Beyond the gold rush

As the dust settles on her Paris triumph, Ōhope’s Dame Lisa Carrington contemplates her next chapter. The kayaking legend shares her post-Olympic reflections and the unexpected joys of an unscheduled life.

WORDS Karl Puschmann | ART DIRECTOR Annabelle Rose | PHOTOGRAPHY Garth Badger
PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANT Melissa Brinsden | STYLIST Nicky Adams
HAIR+MAKE-UP Desiree Osterman

Half an hour into UNO’s chat with Dame Lisa Carrington she makes a dramatic and quite unexpected admission. 

We’d been talking about her phenomenal success in kayaking. Not just at the recent Paris Olympics where she claimed an awe-inspiring hat trick of gold medals in the K4 500m, K2 500m and K1 500m kayaking events – astoundingly being the second time she’s accomplished the miraculous feat of claiming three golds – but also how she got started in the sport she now thoroughly dominates. 

After three consecutive Olympic Games, a total of eight gold medals, numerous records and the national honour of a Damehood for ‘Outstanding Services to Canoe Racing,’ it’s easy to imagine she was born with a paddle in her hand and had a kayak as a cot. 

This couldn’t be further from the truth.

“Kayaking was really just a supplement to surf lifesaving,” she admits with a grin. “But I was fairly good, so I kept at it.”

Lisa didn’t come to kayaking until her teenage years. It’s crazy to think that had the elite athlete, now 35, been fractionally better at her beloved sport of surf lifesaving, her life, Aotearoa’s sporting history and the Olympic record books would all look vastly different.

Maybe she would have smashed it in surf lifesaving the same way she dominates kayaking.

She laughs at the idea. “I wasn’t going to make it to the national teams or anything like that,” she says.

Aside from the bleary-eyed die-hards, Aotearoa awoke on August 11th to the huge news from Paris that Lisa had achieved the impossible; a second successive hat trick of Olympic gold medals following a masterclass performance in the final of the K1 500m.

As the defending champion, she went into the race the favourite, but gold was not a sure thing. Her great rival, fellow Kiwi Aimee Fisher, was marked as a potential upsetter. 

So it made for alarming viewing for Kiwis who’d stayed up late to cheer New Zealand on when Hungary’s Tamara Csipes shot off like a rocket at the starting gun. At the halfway mark Lisa was trailing by half-a-boat length, which is massive, and Fisher was stuck fighting for position in the middle of the pack.

If Lisa was as worried as the Kiwi supporters watching on, it didn’t show. The camera frequently zoomed in on Lisa and she looked cool, calm and collected. It did not look at all like she was straining to kickstart any dormant energy reserves. Nor did she look rushed. It didn’t even look like she’d cracked a sweat. 

Instead, her movements were fluid and hypnotic, as she smoothly glided up to catch Csipes, pass Csipes and then leave Csipes in her dust. Lisa crossed the finish line with no one else in sight and her famous beaming smile radiating pure joy. “Carrington, simply unbeatable!” raved the television commentator. “The GOAT [Greatest Of All Time] just keeps getting greater,” Radio New Zealand gushed. “A sporting immortal,” enthused the New Zealand Herald. “Yessss!” cheered Poppy, my nine-year-old daughter, when we watched the early-morning highlights.

It was Lisa’s final event of the Paris Olympics. She’d already led the K2 and K4 teams to gold but hadn’t been able to join in the post-race celebrations because her focus needed to remain on her upcoming solo K1 race. 

“I could finally take it in, be proud and not be preparing for the next thing because there was no more to prepare for,” she says of the moment she crossed the finish line. “It was cool to be able to embrace my teammates and my coach and my family and let it all sink in. I felt amazement and pride that we as a team had won all three events that we’d challenged ourselves to achieve.”

That was the glorious end. But how did she feel, on the water, at the starting line?

“Part of competing at the Olympics is managing pressure and expectation,” she says.

The way she does this is to question herself. As she explains, gold medals and glory are not what’s powering her outstanding career.

“It’s really understanding the balance of what I’m doing it for. Is it just to win? Just to cross the line first?” she says in a way that makes clear the answer to those two questions is a simple ‘no’. 

“Or is it because of all these other things that are important to me? I want to be able to cross the line and whether I’m first or last, be really proud of the performance.”

It turns out that the stress of defending your title against the world’s best, at the world’s premium competition, with the whole world watching, is only half of it.

“Pressure also comes from the expectation of thinking you need to win. Thinking that if you don’t win, you’re nothing. What will people think if you don’t perform? I can’t attach my identity to thinking that I’m a winner and if I don’t win then I’m not myself anymore.”

“There’s a lot of awareness and self-awareness around what those medals mean,” she says quietly, before adding. “It’s also about keeping your ego in check.” 

Which is another surprising admission. Chatting with Lisa is like talking to an old mate. She’s incredibly friendly, quick to smile and down to earth. And when it comes to discussing her astounding accomplishments she’s almost ego-less, talking of them in a matter-of-fact fashion rather than the awesome achievements they are.

Still, it must be hard to not believe the hype, especially when you’re routinely called the ‘Queen of Kayak’ and have people falling over themselves to congratulate you − this writer no exception having greeted her with a proudly patriotic congratulation.

“It definitely is,” Lisa admits. “It’s about humility. Just because I’ve achieved something doesn’t mean I’m better than anyone else.”

Then, an example springs to mind.

“If I’m lining up in a queue, and I’m hundredth in line, just because I have medals doesn’t mean I get to jump the queue,” she laughs. “Your medal doesn’t define you. It doesn’t make you a better person than anyone else. You don’t have to be a great person to win an Olympic gold medal. You could be a terrible person and win a medal.”

Lisa’s house may now be north of the Bombay Hills, having relocated to Auckland years ago for training, but her home remains in Ōhope, the picturesque beach town that’s just a smidge east of Whakatāne. She, her husband Michael ‘Bucky’ Buck and Colin, their pet cavoodle, regularly pop down to see family and friends. They headed there after her triumphant return from Paris.

“It’s a beautiful place to be,” she smiles. “I reckon this summer I’ll be able to spend a bit more time there.”

It was Ōhope’s endless beach that Lisa credits for birthing her love of the ocean, as she recalls a childhood full of adventure playing with friends on the golden sands and playing in its rolling waves.

“We lived right on the water, right on the beach there. That’s where my affinity for the water came from,” she says. “We would spend quite a bit of time in the water, especially when it was stormy and rainy. We’d go out and have a heap of fun surfing on boogie boards or kayaks.”

Wanting her and her elder brothers, Shaun and Brett, to respect the ocean, her parents enrolled them into the Whakatāne Surf Club’s Nippers programme, where Lisa quickly became enamoured with the sport
of surf lifesaving.

Even at a young age, her focus and determination manifested, and she threw herself into her training, even switching to the Mount Maunganui Surf Club when she was 16 for advanced coaching. Surf lifesaving was everything and she started competing. She was walking the path but it was proving a bumpy road. Then fate intervened.

“My dad heard about a camp that was being held for kayaking. He took me along, just as a supplement to surf lifesaving,” she says of her less than auspicious introduction to the sport. 

“From there I raced at a few national champs…” she suddenly cuts herself short. Perhaps worried it sounds like she’s bragging, she almost apologetically says, “There wasn’t too many of us that competed. You
could make a New Zealand team pretty − I mean, you had to be a certain level but there really weren’t many of us competing.” 

Satisfied she’s played it down enough, she continues. “And then kayaking just became something I did.”

Another thing she recently did is release her first book. Lisa Carrington Chases a Champion is a beautifully illustrated children’s picture book for kids aged four to nine. The book is fictional but based on her lived experience, and follows eight-year-old Lisa conquering her fears and anxieties around her first big kayak race. Lisa hopes it becomes a book series. She started it three years ago, after being approached by independent publishers Huia. They asked if she’d like to write a book.

“I thought a children’s book would be cool,” she smiles. “I wanted to share the lessons that I’d learned and the lessons I’m still learning. You can be influenced in such great ways at a young age, so having lessons that I’ve learned be woven into what kids are reading at night, or what their parents, grandparents or aunties and uncles are reading them is so cool,” she enthuses. “I’m so proud of the story.”

She’s also proud that Huia are publishing the book in both English and Te Reo, saying “I’m so grateful that we were able to translate it into Māori, it’s really important.”.

She walks with her Māori heritage, especially when overseas competing in high-pressure events like the Olympics.

“It’s something that I draw strength from, particularly when I’m away. Those are the moments I’m leaning on my heritage and whakapapa to give me strength,” she says. “It’s part of me. But I also use it in a way to keep me humble. To remind myself of who was before me.”

As for what the future holds, Lisa’s in no particular rush to find out. Media have been pushing to discover whether the Queen of Kayaks, the GOAT, will paddle out to defend her titles at the 2028 Olympics in
Los Angeles. It’s a tantalising thought; having accomplished the impossible of two gold-medal hat tricks, could she go on to achieve the downright unthinkable and win a hat trick of gold-medal hat tricks? The extreme challenge and monumental difficulty of such a feat is inconceivable. Outrageous. Preposterous. But, then again…

For now, however, Lisa’s “taking a breath”.

“I’m still not 100 percent certain on what I’ll do with sport,” she admits after the year she describes as “massive”. 

“People tell me I need to go on holiday,” she laughs. 

That, however, would be doing something. Instead, she’s enjoying the possibilities offered by all the hours in an open day free of alarm clocks, training and schedules.

“In sport, there’s always a sense that time’s running out because you’ve got to make the most of every moment,” she explains. “Right now, I’m spending all my time being relaxed and saying ‘Yes’ to things that I normally wouldn’t.”

“You know, staying out late and pushing the boat out…” she grins.

After her unprecedented history-making performance in Paris, no one can begrudge Dame Lisa Carrington a few celebratory late-night drinks followed by some late-morning sleep-ins. Los Angeles 2028 can wait. 

Before leaving her to some well-deserved relaxation, I sneak in one final question that may provide a hint about her future plans; Has she been out on the water since she’s been back?

“I’ve been out for a few swims,” she beams, gliding past my trap question with all the effortless grace she displayed in the water at Paris. 

“But no paddling.” 

Lisa Carrington Chases a Champion is in all good bookstores now.

Meaning & the madness

He’s exposed hypocrites, taken on bullies, released a Netflix series and topped the box office with his two feature-length documentaries. Tauranga’s David Farrier reveals to Karl Puschmann the secret
to his success, his one regret, his philosophy on life and how
breaking his brain was the best thing he ever did.

Words Karl Puschmann | Photos Shayan Asgharnia + supplied

“All the best things that have happened to me – I’ve never planned them,” says David Farrier, his face scrunching into a look of quizzical bemusement. “If ever I do plan something, it usually goes disastrously wrong.”

