Donna Mills

Donna Mills is one member of a remarkable athletics family.

She was the daughter of one of New Zealand’s great athletes, shot put and discus champion Les Mills, and of Collen Mills, a 400m champion. And she’s the sister of hurdler Phillip.

If the national selectors hadn’t for some bizarre reason excluded Les from the 1974 Commonwealth Games team, despite his world ranking of 5th in the shot put, four members of the Mills family would have been in the team in Christchurch. Instead, Les did television commentary work and watched proudly as his wife, son and daughter, all of whom he helped train, did the honours.

Colleen ran in the 400m, Phillip in the 110m hurdles and Donna competed in the high jump.

Donna was just a teenager when she won the 1974 national high jump title, contested at the end of 1973 to fit in with the 1974 Commonwealth Games the following month. That victory earned her selection for the Games.

In the Games high jump, Donna succeeded with her first attempt at 1.60m, but then had three misses at 1.65m. She finished 12th.

Donna was set to join her brother Philip on a three-year athletics scholarship at UCLA University in Los Angeles, but by then her heart had been captured by charismatic musician Graham Brazier. After a stopover in Sydney on her way to the US, she had a change of mind and returned to Auckland to be with Brazier.

They were married in the garden of the Mills family home just after her 19th birthday. Though the marriage didn’t endure, she remained friends with Brazier until his death in 2015. In 1985 she married singer/songwriter Dave McArtney after a long relationship. McArtney died in 2013. He and Donna had a son Gabriel and a daughter Moana.

Brazier and McArtney, close friends, founded the band Hello Sailor, sometimes described as New Zealand’s equivalent of the Rolling Stones. Hello Sailor was inducted into the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame in 2011. By extension, Mills became New Zealand’s unofficial first lady of rock 'n roll.

Besides her music connections, she had her own full career. For a time she was an in-house model for Yves St Laurent in Paris. Later she opened ran Jewels & Gems, a jewellery business, over a period of nearly 20 years. It became one of the iconic stores in Ponsonby Rd.

After she closed the store, she headed to Switzerland and ended up in London, where she in 2017 she opened Roseheart Jewels, in Covent Garden.