Tuff Crater: Whinging children, disgruntled parents and a maar.

After the enthusiasm of our first climb, week two proved less invigorating. We had planned to head up Big King, but after a busy Saturday, a Sunday morning visit to the North Shore, and it just being so damn hot, we couldn't face dragging ourselves up a relatively steep hill. So we thought, maybe let's just take the kids to Onepoto Domain, because a) it's on the way home, b) it's a reclaimed crater or maar, and c) it's one of the best playgrounds in Auckland. Then my brother suggested we go to Tuff Crater over the ridge from Onepoto, which despite being just off the motorway and maybe five minutes drive from where my in-laws live, we had never been.* Never even seen beyond the mangrove swamp harbour entrance near the Esmonde Rd off-ramp.

So Tuff Crater it was, with the plan for a cheery walk around its edge and a stop-off at Onepoto to give the kids a play on the way back home. As a treat.

The minute the words "as a treat" escape your lips, you should know it ain't happening. 

Looking across Tuff Crater to Mt Victoria in the distance

Fulfulling our Auckland suburban requirements, we popped into a cafe in Birkenhead Point to fuel ourselves for this less than taxing lagoon saunter, steeling myself with caffeine and bribing the children with a gingerbread man and fizzy raspberry drink, and a gingerbread rocket and chocolate fluffy respectively. Then we drove down through Little Shoal Bay, back up to Onewa Rd and past Onepoto to find this fabled mangrove swamp lagoon crater surrounded by Northcote houses and the motorway.

Tuff Crater is named Tuff Crater because it is a tuff ring, or a maar: a low profile volcanic vent located in a lake or coastal region. It is also known as Tank Farm, because of the petrochemical tanks stored there during World War II, but shouldn't be confused with the other prosaically named petrochemical tank storage facility on Wynyard Wharf in the city called Tank Farm.

In Te Reo Māori it is Te Kopua o Matakamokamo, the basin of Matakamokamo; a hotheaded chap whose domestic squabbles ran afoul of Mahuika, the goddess of fire. Onepoto is the basin of his equally tempestuous wife Matakerepo.

Disgruntled child with drink by mangroves

We were a squabbling family by the time we found a street with access to the walkway. One child storming off ahead to see how far her legs could take her from the other child who didn't want to walk or to move and didn't want to be there and why couldn't we just go home now. Mock enthusiasm and idle threats abounded from the parents as we set off through a little grove of native trees around to the viewing platform. Where we discovered that the proposed bridge at the mouth of the lagoon was still very much a proposal, so we couldn't walk the full circumference anyway. Back we trod with one child crying foul play and the other child crying about anything he could think of at the time.

And no we didn't go to the park. NO ONE IS GOING TO THE PARK WITH THIS BEHAVIOUR.

So we went to my parents, who offered to take the kids out to Clevedon. Not for geological, but for geographical and genealogical betterment.

That was Tuff Crater.

P.S. Click here for a link to a much more informative description from the people at Bike Friendly North Shore.

* It is important to remember that my husband grew up in Takapuna and Tuff Crater is in Northcote. They are divided by more than just the motorway. My excuse is that I'm not from the Shore. Hey, how many times have you been to Pigeon Mountain or Stockade Hill, eh?      

Mt St John; Pastoral Idyll

Mt Eden from Mt St John (Sep 2012)

Tucked away between Market and Manukau Rds in the heart of Epsom is perhaps the most pleasantly suburban volcanic cone in existence. Surrounded by gracious villas and bungalows, not to mention a concentration of Auckland's private schools, you can often forget that Mt St John* is there and that it's actually public land. That's right, it doesn't belong to the gardens of houses along Ranfurly Rd or Mt St John Rd.

And it is quite lovely. In certain seasons, it even has a wee lake in the middle of the crater, with cows lowing in the pastures.

