Shelter from the storm on GBI I finally realised exactly why I love Great Barrier Island so much. It’s equal parts of the natural beauty of mountains, bush and sea that it does have and all the rest that it doesn’t have. Not only is the island off grid, with all the wonderful limitations that result, it's as close to 100 percent non-commercial as an inhabited island can be within a capitalist system. I’ll be very glad to never again see heavy traffic, traffic lights, shopping centres or malls, big car parks, petrol stations, any of it! What we don’t have on the island is very special and everyone who lives here is well aware of it. On to the topics of food, farewells, fun and frolic, friendship and faraway family! Healthy coop mitosis When we arrived on the island five+ years ago, we straightaway joined the North Barrier Coop, which had formed in the north several years before but soon had members all over the island. Once every four to six weeks the coop orders bulk and packaged food in outers from Ceres Organics. Coops like ours throughout the country access the extensive Ceres catalogue at wholesale prices. In the core team, Bree looks after the spreadsheet, I place the order, Gerald or Caity collect it from the wharf and bring it to their big shed at Okiwi Passion, and Sue comes to the “split” and does the order reconciliation and billing. Other members take turns helping at the split and delivering orders. Sue lives boat-access only so the split is scheduled according to the tide, so she can be there! The coop became so popular that orders were approaching $10,000, which could take many hours to place and to split. Happily for all, members in the south formed their own coop, Aotea South, and central people like us could go with either one. Both started adding new members, and now each has over 20. It’s my dream to see the coops continue to grow and divide until the whole island has access to a full range of less expensive organic dry goods. Gerald was primed to take a photo of the order coming off the barge, but it was hosing down rain and he couldn’t get it. Next time! Gerald's home, the van's unloaded and Sue's organising for the split. Bree delivers our order Aotea South has since joined FareShare, a software platform that eliminates the need for a spreadsheet and automates reconciliation, billing and emailing members, in exchange for three percent of the order total. https://fareshare.coop Local produce The global situation has truly gotten people’s attention here. More and more are realising that ordering food boxes from Countdown to be flown over and collected from the airport may not be a long-term solution for food on the table. With many submissions on food self-reliance for the island, the local board included it as a top priority for their annual and three-year plans. It was amazing how quickly covid was forgotten as people packed the room for the initial meeting. It was organised in a modified “world café” format, with a different topic at each of four tables and 15 minutes for brainstorming before participants randomly switched to another table and topic. The topics were: utilising resources already on island for producing food, maximising productivity for home gardens, organising for community-scale value-added food production, and facilitating collection and distribution of locally produced food throughout the island. The responses will be collated and the conversation continued. These steps in the right direction are very dear to our hearts. Cherimoya for boxes from Okiwi Passion – YAY, they’re the best!, the largest supplier of produce for the island. https://okiwipassion.co.nz https://fundrazr.com/okiwipassion?ref=ab_7Vg4aSBbhro7Vg4aSBbhro Darren, above Palmers Beach, also greatly appreciated, is the second largest, growing kumara, potatoes and cupola. He and Shona sell them at markets and pop-up stalls at the art gallery and the church. Everyone ❤️ Lorraine Lovely Lorraine, a beloved Barrier icon, recently sold Pigeon Post shop and post office after running it for 17 years. She was the first islander we spoke to before moving here in 2015. We always enjoyed going into Pigeon Post for a chance to have a chat with her. I had the idea of asking Shel, an amazing artist, to make a nice, big card that lots of people could sign. It was kept in an envelope at the till at Claris Store, where the staff could let people know they could sign. Luckily Lorraine doesn’t do facebook, so I also used Barrier Chitchat to get the word out. Here's the card early on. By the time of the sweet farewell gathering the card was all filled up and Lorraine was very pleased to have it! In an atmosphere of warmth, smiles and wistfulness, her friends stood up to thank her and present gifts. Second from the right is Erua. When we introduced ourselves he became he 700th person we met on the island, 13 months after the 600th. We’re still keeping track! The previous 100s were reached after 9, 7, 9, 12, 8 and 7 months. No one’s really sure how many people live here, if it’s closer to 800, 850 or 900. If we make it to 800 we’ll be very pleased. To Lorraine’s left is Kirstie, who bought Pigeon Post with her husband, Ruark. To Lorraine’s right is one of their two daughters. Lovely people! They live on the Hauraki Gulf at outer Whangaparapara Harbour, the deep bay on the left in the photo, so they have quite a commute. (Blind Bay is to the right.) Their boat-access-only house is somewhere around here. Some days getting onto their boat and into the harbour can be risky, and once they get to the wharf, they have a long drive to Claris on a windy, unsealed road that’s sometimes blocked by slips. The shop opens at 8 and the girls have to catch the bus to Kaitoke School! They’re young