Check out the GwenGary website.

In the nearly-19 years that I have lived outside my native New Zealand (and in all my travels around our little blue-green planet), I've seen some pretty impressive sights, had some high times, met some terrific people and marveled at a fair number of wonderful things.

But during a recent trip back to New Zealand, I realised that I've been particularly blessed in one area of life; one that wasn't fully appreciated at the time and one which has only been better appreciated recently.

I'm talking about the place I grew up in.

Because I've never found anywhere else in the world, that I'd rather have spent my most (according to Freud) formative years.

In 1973, my folks decided to depart the suburbs of Auckland and moved their young family to a block of farmland in the Northern Bay of Plenty. It was a pretty bold move to swap the relative security of wage-packet suburbia for the ups and downs of rural self-employment; to be at the mercies of both markets and meteorology. But they wanted a life less ordinary for their family and so they were determined to make it work.

Our new family home on a plot of pasture land was certainly different. For a start it had no house or basic amenities other than water. We initially spent 8 weeks living in a tiny caravan while Dad built the house pretty much from scratch. We heated water on a stove, used an outhouse loo and ran lights on a battery. A very organic existence that has only become popular in more recent years (at the time we simply regarded it as a temporary inconvenience).

They named their little slice of heaven: GwenGary; a pun on their names and our family's Scottish lineage.

When I think back to that time, I mostly remember feeling like I was on some extended form of camp-out, just one that also involved school. It was great!

Once we had a more solid roof overhead, my folks turned their attention to the land itself and in the years that followed, grew one form of citrus fruit or another (mostly tangelos ). Citrus takes a good few years to come into production so cash crops like tamarillos and water melons were grown to pay the bills.

Some of my strongest childhood memories are related to the harvest. Coming home from school, chucking our school bags, books et all into the laundry room just inside the back door before heading out to help with the picking, or into the packing shed, taking our place on the factory floor where we were needed. My folks both expected us to do at least an hour after school each day and a full day on the weekend, reasoning that it was a family business and we were in the family. This was followed by chores, homework, dinner and ablutions (in no particular order).

But it wasn't all work either. Dad's family is fairly large and we often had extended family swinging by to see us. Most of our cousins are male and like all boys we delighted running or riding our bikes everywhere, climbing every large tree on the place or swimming in the pool that my folks put together in later years.

My dad got hold of an old plywood car crate and built us a great a-framed hut on stilts under one of the biggest walnut trees down at the rear of the place. It had it's own bunk bed and even an old crank-handle telephone which ran on batteries and was connected to the house by a wire strung along the top of a fair length of fence. In later years the hut became a sort of toolshed but in it's heyday, it was the coolest place to be an 8-year old boy. At night in the summer we would camp out in the hut, scrump a few apples from next door, tell ghost stories and fall asleep with the window open, listening to the lonely hoot of the Moreporks in the Macracarpa trees.

In later years, the citrus was replaced with kiwifruit. By then I had left home and was living firstly in Wellington and then in Auckland, before heading over to the other side of our big, water-covered rock, in 1990.

This year, while home on a visit, I was able to take part in the kiwifruit harvest for the first time ever. It was very different from the citrus harvests that I remember; all very streamlined, better mechanised, arguably more efficient and certainly faster. But after the harvest was done, the last truck had rolled out and the dust had settled, the land still had the same quiet charm I recall in my memories of a childhood home...

I remember parties and fishing trips, cricket games and tennis matches. I remember bonfires and BBQ's, storms, sunsets and star-filled skies, the first time I swam over 200 lengths of the pool and the time I flew over the handle bars of my bike when a wheel bearing locked up (ouch!).

I remember squeezing fresh tangelo juice and helping make a huge pot of blackberry jam after we stumbled on an enormous bramble patch during an abandoned fishing trip. I remember summer salads of smoked stingray with fresh seasonal veges and winter leg-of-lamb roasts and casseroles. I remember cutting firewood and riding on the tractor mowing lawns, the smell of fresh coffee and the taste of home-made wine.

I remember my first day of college and the last day of many harvests (often followed by a party). The winter frosts and the occasional summer storms. I remember the smell of wet walnut wood and green things growing. And the taste of honeycomb taken straight from one of several hives, once a year.

It was a great place to grow up. And now it's up for sale.

I just hope that whoever buys it, has kids that will love it as much as I should have.

Check out the GwenGary website.