Gems Are My Life

When you first meet an alert and smiling Hettie Wells in her famous Christchurch 'Rock Shop', you'd never believe she survived the horrors of a Japanese death camp in Java during the second World War, where beatings, torture, starvation, and disease, killed more than one third of her fellow prisoners.

After the war Hettie and her husband emigrated to what they thought would be a better life in New Zealand - only to find themselves desperately poor in a cold and unfriendly land.

But Hettie is no quitter. In the 46 years since she came to New Zealand she has taken all the hard knocks that life could throw at her.

She raised her children, renewed her life-long interest of geology, and then turned it into a successful business.