If I'm honest with you, the passing of John Barnett on Sunday has actually hit our house quite hard over the last three day - because at the start, nobody knew anything about what had happened.

And as the information has come out, we've realized that when my husband bumped into him on the street on Sunday afternoon, it was literally just before he died

They stopped for a chat, husband went in one direction, Barnett went in the other direction, and it wouldn't have been another 200m or so beyond that, that John collapsed.

Now, I don't think the full force of it actually hit me until I was watching the television news about this last night, because, you know, you're watching somebody alive on TV in the footage, but not alive in real life anymore.

And what struck me last night was that I never realized how big a force John Barnett was for us in New Zealand. 

I knew what he'd done, we all knew what he'd done - Shorty Street, Whale Rider, all of that.

But it wasn't until I heard the list rattled off that I realized the scale of the impact - Footrot Flats, Sione's Wedding, Whale Rider, Shortland Street, Once Were Warriors, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, Outrageous Fortune, apparently commissioning Dave Dobbyn and Herbs to make 'Slice of Heaven', and apparently helping to rescue people in Dawn Raid.

I mean, how much of what we consider to be intrinsic parts of our culture, or at least reflections of our culture back to us, were created or facilitated by John Barnett?

It was really easy to forget that when you knew John, because he's really easygoing and really gracious, never reminded you of what a big deal he actually was.

He was just Barney, who you bumped into almost every week on the kindy run or at the weekend sitting outside Dizengoff or strolling down Ponsonby Road.

The last time I saw him and sat down and properly had a chat to him was over dinner at Prego not long ago. And the thing that struck me about him was how much into life he still was at the age of 79.

He still had an eye for a good yarn, he was telling us about the story he never got around to making, which is of the only woman ever to be jailed in London for being a hitman. She was a Kiwi - and his eyes lit up and he cracked a big smile telling the story.

He was still enthusiastic about telling our stories back to us.

I will miss seeing John on my walks, not nearly as much as his family and his wife and his dearest friends will miss him - but how lucky were we that he spent his life giving us this part of New Zealand back to us?

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