By Fiona Ramsay · Port Chalmers, Otago

“Most wind chimes from the big shops don’t sing. They clatter like a dropped cutlery drawer.” — Why a 71-year-old boatbuilder from Port Chalmers is selling her last hand-tuned copper wind chimes at cost, before her workshop closes for good.

Moira Galbraith at her boat shed above Otago Harbour. Her father’s tug bell hangs over the door.

At half past seven every morning, a bell rings on the hill above Port Chalmers. It is an old brass ship’s bell, and it hangs over the door of a small red boat shed. Moira Galbraith pulls the rope three times. Then she goes inside and starts work.

“Graeme says the neighbours set their clocks by it,” she says. “I think they’re just being polite.”

Moira is 71. She is a boatbuilder. And for the last fourteen years, she has spent her mornings in this shed making copper wind chimes, one at a time, by ear.

The Only Woman on the Slipway

Every plank of a clinker boat is held by copper rivets. Moira set them for 38 years.

Moira grew up in a wooden house on the hill, the daughter of a harbour tug skipper. In 1973, at eighteen, she walked down to the wooden-boat yard at Careys Bay and asked for an apprenticeship. She was the only woman on the slipway.

She stayed for thirty-eight years. Her job was copper. Every plank of a wooden clinker dinghy is held together with copper nails and small copper washers, hammered tight by hand. Hundreds on every boat. Moira reckons she set more than two hundred thousand of them.

“You learn what copper sounds like when it’s done right,” she says. “It’s a wee ring, not a thud.”

When she finished at the yard in 2011, she missed that sound. So she bought some copper tube, took it up to the old boat shed behind her house, and started making wind chimes.

A Shed That Smells of Linseed Oil and Sea Air

The last stroke of the file is where the note is made.

The shed is five metres by eight. Through the open doors you can see across the rooftops to the harbour, where the big ships come in. Her old rivet hammer hangs on the wall, its handle worn dark. A box of copper tube offcuts sits under the bench. Skip, her border collie, lies in the doorway.

Moira files the end of a tube, holds it up, and flicks it with her fingernail. She doesn’t look up. “Hear that? Flat as a pancake. Another hair off and it’ll sing.”

She has made more than 1,600 chimes in this shed. Each one takes her about four hours, from the first cut to the last check against the bell.

What 38 Years of Copper Rivets Taught Her About a Wind Chime

One tap, then she listens. If the note is wrong, the tube goes back on the bench.

Moira has heard plenty of wind chimes from the big shops. Most of them just clatter. Hers look simple: four copper tubes, a copper cap with a small animal on top, and a striker in the middle. But every part is there for the sound.

• “The Tug-Bell Tuning.” Every tube is checked against her father’s old tug bell before it is hung. Four tubes, four notes that belong together. When the wind moves them, you hear a soft chord, not a clatter.
• “The Rivet-Maker’s Cut.” Moira files every tube end dead square, the way she once finished a rivet. A crooked end sounds dull. A square one rings on and on.
• “The Harbour-Copper Voice.” Copper is heavier and softer than the thin aluminium in most shop chimes. The sound is deeper and warmer. “Like a church bell across the harbour,” Moira says, “not a bicycle bell.”
• “The Honest Patina.” There is no paint to flake off. The copper slowly darkens in the weather, like the rivets on an old dinghy that still hold after fifty years.

Turn Your Sound Up — This Is What a Tuned Copper Chime Sounds Like

No clatter, no rattle. Just four notes that belong together, carried on the wind. “That’s the bell talking,” Moira says.

The Bell Her Father Rang Every Morning

Half past seven. The same bell, the same time, for more than forty years.

Moira’s father, Archie, skippered harbour tugs for thirty-one years. Every morning he rang the bell on deck before the tug pulled out. You could hear it all the way up the hill in the family kitchen.

When his old tug was retired in 1983, he was allowed to keep the bell. He hung it on the boat shed and rang it every morning at half past seven for the rest of his life. Now Moira does it.

That bell has one clear note. It is the only tuner she trusts. “Every tube I make has to agree with it,” she says. “If it argues with the bell, it goes back in the box.”

Everything She Can See From the Shed Door

Dolphin, owl, butterfly, dragonfly and ladybird. Each one came from the life around the shed.

Moira never planned to put animals on her chimes. The dolphins came first, for the little Hector’s dolphins that used to swim beside her father’s tug at the harbour heads. “Dad called them his escorts.”

The owl is the ruru that calls from the bush above the house every night. “More-pork. Two notes. He’s never once been out of tune.” The butterfly is for the monarchs on Graeme’s swan plants. The dragonfly is from the creek behind the old boatyard. And the ladybird was for her great-niece, who used to count them on the bean plants.

The Thumbs That Built 200,000 Rivets

Moira can still hear every note. She can no longer grip the cutter.

Every morning for fourteen years, Moira has rung the bell, opened the shed doors and picked up the first tube of the day. The gulls on the roof, the smell of linseed oil, the first clear ring of copper. That is the part she will miss most.

Thirty-eight years of hammering have worn out the joints at the base of both thumbs. She sleeps in splints now. Her doctor in Dunedin was kind about it, but clear: they won’t come right.

“I can still hang them and I can still hear them,” Moira says. “What I can’t do is grip the cutter. The thumbs just say no. Thirty-eight years of rivets, I suppose. They’ve earned the rest.”

So the chimes hanging on the rack above her bench are the last. There will be no second batch.

“I’ve Had a Good Run”

Where Moira hopes her chimes end up: on a deck, heard every evening.

Friends in Port Chalmers tell Moira she should charge more. She just laughs. “I’ve had a good run,” she says. “I don’t need to make money on the last few. I’d just like to know they’re out in the wind somewhere, not sitting in a box.”

So she sells her last chimes for the cost of the copper and the postage.

She hopes each one ends up somewhere it gets heard: on a deck in Timaru, by a back door in Hamilton, on a bach by the lake. “If somebody’s nana sits out with a cuppa and listens to one,” she says, “well. That’s the whole point.”

Moira doesn’t own a smartphone. Libby, her last apprentice from the boatyard, set up the online shop after posting a short video of her own chime and waking up to seventy-one messages. Moira still writes a card by hand for every order.

“It Sounds Like a Bell Across the Water” — What Kiwis Say About Moira’s Chimes

Sent in by a reader: “Hung it on the bach. Now nobody wants to come inside.”

• ★★★★★

  “My old chime from the hardware store went straight in the bin. This one is soft and deep. Even my husband, who can’t stand wind chimes, likes it.”

  Sandra M., Hamilton
• ★★★★★

  “Heavier than I expected. It has come through two southerlies on our deck without a scratch and still rings beautifully.”

  Bruce K., Timaru
• ★★★★★

  “Bought the owl for Mum’s 80th. There was a handwritten card from Moira in the box. Mum read it out loud to all of us.”

  Karen T., Whanganui

Before You Order — What People Ask Moira Most

More From the Decks They Landed On

• ★★★★★

  “I’ve had cheap chimes for years. This is the first one that actually sounds like music.”

  Murray P., Tauranga
• ★★★★★

  “The dolphin is beautifully made. You can tell a real person tuned it, not a machine.”

  Jan W., Nelson
• ★★★★★

  “The ladybird is on the veranda post by the vegie garden. The grandkids ring it every time they go past.”

  Diane F., Wanaka