In the late 1930′s, my grandparents bought a bush-covered slice of land on a peninsula in the tiny settlement of Ostend on Waiheke Island. They built a fibrolite bach, with windows lining the front, overlooking sleepy Anzac Bay. It was a holiday home, with second-hand furniture, leaky roofs, a long-drop and a grouchy old wood-stove that took forever to heat up the three rooms. Generations of family spent summers there, but the bach held a special place in my father’s heart.

Forty years later, in the early 1970′s, my parents scratched together enough money to buy the bach from my grandmother, and our little family moved from suburban Massey to live in the middle of the bush. I was five years old, and Lil’Sis was three.

Life on Waiheke Island was about the sea. The school buses were timed so the buses could drop all the children off and get to Matiatia in time to meet the ferry. The tide controlled whether we could get home along the beach (the quick way) or whether we had to climb the steep, gravelled road that ran along the spine of the peninsula and down the track through the bush (the long way). In the summer, the telly was never switched on – we swam, we rowed, we fished, we played in the rockpools or explored the peninsula, collecting shells and mermaid’s necklaces (which you could pop in your sister’s face).

It was also about living in the bush. Our little house was completed surrounded by punga, karaka, kawa-kawa, ponga and manuka and tui, fantails and kereru flocked in the trees. We made huts and climbed to the very tops of the tallest trees, and every now and then we came across vivid green plantations of five-fingered plants (grown to supplement the income of the resident “alternative lifestylers” or, as they were known back then “hippies”). The bush was alive in the summer, pulsating with cicadas during the day and swarming with mosquitoes at night. During the winter, it was dark and sodden and so, so cold. Those chunky, hand-knitted jumpers of our childhood definitely served a purpose.

We saw very little of our father during those years. He left for work at 5am, catching the bus to meet the 6am ferry to Auckland (a journey of an hour and a half) and catching another bus to his job as a signwriter in Grey Lynn. He was home just before 8pm, and it was only during the school holidays that we were able to greet him on his return. Weekends were spent maintaining the track, repairing his boat, or having a few beers with his mates over at the Onetangi Hotel.

Mum worked part-time in the office for the local transport company, and during the school holidays we had to come to work with her, and play on the typewriter or the adding-machine while she did her thing. To make up for those tediously boring hours at lunchtimes she would take us for fish’n'chips at the takeaways in Oneroa, or we could take our pick from the stock of yoghurts in the chill-store. Sometimes we were allowed to go over to the manager’s house and hang out with his kids. They had colour-telly, which Lil’Sis and I thought was pretty damn fancy, and an automatic washing machine, which Mum admired greatly. 

Life wasn’t so advanced for most Waiheke residents, however, and most of them liked it that way. Potters, painters, weavers, carvers, organic gardeners and farmers and greenies in general found the island a haven for their lifestyles. They lived in ramshackle bachs or houseboats and often one of Greenpeace’s yachts would moor in our bay, painted in rainbow colours and stamped with the No-Nukes symbol.

In 1980, our life suddenly changed. My grandmother asked my parents to move in with her into her large state house in Waterview (in inner West Auckland) – she’d had several burglaries (one in the middle of the day – a man had walked right into her house and helped himself to jewellery while she watched, helpless and terrifed) and was starting to fear for her life. She was also finding in increasingly hard to maintain the house and the big quarter-acre section.

So, along with all this, Dad’s plans to go into business on his own and bearing our future education in mind (the local highschool had quite a poor reputation back then) our family moved up to the Big Smoke, leaving our idyllic island life behind to start a new chapter of our lives.