Paul Thomas: Nostalgic bliss in a four-room bach

Francois Villon, the 15th-century French poet, vagabond, thief and prototype artist in revolt, wanted to know what had happened to the snows of yesteryear.

The middle-aged New Zealander is far more likely to yearn for the golden summers of our obligation and debt-free youth when the sun always shone, the beer never ran out, the barbie always started first time and, if you were prepared to go the extra few miles, you and your friends could have a perfect beach all to yourselves.

My blueprint for the authentic New Zealand summer holiday experience is Otama Beach, Coromandel, in the early 1970s.

Access was via the fearsome Black Jack Rd, no walk in the park for today's ubiquitous SUVs let alone a Ford Anglia. The notion that it's better to travel hopefully than to arrive definitely didn't apply to Black Jack.

I stayed in a bach with walls lined with empty wine bottles, each one with a story to tell.

With its medieval smells and low-flying but radar-less bluebottles, the long-drop dunny was no place for those who like to contemplate the big questions while answering nature's call.

When the sound of the sea receded to a gentle rinse and the insect chorus faltered in the midday sun, the vacuum was filled by the penetrating voice of a future governor-general engaged in ribald give-and-take and the somnolent drone of cricket commentary issuing from a future deputy prime minister's transistor.

Over the past three decades the common dream of one's own little slice of beachfront and the resultant property boom have changed the face of many of our loveliest beaches while also sounding a drawn-out death-knell for the traditional rough and ready bach.

Even so, many New Zealanders will still enjoy an authentic summer experience.

In my case that was on Great Barrier Island where it was easy to believe that the clock had been turned back 30 years, to the way summer used to be.

Our bach had four rooms: a bedroom, a toilet, a bathroom and a kitchen cum dining room cum kids' bedroom.

It had a gas-fired fridge, an appliance that must have inspired more foul language than the lawn mower and outboard engine combined. Ours behaved impeccably; the one in our friends' bach conked out twice.

The air was filled with summer holiday sounds: the whistle of a kettle coming to the boil, the whine of an incoming mosquito at four in the morning and, yes, the somnolent drone of cricket commentary.

It was a return to the days of taking one's time over the newspaper rather than submitting to the force-feeding of TV news, where every item comes with amateur theatrics intended to let us know how we should feel about what we're about to see - the tremulous anxiety for beached whales and siamese twins, the funeral-director solemnity for Third World death tolls, and the cheerleading enthusiasm for tonight's non-story about the made-in-New Zealand blockbuster movie.

It was a return to the days of doing dishes by hand and therefore an opportunity to give the children a harrowing glimpse of life as it was before the dawning of the Age of the Dishwasher.

Over the hill was Medlands beach, a swathe of white sand with plenty of room for everyone and enough surf to keep the board riders and body surfers happy.

All that was missing was a pohutukawa, but then the beach at the bottom of our road had more pohutukawa than anywhere in New Zealand according to my informant, an ageing hippie type who emerged, blinking but garrulous, from the undergrowth.

Our friends are hunter-gatherers in the best Barry Crump tradition so, while we lazed and swam and read our Christmas books, they dived for scallops and crayfish and hauled up snapper.

A 6 o'clock gin and tonic was a grace of sorts for the nightly feast. No one felt the need to see in the New Year.

We walked the Kaiaraara Track to a kauri dam built in 1922 and marvelled at the hardiness of the men who constructed it. They stacked kauri logs behind the dam and, when a sufficient weight of water had built up, flushed them down the riverbed all the way to the sea.

The dam builder, George Murray, reported that the noise could be heard for miles and many of the hundreds who came to see the spectacle were terrified by the sight and sound of the giant logs smashing everything in their path.

On the walk we swam in the stream, an almost forgotten pleasure that brought back memories of my South Island childhood.

All good things must come to an end and this idyll ended jarringly.

Tourism Auckland's Great Barrier Island brochure talks of getting there by a "leisurely" ferry ride. Significantly, especially given this document's welter of adjectives, there's no description of the ride back.

If your idea of leisure is being inside a 44 gallon drum careening down a stony riverbed, much as the kauri logs used to, then you would have enjoyed our trip back to Auckland.

It took almost six hours and would have tested the stoicism of even those hollow-eyed professional masochists who feature on the reality television shows.

Never has Rangitoto's symmetry seemed quite so pleasing.