In a 29-year career, the now departed Forest & Bird Otago Southland regional manager has angered anti-1080 activists, the fishing industry, recreational fishers, and high country farmers alike.
Ms Maturin (63) said her position with the conservation organisation required a thick skin, and she had to learn to "deal constructively with conflict".
Yet the Forest & Bird family of volunteers, the support of everyday New Zealanders on conservation matters, and the committed core of professional staff at the organisation had made the job worthwhile.
"I wouldn’t say it’s thankless: I’d say it’s at times really challenging, it never ends, and at times you have to be really persistent," Ms Maturin said.
Her mentor, ecologist Prof Sir Alan Mark had taught her the value of persistence, she said.
She learned it took about 20 years to win a conservation battle.
After gaining a masters degree from Lincoln University and working in a series of ecology, or wildlife services, positions, Ms Maturin started with Forest & Bird as the southern regional field manager responsible for the subantarctic islands and high country — an admittedly diverse set of concerns.
"The crazy thing is I’m still working on, or I was still working on, the same issues that I was when I started 29 years ago," she said.
But highlights in her career included being seconded to work in Vanuatu, being involved in the campaign to establish the Waitutu Forest as part of New Zealand’s national parks system and helping to secure conservation parks in the high country.
Recently she spent three years on the South-East Marine Protection Forum, and remained hopeful a marine reserve at White Island off Dunedin’s coast would be established through that process.
Over the years, she was heavily involved in attempting to influence district plans and regional policy statements through council processes and the environment court, she said.
When she started there were no real rules around the clearance of indigenous vegetation from the land, but now those rules were inserted into planning and policy documents as a matter of course, and the fight had now shifted to get councils to enforce those rules.
Seabirds had increasingly become her focus as Antipodean albatrosses and yellow-eyed penguin populations plummeted.
But she had started a "new chapter" in life, she said, one that allowed her to visit the subantarctic islands for the first time as a tourist.
After a summer of "exploring" when there were no crowds of tourists to compete with, she planned to take on new advocacy work, she said.
She said she hoped her successor at Forest & Bird would work to protect biodiversity on private land, and to protect water in the South.
