Rodney and Shona Morgan epitomise community spirit.

Both were born in New Zealand, where, as young adults, Shona worked for the bank and Rodney with the post office.

“I was working at the Bank of New Zealand and at first the post officer came over once a day to do the banking, then he came over twice a day, then three times,” Shona said. “He ended up asking me out and we’ve been married 58 years.”

The Morgans made their way to Australia in 1986 and settled in Woodcroft, a southern suburb of Adelaide, the following year.

But in January 1987, a severe reaction to a bee sting left Shona confined to a wheelchair.

Then the couple’s daughter broke her arm on the first day of school.

“I thought, ‘What do I do?’,” Shona said. “There were no mobile phones, Rodney was at work, and I didn’t know where any doctor's surgeries were.”

Shona and her daughter eventually made it to a clinic, but the situation sparked Shona into action.

“I went to the Happy Valley Council and they told me I could volunteer by making bags with information about where things were, like the doctors or dentist, and somebody would deliver them,” she said.

Shona continued to assist her new community; advocating for footpaths, traffic lights and a pedestrian crossing to be installed in the area.

Then came Neighbourhood Watch.

“I saw a sign for Neighbourhood Watch and didn’t know what it meant, so I rang the local police and they told us about the program and it went on from there,” Shona said. “It took about four years before we got the Woodcroft Neighbourhood Watch group started in 1995,” Shona said.

As Woodcroft continued to grow, so did the suburb’s Neighbourhood Watch group.

“We used to hold meetings at the Woodcroft Neighbourhood Centre and the entire hall would be full of people, because it was a new suburb,” Shona said. “Residents came to learn about what Neighbourhood Watch actually was.”

New homes meant more doorknocking for Rodney.

“In the earlier days we went from 300 homes in Woodcroft to around 4,000,” Rodney said. “The homes went up pretty quickly and I basically door knocked all of them.”

Rodney helped organise printing of the group’s newsletter, typically produced every two months and distributed to thousands of homes across the suburb.

“At the start, all I wanted to do was be Treasurer, because I was a bank manager in New Zealand,” Shona said “But we were having an AGM around 2007 and three minutes before the meeting started our son came up to us and said the Secretary and Area Coordinator were vacating their roles.”

Shona’s name was swiftly cast forward to fill the void.

“I thought, ‘How am I going to be able to be Area Coordinator when I’m in a wheelchair?’,” Shona said. “Well, in the end I was Area Coordinator until August 2021.”

Among Shona’s fondest memories from her time with Neighbourhood Watch are the yearly dinners she helped organise for almost a decade.

“Some members of the police would attend and we had dinner and a raffle,” she said.

Two people who attended Woodcroft NHW meetings went on to become sworn police officers during Shona and Rodney’s time with the group, in what Shona describes as “very proud moments”.

“We had the time of our lives in Neighbourhood Watch,” Shona said. “It meant a lot to us.”

“When I first came to Australia I didn’t speak to anyone, so I had to do something to speak out. It allowed me to point people in the right direction who were in a similar situation to me when I came here from New Zealand.”