It’s funny to hear him talk like this. From the outside, his life has seemed a steady, determined rise to the top. His media career began in the early 2000s, when as a fresh-faced journalism graduate, he took a job behind the scenes at 3 News. Passionate about pop culture, he began volunteering for entertainment-based assignments, eventually moving in front of the camera full-time as TV3’s entertainment journalist in 2006. 

Even that wasn’t enough to occupy him, though, so he began a variety of side hustles, including acting, radio, writing for magazines and generally reporting on anything that tickled his fancy. The stranger, the better.

Deeply engaged with internet culture, David’s trajectory changed when he discovered the world of competitive endurance tickling. Originally, he thought he’d found a typically quirky story for the nightly news; however, the tale took a dark turn when his jovial request for an interview with the US producers resulted in a shockingly hostile email response. 

Correctly inferring they had something to hide, David began seriously digging into the subject, leaving his role at TV3 to pursue it. He chronicled the twists and turns of his investigation in Tickled, his first full-length documentary feature. 

With its unusual and taboo subject matter, its crooked antagonist and David’s underdog fight to get to the truth behind the fetishistic videos while facing a barrage of life-destroying legal and implied physical threats, Tickled got the world talking. It premiered at the esteemed Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim, topped the New Zealand box office and announced the arrival of a new force in the documentary arena.

Since Tickled, David has produced and starred in the 2018 Netflix docuseries Dark Tourist, which saw him visiting places around the world
that you really wouldn’t want to; released his second feature documentary, 2022’s brilliant and bizarre Mister Organ; and created the ongoing podcast Flightless Bird with David Farrier for Hollywood actor Dax Shepard’s popular Armchair Expert network.

But the project he’s most passionate about, and the one that connects him directly to his audience, is Webworm. This is his online newsletter that lands directly in your inbox and sees him flexing his considerable journalistic muscles in tackling the delightfully strange and quirky as well as the heavy and newsworthy. He has a particular and devastating focus on bullies, conmen, hypocrites and false prophets.

David says this astounding career arc was all completely unplanned. In fact, growing up in Tauranga’s leafy Bethlehem, he didn’t even want to be a journalist. Instead, he’d meticulously plotted out his life in an entirely different field.

“I went to Auckland University to get into medical school,” he says. “To get into med school, you’re competing with all the smartest people. I felt so dumb because I was dumb in comparison. It was a stressful time.”

Even though it had been his dream, he quickly realised he wasn’t built for medicine when he had to dissect a rat and experienced a visceral reaction. “I wanted to vomit,” he admits with a grin. “I didn't have the brains or the stomach for medicine. I would have been terrible. I care about people, but not in that capacity.”

Then, more seriously, he says, “That year completely broke my brain. It made me reset. I stopped caring about having to reach a goal or do a thing.”

Faced with this harsh awakening, he dropped out of university, tore up the blueprint he’d mapped out for his life, threw caution to the wind and enrolled into AUT’s journalism course. “It was one of the best decisions I ever made because, from that point on, I tried to walk through doors that opened with the idea of seeing what happened and not being afraid to make mistakes,” he says, then smiles and adds, “So far that’s worked okay.”

David’s now a world-renowned documentarian living comfortably in Los Angeles, so the evidence agrees with him. Yet it’s hard to miss the irony in his origin story: in wanting a career in which he could fix people, he ended up breaking himself.

“Absolutely, it really did,” he says. “I used to be really stressed out, and over-plan everything. I’m still an anxious, uptight person, to a degree, but not to the level that I was. I’m a lot better at chilling than I used to be.”

“That year completely broke my brain. It made me reset. I stopped caring about having to reach a goal or do a thing.”

In his two documentaries, David’s stress manifests in real time – unsurprisingly, considering the intense and unsavory characters he’s documenting, especially Mister Organ’s psychologically manipulative antagonist Michael Organ, a man with an unnatural talent for picking his way unwanted into people’s minds. Off-screen, however, for the 15 or so years I’ve known him, David has only ever been a chilled-out customer. Cool as any number of cucumbers. Someone seemingly unphased by life’s general hang-ups and cruising through the world with a welcoming aura, an infectious smile and a genuine enthusiasm for whatever’s happening around him. 

It’s an outlook all shaped by that devastating year, and the mental reckoning that followed. Indeed, the secret of his success, he reckons, is simply going with the flow.

“All the best things have come from completely random events, like Dax Shepard reading something I wrote for The Spinoff that now means I have a job and a life here. You’ve just got to be ready to respond to things that open themselves up in front of you, which sounds a bit airy-fairy, I know, but I’ve always tried to be open to random opportunities that came up.”

Even half a world away, David is still very much on top of the goings-on in Aotearoa. Through his Webworm investigations, he’s regularly ruffling the feathers of the unruly and setting the mainstream news agenda.

Webworm made headlines with David’s scrutinisation of the Arise megachurch, which uncovered the emotional and physical abuse carried out by its leaders; with his deep dive into Destiny’s Church, which saw them labelled a cult; and when he found himself in a legal tussle with extremist broadcaster Sean Plunket. This resulted in Plunket being forced out of his job at Mediaworks and facing two police charges, although they were later withdrawn.

Ask David why he’s still so interested in what’s happening here and he has a simple answer. “I care about New Zealand a lot,” he says. “It’s like this little petri dish of five million people trying to figure things out – like we all are. There are amazing stories there – good and bad.”

Although people generally associate him with the weird and quirky, his work on Tickled, Mister Organ and especially Webworm has seen him diving deep into heavy topics with people who experienced awful things and are deeply traumatised as a result. His exposé of Arise Church alone saw him contacted by hundreds of people detailing the evil they were subjected to. 

Their stories can be harrowing, but ever since his brain reset, David says he’s been a fairly upbeat person. “I haven’t had any major mental health
swings. The megachurch stuff became overwhelming because it was a lot of people and it was about something really sensitive. There’s a pressure to give people what they need and support them as they’re telling the story, and that does add up. But I’m lucky that I’ve got a good group of friends around me. I never feel like I’m on my own in it.”

He also looks after himself by turning off the computer and “getting the f**k outside”. He enjoys walking around his neighbourhood and spending time in a nearby park, where he delights in seeing baby skunks and deer. He can spend hours there – although he has to remember to be back indoors by 11pm, because that’s when the coyotes stir.

“Getting outside in nature is the ultimate reset,” he smiles. “As long as I do that, I’m fine.”

His go-with-the-flow philosophy has led him to the darkest and most dangerous places on earth and to interact with the most loathsome and evil people. Reflecting on his wild journey is almost as surreal for him as it is for those who have vicariously tagged along.

“Each project feels like a different life or a different person,” he says with detached bemusement. “It’s partly the way my brain is wired. I’ve got a bit of a spicy brain.”

That said, there’s one moment he can never forget, and can only look back on with deep regret. “Swimming in a radioactive lake in Dark Tourist,” he says, referencing one of the most jaw-dropping scenes in a show chock-a-block with them. 

This happened while he was travelling through Kazakhstan. His guides took him to the Atomic Lake and convinced him to join them for a refreshing dip in its nuclear waters.

“That was dumb,” he says, failing to hide how exasperated he feels with himself. “It was f*****g stupid to swim in that lake. If I could have my time again… It wasn’t worth it. But you know, we were a bit drunk at the time and there were some fun Russians who encouraged us. Objectively, it was really good TV and it felt exciting, but I look back on it and think
I should have skipped that one.”

Regrets, we all have a few. But David has come a long way from the self-described “uptight teen” he was growing up in Tauranga. He was born in Bethlehem on Christmas Day, which perhaps explains the holy fervour with which he pursues his subjects, and his devotion to battling bullies and sticking up for those in unfortunate circumstances. His Baptist parents homeschooled him until sending him to Bethlehem College when he hit his teens. With his med school plan firmly in mind, he studied hard, becoming head boy in his final year.

“I love the Bay,” he smiles, thinking back to his youth. “I’d regularly run up Mount Maunganui to try to get fit with my dad. I loved the beach. I wish I was a surfer – I’d just roll around in the waves.”

His beachy upbringing still manifests to this day. Rather than shorts, he favours wearing togs, bought in bulk during the winter sales at surf shops.

“I wear togs a lot of the time because I always think you should be prepared to jump in an ocean or any good body of water,” he once told me when I interviewed him a couple of years ago.

He says he’s due a home visit. He likes going to the hot pools, spending time on the walking tracks and tumbling around in the frothing surf. The last time he was here, he got a wave of nostalgia and went to the house where he grew up and knocked on the door.

“I thought they might be a bit like, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’” he laughs. “But they were so nice and took me inside.”

This would be a warm, fuzzy way to end our interview, with David warmly reminiscing about his childhood budgie and Chandler Bing, his favourite cat, but there’s still one last question to ask. 

Few people have thoroughly engaged with both the best and worst of humanity in the same way David has. If anyone has a hot take on humanity as a whole, it has to be him.

“I meet so many people doing so many good things, wanting good out of life and being so genuine and kind and thinking about others, but there’s also a lot of horrific, terrible stuff going on out there,” he says. “Both things are true at the same time, right? It’s the joy of humans. But essentially, we’re all the same. We’re all just trying to understand this weird rock we’ve woken up on, with no idea of why we’re here.”

Sensing bigger topics of life, philosophy and enlightenment, I ask if he’s found any deeper meaning to life’s existential and eternal mystery throughout his explorations into good and bad, right and wrong, justice and evil.

“No,” he answers flatly. “I wish I had. I think my life is ultimately meaningless. It is all ultimately meaningless.”

Grinning he adds, “I know that’s not a very positive quote for you,” before flashing a reassuring smile. 

“But this doesn’t mean life is hopeless in any way,” he continues. “It just means we’ve got to be really careful about how we use that time. We don’t have long here. It’s a matter of making the most of it.”

Then, with the accumulated wisdom of a man who has trawled the depths of humanity and survived, he says, “Ultimately, that’s the joy of it all.” 

To sign up for David’s online newsletter, visit WEBWORM.CO

The comeback kid

Two years ago kayaker Luuka Jones could barely walk down the street without wheezing. In July she’ll represent New Zealand in K1 and the extreme new Kayak Cross at the Olympic Games and hope to fulfil a long-held dream.

Words Karl Puschmann | Photos Graeme Murray + SUPPLIED
Styling Nicky Adams | Hair & Makeup Desiree Osterman

When Luuka Jones was 11 years old, she set a goal that one day she would win an Olympic gold medal. In July, the 35-year-old kayaker will
look to fulfil that long-held ambition when she travels to Paris to represent New Zealand in her fifth – yes, fifth – Olympic games.

