Eastwoodhill

Autumn visit to Eastwoodhill Arboretum

There is a beauty and tenderness to Autumn that gives the season a special allure for me. 

It is a season of farewell that has all the tenderness of saying goodbye to something held close. The days shrink and deciduous trees throw off their summer clothes ready for winter, their leaves putting on a final triumphant cloak of brilliant colour - saying "look at me" -  before they die.


And yet ... accompanying Autumn's slow surrender towards winter, is a seductive promise of new growth. The tenderness coming then perhaps in the uneasy meeting of ending and beginning as though they are two strangers trapped inside a glass ball. 

These thoughts come jumbled and unformed as I stand by a pond on the Yellow walking trail at the Eastwoodhill Arboretum on the outskirts of Gisborne. The pond is covered in a soft peppermint green algae with colourful Autumn leaves sprinkled like confetti on its surface.

Yesterday a friend and I had driven up to Gisborne from Hawke’s Bay on a stormy, rain-soaked Autumn day that had downed trees, closed roads and left flooding in some parts of the region. At Waipaoa River Bridge roundabout we headed for the hills winding up through green farmland to Ngatapa where we spent the night at Eastwoodhill Retreat: a cosy, warm farm cottage for rent only five minutes from the gates of the National Arboretum.

Now we have the 135-hectare park – home to more than 3,500 varieties of trees from around the globe – to ourselves. 

Armed with a brochure and map of walking trails – the longest 5.1kms – we weave our way through the middle of the park.  Everywhere Autumn is showing her exquisite face: golden-leaved poplars at the entrance, the brown- fingered leaves of North American oaks, the orange, reds and purple colour of the Liquidambar and scarlet oaks, hundreds of maples, deep butter yellow Persian Ironwoods and Lombardy Poplars, elm trees and flowering cherries.

This must’ve been the sort of scene the founder of the Arboretum, Douglas Cook, envisioned when he first started bringing seed back from Europe in 1918.  Cook was just 25-years-old when he bought 250ha of farmland from the Ngatapa subdivisions in 1910 and named it Eastwoodhill after his mother’s family home back in Glasgow.

“Then he went off to World War 1,” a volunteer at the Arboretum tells me later over a cup of coffee and homemade egg sandwiches at the visitor’s centre.  “He became very worried that the Northern Hemisphere could be subject to acid rain and he wanted to protect the trees that he’d come to know and love in England and Europe.” 

So Cook collected seed and returned to New Zealand after the war intent on starting an arboretum at Eastwoodhill.  As he made repeated seed collecting trips back to Europe, so the vision of Eastwoodhill began to take shape.  By the time of his death in 1967, he’d planted thousands of trees and shrubs from nurseries in New Zealand, Japan, America and Europe.

As we climb high up to the outer edge of the park on the Green trail, a sign tells us that when one 70-year-old tree dies [some] 1200 tonnes of carbon is released into the atmosphere - no longer absorbed by the tree. It is these sorts of facts that must spur Eastwoodhill’s 50 odd volunteers and 600 Friends on.  Plans are currently afoot to expand the park and plant more trees.

We puff the last steps and then stand in the wind on a narrow ridge where we get big views into the rugged Gisborne interior.  We could spend most of the day exploring all the trails in the Arboretum but we’ve got other plans. We weave back down passed the Mexican Way – where there are a collection of trees from central and southern America, pausing at an open green area and one of several Ha-ha’s in the park.

It’s lunchtime when we reach the Fibonacci spiral sculpture – based on the ancient mathematical theory, which connects the opposite corners of a square. It is the only sculpture I’ve seen in the park and is a tribute to Gisborne farmer H.B. (Bill) Williams and his wife Elizabeth who bought the Arboretum in 1965 and gifted it to New Zealand.

As I rest near the Spiral, my eyes involuntarily sweep across the green lawn and lift off taking in the greens, yellows, golds, reds and browns of trees doing their individual dance with Autumn.  In a few weeks most of this colour will have leached out of the Arboretum. The trees quietly re-grouping ready for a new beginning in Spring.

