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

Reel Ambition

The unstoppable Bryce Dinneen from Wish4Fish proves there are no limits to sharing his adventurous dreams.

WORDS Sue Hoffart
PHOTOS Graeme Murray + Logan Davey + Supplied

Four percent. According to specialists, that’s the level of voluntary movement Bryce Dinneen has retained since his mobility was snatched by a single dumb, drunken dive into Wellington Harbour.

He jokes that, statistically speaking, he now has to work 25 times harder than other people just to keep up. 

In fact, the Pyes Pa resident has been outrunning the able-bodied for years, with his clear-headed vision, outstanding fundraising feats and extraordinary drive to share the joy of a salt water adventure.

Bryce formed a trust and launched the Wish4Fish charity a decade ago, to smash down the barriers that prevent some people from boating and fishing on the ocean. Under his watch, the trust has spent almost $90,000 taking more than 350 people onto the water regardless of their physical or mental disabilities, illness or financial needs. 

But he’s always had bigger fish to fry.

Hiring less-than-ideal vessels to take groups of two or three people at a time only proved to him that demand greatly exceeded capacity. So Bryce has driven an additional fundraising campaign that has raised $2.4 million. This venture, dubbed Project Noah, funded the design and construction of a remarkable custom-made boat that has opened seagoing doors for even more people who would otherwise be confined to land. First launched from Tauranga Bridge Marina recently, the world-first 18m vessel caters for 1000 people a year. 

Last year, he was named volunteer of the year in the TECT Trust community awards for being “a shining example to us all to never give up, and to strive to make the world a better place.”

And he has pulled all this off with 96 percent less mobility than most of the rest of us; a shoulder shrug on the left side, some movement in his right shoulder and bicep. It’s enough to manipulate the phone he keeps in his lap and operate his motorised wheelchair, not enough to scratch his nose. His ever-whirring brain works overtime, though, alongside an uncanny ability to articulate and quietly inspire. 

It’s been a team effort, of course. Bryce is adamant credit be given to all the family, friends, trustees, management team and generous business people, strangers, tradespeople and major funders who continue to work alongside him. However, there is no doubt whose audacious dream they’re following.

“Fishing’s part of it,” the charity founder says, explaining his determination to build a large, stable catamaran fitted with everything from hospital beds and a ceiling hoist to an accessible bathroom, shower, elevator and modified fishing rods. “But sometimes it’s not about the fish. It’s about the camaraderie, the highs and lows, losing a fish then trying again, channelling that frustration in the right way. It’s about getting out on the water, wind in the hair, sun on the face. It’s about normality.

“If you have an illness or a disability or a hardship, if your life’s frazzled, you can spend a day on the water and I guarantee you’ll come back with some kind of clarity.”

He describes seeing people with serious diagnoses – schizophrenia, bipolar, cancer, tetraplegic – leave their worries on land when they embark on a Wish4fish voyage. Accompanying caregivers, often overextended family members, are similarly uplifted. Some passengers have never been on a boat, others are keen fishers who imagined they would never venture on one again.

Bryce feared he was in the latter camp for much of his 11-month stay at Burwood Spinal Unit, following his life-altering accident. 

He tosses out more numbers from those difficult days in the Christchurch hospital. Like 8kg. That’s the weight that was initially attached to his head back in 2007, when he spent 23.5 hours a day in head traction to stabilise the fractures that had caused paralysis from the neck down. 

He was at a stag party in Wellington when it happened, an outgoing, carefree business student dressed in a suit and tie. Bryce and a dozen friends started the day with a champagne breakfast – “too much champagne, not enough breakfast” – and decided to leap into the harbour to sober up but he misjudged the depth of the water.

His neck was broken and his spinal cord so badly squashed, doctors likened it to the damage caused by an elephant standing on a tomato. 

Until then, he was a fishing-mad 29-year-old cheerfully on the verge of a new career. Having abandoned a building apprenticeship, he spent 10 years immersed in the “bright lights and late nights” of the hospitality industry before launching into an Otago University finance degree at age 28. He’s always been entrepreneurial and still can’t drive past a kid selling something on the roadside without making a purchase, even if he has to toss the bagged fruit or homemade lemonade away. In his teens, the former Tauranga Boys’ College prefect was a top cricketer who hoped to play for New Zealand. He also chaired the school’s charity committee, gathering skills he never imagined using from a wheelchair.

Suddenly, he faced the prospect of never walking, never feeding himself.

“Mum and Dad brought me up the right way, to open the door for a lady, to pull the chair out for her, to give someone else that seat on the bus. I want to kick a soccer or rugby ball around with my two nephews. Those options aren’t available any more.

“Now, I need someone to turn the light switch on in the morning and to turn it off again at night and everything in between.”

He describes one grim day of hopelessness in the early months and recalls how horribly upset this attitude made his parents and sister.

“I made a promise to myself. No more tears. Whatever happens moving forward, I’ll try and make the most out of it.

“Mum and Dad are really good people. They worked hard, they provided for me but they also taught me you have to work a little if you want to get a little.”

So he focussed on what he wanted, rather than what he couldn’t do. Like getting back on a boat and fishing again. Or using his voice to advocate for others, especially those with disabilities.

It was the photos stuck to the ceiling above his hospital bed that inspired him; images of happy times in the company of good people and plenty of fish. 

“I was like, ‘how am I going to do this again’,” Bryce remembers of his determination to return to the sport he has loved since dangling a line off a wharf at age four. “Speaking with people on the spinal unit, fellow patients, I’d ask ‘would you like to go fishing’. I used to hear ‘never’ a lot. And ‘can’t’. When you’re someone with a disability you hear ‘never’ and ‘can’t’.

“Those words are still there in my vocab, they just get flipped around. If you say negative, I say challenge.  You can change so many things. 

“There’s stuff I have to manage that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, but I’m grateful. I just appreciate everything, waking up every morning. Every minute is just gold for me now. Me getting up in the morning, that’s gold. And if it’s not, well, sometimes you need a day in bed.”

He was still undergoing rehabilitation, living at home in Tauranga with his parents, when he established Wish4Fish. A local accountant and a lawyer helped establish the trust that would govern the charity, serving as unpaid trustees. Initially, they needed to raise money and profile amidst a sea of 27,000 other registered charitable New Zealand trusts, churning out funding applications and talking to people in the community. The team has expanded since then – Wish4Fish has a general manager – but Bryce has lost count of the number of fundraising sausage sizzles, dinners and corporate events he has personally attended. Or the talks given to service groups and interested companies.

Bryce fundraised $2.4m over 10 years to build FV Wish4Fish.

From the outset, it proved difficult to find a suitable, wheelchair-friendly boat for the charity trips. Charter boat skippers were nervous of tackling the necessary logistics and most vessels proved unsafe, too unstable, with difficult access and problematic layouts. Often, Bryce would test potential vessels himself to see what possible issues that others might face on board. He even submitted to the indignity of being hoisted out of his chair and lifted over the side of a boat when his wheelchair would not fit. 

“First, you’ve got to get onto the boat from the dock and you don’t want to be faced with stairs to access the bathroom. Then you have someone in a wheelchair, on a moving platform. Having a high level spinal cord injury, I can’t regulate my body temperature and you’re dealing with sea conditions and weather that can change at any time. If people are strapped into a chair and they go overboard, they’re going straight to the bottom so everyone wears an auto-inflating life jacket. There are a whole lot of health and safety issues.”

Boat owners tried to help. One commercial skipper offered to widen the back of his boat and built a ramp to get Bryce on board. Monohull boats were deemed too unsteady. Most were too small to take more than two or three high-needs people with their caregivers. A boat owned by a double-amputee in Coromandel proved better than most but every vessel required compromise.

“The only solution was to build a boat,” he says, comparing his ‘build it and they will come’ philosophy to Noah and his ark.

As the catamaran nears completion, he and the Project Noah team are focussed on the next stage. That means creating a sustainable non-profit organisation that can fund ongoing operational costs – paying a skipper, maintaining the boat, taking passengers at no charge - by hiring the boat to corporate, community and educational entities. 

Support continues to come from multiple quarters, like the occupational therapists working at local medical equipment firm Cubro. Or the companies that have seized on the cause and run their own fundraising events. Currently, he is in discussion with staff from Waikato University’s marine studies department, to find ways to work together.

He credits UNO magazine with significantly raising the charity’s profile when it published his story back in 2016. That led to an offer of help from a reader with project management and feasibility study skills, which in turn set Wish4Fish on the path to winning a game-changing $1.5m New Zealand Lottery grant.

In 2016, television personality Matt Watson showcased the charity and its founder on screen. When Tauranga retiree Ray Lowe saw the show, he stepped forward to design a fishing rod that allows Bryce to cast and wind in a fish independently, courtesy of electric reels and technological wizardry operated from an iPad in his lap. The inventive stainless steel specialist has gone on to build and donate more of these fishing rods to others and to help with other public accessibility projects. 

Bryce credits his friend with driving the Wish4Fish boat project forward, too.

“Ray’s a special kind of guy. He’s a lot more determined than me, with a 24-carat heart of gold. One day, he said ‘Bryce, if you want to build a boat let’s go draw it, map it out. So we went on an asphalt area and just mapped it out with chalk. Then we came back and measured it out. It was me and a guy and some chalk in a carpark. 

“He was the one who said we need to make the wheelchair or disability king or queen on that boat, make sure all the sharp edges are smooth. Add extra beds for the support people who stay overnight. It needs to be truly accessible to all.”

Bryce pauses and smiles, staring into the distance.

“Imagine if the family of someone with terminal cancer has the ability to go out to Mayor Island on that boat and see the sunrise at Southeast Bay before their life gets really tricky.”

Once the catamaran is in the water, he plans to step back from the “boat of joy” project that has consumed much of his energy in the last decade. It’s not his boat, he insists. It belongs to New Zealand. 

After the launch, he will spend more time with his beloved family in Christchurch, seek employment, fish, watch some cricket and relish seeing friends without tapping them on the shoulder to buy tickets to a fundraising event. That said, he can’t help imagining the changes he might be able to make for disabled people who have to negotiate airline travel.

In the meantime, there is more grassroots work to do for the man who conjured a multi-million dollar dream then made it come true. Tomorrow, he has people to meet and sizzling sausages to sell at a corporate fishing competition. 

Olympic and Commonwealth Games heptathlete Sarah Cowley Ross carves out a new career

WORDS Nicky Adams PHOTOS Graeme Murray + Supplied

The Olympic and Commonwealth Games heptathlete’s journey to redefine herself is about leaning hard into her core values and carving out a career where sport still takes the centre stage.

To reach the standard required to represent your country as an Olympic and Commonwealth Games athlete is extraordinary. To reach that standard across multiple disciplines is, in my view, verging on superhuman. To be so talented, disciplined and dedicated, and still be a well-balanced, grounded and thoroughly lovely person – surely that’s impossible? Apparently not.

Aotearoa heptathlete Sarah Cowley Ross is all of the above and more. If you’re a little hazy as to what a heptathlon actually involves, to clarify, it’s a combination of track and field events that requires both speed and power. Over a period of two days, athletes compete in a total of seven events: A 200m and 800m run, the 100m hurdles, and the high jump, long jump, shot put and javelin. Heptathletes are given points for their best performance in each, then ranked according to the highest overall score.

Sarah competed in the heptathlon event at the London 2012 Olympics, where she placed 26th out of 38, having previously placed 10th out of 12 at the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. At the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, she narrowed it down to the high jump, placing ninth out of 24. Although these are the events that have garnered her the most attention, they’re only the pinnacle of myriad incredible achievements during the course of her career.

I’d presumed the world-class athlete would be a certain type of person, perhaps buzzing with pent-up energy. In fact, I found her to be warm, relaxed and only identifiable as an athlete by her long, lithe legs and an aura of fitness I sometimes fantasise about possessing myself. So deceptive is her demeanour, it’s hard to imagine her out on the field, mentally slaying her opponents one by one.

With a smile, Sarah tells me, “A lot of times people have said, ‘You’re too nice to win – you’ve got to be more mongrel.’ But I can turn it on and off when I need to. I’m very competitive. I always want to win, but that’s changed in the sense that I’m quite comfortable with who I am, so I don’t need to win Pictionary every time! I’ve also changed in that now I want to win for the collective – for communities.”

Sarah was born and raised in Rotorua; her mother Robyn Cowley is New Zealand European and her father Jerry Cowley moved to New Zealand from Samoa when he was seven. Sport was always an integral part of family life; Jerry (who sadly passed away when Sarah was 19) represented New Zealand in basketball, and her brothers Garrick and Richard are also blessed with more than their fair share of sporting prowess. Sarah says that when they were children, there was an expectation that they incorporate sport into their daily life, but not at the expense of other things.

“Looking back, we were allowed to be kids, and play was a big part of our lives. I was just fortunate that I had brothers who were better than me physically and who unconsciously pushed me. I was just always trying to keep up. Later, they’d join in my training sessions. My brothers are two of my closest friends, and when I reflect on my journey, it’s been a family one.”

By the time Sarah reached intermediate, she was keen to shine at netball. In fact, it was her love of netball that initially sparked her passion for sport. “I really wanted to be a Silver Fern – Bernice Mene was a hero to me. Half Samoan, she played netball and did athletics at a young age, and that was it – I wanted to be her. When I was 12, I went on my first representative trip to Dunedin and sat next to her on the plane, which was amazing. Then she came and watched us compete; she’d been in the same competition when she was young. Seeing your heroes is powerful – and Sandra Edge and Chantal Brunner are others I really looked to as well.”

At high school, it was clear that rather than just excellent, Sarah was gifted. She began representing New Zealand at 16, and life became very busy with events and the overseas travel that came with it. That’s not to say her studies took a back seat, though. “I was never not expected to go to university,” says Sarah. “Sport is a vehicle. I got awarded the Prime Minister’s Scholarship, which funded two degrees, and I would’ve preferred to have been training. But I know the value of education, so I got a Bachelor of Health Sciences so I can work as a physiotherapist, and I’ve also got a BA in Communications.”

It’s hard not to be blown away by the sheer commitment that would have been involved in juggling study and part-time work with training and competing as a heptathlete, which is essentially a case of taking the top level of each code and multiplying the expectation by seven. The sheer physicality involved is mind-blowing, and alongside this the mental capacity required to keep up the momentum not just for a short burst, but for 48 hours. Adding into the mix the recovery time for each event and the fact that different sports are known to “peak” at different ages, how is it possible to excel?! I feel exhausted even contemplating it.

“It would’ve been a lot easier to pick one sport,” admits Sarah. “When I was eight, I watched the 1992 Olympics and I knew that’s what I wanted to do. My greatest potential in athletics was heptathlon as I was a natural jumper. I was resistant for a long time because I knew it would be hard and I’m not naturally a thrower, but in 2005 I roomed with a heptathlete and realised it was what I was most suited to. Five months later, I made the Commonwealth Games.”

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Throughout this time, neither Sarah’s dedication nor her family’s support wavered, something that brought both amazing highs and undeniable lows. “Everything was focussed on the performance,” she says. “My friends were buying houses and I had a dollar in my bank account because I’d spent it all on supplements and massages. There were times when I was like, ‘I’m 28 and I haven’t done what I want in athletics yet, I’m single – what am I going to do with my life?’ You finish in your 30s with a lot of great skills but very little job experience.”

Still, Sarah says her ultimate high was when she qualified for the Olympics in Götzis, Austria. “I knew I was in good shape, but a really significant moment was in the high jump when I jumped 191; at the time my best had been 184. I was really free. For a long time, I’d put a handbrake on my life, and for the five years previous I hadn’t improved in the way I wanted to. For a long time, something had been holding me back. A year before, I probably wanted to quit, but I managed to turn it around, and in that high jump I finally unleashed what I was physically capable of. It was one of the purest moments of my life.”

The decision to step away from the world of international athletics in 2014 was similarly momentous, but at the same time natural. There was no big blow-out, no horrendous injury – the timing just seemed right. “I felt done,” says Sarah. “I was 30 and it seemed like a good time to retire. I got married the next year and in 2015 we had our first child, Max.” He was followed by daughter Poppy two years later. Nevertheless, going from training for five hours a day to a desk job was a huge shift, which Sarah says she struggled with.

“For so long in my life, I knew what I was aiming for, so to then have a blank canvas was hard. Immediately after retirement, I worked in marketing for one of my sponsors, Asics, and I loved the job, but I wasn’t expressing my physical gifts through a sport I love with people I love around me. And not being outside was a massive thing too.” Part of Sarah’s journey became identifying a new set of goals to satisfy her competitive nature. The excitement of becoming a mother was also part of the process, and the physical changes of pregnancy meant another mental shift. “It was a transition out of elite sport and out of a body I was used to being in, so I didn’t recognise myself,” says Sarah. “In some ways, it was a release for me to eat anything because I’d been on a performance diet.”

Fuelling her body differently was freeing, “but liberation created a disconnect about who I was and who I was becoming. I had no control – well, I had control over the chip packet! – but not over what was happening to my body.” Throughout this challenging period, Sarah was supported by her husband Angus Ross, a former Olympic sportsman who competed in bobsleigh events. Now a sports scientist, Angus was the perfect person to guide her on what she needed to do to stay well and nurture herself.

For the past few years, Sarah has been on a journey to redefine who she is. Her days are very different and elements of her psyche have undoubtedly changed, but acknowledging her core values has been central to her next chapter. “Self- acceptance became a really big part of who I wanted to be,” she says. “I ‘do’ athletics, but it’s not who I am. There’s a lot more to me than I realised, and sport is a mechanism for living my values, which are legacy, and love and courage.”

These days, Sarah says, her life is like a heptathlon. She’s equally passionate about all her projects, including Olympics- related governance positions, work as a marriage celebrant and as a columnist for online forum LockerRoom (at newsroom. co.nz), for which she exclusively covers women, advocating for them in sport. “I’m really grateful to shine a light on people and provide a platform for these stories to be heard,” Sarah says. As she well knows, it’s vital that young athletes coming through the ranks can find someone to identify with. “I know the power of seeing women in sport.” Sarah also acts as an Olympic ambassador in schools. Through talking about her own journey, she brings the Olympics to life for our youth and encourages kids to be active.

An exciting upcoming role is covering the Tokyo 2021 Olympic Games for TVNZ. Sarah’s thrilled to be a part of this; she’d watch the Olympics regardless, but in this capacity she gets to communicate what’s going on to our whole country. Plus, she says, she’s constantly looking for ways to stretch herself, and the buzz of live TV is similar to the rush of competing.

Despite moving out of the international arena, Sarah certainly hasn’t left sport, and still trains for and competes in triple jump events. “In 2017, I needed something to train for,” she says. “I always really wanted to do the triple jump, and I was highest ranked in Aotearoa. After I had Poppy, I thought I’d try it again, so last year I did and came second at the Nationals. This year, I had a back injury and got third.”

I marvel that she can switch back to the training and diet regime required. “It’s amazing that I still have that,” she concedes. “I can still turn it on. Saying no to things I know won’t help me is empowering.” That’s just another reason why Olympian Sarah Cowley Ross is a cut above the rest.

