When Hilary Lennox moved to New Zealand nearly 10 years ago, she wanted to continue working in the environmental sector.
But getting a job similar to the one she had in the United Kingdom was unlikely. After all, there was little demand for searching for World War 2 bombs, she said, laughing.
Instead, she got a job as a senior consents officer at the Otago Regional Council in Dunedin, later moving to Invercargill as consents manager for Environment Southland.
Now Ms Lennox is general manager of RDAgritech Ltd, an environmental consultancy firm with offices in Frankton and Invercargill, providing environmental and geotechnical solutions for clients.
She had seen a lot of good changes during her time in local government but felt it was time, after seven years, to ‘‘get out into the real world’’.
But her time at the regional councils was very valuable as it exposed her to ‘‘all sorts of different work and scenarios’’.
It gave her a very good understanding of what she wanted to do at RDAgritech, to ensure that clients were provided with good service, and an understanding of the importance of working with councils, not against them.
During that time, she witnessed the service provided by consultants on behalf of their clients; some was good and some was ‘‘shocking’’.
So she had strong views about the attributes people should be seeking when selecting a consultant to help with their resource consent applications, environmental compliance or other issues.
Consultants needed to work with farmers to ensure they had the best long-term solutions; they needed to form a relationship with the client, understand their business and provide solutions and options that suited them, she said.
Sometimes, people making decisions about their business were not aware what was ‘‘in the pipeline’’ in terms of evolving legislation.
The firm was multidisciplinary with its geotech work — which included a strong focus in Queenstown with all the developments in the resort, and in Southland’s farming industry — and also in the environmental space.
While some people saw regional councils as the ‘‘enemy’’, she encouraged people to be ‘‘upfront’’ with the council and fully understand what it needed from them. That way, the council could provide a better service.
It was definitely valuable drawing on her own experience at the councils.
Through the consultancy work, she also had a better understanding of all the other pressures people faced.
The consultants she enjoyed working with in the past were the ones who ‘‘talk to you’’. They were the ones who went on to properties and understood the needs and concerns of their farmer clients and how they operated.
Farming had never been easy and the nature of some of the challenges was changing.
‘‘We want to be there to help people through it. People need to not be frightened to reach out for help along the way,’’ she said.
Scientists were ‘‘finding out new stuff’’ every day and that impacted on how the environment was managed.
Now living in Cromwell and based in RDAgritech’s Frankton, Queenstown office, Ms Lennox grew up in the northeast of England, an industrial area ‘‘riddled’’ with coalmines.
While not from a farming background, she grew up in the countryside riding horses kept on a dairy support block that had winter housing for cows. The cows and horses were kept in the same barn.
Summers were spent building haybale forts and diving into the grain stores, much to the horror of her parents, she said, while vets and farmers featured in her family.
Her aunt, a vet who lives in Dunedin, used to send calendars featuring New Zealand scenes to the UK every Christmas. ‘‘I thought, that’s paradise,’’ she said.
She came to New Zealand several times to visit her aunt and fell in love with the country.