KEY POINTS:
Paul Holmes braves the wilderness of Thames to lunch with Green Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons.
The Greens have sent us a map. It describes the route to "The legendary hard to find but easy to get to Pakaraka Farm." It keeps going round in my mind and is doing my head in.
On the back of beyond side of Thames I have no idea where I am. I ask a woman doing some gardening where Jeanette Fitzsimons lives. Up the way and across the river, she tells me. It is all bush and hills and I wonder if I will have to ford this river.
Eventually I point the nose of my large, incorrect and thirsty car into a gravelled lane that winds into the bush.
I think about parking well out of sight of the house and covering it with foliage. The car is low-slung and the track is brutal.
A narrow, jerry-built bridge appears before me. I am headed into the heart of darkness and think I am going to die. Across the bridge I swing the car an immediate 90 degrees to the right, just making it round the corner under dense, overhanging bush.
The terrain opens out and the track winds up to the house in the distance and I plonk the Bentley a few metres from the front door of the home of Jeanette Fitzsimons' and her husband Harry Parke.
Fitzsimons is smartly dressed and nicely made up, wearing that shy, radiant smile that makes her eyes sparkle.
Harry has a friendly weather-beaten face and greets me with a good country handshake. I ask if I may smoke a cigarette. Harry pulls out a packet of Winfield Red and we light up.
We look out across the lush green valley that slopes down to the river below, our backs to the house that is built into the hill behind us and faces directly north to maximise the warmth of the sun. There are solar panels everywhere. I tell Harry his driveway is quite something.
"Should have seen it before we put 40 tonnes of metal on it," he replies.
I ask him where I should put the butt. "Throw it over the wall into the paddock down there," he says amiably. I look immediately across at the Leader of the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand. She smiles.
"Harry isn't very environmental with his butts. He throws them in the paddock and the sheep eat them. That isn't very organic, is it."
So Harry is not perfect. I am liking Harry. I have always liked Jeanette Fitzsimons. A young woman appears.
"This is Romina, our wwoofer," Jeanette says.
"I beg your pardon," I say, thinking I have misheard.
"Wwoofer. Worldwide Workers on Organic Farms. Romina's from Cologne. She's been here a few weeks."
Fancy that. A world exchange programme to help organic farming young people see the world. Romina seems quite at home.
On a sun-drenched outside table is a bowl of olive oil from their own trees with some grainy organic bread next to it for dipping.
We make our way up a steep path to see the trees. On the side of a walkway across a narrow mountain stream is a machine the size of a circular saw.
"That's our mini-hydro," says Jeanette. "When there's water in the stream it generates power."
Lunch is ready. We step inside. Downstairs is a kitchen, a dining area and a lounge, all facing north. Up against the wall next to the dining table is Jeanette's large woodfire stove cooker on which she cooks most things.
I ask to use the lavatory. As I close the door behind me and lift the lid I see it is most unusual. The hole drops straight down under the house. A generous waft of, shall we say, flavour, inhabits the air ascending from it.
"What kind of toilet is that?" I ask upon my return.
"Clivus Multrum," says Harry.
"A what?"
"Clivus Multrum. The waste drops straight down into a tank and works its way down the hill. By the time it gets to the bottom of the tank it's become compost. 150m litres of compost a year, we put it round the trees."
I look at the salad in front of us and turn to Fitzsimons. She is ready for it and smiling.
"No," she shoots back emphatically, grinning. "We do not grow our vegetables in it. Richard Prebble said that years ago. He said we grow our vegetables in our own s***. It's not true. We don't. We put it round the trees. And even if we did put it round the vegetables, at least we'd know what we're eating."
Can't argue with that.
The first course is tomato soup, made of last year's tomatoes which Fitzsimons froze. Red Thai curry soup, to be exact, and very tasty.
Fitzsimons gets up to cook the main course, asparagus omelette, and I talk to Harry.
Harry earned his living shearing sheep for 20 years. They have 87ha of land here at Pakaraka, of which they farm 12, the rest of it being bush on the steep hills straight up behind them.
The farm renders them pretty near self-sufficient in everything. They grow their own meat, collect their own milk and their own eggs.
