My Account
Author, photographer, volunteer fire fighter, diver, DOC honorary ranger, first chairman of Whangateau Harbour Care, past chair of Leigh Business Community, Auckland Museum’s conchology section, and former president of the Wellsford Camera Club…. with so many titles, you might think that it’s hard to pin down Tony Enderby’s true passion, but it turns out to be life in general. Tony’s made the most of his opportunities and has found a way to focus on the marine life and the partner he loves. “I probably get carried away about things. I always said that the day after I’d swum with a whale I’d give up diving, but I didn’t, I just wanted to swim with more whales.” However, he makes no apology for it, as he told Adele Thackray, he can’t imagine tackling life any other way.
Out of all the things I do, I don’t think there’s any greater adrenaline rush than being on the end of a hose as you’re about to enter a burning building to put it out. The hardest thing is when you’ve got a fatal and it’s someone you know.
I joined the Leigh Volunteer Fire Brigade seven years ago to help with computer work. Although I thought I’d be too old in my 50s, they encouraged me to do a fire fighter course. Now I’m a senior fire fighter and brigade secretary, and still attend all types of callouts.
Medical callouts are most common and range from not too serious, to being worried the person’s not going to make it. It always gives you a real sense of achievement when somebody doesn’t look great when you arrive, but when you put them in the ambulance they’re looking better. We also handle car accidents, oil spills and trucks running through power lines and animal rescues. During the big storm in 2007 we kept going for nearly 24 hours. We don’t get a lot of full on house fires, but we once had three in six months.
We also get quite a lot of drownings, which is pretty tough. Most of them are avoidable. If people that go into the water keep together, one keeps an eye on the other and they’re pretty safe, but in every drowning we’ve had they’ve started with a group or a buddy but been left by themselves.
We’ve got a real cross-section of people, but when you jump on that fire truck it doesn’t matter what you are, you’re part of a team and you’ve got a job to do. And we’re a bloody good team out there, everybody just pitches in.
I was brought up in Onehunga and Mt Wellington, went to Tamaki College and loved sport. I played soccer and was into cycling in a big way, becoming Auckland junior road race champ back when we had no helmets and the bikes were Durailium, a lightweight aluminium mix used in WW2 fighter planes. I had some pretty good crashes, wrecking a shoulder and losing large amounts of skin off my arms, legs and backside. I still ride, but mostly on a mountain bike with my wife Jenny.
As long as I can remember I’ve been interested in seashells and things that swim around in the sea, however, my parents thought snorkelling and diving was far too dangerous. I used to spear fish right around Goat Island in the 1960s. We couldn’t believe it when someone put a sign up saying “marine reserve”, but it didn’t take us long to realise that they did the right thing.
Now I’m an honorary DOC ranger, helping people understand the benefits of marine reserves. You still get some crazy misconceptions, like reserves lock people out and you can’t even build sandcastles, and some people that are silly enough to fish there. One group of young guys claimed they lived in Napier and didn’t know it was a reserve. They wouldn’t give us their names so we rang the cops, but I asked one of them how they’d found their way there. He said, “we followed the marine reserve signs”.
I think we should have more marine reserves that protect a representative patch of the coast. There are virtually no reserves on the west coast and we’ve got no idea what might happen if we did protect part of it.
We set up the business Discover Goat Island to each students about snorkelling and the rocky seashore and have recently found real demand from adults who also want to learn to snorkel.
I wanted to become a marine biologist, but my parents said get “a real job”, so I trained as a linotype operator at the Auckland Star and later worked in Australia, before returning to the Star and a house in Henderson. But I soon decided to move to computerised typesetting at Suburban Newspapers, even though the union said the digital approach would be just “a flash in the pan”. I was production manager there for more than 10 years before being headhunted by Telecom Directories to set up their typesetting division. When I was abruptly made redundant my workmates stopped work for a week, but the disappointment of losing the job was tempered by seeing an article and photos by me and Jenny fronting the NZ Herald’s coverage of the 10th anniversary of the Rainbow Warrior sinking.
I had met Jenny at Suburban Newspapers and found she shared my crazy sense of adventure. She was convinced to go on a dive course by our son and over the past 25 years we’ve dived all over the Pacific. We’d been writing a column for the Underwater Photographic Society and when the editor offered to pay us, we did a photo journalism course together. Now I do most of the writing and Jenny subs out the parts where I get carried away.
As members of the Underwater Photographic Club we learnt from some top NZ photographers and both went on to win medals in a number of prestigious national and international photography competitions.
We moved to Leigh in 1996 after I became production manager at the Rodney Times, working with a fantastic team in Mill Lane, but when I was made redundant in ’99, we took up writing and photography full time. To date we’ve got into about 130 different publications in around a dozen countries.
A friend’s invitation to illustrate three books on marine life led us to write and illustrate eight books of our own, including a 1998 book about Goat Island Marine Reserve and Lonely Planet’s Diving and Snorkelling New Zealand book, which involved a year travelling from the far north to Stewart Island.
We also wrote A Guide to New Zealand Marine Reserves with the support of Leigh’s Dr Bill Ballantine, who we look upon as the father of marine reserves. Director of the Leigh lab for many years, Bill was a driving force behind establishment of Goat Island’s no-take marine reserve. He’s taught us an awful lot and we were rapt when he wrote our foreword.
Subsequent books include Warkworth to the Coast, SpotX diving, fishing and walking guides, and most recently, Know Your New Zealand Fishes.
We’ve been involved with all sorts of things over the years, like guiding on Tiritiri Matangi and Little Barrier, walking the Tawharanui fence line for TOSSI, and working at the new Leigh Marine Discovery Centre. I’m just starting on a project about the NZ freshwater mussel kakahi because the original type specimen came from Leigh creeks. I’ll also be helping the Leigh Fire Brigade to raise money to do some additions to the station.
You just keep doing stuff. If I’ve got some spare time I can always find something to do with it. Life’s there to live and enjoy and I’m lucky to have a partner who thinks exactly the same.
