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We bought some land on Waiheke Island in 1962 and a friend offered to help Alf with putting in the foundations for a bach or holiday home. This was done but Alf was not pleased with the job, so the following weekend he and our son Rodney went to remove the blocks. After a while they saw a police car stop at the section. The policeman was very friendly and Alf began to wonder why he had come. When Alf told him why he was removing the blocks the policeman said, “Oh now I understand. An elderly lady rang to ask us to see what was going on because last week she had seen through her binoculars two men working to put in some blocks, and now some men were there taking them out! Maybe they were stealing them.” Some months later when a lot of progress had been made on the house we arranged for a local builder to put the roof on. Our furniture was loaded onto a van and taken to the Island, only to find that the roof had not been done. We had plenty of space under the house so the furniture was put there. Our only protection from rain was the floorboards above and we knew that would not keep the rain out, so we hoped that it would not rain during the night. But rain it did. Very heavy rain fell. We got drenched trying to cover our beds. We covered all that we could with polyurethyn and walked across the wet grass to our nearest neighbour. We must have looked a real mess when our neighbour got out of bed and came to the door. He kindly allowed us to spend the night in his living room. Eventually the house was finished and I was invited to an afternoon tea to meet the other neighbours. An elderly lady there said, “ I was interested to see your furniture arrive recently.” I asked where she lived and she said, "Oh, I live away over on the far side of that hill and I use my binoculars a lot. I noticed that you have an electric frypan,” she answered. It seemed that there were very few electric frypans on the island at that time! She went on, “I also sent the police over a little while ago when I thought some men might be stealing your blocks.” I am sure she meant to be a good neighbour but I felt that if she could see something as small as a frypan then her binoculars must be quite powerful. I felt that I had lost my privacy. She also mentioned that some folk used their binoculars when the bus was due in, to see what visitors had arrived on the boat. This helped them to feel up-to-date with local activities.