Eco-warrior Lesley Shand left her mark on environment Lesley Shand
Lesley Shand was a dynamic and powerful force for good in her tireless efforts to conserve specific regions of Te Waipounamu and many features of New Zealand’s unique biota and fauna. She seemed endlessly fierce and fearless, but was full of gentle kindness. She had to steel herself in calling people to be responsible for protecting our rich environment. This was part of her family’s legacy of care for their tūrangawaewae, with a keen sense of kaitiaki (guardianship) values. Her forebears migrated in 1851 on the Isabella Hercus and farmed in a range of locales from North Otago to Pelorus Sound.
Born into a North Canterbury farming family in 1942, the young Shand worked hard to assist her parents (Olga and Arthur) run high country sheep farm Island Hills in the steep inland Hurunui catchment under the Organ Range. With younger sister Diana and brother Edwyn (Ed), this involved helping their parents in all farm work, from the yard to the hills, from the earliest age.
Lesley was the first sibling and quickly developed a lifelong passion for the high country, its ecology, traditions and history. Niece Nicky Gardner recalls a feisty but deeply loving aunt who treated her young relatives to a rich education in the outdoors: “Aunt Lesley was a teacher at heart and the outdoors were her natural classroom.” Informative wild-nature walks inscribed conservation values in the young, and the great nieces and nephews were treated to expeditions to Forest and Bird’s ‘Boyle Base Camp’ (secured by Shand in 1999). Shand also set up predator trap lines to restore kiwi breeding numbers and ran diverse teams of people on dozens of trips to the Lewis Pass and Lake Sumner forests to monitor kiwi numbers by listening for nocturnal calls.
In 1988, Shand, already a lifetime member, received an Old Blue Award and, later, a Distinguished Lifetime Award from the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society for her conservancy work, once stating: “If damage occurs to a place I am fond of, it’s just like a body blow. I’m not interested in restoration. I would rather look after the unmodified areas and see they don’t get degraded.” Shand put her values into action, not only campaigning endlessly against the risk of wilding confers, but spending many hours physically removing them.
Perhaps without knowing it, she had imbibed the family’s Christian ethic of responsible stewardship, which Sam Mahon crisply translates as “working to protect the commons on behalf of our children”. Mahon adds that Shand was a doer, a campaigner, and a serious, bone fide activist, and that “Lesley’s flame has lovingly burned all of us”. It was in recognition of these tireless efforts that Shand was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) in the 1999 Queen’s Birthday honours for services to conservation.
The Shand children had to learn through the Correspondence School (Te Kura) with their mother supervising and teaching them, on top of many other exhausting tasks, on an inaccessible farm. Lesley, always up with anything boys could do, worked outside all day helping in mustering sheep on the steep hills, working in the sheep yards, tending and moving stock, as her father’s right-hand. She openly shared her frustration at not being born a boy, “which she longed to be”, says sister Diana. “She dreaded being treated as a girl, so unequally, and with a girl’s future and its restrictive expectations”.
Lesley Shand always preferred the open outdoors as her learning base, but both sisters were eventually sent to Woodford House in Hawke’s Bay for their secondary education, a positive experience for both.
Post-boarding school, Shand worked intensely at Island Hills as her mother was working herself into ill-health and her father was short-handed. This strenuous work compromised her schooling somewhat, but her famous all-nighters, studying after a hard working day, enabled Shand to enter the Fine Art School (Ilam) in 1961. Sadly she lost self-confidence, discontinued that course and instead obtained primary teaching certification to gain a secure income stream.
Saving money from weekend work for her uncle Maurice in the famed Coffee Pot cafe in Christchurch’s New Regent St, Shand eventually left on the Orcades for her OE, travelling in Britain (working at waitressing) and hitch-hiking across Europe on a tight budget, like so many of her generation.
The fact that years later Shand completed a bachelor of science in geography (1996) would have put to rest any lingering inner doubts about her academic ability - her executive and practical abilities in conservation must have augmented and rounded out the gifts she had in such abundance. Shand explained that studying ecology, forestry and conservation management helped complement her practical farm-based and catchment knowledge and teach her how to better structure her conservation arguments, telling Eugenie Sage: “You can read the hills better. You combine what you observe with a theoretical basis.”
Returning to New Zealand in 1968, Shand - keen not to be stuck in a bureaucratised career and within a confining classroom (where she was a superb educator) - started a commercially successful horse-trekking business, Island Hills Safaris. She took people up Organ Stream, across the tussock and steep kānuka-covered hills below Mt Skedaddle, and based in the farm’s 1930s ‘Bush Hut’. This enterprise created a very helpful cashflow for the farm but some family debate led to that enterprise being discontinued in 1971. This decision left Shand shattered and adrift, and Diana came to the rescue by suggesting a conservancy role, which she initially eschewed as not of high country interest.
Shand did winter teaching part-time and worked for Inland Revenue and the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, but her true vocation was saving what she called “our distinctive landscapes in Canterbury - the tussock and shrublands and the open braided riverbeds [threatened] because of invasion by weeds and wilding pines”. Shand opposed logging of native forests at Station Creek in the Maruia Valley and other West Coast sites such as Mt Harata and the red and silver beech forests of the Reid Valley (Springs Junction), and also strove to protect the beech/podocarp forest at Terako Downs in the Amuri Range east of Hanmer.
In 2003, Shand played a pivotal role in saving The Poplars pastoral lease land (at the confluence of the Nathan Stream and the Boyle River, Lewis Pass). She was also a powerful advocate for the Arthur’s Pass National Park, notably gaining the CoxBinser addition, and was a key part of the team which, through the Nature Heritage Fund, protected 176 hectares of beech forest and wetland at Lake Grace near the Mounds of Misery.
To accomplish all this, Shand travelled thousands of kilometres and spent thousands of hours writing letters and submissions to influence politicians and bureaucrats and to advance public conservation awareness in the media.
Former Green MP Eugenie Sage paid tribute to her colleague and fellow fighter for environmental sanity: “Lesley was an incredible advocate for nature and an inspiration for activists because of her determination and doggedness, her staunch activism and her care for others and nature. She campaigned hard to better protect the landscapes and biodiversity features she loved, including the Canterbury high country, West Coast forests, matagouri shrublands, mistletoes, kaka parrots of the Maruia Basin, Loch Katrine and Lake Sumner, and kiwi in the Lake Sumner Forest Park and Lewis Pass forests.”
Sister Diana remains awed by her work as “a highly effective member of the North Canterbury Parks and Reserves Board (1981-90), the North Canterbury Conservation Board (1990-1996) and, eventually, the New Zealand Nature Conservation Council (1984-1996)”.
Shand made a stunning contribution to the preservation of our unique portion of Gondwanaland. Her achievements are awesome, and so much of that was attributable to the voluntary exertions of a rare Kiwi spirit and team leader whose love of Te Waipounamu was unsurpassed.
Lesley Helen Shand, MNZM, is survived by sister Diana, brother Edwyn and a multitude of adoring nieces and nephews.
– By Bruce Harding (with assistance from Griffen Ritchie of the Government Honours Unit, Dr Gerry McSweeney, Anne Saunders, Eugenie Sage and Diana Shand).