What Am I Doing Here?

On a cold winter's day slap bang in the middle of June a hive of activity is happening at The Shade House. The name's a bit of a joke because on that day the only screen required is as protection from the frigid rain.

Rod Brown is in charge of dozens of people who are rugged up against the chilly squalls. They are variously lugging plants into flat deck utes and SUVs, straightening out used plant bags, bagging plants with a trowel or transferring them from one tray to another. This sort of thing is a constant activity at this place hidden down a small valley a stone's throw from the Stone Store.

The Shade House generates plants from seeds and given there are currently 26,000 plants in various stages of propagation it looks, feels and sounds like a commercial operation. Yet it's entirely volunteer-run with a core of 17 very passionate 'staff'. Mr Brown says if they behave themselves they'll get lunch once a year.

The entire raison d'être of The Shade House is to regenerate the habitat and examples of the plantings they've done in the past 13 years can be found in places like the Heritage Bypass, Okiato-Russell Walkway, Pompallier House, Urupukapuka Island, various marae and literally dozens of other islands, walkways, hills and valleys scattered throughout the Far North. Seeds collected from one area properly return as saplings via The Shade House to the same area a year later.

Rod Brown has an air of quiet authority about him when he's issuing necessary directives so it's no surprise to learn he was a ship's commander in the Royal New Zealand Navy. That is, until his former naval career was literally sunk.

He commanded the HMNZS Tui which is now a dive site after it was scuppered off the Tutukaka Coast in 1999 and which, he says, is 'better than making it into razor blades for China." He was also the first navigator on New Zealand's last Leander-class frigate HMNZS Canterbury which was sunk to become an artificial reef in Deep Water Cove in 2007.

After the navy he joined New Zealand's health system to be in charge of capital works and oversaw the construction of the Starship Hospital in Auckland. After 13 years and an 'endless list' of nomenclature changes (Crown Health Enterprises and Regional Health Authorities to name just two) he thought he'd go mad.

"But knowing the state of the mental health system, I thought I should bugger off before I went completely insane," he says. He buggered off to Kerikeri 13 years ago and has been involved in protecting the environment and his sanity as chairman of Vision Kerikeri. If you were in the Bay of Islands on the shortest day of the year you would have found him and numerous other volunteers planting 350 metres of the edge of the Wairoa Stream by Cobham Bridge in Kerikeri in a back-breaking, messy, muddy and bitterly cold exercise.

You'd have to be mad to do it, you'd think, and all for a free lunch afterwards. But for those who give of their time, a hunger to protect the environment is sustenance itself.