Bob Mankelow followed the footsteps of his deerstalker father with a love of the great outdoors. Now 73, he's spent 50 years passing on that passion to a new generation.
Physical exhaustion is catching up with retired reserve soldier Bob Mankelow.
If his Youth Search and Rescue (YSAR) students are walking too fast in the bush, he throws them a distraction.
"'Oh, look at this tree'," he tells them.
"I start talking about the tree just to get a breather in. I'm not as fit as I used to be."
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Exhaustion won't get in the way of his outdoor addiction, though.
He'd just started primary school when he first went bush with his deerstalker dad, and it's a chapter of his life that's never closed.
As well as a lifetime of hunting and working outside, he spent 47 years as a part-time soldier in the Territorial Force (TF), reaching the rank of Staff Sergeant in the 6th Hauraki Battalion Group.
He's also volunteered for dozens of organisations from YSAR, where he's one of seven co-founders, to the New Zealand Defence Force, where he teaches resilience training to New Zealand SAS soldiers.
His bushcraft skills come from his upbringing, and from participating in jungle warfare training.
He started teaching self-reliance in the bush and the use of native plants for medicine to his local TF unit, and then was approached by the NZ Defence Force to help with their Aumangea programme ("be strong"), which involves small groups of soldiers being taken from their normal environment into the Whanganui wilderness for 33 days.
As well as being put under pressure, Mankelow gets soldiers to hug a tree.
With their muscly arms wrapped around rough bark, he asks: "Tell me what you're feeling?
"Does the tree feel warm to you?'
"Some of them actually take it on board and feel the spirit of the tree. Others, nothing, because they are not receptive.
"I say: 'All I'm trying to do is make you comfortable with the realm of Tane. Don't be frightened of the tree'.
"A lot of these fellas, they're scared of the bush. They're not comfortable, it's not their realm.
"People grow up and have never been in the bush and suddenly become a soldier and have to do all this heavy, physical stuff, and they go off to Borneo and all over the world to get jungle training, but they're still not comfortable in that environment."
People grow up and have never been in the bush and suddenly become a soldier and have to do all this heavy, physical stuff, and they go off to Borneo and all over the world to get jungle training, but they're still not comfortable in that environment.
Teaching bushcraft
skills has landed him awards, including a Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year "local hero" medal for his ongoing work with YSAR, where his lessons have a life-saving purpose.
Students learn to take care of themselves in difficult outdoor environments and eventually aid police and skilled volunteers with official searches.
The three-year programme was launched in Tauranga in 2007 and is also offered to Auckland students.
"The potential amongst some of our young people is just fantastic," he says.
"They've got their futures ahead of them and they're looking toward it and they give it hell."
Their energy charges his soul.
He fittingly wears a T-shirt with a picture of a mountain on it and the words "hunger to explore" and "forever seeking adventures".
Fellow founding YSAR tutor Steve Campbell calls him a "volunteer extraordinaire", and while he's slowing down, the bush clearly has an anti-ageing power.
He half-jokes he won't stop volunteering until he dies.
"Going to a rest home doesn't appeal. I have trouble sitting in the backyard under the tree catching flies sometimes. I have to get up and weed a bit."
As well as YSAR, he volunteers for Land Search and Rescue (LandSAR). Ngatuhoa Lodge, The Duke of Edinburgh Award, Outdoor Education New Zealand (he is chairman), Forest and Bird, the New Zealand Deerstalkers' Association, and previously volunteered for the Mountain Safety Council.
Before retirement a decade ago, he worked for the New Zealand Forest Service, Department of Conservation as a ranger - where one of his areas of expertise was whale strandings - and then as a contractor to Environment Bay of Plenty.
He also did a stint for Work and Income with youth at risk.
He's done so much it's hard to keep track.
"The flow diagram would be interesting, wouldn't it?" he quips.
Friend Mark "Dingo" Noack, who volunteers for YSAR, LandSAR and Tauranga Response Team (nzrt16), says Mankelow has mentored a lot of people, including himself, and is a Tauranga icon.
"He's probably too generous with his time, to be honest.
"I think at one point he was with five different organisations volunteering. The outdoors comes first with Bob, everything else comes second.