What makes her young promise so audacious is that back then, she was not a young kayaking prodigy nor was she showing promise of becoming the history-making athlete that she is now. Heck, she wasn’t even kayaking competitively. She’d barely gotten her feet wet, having only learned how to paddle a year earlier.

“I don't know where that goal came from,” she laughs, thinking back to her humble beginnings on the water. “But I do have a strong memory of setting it. I was babysitting for my neighbours. They had Sky TV so I was able to watch Sarah Ulmer win her gold medal at the Olympics. It must have inspired me.” Watching Sarah Ulmer whiz over the line at the 2004 games in Athens sparked something in Luuka. Sarah had just given New Zealand its first-ever gold medal in cycling and set a new world record in the process. Witnessing history being made was life-changing for the young Tauranga local watching along on the TV.

Shortly after she remembers entering the Waimarino Intermediate School kayak challenge on the Wairoa River. The event was a multi-stage race that strung various kayaking disciplines together and challenged participants across a wide range of skills.

She says she felt focussed and completely determined.

“I remember the nerves. The other girls were all really good but I was so motivated to try and win that competition. I remember how good it felt when I did,” she smiles, still looking chuffed at the result. “That feeling of winning never gets old. It's a deep satisfaction that you achieved something.”

It will not surprise you at all to learn that Luuka has a fierce competitive streak. It’s something you need to become a world-class athlete competing in two events at the Olympics – K1 slalom racing and the new Kayak Cross event – with all the discipline and training that is required. She guesses it was inherited. Her nana was a competitive tennis player and basketballer and her mum also plays tennis. Her sisters haven't been involved in high-level sport but their blood still pumps with that same fire.

“We played a lot of competitive board games,” she laughs. “We’d play The Game of Life and all be doing whatever it took to win. I've just always had a competitive streak. I guess what’s driven me is that I found a sport that I absolutely loved. I was going to do anything to try and get better at it.” Then she pauses and says, “It’s just been quite a long road.”

That road started on a farm. Before Luuka hit her teens, her grandparents bought some farmland next to the Wairoa River and then, shortly later, her parents moved the family next door. She started swimming lessons at the nearby Waimarino Water and Adventure Park, which is still running today, and then took up kayaking lessons, working at the park in exchange for the lessons.

“Barbara and Barry, who owned the park, were incredible and really supportive of me,” she says.

She quickly grew to love recreational kayaking. She would go away on kayak camping trips and learned how to paddle the river’s gnarly whitewater. Her skills quickly improved and before too long she was navigating the entire whitewater section right down to below McLaren Falls.

“It was such a buzz,” she enthuses. “You learn skills that you don’t know you’re learning and get that whitewater confidence. But it’s also the joy of being out on the river with everyone. That camaraderie and friendship. Some of the people I met early on in my recreation career are still my friends today.”

In a few short months, the sport of Kayak Cross will make its Olympic debut. After taking first place at last October’s World Cup in France, Luuka is considered a favourite for the event.

This kayak offshoot is best described as a mix of raw physical strength and chess-like tactics that plays out in real-time among swirling rapids.
It is thrilling to watch.

At the start of the race, the kayakers plunge down a steep ramp straight into the frothing waters below. They are frighteningly close to each other and then, suddenly, they’re not as they disappear into a flurry of paddles and shoot along their chosen lines through the whitewater and around the gates that make up the course. From their vantage point at the top of the ramp, the athletes have a split second to see a line that accounts for speed, the churning waters, and take a guess at what their competitors are thinking. Plans can rapidly go out the window. Ramp position, the way the kayak hits the water at the bottom of the ramp, and even a little bit of competitive argy-bargy on the water can sink any Olympic dreams. Kayak Cross is both physically and mentally demanding. And not without its dangers.

“It’s very tactical. Some lines are shorter or faster but people are chasing you or you’re chasing someone and you're having to read the whitewater, navigate the gates, and interpret what other people are doing. You’re under pressure because someone’s going to try and take you out or smash into you. You really need to be aggressive. There’s so much going on. That’s what I love about the event.”

As Luuka explains the physical, aggressive, aspect of Kayak Cross, I can’t help but notice a little glint in her eye. I point this out and she laughs and exclaims, “It’s true!” before elaborating.

“If you’re behind someone, you really do need to come down and smash them out of position.”

We both laugh and then she says, “But it is quite nerve-wracking, sitting up on that ramp,” before explaining what it’s like. 

Luuka competing at the Kayak Cross Nationals in Auckland

(photo Rod Hill). 

“You have your plan, but when you launch in you have no idea what’s going to unfold. You all launch at the same time and you want to be fast down the ramp and people are paddling and there’s so much going on that you have to be quite calm and composed in what is an incredibly chaotic situation. You hope that when you land, you’re going to be out in front, but that doesn’t always happen. You could get a paddle to the face.”

The most extraordinary part of Luuka’s journey to the 2024 Olympic Games, and what will make it ripe for a movie adaptation if she does indeed win the gold medal, is that less than two years ago she was diagnosed with Long Covid. It well and truly knocked her out. Forget about gold medals, she could barely make it to the letterbox without becoming puffed out of breath and needing to rest.

Her illness forced her to completely drop out of the 2022 season, losing the whole year as she rested and recuperated. For the competitive, world-class athlete, it was devastating and led to many dark days and sleepless soul-searching. During that long, hard year Luuka admits that she often thought about quitting and regularly questioned not just her commitment to kayaking but also her love for it.

“It was a hugely challenging experience,” she sighs. “I realised a lot of my happiness was wrapped up in physical activity. It wasn’t that I just couldn’t compete for a year, it was that I couldn’t do anything physical. Going for a walk was a big deal. I couldn’t feel competitive so I wasn’t excited about coming back to race. I was starting to question,

‘Should I even be doing this?’ or ‘Am I ever going to come back after a year out?’ All these thoughts cross your mind.”

It sounds like there may have been some depression seeping in, understandable given the circumstances, and she nods and heavily says, “Yeah, probably a little bit.”

Luuka talks about installing a hyperbaric chamber in her garage and laying in it for a couple of hours each day to get more oxygen to her lungs and help her body fight the infection.

Her recovery routine started out with three training sessions per week. If she had a recovery week, she never really enjoyed it, as she never felt like she'd earned it.

Eventually, after an incredibly difficult year, the fog lifted and Luuka felt able to race. She entered the Nationals, an action she describes as “a big deal” after her year off. She paddled well but disaster struck when she injured her neck. The injury took her out of contention for another couple of weeks. This set a pattern where she’d return only to hurt her knee or stuff up her arm. It seemed like every time she hit the water, she’d land another injury and be confined back to land.

“It wasn’t all just Covid, it was all these little obstacles along the way to getting back into full-time training,” she explains. “But my philosophy is that there’s an opportunity in everything. So I tried to look for the opportunities.”

One was being able to spend the year in New Zealand with her fiancé and her family instead of being off competing in Europe as she usually would be. But the biggest thing, she says, was that the enforced time off ultimately led to rediscovering her love for the sport.

“Before Covid I’d get so caught up in my mistakes. If I had a bad session, I’d take it home with me and be really pissed off for a long time. Now I’m just grateful for being out on the water, feeling those sensations and being able to paddle again. I’m glad I wrote down in my journal what was going on because I can look back and be like, ‘Oh, yeah, that was tough.’

“But I’m the sort of person who just charges forward and doesn’t really hold on to those things too much,” she continues. “They make you more resilient, or they teach you something at the time, and then you just have to crack on.”

For someone about to compete in two events against the best athletes in the world at the most prestigious and globally historic sporting competition, Luuka is extremely relaxed. She’s in good spirits and feeling confident.

“I think it’s easy to be relaxed when you’re a few months out from the Games,” she jokes. “But it’s a high-pressure event, for everyone, and we’re all in the same boat, excuse the pun. But I try and put a lot of effort into preparing mentally as well as physically. It’s a big occasion with a lot of pressure and a lot of distractions. When I visualise the Olympics I feel a bit nervous. But I enjoy this time of year because it’s been a three-year build, and it all starts coming to fruition.”

Luuka’s comeback is nearly complete. She’s mentally and physically prepared. She’s going in as a favourite. And, perhaps most of all, she’s excited.

In her astonishing career, she’s set so many kayak slalom records in New Zealand, brought home so many medals, and competed in those four previous Olympic Games that she’s now the athlete that young babysitters around Aotearoa are watching compete on TV.

“I sometimes forget that maybe I am a role model because I still haven’t achieved what I want to achieve, or I’m not at that level yet,” she says, referencing her decades-old goal.

“But when I reflect on my journey I have a lot of things to share, and it’s nice to maybe inspire someone to pick up a paddle or pursue something that they’re passionate about. That would make me really happy to know that I've helped someone to chase their dream.”

Which circles us back to the start. Luuka got Silver at Rio. Will she get Gold in Paris fulfilling the goal she set for herself all those years ago?

“Hopefully, yeah! I mean, that’s the goal,” she laughs. “My fiancé, my family and my friends will all be there watching. It’s a really special occasion to share with them and then to go out there and see what I can do. And it’s so exciting to represent the Bay.”

Then she smiles warmly and says, “Really, I’m just a small-town girl from Tauranga.” 

Love conquers all

He’s one of Aotearoa’s biggest music stars and she’s working hard to make a difference in our community. Together Rachel Axis Taane Tinorau and Tiki Taane are one of the Bay’s most recognisable couples. Here they talk about their unusual love story, overcoming addiction and ghosts.

Words Karl Puschmann | Photos Graeme Murray + Supplied
Styling Nicky Adams | Hair Sam Henry | Make up Desiree Osterman

Moving up to the Bay from Christchurch had been a dream come true for Rachel. But the dream turned into a living nightmare when a ghost showed up. “I had a rough time when I first moved here. There was a weird energy and a spirit,” she tells UNO over a piping hot cup of cinnamon tea. “We nicknamed him Spirit Fingers.”

We’re sitting in the comfy lounge of the Pāpāmoa Beach home she shares with her husband, musician Tiki Taane. It may be a gloriously sunny afternoon but her haunting story and the spirit’s creepy nickname cause a shudder. 

It’s fair to say that Spirit Fingers put something of a spooky damper on the excitement the couple had been feeling. They’d spent two years making their long-distance relationship work. Rachel’s move up in 2015 marked the beginning of not just their life together but, as they each had a child, also the beginning of their life as a blended family. The couple couldn’t have been happier. 

Until…“I’d wake up with someone standing next to the bed or at the bedroom door,” Rachel continues. “When Tiki was away, walking down the hallway would freak me out. It was creepy. I could feel there was always someone there. It was full-on.”

Tiki, who has planted himself in a huge, comfy beanbag, nods and says, “Where we are there’s a lot of spiritual energy. And a lot of spiritual history as well.”

