Previously, he played as a hooker for Marlborough (one of the predecessors to today's Tasman side) and Otago in the National Provincial Championship and Air New Zealand Cup, and spent twelve seasons with the Highlanders in Super Rugby.

[2] Oliver was born 9 September 1975 in Invercargill and spent the early years of his life in several small towns in the deep south of NZ.

[2] and was in a member of the All Blacks for thirteen years – an astonishingly long time and a testament to Oliver's ability, resilience and tenacity.

He then decided to leave Toulon after only one year and announced his retirement from professional rugby, heading to the University of Oxford to study for a postgraduate degree.

His dissertation involved him travelling to the Ringgolds Islands, an outlying archipelago of Fiji, for a month of research on the relationship between poverty and conservation.

Oliver is known as a modern NZ renaissance man because of his rare interest and involvement in sport, academia, the arts, and various environmental, social and political issues.

He posed nude for a Simon Richardson realist painting that challenged cultural and sporting stereotypes, although he had not intended for it to become public knowledge that he was the artist's model.

Save Central won the last hearing in the High court and Project Hayes has not been granted consent and Oliver was a publicly – as a current All Black at the time, this was a very rare and controversial position.

More recently Oliver became a water conservation spokesperson for Fish and Game, bring awareness to river degradation and overuse issues in a NZ context.

[3] Oliver was Marlborough Boys' College's sportsman of the decade, has been inducted into the University of Otago's Hall of Fame.

He is an Ambassador for Cure Kids, a charity that funds research into finding cures for life-threatening illnesses that affect children, and an Ambassador for the Shackleton Foundation, which supports budding leaders and social entrepreneurs with inspirational projects that have the power to make a difference to the lives of disadvantaged and socially marginalised young people.