Scoop's autumn issue is available to read online. See page 92 for the New Zealand section of the global review, a feature I've been putting together for eight years. It feeds my love of design and justifies hours of web surfing design blogs. 

I am the co-ordinator and writer of the award-winning Thinking book for Strategy Design and Advertising. Each issue contains in-depth articles, snapshots of recent work and extended case studies. It's a great example of how editorial-style content can inspire customers and give them some value, while also telling them more about what you do. I think this kind of content-driven marketing will win out in 21st century ad-land.

Heritage Magazine
by Kris Herbert 

In this limited panorama, the news reports of Lyttelton’s “utter decimation” echo strongly. But these damaged buildings are only a façade. And you don’t have to go far to find that the town’s heart and soul are very much alive.

“Kia Kaha Lyttelton” reads a hand-stitched fabric bunting on the safety fence outside the Royal Hotel. A group of people sit in a circle on the footpath near the corner of London and Canterbury Streets. Kids and grandmothers, trendy musicians and out-of-work school teachers use old woollen blankets, buttons and bright-coloured embroidery cotton to stitch heart-shaped badges and adornments for the bleak, ubiquitous fences.

The Lyttelton Coffee Company building is inside the fences of the London Street cordon, but the café itself has hardly missed a beat, thanks to co-owner Stephen Mateer, who got the Army to rescue the roaster and set up a makeshift café to serve up free coffee and a vital meeting place for the people who have refused to leave.

Lytteltonians are now happily paying for their coffee, gathering and chatting and laughing in this al-fresco café - proving that this community is not defined by its buildings.

Local radio is broadcasting, a volunteer alternative high school is operating and the Lyttelton Street Party, planned for 26 February went ahead, even without the street.

Though much of the bricks and mortar that marked one aspect of Lyttelon’s past will be lost, most of the historic wooden houses remain. The geography of the extinct volcanic caludron will continue to delineate and define the town. And the spirit that inhabits this place is, if anything, stronger than ever.

History shows that Lyttelton has rebuilt before. Over 162 years, the town has adapted and evolved, grown and shrunk, failed and succeeded.

The idea of Lyttelton port and township was conceived in 1847 by Edward Gibbon Wakefield and John Robert Godley as part of their planned programme of systematic colonisation. The town plan was drawn up in London – a traditional grid pattern that took little of the town’s steep geography into account.

By the time the First Four Ships arrived in 1850, there were 300 people and 30 buildings in the port. These early buildings were mostly Colonial Georgian style timber cottages. By 1868, the population had grown to 1400.

In October 1870, New Zealand’s worst urban fire ever struck Lyttelton. It started at the Queens Hotel and a wild norwest wind fanned it rampantly through the closely-packed timber buildings. With a lack of accessible water, the volunteer fire brigade could do little. Miraculously, no lives were lost but 75 buildings were destroyed. When the town slowly rebuilt, stone and brick were the preferred materials.

Last year, Lyttelton became one of the largest historic areas to be listed on the NZHPT Register. The brick commercial zone is only one part of the listing, which also includes the pedestrian walkways and steps that link the town’s streets, the 19th century timber cottages, the cemeteries, former goal site, the brick barrel storm water system under the town and the streetscape and views to and from the crater rim, the port and the harbour. These things are all intact. As is the community.

Margaret Jeffries is the chair of Project Lyttelton, a grass-roots community group with a vision for developing Lyttelton as a vibrant, sustainable community. Margaret describes Lyttelton as a “connected community where people look out for one another, without any judgment”.

“It is a vibrant community that is quirky, has lots of ideas, is diverse, is moving towards sustainability and is very vocal - all of these attributes have put us in a good situation for coping with this earthquake.”

Looking forward, Margaret says, “There is an excitement in the town as to what the new heritage we create might be. There is much talk that we do this in an environmentally sound and sustainable way – that we want to explore options that are more out on the edge rather than simply and speedily putting up tilt slab block buildings.”

If Lytteltonians are vocal, then writer Joe Bennett is perhaps one of the town’s most outspoken and most well-spoken residents. He has called the port home for 23 years.

“I've always liked its striking location - the inside of a volcano, everything overlooking the port, the size of the place dictated by the gaunt impassive crater. And I like its mix of people. Ports are cosmopolitan places, rough but tolerant. Architecturally, the best of it for me has always been the little weatherboard cottages. The big buildings, the ones I'm supposed to revere, do little for me.”

Post-quake, the people are still there and so are the weatherboard cottages, by and large.

Joe’s vision for the future is bold: “Here’s a chance to do something startling. I'd like it to look more like it did in 1869 than in 2009. Timber. Verandahs. Low. Human. Vibrant. Bowl London Street, Norwich Quay and the area between. Turn the area between the two streets into a pedestrian entertainment precinct.”

Lyttelton’s history shifted course on February 22, 2011 - the event itself a bold mark on the timeline. But heritage doesn’t exist only in the past. It is being created today and it will evolve into tomorrow. It’s not often that a town gets a chance to put its mark so solidly on the future. The people of Lyttelton are eager for the challenge. In 100 years, they hope their grandchildren will look back and say they were bold and wise and clever.

By Kris Herbert
Staple, 2005
Harry's pub. Saturday night. I'm trying to look cool while I suss out the crowd. Who the hell pays $35 to see people bleed, I'm wondering. Hundreds of people have packed into the room adjoining the 24-hour pokey bar for one of Christchurch’s few live fights. There are kickboxers, people who know kickboxers and people who wish they were kickboxers.

Next to me is Laura Marsh, a clothing designer and fine arts student. She's here because here little sister is taking on a Maori mother four from Dannevirke in the fifth fight. And on my right is her dad, David, who's flown from Dunedin to see his daughter fight for the first time.

Sitting nervously in his navy overcoat and scarf, Mr Marsh is a comical contrast to the skinny, short-haired guy screaming obscenities at the end of our row. One round into the first fight, Mr Marsh leans across me to ask Laura’s is winning. Laura shrugs.

Suzanne Marsh doesn't know her dad is in the audience. The 23-year-old natural resource engineering student is out the back, her shoulder length blond hair pulled into neat corn rows. She's spent half the day tracking down the perfect intro music, which turned out to be Hit ‘Em High, Hite ‘Em Low by Cyprus Hill. Now her eyes are greased with Vaseline to keep the skin from splitting under the impact of a punch. But even with a mouth guard and big red gloves, she’s not very scary.

Suzanne can't hear the announcer's intro. "In the red corner, from Academy Combat, the women's middleweight Thai boxing champion of New Zealand. Please welcome Suuuuusan Marsh."

It's an impressive intro. Too bad he got her name wrong. But she's got a friends in the audience and when the sweet looking blond appears with a look of intense focus on her face, the crowd goes wild. Her opponent is waiting.

Live fights in Christchurch are rare because, despite high participation number in Thai boxing classes, there aren't many people willing to take it into a live ring. There are around 30 matches a year in New Zealand, but only one or two of these are in Christchurch, and most of the opponents have to be flown in from the North Island.

Suzanne’s coach looks like the real deal – like a tough guy from an 80s karate movie. He’s not so intimidating when you learn he’s actually a well-spoken molecular biologist called Geoff who wants to promote kickboxing as a family event.

This one certainly is, though I’m not sure how happy Suzanne’s dad is to see his little girl taking – and serving - blows in the ring. Her mum, Annette, hasn’t been to see her fight – can’t bear to see her baby get hurt.

But Laura is a regular fan. She and her other sister Adiranne saw Suzanne fight for the first time in 2003. “The build up was so nerve racking,” Laura remembers. “Then she rocks out with some big romper-stomper, big beat tune and everyone was screaming for her like she was some kind of rock star. When she started fighting, Adrianne and I were screaming at the top of our lungs and she just kicked the other chick’s ass. We totally just discovered another side to Suzanne that we’d never seen before.”

Suzanne only recently discovered it herself. Laura says Suzanne was the least confident of the Marsh sisters – until she took up kickboxing.  

“I have definitely grown more confident in everything I do and even the discipline it requires has helped me progress in other areas of life,” Suzanne says. “Instructing has also given me heaps of character building experiences especially dealing with guys who find it difficult being taught to punch by a girl! I have learnt my strengths and weakness and I also know my limitations.”

But going to the gym and swatting leather bags is a far cry from taking your fists to a mother of four in front of hundreds of people. Suzanne’s decision to get into the ring was about the challenge. 
It’s not always easy for her to find an opponent. There are only about 300 competitive kickboxers in New Zealand. Most of them are in the North Island and a lot of them are men. Opponents must be matched to within 3kg. 
But tonight Suzanne has a fight and from the beginning, she has the upper hand. Even though everything I know about kickboxing I learned from Jean-Claude van Damme, I can tell that Suzanne has got more moves and better fitness.
Suzanne says success in the ring is a fine balance between self-confidence and respect for your opponent. “It’s important to not get cocky or to be afraid. It’s a fine line but fall either side of it and you’re almost guaranteed to lose.”
Between rounds Geoff with his forehead pressed to Suzanne’s and he talks a steady stream of instructions and encouragement at her. 
Kickboxing, or Muay Thai Boxing comes from – you guessed it – Thailand, where it evolved from self-defence to sport. Today, it ranks with soccer as one of the most closely followed sports in the country. Characterised by furious punches, crushing elbow blows and powerful kicks, Muay Thai Boxing is fought in five, three-minute rounds with two-minute breaks in between.
The night also includes three Vale Tudo matches. This is hard-core, no holds-barred cage fighting. The fighters wrestle each other to the ground and then bash the shit out of each other. I can barely watch. 
After the full five rounds, Suzanne is declared the winner of her fight. She permits a smile as her glove is held high by the referee. In the third row, Laura’s dad relaxes noticeably.

The drive from Queenstown to Sam Neill’s Two Paddocks vineyard takes you through some of the country’s most spectacular landscapes and back at least a half a century.

