Tinkerer, sailor, water warrior, spy
Saturday, 29 June 2024
As a teenager, Mike Joy was suspended from St Bernard’s College in Lower Hutt because he refused to trade his black corduroy Gatsbys for regulation uniform pants.
(It may also have had something to do with him burning rubber at lunchtimes in his Ford Prefect at the nearby Sacred Heart girls’ school.)
Ultimatum after ultimatum left him unmoved. And so began, perhaps, the fierce fighting spirit that later transformed Joy into an unbending advocate for New Zealand’s polluted rivers.
The 65-year-old ecologist’s new memoir, The Fight for Freshwater, details that battle, and the vitriol and frustrations that have gone with it.
But it’s what he packed in before he went to university at 33 that has surprised early readers.
“I thought everybody had a life like that,” Joy says.
Street sweeping
Standing at Wellington Railway Station with five other novices, Joy had no idea what he was getting into.
The 23-year-old had signed the public service paperwork, and packed a bag for two weeks. He imagined it would be like the British intelligence agents on BBC show The Professionals.
And then they drove to a motel in Palmerston North.
The spy job was Joy’s dad Trev’s idea.
Although Joy did OK at school, he never considered university an option. Since the age of 17, he’d done a succession of jobs, from factory foreman at a Petone glass recycling factory, to storeman at Firestone Tyres, to working on a dairy farm in Palmie, to driving taxis at night in Lower Hutt.
Trev ‒ a former cop turned Civil Aviation Authority official ‒ was worried Joy’s life was going nowhere. Then he heard the SIS was looking for a surveillance team.
If the aim was to be inconspicuous, Joy should have been disqualified on sight ‒ his Magnum PI moustache was anything but.
But having worked on his boy racer cars and spent holidays with his aunt and uncle at Peel Forest in Canterbury learning to weld, plumb, fence, and use a chainsaw and lathe, Joy was a skilled tinkerer.
He became the team’s wheel man, learning fast driving and wiring cameras into backpacks to take snapshots of airport arrivals.
They were schooled in the art of following, memorising traffic light sequences and sneaky shortcuts.
Their targets were mostly Russians, and while there were exciting moments, it turned out the job wasn’t at all like the wild car chases and intrigue of spy movies.
“Much of the job was sheer boredom.”
They sometimes spent days standing at the Karori tunnel just to see which exit the Russians would take after leaving their Karori embassy. They drilled so many holes in a Taupō motel for surveillance devices they joked it would fall down.
They were too lowly to be told if their information ever revealed anything important. But the files of turned Russian, Vasili Mitrokhin, revealed the KGB had been active in New Zealand at the time.
“They never mentioned us so we obviously didn’t get sprung,” Joy says. “That was kind of nice. Because inevitably, shit went wrong. You would end up bumping into them and think that they had sprung you. Sometimes chasing them you’d come round the corner, going like crazy, and they’d stopped or slowed down. One time I just had to hoon it past them like I was in a big hurry.”
Joy stuck it out for six years, but still hankered for something different.
“I thought that maybe I had a brain, but I just didn’t know what to do with it.”
Biology was one of the few subjects he’d done well at at school. So he took up an extramural science paper through Massey University. And to his surprise, he did OK.
A life in cars
With his wild thatch of curls, hate of killing things and vegetarian diet, Joy has greenie hippie written all over him.
But he started out life as a gun-toting, spotlighting boy racer who once set up a secret gun club fitted out with his dad’s broken revolver and decommissioned machine guns nicked from a dump on Christchurch’s Wigram airbase, which he and mates would snake through grass to pillage.
The arc of the many lives of Dr Joy are neatly described in his life of cars.
He bought his first ‒ the Ford Prefect ‒ at 14, before he was even allowed to drive it.
Then there was the beach buggy he built and drove with mates on the Hutt riverbank, and which earned him a conviction for wilful damage, despite no actual damage being caused.
The Prefect was replaced by a Vauxhall PC Cresta, then a Mark III Zephyr with six aerials ‒ boy racer heaven.
Then at 18, he fell in love with Janice, and moved to Palmie to live with her. The first hint of hippiedom was cemented when he traded the Zephyr for a 1959 VW Kombi van, and built a biodigester to use methane from plant and animal waste to fuel his camp stove.
When he returned to Wellington and met partner Alli Hewitt, he was the proud bearer of an Alfa Romeo, a classic yacht, black stovepipes, grey velcro shoes and the worst kiss ever.
Remarkably, she stuck around.
Now, Joy drives an old Toyota Corolla and rails against fancy cars and gas-guzzlers.
The former petrolhead is now fuelled by a very different passion.
Water warrior
Joy opens the memoir with Stephen Sackur’s 2011 HARDTalk interview with John Key, in which he used Joy’s data to challenge New Zealand’s clean and green claims.
That was the beginning of Mike Joy as media persona, water warrior and public punching bag.