You can follow Sarah’s behind the scenes journey covering the Olympics on Instagram: @SARAHCOWLEYROSS

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Tokyo 2020 TVNZ Presenter

“For the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, I’m excited to be presenting alongside Toni Street and Scotty Stevenson on TVNZ. We’ll bring all the top sporting moments to you every hour, as they happen. All the Kiwi news and more will be beamed straight back into our homes in Aotearoa. I’ll be cheering on my friends like Emma Twiggs in the sngle skulls. and all my sisters in the Black Ferms sevens team. And, of course, I can’t wait to see how the athletics events unfold.”

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Governance roles

“A significant part of my work right now is as a board member of the New Zealand Olympic Committee and as chair of the NZOC Athletes’ Commission. The advocacy work in this role has created meaningful change for Team Aotearoa and the wider sports high-performance system. I enable athletes’ voices to come through the commission and into the boardroom. Athletes are very goal-oriented people, and want to see action come out of mahi. It’s vital they see their opinions being voiced.”

Entrepreneur and disability advocate Charmeyne Te-Nana Williams

Entrepreneur and disability advocate Charmeyne employs over 200 people to support people with disabilities, like her husband, Peter who suffered a brain injury in a boxing match. Whatever It Takes is a fitting name for her business, and the way Charmeyne approaches life. She lives between Mt Maunganui and Auckland.

PHOTOS Garth Badger WORDS Jenny Rudd

At a recent event for our speaker series, This Is How I Did It, Charmeyne told us the incredible story of how her husband Peter Williams’ brain injury and resulting tetraplegia has shaped her life. 

Charmeyne and Peter had baby twin girls, who'd just arrived home from a 5-month hospital stay after their premature birth. And four weeks earlier, the couple had buried their son who passed away after being born at 26 weeks. Charmeyne was at home with their daughters in Auckland, on maternity leave for a job she loved at New Zealand Trade and Enterprise in the Māori enterprise team. Peter was down in Timaru at a boxing match, on his path to his plan to qualify for the Olympics. He'd previously won the world title for waka ama (canoe racing) in Tahiti. He was strong, athletic, and world class at the disciplines he put his mind to. He called Charmeyne and announced "I won, so I'm now the New Zealand Super Heavyweight Champion. I just need to go and do a drug test, then I'll call you back."

But he didn't call back. One of his teammates did. Charmeyne said it wasn't what he said that was worrying, it was what he couldn't say. He could barely get the words out. Peter had suffered a traumatic brain injury which left him a tetraplegic.

Her story was so inspiring, we knew we couldn’t leave it in the room. 

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I remember the day Peter went down to Timaru like it was yesterday. It was labour weekend in 2002. That morning, we'd talked about what we had dreamt the night before. We often did that. He said "I dreamt that my spirit had left my body and it was flying across Samoa.”

After I'd spoken to Peter when he won, I remember being so excited. I thought he hadn't rung back because he was out celebrating. Then his teammate called me and said "You need to get down here." At that point I had no idea what that meant. I didn’t know what I was walking into. 

I’ve been so lucky and blessed, because my family has been amazing. My sister was staying with us at the time and she looked after our babies. I jumped on a plane and went down to Timaru. 

Since that day, my life has really been in stages. Stage one was going down to Timaru. 

STAGE ONE

The Rude Awakening

Some of the questions that came to mind at this time were: What the hell is a traumatic brain injury? I had no idea. I had never worried about Peter because he was so strong.

What the hell is this health system? I had no idea what I was walking into. I went into the hospital, he was in ICU and I just didn’t know what to expect. We weren’t allowed to stay there, so that was really daunting for me. 

If it wasn’t enough that we were trying to deal with what was going on with Peter, it was all over the news. My brother rang me up and said, “Have you seen the newspaper?” On a front page was an article that said Peter was actually a Black Power member and had sustained his brain injury through an initiation. So he’s trying to fight for his life and here’s this article on the front page. Where did that even come from?

I rang a friend of mine whose husband was an All Black who’d had some bad publicity, and he put me onto his lawyer who represented us for nothing. We went to court to get them to retract what they'd printed.

By this time, I had to send my girls off, at eight months old, to live with their grandparents in Wellington so that I could work out how to help Peter. Thank god for my whānau, because if it wasn’t for them, I’d never have been able to get through these early stages.

STAGE TWO

The BS

I thought the system would focus on what's best for Peter, me and our whānau. But it didn't feel like that at all. You'd think you’d go from stage to stage – from hospital, to rehab, to home but, actually, it's not that way. Every time I went to another stage of what I thought was our recovery, it was just the same shit on a different day. All I knew was that I loved this man and wanted to keep my family together – that was my priority.

It wasn't just the medical system either, it was our society. Arriving in Auckland, a friend asked me if I was going to stay with Peter as a partner. I was shocked. They asked if I really knew what I was getting myself in for.

We left Timaru after a month and moved into ICU in Auckland for a month, then Peter moved to a rehab facility in West Auckland just before Christmas 2002. I thought that was going to be awesome, but it was really bad. The staff weren’t used to family members sticking around, but I was there every day. I became known as ‘the bitch’ – true story. In my mind I couldn’t understand why, because I was just trying to figure out how I could make sure that Peter was well looked after. What I started to realise was that everyone was doing what they thought was best, as opposed to what was best for me and my family. 

Trying to find financial support to keep my family going was really difficult. When my maternity leave was over and I had to go back to work, I thought I’d go to Work & Income to get help with child support but was told I wasn't eligible because I was earning too much. I’m on $50k and I’ve got an adult who has a serious disability and two children. How is that a high income?

Then I was offered redundancy, which I took, because it meant I could go on benefit. I fought with my pride. I had never been on a benefit. But I knew that if I didn't, it was really going to affect my family's well being and my ability to care for them. I was exhausted and I needed to, so I did. And rather than pay me the extra $100 a week on top of my wages I could have been earning, they paid me about $70,000 a year to be on benefit and to support my kids. That seemed dumb! 

You expect and trust that the experts are giving you the right advice, but I learned that that’s not the case. I found out some time later that Peter had been eligible for child support the whole time. We had to go to court to recoup it. What a waste of time and money for everyone involved.

STAGE THREE

Kete of knowledge

Finally, the penny dropped. When you’re in a rehab facility, you have a multidisciplinary team. You go to these whānau meetings and sometimes you might be the only member of the whānau with 12 clinicians around the table, who are all telling you what you should do. I was in one of these meetings and everyone was talking about how aggressive I was. I could feel myself shrinking into a corner in the chair, just fading away. My cousin was sitting next to me and she said, “You know, what some people would describe as aggressive, others would describe as proactive”. That was a turning point for me. I thought, that's right. I’m being proactive. I’m not being aggressive, I’m just fighting for what I know is right.

From then on, I started to listen, observe and figure out the things that Peter would respond well to in terms of his rehab. I thought about how I could take all these little bits of advice and information and fill up my kete of knowledge to move forward for Peter.

As well as learning from the model he was under, I looked around the world for different care models that fit what I believed he needed.

My aunty, who’s Māori and a social worker, said, “Have a look at this and tell me what you think.” It was a Māori model of care called Te Aho Takitoru which had been developed by her team as a social work kaupapa. What really jumped out to me was that the mana of the person being cared for was at the core. Reading it solidified in my mind what I have been trying to do since Peter's accident - I was fighting for the mana of this man. I just wanted him to be recognised as the man of the family, as a dad and as a partner. That’s all I was asking – nothing more and nothing less.

STAGE FOUR

Home is where the heart is

I thought going home was going to be easy – but it wasn’t. Having been in hospital and rehab for nearly three years, we’d applied to ACC to fund the modifications we needed for Peter to live at home. It was just before Christmas and I got a reply from ACC saying they’d declined our application. The application had taken forever, and they'd said no. I felt it was because they were solely looking at the injury and how to manage that injury. It was being done adequately, they felt, in the rehab centre. I could see though that there was so much more to the picture surrounding Peter's injury. What about his well-being, his wairua (spirit) and the mental health of my family as a result of the care decisions?

When ACC turned down our application, I thought if I don’t do something now, my family is just not going to survive this. 

My brother-in-law worked for 60 Minutes and asked if they could do a story on us. I had turned down offers like this in the past, but I was desperate. So I said ok on the condition that Peter's integrity was maintained, and that the focus should be on getting Peter home.

At one stage during the research, I could see there was some focus on the fictitious Black Power connection. So I went marching up to the Black Power pad in Mt Wellington, knocked on the door and asked their leader to speak on 60 Minutes and set the record straight that Peter was not connected to them.

In the end, the show only talked about ACC for about a minute and how our application had been declined. It took three years for them to decline it, and honestly about two days to approve it.

Finally, we were going home. I got so excited. But we then headed into a new world. The world of agencies. In 18 months, we had around a hundred people come through my house. My girls were verbally abused, and Peter was physically and sexually abused. We went through another grueling court process to bring the sexual abuser to justice, but she got off on a technicality. That whole process was so traumatising for me. It was like I was the criminal. This woman wasn’t held accountable in any way, shape or form, and neither was the agency. That was it. No more. I had to take all my learnings and bring them together to provide a new model.

We weren't the only family going through this either. I knew there were others looking for the same as us, so I put together a business proposal to set up a programme bringing together everything I learnt from Te Aho Takitoru, my research and experience in hospital, at the rehab facility, and the agencies.

Ten years after Peter's accident, I set up What Ever It Takes, a home-based rehabilitation service.

STAGE FIVE

Doing Whatever It Takes

Our vision for our company was to set the standard internationally for how we care for families, regardless of their situation. 

The biggest difference between a mainstream clinical approach and the Māori model we use, is we take into consideration all aspects of what’s going on in the whānau’s lives. A mainstream model looks at what's best for that injury in isolation. But that’s not reality for our families. We don't focus just on physical things like the brain or the spine. This person lives at home with a whole family, so we consider that whole picture. What help do they need to access their entitlements? What is the best wrap-around care that this particular family needs? How does the family operate? What are their dynamics? What are their values? What do they need to support them to live how they want to live?

We work mainly with Māori and Pacific Island whānau. They’re already compromised and they’re further compromised with this disability. I’m a supporter of whānau looking after whānau. I think if you want your whānau member to look after you, then let them look after you. There have been lots of debates about whether whānau members take advantage of the situation, but that’s really not my experience.

Our business model has allowed us to really flourish through the lockdown periods. We’re essential services, but we have a single team for each whānau we look after, so during lockdown we went right back to our aspirational goals and how we were going to do that within the confines of our four walls.

Each time my company gets audited, we receive continuous improvement on continuous improvement. That’s not just great, that’s exceptional in our sector. My goal is to create pathways for the future. I want us to be able to really pave the way for other organisations to come in and support families. 

STAGE SIX

A deep breath

When my girls were at intermediate school, I realised that I had become so absorbed with what was going on for Peter that I was being counterproductive. That's when I started to think about my happiness. All they’d known their whole life was this environment of conflict where I'd been fighting for Peter. It was incredibly hard, but I moved out. It was the right thing for Peter to be able to work with his team from then on, and for our girls, and me.

My journey continues. It's been 18 years and time moves on. My father and my grandmother have passed away. My twins are leaving school. 

I never thought that I’d meet somebody or fall in love, but I have. I’ve had feelings of guilt, but Peter and I were only young when this happened; he was 27. I’ve always committed to being married to Peter. But I got to a point where I thought, I don’t want to die wondering if there could have been more.

When we first met, Rob said to me, “I need to tell you something, I’m having a baby,” and I went, “Oh well, I’m married. I’ll have your baby if you have my husband.” And he goes, “Sweet.” So that’s been the basis of our family. We have five kids now with our big, beautiful, blended whānau. We have all this extended whānau on Rob’s side, and we have Peter and our extended whānau on my side, including Peter’s two sons Puna ma Faleasi and Siagogo. 

It's unconventional, but it works because we make it work. I feel that’s probably my biggest learning: you just have to make things work.

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No reira ngā mihi nui, ki a koutou. Mo te whakarongo mai ki ahau. Thank you for listening to me. Go home and tell the people that you love how much you love them. I’ve learnt how to care for my family and it's the pathway that I intend to to follow forever more.

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What Ever It Takes

There's such determination in the name of Charmeyne Te Nana-Williams's business. And love, when you consider who the beneficiaries are of this determination. What Ever It Takes employs over 200 people across the North Island to deliver a programme of home-based care for people with severe and complex disabilities. What makes it different is the whanāu-centred approach. The family is involved in all aspects of the care, because Whatever It Takes looks at the needs of the whole family, rather than keeping the spotlight on just the injury.

This programme has been developed by Charmeyne and her team to give control, mana and quality of life to those suffering from and affected by major brain traumas and other life-changing disabilities. Their struggle to be allowed to take Peter home to care for him showed Charmeyne that there was a need for a different model of care.

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The rise of the local rock star with his feet firmly on the ground

WORDS Nicky Adams PHOTOS JOEL MCDOWELL

Like any self-respecting frontman, L.A.B vocalist/guitarist Joel Shadbolt has that certain something you can’t quite put your finger on, the upshot of pure talent mixed with a palpable drive. Add the edge that makes his vehicle of choice a Harley-Davidson, and it’s a heady mix. But Joel’s also a man with a firm grip on reality, so although he may perform to sold-out stadiums, he’s also happy to mow his mum’s lawn.

L.A.B is riding high on a wave of success. After a year of chart-topping brilliance, November’s Aotearoa Music Awards saw them pick up two prestigious gongs for Best Roots Artist and People’s Choice. They’re currently working on their latest album, L.A.B IIII, due for release in January. It’ll be their fourth, with the previous three making waves in the industry and gathering the band a following that (on social media, at least) increases by the minute. 

It was the 2020 summer single In the Air that created the seismic shift that took the band from successful to household name. It’s one of those tunes people just can’t get enough of, crossing genres and leapfrogging age groups to get everyone tapping their feet and singing along. It’s nothing short of musical gold.

Despite L.A.B standing on mixed-genre musical terrain (soul, reggae, blues, R&B, funk…), the latest album sees them really grow into their groove. Reflecting on this, Joel says, “There’s always a common thread between the albums, and like any band, the sound evolves over time. This album has more strings, which we only dabbled with a little bit on the last album, and we’re using a horn section for a couple of songs. We’re experimenting with different instruments, which in turn makes you try out different styles. We’re not a band that’s stuck in one place – we’ve got reggae, funk, blues and electronic influences in there.” 

I wonder if the pressure of trying to follow one chart-topper with another leads to a less natural or experimental creative process. Joel thinks not. “In the past, we’ve tried to write in a way that’d suit a certain market, going in with the mentality ‘Let’s write a hit’, and that’s never worked for us,” he says. “We figured out quickly that to write well, we just need all the instruments set up in the room and to jam as a band. That’s when the best stuff comes out. It’s interesting that as one song out of 40-odd, In the Air is what people gravitated towards. It’s not a ‘pop’ song as such. It was an organic, jam-an-idea-then-press-the-record-button type of song.” 

The thing about this kind of out-of-the-box success is that the follow-up is going to be hotly anticipated and expectations sky high. You’d imagine this would make releasing the new album a bit nerve-wracking. “Definitely,” says Joel. “But our approach has always been the long game – to be a band that writes albums, tours a lot and builds a solid fan base from the ground up. We’re doing what we love. Yes, all eyes are on us, and there’s the ‘Can they do it again?’ question, but we felt that pressure with the first album, which put us into the vortex. Although the second album didn’t do so well, with the third – boom! We’ve taken that same concept and I think the songwriting is stronger. We’ve been playing together for five years now, so there’s a very strong chemistry and that’s a key ingredient in good songs – a band that’s cohesive and works together. I think our fans are going to love this next album. It feels really cool.”

When Joel got the call from founding member Brad Kora in 2015 to see if he was interested in joining L.A.B as its lead singer, he knew it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Never mind that he believed his main strength was as a guitarist rather than a vocalist – he jumped at the chance. Brad and his brother Stuart were already big names in their own right with their band Kora, and Joel himself had grown up a fan of their music, so he couldn’t sign on the dotted line fast enough. “Preparation met opportunity, and I was prepared to sacrifice everything for that moment,” he says. With Joel, Brad, Stuart, ex-Katchafire member Ara Adams-Tamatea and Miharo Gregory in the mix, the chemistry took hold, and the first album proved it was a winning formula. 

“Preparation met opportunity, and I was prepared to sacrifice everything for that moment.”

In many ways, Joel seems too grounded to be the New Zealand rock idol he’s become, although music has been his world from the start. Growing up in Papamoa, he went to the local primary school then onto Mount College, staying for three years before the decision was made to move him to Bay of Plenty Polytechnic (now called Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology), where he’d been offered a scholarship to study a two-year diploma in performance and production. On completing this, he studied jazz for three years.

“While I was at polytech, I went to a summer music academy in LA,” says Joel. “That was a moment where I realised that if I wanted to take my music seriously, I had to study on a higher level. At that time, you could either study classical or jazz at a tertiary level, and if you wanted to get good at understanding the harmony of contemporary music, that was the way to go.” 

The Shadbolt household was a musical one. His dad is professional country singer/guitarist and his mother is also a music enthusiast, boasting a collection that would make anyone with an ear for a tune weep. With songs by Jerry Coker, Van Morrison, The Doors and The Doobie Brothers the soundtrack to Joel’s early years, he still loves those ’70s beats today. Busking and playing in cover bands and other groups at local pubs was his rite of passage, as was the usual OE, which he spent in Cornwall.

Joel returned to New Zealand when his father fell ill, and felt a shift once his dad passed away. It was time to get serious about his life goals. He joined L.A.B the following year; five years later, they’re one of New Zealand’s hottest bands. 

The celebrity part of fame is hard to get your head around, says Joel. “You’re never ready for the attention that can be thrown at you – no one teaches you how to deal with that. The energy it requires to have your game face on every day just isn’t natural.” 

We talk about fellow Kiwi band Six60’s upcoming documentary, Till the Lights Go Out, in which its members discuss their vulnerabilities and struggle to cope with the level of success they’ve achieved. Joel can identify with how they sometimes find themselves in a dark place. “Your world gets noisy,” he says. “I used to sit and play guitar all day, but it’s like your reality gets flipped. I’m doing what I love, but now there are other things that are a part of that.”

“You’re never ready for the attention that can be thrown at you – no one teaches you how to deal with that. The energy it requires to have your game face on every day just isn’t natural.” 

Being a musician is, after all, not the same as being a performer. In a sense, the two go hand in hand, but the performance aspect is notoriously daunting for many talented musicians. Joel agrees that talent doesn’t guarantee the X-factor needed to front a band. “In the early days, I struggled with stage presence and confidence,” he says. “I worked on being more outward with my personality and learned a lot just by playing and being in a band with musicians who had toured on that level and played the bigger stages, just how to work the energy of the crowd a bit better, as well as my energy as a performer. That’s something I’ve crafted over the last four or five years. I’m constantly refining and analysing.” 

As seasoned musicians, Brad, Stuart and Ara have been generous with their guidance, and not just in a musical sense. At the start, the band sat down and wrote on the back of a pizza box a list of things they wanted to achieve. Hit songs and house purchases were included on it – not exactly drugs, groupies and throwing TVs out of hotel windows. As Joel points out, though: “It’d be different if we were a group of 29-year-olds, but we’re not.” 