"I would probably say urban life is his second home. His first home is the bush."
Mankelow has a charisma about him which keeps students on the edge of their seats.
At a recent YSAR camp, Noack watched him engage a 16-year-old in a one-on-one chat for an hour, about native plants, Māori history and how they connect.
"He's almost like a magician with presenting stuff and the way he keeps people engaged.
"The knowledge he has is phenomenal. How we're doing to download it out of his head I'll never know."
He's almost like a magician with presenting stuff and the way he keeps people engaged. "The knowledge he has is phenomenal. How we're doing to download it out of his head I'll never know.
Born and bred in Tauranga, Mankelow originates from pioneer stock.
His dad, Herbert "Bert" Stewart Mankelow, was the youngest of 12 children and lived in a tent before his father saw pitted the timber for a slab hut in the Waipa district.
He met Mankelow's mother Doreen Frances Watkins in Tauranga, where she was a theatre usherette, and the eldest of 10 children. They had three sons.
When Bert returned from the war, the family spent three years in a one-bedroom hut in Tauranga Domain's transit camp, before shifting into a statehouse on 19th Ave.
After leaving school, Mankelow studied to become a fitter turner/machinist with sawmilling engineers AA Edwards & Sons and was awarded a trip to Outward Bound in 1966 for being their top apprentice.
At this time he also joined the TF and he remains on the 6th Hauraki Regiment Association committee.
His Outward Bound experience redirected his focus to working in nature.
One of his earliest memories is sleeping under a tree with Bert, at age 5, and looking up at the stars through the leaves.
Later, he recalls the two of them eating fresh deer liver on buttered bread, cooked on an open fire beside a fantail's nest.
After Outward Bound, he got involved with setting up youth programmes Compass, and Outdoor Experiences, and worked on the construction of the Kaimai Tunnel.
A year later in 1967, a group of old soldiers was forming outdoor education centre Ngatuhoa Lodge in Omanawa.
Mankelow volunteered to be their secretary and treasurer, and assisted with their Kaimai Youth Camp Society and has stayed involved since.
He worked for Ngatuhoa Lodge as their summer outdoor education instructor, and in the winter the New Zealand Forest Service, where one of his jobs in the 1970s was to research the Kaimai Ranges' 427 different native plants and learn their Māori names.
He's since become somewhat of a guru on native plants and has 27 species in his backyard at home which he shares with wife, Jocelyn. The couple have four children.
Through New Zealand Forest Service, he also supervised work gangs in huts, teaching them life skills.
"How to cook your feed and look after yourselves," Mankelow says. "Some of these boys came straight out of school and had no idea."
He reckons lack of knowledge is even worse now that modern life is increasingly spent indoors.
Similarly, he volunteers for Tauranga's Hunts course run through the NZ DeerStalkers' Association, which trains first-time recreational hunters.
"We're getting quite a few older people doing these Hunts courses now because they've never been brought up in the family to be hunters, so they're starting off at 40 or 50 to learn bushcraft skills and how to track animals, how to bone them out, that sort of thing.
"That's cool," he says.
Mankelow takes great pride in passing on his knowledge even though he doesn't hunt much any more.
A bleed in the back of his shooting eye means his vision is blurred in the middle, and he's had to train his left eye instead.
"I'd rather take photos these days but I don't even take the camera half the time. I just go and enjoy the bush."
Tauranga Hunts course senior instructor Keith Theobald says Mankelow's knowledge, particularly around native plants, is "unbelievable".
"He's right in his element and keeps everybody absolutely engrossed."
Theobald, who has hunted six of New Zealand's seven deer species, still goes bush at 84 and has on his wall at home a Himalayan tahr and sika head.
"It's knowledge of the outdoors that takes you into places that unless you had that knowledge, you wouldn't go," he says.
"So many youngsters these days have never been off the tarseal.
"When [our students] come back so excited and say: 'Guess what? I've got my first deer, would you like a bit of back steak? It's great to get that enthusiasm."
It's that passion that also keeps Mankelow hungry for more adventures.
"That's why I'm still alive," he says.
"Sitting by a creek and watching the water flow around the rocks, listening to the birds sing to you, the rustling of the leaves and the breeze … It's great for the soul."
