Shot at, kidnapped and bombed

Rightly or wrongly, quarries don’t enjoy the best of reputations as neighbours. Never-the-less, few quarry operators can honestly claim to have been shot at, kidnapped, or bombed. Jenny McMahon can, and she talks with ALASTAIR MCKENZIE.

Jenny McMahon (pictured), a director of Blackhead Quarries – a joint venture between Dunedin quarry company Palmer & Son and Fulton Hogan that quarries rock in coastal Otago – joined the company after 16 years working for the Red Cross in war zones and areas of extreme poverty around the world, a career recognised with an MBE and the Florence Nightingale Medal, one of the Red Cross’s highest honours.

Being a director of a quarrying company and delivering health care in Africa may seem poles apart, but, according to Jenny,the two key processes involved in both activities are pretty much the same. It’s all about risk management and negotiation, she says.

Palmer’s started quarrying at Logan Point, in the 1860s when Jenny’s maternal great-great-grandfather founded the company. For Jenny, it has been a circuitous route back to the family business. After graduating as a nurse in 1978, and adding midwifery skills to her qualifications, she headed off to work in Australian outback hospitals to test her mettle.

 Then, during a stint as an intensive care nurse in Wellington, she heard the Red Cross was looking for senior nurses to work in a surgical hospital on the Thai-Kampuchea border. So began her career in emergency relief work. After her mission to Kampuchea, Jenny studied nutrition through Massey University, good preparation for her next mission, which took her to Africa, where she came to lead feeding and household-food-security programmes across the continent.

And it was here Jenny began to truly polish her negotiation skills. Repeated face-to-face confrontations with sometimes very angry and desperate people left their mark: Jenny’s calmness and unflappability are testament to this. Negotiation the only way to sort out disputes, she believes. 

“Get someone talking and you can sort out any misunderstandings, and gain an understanding of different points of view, and hopefully this goes in both directions.”

Once, needing to get emergency food supplies through to a feeding centre in Eritrea, Jenny successfully negotiated with the leadership of the warring Eritrean People’s Liberation Front and government troops to stop mining the road to the centre for two days while she went about her business.  

But her luck ran out in 1988 when she and three others were taken hostage in South Sudan – for reasons that have yet to be explained. Held for nine days, the experience was troubling enough for Jenny to decide to take a break.

In Jenny’s lexicon though “taking a break” means something slightly different than it does to less driven people. During her time off, she completed a Masters in Consumer and Applied Science at the University of Otago, neatly positioning herself for a permanent post with the Red Cross rather than the mission-by-mission contracts she had previously undertaken.

Missions to Sri Lanka, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Zaire, Congo-Brazzaville, Angola, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, South Sudan, Uganda and the Ivory Coast followed.

An illness in the family saw Jenny return to Dunedin in 2000 where she completed an MBA at Otago before moving on to a doctorate in Human Nutrition.

Today, besides sitting on the board of Blackhead she holds a number of other company directorships, including AB Lime in Winton and Victory Lime in Mt Somers.

Administering health care in some of the world’s most demanding places, managing thousands of staff, and juggling multimillion dollar budgets, has equipped McMahon well for her work. A fact recognised earlier this year by Dunedin’s business elite, the “Tartan Mafia” when they made her the first women committee member of the Dunedin Club in its 150 year history.

Working in Africa suited McMahon’s pragmatic personality. Working in New Zealand is the same, she says. Success here, there, or anywhere requires the same approach: a blend of flexibility and dogged tenacity.

Even so, she admits her work in quarrying tries her patience occasionally.

“Even when renewing ‘existing rights’ consents, the expense, inequities, and extended time frames involved when dealing with local authorities requires patience.

“Because of existing rights to operate at all the current Blackhead operations, the RMA is less of a problem than in the new operations we have – where the RMA makes things extremely expensive.”

AB Lime is an example. The company applied for a consent to site a landfill behind the excavation site. All the local authorities agreed it was a good idea. Nobody appealed to the environment court. Despite this, the cost of gaining the consent was high, she says.

Another beef McMahon has with the RMA is the inequitable way it is interpreted and applied.

“It enforces conditions on some but not others, which is okay if you happen to not have to meet rigorous conditions,” she says. 

“Quarrying is a diminishing resource, so new sites are going to be needed to be found. Because of the RMA, we need to have a 50-year forward plan for new resources as it won’t be straight-forward.”

Having seen the direct link between degraded environments, war, and social dislocation in places like Eritrea and the Sudan, McMahon doesn’t need any convincing or preaching to about the need to protect the environment. But she questions both the public’s attitude and the inequities of some of the regulations governing quarrying in the country.

Quarries aren’t sustainable. They are holes in the ground. But they are essential holes in the ground. Perhaps because we build with concrete, New Zealand uses more aggregate per capita than all or most of the rest of the world. But despite this, the public reviles quarries as noisy, dusty, sores on the landscape.

McMahon shares the frustration that Straterra chief executive Richard Michael expressed in the May edition of Energy NZ magazine. Richard pointed out the National Freight Demands study found that over 40 million tonnes of aggregate was moved around New Zealand in 2008, the largest amount of material moved in the country. Of the 40 million tonnes, fully 99 percent was moved by road. Yet public nimbyism and political denial are forcing quarries further and further away from sites of customer demand. This cost everybody involved, ratepayers and taxpayers included, time and money. It cost the environment in terms of extra fossil fuels burnt and CO2 emitted, and it cost the roads additional wear and tear.

“I don’t think the New Zealand public have the appetite for the costs that would be incurred if the sources of so much of the infrastructure and construction sector were “out-of-sight”. With tree planting and good benching a quarry is not an unattractive sight!”

Has Dr Jenny McMahon got emergency relief out of her system or does she hanker to return to Africa for another mission?

No, she says, she’s here now and is committed to what is going on.

“I can always visit Africa, and see my friends and old colleagues. It is someone else’s turn to have the experiences and create the changes.”