Having been on the circuit for some time, the older band members were all too aware that fame is transient, and so is the influx of cash. To ensure financial harmony, the group set themselves up equally, in a similar way to bands such as U2 and the Rolling Stones. “It doesn’t matter who writes the songs – up the guts, it’s an equal spread through the whole band. The person who writes the hit song doesn’t get the credit, the band gets the credit, and everyone gets an equal share of that pie, which is key to everyone feeling ownership of the band and working hard because you’re getting paid properly. It keeps you accountable. We want to be a band that has depth; we want to be here for 30 or 40 years. The success is amazing, but we’ll carry on regardless.”

It’s this focus and work ethic that sees the band tour relentlessly. They don’t take their fans or success for granted, and continue to play at everything from small venues to stadiums and arenas. Covid-19 has obviously changed the dynamic, with the international side of things stalled for the time being. However, Joel doesn’t seem too fazed by this and social media means L.A.B’s still getting its name out there. Pre-pandemic, the group had been making inroads into the Australian market, largely via the ex-pats over there, and there are still a few opportunities coming up. They’ve got their feelers out in the US and Europe too. 

Joel has his head screwed on in some areas, yet he’s still a loose cannon in others. He had a minor mishap on his motorbike earlier this year, but it’s part of his rockstar DNA (and possibly his actual DNA – his mum is also a biker). His accident couldn’t have happened at a worse time, just a day before the band was due to open for Fat Freddy’s Drop in front of a massive crowd. Things weren’t looking too peachy for a guitarist with a dislocated shoulder, but despite being told he needed to stay in hospital, in true frontman style, Joel topped up on painkillers and whisky and played on. 

The ability to temper success with reality is in part what makes Joel and the rest of L.A.B such an awesome combination. Fame’s not the incentive – bringing beautiful music to life is what drives them. They don’t take themselves too seriously, and if this wasn’t obvious before, Brad’s acceptance speech for their Best Roots Artist Award well and truly captures their spirit. He told the audience: “Five years ago, I met Joel, I was writing this song and we had about two fans. I was looking for a singer and I heard this guy on the Good Morning show, and he sounded like a black man, so I looked at the TV and it was this ginga...”  As Joel basked in Brad’s humour, it was clear that a prouder, fair-skinned redhead could not be found in all of Aotearoa.

@LAB_MUSIC

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FUN FACTS ABOUT JOEL

• Joel’s 29, an only child and with the world at his feet, would still rather live right here. Town, country or beach? “I’m not fussed,” he says. “As long as I’m in the Bay, I don’t really care.”

• If he could play with anyone, he’d play with Eric Clapton. “I’ve listened to him across his whole career,” says Joel. “His voice, his songwriting, his career has been massive.” 

• What’s one gig he wishes he could have been at? “I’d have loved to be a person in the crowd at Wembley watching Queen, with Freddy Mercury singing and Brian May on guitar.”

• He still teaches beginner guitar lessons. “There are parts of my old reality I don’t want to change and I love teaching,” he says. “So on a Saturday night, I’m rocking out to 1000 people, but on a Tuesday, I’m teaching a kid how to play a G.”

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The multisporter making his own way in the world

WORDS Sue Hoffart PHOTOS Graeme Murray

For four-time Coast to Coast champ Sam Clark, dodging explosives in China and kayaking from Sweden to Finland are what makes adventure sports not just a hobby, but a way of life.

Endurance athlete Sam Clark credits cartoons with kick-starting his career as a jet-setting adventurer and multisport titleholder.

In recent years, the tenacious Welcome Bay resident has managed to dodge explosives in a Chinese quarry and container ships in the Baltic Sea. In February, he ran, biked and kayaked across the South Island in just over 10 hours to scoop the prestigious Coast to Coast world multisport championship. It was the fourth time in five years that he’d won the gruelling 243km race from Kumara Beach to Christchurch.

His early forays into sport were far less successful. As a boy, Sam proved uncoordinated with a hockey stick and similarly awkward with a soccer ball.

By age 10, he had his priorities sorted. If the painfully slow school bus couldn’t deliver him home in time for his favourite martial arts cartoon, he would bike to and from Otakiri Primary School himself. Given the school was 11km from the Clark family abode in the rural Eastern Bay of Plenty, Sam easily clocked up more than 100km of riding each week. It also set a precedent; if he wanted to venture into downtown Whakatane on the weekend, his parents knew he could cycle the 70km round trip himself.

Young Sam had discovered the joy of independent travel and found himself quickly, accidentally fit.

“By default, I became one of the fast kids,” the 30-year-old recalls. “And winning cross country was pretty important at primary school. Once I was fit, running opened doors.”

Sam and older sister Sophia began training for triathlon competitions, piling in the back of their father’s ute to swim train at Lake Rotoma. From a young age, the siblings also embarked on challenging multi-day tramping and kayaking trips in Urewera National Park with their outdoorsy parents, Environment Bay of Plenty Councillor Bill Clark and recently-retired primary school teacher Alison. 

Sam suspects his thirst for adventure was inherited from his poetry-loving father, who had lived and travelled in Africa, owned sawmills and gave up an accounting degree to become a deer culler. Bill Clark also competed in the Coast to Coast multisport event that his son would go on to win four times.

“Growing up, complaining was not an option. I think there’s something in my blood that makes me push myself to do mad things,” says Sam.

The school teacher’s son was also studious and bookish and a trumpet-playing member of the Bay of Plenty Brass Band till age 14. To earn any screen-watching time, he and his sister needed to chalk up the equivalent period in music practice.

At Whakatane High School, Sam discovered interschool multisport races. He borrowed a mountain bike, dusted off his father’s old kayak and fared unexpectedly well against a much bigger pool of teenage peers. Hooked, he asked his parents whether he might perhaps have a racing kayak for Christmas. 

“I woke up Christmas morning to find there was a splitting axe under the tree. It was their way of giving me the opportunity to earn it, and I spent most afternoons and holidays splitting firewood,” explains Sam.

It took months of work to earn the $2000 ticket price.

“By the time I could afford the new kayak, I had the strength to paddle it.” 

Even before he was legally old enough to hold a licence, Sam would load up his prized craft and drive 10 minutes down country roads to the Rangitaiki River, to practice paddling. 

His final year of high school was a blur of entry forms and weekend races, including the rugged Motu Challenge multisport race where he finished fourth amid an adult field. He was only 18 when he entered and won the non-elite, two-day section of the Coast to Coast event for the first time. 

“I thought I might truly be good at this kind of racing, but how could I fund it?” recalls Sam.

Unwilling to face the prospect of more full-time study, he opted instead for a mechanical engineering apprenticeship at the workshop where he had spent his school holidays. While he was an able enough worker, Sam was not a model employee. 

“I was constantly at odds with my bosses about staying late or doing overtime because all I wanted to do was go and train. And I was taking a lot of unpaid leave to go do sports events around the country,” says Sam.

For four years, his apprentice’s wage was spent on race entry fees, travel and sporting equipment, ticking off Ironman events and world championships, eight-day expedition races with a team and individual challenges in New Zealand and overseas. 

Once he had his fitter and turner’s qualification in hand, Sam continued to mix work and sport.

“A lot of athletes my age dropped away. They went to uni or couldn’t fund themselves any more. But I was always able to find work and some way of getting to the start line. Eating baked beans, using borrowed gear; if you really want to do it, you’ll somehow make it work.“

Disappointments came with the wins and placings. A planned trip to Europe, for a season of  cycle racing, had to be abandoned when Sam tumbled off his mountain bike and broke his wrist. Those events that didn’t go well only served to spur him on.

“I thought I’ve got to train harder, come back better, more well trained, better prepared and faster,” says Sam.

“I made an awful lot of mistakes but I learned from them. What to eat, what not to eat. What gear to use. Lining up and doing ultramarathons, thinking running 90km will be easy, then having to walk 40km at the end because I didn’t fuel properly, or train. 

“There’s nothing like the absolutely darkest moments to learn from.”

In China, Sam has raced through northern provinces using Soviet-era maps to traverse roads that no longer exist. He has paddled on the Yellow River and through one of the world’s largest cave systems. In later years, mobile translation apps have helped him communicate with friendly, curious locals as well as fellow Chinese competitors. Once, he and his teammates found themselves in the middle of a quarry, surrounded by explosives. 

“There were sticks of dynamite and blasting caps in the rocks around us. What did we do? We ran extra fast to get out of there! No, my mum doesn’t know about that,” laugh Sam.

“But part of what makes racing in China so appealing is that when you finish each day, all the teams sit around a dinner table and share war stories, so there’s a lot of camaraderie involved. It’s the hardest and most challenging races I’ve ever done, in places nobody has ever heard of.”

Some destinations are easier to love than others. He talks fondly of a particularly satisfying world swim-run championship event in Sweden that involved 72km of running and 12km of swimming between islands in the Stockholm archipelago. The spectacular scenery was part of it, and the Baltic Sea’s low salinity level meant he didn’t need goggles and the water tasted almost sweet.

Sam has become far more appreciative of the places racing takes him. He now makes a concerted effort to stay with local residents, to explore and try the local cuisine rather than focussing solely on race preparation and recovery. His favourite memory of a French alpine event involves staying with a local family for a week and helping them concrete their driveway.

The failed soccer and hockey player has certainly discovered the joy of being a valued part of a team. He has found his tribe; a like-minded international group of adrenaline-fuelled athletes who have taught him about organisation, team dynamics, friendship and the thrill of pitting himself against a series of outrageously difficult challenges.

Two years ago, when he raced – and won – with the Swedish military adventure team, he found himself paddling from Sweden to Finland.

“It was terrifying. You’re in the middle of the open sea with towering waves, in kayaks that aren’t up to the job, trying to avoid enormous container ships and knowing you just have to keep going, turning back’s not an option,” says Sam.

“For me, it’s such an exciting, unpredictable way of living.

“I don’t always look forward to a race, sometimes I dread it. I put an awful lot of pressure on myself… And yes, I do that in life as well, because all this has an opportunity cost. I look at friends who have gone to uni, have steady jobs, own houses and sometimes you can’t help but compare what you have.

“But of course, I’ve now had 15 years of travel and adventures. It opens you up to having these absolutely wild experiences you could never hope to achieve any other way. I love the sense of fulfilment. I certainly wouldn’t change it.”

Boy meets girl

Sport and social media brought Welsh medic Zoë Cruse into Sam’s orbit.

The pair became Facebook friends after he spotted the dreadlocked doctor out for a run in Whangarei, where she was working in urgent care after emigrating from the United Kingdom.

Then, when Zoë was living in the Philippines and Sam was racing in China, they found themselves in similar time zones and began chatting online. Once they were both back on New Zealand soil, they met in person for the first time. On their second date, mutual love was declared. By their sixth date, in the summer of 2018, she agreed to move to Tauranga with him.

Since finishing her medical degree, Zoë aims to spend six months practicing medicine and the other half of the year travelling and teaching yoga or scuba diving.

“The reason we are so good together is because our lifestyles are similar and we have similar values,” she says.

“I think I’m a bit nomadic, I have the worst itchy feet. Helping people and making a difference to people is a big part of what I do but I’ve never wanted medicine to define me. It’s one of the things I do.”

Zoë is also an amateur triathlete and a current member of Tauranga’s musical theatre group.

A locked-down world

Sam and partner Zoë ought to be in Europe right now, recovering from an Ironman-style event in Germany. But the global COVID-19 pandemic has scratched almost everything from the international racing calendar and removed Sam’s ability to earn from sport.

“COVID-19 really forced me to evaluate the way I’m living a little bit,” Sam says. “Without having an income stream from overseas races, I’ve had to go back to doing a bit more work using my trade.”

He is currently working as a landscaper, taking engineering work when he can and studying towards an engineering diploma, while fitting in 14 to 20 hours of training each week. And he considers himself one of the lucky ones.

“There are an awful lot of athletes out there stacking shelves or making coffee to make ends meet. They are really struggling with their own sense of worth because there aren’t races to target and work towards. And that’s not just professional athletes.

“For now, overseas events are not going to be a reality for most Kiwi athletes. It certainly makes you appreciate what we’ve been able to do in the past.

He says domestic events are starting to pop up again.

“One I really want to do is the Geyserland Mega Grind, a 700km bike packing race from Rotorua to Gisborne and back via Urewera National Park,” says Sam.

“In the absence of overseas travel, I’m turning my sights back on grassroots New Zealand events. This is a great opportunity to look at what we have in New Zealand. People flock here from all round the world to fulfil their sense of adventure and there are still many parts of the country I have not been to.”

Theresa Gattung: pioneering change from the top down

A regular fixture on Fortune’s most powerful women in international business lists, Theresa is no stranger to the challenges such females face. Now leading the New Zealand chapter of SheEO, she’s helping a global community make long-overdue change. 

Spend any time looking into the life and times of Theresa Gattung and you’ll realise one thing very quickly: she’s not afraid to pioneer change. Arriving in the public eye at the age of 37, when she became the youngest ever and first female chief executive of Telecom (now Spark), she then went on to co-found My Food Bag, the home-delivered cooking-kit service that revolutionised the way thousands of New Zealanders approach mealtimes. She’s been recognised as one of the country’s leading philanthropists, working with charities such as the SPCA and Tauranga-based Cambodia Charitable Trust, and more recently launched the New Zealand arm of world-first female venture-capital fund SheEO. 

Playing her part in an ambitious goal to see 10,000 women-led ventures funded through SheEO worldwide, Theresa’s knee-deep in what may be her most important quest for change yet. To put its significance into context and demonstrate the urgent need for organisations of SheEO’s kind, you need only to consider that worldwide just four percent of all available capital is currently invested in women-led ventures. Having spent decades holding prominent positions in the business world, Theresa’s quick to recognise that even in 2020, the playing field for women in business is still far from even. “You don't really have to walk very long as a woman in business to realise that it's still harder,” she says. “It's not as hard as it was 20 or 30 years ago, but it’s still hard.” 

As the daughter of two entrepreneurial British migrants, it’s no surprise that Theresa grew up to be business-savvy, with a bent for challenging the status quo. Leaving behind their native London, her working-class parents, Marion and John, set sail for New Zealand in the 1960s. They were what Theresa affectionately calls, “ten-pound Poms”. “They paid £10, got the passage by ship and had to sign an agreement saying that they’d stay in New Zealand for at least two years,” she says. “And here they are, over 50 years later.”

Moving from their initial base in Wellington to settle in the Bay of Plenty, Marion and John set up a souvenir business in Rotorua. “My parents were entrepreneurs, in a small way,” says Theresa. “My father retired from the paid workforce in his forties after ill-health and had to support himself ever since, with property and other interests. So, yes, I come from a background of small business people.” 

Breaking away from their established family tradition of taking the same career path as their parents before them, Theresa believes that her parents’ success in New Zealand is partly due to their adopted Kiwi mentality – simply getting stuck in and being willing to try something new. She also recognises her father’s progressive and supportive approach to parenting as a unique factor in shaping the person she became. “My father had only sisters and then he had four daughters,” she says. “He was always very encouraging of us reaching our full potential, and never had any particular gender stereotypes about what girls could do [or] boys could do, which was pretty unusual [at the time].” 

On completing her schooling in Rotorua, Theresa studied a business degree at the University of Waikato, before moving to Wellington to complete a law degree. Even as a young adult, she understood that she would need to play her part in fighting for gender equality in the business world. At the time, there were no women running large companies in New Zealand, so she knew that achieving her dream of running a large company by the age of 40 would not be easy. “I've always understood that there are structural issues that can hold women back in society,” she says. 

In the years that followed, Theresa began her corporate career climb through TVNZ, National Mutual, the Bank of New Zealand and telecommunications company Telecom. Originally joining the latter in 1994, she was appointed CEO in 1999. As its first female CEO, she was thrust into the public eye, at times facing challenges that her male counterparts would rarely experience (after being announced as chief executive at a press conference, the first question she was asked was if she intended to have children). 

As she says in her memoir, Bird on a Wire, Theresa successfully led the company into an entirely new era of communication. “I joined Telecom in 1994 and I was given a cell phone that was really big; you almost needed a separate briefcase for the size of the cell phones!” she laughs. Two years later, returning from a conference in Europe in 1996, she began to realise just how big the internet was destined to become, and went on to lead Telecom’s transition into the age of IT. “When I was CEO, we bought a couple of large IT companies. We bought Gen-i and we bought Computer Land, and we put it together with Telecom’s IT division and we called it Gen-i. Then over that time, Telecom became the number-one provider of IT services.”

Stepping down from her role at Telecom in 2007, Theresa spent several years pursuing other business and philanthropic ventures, before co-founding My Food Bag in 2012 with Cecilia and James Robinson. “When Cecilia was on maternity [leave] with her son, Tom, she wrote up the business plan for My Food Bag and showed it to me,” she says. “I looked at it and I thought, ‘Yes, this is really gonna work’. I realised that something like that would fill such a need for women of every situation because ‘What are we going to have for dinner tonight?’ usually falls on the woman of the household.” 

As chair of My Food Bag and a key investor, Theresa worked with the Robinsons, Nadia Lim and her husband Carlos Bagrie to swiftly get the business off the ground. “In the beginning it was just us and then we started hiring people, and we did have that philosophy that we're going to go for the best,” she says. “We had the best advisors, we got the best people and we always thought that it could be a bigger business. We never saw it just as a small business. We set it up, the systems and everything, to scale fast.” 

After huge and rapid success, a majority share of My Food Bag was sold to Waterman Capital, freeing Theresa up to focus on building a name for SheEO in New Zealand. “When I heard [SheEO founder] Vicki Saunders speak a few years ago at a conference in America, she had just launched SheEO in Canada [in 2015] and I thought it was a brilliant idea,” she says. “Her idea was to completely change the paradigm.”

Simple yet hugely effective, SheEO operates on the principal of ‘radical generosity’, a belief that trust, collaboration and a strong female community is key to creating opportunities for more women-led ventures to succeed. Each year, an intake of local investors, called Activators, each contribute $1100 into a central funding pool. These women then work together to choose five women-led ventures to fund through five-year interest-free loans. 

“[Vicki] had a couple of cycles [of funding] in Canada and I went up to her and said, ‘This would be fantastic in New Zealand,’” says Theresa. “I organised a conference and brought her down [to New Zealand] and she presented to a room full of 500 women who just loved the idea. We decided to launch in New Zealand, but then we hit a roadblock because in Canada [SheEO] is not a business or a charity. It's not tax-deductible and it doesn't want it to be a charity. We're trying to reframe what business is, and I believe the world will be more effectively changed through business than through charity. So we struggle because the law doesn't really have a category that's in between.”

“You don't really have to walk very long as a woman in business to realise that it's still harder.”

Having ironed out some teething problems and brought Westpac on board as a key supporter, the New Zealand chapter of SheEO has so far raised $700,000, which has been loaned to 10 local ventures over two cycles of funding. Worldwide, SheEO has so far raised more than US$4 million in loans through 4000 Activators, allowing 53 women-led ventures in five countries to gain vital funding. The opportunity to change the face of business seems almost limitless. 