See www.eastwoodhill.org.nz

Eastwoodhill Retreat: Cottage  

Hillary Trail

Photos: Alison Brown and Julie Miles

Standing still: The Hillary Trail

I’m reminded of a Jonathan Franzen line -  “You see more standing still than chasing after” - when I think back to the weekend before Christmas 2010 when myself and three friends walked the Hillary Trail on Auckland’s West Coast.

For weeks we’d been anticipating the four-day, 70-odd km walk from Huia to Muriwai. The weather had been relentlessly hot and in my mind’s eye I’d imagined endless river and beach swims - and a swathe of sunscreen.

But on the second day at Whatipu Lodge we woke to the sound of rain knocking on the corrugated iron roof.  Two hours down the track as we carefully navigated a steep, slippery rock face into the Pararaha Valley the skies cracked open and torrential, skin-soaking rain thundered down from dark clouds overhead. Ironically we thought we were smart getting to the creek-side Pararaha Shelter just as the rain cranked into top gear.  But the joke was on us when 40 minutes later we stood dumbfounded at the normally knee-deep Pararaha Creek watching its dirty waters lick the neck of a brave member of our party as, clinging to toi toi, she ventured out into it’s swift current.

“So what do we do now?” 

“Use our packs as floatation devices and float down the stream.”

“Won’t everything get soaked?”

“And what about getting caught by snags?”

 “Does anyone have some rope? 

“Nope didn’t even think of it.”

“Wouldn’t it be embarrassing to be the first people to die on the Hillary trail?”

 “Don’t we link arms like this when crossing a river.”

“Isn’t it like this?”

“We’d have to undo the waist belt on our packs!"

Our conversation stumbled on like that and even though we were all experienced trampers when one member said: “I think we need to go back to the shelter and wait” it quickly became clear that it was the only sensible decision. Perhaps 20 years ago we’d have tried to find a way across  … but not now. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Back inside the shelter at 3pm one of our party cut strips of flax and started weaving a rope as we tossed our options back and forth. We could wait until 5.30pm at the latest to cross the stream and walk on to KareKare and Piha, otherwise the only other real choice, apart from sleeping the night on the concrete floor of the shelter, was to turn back to Whatipu and get there just before dark.

We boiled the billy, changed into warm clothes, studied the map and read the trail instructions. Despite a light rain falling, inch by inch the stream seemed to be shrinking. When I put a ruler-length piece of flax at it’s clay edge, it was high and dry half an hour later.

“Look only waist high and not nearly as swift,” called out our brave water-tester as using the flax rope tied to a bush she edged out into middle of the stream.

Close to our 5.30pm deadline, we hoisted our packs above our heads like participants in Survivor and waded across the stream using the flax rope to steady ourselves. 

High on adrenalin and on having made the right decision, we climbed up Buck Taylor Track and onto Zion Hill Track with spectacular views down to KareKare. 

You will know when you get there

 “Nobody comes up from the sea as late as this

In the day and the season, and nobody else goes down

The steep kilometre, wet-metalled where

A shower passed shredding the light  which keeps

Pouring out of its tank in the sky, through summits,

Trees, vapours thickening and thinning…”

Allen Curnow

Karekare is “not for those who prefer safe landscapes“ says Bob Harvey in Rolling Thunder: The Spirit of  KareKare.  “There's an over-powering sense of place here.  The moment you arrive, you know this is a special place.”

The rain had stopped and it was a clear evening full of promise, as at 9pm we strode up the steep, concrete driveway of the much-anticipated Piha Lodge where we’d booked a bach with a swimming pool and views out to the ocean.

AAAAAAAAh … I think we all felt like we’d stepped into the wrong story as we found ourselves instead in the tiny, cluttered Piha Bach: a small cabin – really only suitable for two people - attached to a musty smelling caravan with notes of instruction plastered everywhere! One of three above the toilet reading: “Use as little paper as possible toilet will block!!!! IF OVERLOADED”.  One of three in the shower: “If shower starts going hot and cold it’s usually because the lever has been bumped.  Just push it in, turn it to the right.  Pull toward you and then across to your left to the desired temperature”.

There wasn’t enough room to swing a cat, let alone comfortably house four wet, weary middle-aged women, our wet gear and packs…meanwhile the lodge proper, the swimming pool and views out to sea illuded us up the hill.   After a complaint to the manageress/owner there was nothing left to do other than laugh and sleep – or try to!

The next morning the sun was bright and the day fresh. We wound round the back of Piha passed the Kitekite falls, stopped for a flat white at the Piha store and then strode out onto the rolling surf beach -  Piha Lodge and its tiny “La Bach” was history!

We grunted up out of Piha, climbing high above Whites Beach - home to the Sir Edmund Hillary family bach and the reason this track is called the “Hillary Trail” in a tribute to the conqueror of Everest and the time he spent out on this coast.

An hour later at the Anawhata stream, we were all so hot we stripped off to tramping boots and immersed ourselves in the “shallow”  knee deep water. After a cup of tea boiled on the billy and some Christmas cake we plodded up out of the Anawhata Valley to Kuataika (250 metres) and then employed tactics to keep weary trampers going by singing songs from our 70s and 80s youth: Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Neil Young, Carole King, the Bee Gees, the Hollies until finally as the day started to turn on the cusp of dusk, we arrived at the southern end of  Lake Wainamu.

It was quiet and picturesque as we walked through long grass and raupo round the edge of the lake.  But at the fartherest reach, we lost the track.  Just a big raupo swamp in front of us. Back and forth we went: two climbing high up into the waterfall looking for a way across, the others lunging through the raupo. I could hear again the  haunting joke we'd had at the Pararaha Creek “wouldn’t it be embarrassing to be the first to die on the Hillary Trail” when there was a "whoopee" from the other side of the raupo. The scout in our party had hauled herself up a steep bank and found where the track had lost its way in a flooded creek.

Waitakere Rain

“Ernest Hemingway found rain to be

made of knowledge, experience

wine oil salt vinegar quince

bed early mornings nights days the sea

men women dogs hill and rich valley

the appearance and disappearance of sense

or trains on curved and straight tracks, hence

love honour and dishonour, a scent of infinity.

“In my city the rain you get

is made of massive kauri trees, the call of forest birds

howling dark oceans and mangroved creeks.

I taste constancy, memory and yet

there's the watery departure of words

from the thunder-black sand at Te Henga Beach.”

Paula Green

 Round the lake we plodded as the playful sounds of a group of teenagers swimming and frolicking in the water, followed us. Down Bethells Beach Road in the dark: weary, hungry, and thankful that a spacious, comfortable bach, with nary a notice in sight, awaited us. The night so warm I went to bed lying half out of my sleeping bag’s silk inner - a breeze from the opened window and the sounds of the sea accompanying my journey to sleep.

Up on the tops above Bethells or Te Henga (the sand) the next day, we languished over lunch with clear, blue sky views all the way back down to Whatipu and then north up the sweep of Muriwai Beach. Later I read we were sitting on Te Ara Kanohi (the pathway of the eye). 

We ploughed on passed flax in flower, hot beating sun, green farmland, swirling blue sea below. It was so hot when we stopped under the shade of a big Puriri tree that one by one each of us stumbled down to a little stream and soaked our shirts in its cool water.

The climb up to Constable Road was steep and long. But a text message about cold beer at the end of the track got through.

Soon we were in a car and on our way back into the rush of the city.  As of the four-day walk settled in our collective memory, the stream crossing at Pararaha surfaced as a pivotal point around which the story was told - and told again.

The Hillary Trail  

Nothing but the birds

Nothing but the birds

Free range on the Otuataua Stonefields and Watercare Walkway  

Photos: Debbie Harkness

For weeks I’d been carrying the metaphor of a safe harbour around in my head. It was time to weigh anchor, farewell calm waters and venture out through jagged heads to the open ocean beyond.

So when I find myself on a hot early summer’s afternoon staring into the distant blue-hazed throat of Auckland’s Manukau Heads, it’s as though I’ve retrieved the image from my imagination.  

