Grant | Onehunga

“My name’s Grant and I’m from Onehunga. Sir Edmund Hillary came to our high school and gave a talk, and that was really inspiring, and you know, he had gone with an English team, but as a New Zealander, he was the one who went to the top, and also he shared his story with Sherpa Tenzing.

So that was the Kiwi attitude, to include, be inclusive of different people. Then, of course, he went on to do so much for the Himalayan people on the Nepalese side, and that’s fantastic.

What would I talk about with them?  Oh, what put them into motion, what gave them the drive. In their case, you know, what were they? Avid readers?  Did they want to write, themselves? Of course, Hillary actually climbed little mountains when he was a kid. The questions you ask about childhood. That influences us, and if we have an active, happy childhood where we could do things that we wanted to do, given that sort of freedom, then I think they must have had that, to be able to do that, to actually desire to follow right through, and they followed those dreams. They followed those dreams right through.

I value friends, family. I’m the centre of a family. I arrange family reunions for all the others who don’t sort of meet each other, and it’s held at my place. Friends, I’ll go, you know, around the world to go and meet friends, because I’ve got friends overseas as well as in New Zealand. So, those two, probably I treasure the most. In other words, human contact with important people in your life, who you’ve lived with, and had fun with and shared everything with. 

I was born in the wop-wops. A lot of people, especially Aucklanders don’t know where when I mention it. It’s a Maraetai Block, which is not Maraetai Beach or Maraetai Bay. It’s between Whakamaru and Arapuni, so it really is the wop-wops. It’s a forestry road, no electricity, rainwater, and self-sufficient. So, I’ve sort of been a self-sufficient person, I suppose from that, childhood with was fun, and tough.

Both Mum and Dad, we had two cows we milked. There’s six in the family, the two younger ones of course, didn’t do much, but we had to do everything to help. Chop the firewood, milk the cows at four o’clock in the morning, and my job, even when I was just a little kid, was crawling under the hedges and getting the eggs because I was so small, and then my sister had to do the fire-lighting for breakfast which is of course heating, and which was drying to clothes. So, we lived a self-sufficient life. Mum and Dad were the role-models there. You know, if something had to be done, we just went and did it. Uncles and aunties, they were the same, too. We shared the bottling. If somebody had that fruit tree and this one had the other fruit tree, then we’d just swap big jars of fruit for the winter times, and it’s quite cold there so a lot of things don’t grow. In Auckland, I have vegetables all year round, and I supplement those vegetables with those I buy here at the markets, the unusual ones that I don’t have, but otherwise, every morning I’m collecting vegetables from the garden, wintertime and summer.”