He explains that the area was used as battlegrounds and that there are urupā (burial sites) underneath the nearby boardwalks that stretch along the beachfront. “That’s why it’s up high,” Tiki explains. “There’s a lot of bones in that area.”

There was something strange in their neighbourhood, but both being spiritual people, they weren’t about to call Ghostbusters. Instead, they wanted to show respect and understanding. They had a karakia (a traditional Māori prayer to invoke spiritual goodwill) written, which they then recited in their home. “It was basically to say to them, ‘You're welcome to be here’,” Rachel says. She laughs, then adds, “But just please don’t interfere with my sleep.”

Looking back now, she thinks it was curiosity, rather than a terrifying Hollywood-style haunting, that was the spirit’s motive.

“Tiki’s been settled here for a while so they were probably like, ‘Who’s this bitch?’” she grins. “They were just sussing me out. Since the karakia, it’s been sweet. There’s definitely still an energy, but not a bad one.”

“This whole area of Pāpāmoa has an energy that I really enjoy,” Tiki says. “I love it here.”

His connection to the area runs deep. He moved here back in 2010 but first visited in 1996, when his former band, the award-winning group Salmonella Dub, played in the Mount. 

“The first time I came it blew me away. Then I just loved coming back here,” he says. “It’s always been good vibes.”

When Tiki first laid eyes on Rachel, she wasn’t even there. He was in Auckland getting a tattoo when he saw a photo of his tattooist and her friend. “I was like, ‘Who’s that hottie?’ and she was like, “Oh, my God! I’ll hook you up!’” he laughs. 

Rachel of course knew of Tiki, but even with their mutual friend putting in the good word, she wasn’t prepared to rush a meeting with a stranger.

“Rachel was like, ‘This is a red flag’,” Tiki laughs. “She didn't give me her number. She gave me her email. So I started emailing. Then emails led to texting and texting led to phone calls. We'd call each other every night.”

In that regard, it was quite an old-fashioned courtship, with Tiki really trying to impress her. “Yeah. Hard,” he grins.

When Tiki appeared somewhat out of the blue, Rachel was concentrating on being a solo mum to her toddler and not at all about relationships. “I hadn't had very good experiences with men, so I had my boundaries up,” Rachel says. “I was quite weary. But Tiki was really respectful. He wasn't creepy. So when I had trust through the emails, I was like, ‘Okay, here's my number’.”

While the pair hadn’t committed to each other, they were becoming bigger parts of each other’s lives. But they hadn’t yet met and were still, in the words of Rachel, “doing our own thing.”

About six months on from their virtual meeting Rachel entered a radio competition to win a trip to Rarotonga. It was a typical shock-jock style of radio competition, which saw five married men going to the island with five single women and their friends.

“It’s so wrong and looking back now I’d be so anti it,” Rachel admits. “But I entered as one of the single chicks and won. I told Tiki and it turned out the dates I was there he was actually going to be there as well.”

In what can only be described as serendipity – a word Tiki would also use when he wrote a love song to Rachel before proposing on camera during the making of its music video – he was going to be there with the drum ’n’ bass group Shapeshifter.

The pair arranged to meet the night she arrived and he zipped over to her hotel on a scooter. After their six-month courtship, the couple finally met, and embraced, for the first time.

“Then she got on the back of my scooter and that was it,” Tiki beams.

“I pretty much spent the whole time with Tiki,” Rachel smiles. “It was a great first date.”

After the fairytale romance in Rarotonga, the real world hit hard when they returned home. Rachel’s friends were worried she’d get too attached and her mum was concerned her old habits might return.

“My mum was absolutely horrified. I'd been through such an intense time with addiction that she was really scared about the rock-and-roll, party lifestyle. Tiki was not like that at all. But there was an assumption, a stereotype, that the music industry
is all about getting slaughtered and taking drugs all the time. It may be in some groups, but not ours.”

Having finally met Rachel, Tiki wasn’t about to let her go. He already knew she was the one. He emailed her tickets to fly to Auckland that weekend so they could go to a dance party. 

“You told me that you loved me and I was like, ‘Ooof. This is a red flag’, because it had only been a week of physically knowing each other. But you asked me that weekend to be your partner. I was like, ‘Yeah!’ and here we are!”

“We both had the same mindset and just really connected, big time,” Tiki says. “We were talking for months and months and months before we actually met in person. So we built our connection that way.”

“Yeah, we had the same values and passions, like advocacy. We both had a kid, they’re only two years apart,” Rachel adds, referring to her daughter Karcia (12) and Tiki’s son Charlie (14). “And a similar life story in a way. Both of us have been through addiction and both came out the other side of that. We're both of a similar vibe.”

Because Rachel’s mentioned it a couple of times, I ask about her addiction. 

“I was a meth addict for four or five years, from age 14 to 19,” she replies. “I'd done my work well prior to Tiki coming along. I went to rehab when I was 19.”

Rachel escaped into addiction due to trauma. Her parents separated when she was two years old and Rachel's relationship with her father has had its challenges ever since. She moved schools a lot due to bullying and at just 14 years old she was sexually assaulted in a park after a party. The culmination of all this trauma at such a young age led her to meth. 

“I still struggle with PTSD,” she says. “I hate the word addiction. I look at it more as escapism. When people use a lot that's usually because they're trying to numb or hide from something that's either happened or that's going on. But me and Tiki have a really good relationship where if there’s something going on, we both talk about it. We don't need to get wasted to numb anything.”

Those dark days are well and truly behind her. Having turned her own life around, she’s now determined to help others do the same. She does public speaking at events where she shares her journey through trauma, addiction and recovery and is also a qualified social worker who previously worked at Women’s Refuge and now goes into the Bay’s secondary schools to deliver consent education and healthy relationship education.

“As someone who has had sexual trauma, I wish that I’d had this education when I was younger,” she says.

Depending on the situations she encounters and the people she helps, it can sometimes be hard for her to switch off at the end of the day. But she knows Tiki is always ready to support her.

“I listen and I wait till she’s got it all off her mind,” he says. “It’s been a huge education for me as well and made me really become more talkative about sexual harm in the music industry. When you start delving into the subject, this kaupapa, you've got to look at yourself, what you've done and start questioning the behaviours that you've done in the past. Some of it might not be nice. I can't sit here and go ‘this, this, this and this’, I have to look at what I've done and think about that and go, ‘How come that happened?’ or ‘Why does this happen?’. It's a really vulnerable opening you've got to do, and I think a lot of people are scared to do that. For me, I've learned loads from Rachel. Untold amounts of stuff.”

Tiki, in turn, has also been sharing his knowledge with Rachel. Over lockdown, he taught her how to DJ and now she often plays support slots for him at his shows. Because he’s away playing his own shows so much he doesn’t often get to interact with the local music scene here that much. 

“This is my home. This is where I live. When I think of doing gigs and stuff, I think outwards. I don't think about playing locally. It’s quite interesting. I don't know why that is.”

As well as touring, Tiki produces artists and bands in his purpose-built home studio and recently released his first feature film, the award-winning concert-documentary Tiki Taane in Session with CSO, which he produced, directed and performed himself. Following rave reviews at the New Zealand International Film Festival, it has since been accepted into numerous festivals around the world and continues to clock up awards.

“It's doing really awesome. It's been a wicked buzz,” Tiki says of the project which took him three years to complete. “I'm so stoked that I rolled the dice on it.”

Spend some time with Rachel and Tiki and it’s easy to see why they work so well together. They’ve both overcome demons and found each other, and then overcame their initial physical distance to connect in a deeper, spiritual way. Their personalities complement each other with Rachel outgoing and Tiki more laid back. And with Spirit Fingers no longer haunting the hallways, their home has a chill vibe and a welcoming atmosphere. 

“We definitely made the deal, the commitment,” Tiki says of their relationship. “I knew from the beginning that I’m in this for the long run.”

Then, smiling warmly, he says, “It's been incredible.” 

Tiki Taane in Session with CSO is available to rent
at Tiki’s website tikidub.com

Inside the mind of Richard O’Brien

Enter the surreal world of actor, writer and musician Richard O’Brien. Residing in Katikati, the Rocky Horror Picture Show creator takes us on a journey through the history of the world-shaking musical he wrote exactly 50 years ago.

Words Karl Puschmann
Photos Graeme Murray + supplied

I feel a slight shiver of anticipation as I approach the front porch of Richard O’Brien’s homestead, which sits between Tauranga and Katikati and overlooks the harbour. As a struggling theatre actor in the 1970s, Richard wrote a musical in order to create himself a job and have something to act in. That musical was an instant phenomenon and would go on to become the very definition of a cult classic, with the BBC hailing it as “the one cult movie to rule them all”.

As a teenager, it blew my mind when I discovered it had been written by a New Zealander. This was something far more impressive to me than any number of Rugby World Cup wins or America’s Cup victories. Richard’s musical was called The Rocky Horror Picture Show. 

A sexy, madcap tribute to Richard’s beloved sci-fi and horror B-movies of the 1950s, Rocky Horror revolves around a wholesome, newly engaged couple who seek refuge from a violent storm in the castle of Dr Frank-N-Furter, a lascivious transvestite scientist who is conducting strange experiments in his laboratory. The story follows Frank-N-Furter’s efforts to – depending on your view – either sexually corrupt the couple or sexually liberate them. And then aliens get involved.

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat this is not. Rocky Horror is deeply weird, unashamedly sex-crazed and extremely funny. It features some absolutely banging tunes, the most famous of which is “Time Warp”, a spot-on rock n’ roll parody whose infectious lyrics instruct you how to dance to it (It’s just a step to the left / and then a jump to
the right). But songs like “Dammit Janet”, “Sweet Transvestite” and “Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch Me” are right up there with it in terms of memorability and sing-along catchiness.

On stage, the musical was an instant hit when it debuted in June 1973, in the small upstairs theatre of the Royal Court Theatre in London’s West End. The show became the hottest ticket in town and quickly outgrew the venue, moving to bigger and bigger theatres and collecting awards. Two years later in 1975, the film adaptation was released with most of the original cast reprising their stage roles, including Richard as the hunchbacked butler Riff Raff and Tim Curry in his star-making performance as the fishnet stocking-clad, nymphomaniac Frank-N-Furter. And that’s when things for Richard and Rocky Horror really launched into outer space. 

I knock on the door and the shutters, which I presume had been closed so UNO’s photographer could take these stunning portraits of Richard in his open-plan living area, are opened, allowing me and bright rays of light to enter. Having just finished the shoot, Richard, resplendent in black with a sparkling diamond necklace rubbing up against a sheer silky negligee that’s exposed under his open shirt, has taken a seat at the circular dining table. He’s now 81 but exudes an ageless androgynous glam rock cool.

