Tim Higham: 1962 - 2025 

A few weeks ago our friend and colleague Tim Higham passed away at his home in Kaitoke, on Aotea, Great Barrier Island. Tim had made a career out of telling stories—from Antarctica, our sub-Antarctic islands, for the UN, for the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park, Predator Free 2050 Ltd and latterly, Aotea and Tū Mai Taonga. Tim helped this trust clarify its purpose and story with his pithy journalistic questioning. He’d moved lock stock and barrel to live on the island after leaving PF2050 Ltd in 2019 or thereabouts. There was “Barrier Tim”, on motorbike, in wetsuit (regretting spearing this octopus for science), mad hair, and the corporate Tim, mostly seen in town. That’s where I first met Tim, as Executive Officer of the Hauraki Gulf Forum. He’d worked with my sister Emma in Antarctica championing the environmental science being done there and now we were council colleagues.

Tim was a strategist first, writer second. In the Forum role he was taking on the fishing and dairy industries as the major wrecking balls of the Gulf. Every three years Tim and a core team of experts reported on the true state of the Gulf. The team took a lot of flak for the 2011 report in particular, which clearly pointed the finger at big fishing, dairy and sediment. When I went to see him at home last spring he gave me his take on that period of his career. Agencies, he said, had cultivated the narrative of NZ having the best fisheries management in the world. “They said it wasn’t possible to overfish – sustainable means “not extinct”, because stocks can be built back.”  Fisheries are still being managed on this basis. Collaborative processes like Sea Change—aimed at addressing overfishing, could be distorted, he said. Relationships could be built but at the end of day powerful players had participated knowing that there was another game. “You can’t beat the machine,” he said.

 Tim wouldn’t be at all surprised that our present government are finding ways to stop the introduction of any more protections for what’s left of the abundance of the Outer Gulf, Te Moananui a Toi. “You can be sad and cynical. It’s a consequence of trying to tell the truth about the system.”  Prescient as usual. He told me was backing Ahu Moana as the way forward for Aotea. Local, iwi and community together, shared goals and values.

 After his long stint advocating for the Gulf, came Predator Free 2050 Ltd. Tim was the go-to person in the early days of PF2050 when the vision was big and the budget wasn’t. He was an advocate for Aotea behind the scenes and it was great to have him on the island when at last some of that Jobs for Nature funding came our way. He was a logical fit for Tū Mai Taonga and gave the Aotea and Ngāti Rehua led kaupapa the profile it needed to gain the confidence of funders, Council and DOC. The strength of feeling and grief expressed at his loss from the project and all those he worked with is deep.

 Tim was kind, funny, at times curmudgeonly, always insightful, and tenacious with a point if he thought he was right. Definitely not finished with life, but he has left us with plenty of instructions. Mainly, to get on with the important things while you can, whatever you deem them to be, but also to slow your mind. Writing in this publication in 2021 Tim reflected: 

Thank you, Tim, rest in peace.

Kate Waterhouse, Chair - Aotea Great Barrier Environmental Trust