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Source: Radio New Zealand

Dame Helen Danesh-Meyer works “at the intersection of where the eye meets the brain”.

As New Zealand’s pre-eminent authority, and an internationally recognised leader in this area of clinical science, she has been made a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to ophthalmology.

Dame Helen is one of seven new knights and dames appointed nationwide this New Year.

As a clinician scientist, she told RNZ she spent half her week with patients or in the operating theatre, and the other half on research, supporting students and working with a number of charities.

“When you see your patients, you understand the questions that need to be answered to improve their outcomes.”

Since her first honour, when she was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2023, Dame Helen had made further contributions on the international stage as president of the Neuro-ophthalmology Society of Australia – the first New Zealander to hold this post.

This year, she was ranked among the top 10 glaucoma leaders globally.

Her desire to help people began at university, when she was studying in Otago. “What struck me was how precious vision was,” she said. “Patients would mention all the time how precious their sight was.”

Now, her work involved using the eye as a biomarker for brain health.

In 2024, she was elected as a member of Academia Ophthalmologica Internationalis – a group limited to 100 scientists from around the world.

“New Zealand, in many areas, is at the forefront of research,” she said. “We have a strong group of researchers who manage to do extraordinary research that hits the international stage, and I’m fortunate to be part of that team.”

She also sought ways to improve quality-of-life for patients through her charity work.

“A diagnosis is just a diagnosis,” she said – patient education and advocacy could go a long way to improving life for people with chronic disease, such as glaucoma.

She led Women in Vision, a national forum empowering female ophthalmologists, optometrists and students, and through Glaucoma New Zealand, which she had founded and now had 15,000 members, she sought to provide patients with meaningful, ongoing support.

The Vision Research Foundation, another organisation she founded and now led, “is a charity to give bright young researches the freedom to follow their curiosity, and to pursue bold, transformative research work in vision science”.

“So it means creating teams where people are trusted with challenges early in their career, and supporting them to move forward.”

Being made a dame was “a tremendous honour,” she said, “But it reflects the team work of many exceptional people.”

“The better work is still yet to come – it’s a platform to move forward.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Auckland rider Erin Swainston knew she had to let go of the reins, or be crushed by her beloved horse when it lost its footing.

“Waves were kind of throwing us around, Scooter was thrashing and trying to get his feet up underneath him and started rolling a bit.”

All she could see after the sudden fall into the surf, and her horse Scooter’s desperate efforts to right himself, was his belly and feet.

“And I was like, oh my goodness, if I don’t let him go he won’t be able to really get up on his own and he could potentially end up rolling onto me,” she told RNZ.

“So I needed to let him go, so then I did.”

Swainston and Scooter were with a friend and her own horse on Auckland’s Muriwai Beach on Sunday for what would be the start of a 24-hour ordeal.

It would involve hundreds of people online and on the ground, frantically spreading the word and searching the beach and forest.

The weather was good, “a lovely day”, and Swainston had guided Scooter into the waves so he could cool down his legs.

“And then all of a sudden this massive rogue wave came out and hit us,” Swainston said.

They tried to get out as quickly as they could but the large wave had spooked 14-year-old Scooter and the pair crashed into water.

The waves, eventually, pushed Swainston away from the horse she’s had for seven years – the horse she calls her boy.

He took off on his own in fright.

“Honestly it was the scariest thing, I felt my panic just rising and rising and rising… he was just so panicked that he just started to run around and then he started heading towards the dunes, and I was like ‘oh God, oh God, oh God… and then he just, he eventually found himself on the other side of the dunes.”

Swainston’s friend went after him and followed Scooter’s tracks for as long as she could, but to no avail.

Scooter was gone, and Swainston did not know if they would ever be reunited.

The search with hundreds online and scores on the ground

What began as a few desperate messages snowballed into a groundswell of support and help, her lost horse took over social media.

Swainston, who is president of the Massey Pony Club, messaged close friends and family asking if they could come to help look for him.

She put a message into the club committee’s online chat, and club members soon joined the hunt.

“And then posts were starting to go up as well on social media, like my friends were posting on social media and they started going into community groups and things like that as well, so then it just started really growing and growing and growing,” Swainston said.

She was blown away by the response, soon there was a Facebook group created to help find Scooter with about 200 members with many joining the search on the ground.

About 150 were searching on Muriwai Beach and combing nearby Woodhill Forest.

Posts with photos of Scooter, pleading for any sightings, kept popping up on social media.

“Honestly, how the community banded together, like the horsey world, the horsey community and the locals and non-locals and the iwi, and everybody that came together and also, like, how much awareness everybody had about it, everyone throughout the country knew about it and people from Aussie and the UK knew about it,” Swainston said.