I arrive at the Redbank property almost 20 minutes late, thanks to road delays at the Nevis Bluff.

There is a 1947 Chevrolet truck parked in the shingle drive. The gold tinge of the leaves betray what could otherwise be mistaken for a full summer day. Vines stretch out towards the valley while lavender bushes and fruit trees rise up the gentle slope to the damn.

Two Paddocks manager Mark Field greets me and leads me into the office. Sam is bent over a desk and turns to greet me quickly. “I’m terribly busy,” he says, “We get up at dawn and go to bed exhausted.”

When he turns back, I see that he is writing a postcard.

His humour is as dry as the sun-scorched Central Otago hills. And so is my throat after a dusty drive through them. Sam pours me a glass of water while I pull up a chair. He speaks slowly and thoughtfully and rarely makes eye contact.

We get the formalities out of the way first. It is New Zealand, so we search out our one-degree-of-separation. It doesn’t take long.

“You’ve come from Lyttelton?” he asks. “Yes,” I answer. “I know your sister and your niece.”

More formalities ensue. He’s pleased with the hot weather. It’s good for the vines, which are still catching up after a cool, wet summer.

Sam has been in the news this morning, the New Zealand Herald reporting his opposition to cubicle dairying in the Mackenzie Country. He’s been asked to go on Saturday Morning with Kim Hill but he’s hesitant.

“I’m not good at thinking on my feet and I don’t like radio because you can’t take anything back,” he says.

Yet this issue is worth speaking up for.

“You’ve got to put your hand up once in a while,” he says. “I don’t do it often but this proposal is infuriating. It’s dry land and it should be dry farmed if at all.”

The large-scale dairying proposal includes three companies proposing to house almost 18,000 dairy cows in cubicle sheds. The hearing had just begun and Sam had put his voice to a group called the Mackenzie Guardians, which includes former poet laureate Brian Turner and artist Grahame Sydney.

The group estimates that the proposal would create as much waste as Christchurch city.

“The equivalent of waste from a city of 400,000 people going into that fragile ecosystem every day - to my mind, that’s vandalism. Corporate vandalism.”

In its report, The Herald has referred to him as “Hollywood Star Sam Neil”, but I imagine that reference would make him wince.

I ask if he sees himself as a celebrity. “Dear God, no. Why would anyone want to be that? I’m a reasonably successful non-entity. I’ve certainly never chased fame. I’ve never had a publicist.”

The celebrity culture is baffling to Neill. “When I go to the dentist, I look through the magazines and I don’t know who any of those people are. Some of them look quite nice in a frock but I’ve got no idea who they are.”

I suggest that New Zealand is a bit insulated from the celebrity culture but Neill disagrees. “It’s rife in New Zealand. Auckland is full of celebrities.”

But not Alexandra.

“Every now and then someone might toot the horn and say ‘Hi Sam’. I usually know them.”

After a very busy 2009, Sam is enjoying some time off to enjoy life as a Central Otago local.

“I do quite a bit of fishing,” he says. “We take a few bottles of wine, for testing purposes only. We need to find out if it drinks well at high elevations and after being carried around in your backpack all day. We also need to see if it measures up to the grandeur of the surroundings.”

It would be most unacceptable to drink average quality grog amongst the spectacular landscapes of Central Otago.

An appreciation of alcohol run’s in Neil’s blood. “I come from generations of fine boozers,” he says.

The family business, Neill & Co, was a wine and spirit merchant. Sam’s father, Dermot Neill, was also a military man. Sam was born Nigel Neill in 1947 while his father was stationed in Northern Ireland.

In 1954, the family returned to New Zealand and Dermot moved into the family business. There were several Nigel’s at school, so Nigel became nicknamed “Sam” and it stuck.

So, was it a return to his boozing roots that motivated Neill to start a vineyard? No, he says, it was almost an accident.

“I bought some land, planted some vines. I never had a plan, just like the rest of my life. It’s bigger than I intended.”

I get the feeling his film career is also bigger than he intended. Certainly bigger than he expected.

“I never had any ambitions for anything,” he says.

Neill started acting at high school in Christchurch but he never had any formal education. “I always thought acting would be a cool thing to do but when I left school there was so little work. There were only half a dozen people who could make a living from acting. When I did some plays at the Downstage Theatre in my last year at uni, I was paid $30 a week and we did six performances a week. $30 plus a free dinner and it was always the same – it was always mash potatoes and beef stew.”

Neill moved to Wellington and got a job at the National Film Unit. He worked as an editor, a writer, a narrator and eventually the director of documentaries.

His big acting break came in 1977, when he starred in Roger Donaldson’s Sleeping Dogs. The first New Zealand film to be released in America, Sleeping Dogs caught the attention of Australian casting director Margaret Fink, who got Neill an audition for a film called My Brilliant Career. When he landed the part, Neill resigned from the Film Unit and took up acting full time, going on to star in many, many films, including Jurassic Park, The Horse Whisperer and The Piano.

Not at a bad career for someone with no ambition. He is characteristically modest: “I’m still here. I think I’m durable and reasonably useful. I’m not a specialist. I’ve also had a great deal of luck. I’ve been the right places at the right time.”

Though he’s been enjoying some much-deserved time off, Neill is in no sense slowing down. “I never want to hang up my boots. I can’t imagine anything worse.”

The pay has improved dramatically since his days at Downstage but Neill says he also loves the camaraderie of working on a film and the experience of travelling to new locations.

“I love the family feel you get from a being with a bunch of people for three to six months. And occasionally, I get to work with directors who are really fantastic and do work that I’m really proud of.”

I ask what he is most proud of but he is diplomatic. “I can’t single anything out because then there are people who get upset because they haven’t been singled out.”

Neill has always been a great supporter of the New Zealand film industry, most recently starring in Jonathan King’s Under the Mountain, but he says he won’t take on a role, just because it’s a New Zealand film. He has to believe in the film as well.

When he’s not working, Neill splits his time between his homes in Sydney and Queenstown. But his heart is clearly here. “You’re either a hill person or a beach person and I’m a hill person but we’re lucky in New Zealand that we’ve got both in great numbers and you’re never far from one or the other.”

He takes me for a tour of Redbank. Fire, his ageing and nearly-deaf Staffi, ambles along with us. The property was formerly a research station for Crop & Food. Along with the grapes, Redbank grows lavender, saffron, Echinacea, apricots, cherries, apples, pears and truffles. The lavender and saffron are commercially harvested and sold under the Two Paddocks label.

Sam shows me the lavender still and I sniff a few bottles of the extracted oil. He takes me to meet Hamish, the naughty Boer goat who has been known to jump fences and eat the vines. We visit the newly hatched, free-range chooks up by the Neil Dawson floating feather sculpture and feed the pigs some rotting pears.

It’s an idyllic life and it suits him – strolling around in shorts, a collared shirt and sun-hat. But vineyard life is only a part-time distraction and Sam will be back on the road again when the next project presents.

“There is always stuff in the pipeline,” he says. “There are a few things I’d like to do that still haven’t got funding and there are a few things that have got funding that I’m not sure if I’d like to do.”

In the mean time, there is jam to make and the harvest around the corner followed by, no doubt, more rigorous product testing.

(c) Kris Herbert. Originally published in b-guided magazine 2010.

Think Dirty Dancing meets Flashdance meets Footloose meets The Solid Gold Dancers meets you in your lounge when you were 11. That’s the Real Hot Bitches, a Wellington-based dance troupe with an unashamed love of dance routines and a fondness for legwarmers, sweat bands and Lycra G-strings. They have no training and limited technique but passion and enthusiasm to spare.

It all began one night in 2005, when Angela Meyer and Rosie Roberts used 80s music and made-up dance routines to get through a long night re-painting a theatre set.

“We thought, this is really fun, I wonder if anyone else wants to join us,” Angela says.

They sent out an email that invited people who thought of themselves as real, hot and bitching (“in a phat, non-gender-specific way”) to come and learn some of their made-up dance routines. Fifty people turned up to the inaugural event and the now-weekly bitching sessions, held at a local surf club, are still free and open to anyone.

The Real Hot Bitches have grown to become the largest dance troupe in Australasia. There are more than 300 bitches in the “dance-a-base” and sub-chapters in London, Berlin, Tokyo and Melbourne.

The Bitches now hold the world record for the most people performing a synchronized dance routine (done to Bon Jovi’s Shot Through the Heart). They have charmed theatre audiences with sold-out performances and just released their first DVD.

Though they never really intended to perform publicly, the bitches inherent show-pony personalities would not be confined to the surf club for long.

“We realised that the world had to see our Lycra-clad bodies – that it would be unfair not to unleash ourselves on the public,” Angela says.

The first public unleashing, at the end of 2005, was a simple friends and family night. “It was like an end-of-year recital,” Angela remembers. “Some of the bitches had their parents there. Nerves were high. Tensions were high. We had a shared afternoon tea afterwards.”

While the weekly “club bitching sessions” are still the beating heart of the Real Hot Bitches, an Über Troupe was formed to take the showiest of the show ponies to the streets. Literally. In 2006, the Über Troupe rolled out a series of dance terrorism attacks during the Wellington Fringe Festival – 20 neon Lycra-bombs armed with a boom box.

Since then, the Bitches have gone on to do three feature performances at the Wellington Bats Theatre, the most recent of which sold out six weeks in advance.

“We’re not big on plot,” Angela admits. “It’s more about the power of dance.”

But there is more to the Real Hot Bitches than Lycra and badly remembered 11-year-old dance moves.

“Often people don’t see past the Lycra but for me it came out of always wanting to dance. It can be kind of an intimidating thing – we don’t really use our bodies much in our society,” says Angela.

The Real Hot Bitches, she says, are challenging body image stereotypes, building confidence and creating a community.

“It’s really an incredibly feminist movement that no one really realises it is. We have so much fun - we laugh ourselves stupid. But it is very much about challenging those stereotypes and telling each other, ‘your ass looks great in that G’.”