When it comes to selecting ventures to invest in, SheEO has unique criteria. They have to be at least 51 percent women-owned, be doing something good for the country, the world or the planet, meet revenue criteria and demonstrate an ability to scale. Among recent local ventures that have received funding from SheEO is Pure Peony Skincare, a Nelson-based business that uses the root of organic peonies to create natural products to soothe skin conditions such as eczema, psoriasis and rosacea. 

Although SheEO has game-changing benefits for their selected ventures, the system isn’t all take. Through several nationwide and regional events, SheEO Activators have the opportunity to make invaluable business connections themselves through their involvement in the organisation. Every year, SheEO runs a launch event at which the supported ventures for the year are announced and Activators have the opportunity to gather on a national level. Along with networking opportunities, Activators also have the chance to participate in follow-on funding programmes with the ventures as and when they become available. 

“The first benefit you get as an Activator is meeting all the other Activators,” says Theresa. “Vicki comes down from Canada and it’s amazing to spend a day and an evening with that group and to be so inspired. You really make linkages that will benefit your business.” 

SheEO is unique in that the required investment is relatively minimal, allowing women of all ages and backgrounds to invest in the fund. Aiming to encourage a more diverse range of women to join as Activators, SheEO gives Activators the opportunity to split the yearly financial commitment across a monthly payment plan. This commitment to accessibility helps to ensure that SheEO not only continues to support women-led ventures, but also creates a chance for women who otherwise may not feel empowered to do so to become involved in investing. 

It’s this sort of clever thinking that has contributed to the rapid growth of SheEO locally and internationally. The first ever SheEO Global Summit took place in Canada on March 9 and SheEO Magazine launched in New Zealand with the aim to help to further the SheEO’s reach and inspire Kiwi women. 

Seeing SheEO in action, it’s obvious that the world needs more of its kind and Theresa is to be commended for having the foresight to see it could work in the New Zealand market. With a knack for knowing exactly what the world needs when, she says she allows both passion and logic to guide her when it comes to choosing what to take on. “I do what moves me at the heart level and the head level. I think, ‘I could make a difference to this and it would be a good use of my time. It’d have a big enough impact and I’d enjoy doing it.’”

Theresa knows better than anyone that New Zealand is a nation of risk-takers and innovators, but she insists we need to keep pushing for more and looking at how to solve the big issues in our society. When asked about what the world needs most right now, she puts a challenge to her fellow Kiwis. “We just need to keep being more of what we can be, because we can really mean something to the world,” she says. “We show what's possible. We have to make New Zealand the best she can be because we lead the world in many ways. We have to keep doing that, even though we're not perfect. New ways of thinking to deal with problems can flourish here. We have to become even more a part of the solution – that’s the mission of every person living in New Zealand

Theresa recommends: Inspiring reads

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood 

A sequel to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, originally published in 1985 and now a TV series, this 2019 novel is set 15 years after the gripping and gruesome events of the first book. “I find it a complete reminder that [women] have to keep reclaiming our power and asserting our right to have our voices heard,” says Theresa. 

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer  

Written by a botanist and professor of biology, Braiding Sweetgrass explores our reciprocal relationship with the earth in connection to the widespread general awakening of ecological consciousness. “It’s a fantastic ode to nature and an inspirational read about the beauty of it,” says Theresa.

Diving into the art of surfing after life-altering illness

PHOTOS Salina Galvan

Matt Scorringe first set foot on a surfboard at the age of two and has been catching waves since he was five. Now, he’s making waves, after a life-altering health battle gave him the impetus to pursue surfing in a way that’s changing the ambition and success of surfers throughout New Zealand.

Growing up in Whangamata, it was bound to happen. After Matt Scorringe’s parents moved from Hamilton and took over the family bach in what he affectionately calls ‘Whangas’, the beachfront location had an immediate effect.

“I was probably first on a board when I was about two years old,” Matt says. “My brother surfed and growing up where surfing has such a rich history meant we had boards in the garage. I think I was about five when I took a foam board from the garage and first started catching waves. Whenever mum wasn’t looking, I’d be up to my waist in the water.”

Fortunately, Matt’s mother usually was looking, as she could watch the young surfer from her kitchen window to make sure he didn’t drown. And when not up to his waist in water, Matt worked at the family gas station to save money for boards. Kiwi childhoods don’t get much more classic than that, and so it was pretty much inevitable that surfing was going to be in Matt’s future. 

“There were these iconic surfers like ‘Taff’ Kenning, Bob Davies, and Pete Mitchell around there,” Matt says, “and, though, at the time they weren’t called pro-surfers, they were real innovators of the sport in New Zealand. Growing up in that environment – a beach town with three surf shops and what seemed like just 500 people, with the culture and the waves – it had a real effect. There was just no other road for me.”

By age 14, that road had taken Matt to Bali where he represented New Zealand at the International Surfing Association World Junior Titles, a feat he repeated until the age of 20 when Billabong came knocking on his door with a sponsorship offer. He moved to Australia at 17 to be closer to the competition circuit and, soon after, teamed up with pro surfer Joshua Kerr, a friendship that would later see the pair travel the world together, living the dream: surfing, and getting paid to do it.

But all that changed in 2009. “I got home from a tour in Hawaii,” recalls Matt, “and eight days later I was having chemotherapy. I thought I’d just been burning the candle at both ends a bit too much, and maybe had a bit of a hangover, but the turning point was when I woke up and my whole body was covered in a rash and I was getting blood noses.” A quick trip to the doctor followed and the assessment was earth-shattering: acute myeloid leukaemia. 

“There was really no time to process it or make decisions on it. Fortunately, I responded to treatment, but it took eight months of intense chemo. The initial stage is a bit of a blur to me – it’s one of those parts of your life that you tend to block out a bit. It was a pretty crazy experience and I really had a moment but, once I got to the hospital, that changed. I’ve always been very competitive, so once I was at the hospital, I thought, ‘Well, this is another challenge and I’m going to smash this thing and win it.’ I set a goal of being back and competing in the New Zealand nationals the next year – and, though I still looked like a cancer patient when I got there, it was a stepping stone for my journey back.”

“I’ve always been very competitive, so once I was at the hospital, I thought, ‘Well, this is another challenge and I’m going to smash this thing and win it.”

It was also a turning point. Like many people suddenly faced with their own mortality and months of medical treatment, Matt did a lot of thinking.

“When life comes at you like that, you re-evaluate everything,” he says. “Even though I’d recovered, I thought that my chance to be a surfer was gone and that I’d have to do what everyone else was doing: find work somewhere in the surf industry, move to Auckland, drive the traffic, be a nine-to-fiver. But, a year after my cancer, my partner and I moved to Bali for six months and we decided to try and get some priorities sorted.”

One of those priorities was pursuing his love of surfing in a way that gave back to the sport he loved. His years on the competition circuit had been great and he’d learnt a huge amount about surfing, but he’d also learnt a lot about how many competitors were still not giving it 100%; the accepted mentality was that, to be a good surfer, you just surfed. And things like nutrition, structured coaching and training programmes were for nerds. 

“The reason I started the Art of Surfing was that I realised too late that there are so many components to it. Being on tour meant I saw what those top-level surfers were doing, and I got to be in the locker rooms with Kelly Slater and the world champions and see what they were doing, what equipment they were using, and how they were being coached.” 

“The big turn-around came after Mick Fanning got injured,” Matt says referring to the champion Australian surfer known as White Lightning. “He was the first surfer to take training and nutrition and all that high-end stuff seriously, as part of his road back. He came back to win the world title. And then the chase was on – it was a whole new world of professionalism, while back here in New Zealand we still thought that, to get better, you just surfed more.”

Embracing a whole new world of professionalism is Matt created Art of Surfing for but, when he initially pitched to the powers that be, the reception was not quite what he expected. Surfing – not just in New Zealand but worldwide – was in transition. The surfing boom was in decline, the global financial crisis was hitting hard and streetwear was taking over from surfwear. So, while the organisation Matt approached liked his idea, they were looking to downsize rather than take on new ventures. 

“Looking back now, it was perfect for me, because it made me realise I was going to have to do it all on my own. I’d looked around and there was no one else doing what I wanted to do – and to this day, nearly ten years later, I’m probably still the only one doing what I’m doing.” 

Matt – like most surfers of his generation – was self-taught, and he had, in fact, turned down the opportunity to be tutored by ‘the godfather of technical coaching’, Martin Dunn, largely because he felt surfers had to be self-taught, with the raw talent being shaped by some inner Zen. He now sees the error of that and wishes he’d had a mentor and teacher – but, he realised, that if he never had one, he could at least be there for the next generation.

“I came home with all the knowledge I’d picked up and, after recovering, I sincerely wanted to use that to help our surfers do better,” Matt says. “I’d been in competitions where we’d come up just short, and I knew that if we just tweaked what we were doing, Kiwis could be on the next level. I still see a bit of the pushback against coaching but its changed a lot. When I started, there were a lot of people who wanted to come and train, but didn’t want to be seen coming to train! There was this mentality that getting trained in surfing wasn’t cool. People wanted to go out to Papamoa to do it, so they wouldn’t be seen. That’s changed completely now.”

One of the drivers of that change has been the acceptance of surfing as an Olympic sport. “Surfing,” says Matt, “particularly in New Zealand, is still seen differently to other major sports – and the Olympics will change that. It will mean we start to take things seriously and start working towards finding the best path for our athletes at Olympic level.  I’ve talked with friends in snowboarding and other sports that have recently been made Olympic sports and they all say it takes time. It’s like the chicken and the egg – you need funding to get results, you need results to get funding – but it’s great to see that we’re off to a really good start with two athletes going to Tokyo.”

Matt’s role in preparing those Olympic contenders has been as head coach of the development pathways programme he helped put together to get our surfers up to Olympic qualifying level, and he’s more than happy with the results. “We’ve now got two athletes qualified for the 2020 Olympics – Billy Simon from Raglan and Ella Williams from Whangamata – who both came through that programme. Now we just need to get some more structures and mechanisms in place to support them and the sport. At that level, you don’t spend a lot of time at home; you’re travelling all the time, so you need coaches, nutritionists and all the support required on different continents. Part of what I’m doing is not just bringing my knowledge but the connections and contacts to make it easier.”

Olympic-level mechanisms have been in place in Australian surfing for some time, only on a much bigger scale. While Matt might be envious of their resources, he’s not sure it’s what we need here in New Zealand. “I think they’re getting silver spoon-fed over there and I don’t think it’s producing the grit and determination that’s needed in the sport. There are competitors from other countries where their families depend on their success and they’ve got all the fight in the world that money can’t buy. Hard work beats talent nine times out of ten, and our biggest issue as Kiwi surfers is that we’re laidback Kiwis! We don’t have the dog-eat-dog mentality we need ... so I want to focus on making a kick-ass programme for our surfers. We are world-renowned for sports and I want to play a part in making surfing one of those sports.”

And as though helping shape a whole new generation of surfers and raising our standouts to a whole new level isn’t enough, Matt is also upping the game for non-professional surfers here in New Zealand, from his base in Mount Maunganui. 

“Moving to the Mount was the best decision I ever made,” Matt says, “on all levels. It’s not really known for consistent surf here, but the way it’s become a hotspot and the way surfing and the beach lifestyle has grown is great. The amount of kids coming through at development level is fantastic; we’ve gone from one squad a week to five, and it’s still growing. My business is completely built off word of mouth, and you can see there is now a real hunger for coaching and teaching that is great for the sport long-term.” 

A man with so much on his plate can’t be everywhere at once, unfortunately – but, ever the problem solver, Matt has a plan. “I want to go to every region, I want to help every grassroots surfer everywhere. So I’ve really turned my focus to the online side of the Art of Surfing, and people out there want it. I’ve developed a library of online content for people who want to learn how to surf, from beginners through to elite. And we’re going to take this global. We’re known as the go-to in New Zealand and we’re confident people will come along for the ride, but the potential in places like America is really where we could see growth. It’s been a three-year project but, in the last six months, it has really come together.”

With all this going on, does Matt Scorringe still find time outside of coaching, teaching, developing online content, and mentoring Olympic surfers for the thing that got him on this path back in ‘Whangas’?

“Oh yeah, of course,” he says. “Surfing’s the one thing that keeps everything else at bay!”

Mr G: capturing and connecting with whakapapa through art

With his large-scale portraiture work proliferating around the globe, UNO discovers that it’s Graham Hoete’s deep connection to home that gives this artist’s pieces a depth that extends far beyond their physical size.

WORDS JENNY RUDD / PHOTOS QUINN O'CONNELL

"Let me talk you through this portrait of my dad," says Mr G, showing me a photo on his phone. I'm having dinner with UNO publisher Mat and artist Graham Hoete, “Mr G”, in Izakai at Bayfair in the Mount. There's quite a bit going on around us in the busy restaurant as they serve a five-course degustation but, at our table, all I can hear is Graham's euphonious voice as the future of Māori portraiture explains why hononga [connection] to the art he's creating has become his true north.

Graham is best known for his large-scale spray paint murals. I wonder how far afield his art can be found and discover a video online of him in an All Blacks shirt and a kilt, painting a mural of his ancestor, John Alfred Borrowdale Murray, onto a wall of the oldest building in the village of Moffat, Scotland, where John Alfred was born. "I wanted to pay tribute to my Scottish three-times great-grandfather on behalf of all the Murray whanau in Aotearoa who are descended from him," says Graham. If you keep looking online, you'll find more celebratory photos unveiling Mr G murals across the world, most of which are portraits.

His current artistic focus plays a film in my head, starting with Graham in front of huge crowds – like the one where he unveiled an eight-metre mural of Prince in Minnesota – running backwards to New Zealand, then Bay of Plenty, then finally to the tiny island of Mōtītī where he grew up and, before him, his father. Home.

Graham is putting together pieces for an exhibition called Home to be shown at Tauranga Art Gallery from November 9, 2019. Graham and photographer Quinn O'Connell flew to Mōtītī to take photos that show the importance of his hononga to home.

It's easy to underestimate the everyday things that are so precious to us. Quinn's photo of jars of preserved peaches sitting on a stove resonated with Graham. "To someone else, it's just fruit and glass but, in the context of my life, it's so much more. It's a symbol of home. I felt the deepest of hononga when I saw those peaches. And it won't last forever as, one day, my mum won't be here to make them, and someone else will be in this house, using this stove."

That takes us back to the portrait he's showing me on his phone. "I'm going to talk you through every aspect," he says. "You will see and feel something else when you understand the context."

"Portraiture isn't just about painting a face, it's about representing a person and all they are connected to."

Every element in the multidisciplinary portrait has some kind of hononga to Graham's father. Photorealism, spray-painting, whakairo [wood carving], sculpting, weaving, fabrication; each has its role in connecting Graham's dad to his past, his whakapapa [genealogy], whenua [land], and to the artist, his son.

"Portraiture isn't just about painting a face, it's about representing a person and all they are connected to." And in this, the first in the series, the artist is part of the story; the bloodline is the ultimate connection. The next day we meet in Graham's Papamoa studio, where I can see, touch and feel it all.

Capturing a father’s spirit

Graham's dad grew up on Mōtītī Island. The islanders grew maize and spent time in the ocean. "He's a hardy, gruff, old school kind of guy," says Graham.  As the kaumātua at the marae, he introduces himself by saying, 

Ka tangi te titi

Ka tangi te manu

Ko te manu ko te karoro

ko te karoro ko kere am e Hoete

"He's saying he's a black-backed seagull. The first time I heard him say these poetic and soulful words, I was blown away. It was true, too, as that's what we would have seen all the time while he was working in the fields or on the beach. And, when I see the birds from Papamoa where I live, I feel hononga to my Dad."

Painting the face

"I chose to spray-paint the face because it represents the hononga to my artistic journey. Using spray-paint to convey this level of detail isn't easy, and I really went steroids on the photorealism. It helped not having the time constraints that I usually have on a mural.

"Photorealism has an amazing ability to engage and attract people. It's universal. They always buzz out saying, 'Oh, it's so real, look at the lines on the face!' It draws everyone in, no matter their background. You then have their attention to look at the context of the image through the visual storytelling around the frame.

"It's not a traditional head-and-shoulders portrait. The face is pushed forward because I wanted to focus on his eyes, the most engaging component of a portrait. He's always had a great weathered, journeyed look which is well-suited to a portrait. I maximised every detail.

The yellow G

"In the centre of the portrait there's a yellow portion. That's a zoomed-in painting of the yellow pōhutukawa flower. These yellow trees were discovered on Mōtītī Island in 1814, and they are the symbol of the islanders who'll be reminded of home every time they see the bright flower. There are only two of the trees left on the island and one of them's outside my dad's house. The G symbol will continue throughout this portrait series."

The frame

The face has a beautiful aesthetic and spray-painting has a modern, edgy, street feel to it. That contemporary discipline has been fused with whakairo, the ancient art of Māori storytelling through wood carving. The frame tells the story of the central portrait. The wood is a blend of kauri and matai, and it's extremely heavy. It took three people to lift it onto the wall at the gallery for the photoshoot. The physical weight and density of the wood gives heft to its role in the portrait – to solidify and make tangible the histories and stories of Graham's father, his tribe, his home.

"I have always wanted to learn how to carve. I used to live with one of my uncles, he was a master carver in the traditional style. Its purpose is to tell each tribe who they are and show their cultural identity visually. The history of a tribe is told through carvings to future generations.

"About a year ago, I started to learn how to carve, and I'm lucky to be learning from one of the best Māori carvers in the world, Todd Couper. He's just a real Jedi when it comes to whakairo. I was walking up Papamoa Hills one day and he was walking down. He called out, ' Hey, Mr G!', and, from then on, we became friends. His work is exquisite. He's an exceptional perfectionist, and shows his work around the world. He lives in Papamoa, so we see each other most days.

The kupenga

Each marae has a theme which connects the local iwi, hapū and whanau to their ancestry and story. In Tamatea ki te Huatahi marae, which is the main marae on Mōtītī Island, the kupenga [fishing net] plays a central role in its interior storytelling. There are carvings on the pillars as you enter the marae and references throughout the buildings. The curved shapes on the bottom left and right of the frame echo the kupenga hanging below the fame.

“I feel very connected to my dad through his sea-venturing stories, especially through my own love of the moana."

"It shows the connection to the moana [sea] and that lifestyle. My mum and a few of my aunties still go diving for kina and pāua. It's not often you see groups of ladies my mum's age going diving! They are legends.

"There's strong hononga with this element of the portrait. The kupenga has been woven by my sister. She went and collected harakeke [flax] from Mōtītī, and the sinker stones are from Tumu Bay on the island too.

"When my dad was young he used to take me out diving. I loved watching him and my uncles spear fish with a Hawaiian sling. They were graceful, like the fish they swam after. As a young guy, I was inspired to watch them. Many people never get to go diving but, to them, it's second nature. Dad and Uncle Patu used to have competitions to see how many fish they could catch, as kids. They'd make their own spear guns out of poles and bits of rubber and spear blue maomao then thread them and trail them around as they fished. I feel very connected to my dad through his sea-venturing stories, especially through my own love of the moana."

The carved heads

As we move through the portrait, it's clear that the role of the sea is absolutely central to Graham's dad's life as an islander. The two faces on the left and right are based on the amo [posts] outside the marae.

