Captioned by Catherine de Chalain Edited by Imogen Staines. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016 PEACEFUL MUSIC The island I grew up on stands guard between the Pacific Ocean and the inner reaches of the Hauraki Gulf. Aotea ` the Great Barrier Island. PEACEFUL MUSIC CONTINUES Under 1000 people live out here, mostly making a living from tourism or farming. Life can be tough ` no mains electricity or sewage system, and the islanders can be a picky bunch. The story goes they turned down an application from Paul McCartney to build a property out here because he would draw too much publicity. I loved growing up here with all the unique people with passionate and colourful, unique stories. I'd love to share with you what makes this community so special. On this episode of Neighbourhood, a man born in Hawaii focuses on the power of nature. I was consumed by filming volcanoes. I was probably the only one on Earth that was consistently filming from a metre or less. I had a tendency to feel that I was bulletproof. A local woman extends some genuine Irish hospitality. One of the things that we were really surprised with ` there was no pub on the island ` what we knew from Ireland and London ` sort of, an authentic pub ` and so we thought, 'Yeah, let's open an Irish pub.' We'll discover some treasures from the Yorkshire Moors. Every time I found one, I would pick up this implement and I would think, 'The last person who held that was probably 2000, 3000 years ago 'who made it for some particular purpose.' And that` Even as a young boy, that used to amaze me. And a man with a Swiss heritage helps the community to pull together when winter is coming. LOGS CLATTERING Usually I have to do all this. We have no electricity on the island. Many people depend on firewood for their, uh, stoves, for heating, for cooking, for hot water. They couldn't afford it, they would freeze in winter. I'm Wolfgang Schmidt, and this is my neighbourhood. 'NEIGHBOURHOOD' THEME WARM, LAID-BACK MUSIC This is the house where I was born. This is my mum, Denise. She's French-Maori, from King Country. Ngati Maniapoto. She really thinks she's a pirate. And this is my dad. He was born in Germany and moved to Canada soon after the war. You can imagine the discrimination that someone would've had to face, being German at that time. I've never felt nothing but pride for my heritage and never really experienced racism until I left for the mainland. I'm proud of all the aspects, you know? My whole entire heritage brings me together, and it makes me who I am today. PIGS SNORT Ja, hello, piggy piggies. How are you? Have some pumpkin. I consider myself a Swiss Kiwi, because I was born here, but when I was 2� I went to Switzerland. I came back to NZ when I was 21, and with 23 I came to the Barrier. In Switzerland, when I was a kid, my teachers and parents and so on said, 'Oh, Peter is a dreamer, and one day he will realise that it's important to learn something.' But I was much more interested in being out in the forest and being with nature, so I had a very close relation with nature all the time. I came to the Barrier ` uh, to this place ` 29th of December 1980 we took on the farm. So, the Barrier is not commercial, so I knew here I could work organically without getting polluted. To me that is very important ` incredibly important. I wouldn't work any` any other way. I make, uh, different kinds of compost. This particular one here is, uh, made with cow manure. And this one has, uh, biodynamic compost preparation added, made from five different herbs. On this ` anything grows on this. It doesn't matter. Uh, compost is the cash on the property. The more compost I have, the more cash I have available to spend on the farm. Uh, if something is struggling, give it a little bit of compost and it becomes right again ` most of times. The island is` Very hard to make an income here ` very hard. If you have an occupation ` maybe if you are a builder, maybe if you are a plumber ` you might be able to get a full-time job. With all the other jobs, it's probably pretty much just part-time, so you have to do different things on the island to make a living. So out of that came that we started a bed and breakfast. Out of that came that I went out doing landscaping. Uh, out of that also basically came that I have, uh, the time to do the firewood for Family Support Group. So, um, how've you been getting on with, um, cutting firewood? Yeah, good. Last week we had a very busy week, as you can see here. We've been at` uh, at the nursery. Uh, we put in quite a few hours, but last week we got, uh, 44m2 of firewood cut. PEACEFUL PIANO MUSIC The Aotea Family Support Group provides a range of services here for residents of the island. They range from youth service to taking care of people in their homes. Our role is basically trying to help people stay in their home as long as possible, so we have caregivers that go and visit people as much as required. But one of the needs that became apparent was firewood. At the same time as providing employment for a group of people, people end up with firewood in their place` in their` in their homes. Um, we have landowners that feel they're taking part in the community by giving wood or giving access to wood, and, um, people in the community just helping out in lots of different ways. We are an elderly community, and we're also a community which has a very low annual income on average. We have no electricity