Angela says there are many examples of bitches who have found confidence through the group. “One of the bitches was really shy and hadn’t had a job for about four years. She had gotten herself in a rut but now her life has totally changed.”

They come in all shapes and sizes and from all walks of life. They range from six-year-old mini-bitches to 60-plus granny-bitches. Men can be bitches, too.

“There are two hard-core guys who are fantastic,” Angela says. “They shake it. It’s been very liberating for them and they get to hang out with heaps of hot chicks.”

The secret she says is attitude, not skill.

“I can never remember the routines. I have to always stand behind someone and go, oh, that’s right. It’s about attitude. If you think you’re hot, come along.”

Wellington has a reputation for embracing the off-beat, but the Bitches have charmed even the most bogan of audiences, which they proved by taking home the May Day Cup this year in the not-so-cosmo Palmerston North. They’ve had entire rest home groups up and joining in to the ‘Shot Through the Heart’ routine.

“I think it’s because we’re so passionate and because we’re not all models. A lot of people look at us and go, ‘I could do that’. There’s a real sense that people aren’t intimidated by us because a) we can’t really dance and b) we’re all shapes and sizes. We’ve created a really great community and that’s the thing I’m most proud of,” Angela says.

Sidebar:
RHB Wardrobe Motto: More is more is more

(RHB wardrobe hint: The tighter the lycra, the more it holds in.)

RHB Performance Motto: Only When I'm Dancing Can I Feel This Free
RHB Choreographer Motto: No dance-stone unturned


RHB Mantra:
'I am Real',
'I am Hot',
'I am Bitchin',
'I AM a Real Hot Bitch'

(c) Kris Herbert. Originally published in FRANKIE magazine.

And what can be done with a few snippets of information is astounding. Latanya Sweeney, a data-privacy researcher at Carnegie Mellon University found that 87 percent of Americans can be identified simply by knowing their date of birth, gender, and five-digit post code.

Consider this. Every time you make a telephone call, purchase something using a credit card, subscribe to a magazine or pay your taxes, a little parcel information that can be linked to you goes into a database somewhere. Every electronic transaction, every email, every phone call leaves a mark. Just like snails, we leave a trail behind us. It may feel invisible but in fact it’s almost impossible to erase.

We do it without thinking. Surf the web. Send an email. Register our car. Use a supermarket loyalty card. Buy a house. Go to the doctor.

On their own, these pieces of data reveal little. But put them together and you have a data profile that is extremely valuable to people who want to sell us stuff.

In the US, where direct marketing campaigns account for about three-quarters of a billion dollars in sales each year, the personal data industry is booming. One company, Donnelly Marketing, keeps dossiers on over 90 percent of American households.

In New Zealand, Loyalty schemes like Flybuys or Progressive Supermarket’s One Card allow companies to collect additional information like name, address and date of birth and correlate them with purchasing patterns.

Companies can use a method called data mining to profile the card holder and forecast their response to special offers. This way, offers can be targeted to the people most likely to take them up.

University of Waikato professor of Marketing Richard Varey says, “Once an electronic connection is established, every move is recorded and trackable.”

One often-quoted example is of a US grocery chain that used the data mining to analyse local buying patterns. They discovered that when men bought nappies on Thursdays and Saturdays, they also tended to buy beer. The retailer could use this information to increase revenue by moving the beer closer to the nappies and making sure beer and nappies were sold at full price on Thursdays and Saturdays.

“Tracking and analysis of shopping behaviour, linked to time, place, and activity, is now commonplace,” Varey says.

Marketing planners look at what is purchased and in what combinations to draw conclusions about a person’s lifestyle. They can time offers to match birthdays, weddings or anniversaries.

“This is way more sophisticated than simple revenue or profitability measurement – and the customer is no longer anonymous to the supplier. Communication via email, SMS, etc. is now almost costless, and endlessly personalisable, avoiding the waste of large-scale broadcast advertising. The benefit to sellers is obvious,” Varey says.

Massey University marketing professor Ben Healey says targeting offers is a way to try to reduce wastage in marketing. “There’s an old adage that half of your advertising money is wasted, but you don’t know which half,” Healey says.

Companies that collect information about customers normally have a privacy policy that promises not to pass personal information on to a third party. Healey thinks there is a strong incentive for companies to stick to this policy.

“My personal experience in working with these organisations is that they’re quite well run. Of course, there are always instances where people misuse information and you hear about people in the US hacking into computer systems and stealing data. There’s always the potential for that but there is also a heavy incentive not to misuse data.”

Healey believes that New Zealand companies who have loyalty schemes tend to use them more for their original purpose, encouraging customers to choose one chain over another.

So should we be concerned about the supermarket knowing who we are, where we live and which brands we prefer?

“It comes down to the individual,” Healey says. “We definitely need to be more aware of what data’s collected and we need to be comfortable with what information we are giving out.”

Why do marketers want to know so much about us? It’s summed up with a new corporate strategy called "relationship marketing," where companies try to bond with customers for life through an increasingly differentiated array of transactions.

And there are some frightening technologies in development to achieve that. A New Jersey company called PreTesting is developing a watch that records messages encoded into the sound tracks of radio and TV commercials. The same device will also detect signals from a chip inserted into the spines of magazines, conveying how long a reader spends perusing a publication.

The old standard of selling to the masses, demographics, is being replaced by a more precise classification of personality profiles called "psychographics." Psychographics are used to determine not just who is buying a certain product but why they are buying it. Demographics include statistics on age, income, education, status or type of occupation, region of country and household size. Psychographics take it a step further to include people's lifestyles and behaviours – hobbies and interests, favourite holiday destination, the values they hold and how they behave.

Keeping such close tabs on the consumer population requires a high level of surveillance or what Australian information privacy researcher Roger Clarke calls “dataveillence”.

Clarke coined the term in 1988 and he defines dataveillance as “the ability to monitor a person's activities by studying the data trail created by actions such as credit card purchases, cell phone calls, and Internet use”.

Felicity Brown, a master’s student at Auckland University of Technology, is researching surveillance.

“In the private sector, dataveillance is used by agencies such as Baycorp to determine an individual’s credit history. In the public sector, citizens are watched to make sure they correctly declare their income for taxation, provide welfare or a student allowance. In fact, dataveillance is a very pervasive part of our everyday lives. We require these passports that testify to our trustworthiness when applying for insurance, hire purchase agreements, finance, or any dealings with the bank,” Brown says.

One of the most common ways that your personal information can be used against you is through identity theft. Identity theft is much-talked-about overseas, especially in the US (where identity fraud is the fastest growing crime and now totals $52.6 billion a year) but it’s also on the rise in New Zealand.

Using a bank statement, driver’s license, passport or even a power or phone bill, identity thieves steal personal details to commit theft or fraud. They can use your identity to buy items on hire purchase, open a credit card account or take out a loan. They could fraudulently obtain benefits. It can be an expensive and time consuming process repairing the damage done by identity theft. Victims in the US spend an average of 600 hours recovering from this crime - the equivalent of nearly US$16,000 in lost potential or realized income.

Identity fraud is the most ominous misuse of personal data but there is also a more common consequence of being classified by your data trail. Clarke believes our digital profile can extend the biases of class into everything from getting a mortgage to the marketing information you receive in the mail to the way a company responds to your complaint. Once established, your profile is hard to shake.

Felicity Brown says monitoring consumer activities reverses the perceived benefit of the free-market – consumer choice. “In telling consumers what to think about direct marketers create shopping agendas for individuals, seeking to programme particular choices by privileging certain options, and then smoothing the path to the door of the outlet.”

Fooled by the mistaken belief that we are anonymous online, we often reveal vast amounts of information about ourselves while we surf the web.

The internet - by definition - is a system designed to share information between computers. So it should come as no surprise that our online activities are an open book. When we surf the web, send an email, chat or post to newsgoups, our computer leaves behind a digital fingerprint called an Internet Protocol (IP) address. An IP address is a computer’s unique identifier.

We may be anonymous but our computers aren’t. Little files called "cookies" can track every site visited on your computer. Web merchants may monitor Internet chat-rooms or news groups, collecting email addresses and demographic information based on users’ online behaviour and postings. Every time you subscribe to a newsletter or fill in a form, your profile becomes more comprehensive. Marketers use this information to assemble a precise image of your wants and needs. This information can then be sold to other interested parties and direct marketers.

Sometimes, we’re willing to sacrifice privacy for free services. Google’s popular Gmail service, released two years ago, offers users a free email account with huge 2GB mailbox. Is Google just generous? No. By signing up, users agree to have their emails scanned and then Google delivers targeted advertisements based on their content. You might think that would put people off but Gmail now has tens of millions of users.

When governments start to take an interest in the information held by search engines, things get scary. Yahoo has been cited in a Chinese court decision to jail a dissident internet writer for 10 years for subversion. This is the fourth case implicating the US search engine, who has responded by saying, "The Chinese government ordered Yahoo China to provide user information and Yahoo China complied with local laws."

While the Chinese government has a reputation for jailing dissidents and disrespecting privacy, search engines have also received subpoenas for US courts.

In March, a US judge ruled that Google must give the Federal Trade Commission the entire contents of a customer's Gmail account, including deleted messages. In another case, a judge said the company had to provide 50,000 web addresses from its database to the Justice Department for a study of child pornography online. While Google initially resisted the subpoena, Yahoo, AOL and MSN complied without a fight.

GOVERNMENT INVOLVEMENT

Apart from our electronic spending data, the largest holder of information about us is the government – in the form of electoral rolls, car registration, building consents, and the companies register.

We are under the mistaken impression that data held by the government is safe – locked up in some grey Wellington office block. But thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, public information is, well, public. And more and more of it is available online.