and enthusiastic and the difficulties don’t seem to daunt them in the least! Let’s laugh! Laughter was the topic of this year’s Small Island, Big Ideas “festival of the mind”. Great topic, but when the postponed date was announced, Ro and I thought it was a bit early for people to have reacclimatised to being in large groups and many would hesitate to go. It really was a shame after all the organising, twice, and the guest speakers flying over. We used the Wholefoods Handbook fund to pay someone to film it, and good thing we did – only 30 people turned up. In one of the videos we heard someone in the audience sneeze and I imagine everyone nearly fainted! Moderator Michele A’Court – renowned comedian, writer, social commentator and mum. Winner of multiple awards for comedy and popular on radio and TV, and in theatres, clubs and pubs. Panelists Nick Holm, Senior Lecturer in media studies at Massey University. The role humour plays in advertising, politics, popular culture and the media, also parody, satire, irony and comedy. Alex Taylor, Senior Lecturer in psychology and leader of the Animal Minds Lab at Auckland University. Do animals laugh? Alex studies the minds of humans, dogs, kea and crows, using theoretical and experimental approaches, including tickling rats, to figure out if animals see the funny side of life.. Barbara Plester, Senior Lecturer in Management and International Business at Auckland University. An expert on workplace humour. Can banter and a chortle at work improve performance? The workplace joker and kindness and cruelty in laughter. Jeremy Elwood (Michelle’s partner), award winning comedian and regular panellists on TV3’s 7 Days and RNZ’s The Panel. How do comedians make people laugh? What's funny and what's not, and what happens when it all goes wrong? A morning “breakout session" The afternoon panel How soft is your towel? Rayco in Japan sent these most beautiful organic towels as a gift for helping her students with their theses. She said that when she was in the States (that’s when we met, when she was getting her PhD in Tucson and I edited her dissertation) she was constantly appalled at how scratchy the towels are there! All towels are nice and soft in Japan, she said. These towels are the softest we ever had, like drying your face on a puffy white cloud! I sent the photos to Naomi, another friend in Japan. She wrote “I know which ones Rayco sent you. That is the best towel in Japan or maybe best in the world. Very soft and feeling good. Every time you use it you feel happy.” It’s true! Rayco got them at a towel museum! I’m learning they have all sorts of unusual specialised museums in Japan, such as tin toys, subways, pears, footwear, soy sauce, salt, kites, gloves, mercury poisoning, paper, black pearls and lanterns. Love at first swim We finally went to the swim hole in Awana Stream we’ve known of for several years. Now we know why people speak of it with great enthusiasm. It’s at the edge of the campground from where surfies follow the stream downstream to the sea. You can see it gets deep straightaway! Further downstream The dunes at Awana Campground. The stream is to the left. Baby to baby – a Pacific bubble of love The baby on her mamma’s lap is Moana, July 1980. When we were in the South Pacific we stayed with this beautiful family in the village of Safotu on the island of Savaii in Samoa. While we were there they renamed the baby Joanna! We often walked with Vitale to their two plantations, one of them very far away, and spent hours and hours day and night talking to him. We got to know the rest of the family as best we could with only the shared language of love. We learned a lot from all of them. They made these shell necklaces for us and gave us this lavalava. We’re still friends! Since then they had three more children, and recently I had a wonderful surprise of a facebook friend request from the youngest one, now 16! In 30 years, things have changed a lot in Safotu. Alapina and I have been corresponding ever since. Here’s Joanna now, at 30, with her six children, including twins. Her youngest is this wee cutie! Let’s learn! Enrolment in online courses surged at the height of the stay-at-home, and we were inadvertently part of the trend. In the two years since I started my radio show, which ends with a classical hour, our appreciation of classical music has grown and deepened. We were ready and keen to learn more. We signed up for what proved to be a WONDERFUL course: www.coursera.org/learn/introclassicalmusic It’s free! The instructor is a scholar of music and music history, and he’s most engaging as he explains the fundamentals of composition and performance, outlines the composers’ lives, and places them and their music in a rich context of history and culture. Our nightly videos are a treat and our knowledge and understanding are accumulating effortlessly. Craig Wright Below is the signed first page of the score of Beethoven’s Symphony No 5. You can see the three famous notes followed by the long note with a fermata over it, indicating that it’s to be prolonged. Flying bicycles What a surprise to see two of these heading for the airport! Some people who saw them thought they were dreaming. Lucia, who works for FlyMySky, said they left almost as soon as they arrived. As far as I know, no one got a photo. Friendly postie Handmade gifts from the author of Functional Education, the unique, brilliant and potentially culture-changing homeschooling guide I edited recently, which is in layout stage and soon to be published. Santi’s mother’s painting of Medlands Springtime lettuce – the red ones are Blood Red and Perella Rougette. SS Alevei in Tryphena Harbour (not my photo)
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