Back in September 2012, an enthusiastic wee girl in a Canada hoodie, dolly in hand, joined us in walking up the farmer's track from Market Rd. We had left the little one with grandparents - from his pushchair he was developing his now well-honed dislike of hill walking - and were enjoying being able to saunter up the easy 126m peak without negotiating cowpats and muddy grass with buggy wheels.

The amazing thing was despite being able to see this cone from my school tennis courts, having driven along Mt St John Rd more times than I've had hot dinners, and actually knowing a girl from school whose garden backed onto the hill, I had never been up to the summit and seen its pastoral views. We were utterly charmed.

There really were cows grazing by the pond.

Yet, like most of Auckland's maunga, the bucolic terracing of hillside and crater are signs of habitation much older than the surrounding early-twentieth-century suburb. Mt St John is Te Kōpuke and was a  pā. I do not know its strategic place in the network of villages and defences on the maunga of Tamaki Makau Rau, but you can still see the earthworks and kumara pits over which whare and other buildings would have been built.

Today, in the midday heat of a February Sunday, the grass was brown, the pond had dried up, and the cows were replaced by a handful of shorn sheep sheltering under the crater trees.

 It was hot though, and the boy child whinged muchly perched upon his father's shoulders, but the now somewhat older girl strode with gusto and the same enthusiasm of yore.

Mt St John is one of the little maunga, so it doesn't take long to get up and wander around the crater. Oh, it's a hill and I like hills. So here's to views to the Waitakere Ranges in the west and the Hunua Ranges to the east, the Waitemata Harbour and the Manukau Harbour, and all those mountains yet to (re)climb.

* I wish it was pronounced Mt "Sinjin", Jane Eyre-style, but it is prosaically Mount "Sint" John. 

Maunga - An Introduction

Thanks Wikipedia

Auckland is covered in small volcanoes or maunga. Approximately 53 cones, craters and maars scattered across the city; some prominent, some barely discernible, and a few quarried away entirely for the scoria rock and gravel. 

Rangitoto, Mt. Eden/Maungawhau, Mt Albert/Owairaka, Mt. Wellington/Maungarei, Mangere, One Tree Hill/Maungakiekie, Mt. Roskill/Puketāpapa, Mt. Hobson/Remuwera, Mt. St. John/Te Kōpuke, Big King/Te Tātua-a-Riukiuta, North Head/Maungauika, Mt. Victoria/Takarunga, the list goes on. Remnants of an ancient volcanic field, or in the case of Rangitoto, not ancient at all.

They are focal points of the city skyline, they name our suburbs, and provide open space for the city. Like any self-respecting Aucklander, I love them.

But like most Aucklanders, I tend to only visit them periodically. Mostly when you're giving the Auckland tour to visitors. First stop, a drive up Mt Eden to show them the city. Even when you live in the shadow of Mt Eden and always mean to regularly walk up it, most people don't. Though as of last month, you can no longer drive up Mt. Eden, so maybe we will all start the Auckland tour with a bracing ascent.

Back in 2012 when we had made the decision to move to Canada, we hatched a plan to walk up as many as we could with the kids. Even though they were only 3 3/4 and 17 months old when we first walked up Mt. Roskill on Sunday the 12th August 2012, we wanted a record of them with their maunga. We didn't know how long we'd be away and we wanted them to have Auckland in their bones, to have the mounts in their muscle memory.

Little Auckland Mountain Climbers - Puketāpapa (Aug 2012)

It turned out we were only away for two and a half years, so now that we're back we've decided to revisit the "weekly" mountain climbing. We'll go back to the ones we conquered, and finally get to those we missed. Shamefully, we never took the children to Rangitoto, and we grown-ups have a idea involving kayaks and Browns Island. It shall happen. I also thought this might be a fun then and now blogging project.

So welcome friends, come climb some maunga with us.

No, you can’t have the iPad! A rant about school reading in the digital age.

As an educator, I understand the benefits of online learning tools, particularly the easy access they provide to a wide range of material and information. However, as a parent I cannot overstate how much I hate my daughter’s online reading programme. I’m not going to name it for fear of accusations of online slander, but I hate it. HATE IT. It is the ruiner of evenings, the sucker of time, and the destroyer of the love of the written word.