I can – without leaving my desk – find out if you are a director of any companies or trusts. If you’re listed with Telecom’s directory, I can find your phone number and address. I can search QV or LandOnline to see if you own the house at that address and for a small fee, I can find out how much you paid for that house and when, and what its approximate market valuation is now. Thanks to the LTSA’s online Motoweb, which was designed to protect car buyers from purchasing stolen or fraudulent vehicles, I can punch in a vehicle registration number, find out who owns it and whether they bought it outright or financed it and how much is owing.

If you were born in a New Zealand hospital after 1969, a sample of blood taken from a heel prick is stored at the National Testing Centre in Auckland’s National Women’s Hospital. The blood is tested for seven diseases but it doubles as a DNA database and samples are sometimes released to police for criminal investigations.

There are other examples of government information being passed on to third parties.

In June 1998, it was revealed that thousands of Auckland valuation records had been sold to a marketing company in Queensland by Valuation New Zealand (now Quotable Value). As a result, property owners received unsolicited marketing in the mail. Some government agencies – like the motor vehicle register and the drivers’ licence register - give information away for free.

It may be the law hasn’t kept pace with technology. When these registers were made public, it was anticipated that someone would have to go into an office and request the file in person. Now that the databases are electronic, they’re more subject to abuse.

The electronic age also allows government agencies to share information between them. The Privacy Commission reported last year that over the period of 2004-05, 21.4 million files were officially disclosed by one government agency to another.

The Privacy Commission says that data matching is done mainly to detect fraud. WINZ and NZ Immigration might cross data to make sure that someone collecting an unemployment benefit hasn’t left the country for a holiday in Australia.

Parliament has to approve any data matches by government organisation in New Zealand and the Privacy Commission acts as an expert advisor. The requests for data matching must show that the public good overrides the intrusion of privacy.

Felicity Brown: “In terms of government dataveillance, a certain amount of information is required to run a nation, and do the things that we collectively agree to through democracy. Specifically, the provision of welfare, student allowances and the electoral system all require some degree of dataveillance.”

Properly handled, data matching can be both an efficient and beneficial bureaucratic solution. But data matching is basically a series of inferences based on a formula. And sometimes these inferences can be wrong.

In Britain, a minister recently had to resign because 2000 prisoners who should have been deported were instead released. Everyone assumed the computer wouldn’t lie.

When there are discrepancies in data in New Zealand, the law dictates that the citizen must be given a chance to explain themselves. 

Felicity Brown says that this is the biggest problem with dataveillance: “It reverses the basic tenet of justice, that citizens are innocent until proven guilty. When dataveillance flags an individual as having transgressed the rules, it is up to them to prove that they haven’t. Apart from the worry that there might be mistakes in the system, this is the opposite to the way we’ve usually done things.”

There is also the risk that the aim of the data matching might be discriminatory. “Information-matching might be encouraged in order for welfare fraud to be identified, which is great, no-one wants their tax dollars ripped off. But welfare fraud might be more surveilled than tax evasion on the part of large corporations,” Brown says.

Brown says that dataveillance, in general, does not affect everyone to the same degree.

“Dataveillance involves a series of pre-determined judgements about an individual’s innate qualities, their moral fibre, their strengths and weaknesses. Large databases of information are searched for particular sets of qualities which signal a ‘risk’. The combination male + arab + flying from Dubai to Auckland, will require investigation, while the combination female + Australian + arriving from Sydney will not.”

International terrorism has driven a lot of recent surveillance initiatives. Since September 11, 2001, the New Zealand Government has passed several laws that require internet service providers and telecommunications companies to have systems in place so that calls and communications can be intercepted.

“These are laws that give police and intelligence agencies much greater access and dramatically increase the legal capabilities of the government to engage in surveillance,” Tim McBride says.

These laws have, McBride says, crept in mostly unnoticed. Mostly. In 2004, McBride was the spokesperson for the Big Brother Awards, which nominated people and agencies responsible for “outstanding abuse or disregard of privacy and civil liberties in New Zealand”. Three of the five awards were related to “antiterrorism” and surveillance legislation.

Person of the year went to all politicians responsible for passing the legislation, which the awards said “allow additional, secret snooping – with little or no public accountability - into the private lives, transactions and communications of New Zealanders. While falling mercifully short of the excesses of the United States Patriot Act, these various pieces of legislation result in significantly reduced privacy and civil liberties for all of us, but do little to reduce any actual terrorist threat.”

Along the same lines, Minister of Justice Phil Goff won worst elected representative and the Government Communications Security Bureau won worst public agency or official for the agency which has most systematically invaded privacy.

In Australia, privacy advocates are fired up by the John Howard’s proposal for a national identification card. Supporters argue it will increase efficiency and streamline government services but Roger Clark says, “National identity cards are an extremist measure, attuned to the needs of countries subject to central planning and despots, not to the expectations of free countries. The dangers of the card are serious enough, but the real focus needs to be on the dangers of the 'national identification scheme' that provides the infrastructure to go with it.”

Assistant Privacy Commissioner Katrine Evans says New Zealand laws don’t allow organisations to use the same unique identifier. A university cannot use drivers liscence numbers as student numbers and the heath system cannot keep track of patients using tax file numbers. This system is designed to keep information separate – and therefore safe.

“We don’t have the quantity of war stories in New Zealand that we see other places and that’s partly because we have strict limitations on the uses of unique identifiers. Another department cannot use IRD numbers to identify people because that would allow data aggregation.”

But McBride believes biometric identification cards are inevitable. “I’m sure we will fall into line but we need informed public debate on it. The proponents need to provide compelling arguments as to why we need such a system.”

The New Zealand Government is already involved in a much bigger system – a massive electronic intercept program called Project Echelon that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.

According to intelligence experts in the United States and Europe, Echelon scans Internet traffic, cell phone conversations, faxes, and telephone calls looking for evidence of terrorist activity, military threats, and crime.

The electronic spying is being conducted by the secretive US National Security Agency and its counterparts in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and, yes, New Zealand. Echelon is so secretive that the NSA will not even acknowledge its existence.

The possibility that innocent people may become Echelon targets or that the project's spying may exceed legal boundaries bothers privacy activists, but researcher and writer Nicky Hager, who wrote a book about the subject, Secret Power - New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network, says he doesn’t believe Echelon is a threat to everyday New Zealanders.

“But it is an example of large scale international spying, which does have implications for all kinds of issues that New Zealanders care about.”

Hager says there is a much more immediate and common threat in the vast amount of data that we leave behind in our everyday lives.

“When you put it all together in systematic way it adds up to a very complete picture of someone’s life,” Hager says.

Though this information can potentially be used against us by anyone from a jealous partner to a zealous employer or an aggressive marketer, Hager says the affect is even greater than that.

“The potential actually changes the way people live in very subtle, long term ways,” Hager says. We behave differently knowing that our emails are potentially read by our employers and that the websites we view can be looked up by other family members. “It changes the way somebody feels about their sense of private self. Most effect of that day-to-day is psychological. The serious, society altering thing is where people who like to be private stop believe that they have privacy.”

Computer forensics has shown that people’s lives can be remarkably reconstructed by the data on their computers.

“People have no comprehension of how much of their lives are going into computers, texts and emails with the assumption that those are private. The thing that’s changed since 30 years ago when surveillance meant a telephone tap is that very large parts of people’s live and relationships and legal, private personal business are being recorded electronically as we do our business. That means there is a much larger part of person’s self which is easily susceptible to interception.”

A warrant to seize a computer can be signed off by a junior registrar of the court with generalized explanation.

“I’ve heard of cases in Auckland where protesters – moderate lawful protesters - have had their computers seized by police. Suddenly, you have somebody who did a small, democratic political action and the police know more about their lives than anybody could have known about anyone 10 years ago.”

Hager says the level of warrant required to seize a person’s computer doesn’t reflect the seriousness of this privacy intrusion.

“It’s normalisation of what I would say is the most intrusive form of surveillance. The amount of data left on a computer about someone’s life is mind boggling.”

Hager predicts that when it dawns on people how much they’re computers reveal about them, there will be a call for the laws regarding seizure to be re-thought completely.

Although Hager accuses the New Zealand government of not being interested in privacy issues, he’s not pessimistic.

“What happens with new technology is that people at first are just dazzled by the advantages and it takes longer to realise the down side. I take more optimistic view. I would argue that over time people can understand and control the bad sides of it.”

And that will happen, Hager says, when there is more commitment from the government or when the issues become controversial enough that there is greater public pressure for change.

Tim McBride has spelled out his expectations for privacy protections in the New Zealand Privacy Charter 2004, which says, “A free and democratic society requires respect for the autonomy of individuals, and limits on the power of both state and private organisations to intrude on that autonomy. Privacy is a value which underpins human dignity and other key values such as freedom of association and freedom of speech. It is a fundamental human right.”

Sidebar: New monitoring on the horizon

An old technology may be about to change our lives dramatically. Radio Frequency Identification tags (RFIDs) were first developed in World War II, when the allied forces used the tags to identify friendly aircraft. Today, the tags are being used to track everything from warehouse stock to children and employees.

An RFID tag is like a high-tech version of a bar code. They are permanently attached to a product in order to electronically monitor levels of stock, or locations of objects (such as luggage at airports).

Privacy advocates warn that RFID tags will offer store owners, governments, hackers and direct-marketers unsurpassed insight into a consumers’ mobility, tracking them as they move through daily-life wearing tagged clothes and accessories.

In some cases RFID tags are even planted directly under the human skin. Select patrons of the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona, for example, have the rice-sized grains of silicon implanted in their shoulder. The tags allow the VIPs to skip the queue and order drinks directly on their e-accounts.

Amusement park Legoland in Denmark rents RFID tags to help parents keep track of their children. Employees in North America have been embedded with a small microchip to store information and control access to certain work areas. The technology has been trialled by Walmart in the US and the Warehouse in New Zealand.

