Source: Eastern Institute of Technology
8 minutes ago
EIT professor Annemarie Gillies has been on a forty year learning journey.
She was 31, had worked at Whakatū for seven years and had no plans to do anything different. The pay was good; she earned enough to buy a new car and her first home. When the works closed on 10 October 1986, she was devastated and faced some tough choices.
“I had to sell my car just to make sure I had money for the mortgage payments.”
At the time EIT, then the Hawke’s Bay Community College, partnered with the government to run programmes for freezing workers who had lost their jobs. Many of Annemarie’s workmates enrolled, and she chose a business simulation course.
“It made me think, I can’t get a job where I’m dependent on other people. I have to get a job where I’m the boss. Studying business makes you work-ready, so you can get a job out in the community and be a bit choosier about what you do.”
She decided to stay on for two more years, completing a National Certificate in Business Studies. The college didn’t offer degrees then, but the experience gave Annemarie the confidence to look further afield.
“I applied to all the universities to see how many cross-credits I would get for the 13 papers I’d done. Most of them would give me six, one gave me seven, but Massey University gave me eight. That meant I didn’t have to do the whole first year of a Bachelor of Business Studies in Accountancy.”
“The thing that kept motivating me was, I’ll just keep going until I fail a paper, and if I fail a paper, I’ll finish. But when I failed a paper, it made me more determined. I tried to do eight papers each year to make up my 24.”
Annemarie went on to become Business Manager of the Te Pūmanawa Hauora Research Centre in Massey’s Māori Studies department, hired by Professor Mason Durie (now Sir Mason), and spent five years there as business manager and got involved in research. Professor Durie was always supportive of his staff continuing their study. She kept studying alongside her job, completing a Diploma in Māori Development and then a Master of Business Administration. After moving to Massey’s College of Business, she completed her PhD with the support of a Health Research Council scholarship, became a senior lecturer and was later put forward for associate professor.
She credits strong, supportive leaders such as Professor Tony Vitalis, who then headed Massey’s School of Management.
“He just believed in everything I did. In 2000 I developed Māori business and management papers and strategic governance, which was pretty pioneering back then. I developed a whole diploma, which I ran until I left in 2014.”
She was then appointed Professor of Māori and Indigenous Research at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi.
Through the National Science Challenges, Annemarie has worked with colleagues across the motu on projects including Our Land and Water, focused on agribusiness, and Sustainable Seas, focused on the blue economy. That work took her to Rēkohu (the Chatham Islands) to work alongside Moriori.
Closer to home, through Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, New Zealand’s Māori Centre of Research Excellence, and her work with Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, she led a pilot project applying traditional knowledge labels to wāhi tapu – places of special spiritual, cultural and historical significance to Māori. Working with international organisation Local Contexts, the team added hapū kōrero to archaeological sites recorded in the New Zealand Archaeological Association’s ArchSite database. The pilot began in Waimārama, where Annemarie’s whānau is from, and will now be opened to other hapū and iwi.
Most recently, Annemarie and her team helped secure a place for Mataatua Wharenui, one of Aotearoa’s most treasured meeting houses, on New Zealand’s World Heritage Tentative List – the first step towards UNESCO World Heritage status. This was a dream that was strongly advocated by the late Sir Hirini Moko Mead, who provided leadership for this project. He was instrumental in getting the Wharenui returned to Ngāti Awa in 1996. The next stage of the UNESCO World Heritage will require much more work and material for international assessors, from management plans, risk assessments, and local and national government collaboration to letters of support and engagement with Mataatua iwi.
“We had to use international language, so people across the world could relate to it and see why it would be suitable for the tentative list”, explains Annemarie. “
“Comments from the Minister’s representative Indicated how we kept our language indigenous and international to ensure we expressed and were able to apply and clearly link the universal values criteria to Mataatua Wharenui. We provided examples that connected us to other indigenous groups – the values had to be universal, not national.”
Today, Annemarie has come full circle and is back where her learning began. She says it’s been an amazing journey and one she believes would never have happened if the Whakatū freezing works hadn’t closed.
“If it hadn’t closed, I would have probably stayed there, and I would have retired by now. Many of the people who worked with me went on to become teachers, nurses, other health professionals, and lawyers. So, in one respect, it was probably a godsend for some people, but not so for others.”
With some recent business closures, some Hawke’s Bay workers are once again facing an uncertain future. Annemarie’s story is a reminder that losing a job can be the start of something bigger, and that sometimes the first step is walking through the doors of a place like EIT.