Fern Sutherland: My story as told to Elisabeth Easther

Fern Sutherland plays Detective Sims in the television series The Brokenwood Mysteries, with series eight set to premiere on TVNZ1 Sunday August 7 at 8.30pm.

My parents were shearing contractors and I spent my first
three years in Mangakino. Mum cooked for the shearing gangs and dad shore the sheep and they worked all around the King Country. It was a very rural life with lots of adventures and my earliest memories are of jumping up and down on the wool presses at various farms.

When it was time for me to start school, we moved to New Plymouth. Dad became a landscape labourer and mum was a waitress at a buffet restaurant called Marbles, which was a bit like Valentines and it’s still there. Back then though, every time the song The Time Warp came on, the wait staff had to stop what they were…