KATIE SADLEIR
Voice of change
The gazebo at Pa¯ pa¯ moa Beach
Memorable summer holidays? Ours at Pa¯ pa¯ moa Beach over a decade were so memorable that daughter No 1 was moved to write a poem about them – entitled The Fight – it was about the only time she had witnessed her parents at war.
Nearly as gripping as a Siegfried Sassoon or Rupert Brooke in its portrayal of wartime horror, it is undoubtedly now in the Karori Normal School Hall of Poetry Fame.
At the core of the marital strife was a malevolent gazebo. Green and white striped, with four legs and a peaked roof, it cast shade over the opening day of every holiday at
Pa¯ pa¯ moa Beach Resort.
Quite simply, no matter which bit we put into which other bit, it emerged looking like a giraffe that had spent all night at a safari bar and was now too drunk to stand.
And so the poetry-inspiring events began. Year after grumpy green striped bloody year. Each of us had an idea just where we had gone wrong, when in fact we had no idea at all. Both were simply suffering Shelter Shock from previous battles.
Around us milled the girls. About 3 and 5 when Gazebo War I broke out, they were into their teens by the time the Drunken Giraffe revealed its secrets.
Each summer while construction, deconstruction and reconstruction were under way, they were forced to sit and watch other small holidaymakers heading for the waves. And coming back beaming. Or heading to the dairy. And coming back with icecream. Beaming.
Foolishly, they did the opposite of easing the tension.
‘‘Can we go to the beach? Can we go to the beach now? When can we go to the beach? Mum and dad, we want to go to the beach.’’
Here’s some context. Gazebo grappling always followed an eighthour drive from Wellington, a journey that started at 4am, only to be halted by a multitude of car sickness stops (once the first was in Karori, our home suburb).
We wrote a travelling song to pass the time, to the tune of Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer.
It starts out thus: ‘‘Whoa, whoa are we nearly there? Whoa, whoa we’re living in despair’’.
Those lines came from the back seat; the parental refrain was, ‘‘eat dried crackers, it’ll help I swear, whoa, whoa living in despair’’.
But of all the many memorable holidays at Pa¯ pa¯ moa with its sunshine, surf and sausages, one stood out above all others like a sparkling Sky Tower wrapped in twinkling lights of joy.
It was about a decade after the cursed gazebo entered our lives.
That summer, upon arrival at the camping ground, grumpy dad grabbed the bag containing all the gazebo bits and, in anticipation of the stress and poetry to come, flung the pieces out in one mighty swoosh, scattering them for metres.
And there it was, emerging amid the clutter; a piece of rolled up paper, never previously witnessed by the subset of human known as Norquay.
On it the word INSTRUCTIONS was written. Words, arrows and drawings indicated the pipe marked A should slide into the slot marked A, pipe B into slot B, then ever onward.
In just 10 minutes we had a proudly standing giraffe, straightlegged and stable. In 15 minutes we were at the beach. And THAT was our most memorable summer holiday.
The South Island road trip
My classmates at Otago Girls’ High School always came back from their summer holidays with perfect tans. In the first week of term we’d have our class photos taken, and beneath the hemlines of the navy skirts would be a neat row of golden shins, beautifully ripened by long days under the Central Otago sun.
Then there were my legs, which stood out like glow sticks. I hated that I couldn’t tan. It didn’t matter how many hours I spent out on the deck of the crib in Naseby my family rented every year, attempting to toast my pasty body. I simply wasn’t built for summer. I was far more comfortable indoors, beneath the glare of my computer screen.
The summer of 2006 was the first year we didn’t go to our usual holiday spot. Instead, we embarked on an epic South Island road trip, driving up the east coast from Dunedin, along the top, and down the West Coast before taking the Haast Pass back across.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime holiday, and my younger sister and I were lucky to have parents who went to the trouble and expense of planning such an adventure so we had the opportunity to see our own backyard.
But I was 15 at the time. Too uncool to spend summer at the camping grounds, experimenting with booze and boys. Yet too cool to show any enthusiasm for the wonders of my home country.
That year, I had an excuse to be miserable. I’d dislocated my knee and was in a brace. While my parents and sister got out of the car to explore towns along the way, I would sit sulkily in the front seat, listening to The Killers on the iPod Shuffle I’d got for Christmas.