University of Otago law professor Dr Paul Roth told Privacy Issues Forum in Wellington in march that Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) could be used to monitor workers and measure performance. He said the uses of RFID in the workplace raised new questions surrounding privacy law and practice.

As with any technology, there is a risk of failure or abuse. A master’s student at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam wrote a virus small enough to fit on a RFID tag in just four hours. The tags, which contain as little as 114 bytes of memory were previously thought to be resistant to such attacks.

What can we do to protect our privacy?

It is difficult to take action against violations of our digital privacy. As Tim McBride says, “It takes someone with deep pockets or an obsession.”

The best protection is prevention:

- Be aware of what information you disclose and read privacy statements carefully before you pass on your information

- Turn off cookies in your internet browser

- Ask to be removed from any Marketing Association member's mailing or telephone lists through the association's Name Removal Service. Call 0800 222 332 and for more information. If you also wish to have your name removed form the NZ Post mailing list phone 0800 804 307.

- Get a hard-to-trace email with services such as Anonymizer and Zero Knowledge.

You are what you search

A slip-up by US internet provider AOL proves how much people unintentionally reveal about themselves when they use search engines. The company posted detailed records of 670,000 customer’s online searches onto a supposedly secret website for research purposes. It didn’t take long until the information was the talk of blog sites. AOL was shamed in the media. The company quickly apologised and withdrew the files. But it was too late. The information had already been transferred to independent websites that allow anyone to easily search the data.

AOL identified the customers only by random user numbers but it didn’t take long for The New York Times to identify people using only their searches.

User No. 441779 searched for “60 single men” and “dog that urinates on everything”. A search for “landscapers in Lilburn, Georgia” narrowed the field as did several searches for people with the surname Arnold and one on “homes sold in shadow lake subdivision Gwinnet County Georgia”.

It did not take much investigating for The Times to follow user no. 441772’s data trail to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old dog-loving widow who lives in Lilburn, Georgia.

"Those are my searches," she told the paper when a reporter contacted her and read out some of the search terms.

Mrs Arnold said she was shocked that her search queries had been recorded and released to the public by AOL.

"My goodness, it’s my whole personal life," she said. "I had no idea somebody was looking over my shoulder."

The searches show that people turn to the internet for the most personal and sensitive issues. No. 3505202 asks about “depression and medical leave.” No. 7268042 types “fear that spouse contemplating cheating.”

There are also many thousands of sexual and possibly criminal queries. The search strings “how to kill your wife”, “child porno” and “how to kill oneself by natural gas” raise questions about what legal authorities can and should do with such information.

But while these searches can be interpreted to reveal much about the person who typed them, they can also prove highly misleading.

Thelma Arnold’s search history includes “hand tremors,” “nicotine effects on the body,” “dry mouth” and “bipolar.”

Arnold’s searches make her sound like a walking health hazard, but when contacted by The Times she said she often researches her friends' medical ailments.
“I have a friend who needs to quit smoking and I want to help her do it.”

AOL said that it had not intended to release Arnold's data or anyone else's, and told the paper: "We apologise specifically to her. There is not a whole lot we can do."

Mrs Arnold plans to cancel her AOL subscription. "We all have a right to privacy. Nobody should have found this all out," she said.

Try it at home:

Visit AOLSearchLogs.com and click on a random user. After browsing their search strings, you can have a go at putting together a profile of the user and see what interpretations others have come up with. Thelma Arnold's search records can be found on the site.

Article (c) Kris Herbert. Originally published in NZ Geographic, December 2006.

The climate campaigner warns that only drastic measures will save the planet.But there’s no mention in the film about the impact of air travel – despite some contentions that flying is the most damaging thing an individual can do to the planet.

A UK Royal Commission study conducted by York University calls air transport “the most heavily polluting form of transport on Earth”.

Yet, in terms of fuel consumption, air travel is not inefficient. According to figures from Landcare Research, each passenger’s share of the carbon dioxide emissions on an average domestic flight in New Zealand is 180g per kilometre, which is quite good compared to a two-litre car with just one passenger, which emits 370g per kilometre.

On the other hand, if you choose an average-sized diesel car and pile in the whole whanau, that’s only a modest 35g per kilometre.

One person’s share of the carbon dioxide emitted in a round trip to London is 5062kg. You’d have to drive more than 20,000km (by yourself) in a two-litre car to match that on the road.

So why do the New Zealand transport emissions statistics show that motor vehicles are responsible for 92% of carbon dioxide emissions but air travel is 3%?

This is because most countries don’t include international flights in their statistics. Air New Zealand environment manager Martin Fryer says, “The reason international flight data is not included in state carbon-emission statistics is that, under Kyoto, international aviation is exempt until 2012. To try to include aviation was seen as extremely complex.”

Although it gets the most attention, carbon dioxide is just one of several greenhouse gases. The other bits coming out of the back end of a Boeing include nitrogen oxides, sulphate, soot and water vapour.

Richard McKenzie, an atmospheric scientist at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), began looking at the atmospheric effects of aeroplane emissions in the 1980s, when a study was commissioned to explore the potential effects of a new supersonic aircraft. This research helped scientists to better understand the complex chemical reactions that happen in the flightpath.

Most jets fly in the upper troposphere (between 10-13km up) where the thinner atmosphere makes their path more efficient. In this cold, clear air, the water vapour from jet engines forms into ice crystals. These vapour trails trap heat and warm the Earth’s surface. At the same time, the nitrogen oxides are interacting with ozone. The chemical reactions taking place increase ozone production. This extra ozone in the the troposphere is actually a greenhouse gas that traps heat. McKenzie believes that jet engines contribute more to global warming than a simple carbon dioxide calculation reveals.

In a 1999 special report, “Aviation and the Global Atmosphere”, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the overall warming effect of aviation is 2.7 times greater than the effect of its carbon dioxide emissions alone. New research from the UK indicates that aviation will account for 5% of the world’s CO2 emissions by 2050. But the percentage that flying contributes to global warming may be much higher.

There is some good news. Improved aircraft engine design has resulted in a 70% decrease in carbon emissions from 1976 levels. Nitrogen oxide emission is forecast to fall by 80% by 2030. But fuel and pollution savings are being eclipsed as almost half a million new passengers take to the skies every year and another 13,500 heavy jetliners are scheduled to enter service by 2017.

Gore buys carbon credits to offset his flights. Using websites like www.carbonzero.co.nz, anyone can do this. (These credits go towards New Zealand native forest regeneration projects administered under the EBEX21 project.)

Planting trees is a good thing, McKenzie says, but not a true solution. “Planting trees is really only a stopgap solution. Eventually the trees die and then they release their carbon back to the atmosphere.”

Jet emissions linger in the stratosphere, modifying Earth’s atmosphere for about 100 times longer than when released near the ground. The carbon calculators don’t take this into account. Plus, it’s hard for trees on the ground to absorb carbon 13km up.

The only sure way to reduce the global warming contribution caused by aeroplanes is to stop flying.

There are other good reasons to avoid jet travel. Airports are a toxic source of noise and chemical pollution for people who live nearby. Every four hours, passengers on high-altitude flights are exposed to radiation equivalent to one chest x-ray.

Gore’s impact in raising awareness of climate change may justify his jet-setting contribution to the issue, but the rest of us are faced with a moral dilemma. It’s summed up with a concept that Guardian columnist, and author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning (published by Allen Lane), George Monbiot calls “love miles”, or the distance between you and the people you love.
“If your sister-in-law is getting married in Buenos Aires,” he writes in Heat, “it is both immoral to travel there – because of climate change – and immoral not to, because of the offence it causes. In that decision we find two valid moral codes in irreconcilable antagonism. Who could be surprised to discover that ‘ethical’ people are in denial about the impacts of flying?”

Monbiot admits that his environmental consciousness has been shaped by travel abroad and says this partly explains the gap between good intentions and damaging actions. “While it is easy for us to pour scorn on the drivers of sports utility vehicles, whose politics generally differ from ours, it is harder to contemplate a world in which our own freedoms are curtailed, especially the freedoms which shaped us.”

But he concludes: “If you fly, you destroy other people’s lives.”

In the UK, where a Ryanair flight from London to Rome can be just 50p, some conscientious travellers are vowing to give up the air-travel habit. Websites like FlightPledge.org.uk encourage citizens to swear off it.

In January, Mark Ellingham, founder of travel-publishing company Rough Guides, announced that he would fly less and vacation in Britain. He is spreading a new message: travel less and stay longer.

“We have all mastered the art of beginning and ending a narrative at the points which suit us,” says Monbiot. Unless the story can be rewritten, a happy ending to the climate crisis will require us to fly less. The end of cheap oil could make the choice easy. Or Richard Branson, and his $3 billion commitment to developing alternative energy sources, will find a sustainable option.

In the meantime, maybe New Zealand should focus on its sailing industry instead of brokering its clear skies to bring an international aircraft test facility to Christchurch. Climate change wasn’t a factor in the decision to keep the Overlander running, but maybe it will be. A University of York report found that if journeys of less than 400 miles are undertaken by train rather than plane, 45% of all flights could be eliminated.

Air New Zealand ads say, “being there is everything”, but organisations like NIWA are trying to replace some flights with videoconferencing.

This could be the most inconvenient truth of them all. I don’t blame Gore for leaving it out.

From the Listener magazine:http://www.listener.co.nz/issue/3470/features/7452/the_inconvenient_truth_about_airline_travel,1.html;jsessionid=AA3386B23A3C97BDD178EAC53759EBBA

In between these incredible tales, Bob managed to offend everyone within in shouting distance and lambasted passers-by for talking on cell phones or wearing dark glasses.

Bob Jones was in town promoting his latest book, Degrees for Everyone, a fictional tale that gives voice to his very real distaste for the modern state of Universities.

“Massey University in Wellington, for example, has a three-year degree in air hostessing,” he told Yardley.

It takes a lot of confidence to be as politically un-correct as this man and there is no confidence like that of a self-made millionaire.

