Thames hills alive with the Sound of music
Fourteen people, one house, many instruments — this is the tale of the Shelling family, writes Libby Wilson.
There’s a waiting couch outside the bathroom in the Shelling household. When you have 14 people in one Coromandel Peninsula home – and a bathroom with the toilet inside – that’s how it has to work.
If you don’t get up as soon as the bathroom door opens, you lose your turn.
There is a loo outside, for emergencies, mother Shelley Shelling said.
No-one wants to use it, though, because of the spiders.
A few things make this family stand out, apart from the size – most notably that all members are musical.
Getting instruments out or dusting off their vocal cords is a nightly routine and, yes, they’ve had comparisons to the von Trapp family in The Sound of Music.
‘‘If only we sounded as good as that!’’ eldest child Hannah Shelling says.
The Christian family has been living on a lifestyle block in Tapu, north of Thames, for almost three years, and the children are homeschooled.
Getting to their place requires a winding trip up Tapu Coroglen Road, with its one-way sections and stream running alongside.
At the gate, a ginger-haired boy in gumboots is waiting on a motorbike, and grins when asked if he’s part of the Shelling family.
Down there and to the left, says the boy: David, 15.
He kicks the bike into life, and leads the way, over a ford spanning the stream – it’s low – and up to the family home.
The red, American-style barn still has bare earth around, some with what looks like a volleyball net strung up over it.
But it’s not that which grabs the attention: the whole family has come out to greet their visitors – or, at least, it feels like it.
They stand between a sleepout and the main house chatting about getting to the main road when the stream rises. A blonde girl in a pink top comes over to offer a hug.
‘‘My name’s Elizabeth, but you can call me Lilly,’’ the six-year-old says.
Despite the throng it turns out this isn’t even the whole family; 16-year-old Daniel is at work on a building site down the road.
The family crowds onto the couches in the living room, where violins, guitars and ukuleles hang from the wall, above two pianos.
The Sound of Music is mum Shelley’s favourite film – required watching at least once a year.
It comes to life with the Shellings’ hilltop rendition of My
Favourite Things, sung overlooking a favourite view up the back of the property.
Among the family are singers, guitarists, ukulele players, pianists, a flautist, violinists, cellists, and a harmonica player.
The family’s nightly routine includes squeezing around the dining table to eat, then playing and singing together in the lounge, plus a bit of reading the Bible and talking about life.
Many members have – or used to have – music lessons, some are teaching themselves, and they might read music or work from chords.
Christian music is a staple but styles really depend on personality and the instrument.
Yet the Shellings are embarrassed to have the focus on them because of music.
‘‘We’re still learning,’’ Hannah says. ‘‘I can think of so many friends who are so much more accomplished at doing this kind of thing.’’
Mostly, they play at home, and maybe at Thames Baptist Church or a rest home.
Nerves ran high when friends talked them into performing at a late February Thames Music Group concert.
Music has always been a feature of the relationship between Shelley, 48, and Andrew, 46, as her voice caught his attention at youth group functions.
Tell the guitar story, the kids urge.
Andrew played a bit, and eventually asked Shelley for lessons.
‘‘That was the way I got into the door and into the home and presented before mum and presented before the brothers and sisters.’’
Despite both being sporty, Shelley and Andrew picked music as a binding force for their family.
Part of that is about logistics, Shelley said. ‘‘We just can’t be tripping people around to sports practices and sports teams and playing on the weekend.’’
‘‘The music is something we can do together as a family and also, hopefully, they’ll get to the stage where they’re good enough to remember it for the rest of their lives, and also be a blessing to others.’’
Once, the family cranked up the speaker and sang a Christmas carol to their neighbours across the valley.
‘‘When special occasions present themselves, [Andrew’s] quite open to doing something weird and out there,’’ Shelley says.
The Shelling parents have been married about 20 years, but have quite different personalities.
Andrew has hard-working Dutch heritage and likes structure, Shelley says.
He draws up where everyone will sit when they travel by car – a very contentious topic.
‘‘We just can’t be tripping people around to sports practices and sports teams and playing on the weekend. The music is something we can do together as a family and also, hopefully, they’ll get to the stage where they’re good enough to remember it for the rest of the lives, and also be able to be a blessing to others.’’
Shelley Shelling
Shelley is at the opposite end of the spectrum, as she’s part Samoan and super laid back.
She loved school and was top of the class, whereas Andrew didn’t get School C but found success when he got into building.
‘‘We didn’t start off planning to have 12 children,’’ Shelley says. ‘‘We just had them one at a time and just kept going.’’
She was 27 when they married and 30 when Hannah – their first child – was born.
Different personalities play out in the next generation too, eldest child Hannah adds.
The kids who take after dad are the house-cleaners – ‘‘the house is the way it is at the moment because of those people’’ – for example, and others, including her, are more about hospitality and having a happy time together anyway.
Some struggle to find space for quiet time, others aren’t bothered by being in the thick of it.
Then there are the different bents: Joseph has an almostpermanent cowboy hat, Noah deals with all the bugs, Rebekah’s good at crafts with the younger girls, and David says ‘‘apparently I’m the clown of the family’’.
Hannah has earned a reputation for being good at logistics, partly because of a chore teams approach she adapted from a camp.
‘‘This was how they organised 50 people, and I was like, that will work for us.’’
The kids are in teams, and rotate between chores each week.
Hannah doesn’t cook all the time now, so the others can learn.
And you can learn to clean, Esther interjects.
‘‘Yeah. That’s not my strong point,’’ Hannah continues, with a grin.
Almost three years ago, the family had a big lifestyle change: uprooting from west Auckland.
Up there, Andrew built milliondollar, one-off homes.
It was a learning curve when the family fell for Tapu, decided to sell up and do things as cheaply as possible.
‘‘Right now, we really have to look at every little penny that’s going out,’’ Andrew says.
‘How do you afford it?’ is normally the second question people ask when they find out the size of his family – right after ‘don’t you have a TV?’
After six months of heading down to Tapu at weekends, the family moved down.
Space-wise, their 190sqm home is similar to past places, even if Shelley hankers after a bigger kitchen.
They may up-size on the site in future but have cut back on the Auckland-sized plans they arrived with.
Budgeting for the move allowed two years for Andrew just to work on the land, but time disappeared fast.
He’s since started businesses he can run from home – one selling trailers for fibre optic cable drums, another building sleepouts.
Frugal living led to him discovering the ‘‘seagull centre’’ – a recycling and recovery centre by the Thames dump, and the kids got adept with altering clothes from the op shop.
Community members have sent
‘‘People will think we’re trying to protect our children from the world, and that’s why we’re keeping them locked up at home and doing our own thing. But, really, we’re not . ... We’re trying to prepare them for when they go out into the world.’’ Shelley Shelling
fruit, vegetables and buns the Shellings’ way.
They buy in bulk, and have a house cow which Esther is in charge of milking, a couple of ‘‘beefies’’, and chickens.
Long term, as their garden grows, they want to become more self-sustainable, and share excess produce with other locals.
Shelley imagines people will have their ideas about why the family chose home-schooling, given their rural spot, Christian faith and large family.
‘‘People will think we’re trying to protect our children from the world, and that’s why we’re keeping them locked up at home and doing our own thing. But, really, we’re not . ... We’re trying to prepare them for when they go out into the world.’’
According to Hannah, the kids are ‘‘way more social than we have ever been’’ in the Coromandel, with communities in both Tapu and Thames.
Home-schooling is just more practical, Shelley says – imagine the uniforms, school trips, and morning rush otherwise.
Flexibility to do what suits the kids is another drawcard, as dad Andrew was a practical child who felt disheartened by book learning.
So, though the family could double the roll at local Tapu School, their school day generally starts around the dining table.
They start together, with memory games, singing, project work, reading some curriculum.
After morning tea, people branch off to work at different levels: maybe maths activities on the computer, piano practice, reading comprehension, the younger ones might work with an older buddy.
They add bits to their Americanbased curriculum to make it more Kiwi, and Shelley is open to working towards NCEA qualifications if the kids need it.
There are life lessons too, like when Esther helped David’s goat gave birth to triplets – only one survived.
Seeing the goat struggling, the family took a library book to the paddock and David read out what can happen in a multiple birth.
‘‘Even I didn’t want to do it,’’ dad Andrew says. ‘‘But [Esther] was in there, putting her hand in the backside of a goat, and twisting it, and pulling it out.’’
After all the questions, it’s time for a quick family lunch.
Tins are pulled out of bread makers, fruit and veg chopped, spreads out, and chocolate chip slice made by Rebekah handed around.
Once the kids have a munch, and a few photos, it’s gumboots on, grab instruments, and jump into the trailer behind the red Massey Ferguson tractor or trudge up the hill.
Among long grass at the top the Shellings turn von Trapps and the Coromandel ranges become the Alps.
They sing My Favourite Things with 16-year-old Daniel – home on lunch break – playing guitar.
A rope swing on the hillside seems to sweep out into nothingness over the tree-lined valley, and the kids can’t resist having a go for long.
While the Shellings’ life may intrigue others, Shelley says they’re just a normal family.
‘‘Well, slightly different than normal, I guess, in the fact that we have got a few more bodies.’’