While one wealthy businessman is going to the Privy Council to stop us driving on his land, another is opening his multi-million dollar piece of Waiheke
to the public, writes SUZANNE McFADDEN.
These days Rob Fenwick's political career is up in the air. Well, more correctly, in the boughs of a tree where the hoardings from his days as leader of the Progressive Greens now serve as the roof of a rough-and-ready tree hut in his Remuera front yard. All there is to win over are a rocking horse's head and an old plastic chair.
While the mossy billboards are a relic of his political past, Fenwick's home is cluttered with keepsakes from other endeavours in an extraordinary life. There are countless photos from his trips to Antarctica. The gallery of fine art stretching along the walls features a painting of the huge property on Waiheke Island he has just opened to the public. And the radio in this 50-year-old businessman's home is pre-set to 88.6FM - the Mai youth music station. Not because he is chairman of the board, but because his kids demand it that way.
On the inside of the lounge doorway are notches recording the growth of his three daughters, aged 26, 13 and 12, and a 3-year-old granddaughter all of whom still live with him and his second wife, Jenny, a yoga teacher.
Fenwick, who rises at 5.30 to start work in his home office most mornings, leads a life so packed it diminishes his foray into politics into a mere flirtation - and not one he would like to repeat.
His attempt to get a pro-business green party into parliament failed first time around, and he shakes his slightly greying head vigorously at suggestions he try again. Not that he has lost his abiding interest in conservation - he is simply making his stand for conservation in many different ways.
There is his day job as director of Living Earth, the company which turns garden and bodily wastes into compost - an end product he so believes in, he once offered to eat it. He heads the Antarctic Restoration project to help to save the historic exploration huts of Scott and Shackleton. He is a trustee of the World Wide Fund for Nature and chairman of the trust to restore Motutapu Island to its native glory.
But it is Fenwick's most recent accomplishment that is his favourite. As he says, permanently protecting his 373ha block of land on Waiheke from the clutches of mining companies, gives him immense satisfaction. Even more important, his plans to thread the regenerating forest with a public walkway - so opening his land to ordinary people - gives him extra joy.
The Fenwick farm sits idyllically on the south-east coast, a peninsula between Awaawaroa Bay and Te Matuku Bay. Native bush is regenerating through old sheep pastures, a waterfall flows and there are archaeological signs of Maori occupation. "I was lucky enough to buy this property 15 years ago," says Fenwick. He left it alone to regenerate and now "there's some really stunning forest".
Usually weekends are interspersed with work and family. Fenwick tries to ensure that he and his family get over to Waiheke every second weekend.
While across the island another successful businessman, John Spencer, is heading for the Privy Council in London to try to stop people driving on his land, Fenwick has opened his gates wide. Fenwick's plan began when a mining company approached him, with a view to mining the 50 million tonnes of high-quality aggregate rock that lay beneath the surface. The request was like a red rag to the conservation-minded Fenwick. In an unusual step, he covenanted the land under the Reserves Act to protect it forever from mining.
Although the family will still run the farm as a business - there will be pasture, a vineyard, an olive grove and an oyster farm off the beach, in waters set aside for a marine reserve - some of it will be open to the public. "It's all about being inclusive," says Fenwick. "You can have conservation and production complementary to each other."
A walkway will run through the forested land, providing a link to a proposed track that will wend around the coast, hopefully allowing people to do the round trip without stepping on public roads.
"I've got a special affection for the old Gulf. And I guess I've got a bit pissed off over the years that previous administrations of DoC have allowed these islands to get overrun with weeds, rotting wharves and run-down dunnies," Fenwick says.
One of his oldest friends, Waitakere mayor Bob Harvey, bubbles over with praise. "If you asked me to name five great New Zealanders, I would put him right in there. He is one of the most dedicated and generous people living in this country," says Harvey. "The only person who he compares to is Stephen Tindall. Stephen is an extraordinary public man, while Rob is much more private."
Fenwick might blush when he reads this. But as a once-prominent public relations maestro, he should have learned to swallow the spin.
"I do things that give me some satisfaction - not always things that make a lot of dough," says Fenwick. Yet he admits he has done quite well out of some of his ventures. "I have just picked up causes along the way, or maybe they have picked me."
One of them is Queen Mary Hospital for addiction treatment at Hanmer Springs in the South Island. A member of Fenwick's family received treatment there and, say friends, after a harrowing time for Fenwick, he was moved to put his money into the hospital.
"A mate and I purchased the hospital when the government was about to close Hanmer in 1997," he says. "It was a basketcase when we took it on. It's been quite a journey really."