To his left is a gleaming white baby grand piano that’s covered in stacks of books, and beside that is a flamboyantly dressed life-sized mannequin. Behind him is a wall covered from floor to ceiling in currency from around the globe, with the phrase “The root of all evil” painted in the middle. 

There’s so much to take in. Everywhere you look there are bright artworks, sculptures, instruments, books or pop culture collectibles. But don’t get the impression that it’s cluttered. Everything has been curated and displayed with an artist's eye.

I take a seat at the table as his wife Sabrina brings out a freshly brewed pot of strong coffee and a plate of chocolate bikkies before disappearing into the house, leaving Richard and I to talk.

Did she pull the curtains again on her way out? I’m not sure. But the day’s bright sun very quickly dissolves into a smeared golden haze, lending our chat an almost dreamlike quality as we veer away from Rocky Horror to discuss everything from the evolution of man, politics and religion, to what awaits us in the afterlife.

It was appropriately surreal. It’d be disappointing if an audience with the creator and star of Rocky Horror was not an intrinsically and pleasingly strange experience. There are also moments of breathtaking performance when he figures the best way to answer a question is to simply demonstrate rather than explain. 

A question about writing Rocky Horror’s world-famous songs sees him answer by picking up a guitar and brilliantly performing a tune from his upcoming musical The Kingdom of Bling before joking, “Three chords do go an awfully long way.”

And when I ask about his creativity, Richard says he’s striving to “create a gem of a phrase equal to Oscar Wilde,” before dramatically reciting an astonishing and wondrous poem titled The Fatous Fowl from a collection of children’s poetry he’s currently looking to have published, which consists entirely of sparkling gem-like phrases.

But before all that, we have to start with Rocky Horror which, unbelievably, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. 

“I really think it's wonderful,” Richard says when asked about the musical hitting this impressive milestone. “It's so nice to meet so many people that love it.”

Then, as a nod to his purpose for writing it in the first place, he adds, “And it's so nice that it has employed so many people over the years.

“Without it intending to be, it’s become a kind of haven for people who feel different sexually. We all know that nobody asks to be born straight or gay. We seem to be going backwards slightly, don't we, on this whole issue. I thought we'd have got over that. I thought we all understood now that people are born gay and people are born transgender. It's not a choice. I thought we'd all agreed on that. But lately, we're becoming confused by the whole subject once again. I prefer a more tolerant society. I'm not sure if I approve of being too tarty in public.”

Then he chuckles softly and says, “Although, I think you should push the boat out occasionally. We don't want to live in a stuffy, staid, deeply evangelical society. It’s unhealthy.”

It’d be easy to think Rocky Horror was Richard purposefully pushing the boat out, ruffling the feathers of stuffy old England while waving the flag for LGBTQIA+ ideology and inclusivity. But that would be wrong.

“Rocky was a piece of adolescent fun. A boys' bedroom musical,” he says. “It has nothing of great import to say. It's not a political piece. It’s just what it is; a piece of nonsense. It’s very entertaining and it’s not a bad yarn. As a piece of storytelling and entertainment, it’s perfectly good and enjoyable, and fun. But for it to have had this longevity… It doesn't make a great deal of sense.”

He sounds almost puzzled by its success. But then, he’s struck by a thought.

“Maybe,” he begins, “that’s all we want? Maybe it’s the fact that Rocky Horror guarantees an evening out. You’re going to enjoy yourself and have a good time. It really could be just as simple as that.”

Perhaps. Rocky Horror is a good time. A whole subculture has grown around the movie, with people dressing up as their favourite characters and singing along with the film, while the stage play is said to be performed somewhere around the world every single night. 

But it’s also credited as being a major influence on the counterculture and sexual liberation movements due to it being one of the first popular
and successful musicals to depict fluid sexuality and progressive values.

“It’s become connected by default to transgender issues and gay issues. I understand that and I'm glad that the world became more liberal,” he says. “As I get older, I’d like the world to be much, much more liberal and much more left-wing. I wasn't always that way. I was ‘conservative’ with a small ‘c’ when I was in my 20s.”

A surprising admission after he’d described himself as “a dope-smoking hippie” during the time he was writing Rocky Horror. 

“Well, I hated the politics of envy. If people have a nice car and enjoy it, I say f**k it, they’ve earned it. That’s their right. They’re only caretakers anyway. It’s only yours while you’re alive. I don't like resentment,” he explains. “But I really loved the fact that there's a welfare state. I say to look after those who are less well-off, disenfranchised, isolated, or marginalised. It means that we’re civilised. If we start putting some bucks into that, it means we're really civilised. The glorification of wealth by the right-wing is an empty path. It’s really a glorification of greed. And that's shameful.”

Politics is a subject that’s very much on his mind. He especially has a keen interest in the circus of American politics and holds sharp vitriol towards the likes of Donald Trump and those who hide unsavoury, rights-destroying political convictions behind the facade of religion.

“It's odd to me that people prefer fantasy to rationality,” he sighs. “I think as a human race, we've lost the plot. Religion has led us astray. It confused our thinking. It demands that you abandon rationality and believe in an invisible man in the sky.”

It’s ironic, I say, that religion’s promise is on what happens after you’re dead, rather than doing good while you’re alive. 

“Well, I do hope there’s something more because what I would like to do – what Sabrina and I want to do – is travel through time and space for eternity. To see how it all started and what went on. To see life on other planets and to look back on our own history. I can't wait to get back to the megalithic period. That’s my favourite. I want to know the answers to everything.”

Despite his age, his curiosity and creativity remain as strong as ever. Far from sitting back and watching the world go by, Richard’s working on a myriad of projects. There’s his art, which is currently going through a pastels phase, and the aforementioned children’s poetry book as well as The Kingdom of Bling, his brand-new musical which he describes as a “satirical fairytale”.  

“I have fun working and writing and doing things,” he explains simply. 

His slightly posh and proper accent betrays the short decade he spent as a child growing up in the upper-class town of Cheltenham, England before his family immigrated to Tauranga when he was 10 years old, but his affection for this adopted area can’t be overstated. 

It’s so strong, in fact, that rather than produce The Kingdom of Bling among the bright lights of Soho, Broadway or closer to home in Auckland
or Wellington, he’s instead chosen to put it on at his old school, Tauranga Boys’ College.

Smiling warmly, he says, “We’re going to have the world premiere of The Kingdom of Bling using pupils from the primary school plus students from the boys’ and the girls’ colleges. What joy.”

He’s a singular presence with a highly theatrical aura. He carries a reputation for being a little prickly at times, but this morning he’s nothing but delightful company, whether slamming close-minded politics, marvelling at the hidden mysteries of the cosmos, recounting minutiae about the creation and legacy of Rocky Horror to an obvious fanboy or enthusing about his latest works. 

“I’ve always lived in my head,” he says. “Being transgender and not being able to talk about that and yet wanting to be a young rock-and-roller...
But I enjoyed myself. I never felt that I’d been shortchanged in any way. Life is what it is and you get through each day. I was a dustman. I cleaned people’s houses. I pumped gas. I did a lot of these jobs.”

While he found success in London, he did so with a very Kiwi attitude. He didn’t wait for anything to happen. He made it happen. He knocked on doors. He took any theatre stagehand job he could get just to feel a part of that magic. 

And when he couldn’t get acting work, he sat down and wrote his own musical, inadvertently creating a show that would resonate with millions of people around the world and become a saucy, fun, fishnet-clad beacon of the LGBTQIA+ community in the process and championed as a progressive cultural landmark. So happy 50th birthday, Rocky Horror, and bravo Richard. 

To quote his character Riff Raff in "Time Warp", “It’s astounding.”

To the edge of the earth

Olympic kayaker Mike Dawson's spirit of adventure continues to drive him toward epic expeditions, traversing remote landscapes and pushing himself to the limit.

Words Karl Puschmann / Photos Graeme Murray + Supplied
 Hair + Make up Desiree Osterman

Mike Dawson has never been one to shirk from a challenge. Instead, he actively seeks challenge out. You could say it’s a defining characteristic.

The former Olympic kayaker and Antarctic adventurer has also chalked up another win in beating UNO to our interview. When we park up at the Okere Falls Store, he’s already there sitting on the deck, coffee in hand and having quick chats with the people coming and going on this fine Friday morning.

Mike’s lived in the small town of Okere Falls, population under 400, for around 15 years, so greets most of the other regulars arriving for their coffee fix by name.

“I’m based here,” he explains. “When I was racing, we’d train a lot on the river. So it was a natural progression for training to be here full time. It's pretty cool. There's an amazing community, heaps of good running, and the cafe here is great. And we're not even 20 minutes from town,” he says, referencing nearby Rotorua. 

In fact, that’s where he’s been this morning. Out on his mountain bike tearing around the bike trails in the mighty Redwoods. He reckons he’s “close” to having ridden all 200 kilometres of their various tracks. 

Between kayaking, mountain biking and his recent 50-day trek over the snowy grounds of Antarctica, you’d be right in thinking he’s an adventurer.

“Slalom kayaking is not super adventurous. That's a typical Olympic sport,” he says of the sport that he’s most known for. “Whitewater, or what you could call extreme kayaking or running rivers around the world, that's a more adventurous sport.”

Then he chuckles and says, “But my bike is far from adventurous.”

What’s a lot closer to adventure was his recent trip to the edge of the earth and back. After a rigorous application process, Mike was selected to join the Antarctic Heritage Trust’s Inspiring Explorers Expedition which would see him skiing 1000 kilometres over 50 days through the beautifully scenic, but incredibly hostile, environment of Antarctica, trudging all the way to the South Pole. It was an epic adventure in the truest sense of the word.

“It was a pretty interesting mission, like, it's definitely hardcore,” he says with typical understatement and no hint of irony. “It's a massive undertaking. The physical strain you put on your body is unbelievable and the environment there is hostile but stunningly beautiful and peaceful. It's a freezing cold environment, one that doesn’t suit long-term living. There's no food, no water and no trees. There's nothing. It's a real adventure. The frontier.

“If you think about it, you're pretty much doing a half marathon a day, towing a bunch of weight behind you,” he says.

It sounds hellish. Mike says that, for some of the time, it was.

“For me, it was around the 30th day, when I realised I still had 20 days to go. It's crazy. A three-week trip there on its own would be next level, and we'd already been out there for a month. It's tough. There were some days that we were exhausted. I remember two days clearly that I was done. I was like, ‘Man, I don't know if I can keep doing this.’ It's such a long time. But then the coolest thing you learn quickly is if you can just take your next breath, that'll mean you take your next step, and suddenly an hour will be gone. Once that hour’s gone, the day will be gone. So if you can just keep moving, the day goes.”

