By PSS | Posted: Friday June 8, 2018
A modern two-lane bridge has been constructed across the Kawarau River replacing the original and opened in May. At a cost of $21.9 million, the new bridge is an attempt to reduce traffic delays and increase safety. The original bridge will become a historic walkway.
It’s a nostalgic time for June Thompson who has outlived and overlooked the first bridge her entire life.
June Thompson was born in 1926 in Queenstown, the year the Kawarau Falls Dam and the single lane bridge were finished. June’s father, Charlie Hansen, was working on the construction of both.
Without electricity, this construction meant a single traction engine provided the motive power. The one-lane bridge provided road access from Queenstown to Kawarau Falls station, previously accessible directly only by water, and was completed in August 1936 at a cost of £63,000 ($7 million).
June recalls her adolescence in Frankton. “When the war came, my brothers were called up and went away to camp. At 16, I decided I’d leave school and go home and work on the farm with my Dad. When I was 18, I got called up by the war office to say I’d have to stay working where I was. They said, ‘You’ve got to stay there.’ I didn’t mind that at all.”
June explained how the women she knew didn’t drive. “We all walked. My mother and I used to walk to Queenstown.” So when she was allowed to try for her licence at 16, begrudgingly a year later than boys could, she was an outlier.
“We went away over the bridge,” she recalls, “In a 1939 Chev with a column gear change.” Since then the traffic across the bridge has increased.
June is now a resident at Frankton Court, and was present for the opening of the new bridge. “So you see I’ve lived all my life, over 90 years, at Frankton.”
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