Some would say that Fenwick could hardly fail in life. A child of one of Auckland's premier families, his mother's father, Sir Frank Mappin, gifted Government House in Epsom to the nation in 1969. But he believes it is probably a "genetic rub-off" from his paternal great-grandfather, Sir George Fenwick, who led a remarkably similar life 100 years ago, that shaped Fenwick's career.
Sir George was an editor and managing director of the Otago Daily Times newspaper for more than half a century, and the New Zealand Press Association was founded in his office. Rob began his working career as a journalist, first with Radio Hauraki then the Auckland Star.
Sir George was keenly humanitarian and "animaliterian", setting up the SPCA in 1885. He was asked to accept a nomination for the House of Representatives on several occasions, but shied away from politics.
So the natural-entrepreneurial-political thing was in-bred in Fenwick, whose relaxed family home with its comfortable squishy sofas, piles of books and kids, has that dilapidated English Counties feel. He puts an emphasis on inheriting the environmental side. "I guess all of my family had a strong connection with things natural," he says. "My mother's parents had a love of horticulture, and my grandfather ... wrote a lot of books on nature.
"When we were kids we spent a lot of time on the Hauraki Gulf - we used to chug around in our little speedboat."
He pauses. "But I can't put my finger on a day when the shutters [opening his eyes to environmental issues] suddenly came up for me."
He ponders it for a while, and then the day of awakening comes to him, like an energy-efficient lightbulb. It was when he started bottling spring water under the New Zealand Natural brand. "I tried to take it into the world to export it, and I realised how critically important the image of New Zealand was. When you're up against Evian and Perrier, who are you?
"You rely on being a small country with a wonderful environment. Without that, you're toast. It suddenly woke me up to 'what if we lose it?'
"You know, New Zealand is the most wasteful country in the world. The amount of land needed to sustain each one of us is larger than any other nation. We can do so much better. It's so bloody important to us. If we blow it, we blow more than just a few bird species."
As strong-minded as he is about the environment, Fenwick can be just as guilty as the rest of us at times. He admits with a shrug that his daughters are constantly reminding him to put things in the recycling bin. Yet much of his time is consumed by refuse - well, other people's - at the Living Earth Company's composting site in Onehunga.
The business, which started with composting garden waste, was started in 1994 by Fenwick, Roger Wark, John Tapper and American recycling expert Ron Albrecht.
After beginning in Auckland the company has spread to Wellington and Christchurch, and now mixes sewage sludge with garden waste to make crumbly, apparently sterile, compost for home gardeners.
Fenwick's latest idea is creating and selling entire instant gardens. "It's like a modular kitchen or bathroom that you select from a catalogue," he says. "We bring everything - from the compost to the grass, the paving stones and the plants - and install a new garden over the weekend."
There is no doubt that while Fenwick lives and breathes his clean-green philosophy, he is a competitive businessman who has earned a few detractors over the years.
"I suppose during the Progressive Green period we positioned ourselves against the deep green group," he says. "But in reality I think we had a lot more in common with them than we didn't. I've tried to mainstream environmental things. You know, you can live and respect the environment without being poor. But I take my hat off to the Green party in this country - there has been a lot of progress."
Fenwick tried, and failed, to get his pro-market green beliefs through the door of the first MMP parliament. "I think it showed us that it takes a huge amount of energy to form and sustain a new political party and then front with a full ticket," he explains. "If we'd channelled all that energy into the main political parties we might have achieved a bit more."
A couple of years later he did something like that, heading the National government's environmental policy taskforce which was called the Bluegreens. He has never been a member of the Nats but he continues to offer his thoughts to them when asked and this weekend he is addressing National's Bluegreen forum in the Waitakeres.
Another passion for Fenwick is to try to preserve the history of a chunk of frozen land much further south by leading the Antarctic Restoration project, an international endeavour to try to salvage the exploration huts in the Ross Sea region. One of them, Robert Scott's original hut, will have stood there for a century next month.
"There was always a feeling that the dry climate would preserve those huts forever, but suddenly things are starting to go a bit wrong," Fenwick says. "We need a big injection of dough. The New Zealand trust has the responsibility for them, but funding the project has to be an international job.
"I've been there a couple of times - and you are never the same after you've been to Antarctica. It's such a vast and humbling place to stand in. Then you go into these huts and reflect on what these great men were thinking when they stood here. It's the frontier of adventure."
If Fenwick had been born 100 years earlier, he would have been the kind of bloke who would have sponsored the polar adventures of Shackleton or Scott. Or so reckons Harvey, who used to work with him in public relations.
"He would've been a member of the Royal Geographic Society discussing adventures to explore the world," Harvey says. "He is kind of Victorian in his ways - a gentleman with a sense of the old world, but one who understands how the world could be. He is in love with life."
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