By taking one step after the other, the small team covered around 20 to 25 kilometres a day, depending on conditions and how everyone was holding up. Some days the conditions would be too bad for them to move far. The next it would be beautiful blue skies and glistening snow and they’d be on their way. 

Dark days, soul searching, sore legs and always just one more step to go. It of course begs the question, why was he doing this monumental task in the first place?

“We were doing it to celebrate 150 years since Roald Amundsen was born,” he says. 

Amundsen was a Norwegian explorer of the polar regions and a prominent figure in what we now appropriately call the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. The Antarctic Heritage Trust team was following in his adventurous ski steps and consisted of people from Norway and Aotearoa. 

“The Antarctic Heritage Trust is responsible for preserving all the historic huts in Antarctica. They’re trying to inspire exploration. 

And that's me, it’s what I’ve loved for my whole life. I've been lucky and so fortunate to be able to chase this dream of kayaking and racing, but also exploring the world and the rivers of the world… going to these places, and skipping over that line outside of my comfort zone,” he explains. “I think it's really important to share the stories of the early polar explorers. What I did is easy compared to what they did. When I read their stories I wish I was from that time, so I could have sailed to Antarctica and spent three years exploring.” 

It may have been easy in comparison to Amundsen’s legendary explorations but that doesn’t mean there was anything easy about it. It’s still Antarctica. He says he tried to keep his mind focussed on each day, rather than the overwhelming 1000 kilometres of their trek. When asked what he learned about himself during this epic adventure he stops and thinks for a second before answering. 

“It was such a cool reminder of how important it is to slow down and be content with where you are. When you're out there you don't have any communication with anyone. No internet, no constant distraction like you have in the modern world,” he says. 

“That was one of the hardest parts of coming back. The overstimulation of all this noise that comes at you every day, all the time. I’m trying to remember what it felt like to be out there and keep a bit of that calmness in my day-to-day life somehow.”

Then, with an air of resignation, he says, “It's impossible. But I’m trying.

“When you go on a trip like this one to the South Pole, you have heaps of time to think and take stock of what's going on in life. In general life, things are busy. You're always moving and on the go. You never really get time to think about where you want to be in a few years,” he continues. “When you’re an athlete, it's so clear, it’s so easy, right? Because you’re progressing towards the Olympics or the Worlds. That’s a big goal and a big priority. Every day when you wake up. That’s all you do. The coolest thing about Antarctica is that it gave me time to declutter all that, to think about where I could see myself in a few years and what I want to do. That was a massive takeaway for me, figuring that out.”

So the hard times, the adventure, is what made it all worthwhile?

“Yeah, the moment was hard, but when you get to the end of any challenge, it's always worth it. It's really rewarding. When you finish it's sometimes hard to understand the magnitude of the undertaking, because when you're in it, it's just what you're doing. It’s only afterwards when you start telling the story that you realise it was something to be really proud of.”

To find out what shaped Mike’s adventurous spirit, you have to go back to when he was lad. He reckons his sense of adventure was born from exploring our local rivers on his kayak. A pass time which got him hooked on the sport when he was a student at Tauranga Boys College. In this regard, he was following in the wake of his brother, who was already paddling. Mike joined the school’s kayak club, which led him to competing.

He took to the sport like a duck to water and was soon spending all his free time on the river with his mates.

“I enjoyed it a lot,” he smiles. “It's pretty cool. Kayaking definitely took up a lot of time as a kid for sure.”

I suggest that it sounds like a good way to keepout of trouble.

“Yeah, probably,” he says, before grinning and adding, “Or getting into trouble.” 

Mike recalls a few misadventures trying to crack the rivers and the Kaimais with low water – and too much water. 

“I remember my first day going kayaking up the Wairoa River and tipping over and being scared,” he laughs. “I couldn't roll back up. I ran out of breath and had to swim. I got a lot of grief for swimming in the river.”

From tumbling in the Wairoa River to competing at two Olympic Games, first at London in 2012 and then at Rio de Janeiro four years later, is a heck of a ride. He’s modest about how he got there.

“Just paddling heaps,” he says, before talking about slalom kayaking’s own journey as a sport.

“If I look at the progression of the sport, the kids are so much better now than we were when we were young. We had to learn everything. It was slow and took us ages, especially the slalom. Kiwis love adventure and getting out on the river. Slalom is different to that, it’s really precise. For us to progress from this raw vision of kayaking to a refined version was pretty hard. It was a massive journey.”

He says it’s a very Euro-dominated sport and remembers going to the Junior Worlds for the first time and “getting hammered” by the Europeans. Rather than getting discouraged, it had the opposite effect and the team returned home to begin training harder and smarter. Mike set a goal for the following year – he’d make the finals. It was a goal he accomplished.

“I wasn’t very good in the final, I ended up 10th.” Then he grins and says, “But goal achieved all the same.”

Mike’s retired from competing but is still involved as a trainer. Nowadays the sport is different, with strong clubs, education, resources and an Olympic-level course in Auckland for training. 

“We have athletes and teams that are capable of winning any of the events,” he says. “It's just a matter of them doing it when it counts. Whereas back in the day, when we were first becoming senior athletes, just getting in the Top 40 would be huge.”

After 15 years of kayaking at the highest level, his paddle is now permanently hung up to dry, although he remains heavily involved in the sport in a training and coaching capacity. He has a big year ahead with the World Championships in London in September. Doing well there means travelling to Paris for the Olympics. 

With so much going on Mike says he’s trying to keep his Antarctic cool.

“It's hard. You say all these things, like, ‘I'm not going to drive my car as much, I'm not going to use my phone as much’, then you come back, and the reality is you fall back into some of the old habits,” he says. “But it's making sure you change a couple of little things. Those little things will evolve into bigger things. And then that makes monumental change.

“It’s the same in sport,” he continues. “When you try to change one tiny thing it can be the difference between big performance or small. I feel it’s similar in life. I’ve been trying to be a little bit more intentional with what I do each day.”

Then, with a smile, the adventuring Olympian shares the biggest takeaway from his epic adventure. “Make sure you leave time for the things you enjoy. Go for a ride or a kayak and hang out with friends. When you’re away from everything for so long, you realise how much you miss them.” 

Between water & sky

New Zealand windfoiling champion Veerle ten Have is a naturally talented sportswoman with a passion for bringing her sport to the mainstream.

Words Nicky Adams / Photos Graeme Murray + supplied

Gliding above the water, moving at breakneck speeds, windfoiling seems unlike any other single-person water sport. According to former Youth Olympian and multi-award-winning New Zealand windfoiler Veerle ten Have, a windfoil is, in layman’s terms, “Like a small America’s Cup boat, but for one person. Everything is scaled down, but everything foiling is the same and races the same, except there’s one person on the boat.”

If you’re ahead of the curve and already follow the sport, you’ll know that in 2020 windfoiling blew past windsurfing, and replaced it as an Olympic sport. This immediately elevated its currency from a leisure pursuit with an ever-growing fanbase to a sport that meant business. 

Veerle is one of only two women in the team of six that represent New Zealand at windfoiling. At the tender age of 21, she’s quite the achiever, with a quiet maturity, easy manner, and lovely confidence, making her friendly but without a trace of arrogance. Veerle grew up in the Bay of Plenty, and despite time in Auckland and travelling for competitions, she still very much considers it home. 

From the age of seven, Veerle was a keen equestrian, until at 14 her horse broke its pelvis; no longer able to ride, she looked around for other sporting options. She landed on windsurfing, which was the sport her brother, who was learning at the time, pestered her to join. I comment that she must get on well with her brother, to which Veerle laughs heartily. “We do now – we got on well when we were younger, but we also had to be better than one another!” 

As with most sporty families, Veerle’s parents were very involved, facilitating trainings and supporting her endeavours. Veerle mentions that their role has never wavered, and their encouragement has been the backbone of her journey. Veerle’s brother, however, decided windsurfing wasn’t for him, and moved on. Veerle kept at it. 

You must have loved it, I observe. “No, I absolutely hated it,” she chuckles. So why did she continue? “Well, I enjoyed it at the beginning, and then after a while I thought – this is stupid! It’s cold, it’s on the water, it’s wet, I go out after school when I’m tired and I just want to go home,” Veerle recalls. “So then I started not liking it, especially during the winter months. But I kept at it, because when I start something, I just have to keep going until I’m a bit better.”

By this point, just as the less appealing aspects of windsurfing began tipping the balance and the temptation to quit was almost too great to resist, an opportunity presented itself in the form of a trip to the Junior World Championships in Sardinia. “I love travelling, so I was pretty excited,” Veerle says. This trip proved a huge turning point for her. “After I’d done that, I thought, ooh, you can race these things, you can compete! And that’s what I love about the sport, the racing and competing, because I’m quite a competitive person.” 

Sticking with windsurfing for the next six years, Veerle continued to achieve. Then, while she was training to try to get into the Tokyo Olympics, a curveball came her way when a decision completely out of her control altered her whole life path. “In 2020 when I was training in the Olympic class trying to get to Tokyo, they changed the Olympic class from windsurfing to windfoiling. So everyone in New Zealand and around the world was making the switch, and new people were coming into windfoiling. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it – I didn’t know whether to keep doing sport or go to uni or get a job.”

Despite Veerle’s reservations, the sailing powers-that-be identified that she would be a brilliant windfoiler. “They always pushing to get more girls in the water, but it wasn’t until I started foiling that we realised I was actually pretty decent at it – more so than windsurfing, because foiling was better suited to my body type in the way you had to be a bit heavier and stronger. With foiling it was more about that than about being aerobically fit.”

Windfoiling, it transpires, requires a very different type of strength and fitness. Unlike the more aerobic windsurfing, foiling needs a lot of explosive power. “I think it’s important to be super strong all around – legs, shoulders, arms,” Veerle explains. “With windsurfing it’s not so much legs – when you’re on a foil you’re trying to push the power up the foil with your legs, whereas on the surf you’re just on the water, which tends to be a lot more shoulders.”

It turns out Veerle is not so hot on the cardio side of sports training. “Some people really enjoy going for a run or a road cycle or hopping on the ski erg. That’s not me,” she says. “I just like lifting heavy weights in the gym. Nowadays I really enjoy mountain biking, and I go for the occasional run, but having to do that as my main training off the water is not very enjoyable. I’m just not a cardio athlete.”

Veerle in Lake Garda, Italy. 

When she gets out on the water, however, the joy makes it more than worthwhile – often likened to flying rather than sailing, the sensation of speeding above the waves is like no other. “The cool thing is that you’re travelling at a high speed across the water and it’s completely silent. There’s no slapping of the board on the water or sails flapping next to you, sometimes a slight whistle from the foil through the water. But you’re looking down and going 40 kilometres an hour – no noise – which is so cool,” Veerle says. “And especially if you’re out and it’s maybe light winds, but you’re still foiling and travelling fast and you’re out there by yourself. It’s just... Wow.”