At 21, Bob Jones was lying in hospital waiting to die. He has Addison’s disease, for which he still takes cortisone tables twice a day.

“I realised I was going to live and so I lay there and I thought: what do I do? What do I do with myself? And for the life of me I couldn’t think what I was going to do and so then I thought, well, shit I need to give myself time to think this through and so I need to make some money.”

Having grown up in a Lower Hutt state house where his father dreamt of making 20 pounds a month, Jones says he had no commercial background or commercial interest.

“I had one pair of shoes, two pairs of underpants at best, one pair of pants. I had nothing. Less than two years later I was a pound millionaire and it was so bloody easy.”

Jones says all anyone has to do to make money is stop and think. Turn off the television and the radio and just think.

“You’ve got to be very analytical and give yourself thinking time. It’s a series of steps. You say: what’s the objective? How to I go about it? What are the impediments? And how do I over come them? And you will always work out the answers to all those questions and then off you go until something goes wrong and then you stop and think again and it’s so bloody easy.”

Ten years ago, Jones was going through a rough time. “I had quite an upheaval in my life and I needed to restore my confidence and I thought: I need to make $100 million. It’d make me feel good.”

He did make $100 million in a short period of time, and insists he did it without any hard work.

“And everyone thinks I’m a genius. I’m not a genius. I’m not a clever person but I’m a very knowledgeable person because I read. And that’s another part of it. You have to be imaginative. Ignorance is rife now. Really rife. To be imaginative, you just have to have a broad frame of reference and an inquiring mind, to ask the question why?”

But even with all this thinking, Jones never worked out what he wanted to do with his life.

“Well, I did actually work out what I wanted to do. I worked out I didn’t want to do anything. The object was to retire at 25. I retired at 23. I gave the business to my staff. They all got rich. And the conclusion I reached was that I never should do any single thing, that to get the most out of life, I would dabble.”

And Dabble he has. In addition to running his multi-million dollar property business, which he says he works only three hours a week on, Jones has been a successful columnist, sports commentator and head of Boxing New Zealand. He once became a ballet director after taking a fancy to one of the dancers. As a radio presenter, Jones holds the record for defending libel writs.

His recreational pastimes include fly fishing, skiing, tennis, golf and sailing. On a recent ski holiday in Colorado, he learned to ice skate.

Jones gave up writing columns and starting writing books because they held more permanence. “The columns just became fish and chip wrapping,” he says. “It’s quite a hard thing to destroy a book. It’s not wasted.”

His satirical, comic writing is done at home. “I’ll start on the second bottle,” he says. In the morning he reads what he’s written the night before. “I’ll say, shit that’s bloody clever but I don’t remember it.”

Jones next writing foray is uncertain. “It’s an esoteric little book that no one will want to read and so people say why bother, and that’s a very good point so I’m thinking about it.”

All Jones’ novels have a commercial base, because he never did get away from a commercial life. Shortly after his young retirement, he says he woke up and realised it was “actually quite fun doing commercial work. I’d made all this money and was now buying buildings and it was bloody fun.”

Jones says his mother often asks him why he needs so many buildings. “And I say I don’t know. It’s bloody childish. It’s a ridiculous childish business and I don’t know why I get a kick out of it but I do.”

His ridiculously childish business, Sir Robert Jones Holdings, has now accumulated around a third of a billion dollars worth of office buildings, mostly in Sydney. At the head office in Wellington, cell phones are banned. Jones believes computers and cell phones are the greatest inefficiency in business.

“Cellphones are a curse,” he says, preferring to have messages taken and returned the old fashioned way. “Somebody’s probably ringing me right now, I’m not there. Does it matter? We’ve got all these stupid computers in the place and I can’t find out from any of them what they’re doing, I say what are you looking at? With all this technology they’re turning into mindless robots.”

As a landlord, Jones takes an unusual approach. “Others shave costs. We spend money on the building.” Tenants have access to free gymnasiums and personal trainers. He’s thinking of employing a full-time doctor to provide free medical treatment and plans to deliver fresh flowers from his 50 acre gardens every Monday.

“Nobody does this sort of thing. We spare no expense but we keep our tenants,” he says.

“A lot of wealthy people are not that bright,” he says. “Intelligence is extremely overrated.” So what do you need? “Passion and the ability to think logically. It really gets down to one thing. It’s all about making money. That’s really what it’s about. Sure you can be passionate about making your yo-yos or providing your service, you know, it’s fun to be passionate too, but the ultimate objective is really making money. So what you have to do is to figure out how you can create a monopoly.”

Of course creating a monopoly isn’t as easy as it used to be.

“Our economy was structured to be without competition because competition was seen as wasteful. In 1984, if you wanted to start a restaurant you had to notify ever restaurateur within a mile and a hearing would take place in front of a tribunal and you had to produce a paper justifying the need for your restaurant.”

Jones says life was easy in the old order. “If you owned a shoe shop 40 years ago, you lived in Fendalton, you were member of a golf club and maybe you even had two cars. Today, the man that owns the shoe shop is on the bones of his ass and is struggling. Competition does lead to waste but it also leads to the opposite. So the best outcome is to have our sort of system now and be rich and that’s within everybody’s possibility.”

Jones says you can do anything in a small country. To prove it, he once made a bet with friends. “You think of something and I bet you I’m on television as an expert in it within nine months.” Public housing was chosen as the subject, money was laid on the table and sure enough, nine months later, Jones and the Minister of Housing were battling it out in a television interview with Ian Fraser.

“It was so easy.”

In 1983, Jones proved anything is possible again. This time, the country was at stake.

He formed the New Zealand party with the single objective of splitting the conservative vote to keep National out.

“Under MMP I reckon I would have won the thing. Thank God I didn’t,” he says.

“As Lange once said, I was the most successful politician in New Zealand history. ‘He goes to the bloody electorate. Inside two years of forming the party, everything he stood for, which amounted to some unbelievably radical reform, has been carried out and he hasn’t even gone into parliament.’”

Jones says he wanted to change the country and to make it happen he just did the same thing he did when he wanted to make money.

“I just retreated and thought about it.”

Over the years, Jones has made headlines for punching a television reporter and reportedly paying off Auckland financial journalists to write about his company. He’s crass. His swearing was once the subject of a letter from Prime Minister David Lange.

“It said, ‘Dear Bob, over the weekend I was having dinner with my elderly mother and in the course of conversation your name came up. I have to tell you, she was very laudatory about you but she said “it is such a pity he swears when he’s on television. David,” she said, “you’re the prime minister, put a stop to this.” As prime minister of New Zealand and as instructed by my mother I hereby forbid you to swear on television.’”

The outrageous side of Bob Jones is very well known but long-time friend Margaret Clark says he is also extremely kind and loyal. A professor of political science and international relations at Victoria University, Margaret has known Bob for 45 years.

“Five years ago I had surgery for cancer and he had to travel while I was having radiation. He rang me from every place around the globe where he was, outer Mongolia, places where I thought telecommunications didn’t exist. Psychologically, it was very helpful to know he and my other friends were thinking of me.”

Margaret says Bob’s pattern for setting goals and going after them was established from an early age.

“When he was setting out in business, when he was very young, he worked so hard and ate so little that he finished up in hospital.”

At 64, Jones has seen a lot of life. He travels extensively. He’s been married twice and had five or six de facto wives and eight children. At a recent joint birthday party, his oldest turned 38 and his youngest turned one.

With three house staff, Jones says the children are “no inconvenience”.

What keeps him going? “I think it’s very important for older people to go and do radically different things. It does recharge you.”

Speaking of recharging, Jones leans forward to inspect the empty bottle on the table and declares. “Now, we need some more wine!”

“The details are tricky. We still don’t know how it really works,” said a South Pole winter scientist Nicholas Tothill from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
This process of how they form could answer a lot of questions about stars themselves: why are they as big and heavy as they are? Why are there more light stars than heavy stars and more red stars than blue stars?
“That is determined by what goes on in the galaxy – by molecular clouds,” Tothill said.
“Stars are fairly well understood,” he said. “But the gas – where they come from and where they go to – we have to understand this stuff.”
At the South Pole a 1.7mm telescope named AST/RO (Antarctic Submillimeter Telescope and Remote Observatory) has been measuring galactic gas clouds since 1995.
Other, similar telescopes operate 16,000 feet high in the Chilean desert and from aircraft and satellite, but the dry air over the South Pole makes the best land-based viewing site in the world.
“In submillimeter astronomy, light gets absorbed by atmospheric water vapor so cold, dry air is very good stuff,” Tothill said.
AST/RO picks up submillimeter-wave radiation emitted by dense gas and dust between the stars.
These areas seem black to the human eye but the gas molecules actually emit a non-visible light. The wavelengths of that light can be picked up by submillimeter telescopes like AST/RO.
Concentrating on the wavelengths given off by highly excited carbon monoxide molecules, AST/RO can locate star-forming cores and study the structure and movement of molecular clouds and how the other elements in the galaxy affect them.
Winter is the prime observation time for AST/RO, when the water vapor concentration is lowest so summers are mostly dedicated to maintenance, repair and development work.
The researchers want to minimize the chance of something going wrong during the isolation of winter.
Last year, a new laser-driven receiver was installed. Tothill said the new receiver would provide a higher, more stable frequency for the telescope.
It is the highest-frequency radio astronomy receiver in the world. The lower frequency receivers, were only a few centimeters in size but a larger and heavier device is needed to operate at frequencies of 1400 gigahertz.
“Basically, we’ve replaced something that weighed a few ounces with something that weighs 3,000 pounds (1,360 kg). The only place we could do that is from the ground.”
The two-meter long receiver, which was fine tuned by technicians over summer, will be mounted to the ceiling in the cramped building 800 meters from the geographic South Pole.
The actual telescope is on the roof of the building. It sends the radiated light to the receiver through a series of mirrors.
The project is headed by Antony Stark of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. AST/RO works as a consortium, with participants from several universities and accepts research proposals from the wider scientific community.

