My brother Rhys

My brother Rhys lost his battle with cancer last Sunday. Some of you who read my blog may have met him, and some of you have not, but I have found the importance of stories and that the best way to gain immortality is to share those stories.

Rhys was only 35 years old, he was my younger brother, and it was a one in a million chance that this has happened to him. So here goes, I'll share some childhood stories and help him live on. I hope one makes you smile and will stick in your memory.

I have been privileged over the last week to get to know my brother through other people eyes, to see him as the people he worked with knew him and loved him. Rhys worked at Park Road Post as a film editor in the DI department. I had no idea until last week of the very high regard he was held in by the Wellington Film industry, as was shown by the nature of his funeral and those who attended. If nothing else, go see 'Rain of the Children', a brilliant film that would not be the same without Rhys' influence.

Rhys loved adventures, and we got into plenty of those. I can remember at an early age that we wanted to build a hut together, and lacking a tree to build it in, we decided to create an underground one behind the garden shed at the bottom of the garden. I think we were about 6 feet down before dad found out what was happening.

We lived in Appold Street in Dunedin for most of our younger childhood, and the street itself provided plenty of adventures. It was very steep with a wicked hairpin bend at the bottom. An awesome and death defying circuit for go karts, scooters and bikes.

We both saved for our first bikes, Rhys got a BMX bike and I got a ten speed. I was always slightly jealous that he could ride and jump his bike around the abandoned section near the bottom of the street and I always begged him for rides...he always shared.

When it snowed, new opportunities for mayhem arose, and as you can imagine, having a steep hill with a hairpin bend made for perfect sledding. I’m sure the speeds we got up to made the neighbors hair curl, and of course we never thought about traffic. I can vividly remember one snow day when Rhys missed the bend and sailed on down the bank into the bush below. There was a path that led down through the bush and he had managed to land on it and slid for almost a kilometre before stopping. It took him about half an hour to drag the sled back up the steps to meet me.

We loved our holidays on the farm with our cousins, Alistair, Dougald and Hamish. We though it was a wonderland of fun, and even when we were working it was good times. Huts built in hay stacks, cutting barley, duck shooting and driving cars, tractors and bikes before we were at high school made us the stuff of legends.

Rhys got his love of music from Dad. Dad had a fantastic sound system, and was forever trying to improve the quality of sound from it, and whenever he bought a new linkage or component, he would call us in to compare pre and post sound. Rhys could always hear it, I just nodded along, but we would all have superb conversations about a huge variety of music and artists.

I remember when he was in about the fifth form, he had to do a project on Dunedin. He chose to go out and interview local bands, the ‘Dunedin Sound’ as it is now known. He talked with the Chills, the Bats, The Clean and many more. He not only interviewed them but got to know them and would often hang out with them long after the project had finished. I was always immensely proud that he had done that. Even then he would go the extra mile for his passions.

We are gadget boys, we both have always loved things that plugged in and had buttons on them. Dad brought home a Dick Smith computer when we were in our early teens, it must have been one of the first home computers ever available...it had a tape cassette drive and took about half an hour to boot up. We would spend rainy weekends punching machine code into it, so that by Sunday night we could chase a little green dot around the screen with a bigger green dot, but we loved it.

He always followed his passions, the biggest example of this I know of, is his leaving New Zealand to follow Heather to Japan. She is a passion he never got tired of following.

Before he left, he studied Russian and History at University, but on the side got into film studies and I think in the end film studies won out. Later, we always had the super 8 Rhys and Heather film festival when they returned each year from Japan, artfully chronicling the vivid snippets of life that so captured Rhys’ imagination. So it was no surprise to hear that he was going to the South Pacific film school when they both returned from Japan.

He was the fun uncle, our kids always loved when the Bonneys from Wellington would visit, because Rhys would always take time to play and spend time with them. Train sets, dress ups and soccer games. They loved his hugs and then would clamber all over him, much to their delight and our dismay. He was one of those people that children just warmed to immediately.

It’s hard to understand that he is no longer going to be part of our adventures in the future, but I am immensely glad of the times that we have already shared. Rhys lived a life full of love, experiences and achieved dreams. A life at 24 FPS. I miss you Rhys, but you are forever in my heart.