The weather was as angsty as my teenage self. It would be the coldest summer in decades and was grey and rainy for the majority of the trip.
Instead of experiencing the glorious beaches of Nelson, my sister and I spent the whole time in the motel, watching Hannah Montana on Sky.
We stayed in a beautiful little cottage overlooking the sea in
Po¯ hara in Golden Bay. I retreated to my bunk bed, curling up with
The family reunion at Matarangi
My dad was a no-nonsense Yorkshireman who could be pretty strict with us kids, so when I arrived back at the bach one day to find my niece and nephew leading him around the backyard on a leash, I wondered if they’d somehow managed to spike his drink.
I’d been living in London for the past four years and it was my first trip back to New Zealand in that time – one he and mum had made possible by shouting my airfares.
We’d spent Christmas in their sunny Auckland backyard, before heading to a mate’s bach in the small Coromandel beach town of Matarangi.
Our old man had mellowed as an actual old man, my sister informed me, and it soon transpired that his first grandchildren could take much of the credit. At ages 2 and 4, they had him wrapped around their little fingers, painting his nails in pink, tying what remained of his hair in tight pigtails and, as I’d discovered that day, persuading him to perform like a giant puppy.
Mum had become another of their pliant playmates and before long I was, too. In place of gallivanting around Europe, I found myself building and busting down sandcastles, digging for ‘‘buried treasure’’ in the rock-hard backyard, and flailing about in the shallows with the kids on my back.
I was often exhausted and saw few of the Coromandel sites I’d wanted to, thanks to their easily tired legs and my nephew’s noon naps. But I hadn’t had such literally laugh-out-loud fun in a long time.
Watching dad with the kids, I realised he hadn’t actually changed all that much. Memories of him patiently teaching my sister and me to ride bikes and boogie boards and instigating thrillingly terrifying games of hide-and-seek tag came flooding back.
Dad and I hadn’t exactly been the best of friends during my terrible teens. Back then, I’d thought we had nothing in common and was quick to criticise what I dismissed as his crazily conservative views. Now, we were indulging our shared passions for photography, unfashionably big, buttery chardonnay, and rough-andtumble games with the kids like old mates.
When the kids were in bed, the grown-ups would go for walks along a beach so cobweb-clearing with its long stretch of surf-battered, tumbleweed-strewn sand that I made up my mind that I couldn’t spend much longer living beside the Thames.
Back at the bach, we’d pour big glasses of our off-trend chardie and tales of adventures and misadventures past would pour out with it. Moving up and down the space-time continuum with each anecdote, I felt like a time traveller of sorts – one on an ad-hoc tour of the big cities, small towns and wild Yorkshire moors my family had called home.
Dad’s stories of the old country, though, had changed. He hadn’t just mellowed in recent years, I realised, he’d spread out unrippable roots. Homesick for England for much of my childhood, he was now clearly content with the life he had built for himself and his family in New Zealand. And the grandkids could take much of the credit for that, too.
Chronically restless, I hoped that feeling of being settled was something I could learn to cultivate, too. Four years on – and just over four years after his death – I’m living back in New Zealand and, I have to admit, still working on it. Summer holidays here just don’t feel right without him, but looking at the unpublishable pictures of the kids leading him around on a leash the last time I saw him alive always makes me smile.
The bach at Whangaruru
My job has taken me to the far reaches of the globe – from the Himalayas to the Maldives – but my happiest moment involves a longdrop toilet just down the road from where I grew up.
As a travel reporter, I’ve been fortunate enough to eat at an underwater restaurant in the Indian Ocean, stay at Thailand’s top resort and even travel to an island with nine million penguins on a National Geographic ship. So, if money bought happiness, you’d think one of these once-in-a-lifetime trips would be my most memorable summer holiday.
But, spoiler alert, money does not buy happiness. My happiest summer involved our old family bach in a little place known as Whangaruru.
Northland is pretty lucky to have an enormous coast, and most Kiwis have only explored a fraction of it.
Whangaruru Harbour was traditionally a haven for those travelling by boat between Whanga¯ rei and the Bay of Islands. In Ma¯ ori, it roughly translates to the sheltered harbour.
