I grew up in Akaroa on Banks Peninsula, and my teenage years were in Dunedin. I then went to Wellington, which was where I’ve lived since I was nineteen. But I’ve always wanted to come back to the South Island. There’s always been this incredibly strong connection with this area. So four years ago, Shane Loader - my partner both in filmmaking and life - and I moved south. We spent two years in Dunedin while our house was being built near Middlemarch, and we’ve been here for two years.
The property we live on is part of an old farm that was subdivided. My parents have lived in the original stone farmhouse for nearly thirty years, but as they’ve got older, having us here gives them additional security. We’re just fifty metres away. Over the past thirty-five years we’ve been coming down here for holidays, which was always a bit more intense. It’s been nice to get to know them on a more every-day basis.
One of the harder things for all of us to adjust to is negotiating the fact that we are neighbours but we’re also family. None of us is well-practised in that sort of relationship. What I really enjoy, though, is dropping into each of my parent’s workshops and seeing what they’ve been up to. They are both compulsive makers – my father as a goldsmith and my mother as a weaver and gardener – and I love that they both continue with this work into their 80s. That’s inspiring and I hope that I, too, in my 80s, will be as absorbed as they are in creative endeavours.
Our most recent film, Kobi, was about my father Kobi Bosshard, who is known as the father of contemporary jewellery in New Zealand. There are a lot of films about prominent artists or people who have made a real contribution to their fields, and they’re often very hands-off – there’s a sense of remove between subject and filmmaker. But this was my story about my father and because he knows me so well he was very relaxed in front of the camera. It was fantastic making that film, a very intimate experience.
As independent filmmakers back in Wellington, Shane and I always had to work other jobs to make ends meet. It was a pretty precarious financial existence, and we never had the income to make use of the fantastic things that the city offers, like restaurants and music and concerts. So in that sense, life hasn't changed very much in moving to Middlemarch.
But the quiet here is so phenomenal! It's so special that you can go outside and you do not hear the rumble of traffic. The landscape feels incredibly wild and remote where we are, but we're actually only 10 kilometres from Middlemarch and 80 kilometres from Dunedin.
I've got the most fabulous vegetable garden, which feeds us for three-quarters of the year. It's all organic. I find the whole regenerative approach to land use and the ecological gardening movement incredibly exciting - learning about soil and ecology and water and how to grow things in this very harsh environment. Meadow gardening - that sort of wild gardening - is something I'm besotted with. From late spring to late autumn, our house is surrounded by a joyous mass of flowers - mainly California and field poppies, phaceilia, evening primroses and verbascum.
I have the privilege of living here in a new, superbly insulated and completely off-grid house - both energy and water - and it has been such an education in the management of resources, and living within our means. We are so aware of our energy consumption. There was some adjustment, but basically we've had no issues. We're in the south, so the daylight hours are shorter over winter. We might get two or three days where it's cloudy, and that can be pushing it a bit. We don't take it for granted that we can have a shower any time of the day we like.
The average water use per person in New Zealand is something like 200 litres a day; we're collecting everything from our roofs, so if we were using that much a day we would be out of water in a month.
Being off-grid has made me really aware of the resources available to us and how carefully we have to manage them. It's about learning to adjust. I think it's naive to think we can make fundamental inroads into tackling the issues of diminishing resources, climate change, poverty and inequality under capitalism. Nevertheless, things like regenerative farming, mass electrification, land and soil restoration, the provision of healthy homes, of meaningful work, an awareness of how mass consumerism and the glut of stuff impacts on all of us and the planet, are of course, steps in the right direction.
Something that has really hit me over the past few years is the issue of homelessness and what it means socially and psychologically to not have a home. Families who find themselves homeless are more often than not completely invisible, they're not the ones we see in the streets. I would very much like to make a feature drama about a homeless family set in Dunedin. I have been doing some research into this, and hoping it will be our next project.
This story is part of THREAD, a year-long project by Shepherdess made possible thanks to the Public Interest Journalism Fund through NZ On Air.
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