As I squelch my way across the wet mudflats towards the retreating tide line my eyes pan around the huge “safe” harbour. It’s a revelation to learn the Manukau is New Zealand’s second largest natural harbour sprawling across 394 square kilometres of water surface at high tide.  I see Auckland through a fresh lens as I follow it's borders starting at South Head on the Awhitu Peninsula, crossing the channel to Burnett or Ohaka Head on the north side and then letting my eyes slide along the coast to Huia and Cornwallis. I pause at Puketuku, Auckland’s smallest volcano directly across the water in front of me, once called Week’s Island and before that intriguingly - island of the “Long Desired”. 

The Sky Tower’s ubiquitous needle poking into the grey cityscape is strangely comforting as my gaze sweeps across the wide skirt of One Tree Hill, mentally notes Mangere Mountain over there (huh! Mangere means lazy didn’t know that). 


The hot afternoon sun reflecting off the stonefields is like a giant heater behind me as my eyes zoom low winging their gaze over the mangroves out to distant Clarks Beach and Awhitu.  And then there again  - way in the distance - those beguiling heads and all the harbour’s wide open mouth promises.

There is a Māori story that says the Manukau is named after the “anxiety” of Hoturoa  (Te-Manuka-O-Hoturoa) as he steered the great Tainui canoe across the Tāmaki isthmus towards the breakers at the harbour entrance. It’s thought the name Manuka, first applied to the heads, then extended to cover the harbour, and has since corrupted to Manukau. West Coast poet Paparoa Jeffery Holman draws on the story:

Manukau makes a name for itself (for John O'Connor)

When old Hotunui saw the breakers on the bar, part of him wanted Tainui out of there: "Aue, ka tāhuri tātou!"

They say that feeling got this town a name: Te Mānuka o Hotunui, fear of drowning. Now flying's taken over from the sea, as my way in to Manukau and terra firma, home at last from everywhere to Aotearoa - it almost feels the same.

"Get this thing down, big boy, that's the way!" Once those wheels hit tarmac and we roll, my stomach flips, my heart is in your hands.

Just think: somebody wanted to call the city Churchill, Polaris, Ngarimu, or even Savage(Michael J). Give me a seasick Hotunui any day.

I like another theory about the naming of Manukau. It suggests the name comes from the Māori manu for  “bird”, and kau, “a swim”.  So “bathing place for sea birds”, or “place of the wading birds”, even better “nothing but birds” .  Of New Zealand’s 120,000 wader birds, 60,000 of them make their home for at least part of the year on the Manukau: arctic Wrybills and bar-tailed godwits, pied oyster catchers, pied stilts and the largest New Zealand population of threatened banded dotterels.

But all I see and hear are little black swallows tweeting in the sky just above me as Debbie, my walking mate, plucks her way across the mudflats and comes to a halt beside me.  She holds the camera round her neck clicking through close ups of the colourful old fishing boat wrecked on the shell bank back round the corner.

Interesting that Debbie and I have fetched up here on Labour Day Monday. Just two months earlier I’d gone with my teenage daughter for a weekend getaway to Whatipu Lodge tucked beneath cliffs on the northern edge of the Manukau.  

Debbie, an old school friend I hadn’t seen since “back in the day”, just happened to be staying at the lodge at the same time and we’d re-kindled a connection sharing the light of a dim torch on a cloudy night down at the beach searching for lollies in the black sand as part of a kids treasure hunt.  I wasn’t thinking about it then but we were adjacent to the notorious Manukau sand bar, site of New Zealand’s worst marine disaster: the HMS Orpheus which went down in 1863 along with 189 of its 257 crew.  Something must’ve seeped into my unconscious though because as the safe harbour metaphor surfaced a little while later so did warning bells about the dangers of navigating tricky heads. Wait for the right tide, said a little voice in my head, study the chart for snags and know the route before you depart. Aha! Hoturoa’s “manuka” was surfacing.  Yet there’d been none of that when Debbie and I set out on this walk.  The whole thing had been pretty random.

 “What about the Stonefields?  They’re pretty cool,”  I’d suggested as we sat on her Parnell balcony eating scrabbled eggs and cherry tomatoes. We might’ve sat there in hot sun all afternoon but our walking poles splayed against the railing were like panting dogs. They’ d been promised a walk and they weren’t going to stop glaring at us til we picked them up.

