In this excerpt from his memoir, The Fight for Freshwater, Mike Joy reveals how his activism and academic career began after his niece and nephew fell ill after swimming in a Manawatū river.

Alli and I moved to Awahuri near Palmerston North in 1997. Not long afterwards, our niece and nephew – nine-year-old twins Vanessa and Ben – came to stay for a few days near the end of the Christmas holidays. One really hot day, we decided to go for a cool-off swim in the Ōroua River at the State Highway 3 bridge. We walked down but on arrival were shocked. The river was low and had an odd, unpleasant, musty smell, and its bed was thick with green slime. But the kids were excited about having a swim, so into the tepid shallow water we all went. The kids had a good splash around, but we adults were a bit more circumspect and just paddled. We were all disappointed, and not long after walked back home.

Later that evening, the twins began to complain about stomach cramps and soon became very sick. They deteriorated, we were all up all night, and by morning they were so unwell we drove them back to their parents in Wellington. While the kids recovered after a few days, they were left with a fear of swimming in rivers. 

Not long after taking them home, I told the owner of the local garage about their illness while he was filling our car. “Oh”, he said, “I thought you knew never to swim there. All of Feilding’s sewage flows into the river just upstream at Boness Road.” I was appalled, and felt guilty about putting the kids at risk. I had to find out more. Why were there no warning signs? Why was a municipal wastewater treatment plant allowed to pollute a river? At Massey I was studying the new, much-vaunted piece of environmental legislation known as the Resource Management Act (RMA), which was the envy of many countries. I had learned enough about it to know that what I had discovered in the Ōroua River was not acceptable in law. 

As soon as I could, I drove to the end of Boness Road to look at the sewage plant outfall. I walked upstream a few hundred metres from the road end searching for it, expecting to see a pipe in the river. What I found instead was a narrow canal flowing deep with discoloured, foamy, sewage-smelling water, discernibly darker in colour than the river it flowed into. The bed of the canal was green and slimy, as was the Ōroua River below the wastewater drain confluence. I followed the drain upstream, looking for its source, and found it a hundred metres or so away from the river, on the edge of a farmer’s paddock. The water flowed slowly out of a big concrete pipe from the treatment plant into a deep pool that was covered in foam. The stench of it made me retch. I later learned that this stinking flow makes up one-tenth of the total flow in the Ōroua River in summer low flow.

Why then were there no warning signs that the river presented a danger to human health? And why was the local council allowed to discharge this stuff into a river, clearly in breach of the RMA? After many calls I found that the warning signage is a regional council responsibility, even though it was the district council’s discharge. I was then amazed to find that the regional council had a monitoring site at the state highway, almost exactly where the kids had been swimming; it was one of their mandatory State of the Environment monitoring sites. Eventually, I tracked down the council report for this site, and it revealed that the Ōroua River at Awahuri was consistently worst on a range of measures monitored in the region for all the years records had been kept. The report showed that the measure of faecal contamination regularly breached Ministry of Health guidelines for contact recreation (including swimming). The Manawatū District Council, which operated the wastewater treatment plant, was required to monitor its discharge monthly and report the results to the regional council. When I obtained these reports, they showed that the district council was regularly breaching its consent conditions.

I took this failure up at a meeting with the Manawatū Regional Council CEO and his compliance manager. I was told that council policy was not to take legal or punitive action on breaches of consent conditions. They informed me that, in order to save ratepayers’ money on expensive and time-consuming legal action, the council preferred to “work with” the big dischargers to try and reduce their impacts on the river. The Feilding meat works and vegetable-processing plant also add effluent to the Ōroua River, and they had at different times threatened to pack up their operations and move away to another region if too much pressure was put on them over their resource consents. Council officers felt it was their role to ensure this didn’t happen, as many jobs would be lost. They also pointed out that the Manawatū District Council owned and operated the municipal wastewater treatment plant, so if they were penalised, the regional council would be penalising its own ratepayers.

I found this response perplexing. Surely the pollution was occurring only because no one knew about it? I figured that if the public was made aware then things would soon change. So I approached the local paper, the Manawatu Evening Standard, and a reporter was interested enough to write a story. He wanted to put a face to the story, but I wasn’t keen, so they found a local Green Party representative to stand in the river for a photo. The story ran the next day on the paper’s front page, explaining how that stretch of the Ōroua River was not safe to swim in and yet there were no warning signs. The article reported that the regional council admitted it should have put signs there and had failed to do so.

I didn’t hear any more for a few weeks, and then the reporter contacted me to see if anything had happened. I said I had been down to the river to check whether the signs had turned up, and sure enough after a few weeks one had: an A4 sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve, stapled to a fence post. No symbol of a swimmer with a cross through it, just a paragraph in small type explaining the danger of the river and making vague excuses for the causes. I invited the reporter to come and see for himself, and he took photos of the sign. Climbing weeds had started to grow over it and there were piles of household rubbish dumped everywhere. Nobody would notice the sign unless it was pointed out to them. There was no follow-up newspaper story.

This whole debacle was the beginning of my freshwater radicalisation. I was shocked that this could happen in New Zealand. Now, it is commonplace for councils to be outed for turning a blind eye to continued breaches of resource consents, but back then there was a general belief that the much-praised RMA was enforced to the letter by councils, and that New Zealand was a world leader in environmental protection.

Twenty-seven years later, the monitoring at Awahuri Bridge shows the Ōroua River continues to deteriorate. Despite many battles and hearings, the only positive outcome came from an appeal to the Environment Court around 2015 by the local iwi, Ngāti Kauwhata. The wastewater from the town of Feilding is discharged into the Ōroua River opposite their marae. 

I’m now 64 years old, and although I like the idea of more sailing, gardening and time with friends, somehow I suspect I’ll end up working on, if only to ensure that all this has not been a complete and utter waste of time. I will be continuing the fight for freshwater.

Extracted from The Fight for Freshwater: A Memoir by Mike Joy ($40, Bridget Williams Books) is available from Unity Books.