“It was so scary because we went for over 24 hours without spottings, the only thing we really found was fresh horse poo on the ground which, we’re like, ‘oh this is a good sign’, but there was no sightings for hours.

“And so I was starting to really lose hope, this is such a massive area, there’s so many places he could have gone,” Swainston said.

“But then, I think it was really pure luck and just a miracle really, I was trying to find him, a needle in a haystack.”

Scooter is found

Two women among those looking for Scooter in Woodhill Forest, Liz and Rachel, found him down one of its trails in some undergrowth, and he came rushing down a path.

It was only about 20 minutes from an equestrian park but roughly two hours or so from where this story started at Muriwai Beach, Swainston estimated.

“Once they’re scared they go into full flight mode and they just run blind for hours so then once he kind of regained a little bit of sense he would have been just really lost and turned around, so he wouldn’t have known how to get back, so he just kind of kept wandering around really.”

The two women led Scooter out, and a call was made to Swainston’s mother.

Swainston, still desperately searching for him herself, was in the forest on an e-bike at the time.

“So then my mum just told me ‘he’s back, they’ve got him’, and honestly we both started bursting into tears when we found out that news.”

Swainston called local iwi who picked her up and drove her and her friends through the forest.

“And once I got there, I started crying again, put the halter on him and walked him back,” she said.

“Every horse owner knows it, it’s literally the worst nightmare that you could ever be in.”

Scooter doing well

Swainston said riders and their horses had a special bond and connection, and that they were loved like children.

“He’s like my heart horse, when I lost him it was just the most devastating thing ever and then going the whole 24 hours with no sightings, it was really hard to kind of keep hold of hope and stay strong, and then I had maybe two hours sleep that night, it was exhausting.”

But what Swainston called a nightmare was now over.

Scooter had been checked by a vet and was in good condition with no cuts, no scrapes and no dehydration, despite his ordeal.

“He’s great, he was super happy in his paddock grazing with his friends, he gave me a little neigh when I walked up to him and then got him out.”

He has been pampered with a massage rug back at the pony club.

Swainston said she and Scooter would probably not venture into waves again.

“We might just stick to the estuary or the lakes.”

She wanted to thank the hundreds of people who spread the word or tried to find him, saying she and her mother could not thank them enough.

“The kindness, time and care shown going above and beyond in rain and shine meant more to us than we could ever explain,” she said.

“We are incredibly grateful.”

She also said the sharing of posts and messages being sent helped them hold onto hope when it felt impossible to do so.

“From the bottom of our hearts, thank you again.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

A philanthropist, an art collector and a medical scientist are among those made knights and dames in this year’s New Year Honours. Nationwide, three new dames and four knights have been announced – and the capital is home to three of them. Reporter Kate Green spoke to the Wellingtonians about their work, their motivation, and their new titles.

Sir Graham Le Gros is on his gap year.

It’s a little later than most, but the recently retired director of the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research told RNZ he firmly believed in taking time to “calmly” think through his next step.

“I very much believe one has to retire from the job and let the other younger ones come over and do things before they get too old, so it’s been great passing on the role to Kjesten Wiig, who’s the new director.”

Now, with a little more free time, he spent his days trapping pests in the Orongorongos and catching up on 30 years of home maintenance – while still maintaining a seat on the institute’s trust board.

On Wednesday, Sir Graham is being appointed a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to medical science.

He said it was those young patients with cancer – one 30-year-old mother of three still stuck with him – that pushed him to explore what was, at the time, a novel concept: using the immune system to treat cancer, and help people who “don’t deserve to die so young”.

“Science was the way to solve problems,” he said.

Under his directorship at Malaghan, which began in 2014, the institute more than doubled in size to some 130 staff, and grew its operating budget from $7.5 million to more than $30m by 2024.

Malaghan developed major new programmes in cancer immunotherapy, vaccine development, inflammatory disease and RNA technologies. Sir Graham’s leadership in bringing CAR T-cell therapy to New Zealand to build the institute’s cancer immunotherapy capability was a defining achievement.

“Now, you take it for granted that of course you use the immune system to fight cancer. But 30 years ago, there was a whole lot of people who thought, no, it may work in mice Graham, but it won’t work in humans.

“We just put our heads down and found part of the whole wave of new immune therapies for cancer.”

The Covid-19 pandemic brought a whole new set of challenges – but also, opportunities.

Sir Graham played a key role in the local development of vaccines, and under his leadership the Vaccine Alliance Aotearoa New Zealand was established.