The water’s not always flat, so how do you navigate those bigger swells? “It’s a tiny little body movement. If you see a swell coming, you pull on your front foot a little to fly a bit higher, or you push down on your front foot a little bit to fly a bit lower, and you’re trying to just ride through the waves so that you’re consistently at the same level.”

I wonder what Veerle’s idea of the perfect environment would be. “Everyone enjoys something different, but for me it would be sunny, probably in the evening and maybe 10-12 knots, flat water or little waves and nice and hot. Those are great sporting conditions,” she says. 

Veerle says her favourite locations in New Zealand are Auckland Harbour by Rangitoto, Browns Island, and all along the bays. “Because you have such varying conditions and there’s always other boats on the water that you can sail by. You’ve just got such a vast, wide ocean in front of you that you can just go wherever you like.” 

International sailing must be exciting, though? Veerle shrugs, saying, “Out of everywhere in the world, New Zealand is still my favourite place to sail. I also really enjoyed Hyeres in France, and Texas. Probably because I did well there [in competitions]. It was really hot and windy every day, even though the water was a bit brown, which wasn’t very nice!”

Thus far, Veerle’s career has been an exciting ride. Having been quoted as saying she’s addicted to the sport, I ask what it is that keeps her invested. “The racing,” she says without hesitation. “The competitiveness about it – it’s an emotional rollercoaster; when you have a bad day, you’re really sad, and when you have a good day,
you’re really happy. Just being able to see getting closer to my goal with every competition keeps me driven.” 

What is Veerle’s ultimate goal? “To be able to say that I'm the best in the world at what I do.”

“It’s an emotional rollercoaster;

when you have a bad day, you’re really sad,

and when you have a good day, you’re really happy.”

In a career that already boasts so many highlights, I’m curious what would be among the most memorable. “Winning a youth medal in Texas for windsurfing,” Veerle says. “Also, when we made our debut windfoiling overseas – we’d just been training over here in New Zealand in isolation because of COVID-19. Everyone else had done some competitions, but we had no idea where we stood within the rest of the world. So we were fizzing to race with other people. By the second race of the first regatta, I came first, and that was a highlight. Over that whole regatta, I ended up being in the top 10, which fully exceeded our expectations. Even to see our hard work was really going in the right direction was exciting, as it was still a new sport.”

As with anything in life, there are always setbacks, and Veerle is her own harshest critic. “It’s always disappointing when you have high expectations and you don’t meet them. Especially when you’re racing, your world becomes really small and all you’re thinking about is that competition. Everything else – family, friends, study – become irrelevant. So if you don’t meet those expectations, it literally feels like the end of the world… I’ve had moments in a regatta when I wonder if I was training for nothing. But then you step out of the bubble and get perspective.” 

Georgia on my mind

With her emotional, original songs and powerful te reo Māori waiata,
singer-songwriter Georgia Lines is conquering the
New Zealand music industry.

words Sue Hoffart photos Graeme Murray

Having spent seven years striking at doors with her well-shod feet, piano-playing singer-songwriter Georgia Lines has finally entered the room.

Now, for the first time, the unquestionably talented Tauranga Moana artist has enough work to call herself a full-time music professional. She has clocked up more than 2 million streams for her singles – including a recent release in te reo Māori – as well as a self-titled 2020 extended play (EP) record. Her recent national tour comes on the back of other high-profile gigs at Auckland’s Eden Park, Spark Arena, The Civic, and New Plymouth’s Bowl of Brooklyn. Georgia has another EP tagged for release in late July, and is heading across the Tasman shortly, for a week of songwriting alongside other writers and producers. 

None of it has come easily. And she takes none of her recent successes for granted.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” she says cheerfully. “We’re not in the clear yet, but I do feel excited now.”

In 2015, the then-18-year-old told UNO she was ready to face whatever highs and lows the notoriously difficult music industry might hurl her way. Instead of heading to university alongside her peers, the recently graduated Bethlehem College head girl was determined to be an independent artist. At the time, her debut single “Wannabe” had climbed to number six on New Zealand’s iTunes chart within one day. She was prepared to “go all in,” she said at the time. “Not put half a foot in the door, but kick it wide open.”

And boy has she kicked. And kicked. Against a global pandemic and multiple cancelled concerts and tours. Against isolation instead of audiences. Against financial uncertainty and the heartache of lost opportunities. 

When she speaks with UNO this time around, Georgia is finishing songs and making decisions over artwork for a new EP, while juggling interviews and wrapping up two tours. One is the much-delayed six-show, five-city Leave Behind music tour. The other is an annual road show that places inspiring New Zealanders in front of intermediate-aged children. This year’s National Young Leaders Day lineup included a bright young entrepreneur from Dunedin, the national Student Volunteer Army founder, an explorer who lost his leg in a volcanic eruption, and one determined 25-year-old singer.

She had no trouble relating to the resilience theme of this year’s leadership event, and has spoken with her young audiences about dealing with disappointment and online bullies, feelings of inadequacy, or being a people-loving extrovert during lockdown.

“COVID-19 has been really difficult,” the natural optimist admits. “There were many days I wanted to give up and throw in the towel. But my family and friends have kind of carried me through those really disappointing moments. 

“My first EP, in 2020, was released two days before lockdown. I had this big release party planned, even had the merch printed. And we had to pull the pin. That was the start of a string of events, of having to adapt and go okay, all right, we just have to carry on. Have a cry, let go of the emotion, feel what you feel, then pick yourself up and carry on.”

Music itself has also helped. Georgia’s single “Leave Behind” helped her deal with the sudden death of a beloved grandfather. The song addresses grief and the need to relinquish sentimental attachment to her Poppa’s possessions.

And how about those very few nasty online messages that come her way? 

“It’s easy to say words don’t affect me, but they do,” she admits. “No one likes to think they’re doing a bad job, and I’ll probably have to continue to deal with it. But are you going to take the one strange, sideways, negative comment or go, I’m really proud of what I’ve been doing and a bunch of people also think it’s awesome. And again, family have been really good at reminding me I’m really good at what I do, keep going.”

To combat the tough times, she aims to exercise regularly, eat well “80 percent of the time”, periodically switch off her phone, and check in with a psychologist as needed. There are near-daily chats with parents Andy and Sally Lines, who live rurally and own Urban Lounge Interiors. She also shares a tight bond with younger brother Mac, a drummer in her band. The all-important support crew now includes husband Nathan, the intermediate school teacher she shares a home with in Mount Maunganui. They do not, however, share equal wardrobe space; Georgia admits to hogging most of the storage with her shoe collection, fashion pieces, and vintage or op-shop finds.  The couple managed to wed before the pandemic struck, though COVID-19 stymied their honeymoon plans as well as her career aspirations. 

“As humans, we’re really good at adapting. As creatives, you have to be. I feel like I’ve become okay at riding the (uncertainty) wave. I also make a really intentional choice to think, ‘How can I enjoy this and not let the stress of the job weigh me down?’ When you release something, there’s a lot of work to do. A lot of deadlines, all the practical things. So it’s learning to love the process, the chaos.

“All I can do is give 100 percent to the opportunities in front of me, do a really good job of being a good wife, a good daughter, a good friend. And be really good at my job.”

For the last four years, Georgia has worked as a teacher to supplement her patchy performer’s income. She has offered students one-on-one piano and singing lessons, songwriting, and performance instruction, privately and through schools. 

This winter, for the first time, she is too busy to teach. Frankly, she isn’t sure how she managed to fit it in before now, between the rehearsals and songwriting and the hands-on decision-making that comes with being an independent artist. That includes being intimately involved in the production of her own highly stylised music videos, notable for her bold fashion choices as much as her songs.

“Me and my team do everything ourselves. I have my fingers in all the pies.

“I love it all. I love the visual side, too. Fashion is a natural extension of my personality. I’m drawn to colour and fun things. People often say to me, ‘I could never wear that!’ and I wonder if that is a compliment or not. But I don’t actually care. I can express my creativity through putting outfits together, and that feeds into photoshoots and videos. I get to work with amazing brands and borrow amazing clothes.”

An Auckland Museum show with members of the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra called for a high-necked, full-length beaded gown. The release of her extraordinary, goosebump-inducing “Hine E Hine” single saw the singer clad in a bright yellow shirt, with a vast number of oversized hair clips marching down her dark tresses. In July last year, Georgia played a grand piano and sang that same piece at Auckland’s The Civic theatre for the Tuawāhine show that lined her up alongside Anika Moa, Tammy Neilson, Annie Crummer, and Paige.

The waiata choice dates back to her school choir days, though she revisited pronunciation and learned its true meaning in honour of the event.

“It was really, really special, celebrating Matariki and the power of wāhine toa. Everyone on stage was female, we had a full band, and I’m standing there thinking, how am I here, sharing the stage with these incredible women. 

“That was the start of singing in te reo. I felt really honoured to be asked, and I really wanted to take the care to honour the event. I thought, man, there’s something really special about this.”

Although the planned Tuawāhine tour was cancelled courtesy of COVID-19 restrictions, Georgia was subsequently shoulder-tapped to re-record one of her own songs in te reo Māori for the New Zealand music industry’s Waiata Anthems Week. She fell for the language even harder the second time around while transforming “My Love” into “Tōrere”. 

Working alongside “incredible” translator Hana Mereraiha, she was able to instil new layers of poetry and metaphor. 

“It almost feels that it has captured the meaning of the song in a way that the original didn’t. I am still in the baby stages of my te reo journey, but it has been an absolute privilege to learn, and I am really loving it.” 

In the meantime, fingers are crossed as summer shows start to line up and she dares to look ahead a little further.

While Georgia struggles to recall the exact detail of the dreams she chased as a teenager, she has no doubt her goals have shifted.

“It’s less of that ‘play a big show in a stadium in New York’. Though that would be nice. If we end up with kids, I want to still be loving what I’m doing, to be able to be a mum and do a good job of that, but also release music and play shows.

“In 10 years, what I’d love to be doing is writing music I’m really proud of.”

georgialinesmusic.com

Denise Arnold: Changemaker

In a world where so much is wrong, BOP legend Denise Arnold makes the right kind of difference – bringing purpose and hope to the abandoned generations of Cambodia.

words nicky adams / photos graeme murray + stacey simpkin

styling lisa shea / hair + makeup desiree osterman

It is relatively rare to meet someone who channels their energies into the greater good rather than individual gain. Even rarer when they seem oblivious to the fact that this trait is in part what makes them exceptional. Denise Arnold, although I’m confident she’ll absolutely hate it being said, is just such a person. In 2007, she founded the Tauranga-based Cambodia Charitable Trust, which, through developing quality education, provides free education to vulnerable Cambodian children (predominantly female). The aim is ultimately to give the children of Cambodia the tools to forge a future for themselves. A future which, otherwise, they would not have even the remotest chance of accessing.