on the island, so, uh, people depend on firewood. Many people depend on firewood for their stoves, for heating, for cooking, for hot water. They couldn't afford it, they would freeze in winter. Usually I have to do all this. (LAUGHS) John. I'm sure you wouldn't get this service` You might in a small country place in the South Island, but you certainly wouldn't anywhere that` that we could think of, and` We're very well looked after. And, you know, it's a little bit` It makes you feel guilty, cos somebody's doing it for you, but when you get to our age and you've got a few things wrong, you know, it's so wonderful to have it done, and it's not just me; it's everybody else. And, really, this is only the tip of the iceberg to what the community does in general, and` and so many people do it voluntarily. Some people are lucky to` to get some money out of it, but it's never a lot. I strongly believe that we as human beings, we are not meant to be by ourselves. We are meant to help each other out. Uh, the other thing I'm convinced of ` that, uh, with meeting other people, it makes both people richer. I think community and love is actually higher than, uh` than money. RELAXED MUSIC Although I'm thrilled to have her back in our life, my mum left me and my brothers when we were really young, so Dad had full parenting duties. He got taught by our neighbour how to cook a roast, but he never really embraced the whole cooking. Didn't really care. (LAUGHS) It was down to two meals ` the stew and the canned salmon meal. Now, if it was the canned salmon meal, we definitely were gonna be late for dinner. Good thing there's a few more options for food on the island these days. SERENE PIANO MUSIC DOG BARKS So, I was, um, living in London and met Phil, my husband, this lovely Kiwi, um, was very intrigued with his lifestyle. He was living on a barge on the Grand Union Canal in London. Our first child was born in London and after two years living on a barge with a toddler, we decided that it probably was best to maybe socialise her a bit, and so we decided we would either move to Ireland or NZ and, uh, we actually didn't spend much time thinking about what we would do. We tossed a coin. We were sitting in the Brian Boru Hotel in Thames, having a pint, and we saw an ad in the Herald, and it was a three-line, ad and it said, 'Buy a business in paradise,' and there was a phone number. So we rang to find out where paradise was, and it was Great Barrier Island. One of the things that we were really surprised with ` there was no pub on the island ` um, what we` what we knew from Ireland and London ` sort of, an authentic pub. And so we thought, 'Yeah, let's open an Irish pub.' INDISTINCT CHATTER Can I have the mussels? Mussels? It's lovely. It's with home-made brown bread, and it's in a lovely white wine and garlic sauce. When I left school, the last thing I was gonna do was work in hospo. I studied labour law at university, had a career for a while and then kept drifting into hospo and finally had to admit that this is what I love. I love meeting people, looking after people and... Yeah, every day is different. I'm from a little fishing village in the south-west of Ireland called Cahersiveen. So, Annie, my grandma, ran the` one of the local pubs. Um, a lot of these villages in Ireland had lots of pubs. Um, it was just known as Annie's Pub. So this is Annie, and, uh, I'm on her right, and my sister Eileen's on the left. This is in` uh, at the back of the pub in Cahersiveen. She loved to cook, and, of course, part of` being a fishing village, we had beautiful fresh fish. She would always have lovely fish, um, in the pub and always a fish soup. It was never called chowder. From my memory in Ireland, it was always just called fish soup, but it was very similar to the seafood chowder that we serve here in the Currach Irish Pub. Got the fish from Pete. That's lovely. Oh, she's a` she's a beauty. > That's gonna make a nice chowder. We make our chowder at the pub from scratch. We buy, um, our fish whole, as opposed to, um, buying in ready-made fish stock, which a lot of restaurants do. And then we use our veges from the garden, and we also are very lucky on this island to have a wonderful orchard, Okiwi Passion, and they provide fabulous organic veges for the restaurant. Phil's the chef. I prefer eating than cooking, so when I, uh, met a Kiwi in London that was a chef, then, you know, that was it, really. It was all over. We do, we put the` all the fish bits in the frame, um, whole pile of vegetables and water and then bring it to the` just br` bring it up to a simmer and simmer it for maybe an hour. Phil and I compared our grandparents' chowder recipes, and I have to say that the Irish one would have way more potato in it and also bacon. The Irish seafood chowder has bacon. (SNIFFS) It smells so good. We don't add bacon to the chowder we have here in the pub, cos a lot of people want to have fish soup without the meat. Pescetarians come in, and they don't want to have` They can't take it out once it's in. You can't take the bacon out, and I don't think it does much for the flavour anyway. You know, it just makes the dish... But, then, if you look at most Irish dishes, they have bacon and potatoes in them, so... (CHUCKLES) Into this just now goes the vegetables. This is carrots and potatoes. That's all the vegetables in. Now we` um, we just let it come slowly to a simmer and cook the vegetables and then from