“I was very proud to be a part of that coming together of a group of New Zealand scientists to make a vaccine for Covid, on-time, have it in the fridge ready if we needed it in case the Pfizer vaccine didn’t work – you know, we had to stand up for ourselves.”

In a statement alongside the announcement, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said Sir Graham had “helped shape a generation of scientific leadership in New Zealand”.

For Sir Christopher Parkin, it was a successful property development career that fuelled decades of support for the arts – from visual arts, to music and film, theatre and dance.

On Wednesday, he is being made a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to philanthropy and art.

“I was brought up in a family that was inclined to be generous, I suppose,” he said. “The arts itself has always been in my life.”

In 2013, he established the Parkin Drawing Prize, a national art competition which has awarded more than $300,000 in prize money, mostly to emerging artists, and he’s the principal financial supporter of the arts funding website Boosted, which has so far raised more than $16m for more than 2000 creative projects.

But his initial response to the news was disbelief.

“They basically send you an email saying that you’ve been recommended [for a knighthood], and they’re going to recommend you to King Charles. My immediate reaction was this is just another scam – I was just waiting for the line that says if you just send us your bank details…” he laughed.

“It was a pretty emotional experience really when it comes out of the blue like that,” he said. “A very warm feeling – obviously you start reflecting on your life, and what you’ve done to deserve it.”

As an art collector, more than 150 pieces of a 250-strong art collection are displayed at the QT Hotel Wellington, which he previously owned as the Museum Art Hotel, and still lives in today.

Some of it hung in his Wellington apartment and the hallway outside (“much to the delight of our neighbours”), and throughout a property in Martinborough.

A career highlight, he said – or perhaps the moment that really “turned a few lights on” – was a speech by New Zealand painter and graphic artist Robyn White, who gave a stirring address about the arts at Te Papa and strong desire to paint being one of her earliest memories.

Why the arts? Parkin said he, too, had spent a long time pondering this exact question.

In the end, he’d steered away from platitudes like “art for art’s sake”, and instead took a practical view.

“We’re unique as a species in that we put an enormous amount of effort into the arts for, really an activity, in terms of preserving life, [that] is almost completely pointless. It doesn’t feed us, it doesn’t strengthen us.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that the artistic way of thinking contributes to our intellectual capabilities in other areas that in fact allows us to make the incredible scientific breakthroughs that really do contribute to our quality of life.”

Luxon in his comments called Sir Christopher’s contribution “significant”.

News of her honour might have been “very surprising” for Dame Dorothy Spotswood, but for anyone who knows the extent of her philanthropic work, both alongside her partner Sir Mark Dunajtschik and independently, it’s no surprise at all.

The couple donated $53m for the build of the Wellington Children’s Hospital, Te Wao Nui, which opened in 2022, and earlier this year, they announced $10m for the base build of a new charity hospital – to be known as the Dorothy Spotswood Charity Hospital.

Dame Dorothy told RNZ it was about giving back to the city. On Wednesday she is being appointed a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to philanthropy.

“As Mark said, it’s been a kind city to him, and a kind city to me – we’ve always had work,” she told RNZ. “So we repaid the city with a children’s hospital.”

Sir Mark was made a knight in 2022.

The couple had made their money through property development. “When we started off, we had flats. Mark had his business, and I was working for an insurance company,” Dame Dorothy said.

In their spare time, they worked on their properties and kept investing.

“Mark is a very hands-on person, we did all the renovations ourselves, the fixing ourselves, and if we built new, we did the building ourselves. I’ve poured concrete. We were a hands-on couple.”

More recently, Dame Dorothy had bought land and funded several homes for the Hōhepa Trust, to help establish care facilities for children and adult residents with intellectual disabilities in Kāpiti.

That was a cause close to her heart – the Spotswoods’ adult niece, who had Down Syndrome, died earlier this year.

The Prime Minister said: “In honouring Dame Dorothy as a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit we are reflecting the enormous contribution she alongside Sir Mark have made to New Zealand, particularly the Wellington region.”

The country “remains humbly grateful” for their contributions, he said.

To all the recipients, Luxon expressed his appreciation.

“Thank you for your dedication, hard work, and service to New Zealand. I would like to congratulate all 177 recipients of this year’s New Year honours and on behalf of the thousands of people who have benefited from your efforts, please accept my personal thanks.”

Read the full list of recipients here

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

A person has been brought back to shore safely after a boat capsized in Whananaki in Northland yesterday evening.

The police were called to the incident near Elizabeth Reef at around 5:10pm.

The person was also assessed by the ambulance, according to the police.

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand