Geoff Chapple

IN AND OF THE FOREST

I was nine when we shifted from Henderson to our new Waitākere house. The house embodied a revolutionary 1950s-vernacular credo: to be in the forest and of the forest; to be open-plan, with polished rātā floors and exposed rimu beams; to feature, on each interior wall, the differing grain of native wood – kauri, mātai, red beech. My bedroom was lined with pale kahikatea. Outside, cave wetas hung upside down under the water-tank lid, and the house’s low gables extended at that same rear side within the drip line of the māhoe. On the three sunnier sides, the wide verandahs were sometimes level with the tree-fern canopy.

I was living inside Group Architects’ bold new manifesto and didn’t know it, but absorbed the bush knowledge and competence anyway. The angle of the rātā behind the house was so oblique against the hill, even my two dogs could climb to where the epiphytes made a comfortable rest. Then, hour upon hour, we crossed a Waitākere wilderness. I collected wood ear fungus to sell to the Chinese, or stumbled into adventure, one hand anchored on the harakeke, the other holding my dog’s tail as he fought a possum on the edge of a vertical volcanic plug. Or we ran for our lives through the trees after disturbing a virulent German wasp nest. Once, after my dog came home bleeding from shotgun pellets in its hindquarters, my sister and I and another mate stood on an exposed section of track, heaping insults on the suspected gunman as he toddled round his house below. Then we vanished back into the bush.

As an adult, every time I re-enter that pungent smell of growth and decay, it’s a return to the same soft, green light of childhood. The boundary-less bush, alive and cognisant, reaching deep into itself.