there we start adding the fish. The Currach is celebrating its 20th anniversary in a week, and it's going to be a huge night at the pub. Everyone's really excited, and there are a lot of memories in the pub for the locals. We celebrate a lot of birthdays, weddings, christenings, funerals. It's a really special part of the community. Hi. WOMAN: Oh wow. So, lovely seafood chowder... Oh, delicious! ...and lovely baked bread ` just baked today. The Barrier has a wonderful village feel, and I think that's why I feel so at home here, being so far from Ireland ` because I do get homesick at times, but, uh, Barrier is more like Ireland than anywhere else I've lived in the world. To friends. ALL: To friends. Slainte, as they say in Ireland. GENTLE MUSIC When I was 11, I suffered from a head injury. My dad ended up pulling me and my brothers out of school. I got an older brother and a younger brother, and we ended up doing school via correspondence. That time we had together gave us an unshakeable bond. We were able to live out make-believe lives, making swords out of flax, creating superhero stories, collecting crabs and creating a coliseum of death. We were able to run free, make up worlds and explore our environment. (SIGHS) And that has made an impression on each of us ` Something that we will carry in our hearts forever. PEACEFUL GUITAR MUSIC I've always lived on islands my entire life. In Hawaii I've lived on three different islands. Um, I've lived on North Island here. I've lived on Wake Island for a short while. Yes, always islands. There's something about islands and island people. My name is John Kjargaard, and I was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1947. The big island of Hawaii is totally volcanic, and the rest of the state is 99.999% volcanic. Well, I started filming volcanoes about 1986. Well, this is a picture of me, and, um, I'm right at the edge of a big pool of lava. I have to say that it is extremely hot ` extremely hot. The first thing is the heat ` and the heat that tries to set fire to your boots. And then the fumes, which grabbed you and throttle your throat, and then there's the airborne heat just from that lava. In this picture, I'm about, oh, 6m away, and if I wasn't wearing the white cap and the woodworker's face mask, um, my ears would probably have caught on fire by now. I'm certain that it's much hotter than putting your head in a pizza oven. Uh, that's probably the closest I can compare it to. I was consumed by filming volcanoes. I was probably the only one on Earth that was consistently filming from a metre or less. I had a tendency to feel that I was bulletproof, and, um, I think that most of us that were working out there had the same feeling ` more` more bulletproof than death wish. Well, after I had been doing it for about 14 years, I was beginning to take too many chances. I just decided after a while that I needed to do something else in my life, and, uh, if I stayed in Hawaii, I was so pulled by the volcano, there was no chance that I was going to give it up. Um, so I moved to NZ. The Barrier to me is very very similar to Hawaii. The first place is that you're safe. And, um` And it's a nice place to be, and the people are nice, and I just see so many similarities. I came to NZ to film Ruapehu and White Island. It's not so accessible as it was in Hawaii, where you'd only` from my house down to the lava flow is` was a half-hour drive. I have resisted going back to videography, but I do still take pictures. Most of the time in Great Barrier, I carry a camera. I say that I have it bolted to my hip, and that way, anything that I see that's just a great picture, I'll take it. One of the things I really like about photography is to be able to capture a small bit of the big picture and then find something about the small bit that's enticing, that's interesting. Great Barrier is a great place for any artist to be. Uh, I just happen to like photography. But it's the most, um, encouraging place that I've ever lived, as far as art goes. My gallery is called Top of the Rock, because it's at the highest point on this side of the island. This is one of my favourite pictures, because it shows what happens when water and g` and lava mix, and in this case, we've had an explosion, the sides of the lava tube have broken off, and this is what's left of about 50 gallons of water. This is one of my favourite pictures. Both the way the waves are seen and the spray coming off the waves here and just enough of the green back here to act like a frame. TRANQUIL MUSIC I see myself staying here. Um, I have a house in Hawaii, and I go there from time to time, but I just like the Barrier. It's got people that I enjoy, and it's so peaceful. I don't think that I would want to move away from here for any reason. PEACEFUL MUSIC I was driving with my dad into town to get the mail when I told him I wanted to be an actor. It wasn't until I was 15 that I figured out that acting was actually a job someone could do. Having a Canadian passport, I'd applied for a drama school. I did a video of me acting, followed by six painful hours uploading it to YouTube ` dial-up internet out here, remember? When I got into drama school, no one had a clue where I was from. They thought I was Australian ` from the Great Barrier Reef. I'd try and tell people where I came from, but it's kind of a hard place to describe. I'd tell people if they really wanna understand where I'm from, they'd have to come and see it for themselves. So far not many people have. It takes a certain kind of person to like wild places like this. Ever since I was very young, I've been interested in history, particularly the history of people in Yorkshire as it was when I was a kid, and so going back into archaeological stuff. We're looking at some flint implement. I was only about, I suppose, probably 11, I think, at the time that photo was taken. I lived in` on the edge of industrial Bradford, really, but I was also on the edge of the country, so I could get out into the local woods and up on to the moors and that kind of thing. I was excited by just about everything that I found in those days. (CHUCKLES) I got to know this man here, whose name is Sydney Jackson, who was the curator of the Cartwright Memorial Hall Museum in Bradford, and because I'd found, um, flint remains, he encouraged me and got them published in the little local archaeological magazine, and, of course, this just got me going after that, so after that` and I found I could find things everywhere I went, so I b` that began my interest in archaeology. I do have quite a lot of the finds which came from Yorkshire and from other places, because wherever I've gone in the world, I've found implements. I think I've collected probably well over 2000. I do feel pleased that some of this material is in museums. It's not all, though. I have a quite bit here, which I sometimes feel a little guilty about, because I think, 'Well, what's going to happen to them in the long run?' They're mostly flint implements from` In this box, they're mostly flint implements from` mostly from England. Flint implements are small pieces of stone made from a rock called flint. They're very sharp, and those` those can be used for all kinds of things, like cutting, obviously, or scraping the flesh off skins to make clothing with and that sort of thing, uh, making arrowheads or making tools of different sorts. Every time I found one, I would pick up this implement and I would think, 'The last person who held that was probably 2000 or 3000 years ago, 'who made it for some particular purpose,' and that` even as a young boy, that used to amaze me. I used to think, 'This is an incredible thing to have in your hand.' And what's more, not only did he make it, but he lost it there or somewhere near there, and so his view of this landscape was actually the same view as I have now, except that it's now got maybe houses or whatever. One of the most interesting finds in here` These two bits of flint are very interesting. It's been part of a spearhead or part of an arrowhead, but, more interestingly, in a way, I found the rest of it ` or some of it ` two years later. So very nice. I was very pleased to find both pieces of this and especially pleased when I found they actually were part of the same thing. (CHUCKLES) They fit together. I was trained in plant ecology, so I came out to Massey University at Palmerston North as a plant ecologist. Oh, we were looking for a holiday place, and when we came, we just loved the island and decided that we'd try to get somewhere here. Been here retired I think for eight years. I think Whangapoua Estuary and Okiwi Spit ` I've done quite a lot of work there, so that would have to be one of my favourite places. There are quite a lot of Maori archaeological sites on the island ` some` what are probably very old ones on some of the sand dunes. They've been virulently investigated. You can find things in places like this old, um, soil surface here, which has got charcoal in it. It's got fire stones in it. Those are the old soil surfaces on which Maori were living when the deposits were put down, and they often give you a very good picture of what the people were doing, because rubbish dumps are always full of interesting stuff. (LAUGHS) I say they're probably very old because not only do they contain shells in the midden, but they also contain fish bones, bird` bird bones, sometimes large bones of marine mammals, like seals and sea lions. Here, look ` fish bones ` quite a lot of them. You see, I've got some here. Fish b` And right along here ` fish bones. More fish bones. So, yeah, there's quite a` quite a layer` quite a depth of material here as well. It's, you know, probably several hundred years of people feeding here. It's mostly tuatuas and cockles. My hopes for the Barrier ` I would have to say that it's preserved in something like what it is now ` that it's not wrecked. So if you could make it a really unique environment from that point of view, the economy could be based around the ecology, and that was what I would see as the future for the island. BRIGHT MUSIC I try to make it back to Barrier every four months. The longest I was away was two years, and that was too long. When I'm out here, I like to go surfing, diving, fishing, help my dad out and enjoy the quietness of the night. Time for a surf. BRIGHT MUSIC SWELLS MUSIC CONTINUES When I was growing up, there was a lot of young families around, but a lot of them had to move off so their kids could get education, which was understandable. But nowadays there's a lot more younger families coming back and a lot more young people, which is great to see. This place defines me. It's made me who I am. You can take me off Barrier, but you can't take the Barrier out of me! Whoo! Captioned by Catherine de Chalain Edited by Imogen Staines. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016