Adventures can begin in your yard

By COLIN MOORE Travel editor

Backyards are likely to be the most ignored places in the great outdoors. The bush is always more luxuriant somewhere else, rivers flow with more excitement, nature wears a prettier face.

The great fortune of living in New Zealand is that backyards, even in urban areas, are adventurous places where much diversity of nature can be found.

All it takes to provide a microcosm of nature - the great outdoors in miniature - is a patch of scrub or bush, a creek, some exposed rock and, with luck, a touch of the coastline.

The sediment from the ancient super-continent of Gondwanaland, where New Zealand originated hundreds of millions of years ago, lies as surely behind an urban fence as it does in the wilderness areas of New Zealand's mighty national parks. Given half a chance, native bush will colonise backyards and bring with them birds such as tui and kereru.

Best of all about the mini-outdoors is that it is easily accessible. You can pass it walking to school, catching a bus to work or jogging around the neighbourhood.

When you know what to look for you will easily find a textbook of this land, of its flora and fauna, natural history and human history, right there in your backyard.

The Auckland metropolis has several well-known and well-loved urban reserves such as Smith's Bush and Kauri Glen in North Shore city. So do provincial cities. Most have fine stands of native bush and well-maintained pathways.

But these form only part of the outdoors in the "backyard." To fully appreciate what is available you need to be a bit adventurous and plan a route as you would for a tramping trip.

Tramping buddy Joe Scott-Woods recently took me on an adventure around his backyard. We climbed a mountain (Mt Albert), followed a meandering stream (Oakley Creek) where the early history of Auckland was on show in the exposed face of an old rubbish dump, and enjoyed some regenerating native bush at Western Springs.

Last week we tramped around my backyard in the village of Greenhithe on Auckland's North Shore.

It is an adventure I have done several times before, first as an outdoor exercise for our primary school and cub scout group. Along the way we discovered a microcosm of the New Zealand outdoors, particularly around the Auckland isthmus, with a macro message.

There are backyards like mine everywhere, which is why no attempt has been made to make this story any less parochial. By explaining my backyard I am explaining yours too. The "size" of your backyard is governed only by your interest in exploring it.

Check out my patch and see what I mean.

It is always best to start at the beginning, so let us imagine a beginning when there was no New Zealand, Australia or Antarctica. Instead there was one huge land called Gondwanaland and its east coast was somewhere to the west of New Zealand.

For millions of years earth from Gondwanaland was washed into the sea and settled on the floor of the ocean about where New Zealand is now. Eventually the silt was squashed into rock called greywacke. With the help of heaving forces inside the Earth it rose out of the sea to become New Zealand.

At first the baby country was attached to Gondwanaland, just like land that is reclaimed from the sea. But about 60 million years ago the super-continent broke into several parts. Among them, the islands of New Zealand were born.

If we can imagine that this process happened in just one year and began on the stroke of midnight on January 1, people would arrive in New Zealand at a microsecond before midnight on December 31.

Our journey around our backyard begins at our old school. Every community has a historic building. Ours is the Old School Building, built in 1893 and one of the oldest schools on the North Shore.

The timber for the one-room building was sent from Auckland to Lucas Creek on the scow Lady of the Lake and taken to the site by horsedrawn sledge. It cost the equivalent of $286.

The pupils, from Herald Island and Paremoremo, rowed to school. In the early days the school was also used as a meeting place, church and dance hall and those are the sort of activities that the Old School Building is mostly used for today. The building was moved to Collins Park in 1976 when it became a community centre.

To sit the proficiency examination in Takapuna in the early-1900s, pupils had to travel for three days. They would set off by boat from Greenhithe in the morning, spend the day in Auckland, take the ferry to Devonport, then go by steam-tram to Takapuna, where they would spend the night. The next day pupils would sit the exam, then return by the same route.

Collins Park, used for passive outdoor recreation, is named after an early English settler, Frederick Collins, who started an orchard in Greenhithe in the early-1900s and donated land for the park.

The community hall, built in 1914, is still used regularly by Greenhithe residents for dances, films, indoor sport and almost every kind of social function imaginable.

Not far from the hall is a road that used to be called Wharf Rd. You can still see an old wharf pile in the bank. Such upper-harbour waters were transport arteries for Maori and early Pakeha settlers.

The European settlers cut great stands of kauri from the banks of Lucas and Hellyers Creeks, then potholed the regenerating scrubland in search of kauri gum.

Next they tilled the land to plant strawberries and for orchards, the fruit going to market by boat. As Auckland grew, the ferries brought holidaymakers to Greenhithe and Herald Island.

In 1908 a daily ferry service from Greenhithe to the city began, leaving at 8 am and returning at 5.15 pm The fare was the equivalent of 30c return.

There is no shortage of marine diversity in this humble esturine backyard if you know what you are looking for.

When New Zealand Herald nature correspondent John Walsby did a survey for the Tauhinu Sea Scout troop, he found a formidable list of marine species in the mangroves and mud.

A study of the upper-harbour waters by the former Auckland Regional Authority listed snapper, flounder, mackerel, kahawai, mullet, school shark, parore and spotty.

I usually tramp around Humbug Pt where, in the 1920s, building sand was dredged until the mining eroded the cliff face. The point gives a great view of Herald Island.

But the tide was in, so we skirted the roads to a foreshore and bush reserve. Near here I always enjoy locating a survey peg bearing the number 31, because it marks the boundary of a block of land in Lisburn, a 38-lot subdivision of "villa sites, suburban farms on the Waitemata to be sold at auction by Samuel Cochrane on June 13, 1864."

Cochrane advertised that the property, as an investment, had no equal and that the land was excellent for agriculture, manufacturing and trade.

Lisburn never caught on as a name but the peg remains. I live on part of what was lot 26 at the auction.

We tramp around the edge of lot 38, once known as the Devil's Back, the highest point in the area. It gives a commanding view of the Waitemata, which is why the Ngati Whatua built Tauhinu pa there and the Government had an observation post from which they could make contact with a lookout on Rangitoto.

The heights are privately owned, but we bush-bash around the foreshore reserve, where native bush is regenerating thickly, until we reach the last vestige of the pa site - a trench and three distinct pits.

Heavy rain suggests it is time to quit and we have barely covered a quarter of my backyard. Like all good outdoor adventures , backyards always leave more to be discovered another time.