Sign In / Register
It really was the end of an era at Matakana Primary School on May 23, when Charleyne Garner did her final two school bus runs after a magnificent 44 years in the driver’s seat.
In her time on the buses, she has transported several generations of students, mostly from Omaha and Point Wells, where she has lived for nearly 55 years.
Charleyne says she only got into bus driving because she was friends with the driver who had the job before her in 1981.
“The guy who was retiring from driving the bus just phoned me out of the blue one day, and asked had I thought of driving a bus? I said no, so he said come on the run with me this afternoon and see how you go, so that’s what I did and this is what it led to,” she says.
Back then, there was just one Matakana School bus and it was a great deal smaller than today’s models, carrying only around 20 passengers.
“It was an Education Board J1 Bedford, red and cream, and I used to be able to do Point Wells and Omaha all in the one run, but now there’s a whole big bus-load, with 50-odd kids, just from Point Wells alone.”
Her first passengers included her own son and daughter – “I could make sure they weren’t dilly-dallying on their way to school!” – and five years ago, she was driving her grandson to class for a while.
“It worked out well, because I took my kids to school and home again, and had holidays off with them. It just always fitted in with my lifestyle at the time,” she says.
Her young passengers also included Kevin Jones, whose family owned the Gubbs Motors buses she drove, and who ended up running the company, the bus side of which was sold to Go Bus in 2024 after many years.
Charleyne always went the extra mile for her passengers, including decorating her bus for Christmas and other special occasions.
“I always did Christmas. I used to get Year 6s, or Standard 4s as they were at the time, to come to my place and let them decorate the bus. I would dump the box of tinsel and decorations with them and just say ‘go for it!’,” she says.
“Then it got to the stage where I started doing Easter, then Halloween and occasionally St Patrick’s Day.
There was even one girl who used to come and stay with her aunty at Point Wells every year at Christmas time just so she could travel to school on the Christmas bus.”
Charleyne was no walkover, however, and had her ways to calm things down if the bus got too boisterous.
“You ignore the noise generally, but just sometimes it would get to a pitch where you think ‘enough of this’, so I would just yell out ‘Oi!’ or sometimes I’d stop the bus, and they would know that meant to quieten down.”
Needless to say, Charleyne has seen many changes over the decades, as the area has expanded and more families moved in, but she’s enjoyed her role throughout.
“When I started Point Wells was like a little retirement village with only a handful of kids and you knew everybody, but I don’t know half the people here now,” she says.
“There have been a lot of good times. I enjoy driving, and even on my last run, I was thinking I do really enjoy this driving.
“But my passenger licence expired and I thought do I really need to renew it again? It was a sign that it was time to retire.”
And as much as she’ll miss driving the bus and her student passengers, she says she won’t miss getting up between 5.30am and 6am every school morning.