Right down the end of the harbour, as the bays get more remote and rugged, was a little waterfront bach our large family used to pile into. It was a rickety old pot of gold at the end of a very New Zealand-style rainbow: a gravel road.
Every year for the first 15 years of my life, without fail, our family would gather to celebrate summer. Nobody complained about the longdrop toilet, or having to climb a hill for cellphone reception. It was a time we all got together to talk, laugh and swim.
My nana, in her 60s back then, would be out skiing and showing us age is just a number. Us kids would spend the entire day in the water playing cops and robbers on bodyboards. My mum, who was probably a dolphin in a previous life, would swim for a kilometre across the other side of the harbour – we were convinced she’d become shark food.
Fresh fish would come home each night as the result of daily fishing expeditions. If the boat came home empty, there would be a Royal Commission of Inquiry over the barbecue as to what had gone wrong out on the water. In these situations, the ‘‘break glass in case of emergency’’ sausages would be rolled out.
I went to a family funeral a few weeks ago and something remarkable happened. Rather than talk about wealth or careers, the speakers recounted holidays with family and friends. I realised that’s what a holiday is about: it’s for creating moments that make life so special.
And if there’s one message I want to leave you with, it’s this: you don’t need money to create those memories. I’ve been to more than 70 countries, but my happiest summers were just down the road at a rickety old bach with a long-drop toilet.
Katie Sadleir is one of the most powerful women in global sport. That’s not an opinion, it’s a fact. She’s been shaping rugby as general manager of the women’s game at World Rugby, based in Dublin, since 2017. Her focus has been on diversity, inclusion and normalising women’s roles both on and off the field.
‘‘I took on that role for a specific reason. It wasn’t about the glitz and glamour . . . but it was about sport for empowerment and leadership development, and sport for social change. That was really important,’’ she says.
In 2020, she was the only woman named by Rugby World Magazine in a top 10 most influential people in rugby – only one of two New Zealanders, and ahead of any All Blacks. Wallabies coach Dave Rennie was the other. That was a ‘‘big wow moment’’ for her. ‘‘It made me feel proud. It was great for women’s rugby and . . . we were getting results people were noticing.’’
The results speak for themselves. She’s helped develop a strategic framework to grow participation, pathways and exposure of women, with her main focus on driving leadership.
When Sadleir arrived at the organisation, 27 per cent of rugby players globally were female, yet they weren’t represented on the global sport’s council. Instead, there were 30 men.
‘‘The 30 men knew they needed to do something about this. World Rugby prides itself in demonstrating international best practice in leadership and that was not it,’’ she says.
By the end of her first year, 17 women sat around the table. Two sub-committees are now chaired by women, including two New Zealanders, and a governance review is under way with a focus on diversity and inclusion.
Sadleir’s also in the middle of rolling out campaigns for the 2021 Rugby World Cup for women, hosted by New Zealand; negotiating deals with sponsors and broadcasters, and she has established coaching internships for women this year. Of the top 16 nations in sevens and 15s, there was only one female head coach, and a small handful of female assistant coaches. ‘‘Instant outcome at the end of 2021. There will be 12 more women who have coached at a World Cup level.’’
She’s also focused on developing pathways for participation in regions where women’s rights have previously been impeded – Iran, Syria, Malaysia, Laos. The latter now has more girls than boys playing rugby. That was a major reason she took the role. ‘‘What sport is doing is giving [girls] the opportunity to stay in school, to give them a profession called coaching, to develop themselves in leadership roles.
‘‘The Muslim girls playing rugby, the girls in Mongolia playing snow rugby, the kids in Uganda that are on the beach throwing the ball around. It’s so exciting to see the growth in countries that you wouldn’t think would embrace such a physically demanding, challenging and confronting type of sport. But it’s such a powerful sport.’’
Then throw Covid-19 into the mix. ‘‘I often get asked . . . ‘Isn’t this a disastrous situation for women in sport?’ From a rugby perspective, globally we are doing more than we’ve ever done. What we do have is more people and more time to think creatively, and different organisations wanting to put in resources to get somewhere faster.’’
It’s about working ‘‘smarter, not harder’’ to solve the ‘‘series of challenges’’ sport faces, including the current welfare issues in the likes of gymnastics and canoe racing in New Zealand. ‘‘I think the integrity issue is a big piece globally, and you’re seeing it in all sorts of forms, and linked to that is people having open and honest conversations about things.