At first glance, the eyes which look inwards at the portrait appear cartoonish. But Graham explains they've been painted to represent maramataka [the lunar cycle], and the waxing and waning crescents of the moon around which island life is based. The phases of the moon affect the tides, when to fish and when to plant crops. The economy and lifestyle of the island is centred around the moon. Mōtītī is so small, but all life upon it is driven by cycles way bigger than any of us.

The double tongues on the faces are common in Māori portraits. And there are various different meanings. Te Kau wae wai runga, Te Kau wae raro refers to the celestial and terrestrial language we use, but it can also refer to how you speak to people inside and outside the marae. Protocol is a big part of Māori culture, especially on the marae ātea [open area in front of the meeting house]. The two tongues can also represent division and deception. You'll often see the double-tongue depiction on maraes on the east coast in the Bay of Plenty, towards Whakatāne."

A closer look reveals many elements of traditional whakairo in the faces with their own inherent meanings. The little notches or taratara ā kae along the tongues represent food

and eating, and the pattern above the mouth is called pākati and is one of the main surface

patterns of whakairo.

"And at the top of the portrait is kōruru, which represents the main ancestor of his marae, Tamatea ki te huatahi. It's the same face that presides over our marae and is the symbol of our tribe and so it's fitting that he does the same job over the portrait of my dad."

The future

Learning about Graham's portrait has opened up discussions about how we relate to each others' cultures and what we can all do to stay respectful. And what's happening to Māori culture in its home, New Zealand, and how we can keep its roots watered and well.

Later this year, Graham and his wife Millie are travelling to Art Basel in Miami – one of the world's biggest and most prestigious exhibitions of modern and contemporary art – to see what place in the world his series of portraits could hold.

Graham believes his portraits are unique and are the future of Māori portraiture. "I respect the portraits that Goldie and Lindauer painted, but what I have that they didn't is direct hononga to the culture, so I feel that puts me in the best possible place to be Māori portrait artist of the future. I have a commision for a lady in Hamilton after she saw my father's [portrait]. My plan is to do more portraits of Māori, sourcing materials where they are from, and telling stories of hononga to their whakapapa and homeland."

When you go to the Home exhibition, you are now able to stand in front of this magnificent portrait and know the connection of this man to the life he has led.

mrghoeteart.com

instagram.com/mrghoete.art

Home Exhibition

Tauranga Art Gallery

9 November 2019 - 9 February 2020

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hapū (ha-poo)

sub-tribe, clan a number of whanau (families) make up a hapu, usually from the same ancestor. A group of hapu make up an iwi.

harakeke (ha-ra-kee-kee)

flax

hononga (hoh-nung-uh)

connection

kaumātua (koe-mar-to-ah)

tribal elder

korero (koh-re-roo)

black-backed seagull

koruru (koh-roo-roo)

carved faced on gable at the marae

kupenga (koo-pen-nga)

fishing net

manu (ma-noo)

bird

marae (muh-rye)

meeting house

marae atea (muh-rye ah-tee-uh)

flat piece of land in front of the wharenui

maramataka (mah-ra-ma-ta-ka)

lunar calendar

moana (moh-ah-nah)

sea

takarangi (ta-ka-ran-gee)

the heavenly realm

taonga (tah-ong-ah)

possessions

whakairo (fuh-ky-roh)

Maori carving

whakapapa (fuh-kuh-papa)

genealogy

whanau (fah-noe)

family

wharenui (fa-re-noo-ee)

the main building at the marae

whenua (fen-ooa)

land

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Trekking across Greenland with Hollie Woodhouse

Can you imagine dragging something heavier than you are across a canvas of ice all day, every day for a month? Hollie Woodhouse reckons it’s all about the top two inches. 

WORDS JENNY RUDD + HOLLIE WOODHOUSE PHOTOS KEITH PARSONS + BENGT ROTMO

When I first came across Cantabrian Hollie Woodhouse’s magazine Say Yes To Adventure two years ago, I was completely captured by its exciting stories and eye-widening images of people doing things that make you feel like the world is something to climb to the top of so you can truly see how magnificent it is. She published tales of scaling barren mountains in countries I’d never heard of, camping in the ice under the Northern Lights and cycling across continents. At the centre of it all was Hollie herself, a diminutive, blonde handful of sparks. As well as writing about her own adventures, she edited, designed and published the magazine too.

That afternoon, I went for a walk around the Mount and on the spur of the moment, decided to say yes to adventure. I left the track and headed diagonally up, fighting my way through scrabbly scrub and eventually getting stuck. Sweaty and a bit scared, I perched halfway up the slope facing out towards Matakana Island. My only option was to let gravity lead me back to the base track through the dense bush. I arrived home breathless and muddy. ‘Probably won’t mention that to Hollie…’ I thought.

If you ask Hollie about her achievements, she’ll tell you, “I’m not some ultra-athlete, I’m just a girl next door who goes out and gets involved.” But when you consider what she’s done, you realise she’s anything but average. Among other feats, she’s competed in the Coast to Coast, run 250km across the Moroccan desert in the brutal Marathon des Sables, and most recently crossed the 560km Greenland ice cap pulling a sled heavier than she is.

I was expecting her to be a no-nonsense, laser-focused high achiever; instead, when we eventually meet I find a funny, self-deprecating woman with a flair for graphic design. Originally from Ashburton, she’s been spending more time in different parts of the country through being invited to speak at events and share her experiences. Talking to her in Cambridge, I ask what she learned from her Greenland crossing.

“I learned what it feels like to really, really struggle,” she says. “I used to be pretty dismissive of people when they said they couldn’t do something, especially physical things like running 5km or swimming in the ocean, but now I know, because that was me at times in Greenland. I felt like I just couldn’t do it, but our team encouraged me and spurred me on. So I suppose you could say it made me a nicer person!”

I asked Hollie to tell us more about her extraordinary Nordic feat. Here, in her own words, is her story.

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I was three hours into trekking across the Greenland ice cap, and all I wanted to do was quit. I’d spent the past six months imagining myself as a strong warrior gliding over smooth snow under bright blue, never-ending skies, the sun warming my bronzed face. The reality, however, couldn’t have been further from the truth. 

My 55kg were struggling to pull the 60kg pulk (sled). My skis had a mind of their own, sliding uncontrollably from underneath me, too often seeing me face plant into the icy snow. It’s funny how dreams never quite work out that way we intend, but to hell with happy endings. Ultimately, I was there for the story.

I was part of a six-man team (Antarctic Heritage Trust executive director Nigel Watson, polar guide Bengt Rotmo, and four explorers: New Zealanders me and Brando Yelavich, and Australians Bridget Kruger and Keith Parsons) led by the Antarctic Heritage Trust for its third Inspiring Explorers’ Expedition – a 560km trek across the Greenland ice cap. The trust’s mission is to conserve, share and encourage the spirit of exploration, something they believe is critical in the 21st century. This expedition was to do just that while honouring the remarkable legacy of Fridtjof Nansen, who made the first crossing 130 years earlier. 

“I learned what it feels like to really, really struggle.”

Growing up on a sheep and beef farm prepared me for the rough and tumble of the outdoors, but nothing could have prepared me for this adventure. Even though expeditions in freezing climates had never been on my bucket list, however, I knew this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, not to be missed.

Best described as being trapped inside a ping-pong ball, Greenland was far removed from my everyday reality. Life was broken down into the most basics tasks. It would take me 15 minutes every morning to squeeze my feet into my frozen boots while balancing awkwardly in our two-man tent. After boiling water, eating breakfast, then clumsily taking down our tent (a small feat in itself when wearing three layers of oversized mittens) we’d line up ready to tackle the next 20-odd kilometres of the day. 

Using the sun and wind to navigate, we’d ski in a line, one behind the other, with a 10-minute break every hour. After anywhere between 10 and 16 hours of skiing, time would be called and the evening routine would commence. Tent up, water boiled, dinner eaten, team meeting, diary entry and finally, sleep. Wake up, repeat. I now understand the meaning of the term ‘Groundhog Day’.

We battled unseasonable wild weather, including two hurricanes. Each time, we dug down our tents to escape the full force of the ferocious winds. Using the excess snow, we built giant walls, their proximity to the tents critical, down to the last centimetre. We hunkered down for up to 30 hours at a time, snow falling like cement around us. These delightful moments were considered ‘rest days’; there’s nothing like the steady drum of 180km/h wind to lull you to sleep. 

As the days turned into weeks, my body slowly became accustomed to the new normal. With every step, I managed to grasp the skill of Nordic skiing. Instead of fighting the unnatural movement, I was able to switch to autopilot and would often find myself in a state of flow. It was during these moments that I was reminded why I say “Yes” to the unknown.

“Instead of fighting the unnatural movement, I was able to switch to autopilot and would often find myself in a state of flow.”

We were told the trip would take us anywhere between 22 and 25 days, so we took 27 days worth of food, just in case. Our fuel was high-energy, high-fat foods including nuts, chocolate, chips and lollies – a five-year-old’s dream. On the morning we were due to leave, Bengt was concerned we didn’t have enough to eat. A small detour on our way to the ice cap took us to a tiny supermarket where we bought more food, including three blocks of Norwegian butter. At the time, I questioned if I’d ever be in a situation where I’d voluntarily eat three blocks, but towards the very end of our trip, as I sliced off chunks and ate them straight, I cursed myself for not buying more.

Towards the end of our journey, we were up against it. Storms and sickness had slowed us down considerably, and with five days left and more than 170km still to cover, tensions were high among the team. Would we make it? More importantly, did we want to make it? Frustrations aside, we decided not to call the helicopter, instead opting for human power to get us to the finish – or at least as far as possible. 

Pushing on, the final day provided the best conditions of the entire crossing. With our boat having literally sailed, a helicopter was organised to pick us up, regardless of our location. After battling whiteouts, powder up to our knees, relentless winds and temperatures as low as -39.5°C, we could finally smell the salty sea air.

After 22 non-stop hours, I ungracefully pizza-wedged to a stop for the final time. With tears sliding down my sunburnt cheeks, I was overwhelmed with emotion: elation, pride and an immense sense of achievement (and relief in knowing I never had to pull on my boots again!). In a season in which only a handful of teams successfully made it across the ice, I couldn’t have been prouder.

As I peered out the window, safe in the helicopter that was transporting us back to a warm shower and a decent meal, I watched the vast white of the ice cap below. From east to west, 29 days later (five days more than expected), Greenland had brought me many lessons, complete hopelessness, uncontrollable laughter and life-long friendships.

Eight years ago, I made a pact with myself to do one big adventure each year that challenged me, like New Zealand’s Coast to Coast, and ultra-marathons across Morocco’s Sahara Desert and through Peru’s Amazon jungle. While these experiences left me wanting more, Greenland changed me. I came home with a huge appreciation for my life – my boyfriend, my family and friends, my job and just how lucky I am to live in this incredible country.

This adventure taught me the true definition of resilience, and that ultimately, it’s all about the top two inches. I go on adventures to push myself, and to experience moments I never thought possible. Greenland dishedthese up in bucketloads. 

In Nansen’s Footsteps, a documentary about this epic expedition, can be viewed at inspiringexplorers.com. 
HOLLIEWOODHOUSE.COM 

Mover + shaker

You can take the boy out of the Bay of Plenty, but you can’t take the Bay out of the boy. Maria Hoyle talks to the local influencer about going back for his future.

WORDS Maria Hoyle / PHOTOS Garth Badger 

I’ll be honest – I was apprehensive about meeting Jay Reeve. I’d seen the pics, read the bio. Here’s a tall, handsome, motorbike-riding, surfing dude with multiple successful roles – among them DJ, wine brand co-owner and social media influencer. During his time at MTV (they approached him – he’s never had to apply for a job in his life), he jetted around the world meeting the likes of Kanye, Snoop Dogg and Dave Grohl. He has a beautiful wife, adorable twin boys, and a queue of fascinating personalities to interview as co-host of The Rock radio show Rock Drive with Jay & Dunc. His life is fast, busy, glam. And now he has to spend an hour with me. 

However, from the moment we sit down at a café near Jay’s new home in Auckland’s Herne Bay, he’s fully engaged, relaxed, self-deprecating, interesting and interested. Perhaps acting is another of his many skills. But it turns out the truth is far simpler – Jay Reeve is a people person.

Don’t get me wrong, he doesn’t disappoint on the rock ’n’ roll quotient, turning up on his Harley, sauntering in and shaking hands with a friend (a fan?) at a nearby table. I’d anticipated the cool – what I hadn’t expected was the warm. He gives me a generous hug, meets my eyes with his velvety green ones (yep, something about Jay brings out the Mills & Boon in me), and for a full 50 minutes, I have his undivided attention. Oh, apart from when another cool-looking guy comes over, launches into some banter, and Jay responds with a jovial, “Mate, I’m in the middle of an interview – I’ll give you a bell”. When his buddy’s gone, Jay explains, “Super-clever guy, rides a Harley as well. He’s the lead singer of Blindspott.” Of course he is. Because that’s the world Jay inhabits.

But… and here’s the big but. It takes only a few minutes of chatting to understand something fundamental about this Bay of Plenty-born 36-year-old. A flash Harley might be what gets him around, but community, family and friendship are what drive him. They shape his past, his present, and will no doubt shape his future. As for people, well – Bay locals, band frontmen, baristas, red-carpet stars, middle-aged journalists… they’re all one and the same to Jay. Apart from Delta Goodrem. We’ll get to her in a minute. 

First things first. Jay has a window of time before heading off to a school visit with his five-year-old sons Oscar and Hunter (who are soon to start at the local primary) to talk me through what exactly he, his wife Anna and their boys are doing back in Auckland. In case you’re not familiar with it, the story goes like this.

Jay grew up on a dairy farm in Te Puna, moved to Mount Maunganui at 15, disliked school but nonetheless ended up, at 21, teaching home economics at Tauranga Boys’ College. (Although he appreciated his parents’ hard work, he had no desire to take over the farm.) It was while commentating and competing in the Hyundai Pro Longboard Tour that he was snapped up by MTV. He stayed there for five years as a VJ, doing the aforementioned A-list interviews, then started to ponder a career in radio.

As luck would have it (to be fair, most turning points in Jay’s life might well start with that phrase), MTV made him redundant, so he walked away with a nice juicy payout and able to pursue the radio career he wanted. There followed six years on ZM’s drive show with Paul ‘Flynny’ Flynn, before the popular duo ‘consciously uncoupled’ and Jay snagged a two-year gig at Radio Hauraki.

At that point, in late 2017, the family packed everything up and headed back to the Mount. For good. “The plan was to stay there indefinitely,” says Jay. “I was done with radio. TV not so much; I’ve still got a couple of show concepts bubbling away in my head.”

The lure of the Bay was the slower pace that would enable them to focus on what matters. “We were well set up financially, and I wanted to spend as much time with my boys as I could before they went to school,” says Jay. He also wanted them to experience a taste of the childhood he’d had. On the farm, Jay grew up milking cows, hosing down the yard and doing other chores he “loved”.

“It was the best upbringing,” he says. “We’d put sandwiches in a backpack and walk to the back of our farm about 5km away, and spend the whole day adventuring. Our farm backed onto Whakamarama, and we had friends who lived on the other side of the river, so we’d meet them and jump off the waterfall. We’d go to Maramatanga Park with my dad and play twilight cricket. We’d hang out in the Te Puna clubrooms drinking lemonade and raspberry with a punnet of chips, while the adults told dirty jokes. I loved growing up in Te Puna.”

Jay reckons that even today, life in the Bay is simpler – that people are just that bit more content than their big-city counterparts. So the question remains: what’s he doing back in Auckland?

It came down to “the guarantee of a salary for a set number of years while we’re at the age we’re at. I’ve always looked at it that between 30 and 40 you make the majority of your funds, and then from that point, you can still be at an age to decide what you want to do. You can pivot, start again at 40.”

Jay wanted to maximise that peak earning potential, but if he was going to slam the thing into reverse and head back up to the big smoke, it was going to be on his own terms. He says any Auckland job “needed to tick every single box. I needed the person I worked with
to be someone I got on with, it needed to be the time slot I wanted, it needed to be on a station I liked, and it needed to be on a network I had respect for.”

He found all that at The Rock. Jay says that, ironically, the move ended up being hardest on Auckland-bred Anna. “She really did love the Mount – the pace of life and what it was like to bring up a family there.”

But it’s working out. So far. Anna’s already in her own groove. “She looks after all the social accounts for the businesses, takes care of all my social-influence stuff as I don’t have time, and looks after the boys. She’s ‘life admin’ for the Reeve family. It’s an unrelenting and perhaps under-appreciated job.”

As for Jay, he’s loving The Rock. It’s not just a gig to earn some decent dough – he and Dunc have worked out a format they’re both super excited about. Jay hadn’t worked with him before, so they had a “feeling-out process” – time spent getting to know one another. A bit like Married at First Sight? Jay laughs. “Ha – that’s a good way of putting it, yes.” 

As well as music and cheeky banter, the pair wanted to give people something that would challenge their existing views, and to bring on guests – like a controversial recent interviewee who talked about trying the mind-bending drug ayahuasca – who would provide a fresh perspective. Jay, an avid podcast listener, admits he can be close-minded at times, but tries to overcome it. “I’ve started listening to a podcast and I’ve gone, ‘F**k this guy, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about’, then by the end of it I’m, ‘Oh my god, I’ve come right around’. I like that education; we’re trying to do a bit of it. Nowadays we’re so quick to go, ‘I’m team this or team that’. But you can sit in the middle and go, ‘Well, tell me more’.

“I’ve always said I’m the luckiest guy in the world,” says Jay. With his four career boxes ticked off, everything else about their new Auckland life has magically fallen into place too. “We needed to quickly find somewhere to live and we’ve just, through a friend of a friend, signed a year-long lease on a house, so we’ve been able to get the boys into the school we wanted,” says Jay. “My work is very close. I’m surrounded by great friends, including close friends of ours from the Bay just around the corner.”

Although he’s grateful, it’s not the same as life at the Mount. “Where we lived, Gordon Road, we knew everyone, we knew each other’s kids, there was a real sense of community,” he says. I suggest he can recreate that in Auckland, but he laughs ruefully. “It’s too far gone! Everyone’s just busy. That’s the vibe of Auckland.” So the Bay is never far from his thoughts. But he knows that “to do our show and our talent and the investment from the radio station justice, the minimum term [for him in Auckland] would be five years”. It’s not that he’s complaining; Jay isn’t a whinger. It’s just the way it is right now.

One of Jay’s multiple roles is “silent but loud” partner in wine brand Master of Ceremonies, launched in 2016, which he co-owns with Anna and friends Mat Croad and Nick Marshall. (They’ve also teamed up with Hawke’s Bay winemaking supremo Rod McDonald – read more about it in Jay’s column in UNO Issue 43.) Did he know anything about wine before embarking on this venture?

“I was a big drinker!” he laughs. Plus, “I like to keep an eye out for things that are just around the curve. Rosé was a thing that popped up on my radar. My wife has always drunk rosé. I have bikie friends who drink rosé, not beer. Mat’s a wine importer and could see rosé was going up at a rapid rate. We’ve seen that in the past four years; there used to be three or four bottles in the supermarket aisle, now there are about 100. Nick came on as the majority shareholder, CEO and CFO. He pays himself a peppercorn wage to keep the business going; he’s such an asset to the business. It’s the people who make the business what it is. It’s cool to do business with your buddies.”