A finalist for this year’s Women Of Influence award, Denise is calm and low key, and what strikes me most as she makes me a cup of tea and we chat about cats, children and COVID, is that while so much of her time must be channeled into the charity, there is a real sense of balance about her. She has a marvellous selection of teas in her tea drawer and has recently rehomed a cat from an aged client at her law firm. Straight away it’s clear she has impeccable taste (the love of tea gave that away) and the kindest of hearts.

A lawyer by profession, in 2006 Denise was busy with two teenage girls and her position as a partner at Tauranga law firm Lyon O’Neale Arnold, when she was galvanised into action by two consecutive events. Her elder daughter Emily had just returned from a school trip to Bangkok, a trip that had heightened every maternal sense of safety and ‘what if’. At the time, Denise was working as a volunteer for ECPAT – End Child Prostitution Pornography And Trafficking (now Child Alert). But with her own daughter away, Denise could not shake the knowledge circling in her head of the literally millions of women and girls who go missing. Around this time, she was triggered by another incident. “I read in the New Zealand Herald about children in Cambodia being rented out of a brothel on a weekly basis – that is no less horrific than on an hourly basis – but for some reason it just hit me to the core. When I read about this I thought emphatically no, no, no, that is not happening on my watch.”

She was told by a friend that a man called Steve Chitty (who became an initial trustee of CCT) was talking about taking businesspeople to Cambodia to introduce honest trade. Steve and Denise spent a year independently researching and learning, during which time Denise became more and more interested in the development aspect. At the end of 2007, the duo headed over to Cambodia. Steve focused on Phnom Penh, and Denise spent about three weeks travelling around rural areas. “That was my way of trying to find out how I was going to bring about long-term change. It’s easy to do good, but it’s harder to do no harm; that’s a really strong principle for me. While we can achieve a goal, we need to be cognitive in our path and the impact that might have.”

Returning from the trip Denise was clear that she wanted to implement change systematically. She identified education as the key, thus the manifesto was set for the establishment of the Cambodian Charitable Trust. The team is made up of key volunteers and educators, as well as Patron Theresa Gattung and Ambassadors Nadia Lim and (former New Zealand prime minister / UN Administrator) Helen Clark. Since 2008 the team in Cambodia has been led by “the truly wonderful, gifted, well respected” country manager Soeun Ouch. Over 14 operational years the organisation may have grown, but the guiding principles remain clear – every person is a volunteer, thus 100 percent of money raised goes exactly where it is intended. Surprisingly, this is actually quite unusual.

Today, the Trust supports 209 schools and tens of thousands of needy children.

Denise doesn’t blather on about how wonderful it feels to make a difference, or the warm fuzzies she gets from providing aid. She is at once compassionate and pragmatic as she talks about the gentle Cambodian culture, and how it is one that welcomes her input. “The people want you to know them – they don’t just want money; they want you to appreciate who they are and the challenges they face.” There was, she says, a learning curve she underwent getting to grips with operating within a totally different economic paradigm, for example quickly realising that instead of handing out pre-made school uniforms, by providing sewing machines and guidance a group of villagers could sew them themselves. The concept of providing the tools, rather than just a pre-packaged solution is an ethos she is passionate about.

When there are so many countries in need, why Cambodia? Simple, says Denise – “I really felt like I was in the right place.” It is perhaps too easy to forget that Cambodia is a country decimated by a brutal 30-year civil war that took place in very recent history. A war which, under the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-9) and Pol Pot, destroyed lives, culture, politicians, leaders, educators, mothers and fathers. An entire generation was wiped out, and another brought up in camps barely surviving starvation and physical abuse. This is a country that was expected to re-learn everything, but in the ultimate of cruel ironies, there was barely anyone left to teach. “The rich history has been dominated by recent history. We’re aware that through Pol Pot a whole generation was lost but also lost were the parenting skills – that will take another generation to correct. Today’s adults were abandoned. There’s a gap that will “take another generation to get right.”

I wonder if, as a conservative society, there is a reluctance to deal with a woman in a position of authority. “Not at all – as a Westerner people turn to you… and I feel we’re sending a strong message to women in Cambodia when our van pulls up and out pile a group of rather rumpled, tired women. They are watching this and thinking, ‘Here are unaccompanied decision makers.’” A turning point for Denise was “the realisation that we had the ability to influence schools far wider than you ever expected. If you retain an open approach to knowledge and expertise and resourcing, then you’re lily jumping. That drove us to think about working into clusters of schools to expand further.” Which all comes back to the concept of teaching someone to fish, rather than giving them a meal.

Still, it must be hard not to be overwhelmed. Denise agrees, but says she took heart when her mother-in-law quoted Eleanor Roosevelt to her: “’It’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness.’ I felt a huge sense of relief that I didn’t need to solve it all, I just needed to do something… My role is to keep my eye on the horizon and keep everyone moving forwards towards a better outcome.” Sometimes, though, such

focus is nigh on impossible. Denise recalls, “We had a baby starving and it really derailed me. I had to try and figure out how to save it. In the end the baby died. I wondered what I could have done differently. My husband said, ‘You’re helping thousands.’ And I said, there’s

no point helping thousands if you lose the value of one. I’ve really struggled with that.”

What drives her, I wonder. “Fundamentally every child deserves to have a childhood and go to school and play, and be happy. They also have a right to the opportunity for a decent life and a good future and education is the key to that I believe.”

The success of the Trust cannot be underestimated. She talks not just of the work of the team but also of the incredible educators – many Tauranga locals – who have generously lent their expertise. Nevertheless, for Denise the years have been filled with constant learning, striving to deliver her best.

As part of her journey, she completed a Masters, and contemplated a PHD.

The pressure must be immense, yet I don’t get the sense that Denise sees the difference between how most of us try to make a difference (I struggle to organise a cake bake) and the incredible work that she is doing. What really strikes me is how she seems to be hands-on in every aspect, from fundraising to liaising with ministries. Her bandwidth seems to be so wide I am frankly floored with admiration. To achieve all she does Denise says she breaks it down into sizeable chunks.

“I will never reach everywhere I want to reach. I’m a one-horse race. I need to focus on what I can do and not be overwhelmed by what I can’t achieve. I can’t afford the mission to drift and dilute us to the point we can’t survive.”

The mission, however, has inevitably been affected by COVID. “The issue last year for Cambodia with COVID wasn’t illness, it was the complete breakdown of the economic system. The families had no work, no income, no food. The contrast between them and us is always grounded in the degree of poverty – we have poverty in New Zealand, but this is poverty with no support network.” Just prior to COVID hitting, she explains that Helen Clark was due to spend four days with them in Cambodia. “I admire her vision and capacity for understanding development issues hugely. I really wanted her to give us an overarching strategic review about where we were going, how we were managing, what our focus could be. Because we do span right from the top, working with the Cambodian Ministry of Education, down to sponsorship and getting children to school – and pretty much everything inbetween. We support schools and teacher training colleges, and the sponsorship of individuals. I was really welcoming Helen’s overview.”

Unfortunately, that trip was cancelled, and instead Denise has found herself dealing with a very different landscape. “Last year it was about the economic impact and verging on starvation. This year the Cambodians have Delta Virus in communities so it’s about economic loss, also the management of the virus in a very poor country with an underprepared health system.” Denise explains how maintaining the educational program requires working with the Ministry to develop strategies for the basics of distance learning, both for the students and the teachers who are training. However, “At the other extreme we

have a humanitarian crisis – no rice, no ability to have medical care… but we can’t let go of the systemic development of education in Cambodia. You also need to make sure the people survive.” So, whereas usually the Trust supports 23 schools and 10,500 children, this has increased to include an additional

186 schools. They have also handed out 1,806 50kg bags of rice.

Denise sees education as key to effecting meaningful change in Cambodia, and Ambassador Nadia Lim is also onboard for the cause.

Peppered through our conversation are loving references to Denise’s husband Doug, their children, grandchildren, her sisters, and nephews. It’s no surprise to find that Denise hasn’t fallen far from her genetic tree – her dad, Brian, is a retired teacher and mum, Fiona, a retired nurse. Both are involved in CCT, combining their skills to set up a system for health screening and training Cambodian nurses to conduct eye tests. Don’t ask me how she keeps all her balls in the air, but it’s apparent her close family help with the juggle. She muses that she sometimes wonders if her daughters Emily and Tegan have missed out in any way by the time she has spent focusing on the Trust – but then she laughs as she points out that as teenagers, they were probably just hugely relieved she had a focus that kept her off their backs.

Clearly her family are immensely proud of her, and they share her philanthropic spirit. Daughter Emily is currently setting up an online business, the Giftery, five percent of the profits from which will go towards the concept of building residential facilities on the school grounds – a vital move to protect the most vulnerable. In this family of overachievers, Denise’s sister Janine is the founder of Bestow Beauty, well-known in New Zealand for its holistic products which promote beauty from within (although its collagen powder also helps with those pesky wrinkles on the outside). Janine and Denise’s other sister Robyn are firm supporters of the Trust, both sponsoring children and through the Bestow Sisterhood program. The Bestow Generositea are beautiful teas, the profits from which are donated to the Trust. This tea and Nadia Lim’s cookbooks will be just some of the products available from the Giftery – raising the funds is, after all, the vital foundation on which the charity is built.

It’s exciting to find out not just how Denise has grown, developed, but how she has rolled with the punches and adapted the Charity to unexpected challenges. Denise is very appreciative of the amazing team – Theresa Gattung, ‘a dear friend and stalwart’, and Nadia Lim, who has been unreserved in her support. It’s little surprise that Denise is a finalist for this year’s Women Of Influence awards. It is an honour for which she is obviously very grateful, but in typical fashion sees it as a reflection of the incredible broader team in both New Zealand and Cambodia. Nevertheless, credit where it is due, Denise is more than just the glue holding all these fantastic people together, she is the tireless champion of the cause: the instigator, the cheerleader, and most importantly the voice that sets the tone, both internally and externally. She has

a very human approach to such a multifaceted task.

If she feels daunted by the fact that this is not a position she can just walk away from, she doesn’t show it. Denise doesn’t miss a beat when she tells me, “I see this as my life’s work and feel really lucky that I have found my calling. Other people spend a lifetime trying to figure out what theirs is.” And this is just one

of many, many reasons that whether she walks away with a trophy or not, she is absolutely a woman of honour.

cctnz.org.nz