Obituaries

Defender of her ‘good boy’ Tim dies

By EVAN HARDING - The Southland Times | Thursday, 30 April 2009

When Tim Shadbolt was elected for his seventh term as mayor at the 2007 local body elections, he rushed to tell his mum that he would be the country's longest serving mayor.

Her response: "Yes, that's all very well but when are you going to get a real job."

Mr Shadbolt said his mother, Josien Weersma-Shadbolt-Kral who died this week in Invercargill aged 93 always ensured he kept his feet on the ground.

But she also defended him to the hilt. During his radical years at university his mother wrote numerous letters to Prime Minister Keith Holyoake saying her son was "really a good boy, you know".

Of Dutch descent, Mrs Weersma-Shadbolt-Kral was born in West Timor, with her father in the Dutch Colonial Service.

She lived in Indonesia and the Netherlands for the first 18 years of her life before moving to New Zealand.

Her first husband, Donald Shadbolt, a fighter pilot, was killed when training in England for the Korean War. Mr Shadbolt was aged five and his brother Rodney two.

They returned to New Zealand and she remarried. She worked for many years as a trained nurse and ran a family orchard in Nelson.

She spoke five languages, was well travelled and was a woman of the world, Mr Shadbolt said.

But first and foremost she was a mother to her three sons.

When he first became Invercargill Mayor in 1993 she visited regularly before moving permanently to the city in 1997.

"She found the people to be very good," Mr Shadbolt said. She also told her friends she was proud of her son, he said. "She loved the fact I was mayor but she would never tell me because she was scared I would get a swollen head."

Her final 10 years were spent living at the Rowena Jackson Retirement Village where the nurses treated her with love and compassion, Mr Shadbolt said.

Mrs Weersma-Shadbolt-Kral's funeral is today, at Invercargill's Eastern Cemetery.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/southland-times/news/2373839/Defender-of-her-good-boy-Tim-dies