I’ve decided not to waste my family’s time on it anymore.

As I wrote to the girl-child’s teacher today, “Just thought I'd let you know that my daughter won't be doing her reading for the next week (maybe longer) because there is a blanket iPad ban in our house at the moment, thanks to a couple of pretty extraordinary tantrums.”

Naturally, I made concessions about making notes in her agenda about books read and comprehension attained – BECAUSE I AM A LITERARY SCHOLAR AND ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT THIS – but really and truly, I cannot cope with the iPad wars in the name of education. Just send her home with an actual book.

For those who don’t know these kind of programmes, they’re apps which have a full set of reading books. You work through the lettered levels, like you would with your old printed reading books. They look just like the books and you swipe to turn the page. It’s a solid interface. However, the app my daughter uses reads the book to the child first, then you need to sit with the kid while she reads it, and then there are 5 to 10 multi-choice comprehension questions. It’s a good programme and I’m sure it works well for self-directed learning in the classroom, but at home with reluctant and disgruntled children it takes FOREVER.

Let’s be honest here, a lot of school reading books aren’t the most exciting stories. Well, obviously The Hungry Lambs, Boat Day, The Stars in the Sky, and Sliding and Flying (ooh, mustn’t forget The Sweet Porridge!*) had awesome stories, but that was in New Zealand during my time in primers. These American readers are mostly dull, and as you get up the levels, they’re pretty long.

Photo courtesy of Waterview Heritage Project

My immediate concern with having the story read to my child first was that she avoided having to figure out words for herself, but there are other issues with the interface. It can be hard to track text on a backlit screen (that’s why Kindles are so great), and on an iPad you can’t use your finger to follow the text. Because every time you touch the screen you run the risk of turning the page, which is pretty frustrating for a little kid. Also, if I forget to lock the aspect, every time my daughter turns the iPad slightly, the page flips round. Awesome. Ooh, let’s make an annoying game of that, shall we? Oh, yes, we shall.

Of course, the most galling thing about this app is that it’s on an iPad, and as we know, iPads are portals to child wonderment in the form of games and videos and a misguided perception of cool stuff somewhere else they can’t quite access, so who wants to read a boring school book when you’re on an iPad. Thanks, Steve Jobs. Oh yeah, I know you limited your kids from using your devices, but now the schools have made them compulsory. Cheers for that.

With every story comes bitter complaints for a game. Just one game. Just one.

It’s an iPad. They never want just one game, so soon the whinging and the negotiations and wailings begin, quickly followed by the blind rage of having the precious bloody iPad taken from their singularly focused persons. 

Reading is fun!

But wait, there’s more. While all this is going on, you’re dealing with the other child protesting his lack of the iPad. “But why does she get it? I want the iPad! It’s not fair. I want to read too. I want a game.”

And my boy-child is even worse when it comes to the bloody iPad.

Suffice to say, it’s up high, away, not to be used again. Probably until I get grief from my daughter’s teacher for not doing the reading.

* Let it be known that I did not have to look up these titles from the Ready to Read collection; they were so universally important to New Zealand education and reading that I just know them. I’ll always know them. Here's a picture of The Hungry Lambs, because hungry lambs make me happy about school reading.

By the (frozen) rivers of Babylon

It was at the post office on an absolutely frigid day in January 2014. We had been in Canada little over six months, and as the coldest winter in 30 years was setting in, the novelty of my new life as an immigrant was wearing off.

I was sending something back home and making cheery chitchat with the lady behind the counter. We were on friendly enough terms and she was asking me how things were going. Then she asked me directly:

“But how are you, really?”

She wore her own status as a landed immigrant in her accent, and I knew exactly what she meant.

I’m ok. Everyone is very nice and I’m in a privileged position as an immigrant. I mean, my husband lived here as a child, so we know people, and we have contacts. At least I speak English! But…

“Do you have a job?”

