10/09/2026
‘Community engagement’ can sometimes feel like an abstract notion; an important concept but one that is not always put into practice. Reading through the paper trail left behind by Joe Bell, however, is stitching together the story of a man who embodied community engagement and was one of its strongest and most vocal proponents. I’m sure Joe Bell is remembered by many of you; community board member, poet, frequent flyer in the letter to the editor section of the GB weekly, righteous defender of democracy, and a friend to many. Joe passed away 14 years ago; the contents of his office were collected and brought to the museum. A rigorous archivist in his own right, the result of sorting through and cataloguing this material is a valuable archival cache known as the ‘Joe Bell Collection’. It’s a snapshot of over a decade of life in Golden Bay, with all its colour, intrigue and significance, through the lens of someone deeply passionate about and involved in the place they called home.
Joe was a member of the Golden Bay Community Board, and he did not take that position lightly. In his collection there are dozens of handwritten reports and annotated notes on all variety of local issues, from the big ones like the Tarakohe harbour development, targeted rates, the Village Green land purchase, to other smaller but significant topics, like speed limits, local events, and the Joan Whiting Rest Home closure. He eventually became Chair of the community board. He operated by the policy that everyone has the right to speak at public forums and would never cut off or quieten anyone who came to have their voice heard. He believed strongly in the right and importance of local representation,
Joe was also a prolific poet, and he used this artform in both a personally creative and political sense. He even got himself out of a parking ticket by composing a poem to council about why it was undeserved!
The collection holds many handwritten drafts of poetry about the issues he was passionately debating about, and he often kept his letter to the editor submissions under the word limit by compacting the content into rhyming stanzas. He was a founding member of the Golden Bay Live Poets Society, which is still operating to this day as ‘Acid on the mic’, held at the Mussel Inn on the 3rd Thursday of each month. His legacy is alive and vibrant in this community of poets, with the regional slam poetry competition being held on the 17th of September, at the Mussel Inn.
Joe is remembered as a humble, gentle, incredibly intelligent man with a wicked sense of humour and a deep sense of justice. The Joe Bell Collection is testimony to all of his hard work, and so we pay our respects to a man who was deeply present with and appreciated by his community, and who is still very much missed by his loved ones.
