He sits across from me at in the foyer at the Duxton Hotel, and tells me about his rollercoaster of work since the mid-eighties. He’s been involved with various sporting, business and art-related projects, including Tribute08 – a Vietnam commemoration, Maori art exhibitions in the USA and Canada, the Festival of the Arts, the Gold awards of course, and a whole lot more. More details on all that later, but first I’m keen to get to the bottom of his desire to follow such an unconventional path. He is no 9-5er and I want to know why it strikes me as so unlikely that Dow would ever have considered going down that road.

But when I ask him about his motivation to pursue such a patchwork of projects, the tale takes us back even further than I expected. “The essence of the story” he begins, “lies in that I left New Zealand when I was 18.” It’s a cryptic start, followed by his soft mention of his mother’s tragic death, and his decision 6 weeks later to take off overseas and start a new life. “It had been a bit of an awkward time,” he explains, clearly making the quietest understatement I’ve heard in a while. “So the result of all that was that I went away not feeling all that great about being a New Zealander. It was my home, and I grew up here, but I’d left the country when it was a pretty negative time, both personally, and the environment, it was the Muldoon era.”

So then he was living in Japan, when his partner Gayle (whom he still runs the Gold awards with) became pregnant. “She wanted to come back to New Zealand to her family, and I didn’t want to, I wanted to stay away. I’d done so much travelling, had an Australian passport and lived all over the place so I started to see myself as not really a New Zealander, I just sort of pushed that part of me away.”

But in 1984 they came back anyway, to a country in crisis. Various political and economic problems played their parts, and John was dislocated, didn’t know what to do next. “All I could think was ‘Oh god, this isn’t where I want to be!’ There is an attitude is this country that holds people back. It isn’t supportive. On the surface we have a nice friendly New Zealand way, but a lot of it is bullshit. It can be very emotionally taxing.”

And so Dow had to make a decision. “I said ‘if I’m going to live here, I want to get involved. I want to be a part of the new New Zealand, and the new Wellington.’ That was my motivation and my mission and I just started to really get on with it. That was 25 years ago and I’m still doing it.”

The back catalogue of projects bearing Dow’s name in some form or another begins with Wellington arts and events magazine Agenda, which he and Gayle started in February of 1985. There were 51 free issues, and the final one in March 1989 contained an amazing plus $40k of advertising in it. “And things were very different in Wellington back then, he reminds me “there were something like 2 cafes. It was a totally different world!”

Agenda became a marketing agency, having already undertaken tourism projects for the Greater Wellington Promotion Council (the forerunner to Tourism Wellington) and Tourism NZ and having helped set up the first Festival of the Arts in 1986, Agenda were contracted to both the 1990 and 1992 Festivals as their marketing agency with Dow the Marketing Director for the events. Then followed a whole series of things, Dow rattles off a sporting list “FIFA U17 Women’s World Cup last year, The All Whites, Tall Blacks, Tall Ferns, All Blacks, oh and professional Aussie Rules games: we had 9000 people at the Basin Reserve in 1998 and followed up with 14,500 for the first ever Football match of any code to play at Westpac Stadium in January 2000!” He helps project manage the Wellys, brought the A League Licence to Wellington which has become the Phoenix and is the current chairman of Team Wellington, which plays in the New Zealand Football Championship. He tells the story of his involvement with Toi Maori Aotearoa at the America’s Cup. “We took a Waka and crew to Valencia, and at the opening ceremony we were meant to have the crew on the Waka, leading the parade, but Alinghi said no. So Grant Daulton snuck the guys onboard the yacht instead and they did the Haka. The Spanish crowd and the world media present went crazy, they loved it!

What he feels is one of his greatest achievements, is Tribute08 – a Vietnam commemoration held 10 years after Parade 98, which he was also the Event Director for . “When the Prime Minister issued her apology to Vietnam veterans and their families I was able to stand there and think ‘it’s bloody late, but at least it’s there’. He’s the first to admit they were both personally taxing projects. “It took me emotionally to places I didn’t know about – they really stretched me, particularly Parade ‘98”

But despite the seemingly random collection of jobs, Dow strongly believes in the importance of an overarching vision. “If you have a powerful compelling vision of what you want to do, then your work will become regenerating and energising. I’ve always believed that if you have a really solid core philosophy and you stay true to that all the time and never let anyone push you away from that, then you’ll eventually come through, you’ll win out. The motivation that developed was that as I got older I started to realise there is something we can do, we can make a difference. It’s a lot of hard work and people think it’s easy but it’s not. But there really is something we can do.”

So it seems Dow has made a kind of peace with his nationality, and is even a little bit proud of his Kiwi-ness now. “I guess it’s through the work” he concedes, “that over the years I’ve developed a really strong passion for the place.”