Then in that suburban strip mall post office, the outpouring began. My newfound comrade took the reins of the conversation, explaining how she had moved from India 12 years earlier, and how difficult it had been to find work as an immigrant. How it didn’t matter what her qualifications were, or years of experience, because all anyone cared about was “Canadian experience,” and how her husband never really understood because he got to go to work and meet interesting people, but she was stuck inside in the depths of a foreign winter with the children going mad and no one to explain to her what to do, and no one was that interested in who she really was.

Her rant full of experience and her concern for me as an individual was a lifeline, because in my privilege as a white, English-speaking, highly-educated immigrant, I was denying the shock of being a stranger in a new land. It allowed me to get upset for the first time since we arrived.

I never came to Canada expecting to waltz into my dream job. I am an academic and a musician; we know the dream job is often an unattainable beast, but I expected to be given a chance. I was upset because this act of settlement had shown me with frightening clarity that without the context of your family, friends, work connections, and a general knowledge of your abilities, you are just a faceless applicant with a CV. Whether I stated it or not, my CV screamed woman in her 30s, mother of two young children. NEXT.

My time in Canada hasn’t been all bad by any stretch of the imagination. I have picked up teaching work, I have presented research, I have sung in a professional capacity, and I have made friends with locals and other highly-qualified-but-out-of-work immigrants alike. But I am leaving, returning to a sense of connectedness and community I never fully appreciated until now.

  

People who have never moved countries always talk about your family. “Oh, it must be so hard without your parents nearby.” Yes, but there’s more. It’s hard always having to ask where to get basic services, and always having to check the nature of some specific bureaucracy. It’s frustrating to suddenly realise that you can’t call your doctor friends to check if the specialist you’ve been referred to is any good, because it dawns on you that you don’t know any doctors here. Hang on, you don’t actually know any lawyers either should the need arise for something to be signed, and you’re in a new country so there’s always something that has to be signed. How do I not know any lawyers? It feels like half my family and university friends and their parents are lawyers back home. Hell’s teeth, in Auckland, I’m a phone call away from a friendly chat with a couple of QCs to clarify a point, if I ever needed. My family are by no means “society”, but you don’t live in a city for six generations without knowing a few people.

Even in Scotland, where I studied for my PhD, my status as an active member of a university department, not to mention singing with St. Giles Cathedral, gave me connections to public institutions, the arts, the medical fraternity, the Church of Scotland, the legal profession, even the Scottish Executive. Just knowing those contacts are there is an immense comfort when you are a young, single woman in a new country. It makes you feel like you belong.

For my first year in Canada, despite making friends, actively trying to find work, joining research groups and choirs, it felt like I was mostly at home, and that my only social role was at the school gate or signing permission forms for my children.

Nothing I had done previously was of much relevance to the people around me. I was starting over, which is extremely difficult when you’re in your 30s and your primary focus is your children. At this stage in your life, you rely on walking into a rehearsal or seminar and having people say, “hey, Erin! We haven’t seen you for a while. Kids keeping you busy? Oh, by the way, you’re a bit of an expert on Margaret Fuller, right? What’s the deal with that letter to Beethoven?” Or asking me if I can help organise something because they know I rock at telling musicians what to do.  

Instead, I got condescending smiles and indifference when I gave my apologies for next week because I couldn’t get babysitting.

I am leaving Canada in a few months and returning to Auckland, where I can’t swing a cat without it hitting someone I know. So, you might be wondering where this post is going. Well, whenever you hear someone make some ill-informed comment about refugees and immigrants coming over here (wherever here might me) and stealing jobs and services, just tell them to stop being so ridiculous. Tell them how difficult and lonely it can be even for those of us who immigrate in the very best of circumstances. Tell them to spare a thought for all the people who have to, for whatever reason, give up their communities and connections for the hope of a better life. Remind them that that “better life” can be one shrouded in daily indifference and at times active hostility from new neighbours. Tell them to take the time to ask a new immigrant, “But how are you, really?”