We have about twenty-five volunteers and they kind of naturally shift into
areas of their interest for work.
John, John and Harry are such a laugh.
They didn’t know each other when they first came here, so they’ve met here
and they’ve just struck such a bond up working here.
They make my job really enjoyable, they really add to my job satisfaction
because it’s just such a fun work environment. And because they want to be here and they
want to be helping us all the time I’m so grateful for them.
Yeah, they just do such incredible work.
We’re very lucky because our volunteers have been here for such a long time and they
spend a lot of time out in the park, so they have eyes and ears that are always noticing
things and picking things up…just as much as the staff do. They know the layout of the
park really well, we train them to as high standards as the staff are trained in.
So it’s all NZQA courses for chainsaws, tractors, LUVs etc so
we know they can take care of the tasks safely and they’re all capable.
And I think they really enjoy it so I think there’s that self-motivation for them to
find tasks and just go for it.
I have been coming here for six or seven years, much the same time as my two colleagues here
and we get on well – we laugh more than argue…In fact we never argue.
Am I right in saying that? - Absolutely quite true, I think you know
we just seem to know what we’re doing, and we get on with it and we don’t take life
too seriously. But you know, if we’re working then we turn into serious mode.
We just have in common that we like to do a variety of work and we also have a lot of
laughs along the way which makes it such a neat thing to do.
When we first came here John Gordon and John Pountney, we sort of got together
the three of us – a lot of people classed us as the Three Stooges but I like to say
the Three Wise Men. But anyway, we come here and besides doing a lot of valuable work we
also enjoy ourselves. When the rangers ask us to do anything, we do anything from making
new drains, to cutting trees down, to painting main gates, painting toilets – anything
the park needs done we do it. If you see here we dug drains all the way down here…
so the water run keeps off the main road, off the main track. We got a pipe and went underground
with the pipe to take the…to make the water run right down that hill there to make it
accessible for all the trampers, hikers, walkers we get.
When we first joined here none of the three of us had any particular skills relating
to regional parks. But Wendy the Community Ranger arranged for us to go on driving courses,
chainsaw courses, spraying courses, we’ve gone on quite a few courses. We know quite
our way about the park now, we do vermin control, we’ve been on courses for that, and anything
we don’t know, Wendy will try and find a suitable course for us to go on.
I retired possibly about seven years ago, and so I thought well I needed to keep
myself busy, do something…So I’d always loved the regional parks of Auckland and
Long Bay’s the nearest to me, I live in Birkenhead.
And I came along, no experience, I’d never used
a chainsaw before, I’d never trapped, I’d never ridden a quad bike – I hadn’t done
anything like that – and now I can! And I just find it’s very, very rewarding.
And a lot of people have said: Goodness me, you’ve reinvented yourself, you’re doing all these
jobs you’ve never done before. And I said because I enjoy it, and it’s a change and
it’s a challenge in what we do.
Well we’re checking all the traps, we check these every four weeks.
We have two types of traps here at Long Bay. We have the Timms – this is
what they call a Timms – and these are primarily to catch, or to trap possums.
And then John has got what he refers to as a DOC Trap, Department of Conservation trap.
Over the period of a month, and we’ve got three traplines in the park, we would
catch I’d say between twelve and fifteen, either rats, possums, stoats, whatever – a combination.
As you can see there’s not much left, but it’s a rat because of the long tail.
Being a regional park there’s always things to do, and sometimes we think: Oh...
there’s just not enough time to do it all. I mean, the main volunteer day is Tuesday, but
we also like to come down, a few of us on Thursdays. So we do a huge variety
of work and I guess that’s the main reason I enjoy coming here so much, it’s a beautiful
environment plus you’ve got fantastic people to work with, and yeah, we’ve formed quite
a good friendship over the years.
This is a fence we have erected recently to prevent people going too near the edge.
It’s quite cliff-edge here and it’s rather dangerous.
John, Harry and myself, we do communicate with each other to say: Hey are you going
down Thursday? Yeah, sure! So we all come down and we sort of say: Well let’s
ask Wendy: Shall we do this job, shall we do that job? And it just became a complete camaraderie.
We insist that Harry makes the coffee and we eat chocolate biscuits, and
I can’t think of a better lifestyle!
How long did we take to put the fence up?
That’s basically done. Right, well see you here.
Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, right.