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Building a shed.

It must have been about 17 years ago now, that we decided to build a shed on Rakino, the section bought by Lisa’s parents, some time in the distant past.
I’d jacked up Alistair with his trusty front-loading barge and a local tractor owner, probably called Colin. I’d planned out the timber I needed for a platform; enough to put the shed on, as well as some deck to enjoy the sunset and create a pleasing indoor-outdoor flow.

Waist high kikuyu grass, awaiting a tin shed.

The dwelling itself was to be a 9 square metre kitset garden shed with no windows, so a bit of indoor-outdoor flow was going to be needed.
I pre-cut most of the timber to get it on the barge, and to avoid hand cutting joists and decking. We packed the kitset and timber onto a trailer and met Alistair down at Z-pier to back the trailer on. Colin met us at the ramp to tractor the trailer up to the section to offload before taking the trailer back to Auckland.
The fun began the next weekend; Easter, I think it was, a long weekend anyway. When you have an intrepid expedition on your hands, in a remote destination, you need a band of experienced and resourceful double-plus hard-bastards. Instead, I assembled a group of software developers who’d never seen a hammer in their lives.
Actually, that’s unfair, Phil was a keen DIY chap and dangerous know-it-all.

Michael: a genius coder and handsome man-about-town turned out to be very handy with a hammer, and

Andrew: We’ll never know if he would have shown any great facility with the tools, for he availed himself too fully of the gin, rendering him wasted ballast on the trip.

Lisa: a generally useful member of any expedition, and extraordinarily generous with her advice.

We arrived on a water taxi and made our way up the hill to what was Jim’s place, which we’d rented for the long weekend.
The rest of us had walked up but Phil, being the smooth-talker he is, had bummed a ride with Lyndon and Cathy, leaping on the back of their ute with around 50 feral Chihuahuas, and a labrador.
Phil may (or may not) have been drunk… history does not relate, but the dogs, being excellent judges of character, administered a right seeing to.

We dug footings, carried buckets of water from Jim’s, set pilings, set up joists and pushed off back to Jim’s for well-deserved gin-tonics and roast chicken.

The next day we got up, gave ourselves a stern talking-to in the bathroom mirror, and tucked into a cooked breakie before nailing down decking and erecting the shed.

Andrew was given the inside job, fixing things in the tin shed, with everyone nailing on all sides and a near-fatal hangover, this must have been akin to being inside Keith Moon’s drum kit on a mushroom trip.

Over the weekend we had visits from our two sets of neighbours. On one side they were called John & Caroline, on the other side, John and Carolyn. Clearly there were some odd Island conventions we might need to be aware of…

John, or possibly John; I can’t recall which, advised us on bracing the shed. Due to the typical 450 knot easterlies, he explained, the normal suburban matchstick framing may prove insufficient. We obliged by bracing it with everything we could find, including the timber the shed came packed in.

Simon Fraser.

A Place in the Heart

The islands of the Hauraki Gulf have a unique place in the heart of Elisabeth Easther.

Sunrise over Rangitoto at Narrow Neck Beach, Devonport, North Shore, Auckland. Photo / Brett Phibbs

I grew up in Hamilton so, to my mind, Auckland was the Big Smoke. In the 1970s, to a little kid from the sticks, Auckland was enormous and visiting was always exciting, if a little daunting. It was also where my mother lived before she married my dad and, whenever we visited, we’d stay with my grandmother and Aunt Betty in Glendowie. Their house had wicked views of the Hauraki Gulf and it was there I became aware what a major role those waters played in my mother’s life.

Boats on the beach near Tryphena, Great Barrier Island. Photo / Natalie Slade

In 1964, my mum, Shirley Maddock, lived with her parents while making the pioneering documentary series Islands of the Gulf. Sitting at her typewriter in their sunroom, she wrote the best-selling book of the same name, presumably looking out to sea for inspiration. Not surprisingly, our visits to Auckland would sometimes involve journeys to mum’s beloved islands. One of my favourite outings was to Mission Bay at dusk. I’d be wearing my pyjamas — there’s no shame in that when you’re 4 — and we’d go there and run around, waiting for the fountain’s coloured lights to ignite, the outline of Rangitoto brooding on the horizon. A visit to Kawau was etched in my 10-year-old memory. The ranger took us there from Sandspit in his no-nonsense ranger’s boat. He even let me steer. I had a photo of that proud moment, which I glued into my autobiography: All You Ever Wanted To Know About Elisabeth But Were Afraid To Ask. Somewhere along the line, the picture was lost but I remember that day so vividly and you can still see the Sellotape shadows where the picture used to be. Aunt Betty had baked a bacon and egg pie, Mansion House was like something from a fairy tale, there were even wallabies and peacocks. It was a perfect blue day and it was clear mum’s fondness for the gulf was more than a passing fancy. Another time, three generations took a trip to Rangitoto, and although I’m sure I whined as we hiked in the heat to the crater’s rim, I loved it. There were visits to Waiheke well before the wedding scene exploded and years later, when I was in my 20s, mum and I spent a few days exploring there and I wish I’d known to ask more pertinent questions.