As well as a rosé, there’s now a Master of Ceremonies Central Otago pinot noir and a pinot gris 2018, plus a limited-edition sparkling rosé that’s a collaboration with fashion label Stolen Girlfriends Club. They have plans to export the coming vintage, “a push into Australia, Singapore, Asia”, and exciting plans for expansion. “Nick’s a very forward thinker,” says Jay. “ We’ve been working on something for the past two or three years; it’s very close to being released. It will be well ahead of the curve.”

Are we talking wine here? “Aah… yes and no.” He grins. “I’d love to tell you more, but…” 

Jay has a lot of things on the go, and living life as he does, at full throttle, requires mastering the art of maintenance. How does he keep himself in such good shape? “I fast – it’s a new thing for me,” he says. “I eat between 1pm and 7pm. I also try not to have any sugars or
carbs; it’s predominantly a meat-and-vegetable diet. 

“I met a guy called Nigel Beach, who’s an offsider for Wim Hof [the Dutch extreme athlete known as the Iceman, who pioneered the Wim Hof Method] and does this thing called ‘controlled discomfort’, where you have an ice bath. I get up and hop into a cold shower, or into a cold river, or into the sea. It’s amazing. It’s like going ‘control, alt, delete’. Apart from that, I drink far too much, sleep minimal hours and
really burn the candle at both ends and the middle.”

What about his mental health? Jay has talked in the past about how his relentless positivity has seen him accused of being arrogant. How does he cope when people take a shot at him or when he gets flak for something he’s said or written? Does it bother him?

He strains a little, like he really wants it to bother him. “Hmm… ah…” He laughs. “I don’t put that much thought into it!” What no doubt helps is that he’s always willing to listen. “I can say something, but then if someone more informed comes along and says, ‘You’re wrong and these are the reasons why I think you’re wrong’, then I’m 100 percent open to shifting my position – and I do so frequently. If you’re not learning, you’re just not moving.”

I try him on adversity. Any adversity, Jay, even a smidgen? Er, no. “I choose to be positive,” he says. And he’s aware how lucky he is. “There’s no problem I could ever have, ever, that could compare on a global scale with what happens every day to other people all over the world,” he says.

Okay, let’s try this, then. What about being a parent? Now that definitely comes with its curveballs, especially raising boys in this era of #MeToo. How do you teach them to speak their truth and be respectful of women?

“My wife and I talk about this a lot,” says Jay. “People just want to be treated with respect.” He believes we’ve become so fearful of offending people, that we’ve simply ceased to communicate. “Then there’s a systemic breakdown, then there’s alienation, misinformation. People put it in the too-hard basket. Now more than ever, we need to be talking.”

As for respecting women, or indeed any individual, the key is talk. “Don’t assume,” says Jay. “To be in an intimate situation with a person of the other sex or same sex and assuming they want to take it to the same place as you will get you into trouble. So communicate. But for kids to learn things, they have to see it.”

And then we’re back to the Bay. “I don’t want to say Auckland does a bad job of raising kids, but [provincial New Zealand]does it better,” says Jay. “We just got back from Gore and I didn’t see one kid on a phone while I was there. We did a show out of a bar/restaurant and kids were there with two or three generations of their family, talking across the table with everyone, sitting between adults, being part of the situation.”

For someone who’s met his fair share of celebs, Jay’s touchingly appreciative of these ordinary scenarios and of people showing each other good old-fashioned courtesies. So how does that pan out when he’s meeting the big stars – is he able to apply his philosophy of treating everyone decently, or does he get so starstruck that he acts differently?

Jay shakes his head. There was one person who made him a little gaga. “Strangely enough, Delta Goodrem. She was coming down the red carpet and I was like, ‘Oh, it’s Delta – whatever’.” But as she got closer, the ‘Delta effect’ rendered him speechless. “She was ethereal, like she had a halo of light around her. I was just holding out the mic in front of me. I was with my producer at the time, Bronwynn Wilson, who was going, ‘What are you f**king doing? Just talk!’ It was getting awkward, so Delta looked at Bronwynn and said, ‘So are you guys having a good time?’ and Bronwynn went from being like ‘Grrrr’ to ‘Uh… ah…’ – the same thing. After Delta had walked past I said, ‘Oh my god, I don’t know what happened!’ and Bronwynn said, ‘I don’t know what happened either!’”

It’s hard to imagine Jay being lost for words; for him, striking up conversation is the easiest thing in the world. Be it with A-listers or mere mortals, his favourite opener is, “‘So when you’re not doing this, what are you doing?’ And then they can say, ‘I run I with my dog, I like hanging out with my kids’ or whatever.”

What does that look like for Jay – what’s he doing when he’s at his happiest? “Happiness for me…” he pauses. “It almost makes me emotional thinking about it. This summer, we had this big group of us – all my family, my kids, my wife, one of my sisters, my parents, a big bunch of my friends – and we all rarked it up on the beach. The kids were running around, the surf was pumping, it was a beautiful still day. We were watching over each other’s kids, hanging out, having beers. That for me is heaven. Just heaven. I desperately miss it.”

In the background, Auckland attempts to plead its case: the thrum of traffic, a passing truck, coffee machines going full pelt to fuel the got-to-be-somewhere set. Jay is oblivious.

“You know, sometimes it’s nice to know what you want, so you can miss it and try to get back there,” he says. “It’s solidified for us what we want to do, where we want to be, how we want to raise our family, and what we want to be like as people. For the first time in 36 years, I know what I want.”

And, quite honestly, who wouldn’t raise a glass of rosé to that?  

@THEJAYREEVE

What’s for dinner

Virtually every Kiwi in the country has heard of My Food Bag and recognises its public face, Nadia Lim. In the past five years, the company has produced 45 million meals; it’s New Zealand’s third-largest food retailer, and has changed the way many of us shop for and prepare our meals.

WORDS ANDY TAYLOR / PHOTOS GARTH BADGER

My Food Bag’s ‘nude food’ concept has changed the way many of us eat, making healthy, low-salt, preservative-free meals filled with fresh ingredients easy peasy.

What many of us don’t know is that its creator, Cecilia Robinson, had been there, done that. She’s also co-founder of the groundbreaking and successful Au Pair Link, another company that altered the way a traditional service was delivered while changing lives along the way. Having achieved all this in just 10 short years, it’s easy to see why Cecilia has been dubbed ‘New Zealand’s greatest entrepreneur’ by Theresa Gattung, ex Telecom chief executive and frequent flyer on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women in International Business list.

Cecilia’s journey began a long, long way from New Zealand. “Sweden is a nice place to grow up,” she says of her birthplace. “It’s quite different from New Zealand, though, and the winters can be very demoralising. It’s still a very nice place to be, but New Zealand is just such a fantastic place, with beautiful beaches and a safe environment in which to bring up children.”

Which brings us to Papamoa, where Cecilia’s husband James’s parents live. “They fell in love with Papamoa, and we love the beach. And nearby, at Bayfair, is the best Farmers in the country – have you seen their toy department?! [When we visit] we go to the beach and playgrounds, then hit the cafés – it’s really just a magical place.

“Sometimes in life, you just don’t know where the road is going to lead you. Driving down last year to see my parents-in-law, we went through Katikati. It brought back so many memories, as  it was where we made one of our first  Au Pair Link placements. Ten years later, I’m driving back through with my own family.”

Cecilia’s first forays into the business world began at an early age. “Back in Sweden, my friends and I used to make things like friendship bracelets, then sell them outside the local supermarket, and I went door-to-door for the World Wildlife Fund. But there was never one particular event that started my interest in being an entrepreneur.

“Every week, my father used to say, ‘When I win Lotto, when I win Lotto, when I win Lotto…’ and it used to drive me crazy – it was part of our everyday vocabulary. It made me think that I didn’t want to be at the mercy of winning Lotto to change my life. So that was actually a good driver. Thanks, Dad!”

Once Cecilia had graduated from selling bracelets at the supermarket, it was the world of law rather than business that caught her eye. Her parents were both academics – “I think they have four or five degrees between them,” she says – so higher education was practically a given. But for someone who clearly likes to see things through to the end, the outcome was surprising.

“I studied in Sweden, New Zealand and the United States, but I still don’t have
a degree,” says Cecilia. “James jokes that I’m a law-school dropout in three countries, which is true. But on our first date, we talked about financial freedom and making your own fortune, about business and thinking about things differently.”

James’s name pops up frequently in conversation with Cecilia. They’re not only life partners, but also business partners, and joint CEOs of My Food Bag. While Cecilia has been described as a “serial entrepreneur with sass”, James brings his own skill set to the table, running the marketing, IT and finance teams of both My Food Bag and Au Pair Link. Mixing a personal relationship with business has been the undoing of many couples, but not  so the Robinsons, who seem to positively thrive on it.

“Who would you rather be in business with than the person you know the best, and trust and love the most?” says Cecilia. “And when the leadership culture is collaborative like ours, it makes a huge difference to the business. So although we do separate the various parts of the business, we also spend a lot of time providing feedback to each other. We work very collaboratively and respect each other professionally. In fact, I think the collaboration within the My Food Bag team has been one of the key reasons
we’ve been so successful.”

The couple’s first meeting and the intertwined lives that ensued sound like pure serendipity. “I’d been working as an au pair in the United States while I studied, but decided I wanted to work in New Zealand instead, because my brother was working there,” says Cecilia. “He had a dinner party to welcome me to New Zealand – and that’s where I met James, on my first night in the country.” The rest, as they say, is history.

An exciting new chapter in their story began in 2006, with the launch of their first major project together: Au Pair Link. “We were living in a little two-bedroom apartment in Auckland’s CBD, working and studying full-time, but also thinking about how much I’d got out of being an au pair – it had been such an amazing experience,” recalls Cecilia. “I gained so much from it that I thought other people would want to do it too. James was really supportive, so we started a website, and suddenly we were getting phone calls at seven in the morning from all over the country. We thought, ‘Well, there must be something here, because people really need us.’”

There certainly was, and people certainly did. Au Pair Link was New Zealand’s first dedicated au pair agency that made sure au pairs were safe and fully supported by a national network – a far cry from the previous system of classified ads and word of mouth. The company has grown to employ 40 full-time staff and has placed thousands of au pairs throughout Australasia.

“It was very challenging, because we were starting with something that was very much a cottage industry, and we realised that to succeed, we had to take a new approach,” says Cecilia. “Instead of saying an au pair was someone who just appeared in your home to look after your child, we saw them as licensed childcare providers who add to your child’s education. And that was a game-changer. Within five years, we were one of the largest companies of our kind in the world.”

Having revolutionised the au pair scene and reset the horizons of several thousand young Kiwis who suddenly had an international influence in their homes, you’d think that it was time for the credits to roll and the Robinsons and Au Pair Link to settle into a stately rhythm that would see them through the rest of their careers. But no – luckily for New Zealand, Cecilia got bored with pottering around the house.

“We were travelling in Europe and saw a model there similar to what would become My Food Bag,” she says. “I have a husband who loves to eat but not to cook, and it struck me that there would be a lot of people in similar situations. Back in New Zealand, I was on maternity leave from Au Pair Link. I’d done all the ironing and everything I could do around the house, and I got bored really fast, so I said to James that I wanted to explore the possibilities around this new idea. I did all the research, then started on the business plan. And within four hours of finishing it, I was in labour. So I kind of say that My Food Bag and our son, Tom, are twins.”

As if bringing two new creations into the world in one day wasn’t enough, just four weeks later, the Robinsons presented Cecilia’s business plan to Theresa Gattung and the rest of the Au Pair Link board. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with Theresa particularly impressed and keen to get the project moving forward as soon as possible.

“Theresa came up to me straight after I’d presented it and said, ‘This is what I’ve been waiting for – so what’s next?’” says Celcilia. “We had a month-old baby, 1000 au pairs throughout New Zealand and so many existing business obligations to deal with already, but it just seemed so right, so we reached out to Nadia [Lim] and her husband, Carlos [Bagrie]. They came in thinking we were pitching something around Au Pair Link or baby food.

“Nadia and Carlos were on their way to the airport for a three-week trip to Europe and jumped on their flight straight afterwards, so we heard nothing for 24 hours. And then they said they were in! We assembled the team in November and by March [2013] we were in the market. That was a pretty intense summer.”

Understatements occur frequently in conversation with Cecilia. But if she makes it sound easy, it wasn’t. Bringing the My Food Bag vision to life required the team to master a raft of technical challenges and inject the kind of human touch that would get people out of their routines and see them up for some chang e in the kitchen. And, of course, the food had to be fantastic too.

“It’s complicated,” says Cecilia. “There are so many variations involved. But we have a really great team and what people don’t realise is that each recipe gets tested multiple times. It’s an amazing process and our suppliers come in and show us new cuts of meat or new products that we can utilise. We want to be cutting edge but still provide meals people will love and that become new family favourites.”

Like other new business models – think Uber, for example – My Food Bag has been described as ‘disruptive’, but unlike many others, it’s actually profitable. “My Food Bag is incredibly disruptive, because five years in, we were the third-largest food retailer in New Zealand,” says Cecilia. “Actually, that was probably true after two or three years – it happened so fast.

“For us, it’s been incredibly powerful to be part of giving people new options, which is what we did with Au Pair Link: instead of just having someone in your home or on a trip helping with your children, which was the old model, we changed that and added the education factor. So with My Food Bag, it was again taking an old model and making
it brand new, and when people ask how My Food Bag happened so fast and became so successful so quickly, they forget the many years that we spent reaching that point.”

What’s also not immediately apparent about My Food Bag, but becomes clear if you spend any time with Cecilia, is that beyond disruptive technologies, recipe development and delivery schedules, the company is incredibly people-focused. Staff are encouraged to bring their children to work, and virtually scolded for not leaving early if they have to pick them up.

“For us, it’s always been about people and then letting the numbers and business fall out of that,” says Cecilia. “And when I say ‘people’, I mean our team, suppliers and customers – we start with them. Leading in that way has given us great clarity about how we make decisions. We bring our kids into work and make sure people take the time to do what they need to do around their kids, so we’re people first and on the business side second. We’re mums and dads, we’re husbands, we’re wives, and we’re friends before we become business people. And that builds a lot of love and trust both inside and outside the company.”

Perhaps the most remarkable part of all in the Robinsons’ story is that by the time you read this, the couple will have stepped back from the empire they’ve created and handed over the leadership to new CEO, Kevin Bowler. During our interview, Kevin calls Cecilia. She asks UNO to stop recording, then excitedly congratulates him on his new role and invites him to dinner with James, Theresa, Nadia and Carlos, and to a photo shoot to announce the appointment to the press. “We’re a ‘check your suit at the door’ kind of company,” she tells him. “Just wear something relaxed.”

It may surprise some that Cecilia and James are willing to step down from something they’re so passionate about and that’s going so well. “One of the biggest drivers for entrepreneurs is financial freedom,” says Cecilia. “It’s like being in the Olympics. You prepare and train, and then you run the race and win and achieve everything you wanted –
but what then? You keep running?! And that’s what approaching this change was like for us.

“Once the company had reached the point it’s at now, we had financial freedom and did a lot of things that we’d dreamt of, but the key thing we wanted was the freedom of more time. So James and I said that we’d give it 12 months after we partly sold to Waterman Capital [in late 2016], get stability for our team and ensure that we were delivering, and then our time was done.

“Finding the right person to come in has been something we’ve taken very seriously, and we’ll be continuing in governance roles because we have a real passion for our people, our foodies and our products,” continues Cecilia. “But basically, we are retiring. There are people who achieve financial freedom and want to keep working, to keep running, but that’s not us – we want to use that freedom to spend time with our kids.”

Retiring. It’s hard to believe that the energy and dynamism of the half-Swedish family Robinson will fit the retired life, but they have redefined the way we eat, so they may well  redefine retirement, too.

Something in the water

His face is already pretty much etched into the national psyche, and that easy smile and cool, calm demeanor have become known around the world, but in person, Peter Burling could not be more humble, more unassuming, or any more relaxed.

He may be an Olympic gold medal winner with a string of international titles to boot, and of course there is that not insignificant matter of bringing the America’s Cup back to its rightful home here in New Zealand, but in the flesh the man responsible for whipping a multi-million dollar boat through water at speeds approaching 100 km per hour is just a sweet-natured, very casual, amiable twenty-something. He’s arguably the world’s best sailor, but at heart he is still just a boy from the Bay, unfazed and unchanged by fame and more than willing to spend some time in front of the camera and talk to UNO about the journey so far.

It is a journey that began around 20 years ago in the Welcome Bay estuary, where an eight-year-old Burling and his brother first set sail in Jelly Tip, a wooden Optimist-class yacht that had definitely seen better days. “My brother got into it first and I just kinda got dragged along,” Burling says of his earliest foray into sailing, with that trademark understatement. “My Dad had been into sailing and thought it was a good skill to have. And it kind of spiralled from there.”

And when he says spiralled, he means it whirled wildly and unstoppably onto national then international stages: he won his first Optimist nationals at nine years of age, competed in the World Champs in Texas aged 12, and scooped the 2006 420 Class Worlds title in the Canary Islands at the tender age of just 15; a year later he won the Under-18 World Championship, took the 49er World Champs with Blair Tuke in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016, and – again with Tuke – took home silver in the 2012 Olympics and gold in the 2016 event. Then came the America’s Cup and the New Zealand Order of Merit for Services to Sailing, but before we go there, lets just back up the bus and get back to Welcome Bay in the early noughties. 

“I have a lot of fond memories of that time,” Burling says. “Around here can be a pretty tricky place to sail, but one of the cool things about it is that you can sail in any conditions. In a lot of places you end up sailing in only one type of weather, but here, because you can get out in all kinds, it means you are quite well- rounded as you’ve had to deal with a lot of different things and looked at different ways of wining races - if you want to, you can sail in some pretty big swells at times here! The other cool thing about Tauranga is you have the keel boat club and the dinghies kind of just in one group, with adults and younger ones competing. It’s unique in that there is everything from the Learn to Sail level right on up to the keel boat club, and there’s not many around the country that have that.”

The sailing environment he encountered in Bermuda with the America’s Cup Challenge also had similarities to his early escapades on the sea around Tauranga, with a relatively limited area of open water and changeable conditions; but perhaps the main thing his formative years taught him was adaptability, a decidedly Kiwi trait if ever there was one. “One of the skills I did learn here at a young age was to be able to watch other people do a sport and to learn off them, to notice different things about how they’re sailing and have things set up, and to be able to adapt things really quickly and see whether you are sailing well or not. A large percentage of our sport is how quickly you can get the boat to go, and when people say someone is a natural sailor, they mean that person has an instinctive way of getting a boat to go faster than it should. And that is something learnt from hours of getting things balanced and learning about what is fast and what isn’t.”

And whatever happened to Jelly Tip? “I honestly don’t know,” Burling shrugs. “I’m not even sure if it was even my boat. Jelly Tip was bought for my brother and I ended up with it. . . Who knows where it is now.” Somewhere in Tauranga, someone may just have a piece of sailing history sitting in the backyard.

