Michele Hewitson Interview: Diane Robertson

The City Missioner: master fundraiser and cemetery ballet dancer Diane Robertson has helped to look after the city's deprived people for 13 years. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Diane Robertson, the Auckland City Missioner, says that, oh, she's not best at doing anything, rather she's sort of okay at a number of things: "I'm a jack of all trades." She's just a plodder, she says.

So she suggested, as I was leaving, that I'd have been better off interviewing Kenneth. Kenneth is a wooden robot and the gimmick for the mission's Winter Appeal.

I'm not sure she was altogether joking, although she does like a good laugh and when she has one, which is often, she gives your ear drums a hell of a fright.

I couldn't decide what the point of him was. What does he do? "He moves. There's a button somewhere underneath that makes him go backwards and forwards or something." She has been told not to go pushing his buttons because of a small problem with the wheels falling off, and anyway, she's forgotten how exactly to work him.

What's he supposed to be? "He's a flightless bird robot." She was by now shrieking with laughter, but Kenneth does have a serious purpose: He is in the business of raising funds at a time the mission struggles to raise them.

So, you can follow him on Twitter and Facebook and donate money, which would be very welcome. Robertson has never managed to figure out why the Winter Appeal is the hardest. I'd thought people would give money at this time of the year because it's not hard to imagine how horrible it would be to be cold and hungry, but of course fundraising is never that simplistic.

So gimmicks are required. "Traditionally we've gone with a serious issue in winter ... a major social issue and that's a difficult one - trying to raise an issue at the same time as you're trying to raise money. You try different techniques in the market and there's a lot of debate and arguments in the advertising and funding world that that actually isn't the best way to do it. You try different techniques in the market and I think sometimes these stories showing kids living in poverty ... People do get fatigued by it."

The robot has to raise $280,000. How much has he raised so far? "I don't know. We made $30 the other day! We went to a radio station and came back with 30 bucks."

Really, of course, she went to a radio station and raised 30 bucks. She has raised many hundreds and hundreds of thousands for the mission - although she would no doubt say that many other people have raised the money and been the chief executive of an organisation which in the past year has "provided 9000 emergency food parcels and distributed $2 million of food parcels and served 195,000 hot drinks", among other kindnesses. Not bad for a plodder.

She is very good at raising money, then, and she has managed the unimaginable feat of making helping out at the mission's Christmas lunch almost a glamour event.

People go on a waiting list to volunteer and get very miffed when told there's no room att that particular inn. Her job description might be: Making bums attractive, and she's done it for 13 years.

I put it that way to see whether she'd object to me calling her clients bums. She doesn't. It goes without saying that she is a do-gooder (which is not, or not necessarily, the same as a goody-goody) and a lefty.

She said a lot of people would say that she's not much of a lefty and that she's gone too far the other way. What she means is that she knows loads of really rich people and not only uses her connections to get them to cough up dosh, she even, God forbid, seems to like them.

She has an extraordinary assortment of friends, from the very rich to the very poor, although she draws the line at letting the bums come around to her house. She says her husband, Wilf, a deacon at St Matthew-in-the-City next door, would "bring them all home" if she let him. Is he nicer than her? "He is!"

She also has army friends (Wilf used to be a soldier); fundamentalist Christian friends from her teenage days, although she is no friend or fan of fundamentalist religion; and friends from the seven years of Sunday nights she spent with a Steiner group at an anthroposophical reading group.

She is a great believer in things biodynamic and claims to have cured the youngest of her three sons of an allergy to cows' milk through feeding him biodynamically, whatever that means.

I said she'd swapped the fundamentalism of her childhood for another sort of hocus pocus and she said, well, she supposed I'd like to have nuclear waste in my soil.

Where would it come from, this nuclear waste? "Japan!" she said laughing loopily. She can be a bit loopy, when she gets going, but she's mostly very sensible and practical, so I'll put this down to having come under the influence of hocus pocus at an early age.

She said that I am not to say she believes in burying cows' horns in the soil (which is about all I know about biodynamics) because she doesn't, and I had mentioned the damn cows' horns, not her. "I don't even know what they do with cows' horns but I do believe in organic biodynamic farming, if that's all right!"

She does believe in God but she says her philosophy could best be summed up like this: "Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel."

