Keeping it together
Destination Fiordland’s manager has faith her community can advance through diversity, writes Michael Fallow.
Madeleine Peacock has Fiordland in her DNA. She was named, give or take a letter, after the majestic Mt Madeline that so often drew her mum Robynne’s gaze as she worked at Pyke Lodge.
Her dad, Ron, worked for the Forest Service, the Department of Conservation and then entered the tourism guiding business, with the couple building Fiordland Lodge for the luxury end of the market.
Her grandparents Les and Olive Hutchins were tourism industry pioneers who successfully pursued what Madeleine lightly calls harebrained schemes – initially through the rinky-dink scale of the Manapo¯ uri-Doubtful Sound Tourist Company, and then growing into one of New Zealand’s most recognised operators, Fiordland Travel and Real Journeys.
The Hutchins were also key figures in the ranks of the conservationists who eventually prevailed against the proposed raising of Lakes Manapo¯ uri and Te Anau, after which Les became one of the founding Lake Guardians. She’s a guardian herself, nowadays.
None of that family history happened without times of sacrifice, tenacity and bucketfuls of resilience.
Now Madeleine herself, and the community she holds dear, have need of those buckets.
She’s the manager of Destination Fiordland, the regional tourism organisation facing massive challenges from the cruel double-whammy of the February floods and then the Covid-19 pandemic that has left the tourist industry gasping.
Not for a moment does she deny immense sadness at what’s happening for her region at the moment, with business closures and redundancies around her.
‘‘But I also see joy. And I see happiness. From my office I can hear the children playing at school. I’ve had people saying to me: ‘I have a great idea about something I can do now.’ ’’
‘I’m glad not to be an outsider’
Resilience, she reckons, is more than a matter of disciplined planning. She talks of a spirit behind it, an ability to move forward without getting mired in anger, blame or victimhood, and to trust our individual and collective skills and resources.
Just looking around you, in a place like Fiordland, surely helps. There’s nothing perilously fashionable about its essential qualities. It has no less to offer now than ever it did.
And from her own experience, she knows how tourism works at many levels. What it’s like to clean the toilets, change the linen and serve the meals. She’s a business shareholder experienced in management, sales and marketing and governance too.
The complexities of the job aren’t something she faces in some isolated office.
‘‘I’m glad not to be an outsider who’s come into this role, because what informs my decision-making is a connection with the land and a connection with the business community – and a wider community that has known me since I was in nappies.’’
None of which guarantees gentle treatment. That’s not the way ardent community life works. People exasperate, upset and criticise one another at times.
Some of those criticisms of strategy and even the motivations behind them strike her as uninformed and, at times, personal. But even then, though, there’s the broader sense that the community knows it’s in this together. ‘‘We still all belong to each other.’’
Adventure as therapy
She’s travelled a bit, holding a range of jobs after qualifying with a bachelor of education in Dunedin then studying outdoor recreation in Tauranga for two years.
But none more profound than her work with Adventure Development Ltd providing alcohol, drug and mental health support services to young people.
‘‘I loved that job. We used a lot of wilderness and adventure therapy including five to 10-day journeys into the wilderness with young people. Probably the most meaningful work I’ve ever done.’’
By any measure the stakes in her present role are high ones. But Madeleine Peacock looks back at times advocating for young people in the court, mental health and education systems, fully aware that lives were at stake.
To have made a difference, and seen good outcomes, has added to her understanding of personal as well as collective ways to regather strength and move forward.
‘‘People would open their homes and their lives to somebody, like me, they didn’t know. They’d give permission to walk with them into the good and bad.
‘‘I really learned that incredible resilience exists in some dark places. You get up each day and you do life.’’
Understanding and empathy
She’s no different, herself. Without ever having made a song and dance about it, she’s been upfront about her own on-and-off struggles with depression and chronic fatigue.
At times, it’s meant she’s needed extra support, but in this, as in so many things, people step up. The upshot has been that, although it’s never been easy, happinesses and achievements remained in reach.
‘‘No matter how highfunctioning you are, how welleducated you are, what sort of privileged lifestyle you’ve lived, you can still experience these things. Sometimes life is harder than other times. I feel it’s given me a very good understanding of myself and empathy for others.’’
A while back she found herself in Sydney, lugging a heavy piece of baggage around an airport, train station, Uber. In some respects it was a familiar feeling. Depression and fatigue can sometimes burden her like ‘‘a bloody heavy piece of luggage’’, but that doesn’t stop her getting where she needs to be.
What of Fiordland, then?
Some factors you control and others you can’t, she says.
‘‘Where we will get into trouble is where we start trying to control the things we can’t, and forget to control the things we can.
‘‘We don’t have control over when the borders reopen. We do have control over how we market to the domestic market.
‘‘We do have control over the way we treat each other as people, as businesses, as members of a community. We do have control over how we spend our money.
‘‘Sometimes how you respond in a crisis or in a hard situation says more about you than how you would have done things in the first place if all had gone well. If plan A goes ahead, you might have done great. Along comes plan B and the result could be even greater.’’
The main pitfalls she sees are, well, panic for starters. Another would be slavishly mirroring initiatives from other regions ‘‘and not honouring our own journey’’.
A measured approach to marketing Fiordland, and in particular Te Anau, is needed.
‘‘One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever been given is stick to your lane. When you start looking around at those you’re running with, you lose sight of your own race.’’
Yes, every day matters, but only in the context of the long term.
The strategies to promote domestic tourism, and broaden awareness of Te Anau and Fiordland as destination attractions rather than a blurry experience through windscreens en route from Queenstown to
Milford and back, are up and running. Research is under way, too, to improve understanding of the domestic market.
Less formally within the community right now she’s seeing a workable dynamic in which people are figuring out where they need to step up – and also step back.
It’s the difference between working harder and working smarter. And as she sees it, the dynamic goes like this: I may not fully understand your circumstances, but I appreciate you’re doing all you can, right now, for your business and staff, and I’ll let you do that in peace.
‘‘How we handle ourselves in this environment says a lot about us,’’ she says.
Same for a community as it is for an individual – it’s your reaction to adversity, not adversity itself, that determines how your life’s story will develop.