the electricity networks of the North and South Islands.
Mr Bayliss never did get that letter to go back to Dunedin and at age 80, he is still living in Otematata.
He and his wife are the longest staying permanent residents in the village, of that construction era.
''It's only a fluke. We didn't set out to be like that,'' he said.
''It grabs you, this place ... I think the general story is, if you're here for between seven and 11 years - you'll never leave.''
Mr Bayliss' family came to New Zealand from Wales on August 4, 1949.
He trained with the then State Hydro electric Department to be a technician and worked in Nelson, Dunedin and Roxburgh.
Mr Bayliss and his wife Bev, who he had met in Nelson, loved the lifestyle in the hydro construction village in Roxburgh and when an opportunity arose to move to Otematata they ''nearly fell over with excitement''.
''You won't see anything else like it in New Zealand's history again. There must be comparable things in New Zealand's past and present, but this was hydro construction living,'' he said.
The whole scheme was ''very bold and ambitious'' and the work was ''fabulously interesting''.
Benmore power station has New Zealand's largest solid earth dam and New Zealand's largest man made lake. The construction was the biggest job of its kind in New Zealand. At 540MW, it is the country's second largest hydro station, after Manapouri (840MW).
After working on Benmore, Aviemore and the HVDC link, Mr Bayliss stayed on in Otematata as a supervising technician for the New Zealand Electricity Department (NZED), before becoming a maintenance manager for the group office.
He was made redundant in 1986 but remained in Otematata, working with Transpower until 1992, when he retired.
At its peak, Otematata had 4166 people, a shopping centre, 55 clubs and organisations, primary and high schools and a hospital whose maternity wing had 179 births in 1964.
Mr and Mrs Bayliss had three children.
Their son Mat is now Meridian Energy's hydro asset maintenance manager at Twizel. He did a cadetship with the NZED in Christchurch after leaving school and was then sent to Twizel.
He worked on Ohau A, B and C, and went on to become the project engineer for the automation and remote control of the Waitaki Hydro Electricity Power Scheme 1991 and 1999.
The ''sad irony'' of that work was that it involved removing and modernising all of the equipment his father had helped establish.
