MASTER & COMMANDER
Lisa’s ruling the waves!
Ijoke that I’m married to the Navy. Frankly, people who balance families blow my mind – don’t know how they do it.
Still, I feel like I am a supermum in a way. I have to worry about 178 people. When one of the ship’s company doesn’t get back to the ship on time when we’re in a foreign port, I think the worst. That doesn’t happen often, and they might just have fallen asleep or be running late or their phone’s gone flat, but it always gives me a heart attack.
We’re just back from
Malaysia, taking part in an exercise we do every year. It’s a rehearsal at sea, if you like – of some of the activities we would need to deliver if we were to defend the Malaysian Peninsula and the South China Sea.
Before that, it was the Rim of the Pacific exercise – the world’s largest international maritime warfare exercise.
For the final battle we were in command of the opposing force, so we led a number of ships against the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier, which was excellent – and fun. We made good bad guys!
The highlight was winning the gunnery competition – it’s called the rodeo – where you try to land five shells the closest to a sea target 6.5km from the ship.
We lived in Wellington until I was 14. As a family, we always had yachts. Sea cadets was maybe 15 metres down the road from the Evans Bay yacht club, so it would be my parents at the club having drinks and me at sea cadets.
I always loved being at sea and I just loved cadets. The discipline, the structure and the hierarchy just served me down to the ground.
I was a pretty bossy kid and I’ve always liked taking charge of things. I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of school, but I didn’t make really strong social bonds. I got my UE and then pretty much joined the Navy.
The recruiters sold it to my intake as being the first female midshipmen, so the first direct entry of women into the Navy. I just thought, ‘Okay then, I’m also going to be the first to drive a frigate.’ So even in those early days I knew what my job was going to be.
In the early years it was always going to be tough transitioning into what had traditionally been a male-dominated space. Putting men and women together in a contained environment was always going to be hard, but we had to do it – there was no other way.
For me, it was a challenge. I thought I could do it better anyway and I’ve always had that sort of attitude. Mostly I just put my head down and did the bullat-a-gate thing – a typical Aries. In the early days, I was sharing the same shower as the guys. I’d do it by time or by flipping a sign. It’s a very different place now.
I spent the first 20 years following the traditional warfare officer path and it was pretty intense. I got to the point where I was tired. I’d always been the first to do this or the first to do that. I got weary of all the first-ness, I guess.
I needed to have a change of direction – what I now call an off-ramp – so I went to art school, thinking I was going to become an art teacher. They were all like, ‘Why are you here, Lisa? You’re mad.’ But I wanted to do something for me. That’s where my head was at.
After two years I realised I was a pretty average art student and returned to the Navy.
Because you live and work in the same place, you have to learn how to switch off. Generally when I leave the ship at a port – if I have time off – I’ll book a hotel and get a massage to help relax, but switching off mentally is difficult.
On the latest deployment, which was five months, I started a painting, to be a memory of that time. I asked the engineers to hang it on the wall so that I would see it every day and be motivated to work on it. It turns out that working on a painting is challenging on a moving ship!
When I’m based in Devonport, I use my day cabin as my office – I also have an ‘en suite’, a kitchen and a night cabin.
I usually go home to St
Heliers at night but if there’s some sort of social event on,
I’ll use my night cabin as my alternative apartment, if you like. I stayed here the other night because the traffic was really bad. I was like, ‘You know what? This is completely berko. I’m just going to go back to my ship.’ So I went to the supermarket and came back here.
When I’m not on the ship,
I live with my sister and our fur babies – our cats Oscar and Cleo. I have a global map at home with countries I have visited marked by a sticker – I want to fill the map!
I am taking the ship to
Canada next year for a planned systems upgrade period and have always wanted to see the Northern Lights, so I might be able to do that then.
Ultimately, I’ve realised my dream and it’s been pretty cool.”
As told to Julie Jacobson