Do you want to give the lay of the land first, tell people what it means to be Director General of the Department of Conservation, and then we can also get into the state of play from a government perspective, because a lot of the reason why all of this was happening was because of a significant drop in funding, right, for funding the actual department to do the conservation work that you needed to do.

Yeah, so I came into an environment where there had been a drop in funding and the job is always bigger.

There is more to do out there than you'll ever get funded for.

So it needed a radical rethink and of course the previous Director General Al Morrison had come up with this partnership model.

And I totally agreed with it.

And my ambition was to power and to working with others to enable others to do the work.

And, of course, commercial partnerships.

So how did you navigate that?

So tell me about Southland when you were sort of looking after and living there for, I think, 22 years.

Well, after I'd done the forestry degree, I spent two years at Forest Research Institute in mountain land management.

So I went through plant ecology, animal ecology, geohydrology, all those.

And I was posted to Invercargill and I chose Invercargill.

because nobody wanted to go there.

And I'd heard that people that go to Invercargill tend to get ahead more than anywhere else in the country because people keep on moving on.

That was exactly right.

Did that start on the West Coast as a young man or as a young child? And then how did that sort of go through with your relationships and what did you sort of have to do during this time and then also learn?