You have to love her moments of loopiness. She told me that she does ballet in Purewa cemetery, where she walks her dog. This would be something to see: A crazy lady, who happens to be the city missioner, performing ballet, in her boots, in a cemetery. But she said, "nobody sees me!" Still, they might, and she did tell the story.

She has been doing ballet for three years now, because she got given vouchers for pole dancing dance lessons by a daughter-in-law as a Christmas present (this will make some sort of sense, eventually).

So she did the pole dancing lessons and was very good at the pole bit because she'd just spent the summer digging up her concrete driveway and had impressive upper body strength. But she says she was no good at the sexy part.

"No, that was really not ... becoming. I was likely to do myself some serious damage so the girls said: 'Why not go to ballet?' and I said, 'Oh! Why not?"' (I never really found out why her daughter-in-law would give her pole dancing lessons in the first place.)

She had always wanted to be a ballerina but as a child she wasn't allowed to go to classes because her father had had a sister who had run away with a ballet company (sporadic lapses in logic might be a family trait).

She said, like an over-excited 5-year-old: "I can do a pirouette!" Then, remembering she was the very sensible city missioner: "I'm not going to show you. That's not going to happen."

You can see why she has so many friends, from all of her former lives. After an hour with her you feel as if you've known her all your life - which is no doubt a useful gift for getting money out of people.

In one of her former lives she was a therapist (she's also been a teacher and has run children's homes.) She still is, sort of, which makes her a funny sort of interview.

If you ask her what she thinks about something, she tells herself to not think about the thought, but to simply answer (something like that; she was in a branch of existentialist therapy).

She says she still believes in therapy - although she complained rather a lot about this interview being like a prolonged session - but that she doesn't believe in therapy as a way of "fixing" people.

She would much rather we weren't talking about therapy at all because she knows where it's going to lead, which is to her early family life which was, to put it in non-therapy terms, utterly crappy.

She says, "when I think about family stuff, yeah, it's stuff woven into who I am and what I do, but it's not who I am now." That's a sort of plea not to bang on about her childhood, so I'll keep it as short as I can - although as she says, you need one of those diagrams therapists are keen on drawing on whiteboards to attempt to make any sense of her family.

Her parents were brother and sister-in-law who eventually got together (they didn't marry until Robertson was 10) after her father's first wife died. Her mother had had three other failed marriages. She was a religious nutter, who bashed her kids. (Robertson has half-siblings she has little contact with.) Her father's religion was booze. She liked her father.

She didn't like her mother, but she still obviously finds it terribly hard to admit to this. The difference is that her mother failed to protect her children from sexual abuse. She says her mother knew and her father didn't.

That her mother did nothing used to be "the big question mark in my life. But she didn't and it's not resolvable and it's not understandable". There was poverty and filth and the usual humiliations that go along with both of those things.

She says she had to make up everything she knows about how to live, including how to talk the way she does now, and how to be clean. She does tend to get stuck into things, so once she learned about housework, she became OCD about it, but she had to "let that go" when she got ME. She's now obsessive only about towels: If one drops on the floor it goes straight into the wash, but she doesn't spend hours polishing her copper pots.

She is stubborn, a Taurus, she says, (I wasn't about to ask if she actually believes in astrology after the cow horn exchange) so if she takes on something, like cleaning, or learning to talk nicely, or dieting like mad after going from a size 10 to a size 14 after she gave up smoking two years ago, she does it properly.

Imagine the city missioner worrying about being fat! Next she'd be telling me she was interested in clothes. "Of course not," she said, "I wear sack cloth and ashes, every day."

I thought the idea that some people have of her as saintly might horrify her but she said, "I think it's the good woman syndrome ... And you don't go out and say, 'I'm not actually', because that probably wouldn't be a good way to help the mission achieve its cause. It's a good organisation, it has good values, it does good work and if it's perceived that I'm good as well, then that's okay."

And, anyway, she's not always the city missioner. As a surprised neighbour pointed out after seeing her in gumboots and a daggy shirt, sometimes she doesn't even look like the city missioner. Goodness, what did she think about that? "I thought, 'I didn't expect to have to bring her home!"'

To donate, go to: aucklandcitymission.org.nz