‘‘Creating opportunities where people can have courageous conversations in a way that they are not threatened; coming together to create collaborative solutions with people from different perspectives, and we need to move away from the ‘same old, same old way’ of approaching planning, decision-making, risk mitigation, and bringing in diverse ideas, in a way that people can talk.
‘‘It’s going to be a challenge, but it’s going to be a good challenge.’’
Diversity is something Sadleir talks about a lot. Diversity of leadership. Diversity of thought. Diversity of experience. She’s had plenty of diversity both in her professional and personal life; boardroom tables and disrupting traditional sports culture is a far cry from her early days.
Born in Scotland to Australian and Scottish parents, the family headed to Canada, then, when she was 16, settled in Lower Hutt. She spent many years in ‘‘magical’’ Petone, but you won’t find her name on Jackson St’s Walk of Champions, even though she represented New Zealand at the Olympics and Commonwealth Games.
The 56-year-old grew up with the ‘‘balance is better’’ attitude, engaging in a multitude of sports and activities – from figure skating to singing and dancing en pointe – but it was the water she was most drawn to, combining her love of art and sport in synchronised swimming.
She first dabbled with the sport at age 8, going on to represent Canada, and eventually New Zealand. She and sister Lynette placed 12th at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles – the first time the sport featured in the games – before Sadleir claimed bronze individually at the 1986 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh, in front of ‘‘every single aunt, uncle and cousin’’ from her Scottish side. She was coached by Lynette.
That was her final stint in the pool for New Zealand, but she’s been involved with nine Olympics and Commonwealth Games in a supporting capacity. Her first board position was in her early 20s when she was appointed to the New Zealand Swimming Federation board. It was in those formative years that she knew she wanted to have a professional career in the sports industry, but wasn’t too sure what path she’d take.
So she applied for a masters programme at Victoria University, completing a thesis in the attraction of swimming in masters sports. While studying fulltime, she was approached by the Hillary Commission to work on the ‘‘gain, train, retain’’ programme addressing the role of volunteers in the delivery of sport.
‘‘I was sitting there thinking ‘Do I want to do this?’ The alternative was to work at an outdoor swimming pool, work on my tan and write my thesis,’’ she laughs. ‘‘But I jumped in.’’
The project became the ‘‘government manifesto’’ on the importance of volunteers. Her work got noticed overseas, and she was seconded to help the Australian Sports Commission do something similar.
What followed were roles with the NZ Olympic Committee Athletes’ Commission – ‘‘athletes should have a voice’’ – Sport New Zealand and the New Zealand Academy of Sport.
She dipped her toe further into the public sector. First, four years as a general manager at ACC, then in local government with Wellington City Council, and then two years as the project director of Te Auaha – the New Zealand Institute of Creativity – which she is incredibly proud of.
‘‘People . . .. thought, ‘Are you actually able to do that?’ I’ve been one of those people that if someone says that to me . . . that’s ‘Bring it on’.’’
She says her peers describe her as ‘‘very direct’’, ‘‘emotional’’ and wearing her heart on her sleeve. She was also described as a ‘‘bolshie blonde’’ by a media outlet overseas. What’s wrong with that, she says? ‘‘Own it.’’
‘‘There’s still a perception about how you’re supposed to act as a woman versus a man. We still have those things where it’s all right if a male acts that way and not all right if a woman acts that way.
‘‘The issue is people perceive the way you act is about your gender. It’s not about your gender, it’s about who you are . . . We want strong women leaders to say what they need to say without thinking they are going to be shot down about it. It’s the way it has to roll going forward.’’
Diversity also features in her personal life. ‘‘I’m a closet artist,’’ she laughs. When she’s not trying to shape the sports world, she shapes pottery, screen printing and mosaic art. A lot of her art adorns the walls of her sister’s house and her garden. And she’s a trained singer.
For now, she’s using her voice in sport and is swapping her pottery wheel for the boardroom table.
‘‘If you’re going to be at the table, you do lean in. You’ve got to step up. Make sure you’re there advocating for the future and for other women . . . and men to come forward.
‘‘Let’s get on with it.’’
‘‘It’s not about your gender, it’s about who you are.’’