But the fight really started years earlier, in the late 90s, when Joy took his nephew and niece to the Ōroua River. It looked a bit manky, but the twins swam anyway, and later fell sick.
Digging into the situation, Joy realised polluters were being allowed to fill the river with filth, with no enforcement.
By then Joy was studying at Massey University, where he completed a doctorate in ecology.
The revelation that New Zealand rivers were being allowed to degrade, and freshwater fish with them, spurred the fight of Joy’s life.
But speaking up carries a cost. After Joy made unflattering comments about New Zealand’s environmental record in the New York Times, prominent lobbyist Mark Unsworth sent Joy a late-night email accusing him of an ego trip.
“You guys are the Foot and Mouth Disease of the tourism industry,” he wrote. “Most ordinary people in NZ would happily have you lot locked up.”
He’s had people call him a waste of space and a traitor. That he should be shot. And then there were the official complaints to the university, from people with vested interests, and the sleepless nights that inevitably followed.
“For a while during Covid, suddenly scientists were the best things since sliced bread, and then they went to the worst enemies, and they got so much shit for that. It’s such a tricky space.
“You’re telling the story that people don’t want to hear,” Joy says. “It would be so much easier if I was selling some magic solution, and people wanted to hear it. But people don’t want to know the reality. And so that’s why I’m Dr Doom.
“The tinkerer in me says, ‘OK, the problem is that these are broken systems, let’s fix them.’ It took me a while to work out that this technofix mindset is just another problem. The name of the problem is denial.”
He doesn’t know how academic scientists could be better supported to be the critics and conscience of society that their role requires, without being the butt of personal abuse.
But supportive bosses helps. It wasn’t until after vice-chancellor Steve Maharey left Massey that Joy realised he’d been fending off complaints on his behalf.
As he watches years of (often unpaid) work go down the toilet with this government’s ditching of the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management, Joy admits it’s hard to feel optimistic.
He’s not the type to leave work at the front door to the Paekākāriki home he shares with Hewitt and Clifford the german shepherd. And while he technically works part-time, worrying is a full-time job. That and the public talks. Environmental Defence Society conference, Whanganui Science Group, Wairarapa Science Group.
Even, occasionally, Federated Farmers, like the time a burly bloke tasked with delivering a speaker’s thank you told Joy, “Thanks mate, I didn't like a single effing thing you said but you've got big cojones coming here to do this”.
More than twenty years on, the Ōroua River still isn’t fixed, and three quarters of native fish are threatened or at risk, compared with one fifth when he began studying in 1993.
So how do you hold on to hope? Now working at Victoria University, with the support of the Morgan Foundation, it’s the teaching that motivates Joy these days.
“The whole science thing, I feel like it's toxic knowledge now. All of the stuff that I know is a burden. And lots of times I think, ‘I wish I was just driving a truck again, and would be excited about watching the rugby on the weekend.
“But apart from some of the attacks and fights, it's been pretty fulfilling. For me now, the only reason I can get out of bed in the morning, is knowing that I've got teaching. Because all of the other work that I thought I'd achieved got chucked out by this government.”
Setting sail
Berthed at Mana marina is Joy’s 30ft therapist.
Since he discovered sailing almost 50 years ago, the sea has been his escape.
He was so taken with the sport after a day’s sailing with a family friend, that within a week he’d bought a small yacht with a mate. They learned to sail by trial and error, and would cross Cook Strait to the Marlborough Sounds with a bucket for a toilet and potatoes and sausages for tucker.
Joy loved the challenge of pitting yourself against the elements, and the mechanics and tinkering.
Later, he bought and restored classic yacht Yvonne, navigating drunk passengers and drunk drivers to fund the work.
“For the life of me I can't think how I used to drive taxis all night and work on the boat all day. I don't know when I slept.”
Yvonne joined a 1982 flotilla protesting the visit of US Warship USS Truxtun, with a “No Nukes” banner for a sail.
Between his two three-year spy stints, Joy and Hewitt took a year off to sail the Pacific on a friend’s yacht. In those pre-GPS days, Joy volunteered to navigate. His first sextant reading put them in the wrong hemisphere.
One of the appeals of sailing is that when things get hairy, everything else falls away. For someone who struggles to live in the moment, that’s a release.
“Once you get on the boat and you’re heading away, you’re kind of disconnecting. But also when the shit hits the fan, you’re shit scared and things are going wrong, everything that you were worried about suddenly isn’t important any more. So that kind of disconnect is what I’m looking for as well.”
While Joy worries that when you write a memoir, everyone assumes your life is over, he isn’t about to sail into the sunset just yet. And he still hasn’t given up on fixing our freshwater. As politicians come and go, so too can policies.
“I don’t think they’re going to get away with it. Or if they do, it will be undone again. So, it’s just a temporary thing.”
THE DETAILS
The Fight for Freshwater: A Memoir, by Mike Joy. Published by BWB, RRP $39.99