They are 100 per cent self-sufficient in electricity supply, except when they run a petrol generator on the odd occasion.
Harry grows chestnuts. He says he sells them off the tree, but makes more roasting them at a local farmers' market. He has a production forest of macrocarpa and Tasmanian blackwood. I look out across the landscape.
He has planted a lot of natives, 23 varieties, including kahikatea and totara, many of which he raised as seedlings. He has feijoa, and lemon and apple trees. He runs the farm, runs the wwoofers, runs the stock and cooks for me, says Jeanette.
Harry has two sons and two grandchildren. Fitzsimons herself has two sons, a daughter and one grandchild. They are very nicely balanced as a couple and they are easy to be with. There is a calmness about them as individuals and a calmness about them as a couple.
They both came out of the Values Party. Harry joined in 1973, Fitzsimons when she got back from overseas in 1974. They met at a Values Party meeting in the late 1980s, when their first marriages had ended, and married in 1994.
The three-egg omelette with the chopped asparagus in the middle is robust and hearty. As we eat, I get really careless and tell her I disagree with her on genetic modification.
"Take the apple," I say. "One of the biggest issues the apple people in Hawke's Bay have is frost. Yet the apple is thought to have originally been developed in Siberia.
So the ancient apple probably had frost resistance. We already have Siberian stock in New Zealand. Scientists here could use GM to make a frost resistant apple."
Fitzsimons is having none of it.
"There's evidence that one gene might randomise the other genes already there," she says.
Now comes a short, amiable lecture on GM corn. I let it go. I do not know enough and, in any case, I've never won an argument with the female left.
Well fed, we are back outside in the sun, recharging our batteries. Time for the mischief questions.
Q"Russel Norman has a lot to say for himself for someone who's been there all of two minutes."
She looks straight at me. "Leaders are supposed to talk."
Q"Have you ever had a real job?"
She bristles.
"I've been a school teacher, a researcher and a university lecturer."
Q"Do you use a lot of wheat things?"
"What?"
"Wheat soap. Wheat stuff. Wheat by-products. Stuff like that."
"No, ordinary soap."
"You use soap?"
"Of course. Soap's all right."
She says she and Harry have a wonderful shower.
"Oceans of water, all heated with solar power and the wood stove."
She smiles with pleasure. She likes her shower, Jeanette.
Q"Do you kill bugs?"
"Wasps and snails," says Harry. Harry is very sensitive to the sting of the paper wasp. And he traps possums. She says that on their property, the birds are coming back, tui, bellbirds, kereru, riroriro.
Fitzsimons does a sudden imitation of the sound of a kaka that she recently saw.
"Our basic rule is live and let live. If it stops us eating, if it eats what we grow, we kill it."
Q"Do you use fly spray?"
"Harry uses it on the wasp nests. When I'm away,"
Harry and I chuckle.
"Pyrethrum based," she adds.
Q"Do you believe in free love?"
Fitzsimons laughs in surprise. "God, what does that mean these days?"
Q"Are you monogamous?"
"Yes."
Q"Are you nudists?"
They pause.
"Well," says Harry, "when you're working down the bottom of the farm and you feel like a dip in the river, you don't walk all the way back up to the house to get your togs."
Fair enough.
Neither Fitzsimons nor Harry seem remotely bothered by these questions.
They could be very uptight and defensive with t he election looming but they are not. They are relaxed and good humoured.
We talk about carbon sins, with one of the biggest being my car, just a few metres away.
Fitzsimons' biggest carbon sin, she says, is flying to Wellington and back. "But is it a sin if you can't avoid it?"
Says Harry, with a chuckle, "Yeah, like we couldn't avoid going to Tahiti for a holiday."
But Fitzsimons is serious. She says she wanted last year to go to a UN conference in Europe where she planned to see her son. The conference was cancelled, so Fitzsimons did not go.
But one day, she says, she and Harry will go for a good trip to Europe. They will show each other the places they each went in their youth.
I am sure Harry will find himself on that beach in Corsica where Jeanette Fitzsimons read the Values Party manifesto that changed the course of her life 36 years ago.
I say goodbye, and head back down the driveway, thinking what thoroughly decent people they are, and pointed my frightened car towards Auckland.