What’s even harder to imagine is that Margi, who is now recognised as one of our most important fashion icons, left school with plans to become and “office girl”.

“It was the 60s and at that time, most girls, if they weren’t going to be a nurse or a teacher, then they would work in an office,” Margi says. “It was never really an option within our family for myself or any of my siblings to go to university.”

So Margi studied commerce, learned shorthand, typing and balance sheets, and worked in an office for seven years before she opened Hang Ups Boutique in Dunedin.

“I’d always had a fascination with fashion and clothing. My mother always worked in clothing factories and we always sewed at home.”

For a family of six children, including for girls, sewing at home was a necessity.

“As soon as we could use the sewing machine, we were making our own clothes. My mother taught us about manipulating patterns to give garments your own style.”

Hang-ups Boutique started in 1975. After 11 years of retail, Margi understood the industry well enough to get involved from the production end. The Nom*D label first appeared on a modest knitwear range in 1986.

“Being in retail, I had an understanding what customers liked and wanted and it was also an opportunity to use my own creativity,” Margi says.

Margi describes the mid-80s as buoyant time for fashion in New Zealand. Dunedin manufacturers were doing well and exporting to the US, but the garments were main stream and commercial.

“There was not a lot of high end or avant guard fashion,” She remembers. “New Zealanders weren’t really aware of what fashion was on an international level.”

The first Nom*D collection as just 12 garments, all made in Dunedin. “We were quite sort of very very small time,” Margi says. “The opportunity to have it made in Dunedin is probably what got us started.”

Being a creative hub, Dunedin was also a great place to experiment and Margi says the years from 1986 to 1999 were a huge growing time.

In 1999, Nom*D hit the big time. Margi and her team, along with Karen Walker, World and Zambesi, became the “big four” of New Zealand fashion when they landed on the catwalks of London Fashion Week, where they were hailed as style leaders for their “dark and intellectual” look.

Nom*D may be the smallest of the “big four”, and that was entirely by design, Margi says.

“I like where we are in the fashion world,” Margi says. “I feel proud of what we’ve achieved on an international scale.”

About 60 percent of the company’s sales are exports, with Japan being Nom*D’s biggest export market.

Nom*D is often compared to Zambesi, which was started by Margi’s sister Elisabeth Findlay in 1979, but Margi has worked hard to maintain individuality.

“In the early days, there was a little bit of thinking that Nom*D was part of Zambezi because we used to sell our collections together – we would set up in the same room.”

But Margi says she deliberately gave Nom*D its own space to avoid confusion. “I wanted to give credit to the people in Dunedin who worked so hard to create the brand of Nom*D. At the end of the day, Zambesi is a really big company and we’re not.”

The sisters do sometimes travel to Europe together and, Margi says, “We are each other’s best customers.”

Some of Nom*D’s retail stockists have been with the label since its inception.

“I’d been in retail for all those years and so I started to find like-minded retailers and started to build relationships with them. Then, when we started going into Australia, we started with one store in Melbourne and built it from there. It’s amazing the way things grow and you find like-minded people.”

Margi now has a network of like-minded people all over the world that includes many loyal customers. Margi says retailers around the world tell her that when people discover Nom*D, they come back for it season after season.

“We find that once people get their first few Nom*D garments, they are hooked,” Margi says. “I think that’s because they’re so comfortable and easy to wear. We can do the layering and styling for you all in one garment or it can be as simple as you want it to be.”

So, who are Nom*D customers? “We make clothes that anybody could wear but not everyone would wear,” Margi says. “Our clothes are not flashy. If you want to stand out in a crowd, you wouldn’t choose Nom*D. I think our customers are people who are quite comfortable with themselves.”

Margi says Nom*D is utilitarian and wearable above all else. “There’s a sort of toughness about it – both in the garment and the style.”

“Individual” and “unique” are also words she uses to describe her garments. Like Dunedin, Nom*D is real. It has a sense of humour and is influenced by tradition – Gothic in feel but never too serious.

Margi says there’s no doubt Nom*D is influenced by Dunedin: “This is where I live,” she says plainly.

But the Nom*D values are more general. “Nom*D is very real – very wearable. There is not a lot of frivolity about the garments. They do have a bit of a dark side but there is also a bit of a sense of humour about what we do. We don’t’ make things that are frivolous. We make things that can be worn – a lot.”

Margi’s love of tradition and utilitarian forms means that garments have a sense of familiarity. “They have a feeling of tradition – like you’ve seen it somewhere before but not quite the same.”

Last year, Nom*D created a motto that has stuck: Cum Grano Salis, which means “with a grain of salt”.

The motto came from a collection Margi did last year, which used a lot of ideas from school uniforms, which often feature a crest and a motto. Cum Grano Salis sums up Margi’s philosophy and sense of humour.

“I hate it when everything gets too serious and too thought out and too perfect. We’ve started naming our collections, and they are usually a bit of a play on reality,” she says.

Operation Bombshell was a collection that used lingerie.

“A lot of the collection had been influenced by corsetry but by same token on the t-shirt prints, we had images taken from bomb testing in Nevada desert, which was a real contrast of ideas. H-bombs are quite serious but at the end of the day, we showed ridiculousness of what was going on in Nevada desert - silhouettes of guys watching the bombs as if they were a tourist attraction.”

To Margi’s surprise, the H-bomb t-shirts sold really well in Japan.

Another collection was called Caveat Emptor, or buyer beware. “It’s quite a funny thing to call a collection,” Margi admits, “It was just saying everything’s not as it first seems.”

Winter 2009 is the Bedlam collection, which started with an old eaten school blazer.

A blazer with screen-printed stripes came into form and the collection was built around it. “We thought, okay, we’ve got this full-on, colourful garment, what are we going to put with it. And the idea was that we would make it quite crazy and use pyjama prints.”

Rummaging around for ideas of chaos and madness, the word bedlam came up and a quick Google search unearthed the story of the unruly Bedlam asylum, where the inmates were on display for the amusement wealthy 18th century Londoners. And so Bedlam came to be a word for disorder.

The name was a good fit for the collection, as Margi says fresh ideas are often born from the chaos of creativity.

Bedlam continues Margi’s well-known experimentation with form and construction. Boiled blazers and double waistcoats are thrown into the mix with vintage-look pyjama prints and Fair Isle knitwear. Securely wrapped dresses have a suggestion of straightjackets.

Her favourite garments this year? “I tend to get a couple of things from the collection and they tend to be my uniform.”

For her trip to the northern hemisphere, Margi pinched a few garments from the winter collection, including a toasty zipped anorak, which she says served her well.

“People talk about Dunedin being cold but you don’t know what cold is until you’ve experienced New York in winter.”

A garment Margi says she “could wear everyday if I let myself”, is the Mercury vest, which is loosely based on the Mercury motorcycle jacket. “It hides a multitude of sins,” she says.

The way the Bedlam collection evolved is typical, Margi says. “One collection grows off another, so often we’ll reference back to something we’ve done before. It’s an evolution of one style falls into another. Or it starts with one garment. For Operation Bombshell, I bought this amazing old corset. I never ever want to reproduce an old garment, but it’s a case of looking at it and saying, how can we take some ideas off this?”

There’s no formula, Margi says. “We never consistently start with an idea and build on it from there. The collection grows off a couple of different ideas and towards the end we start to think about what the collection telling us.”

Margi’s collections do have something to say, but they are never overt.

“I don’t think we have to verbalise it too much. If people don’t get it, they don’t get it,” she says.

If not everyone “gets it”, Margi doesn’t mind. “We’re not prepared to compromise our style ideas for the sake of commercialism. If we wanted to be wealthy, we probably would and could.”

For Margi, the rewards come from those people that do “get it”. Asked what she loves most about Nom*D, she says, “I love the way that the staff really believe in it. And the great feedback that we get from people outside of our world. When people can relate to what we’re doing, that’s a huge accolade for us.”