As I drove, Debbie consulted the map.  We passéd the Mangere poo ponds, round the mountain and headed out along the back of Auckland Airport.  We were talking so hard that we missed the official Otautaua turnoff and then found ourselves rambling down Ihumatao Road (the name of the local Māori papakainga), passéd the quarry and through a gate with a sign: locked at 9pm daylight saving . Further down the gravel road, Debbie gets out of the car to unlatch another gate and then on we go in a spirit of adventure rolling towards the sea and a little car park with three or four cars. We look at one another, pleased: without trying we’ve hit a local spot. As we get out of the car a big, burly Pacific Island man puffs up a little mud path straddling a huge blue plastic barrel on his shoulder.

“Can you get to the Stonefields from here?” Debbie asks. 

He and two younger mates who appear behind him pause thinking and then point to our right, over a high hedge. “That way!”

It’s enough for us. We pass some families picnicking on the beach and then clamber up a high wire fence, throwing our walking poles onto the grass below, then jumping after them.  A herd of black and white Fresian cows all dressed up in their Sunday best look bemused by our back entry to Otautaua.  


The day is hot. Bright. Hot.  We cross the paddock, climb another fence and then stand amidst a huge crop of volcanic rock spread across the ground like acres of broken weetbix. It’s as though the land has a really bad dose of acne. Rocks which ever way you look. Yet its beautiful in an unexpected and wild kind of way.  What’s more each paddock is bordered by spectacular dry stone walls orderly and neat zipping across the land, doing up its jacket.

Early Māori iwi Nga Oho and then Te Wai O Hua used the stones flung out in successive Auckland volcanic eruptions to demarcate garden plots and to warm the soil extending the growing seas for crops like taro and kumara by one month.  When Scottish and English farmers came along in the 1840s they cleared scoria rock and built the dry stone boundary walls to contain their stock.  There was once 8,000 hectares of stonefields in Auckland. This 100-hectare reserve is the only pocket that’s left and it’s a fascinating piece of early New Zealand history.

You can download a good map of the Stonefields and take yourself on a guided walking tour.

But Debbie and I continue to free range walking up into the fields and then heading for a huge boulder and heaving ourselves up onto its top.  Looking out across “the bathing place for sea birds” we can hear the  thrum of Labour Day traffic behind us.  All those poor buggers crawling back into the city down the motorway and we could be on… well the Milford Track – it’s that beautiful here on this hot, blue afternoon!

 Interesting that in 1920s and 1930s there were holiday baches built on the shores of the stonefields and used by many Auckland families. They must’ve been appalled when the Mangere Wastewater Treatment plant was built in the 1960s and they were down wind of it and had to go.  Now ironically 500 hectares of oxidation ponds have been removed in a big upgrade and the coastline has been restored once again with the Watercare Walkway. 

I’ve done the 9 km coastal walkway from Ambury Park and back before and now as Debbie and I sit on our Stonefields’ perch, I suggest we go seaward and join up with the end of it.  Enroute we stop under a tree and have a cup of tea boiled on my ubiquitous billy and then we’re out close to the harbour, following a stretch of board walk, the last of the WaterCare Track, Debbie taking arty photos of the mangroves, the old fishing boat, me collecting watercress growing like a virulent beard around the mouth of a small stream.  We free range the last kilometre, over a fence, through long grass, out onto drying, sun-kissed mudflats. Debbie picks up a cocoanut, a sure sign we’re in local territory as I wander out on the wet harbour floor.  The tide’s seeped outwards since we began two hours earlier and I feel like I could just keep on walking.

“Turn this way,” Debbie calls.

 I angle briefly towards her camera and then swing back to the benign outline of the Manukau Heads beckoning way out there in the distance.

Websites
 http://www.manukaulibraries.govt.nz/whatwehave/Journey/photos/map.htm
http://www.nzcharts.co.nz/Chart/431

http://www.manukau-libraries.govt.nz/EN/ManukauOurHistory/ManukauInPoetry/Pages/Home.aspx

http://www.manukau-libraries.govt.nz/whatwehave/Journey/photos/map.htm#

http://www.doc.govt.nz/conservation/historic/by-region/auckland/auckland-area/otuataua-stonefields/