As Burling’s skills grew and the awards piled up – repeated questions about when the silverware outgrew the mantle piece and where they live now are all answered with a sheepish shrug and deflective smile – he also had to learn how to juggle his competitive life and the more mundane aspects of youth. Like getting an education.

Having attended Tauranga Boys College (at the same time coincidentally as cricketer Kane Williamson), he embarked on a mechanical engineering degree at Auckland University, but half way through, in his words, he decided to “major in sailing” instead. Competing in European sailing at pretty high levels and then coming back to try and focus on exams was probably never going to work, but while he may not have come out with a degree, he is the first to admit that two years of engineering studies eventually paid off on the water.

“At the Olympic level,” he says, “a lot of it is just a seat-of- your-pants kind of thing, because today you have a single platform that you can’t really change or improve.”

This is, after all, essentially a one-design race and everyone uses virtually identical equipment, so – as Burling says – “It’s a question of how you set it up and how well you can sail it!” But in something like the Americas Cup it’s different; the variables are almost infinite and change – literally – by the hour. And in that fast moving, high-tech environment, knowledge is power.

“I’ve always really liked the engineering side of sailing,” he says, “ever since I was a little kid and making things and trying things on the boats. I’ve always been quite pedantic on having a really clean and well-thought- out boat, not having anything on there that doesn’t need to be there, and having it all neat and tidy.”

And he would be the first to admit that this has translated from the waters of Welcome Bay to Bermuda. “I do feel like I had a good understanding of the systems on board and our team had a strength in the link between the sailing team and the designers, so that we knew how hard we could push it,” he says, again with an achingly acute sense of understatement. “At the end of the day, we are the ones who have to decide whether to back off or take the risk and play the game. But that is always something that I really loved, that whole side of it.”

If it sounds like a calculated risk, it is. Burling has described international level competitive sailing as being a massive game of chess, and though he finesses that description a little, it is clear he still sees it that way in his mind. “It’s a little different,” he says, “in that you can slightly change your pieces from time to time. But yeah, the better you are the less mistakes you make. And while you have to have an underlying plan, you also have to wing it sometimes.

And just as on the board, so too on the water, it is often he who dares – wings it but errs on the right side of the parameters – that wins. As we all saw played out on our

TV screens, in this level of competition things can go spectacularly wrong, and when they do, they do so at speed. Who can forget the heart stopping minutes that stretched in to hours when it seemed New Zealand’s America’s Cup challenge had nose-dived figuratively and literally. But pushing things to the limits, and recovering from the results of dancing too close to those limits, is what marks the difference between winning and losing.

“They’re incredibly cool boats that we sailed in Bermuda,” Burling says. “We were really pushing the technology side in regard to what you could and couldn’t do, particularly in regard to the structural side of things, and there are so many decisions to be made in regard to how many risks to take in regard to that structure. On the windy days during the Cup, you were really looking at the loads on everything! And whether it was luck or good management we seemed to have got it pretty right.”

‘We’ is a very common word in the vocabulary of Peter Burling. It is not the royal

‘We’, it’s just ‘we’ as in ‘us’, in lower case, and it is striking how even in his own mind he edits out Peter Burling and defaults to the team persona. Striking, and also remarkably endearing in someone who is clearly such a very competitive person; you don’t take home the huge string of awards Burling has amassed without wanting to win, though he confesses – a little apologetically – that he’s forgotten just how many World Champs or 49ers wins he has: “You’d have to look it up,” he says. 

“I’ve always been fairly competitive,” he admits, and that really is an understatement, “but I think we have gone through a period in New Zealand when we had heaps of people who were really competitive and who were pushing each other forward. And that has left us in pretty good stead for what we are doing today.

You learn that you have to keep improving and be your own critic and not really rely on too many people to help you out. We had quite minimal coaching when we were young, so that tends to make you more self reliant, and in this sport that is pretty important.”

Burling had barely been back on dry land – and yes he is aware that a huge chunk of his life is spent on the water – when he entered the international Moth class World

Champs at Lake Garda in Italy, and with almost no prep time he placed a very creditable second. Then it was back to New Zealand to continue touring the Cup, but along the way he announced that he would be joining Team Brunel in the Volvo Ocean Race, a decision that will put him up against his long time sailing partner Blair Tuke, who will be part of a different team in the race. The Volvo, formerly known as the Whitbread Round the World Race, demands a whole new skill set, with the crews being expected to much more than just sailors – medical response, sail making, engine and hydraulics repairs are all par for the course, and some legs of the race can last for up to 20 days. It ain’t for the faint hearted.

But having mastered everything from the one-man Moth class to the finely choreographed racing of the America’s Cup, it seems only fitting that he turns his talents to a new challenge. “Its something I’ve always seen as the other side of our sport,” Burling says, “and it has been a great opportunity to jump in with a team that is going to be on the pace. But we’ll have to wait and see how competitive we are, though it will be really good fun and a great chance to develop some skills. I enjoy change and variation and that is why I like doing other events and finding other ways to improve yourself. Everyday is different.”

In addition to being a remarkable success story, perhaps what we like about Peter

Burling is not just the dedication, the classic Kiwi can-do attitude and the team spirit, but the ability to do it all with a composure that borders on, well, almost disinterest.

The perfect antidote to the white-knuckle rides of the America’s Cup Challenge races were Burling’s pitch perfect performances in the post-race press conferences. He was famously accused of being asleep at the wheel, but his opposition and TV viewers alike soon found that to underestimate Peter Burling was to make a grave mistake. By the final races, more than one commentator was calling Burling’s deadpan delivery on and off the water his secret weapon, a star-turn that both baffled - and incrementally and incredibly infuriated - his opposing skipper.

“Yeah,” he says, slipping into trademark laconic post-race monotone, “it’s always been something that, from a young age, there has been pressure in competing and

I’ve always enjoyed that. I generally bring the best out of myself when I have a bit of pressure on, when you are racing for something rather than just going out for a sail.

But during the Cup, you always look quite relaxed because you know what is going on in the background and you know there are so many bits and pieces in place and obviously you have to perform really well and there is a lot of pressure, but you try to get a nice easy message out and keep everyone nice and relaxed. The main part of my job is to sail the boat fast, and we definitely did a good job of that as a team. We had some pretty tough situations to overcome at times, but we pulled through those pretty well. Having to pull through some bit and pieces – some are public knowledge and some aren’t – pulls you closer together and once we got past that first weekend, when we knew we were in with a chance, I don’t think we were ever going to let it go.” 

Bits and pieces. Those would be the near total disaster of a wrecked boat, quite possibly injury or death, and the dashed hopes of a nation who were waiting and watching eagerly at home. But as we know they overcame the bits and pieces – the public and not so public – and took home the sailing world’s greatest trophy.

“The awards are not really why we do it,’ Burling says, “but it is cool to be recognized for what we’ve managed to achieve.” There’s that we again, but then – lo and behold – there is also a brief flash of just Peter Burling. “For me, a lot of it’s about having fun along the way. Win or lose, at the end of it you want to have had fun doing it,” he says.

And behind the cool, calm exterior and the laid back public persona, behind the calculated risk taker and the perennial team player, that is all you probably need to know about Peter Burling. It’s about having fun.

The Captain: the rise of Sarah Goss

WORDS AND PHOTOS CAM NEATE

The Black Ferns Sevens team has dominated the Women’s Sevens Series, claiming three of the four World Series crowns since its inception in 2012. Cam Neate meets the captain, Sarah Goss (Sarah Hirini), and looks into the background of this world-class athlete.

Sarah Goss led her team to take silver at the Rio Olympics last year, which also happened to be the sport's debut appearance at a summer Olympics. From the frozen fields of Manawatu to an Olympic grand final on the other side of the world. For the majority of young Kiwi sportspeople, the idea of success is often found at the post-match tuckshop. The victorious mince and cheese pie or perhaps the player-of-the-day Moro bar. In conversation, it seems our cover story subject knew from a young age there was success to be had far beyond the walls of the tuck shop.

Armed with the exciting task of writing this feature on Sarah I found myself tracing my own steps back to the cold winter mornings in Blake Park, Mount Maunganui (the location for our cover shoot), searching for inspiration. Rugby, the great New Zealand sport, is for me rich in nostalgia: Wednesday after-school practices, freezing cold feet on game day, thick jerseys, mouth guards and half-time oranges. The nerves, the burning feeling in your throat as you sprint down the wing and the sweet victory of that very first try. It appears, despite my youthful obsession with the sport, my knowledge of the game, and the status quo of women’s rugby in New Zealand is today, rather lacking. Or was, until I sat down with Sarah. 

Growing up in rural Manawatu, Sarah and her two siblings spent any spare time they had outside of school helping mum and dad on the family farm. A modest upbringing according to Sarah and a household that has not seen a lot of change since, with both parents still grinding out the farm work every day. "My parents would be working on the farm from 5am until sometimes 8pm. I remember getting home from school and we’d have to do our chores. We’d bring in the firewood in and cook dinner whilst my parents worked. We’d have dinner, watch the news and go to bed."

It was in the frosty winter fields surrounding their home that Sarah began to dream of her future: an aeroplane pilot, a champion hockey player, Big Macs, hot chips and fizzy. Quite the banquet of ambition, but anything is possible when you are a kid. Once high school rolled around Sarah was off to boarding school, which not only saved her parents an hour daily return trip but it was there at Fielding High where Sarah was able to fully immerse herself in sports.

“It meant I was able to play whatever sport I wanted without my parents having to drive me around everywhere. It was all just there”. Gymnastics and netball transitioned into competitive hockey, and ultimately rugby in her final year at school. At the time, Sarah’s coach had recommended taking up rugby to help improve her fitness for hockey but she soon found the full contact and competitiveness of 15-aside rugby much more stimulating than hockey and as a result, traded her hockey stick for a pair of rugby boots. However, it was not a completely smooth transition into her newfound passion.

“I hid it from my parents for about three months, thinking they were going to tell me off for playing rugby. I felt like back then, there wasn’t much support for women’s rugby despite my family being massive rugby supporters.” But once Sarah decided to tell her parents of her new secret love, they were only disappointed they had missed watching her games and according to Sarah, “they’ve watched me ever since. I remember telling my parents back in seventh form when they asked what I was going to do following year and I remember saying I’m going to become a professional rugby player and back then they kind of laughed, but I am someone who will just go after it and I will do everything I can to prove people wrong. I’m stubborn, and it ended up happening.”

In 2010, the Black Ferns won their fourth consecutive World Cup against England on English soil. The live final on Sky Sports was something Sarah recounts as pivotal to women’s rugby, and it was a key moment that truly sparked the flame for her own competitive campaign. That same year, aged 17, Sarah was selected to represent New Zealand in the New Zealand Maori sevens rugby team, travelling to Italy.

Despite playing at an international level, these were still early days for women’s rugby in New Zealand and players were having to hold down full-time jobs to support their rugby careers. Finally, in 2013 the New Zealand Rugby Union were able to offer full time contracts to the women’s teams, which Sarah simply says was “massive” and a transitional period she is certainly proud to have been through. “It makes you really appreciate what you get now”.

Throughout that period, Sarah studied at Massey University (she has been the recipient of the prestigious Prime Minister's Athlete Scholarship for a number of years), and has worked hard to fit her studies around training. It's clear that Sarah feels that education is the key to a life after rugby.

Sarah would train in a makeshift garage gym with local police officer and fellow teammate, Selica Winiata. The 5:30am training sessions were followed by extramural study and then back to the garage at 6pm once Selica had finished her shift.

Allan Bunting, coach of the Black Ferns Sevens teams says Sarah has an “unbelievable work ethic, a relentless desire to learn, grow and look for every opportunity to better herself.” There was no funding or fancy recreation centres in those earlier years of Sarah’s career, but her concentrated self-motivation and gruelling hours of training would soon begin to pay off. 

Goss modestly accepts that leading New Zealand to victory in the World Sevens tournament in 2016, and winning silver in Rio, were particularly proud moments. It is evident however that these awards and accolades are somewhat trivial to her true personal pillars of success; being able to fly her parents to international games, working with local school children and donating sponsored gear to those who need it is. Sarah says "Being successful to me is about knowing I’ve done everything I possibly can to achieve my goals, this hopefully means I’m inspiring others to do the same." Fellow Kiwi Olympian, Rose Keddell from the Black Sticks, acknowledges Goss’s unique journey in women’s rugby, the milestones and the success it has had under the guidance of Goss. “Sarah has been through all the major changes in New Zealand women’s rugby. From gaining contracts and funding, seeing women’s rugby become a professional sport and of course being in the Olympics last year. The sport is in a really good place.”

Compared to Sarah’s fierce and powerful on field performance, there is a very soft and warm side to her demeanour. Sarah’s eyes are teary when she speaks of pride and family, the personal trials and tribulations of a closet rugby player to one who performs now on the world stage. At twenty-four years young, you could say Sarah Goss is killing it, though contentment is not a word used often in her vocabulary. Sarah is conscious about keeping everything her life fresh and exciting and not allowing rugby to be her only passion.

“If there’s something in my mind that I want to do, I have to do it. I was in 6th form and called the local aerodrome and said I wanted to join the flight school. They sent me out a package and all of a sudden I was going up in a two-seater Cessna before school, watching the sunrise around the Manawatu ranges.” 

I like to stay busy. If I didn’t have something outside of rugby then I'd feel stale and I would worry about rugby all the time and that's not healthy for anyone. For me, having that rush of being in an aeroplane, it gives you perspective. This is a theme we often return to in conversation. Sarah recounts one time she was up in the air on a practice flight and her door swung wide open. “All I could see was the ground below me. I got such a rush, I wasn’t really scared, it just made me feel alive. It’s important to have these moments, and life outside rugby to give balance. I did 12 hours towards my PPA and then had to stop because rugby took over. Once I get my degree then I will get back into it." Sarah has also nearly completed her bachelor of arts degree, majoring in Maori studies and a minor in sports science. It has taken her about seven years so far, fitting in papers between tours and training, but the end is in site.

“I’m doing a full immersion Maori paper at the moment which I’m finding very difficult because I’m not fluent in Te Reo”, she laughs, “then I only have one other paper to get my degree. My sister was the first person in my family to get a degree and now I can’t wait to get mine.” It all comes back to those words from her rugby coach, Allan Bunting, that Sarah “has a relentless desire to learn, grow and look for every opportunity to get better. She is a natural leader who inspires by her actions and words. She will be successful with whatever she puts her mind to.
And the rest of those childhood ambitions? “Before Rio, I didn’t have hot chips and fizzy for a whole year. The nutritionist was like ‘what are you even doing?’ I didn’t have to give them up totally, but it was my inner competitiveness. I convinced myself that if I gave in, I wouldn’t make the Olympics. The night after winning silver I went straight out for hot chips and fizzy and it was all I ate for a month”.

Photographing and speaking with Sarah on the exact rugby field I once played on was quite surreal. I probably would have thought back then that I would be the one being interviewed as a rugby star, not the dude with the camera around his neck. But there we were. A professional rugby player standing on my old patch of grass looking amazing and strong and elegant and determined. And me, well determined to capture all that.

This was a new adventure for me, not a job or a task or work but more an opportunity and a challenge to do something new. I find people fascinating, it is almost a hobby of mine to hear new stories and gain knowledge from all walks of life. Sarah’s story is intriguing on so many levels and it was humbling to spend the day getting to know her. I am proud of what she has achieved so far in what is only the beginning of her career and in particular her stance on success and the importance of being a positive role model. Perhaps once the battery dies for good on my camera career, I’ll make a late comeback for number 12 in the black jersey. After all, it’s a game of two halves.

Siblings surfing: Jonas and Elin Tawharu

Jenny Rudd meets two of the world’s top junior surfers, brother and sister, Elin (15) and Jonas (17) Tawharu. They have grown up surfing on their doorstep, here in The Mount.

WORDS JENNY RUDD PHOTOS JEREME AUBERTIN, SALINA GALVAN + CAM NEATE

“Representing New Zealand in any sport gives you the grit and resilience needed to get through difficult times in life.” John Tawharu is the father of Elin and Jonas, two of New Zealand’s brightest surfing stars.

The siblings have just returned from the Azores in Portugal, where they competed in the 2016 VISSLA ISA World Junior Surfing Championship. Elin came 3rd in the U16 girls’ division (the first Kiwi podium finish in nine years), and Jonas was the top Kiwi competitor in the U18 boys’ division. This year was the biggest in the competition’s history, with 370 competitors from five continents, and the first in the era of surfing as an Olympic sport.

We meet Elin and Jonas at the UNO office. In their Mount College uniforms, they look like any other teens, but they are world-class athletes competing at the highest possible level.

IN THE BLOOD

There’s a fair bit of sporty blood flowing through the family; John, a teacher at Omanu Primary School, has represented New Zealand in softball and rugby. Step-mum Jo teaches at Tauranga Intermediate. They both coach the surfing teams at their respective schools. Jo has toured with the New Zealand women’s team as a qualified judge.

“My children have grown up surfing at every opportunity,” says John. “Living by Moa Park in The Mount, they have always been able to skip across the road in their wetsuits. Every weekend for years has been taken up with surfing, either here at home, or out on one of our infamous weekend surf missions. We study the weather reports, checking swell and wind conditions, work out where the best surf will be, and leap into action. It’s such an exciting way to live. Jo makes a stack of homemade pizzas the night before, and we start getting chilly bins, portable chairs, and all our kit out of the basement; everyone’s hunting around for wetsuits, fins, boards and sun-block.”

“Jonas decides exactly what time we need to leave to get the tide at its best, and I always say that Jo is our lucky charm: she almost always calls the surf conditions bang on. The adrenaline’s pumping as we round the last few corners, desperate to get a glimpse of the waves after a few hours on the road. I’ve lost count of the number of times we have zoomed down that hill at Manu Bay, Raglan! I feel very lucky to do these adventures with my partner and children.”

WAVE AFTER WAVE

The ocean has been the backdrop to Elin’s and Jonas’s lives. As toddlers, John would kick a ball into the waves. They would dive in and scoop it up, so the water splashed on their faces, giving them confidence in the water. As small children, John took them out boogie boarding in the rougher white water, to teach them about the power of the ocean. “Ever since she was little, I have always called Elin my Storm Girl. I’d take her out in cyclones, when the white water was smashing around all over the place. She just loved getting rumbled over and over in the waves, and even now she doesn’t ever care about being smashed by huge, dumping waves. That’s her thing – gnarly waves. Jo calls her the Queen of Gnarly.

“As a youngster, Jonas would surf all day with no rest, wearing himself out completely. Then he’d be wrecked for a few days. He’s had to learn to come in and get food and drink every few hours. He has an analytical mind, and has always been particular about his technique, practising over and over again to get it right. Jonas’s love of physics and interest in how things work is ingrained in him; as a nine-year-old, he gave me a lesson on weight transference on his skateboard!“

“The surf season is long and hectic, running from January through to November. And expensive. All us parents worry about how we are going to find the thousands of dollars needed for travel and accommodation as we take our children on the national tour. If they make the national team and go to the World Championships, it’s even more expensive. It always comes together, though. We fundraise hard, doing movie nights, garage sales, and car washing. And the community really gets behind us, which is fantastic. Jo is our master-organiser in the family, making sure everything stays on track. Everything clicks when she’s on board; her brain is amazing.”