For five years, Hannah and her younger sister were subject to weekly sessions of abuse by their father. "I can remember being relieved when he picked my sister instead of me. And that's a terrible thing to think but I just didn't want it to be me."
To keep the sisters quiet, Hannah's father threatened them. He drove a wedge between the sisters and warned them that their mother was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and if they told her of his actions, it would surely send her over the edge.
When she was 14, Hannah was raped by a family friend. The man asked their father to take the kids skiing. When they arrived at the ski area, he paid for the others to go skiing but held Hannah back. "I want to take you for a drive," he told her. Hannah guessed what this man's intentions were but was helpless to fight. He drove her part way down the hill and then forced himself on her in the car. He told there was no point fighting - he knew she wasn't a virgin. Hannah guessed her father had been bragging to his friend.
Finally, at the age of 15, Hannah threatened to go to the police if her father did not let her leave home. He acquiesced.
Once a promising student with ambitions to be a commercial artist, Hannah left school with no qualifications and headed out on her own.
But years of emotional isolation and an unhealthy understanding of love and sex left Hannah ill-equipped to face the real world.
Despite the fact that she was extremely scared of men and frightfully shy to speak to them, Hannah became very promiscuous - looking for love through sex. Then, at the age of 17, she fell pregnant and married the father of her child.
"My husband was controlling. He was just like my father. He was even kinky like my father and played around."
Eventually Hannah though she would "go around the twist" and so - with two young children - she left her husband at the age of 21.
After the split, Hannah returned to her promiscuous ways."I had a lot of relationships. I picked men that were weak in some way."
Gradually Hannah forced herself through her shyness - working her way into a career as a fashion designer and eventually running her own company.
In 1992, Hannah felt ready to face her past in order to move forward. She started counselling and received lump-sum compensation from ACC. Through counselling, she learned to deal better with issues about sex, relationships, self-esteem and parenting.
The parenting problems were the most unexpected. When her daughters reached the age of 10 - the age when Hannah's abuse had begun - she found herself recoiling from their affection."It's not that I didn't want to, it's just that I couldn't bring myself to give them affection. It took me years to deal with that one but it has improved."
Even after leaving home, Hannah's father had a heavy influence in her life. Finally, one day she decided it wasn't worth it. She didn't want to have to prove herself any more. So she stopped ringing her parents and no communication passed between them for several years.
Her parents moved to Australia. Then one day her father rang. "We haven't heard from you for a while," he said. "Your mother wants to know why and I don't know what to tell her." Hannah didn't know what to say.
He told her: "When I look in the mirror, I see an arsehole. I'm sorry for what I did to you but it happened to me as well." He also said that if Hannah's mother ever found out about his abuse, he would kill himself.
This phone call was devastating for Hannah. All the pain that she'd pushed out of her mind came flooding back, fuelled by a new sense of anger and hurt that - after all these years - her father still held her in the grasp of his threats.
The stress from this re-introduction of her father's presence triggered a decline in Hannah's psychological well-being."I thought I'd dealt with it but he forced his way back in."
Hannah's work suffered. She became depressed and even broke out into boils. To make things worse, her father rang again to say they were considering moving back to New Zealand. Hannah's business failed, her husband became ill and they were on the verge of bankruptcy. As she found herself sinking lower than ever, Hannah went back to ACC for further entitlements.
Hannah was warned by both her GP and ACC that her claim was likely to be rejected but she was willing to fight. She had worked hard to overcome the handicaps of being a sexual abuse survivor. This wasn't a greedy hunt for money. It was an honest appeal for financial assistance when she had nowhere else to turn.
ACC commissioned a psychologist to assess Hannah and after speaking with her for two hours, determined that only 55 per cent of her current depressive episode could be attributed to the abuse.
ACC refused her claim so Hannah sought the advice of a solicitor. Another psychological report was done and that one attributed 80 per cent of the problem to childhood abuse.
The information was re-submitted to ACC and at the review, the ACC representative announced that the corporation had decided to retract its decision to refuse Hannah's claim.
Hannah had the will and the strength to battle ACC but she believes that many like her would not have the confidence to take on the corporation.
Although her strength and determination are remarkable, her case is by no means unique. Christchurch lawyer Matthew Shepherd says people approaching ACC with sensitive claims are rarely given a full description of their entitlements. "It's a common situation. People suffer tragic abuse then go in for counselling and approach ACC. They're told they're not eligible and so they get representation.
"Any time you go to battle against a huge organisation like ACC, many people need help. The law in that area is complex. You're dealing with things which are not straightforward."
His company, and others like it, counsel clients on what they are entitled to and then makes sure that they receive these entitlements.
Auckland Lawyer Lorraine Smith also deals with sensitive claims to ACC. She says people who come to her are frightened. "ACC gives very little information out. They are a big, faceless organisation."
For its part, ACC says it does brief its clients on what entitlements they are eligible for. But if they are still not clear, an ACC spokesperson suggests people look for help from other organisations such as the Rape Crisis Centre, Community Law Centres or an organisation called Combined Beneficiaries in Auckland.
Today Hannah is working full-time again and continuing with counselling. She is determined to overcome what remains of the psychological detritus left over from her abuse so that she can achieve a normal, healthy life for the future. She plans to write a book about her experiences to help others gain the courage to heal.

A New Zealand study of 3000 women found that sexual abuse within the family occurred for 12 per cent of those sampled, or one in eight women. Survivors of incest are less likely to report their abuse to the police than people who are raped by a stranger. Incest often remains a secret. The abuse survivor expects to be blamed, feels embarrassed or doesn't want to upset anyone. They may be protecting the abuser or fearing the abuser.
Possible long term effects of incest include problems with sex (physical, emotional and mental), problems with close relationships, depression, self-destructive behaviours, difficulty parenting and eating difficulties.
Is Sexual Abuse on the increase?
It is very difficult to tell, says Sexual Abuse Help crisis co-ordinator Janice Giles.
"Our incident calls are way up since 1994. We get two and a half times more callouts now but that doesn't necessarily mean there are more incidents."
She says the increase in reporting could be due to people feeling more comfortable about coming forward.
According to NZ Police statistics, Sexual crimes account for .7 per cent of all crime.

By Kris Herbert
Fashion Quarterly 1999


Driven by a need to create and a drive to be successful, Nita Henry took the fashion world by storm at an age when most young girls have barely contemplated a career path.

Working as a seamstress from age 15 and then absorbing the fundamentals of the fashion industry as a model, the young woman from Christchurch – with no formal training but loads of talent, confidence and practical experience – was designing and making leatherwear for shops throughout New Zealand and Australia by the age of 21.

Throughout the 80s and into the 90s, the name, face and label of Nita Henry reflected nothing but success. The tall, confident designer was creating and overseeing the production of her own label’s ranges as well as designing several lines a year for the tourist trade. Nita Henry garments have been worn by Rachel Hunter and The Temptations, and even the Indian from the Village People.

She was also setting records with her success in the Benson & Hedges Fashion Awards. In more than a decade of entering, only one of her famously detailed entrants was not selected. In total, she received more than 20 nominations. Nita Henry won the menswear award in 1993 and had a record six selections in 1994. Four of those went on to win Highly Commended (i.e. second place) awards.

Then suddenly, in 1995, nothing. Not one entry.

At the peak of her career, Nita Henry simply vanished from the fashion scene.

What few people knew about the brilliant and ambitious designer was that behind the beautiful, successful facade of Nita Henry was a woman quietly coping with illness.

Immediately following the break-up of her first marriage at the tender age of 21, Nita fell ill. She began losing weight and there were bouts of painful diarrhoea.

A diagnosis did not come easily. Two years of frustration with shoulder-shrugging physicians led Nita to seek the advise of a naturopath. After thorough tests and questioning, she was diagnosed with colitis, which wasn’t far from wrong.

Only in the last three years has the conclusive diagnosis come through. Nita, like thousands of other New Zealanders, suffers from a mysterious and life-threatening – although relatively unknown – inflammatory bowel disease called Crohn’s.

There is no consensus about what causes Crohn’s and there is no known cure.

Basically, the digestive tract becomes inflamed and in some places plagued with ulcers. This is not only excruciatingly painful, but it reduces the body’s ability to absorb nutrients.

The treatments for Crohn’s disease are limited even today; but in the early 80s, when the disease was relatively unheard of, medical science had nothing to offer Nita.

Yet by altering her lifestyle, controlling her diet and managing her illness with the same determination and efficiency that ruled the rest of her life, Nita Henry worked on. For 14 years she kept her illness quiet for fear of being perceived as ill or incapable.

“I always put on a brave face and worked on,” says Nita.

During bed-ridden periods, when the slightest movement would trigger pain, Nita would draw or stitch the meticulous, labour intensive garments that she was famous for.

“I was basically a workaholic. I would work through pain – I would just keep forcing myself because there was either deadlines or I just didn’t want to let people down.”

But like many illnesses, Chrone’s disease is susceptible to stress. The frantic pace of the fashion industry – and especially the stress of competition – proved more than Nita’s fragile health could handle.

The reality of her illness came to a head at Christmas 1995, when Nita was finally admitted to hospital. For the next few weeks she battled through intense suffering. Despite her high threshold of pain, Nita’s shrieks of agony would echo through the hospital. She was pumped full of morphine to control the pain, cortisone to reduce inflammation and countless other drugs. Attached to machines, Nita couldn’t so much as get out of bed by herself.

“There were times when I really thought I was going to die.”

Finally she had no choice, no where to go but to accept it.

“I had to surrender and I think that was my biggest lesson because I was such an organiser and I liked to control things.”

She says she reached a point where she had to let go of everything, even the career she had worked so hard for.

“It’s a very hard thing to do, to suddenly just walk away when you’re at the height of your career.”

Her experience sounds horrific, but somehow the gentle, soft-spoken Nita – her illness now in remission – invokes no pity.

Somehow, she is not bitter or angry. She holds no resentment for the illness.

“I think that what this has done for me is it’s taught me a lot; it’s given me a lot of compassion; and it’s humbled me a lot – and it’s also led me in another direction.”

Nita’s illness forced her to re-asses her life and decide what she really wanted to do: “I think the main things were that I wanted to be happy, and I wanted to be well, and I wanted to really enjoy what I was doing.

“I loved the fashion but it got to be a job after a while, after you’ve been doing it for that long, you’re caught in the loop and you can’t get out.”

Nita, now 39, is running a successful natural cosmetics business making products like the popular “fizzy bath bombs”.

“I’m still covering people’s bodies,” laughs Nita.

She uses her creativity to develop new products and design packaging for both her products and husband Alistair Williams’s range of herbal soaps and shampoos.

And Nita’s creative evolution does not end there. She recently rediscovered a childhood passion in painting and has embarked on a series of “cosmic comic strip heroines” using a mix of watercolours, oils, acrylics, ink and airbrushing. Each finely detailed painting also has a story explaining the mystical and extraordinary powers of her super-women.

“I see myself in the future just doing painting full time.”

Always mindful that a relapse could be around the corner, Nita says practically: “Painting is relaxing. It’s something, if I ever really got sick again, I could do it while I’m lying in bed.”

The name of Nita Henry is far from gone. Many will remember her for her fashion designs. Many others are sure to see the same stylish signature of Nita Henry on art gallery walls.

And then there are those who do not float in social circles. The little girls who arrive at her factory shop with a gold coin and leave with a smile and a fizzy bath bomb clutched in their little hands.

But maybe the most exceptional are the young Crohn’s sufferers who will know Nita Henry as an encouraging smile over a hospital bed, telling the story of how she was once where they were and offering hope of a light at the end of the tunnel.

“I think that is part of the purpose of it as well, so that I can help others,” says Nita confidently. In a soft, ethereal voice she adds: “And that’s special.”