What Am I Doing Here?

If two words conjure up a mental impression of big-burly-blokes, they are police and inspector in that order. So it comes as a surprise to learn there are 25 women police inspectors in the New Zealand Police and Northland's District Area Commander, Wendy Robilliard, is one of them.

Inspector Robilliard arrived in the Far North a year ago, by choice and without any family connections whatsoever. That alone indicates inner fortitude but it's fairly obvious that being a woman and rising to the rank of Inspector in the New Zealand Police hasn't been gifted to her. Hard work, tenacity, determination, training and a degree of ambition all spring to mind and again, as if exhibiting the singularity that brought her here, she can't even claim a policeman in the family whose size 11 footsteps she could follow. At high school in Rotorua she wanted to be an architect.

"We had a neighbour who was a police sergeant and a lovely family man who talked me into coming out on patrol one night to have a look. I was hooked and from then my whole career aspirations changed."

In 1985 she enrolled in the (then) brand new police training facility, Club Med Porirua she says with a laugh. The country had just endured the Springbok tour protests so with another tour planned there was a fair bit of baton training and her intake was fast-tracked through. When the second rugby test series didn't eventuate Wendy began pounding the beat.

It was two years before she got into a patrol car and along the way she was paying her policing dues. She's a bit of an adrenalin junkie so she quite enjoyed chasing baddies but as she says, when you leap over a fence in the dark you don't always know what you're going to find and the harsh physical reality of frontline policing now shows up on x-ray as metal bits in her body.

She worked her way up to detective in the CIB. Then, in 2000 and as the mother

of two small children, she put family first and resigned and that could have been that until three years later when she was approached to become a co-ordinator working with domestic violence. "Having a CIB background in the child abuse team and knowing the trauma domestic violence can cause families, I decided it would be exciting to look at what we could do to reduce these things in our patch," she says.

Her next step wasn't so much a gentle one-two up the ladder, more a resolute leap skywards as Wendy Robilliard made history by becoming the first woman to serve as a member of the Armed Offenders Squad (AOS).If she wasn't overtly excluded at first she was hardly welcomed with open arms as many other women who are pushing that mythical glass ceiling discover. She'd be gassing up the car as the squad went on call-out but she knew instinctively she was proving to herself - as much as anyone else - that she'd make it.

"I tend to take a challenge head-on with a view to saying if I can change the perception, I will. If something's broken let's fix it because why do I want to do broken every day?"

Then, within the space of just over a year, New Zealand experienced the Pike River mine disaster, the Canterbury earthquakes and the Carterton ballooning tragedy. It had been 30 years since the police had dealt with anything of such dramatic magnitude (which was the Air New Zealand crash on Mt Erebus) let alone three in a row. Wendy Robilliard became involved in the establishment of a network of liaison officers to support grief-stricken families and for some police it became a game-changer.

"There were big rugby boys who would rather be on the frontline in Christchurch who aligned themselves with the families and became so connected. It was quite a turnaround and a big eye-opener to them that they could make such a difference."

To a certain extent the lessons learned from the troika of disasters and their aftermath has altered police perception. They're still there to bring offenders to justice but now there's a deliberate strategy to deal with victims and their families. And for that, in part, we can thank Northland's District Area Commander and it's why she and Inspector Mark Harrison were made members of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the New Year's Honours for such landmark work.

Of course she acknowledges the team when she talks about it but then, as if to reveal part of her inner self which she probably doesn't do very often, she becomes almost wistful as she says some of the push to receive the honour came from the families she