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ELIN

“Dad used to push me into two-foot, glassy waves on his fat fish board when I was little, and I would try and stand up. It was exhilarating, and I was hooked. Those are my earliest memories of surfing at my local break, Crossroads. Learning to surf at The Mount has given us such a great advantage. There’s so much coastline here, and the curves, peninsulas and islands create lots of different waves. The Mount has produced a lot of good competition surfers, as it’s a beach break, which is changeable. You have to be flexible to adapt. If you always surf a point break or river mouth, you don’t get enough practice with the smaller, slushy waves.

EARLY ADOPTER

I picked up surfing properly when I was nine. I’ve always been competitive by nature, and won my first national competition when I was eleven, in Taranaki. I was given a greenstone surfboard trophy. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that feeling. And being round the professional surfers was the most exciting thing I’d ever experienced: watching them sign autographs, have their photos taken, and engage in awkward chatter with fans (like me!). Just to be near them, I was frothing as a grom. I wanted to dress like them, look like them and, one day, surf like them. Everything changed after that. I set myself the goal of making the New Zealand team before I turned 18, with a vision in my young head of travelling overseas and representing my country.

NATIONAL TEAM

Then, just as I turned 13, I was selected! I wasn’t expecting it at all. What made it doubly exciting was that Jonas made the team too. I think it’s the first time a brother and sister combo have ever been selected together. Can you imagine the excitement in our house? I have been selected to represent my country each year since then, and this year I won the bronze medal in Portugal in the U16 girls’ division. It was beyond my dreams to make it to the final, surfing with the best in the world at Praia do Monte Verde, where a large swell pounded the beach break. Even though the conditions improved throughout the competition, the waves were pretty unruly and hard to read, so I was seriously stoked to get a medal.

FAMILY

I’m so lucky to have four supportive parents. My mum, Anna, and her partner, Paul, are yoga instructors, so have always practised lots of yoga with us. It’s great for keeping your body strong, open and flexible. All those extra things really give you an edge when competing at a high level. And Mum and Paul are always ready with a good massage after we’ve been training hard. So we can dissect our technique, Jo spends hours filming us, and offers fantastic analytical advice. She’s incredibly supportive of women surfers, having been with Surfing New Zealand for so many years.

My dad has always coached our sports teams, like many other supportive parents, and he and Jo drive us for miles looking for swell. He and Jo have given up so much of themselves to help us succeed. My dad’s always out in the surf. In fact, he’s the biggest grom I know. He’ll be out there when it’s absolute crap, just loving it, for hours on end. I’d surf every day of my life if I could. It’s an addiction, a habit your body and mind craves. I love the exhilaration that comes from the challenge of riding waves and speeding along the face. I’d like to have a go at the professional junior circuit in Australia. Finding funding for that is the biggest challenge. And I also have next year’s World Champs on my mind. I want to win it.”

ELIN’S ACHIEVEMENTS

2011 U12 Women’s Champion, Taranaki. 2013 Ranked 3rd nationally (U17 girls).

2013 New Zealand Primary Schools U13 Girl’s Champion.

2014 U16 Women’s Champion, Gisborne. 2014 Vissla ISA World Junior Surfing Championship, Ecuador (U16 girls), 13th place.

2015 Ranked 2nd nationally (U17 girls).

2015 Vissla ISA World Junior Surfing Championship, California (U16 girls), 16th place. Best result for New Zealand team that year.

2015 Ranked 7th nationally (open women’s).

2016 Ranked 2nd nationally (U17 girls).

2016 U16 and U18 Women’s Champion, and placed 3rd in Open Women’s, Dunedin.

2016 Vissla ISA World Junior Surfing Championship, Azores, Portugal (U16 girls, 3rd place. First Kiwi in 9 years to reach podium, best result in New Zealand team that year, helping New Zealand team to finish 10th overall.

2016 New Zealand Secondary Schools U18 Champion, Raglan Academy Competition.

2016 Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology Secondary School Sportswoman of the Year for Bay of Plenty.

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JONAS

“Surfing is my passion, and I’m completely committed to it. Elin and I are at Mount College during the week, but all weekend we are on the road or at home, surfing. We have done this for as far back as I can remember.

THE HOME FRONT

Having surfed all over our country, as well as many other places in the world, I’d say New Zealand is as good as it gets. Nowhere else will you score pumping waves with epic landscapes and backdrops like we do here. You can surf a volcanic crater at Muriwai, and see great whites and sea lions in Otago. You seem to feel much more immersed in nature and the ocean. Although there are better and more consistent waves in other countries, it still cranks here when it needs to, especially on the east coast of the North Island. But of anywhere, I have the most fun at home, here in The Mount. Even when it’s two-foot mush. We grew up surfing at our local break – the coolest place with the best locals.

AIM HIGH

This year, I won all three Billabong competitions on the circuit here in New Zealand, which put me at number one in the national rankings for the U17 boys. That helped me get selected for the U18 boys’ team to compete at the Junior World Championships this year in the Azores. Elin and I are pretty competitive with each other, but more than that, we support each other. At the Junior World Championships this year, I watched my sister smash her way into the final and get a bronze medal. I was so stoked for her! Supporting her from the beach, with all our teammates, as she competed with the best in the world was an amazing moment.

BUILDING RELATIONS

The cost of competing is really high. Elin and I recognise just how lucky we are to have two sets of parents who do so much to support our surfing financially. We have some fantastic sponsors too, many of whom have become friends, as we’ve spent so much time together on the circuit. Getting sponsored isn’t just about getting stickers on your board: it’s about working together to make sure both sides benefit. Surf companies do want to support young athletes, but they expect us to use and promote their products in a positive way.

ACADEMIC SUCCESS

I really enjoy school. I think having a strong academic background is important, and have just finished year 13 at Mount College. I studied physics, calculus, biology and sport science, and am considering studying further at University of Otago. My greatest achievement so far was recognition from one of the world’s greatest surfers. Around a thousand surfers, from all round the world, entered the ‘King of the Groms’ video competition last year, each submitting a video showcasing their surfing. Californian, Dane Reynolds, picked my video in the top 30. It has spurred me to work harder on my surfing. Looking to the future, I’d definitely like to craft a career in surfing. I’d like to work with companies in the surf industry, and advertise and market for them. But that’s in the future. Right now, I’m concentrating on getting selected for the 2017 New Zealand team and the pro juniors in Australia next year.

JONAS’S ACHIEVEMENTS

2014 April: Vissla ISA World Junior Surfing Championship, Ecuador (U16 boys), 43rd place.

2014 U16 Boys’ Champion, Gisborne. 2015 Ranked 2nd nationally (U17 boys).

2015 Vissla ISA World Junior Surfing Championship, California (U16 boys), 47th place.

2015 Quiksilver King of the Groms World Top 30 U18 Boys’ finalist.

2015 New Zealand Piha Grom Series, (U17 boys), 3rd.

2016 Ranked 1st nationally (U17 boys). 2016 U20 Boys’ Champion, Hawkes Bay.

2016 Vissla ISA World Junior Surfing Championship, Azores, Portugal (U18 boys) 33rd, top performing New Zealand U18 boy.

2016 Champion Billabong U17 Boys Grom series, at Mount Maunganui, Whangamata and Piha.

2016 U18 Boys, Dunedin, 3rd.

Selfie-made mavens: Tash Meys and Kristina Webb

WORDS Jenny Rudd PHOTOS Supplied + Shawn Rolton

We caught up with Instagram influencers TASH and KRISTINA in a whirlwind three weeks before they moved to LA.

The two girls have just finished collaborating on a project which came about directly from Kristina’s Instagram popularity: Color Me Inspired, a colouring book to bring the world to life: maps made up of flowers, sweet treats and beachy scenes. It is total 14-year-old-girl heaven, and the follow up to the hugely popular Color Me Creative.

By the time this magazine is published, the two girls will have moved from the Bay of Plenty to Santa Monica, California, to keep building their already impressive careers. Tash and Kristina prove what an exciting future our world has, as their Millennial Generation steps into the world of business.

THE CONNECTION

Last year Tash hosted a brunch with Viv Conway (21), another Instagram entrepreneur, who sells sportswear she designs, manufactures and distributes on her own Instagram page, @vividsportswearofficial. They invited some friends, thinking it would be fun to hang out together, have a picnic, and use it as a photoshoot opportunity to get content for Instagram. Tash invited Kristina along; they had been going to Paula Knight’s art classes together since they were young, but this was the first time they’d stepped into friendship. Tash knew that Kristina worked in social media too, as Kristina’s @colour_me_ creative brand was going well in America.

“Kristina told me she’d been commissioned to do a second book, but that she was considering turning it down, because the deadline was so tight. We chatted about ideas for the pages, and really hit it off together. A few days later Kristina offered me a contract to collaborate with her on Colour Me Inspired.”

SHARERS

It’s this easy blurring of lines between work and play, as well as looking for ways to blend their business interests to help each other wherever possible, which characterises the working ethos of the Millennials. They tend to enjoy working on social and environmental projects, and because of that, are less inclined to see personal wealth as a measure of their success. Their Generation X parents were taught to play their business cards close to their chest. Information is power. Always keep a trump card up your sleeve to keep on top of office politics. The hard-nosed, shoulder-padded eighties-boardroom Gordon Gekko world is anathema to the Millennial. They have a different way of looking at the world of paid work. “Collaborate, don’t compete,” says Tash.

WHAT IS A MILLENNIAL?

A generation is a group of around 25 years. We have been naming these groups for a while, but not always with any consistency. They aren’t numbered. They get nicknames. And they are open to interpretation. Here’s UNO.’s take: Baby Boomers: born late 40s to early 60s as a result of post-WWII cuddling. They love shiny stuff, cash and gadgets, and stability at work. Generation X: born mid 60s to mid 70s. A bit disaffected, probably as a result of all the daycare they were thrown into whilst their parents were busy getting divorced. They spent their twenties scoffing drugs and dancing all night. Millennials, also known as Generation Y: born early 80s to early 90s. Tash, Kristina and their mates. The children of the Baby Boomers.

Here’s the best description of that age bracket by Harry Wallop, of The Telegraph: Unlike the generation before them, they are smarter, safer, more mature and want to change the world. Their pin-up is Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani education campaigner, who survived being shot by the Taliban, and who became the world's youngest ever Nobel Prize recipient. They are the first generation of technology natives. They don’t like being sold to, and they aren’t massive fans of accumulating stuff. They don’t do drugs, they don’t drink, they smash back green smoothies, and only want to do business with ethically minded companies.

“The internet has offered a level playing field for young people wanting to work online. No one asks you how many years of work experience you’ve had or what your grades were like at school. You just start doing it yourself. In fact, it is one of the few careers were being very young is beneficial.”

WHAT IS AN INFLUENCER?

An influencer is generally someone who has over 10,000 Instagram followers. Brands pay them to advertise their products, leveraging off the relationship the influencer has built with their followers. It’s important for brands to choose the influencer carefully. For instance, Kristina might post a pic of her using Faber-Castell Pencils saying ‘I’m totally in love with these new pencils! They are perfect for colouring in details.’

The internet has offered a level playing field for young people wanting to work online. No one asks you how many years of work experience you’ve had or what your grades were like at school. You just start doing it yourself. In fact, it is one of the few careers were being very young is beneficial. The brand would get their product in front of two and a half million people who love colouring in. They know it’s the perfect target market. Think about John Key and his 18,000 people on Instagram. Tash and Kristina could get in front of the equivalent population of nearly the whole North Island just by posting one photo. Wouldn't a politician love that targeted reach?

TASH MEYS @tastefullytash

She posts pictures of impossibly delicious food (all made and styled herself), her art, and all things to do with wellness. She also runs a number of other accounts on behalf of businesses, who have seen hers, and pay her to make the same success of their own.

“Ever since I got my first camera at 11 years old, my friends and I have played ‘photoshoots,’ taking it in turns to be the photographer and model, going on adventures and finding cool locations to shoot. We’d then hugely over-edit them in photoshop and post our work on Bebo. It was a surprise to be asked to do the photos for a fellow student's birthday party but it went well and I did a couple more after that including a twenty-first. I’ve taken photos for a website and recorded a wedding video. Even though it was a bit scary taking on these things at the beginning, I learnt so much from each one and since then have made a point of taking on every opportunity that comes my way.”

DRIVER

Tash is an absolute bundle of energy and drive, her brain zipping off in all directions. She has the ability to create her own opportunities, and the character to be grateful for them. A sharp marketing brain is matched by her creative ability as an artist and photographer. Looking through the global window of Instagram has afforded some huge opportunities, which Tash is grasping with both hands.

“I switched my degree from psychology to consumer food science after getting sick from eating processed foods in my first year, doing some research into nutrition, and becoming fascinated. “Taking photographs of food for my Instagram page has enabled me to exercise my artistic skills; decorating smoothie bowls and creating a food photograph is similar in my eyes to painting a canvas. It's all about the layers, the different textures and the colours. Since I have now built my Instagram to a level of followers where I am considered an influencer in my industry of health and wellness, I can start to branch out and include art, lifestyle and typography. It's interesting how when I left school I decided not to go down the art route, but everything I do seems to come back to it.”

TEACHING OLD DOGS NEW TRICKS

It’s down to Tash's collaborative nature, as well as her ambition and well-placed confidence, that along with one of her clients, whose Instagram page she and Viv Conway run, she organised an Instagram workshop. They invited media agencies to come and learn about Instagram and what it could do for their clients. It was impressive to watch a twenty-two year old hold court with all the creative industry experts, most of whom were about twenty years her senior, explaining how the algorithms in this social media platform work.

In fact when we approached Tash about featuring her, she immediately did some research on us, and asked why we didn’t have an Instagram page, then pitched to us to let her and Viv launch and run it for us. The range of work Tash is being offered is quite astonishing: brands pay to feature their products on @tastefullytash; she has been approached to manage social media for an Australian celebrity; she gets professional photography commissions; she was invited to collaborate on Kristina’s book; and she manages Instagram accounts for several clients in New Zealand, Australia and now America, where she has moved to. Santa Monica is the health and wellness capital of the world. Tash has placed herself right in the centre of it.

As far as Millennials go, Tash Meys leads the field.

Kristina Webb @KRISTINAWEBB

Kristina has been sketching, drawing and painting since her early teens and posting her art online to a huge community of followers: 1.9 million, who clearly adore her. Her art is encouraging of others; there are plenty of positive affirmations dotted about, such as anti-bullying messages. She started on Tumblr, and has moved to Instagram. Kristina has hundreds of fan pages copying her art and reposting originals.

“On my seventeenth birthday, I was in Michigan on a student exchange programme. My host family bought me an iPhone, which I had wanted for so long! Purely to start using Instagram. As I looked around, learning how to use the app, I was surprised to find one of my drawings - the back of a girl holding her ponytail to the side - on an account with a large following. I commented with ‘thank you for posting my drawing.’ The picture was reposted with a credit to me. Within a few days, I had 16,000 followers.”

GROWING POPULARITY

Posting new drawings daily, Kristina’s following swelled. She produced a wide range of art: a series of Starbucks coffee cups, drawn on and decorated with tiny cups, drawn on and decorated with tiny plastic jewels, sketches of celebrities, and she would randomly surprise her fans by doing a portrait of them after they hashtagged #drawmekristina. Celebrities like Tyra Banks, Ed Sheeran and Ariana Grande noticed her art, and commissions started to roll in from big names.

AGENT FOR INFLUENCERS

Kristina’s mum, Janette, knew that Kristina needed an agent. “It was becoming increasingly difficult to know how to negotiate with some of the bigger companies like YouTube and Disney, both of whom had offered Kristina commissions. I was in America with Rochelle, my older daughter, who now manages most of Kristina’s business affairs. We orchestrated a meeting with one of the top agents in the industry, who signed Kristina up on her first interview.”

One of her commissions came from YouTube, who asked her to create a piece of art to recap on the 100 most popular trends of the year. “After watching every single video, I mapped them all out, and finally managed to get about 75 of them into the drawing. YouTube then sent out the artwork as a thank you to everyone who participated.”

Interviewing Kristina in her apartment in the Mount, with her mum making toast in the background, it’s hard to fathom the sheer scale of her success. It seems there are a combination of factors at play: adopting the platform early (four years ago Instagram was in relative infancy); posting daily; responding to her followers in a heartfelt way; and being passionate about adhering to her own creative vision.

The other element is the attainability of Kristina’s success. Her art is very much of a current style. Her fans are able to copy her drawings, and feel they have something to aim for. What sets Kristina apart from the field isn’t anything particularly new - it’s old fashioned practice, determination, and hard work.

PUBLISHED AUTHOR

In 2014 her agent in Los Angeles suggested a book. He had a contact at Harper Collins. Kristina had to produce a 50 page proposal. Janette explains “She went above and beyond, decorating every page of the proposal and giving much more detail than requested. That’s totally indicative of Kristina’s working style and commitment.”

Her first book, Color Me Creative, was a huge hit with tweenies and young teens. The first half is an autobiography (written in the same friendly, personal tone she uses when chatting with her followers on Instagram); the second half is full of creative challenges for her fans to complete inside the book. This was accompanied by a long book tour and the recording of 15 videos in Miami (there are icons in the book to scan with your phone, which unlock short videos of Kristina).

On the book tour, mothers of these young teens thanked her personally for not swearing on her page, or posting photos of herself drinking alcohol. For all her global success, Los Angeles agents, published books, and commissions from the world’s biggest names, all Kristina really wants to do is be left to her own devices with a bundle of coloured pencils, her Bose speaker, some paper and her iPhone.

Getting inspired

Digital content creation. It sounds complicated, but it really means taking pictures of beautiful things, which you make or curate, ready to put on social media channels like Instagram. In the old days, photographers were like demi-gods. Swanning onto shoots, dressed in black polo necks with a team skittering along behind them who responded to demands “I need 12 swans sprayed gold, NOW!” They charged a fortune for their creative genius.

With digital cameras, that’s all changed. If you want to have a go, set up an Instagram account, and start posting pics!

IMPROVE YOUR ART SKILLS WITH PAPAMOA-BASED ARTIST PAULA KNIGHT

"Tash first started coming to me when she was just seven, and Kristina as a young teenager. "They both had a strong desire to listen and learn. To me, they are the best kind of students and I loved showing them how to improve their work. We would go over and add details to portraits and hair, developing shade and colour and finely tuning their abilities until they both developed into confident artists.

“I remember when Kristina was working on a school art project and a trail of purple glitter followed her everywhere. Kristina came and went as she went to the USA, but at one point she was attending both my kids’ and adults’ classes, her desire to learn was so great.”

HAVE A LOOK AT SOME OF THE GREAT LOCAL INSTAGRAM ACCOUNTS, AND START ENGAGING @vividsportswearofficial @mtmaunganui @bayofplentynz @tastefullytash @bop.eats

UNO. INSTAGRAM PAGE Viv and Tash have been running it. Fancy yourself as a photographer? Post pics with #unomagnz and we’ll feature the best! Do the art challenges in Colour Me Creative, and hashtag them #cmcbook and #unomagnz.