Simon Collins came to Coralie Leyland's farewell

Coralie Leyland Political Activist

Simon Collins March 19 2007

I was not surprised to see Simon Collins at Coralie's funeral on Monday March 19 2007 as the friendship had gone back to City Voice days when he was editor of Wellington's best community news paper. After Simon left Wellington to live Auckland he kept in touch with Coralie, who died on 13 March 2007.

There are 50 references to Coralie Leyland on Google and one of them is a publication on the pepptalk Community Forum. Coralie was interested in Banking reform, amongst other things, and before becoming unwell was starting to get used to the Internet.

Coralie had been involved in many political battles in the last 12 years that I had known her. Given her poor health, brought about by a stroke when she was 37, she had done well. From all accounts Coralie was a very competent professional musician before her stroke.

Coralie thought up the acronym GROMN around which a meeting was held in the Aro Valley Community Centre . Coralie was a founding member of The Residents Coalition that started 10 years ago. She was keen on community meetings and arranged for her last one at the Aro Valley Community Hall to allow the public to discuss Council's Long Term Community Plan. Coralie would often ring me with political advice and ideas. I was ambivalent about visiting Coralie in the last stages of her illness but she asked that I would, and so only a few days before she died I paid her a visit. She was pleased to see me but looked very tired and the conversation was kept short. I had only got back to my home when the phone rang and to my surprise it was Coralie with some political advice about my election campaign.