Hardy Hunt – a GP who delivered for the south

Dr Hardy Hunt, who has died aged 96, had no lack of admirers. Or informants.

When the Invercargill GP would ask any of his four children, conversationally over the dinner table, “tell me what happened last week?’’, they knew full well what it meant.

It meant he’d once again found out about something, perhaps at school, even though they had decided upon careful consideration it really wasn’t worth troubling their parents about.

In such matters Hardy Hunt was assisted by the sort of network that could only form around a man who during the course of 37 years’ practice in Invercargill had developed expertise in “community medical intervention’’ – back in the days when that meant house visits from 3pm to 6pm several days a week, often topped up on Saturday mornings.

Obstetrics was his particular delight. Hardy Hunt retired in 1996 having delivered between 4500 and 5000 young Southlanders.

He had better things to do than keep fastidious count of them. But he could more readily confirm the exact number of drugs that he had first prescribed as a GP that were still in use when he retired.

There were just three.

One was aspirin.

On top of constant reading and training courses he maintained that through his involvement with the GP registrar training scheme he had received, not just bestowed, further education.

Those “smart young fellows’’ straight from medical school “teach us about the new drugs, and we teach them about caring for people’’.

Amid all that development, one aspect of his professional work that resolutely defied improvement was handwriting bad enough to justify the arch cliche and torment chemists citywide.

Napier-born he grew up in Hawera, and won a scholarship to New Plymouth Boys’ High School.

Known to all as Hardy, the boy who’d been christened Tremayne Everard Hunt had grown with so little need to use that rather more grand name that as an 11-year-old he’d needed to ask his mother how to spell it.

He trained as a GP at Otago University, met his first wife Shirley Bathgate in Palmerston North in 1952, and the couple went to Granity on the West Coast and then Te Araroa on the West Coast.

Those two years of “country service’’ were a bond to the Crown following his training.

After spells in Levin and Auckland, where he trained in obstetrics, they moved to Invercargill and a group practice in Don St.

Atop his regular patients he treated countless meat workers as an Alliance Group doctor, was a former chairman of Southland Hospice, and deputy chairman of the former Southland Area Health Board.

An avid reader and walker, he was also fond of his footy and, in case his services were needed, was a fixture at Rugby Park during the rugby season until the 1981 Springbok tour led him to turn away to express his opposition to apartheid.

He married his second wife, Margaret Henshall, in 1987. After retirement they moved to Wanaka, where he helped establish the town’s croquet club, and then Christchurch.

In his 1996 retirement interview, Hardy Hunt told The Southland Times that the political shift of the health system at the time had not made the caring part of his job easier.

“Often we’ll know what (the patient) needs but we can’t help them. That’s the most upsetting part of the job now.’’