25 years of surveying in New Zealand – with Josh Mason

A guy with a crazy beard and white hair, wearing a t-shirt and shorts, surveying his parents’ home in the 90s sparked a love of surveying in Josh Mason at age 14.

‘’I thought what a great job to be able to wear shorts and a t-shirt to work,’’ says Josh, now technical manager of high-definition surveying at Harrison Grierson, where he’s been for almost 25 years.

Boy, was he serious about being a surveyor.

‘’I changed all my subjects at school. I worked out what you need to do if you want to be a surveyor - tech drawing, maths.’’

Applying for surveying at Unitec at the age of 16, he was accepted after getting 99% in tech drawing and maths, so he left school and started his five-year study journey where he also worked part-time.

At 21, he left New Zealand for Scandinavia and Denmark, living his best life in Copenhagen and later Vernon in Canada for a season in the snow.

‘’My brother-in-law was a Dane and I’d always been fascinated with the place,’’ says Josh, who didn’t plan on working in surveying while overseas.

In 2001, he returned to New Zealand and decided it was time to ‘’get serious with surveying.

‘’I got to work on some cool projects early on in my career. I surveyed the site for the new Auckland Hospital and for the Sky Tower. I was also part of the HG team who did the work on the upgrade to Eden Park in 2011 before the World Cup,’’ says Josh.

''They demolished the old South Stand and found the room that the South African team hid from the protestors during the apartheid tour, which was crazy. Setting out a radial grid system for a sports stadium proved challenging and I had survey control marks in the playing field which I used to dig up on a daily basis just by the try line so had to make sure it was put back nicely for the games on Saturday and stand on a little matt so that I didn’t damage the grass. I was on a first-name basis with the ground staff.

''Surveying was very different in the early 2000s compared to what it’s like now. 

‘’It was all very manual. A lot of As-Built work. We used to have to do crazy stuff like show the whole building in 3D just with AutoCAD linework and heights relating to colours on a 2D plan.''

The turning point of moving into the more technical side of surveying for Josh came when he thought – there must be a quicker way to do things.

‘’Laser scanning was big overseas, and I remember our first big laser scanning job was for what is now Commercial Bay in Auckland’s downtown. We had to survey the site and the entire block, which took about 800 scans, which is still a massive number of scans today, but back then it was unheard of.

‘’I used a Trimble TX6, and it took about a week and a half to scan the site. The time was also then back in the office downloading the files – that took weeks. We’d have to store files on hard drives, and when it came to presenting them to the client, it was always a nightmare because it's like a live demonstration - it never works. There was one time I had to drive back to the office, reload the files onto the hard drive, and drive back. That just wouldn’t happen these days with the likes of programmes like SKAND, which allows us to share pretty much any information we capture with a client and team members in the cloud.

Best job? 

‘’One of my best jobs was for HG out at Motuarohia Island / Robertson Island near the Bay of Islands. There are about eight residents on half the island, and their houses are spread out around the cliff tops overlooking the Bay.

‘’Our job was to survey the site for the homeowners. It was crazy because we could still see the marking from the original survey, which was done almost 100 years prior!

‘’We had four days to locate all the marks on the island. It was a dream job because we got to go out by boat and walk around the rock cliffs and in the water. We did a lot of fishing with the caretaker. It was epic.

‘’They’d introduced kiwi to the island and at night when we’d be eating our dinner, we’d hear tapping at the windows and the kiwis would be trying to get the bugs attracted to the light.

‘’The introduction was so successful kiwis would be running around everywhere. What was crazy was when they ran through the bush, they sounded like a bulldozer, they’re so loud!’’

Josh seems to be attracted to the beach life with a retirement plan to live in Rarotonga with his family, a place close to his heart.

‘’I used to work there when HG bought in a scheme where there were a lot of graduates who would come and work and then get certified or qualified and then disappear overseas. You know, the tried-and-true Kiwi way to do things.

‘’So, it brought in a policy that you could go anywhere in the world for a year and work remotely. We wanted to get out of Auckland and get out of our comfort zone, and we thought, we want to go somewhere not too far away, we didn’t want it to be Aussie because everyone did that, we actually wanted a culture change as well.

‘’We’d been to the islands a lot and thought Rarotonga would be pretty cool. It's the New Zealand school system, New Zealand currency, it’s beautiful and easy.

‘’So, we moved there for a year. We rented out our house. Our eldest daughter Lucia went to school over there, and our youngest Zoe went to daycare.

‘’She’s going to kill me for saying this, but my wife Rebecca lived her best life lounging on the beach for a year!

‘’And I basically did a COVID lockdown before there was even COVID!  I had a room in the house that was my office, and I went in there at six in the morning local time in a pair of board shorts and worked until three.

‘’We loved it. The kids still talk about it – my youngest wasn’t used to wearing shoes once she got back to New Zealand. I still remember her walking like a western cowboy wearing shoes!’’

A self-proclaimed active relaxer, Josh now lives and breathes scanning and drone technology in the surveying world.

As a scanning committee member for the international surveying network Reality Capture Network, he’s leading the field in reality capture.

‘’I like a challenge, I suppose. I like trying new things, doing it differently. I get fascinated watching stuff from overseas where people are doing things before we often get to do it. Although New Zealand's not bad on that front, we're quite early adopters.’’

“Now, the technology is so much better and faster. I was always going overseas and looking at what people were doing outside of NZ.

What are your predictions for the future of surveying?

‘’You never know what the next tool is. It's the cell phone scenario. You buy a brand-new cell phone today, it's the best and the greatest and in three months it's not the best and the greatest. I always tell our clients that.

‘’We might do your job one way today and it won't be the way that we do it in two years’ time. So, it's hard to know what's around the corner and there'll always be new things.

As we celebrate 140 years at Harrison Grierson, we reflect on the key role our people have played in shaping Aotearoa. We've surveyed some of New Zealand’s first and largest subdivisions and helped deliver iconic buildings and infrastructure.

None of this would have been possible without our people (and clients) who we like to call trailblazing pioneers, like Josh Mason, a true technical wizard in the surveying space.