Shirley Maddock. Photo / Supplied

Over the years the Hauraki Gulf has stolen my heart too and, by same strange quirk of fate, not only have I become a travel writer among other things, but my assignments regularly lead me to the same islands that shaped my mother’s destiny. Camping on Aotea Great Barrier, appreciating ornithology on Tiritiri Matangi and taking numerous trips to reliable Rangitoto. And last summer, my appreciation of the gulf peaked when I remade mum’s documentary series.

In the episode where I visited Rakino Island, some lovely locals showed me around and, while it was never scripted, we ended up looking at some properties while I pretended I was in the market to buy one. But it was only ever a pipe dream — make-believe for the camera. Yet it was as if a seed was sown and, when my father died last year, that seed germinated in response to my sorrow. I felt so completely orphaned, a rug had been pulled out from under me. Islands of the Gulf started screening on TVNZ 1 just weeks after dad’s death and neither my mother nor my father would ever see it and mum would never know how her work was being admired and enjoyed all over again. So I did something completely bold — some might say rash — I threw all caution to the prevailing wind and bought a wee plot on Rakino, as if the lightening bolt of my grief might find earth there.

Mum and dad, Michael, are both reduced to ashes now and, despite their being cremated 17 years apart, the company that does the incinerating still uses the exact same containers all these years later.

For 17 years mum sat on dad’s chest of drawers, a box of dust gathering dust and now dad lies in an identical box. Our parents never told us where they wanted to be scattered but my brothers and I are confident mum would be content to rest on Rakino. And dad, well he’d just want to be with mum.

So this year, we’ll purchase some trees from the Rakino Island Nursery, where seeds are specifically sourced on the island and propagated to regenerate native bush.

The Noises are a collection of privately owned islands lying northeast of Rakino Island. Photo / Supplied

I do have moments when I think I was mad to buy a place on an island with no shops, no electricity and a sporadic ferry service but, just as quickly as the knots of anxiety tighten, they unravel again because Rakino is a little slice of heaven on earth and out there in the Hauraki Gulf, beneath a grove of native trees, my parents can rest together in peace.

A Work in Progress

My association with Rakino island goes back to the early 1980’s.

My Dad had a sabre 22 trailer sailer which he insisted we spend every school holidays on. In 1982 that meant sailing around the Hauraki Gulf, and my only abiding memory from that trip is anchoring in West Bay, rowing into shore, clambering up the saddle that divides West and Woody Bay, and being completely captivated by the vision of the little islets at the ends of the bay, the unpopulated sandy beaches, the cerulean blue of the sky, and the sizzling heat from crisp, crackling yellow grass underfoot. It was like discovering a castaway’s island.

*Crispy crackly yellow grass on Rakino Island.*

I imagine I psychologically blocked every other memory of spending days on end with my parents and 12 year old sister on a 22 ft. boat.

Post school holidays and back at home in the small mid-North Island town we lived in I was browsing the property pages when I spied a section for sale on Rakino. For some unfathomable reason it didn’t take much wheedling to encourage my parents to buy it, sight unseen. Probably the pocket change price helped. Regardless, that is how my family came to own a pie-shaped slice of kikuyu infested wetland with no views, in 1983. Luckily we had no inkling of the rat infestation.

My father ‘gave’ it to me in a moment of inebriated weakness back in 1995, but it wasn’t till the early 2000s that we got sufficiently organised to plan an Easter trip with friends, and erect the still-standing garden shed. I recall one of the Johns coming down and saying “Needs more bracing”, approximately three times till it was sufficiently braced to withstand the howling gales of Rakino. I am profoundly grateful for this intervention. I have heard tell of other lesser braced garden sheds that did not have the wisdom of a John to prevent them from buckling and crumpling under the pressure of a fair to middling Rakino storm. At this stage I was still unaware that Rakino had been rid of the rat horror that had plagued the bach owners.

Fast forward to 2017, when in an act of madness we decided to fit out an over-sized green shipping container called ‘Hulk’, and move him over to Rakino, in order to establish a more comfortable campsite. This went horribly wrong, naturally enough, and we were eventually saved from ourselves by donations of timber from Dylan and Les, builder extraordinaire Shaun, two bottle jacks, a couple of winches, some metal pipe rollers, and a quiet Wednesday afternoon.

We now have a reasonably comfortable place to bunk down, with burgeoning decking for impromptu gatherings, and the promise of a roof to protect Hulk’s head whilst collecting much-needed water. We just need to construct a series of boardwalks so as to avoid the aggravation of the biddy-bids that destroy my socks and make my under-garments scratchy. The coming winter will be our third season of tree planting, because we hope some of the tui that blast overhead like a squadron of messerschmitts on a flight path between Mackenzies and Wim and Jo’s will condescend to visit us at some stage. I shall entice them with my soon to be planted kowhai trees. I’m already willing the flax to flower profusely so the kakariki will come calling…

Lisa West.