KEY POINTS:
It takes just 40 minutes to drive from Auckland city to the place where the wild things are.
To an outsider, it is like arriving in Eden, or on a film set, or a 19th-century rural time warp.
Hidden down a winding gravel road, it is a stunning
secret - 100 hectares of nikau palms and manuka, pukeko and a clutch of brown-skinned kids running wild on the riverbanks. It is where panelbeater Alan Chapman carved out a unique home in a patch of wet bush with his German-born love, Inge, in 1987.
They ate smoked goat meat, fern roots and fruit, keeping to themselves and shunning the trappings of modern life. Their first home was made of nikau fronds.
Now, 20 years later, Inge Chapman is a widow and mother of 10 children, living in the couple's sixth home - tiny even by bach standards.
The floor is lined with goats' skins. One winter, the roof leaked in 26 places.
But this is a land overflowing with milk and golden syrup, where the kids cuddle together at nights, where last year a father died happy and his widow made the decision not to leave, ever.
When you turn into this land where the Chapman family live, you cross a bridge over a stream green with waterweed. Not many cars would make it up the pitted, winding clay drive. A couple of wrecks dumped in the ditches look like they have tried, and failed, decades ago.
At the top are more - a veritable graveyard of cars, coated in dust and hung with junk, from animal cages to pallets of wood, and ancient tools.
A dump? Look closer. There - a bathroom. For a long while a longdrop, now a flush toilet, with a ceramic sink bolted to the side. Food hangs in cloth bags in another small shed.
A pukeko bolts from a shed and clatters down the clay track.
Any decent adventurer would know the best bit is just around the corner, down a narrow track leading past a stick-fence into a lush green wall of forest.
Deep, dark grass and young palms flank the track. On the right, a ponga A-frame is dug low into the ground. And ahead, a one-room hut sits in a clearing scattered about with pots and pans. There's pop music playing from a battery-operated radio. It is like the world has stood still for a moment. Time is slippery here, says Inge.
There are no sports practises to rush off to. No awkward barbecues with the in-laws and no phones, computers, electricity, or even running water. "There's something so beautiful about really having your space, having your place.
"The simple life brings happiness - I understand that now."
Today, Thursday, happiness is making peach jam in the sun.
Blue-eyed toddlers, Ana, 2, and Rangi, 3, bunt against their mother's legs, bringing seed pods and cicadas for inspection. They are perfect, in a blonde, nappy-commercial way.
They are tanned brown all over, and brave. The older kids take them for swims on their backs, help them out of the water, lift them up to pick peaches.
When the jam is starting to turn glossy, the middle six arrive back from home-school - they spend a couple of days each week with the midwife up the road - and drift over to the fire to touch base.
Inge rattles off their names - twins Paula and Sophie are 12, Angela is 10, Billy 9, Joanne 7, and Naomi will be 6 in March.
The girls are chirpy and pretty.
They have shiny long hair and long brown legs, and take off for a swim in the river, which runs through the property.
The men of the household, Roy, 17, and Lewis, 15, are up on the hill building a new family home from scratch. It's not that difficult moving, Inge says. They have learned an awful lot, trying dug-outs and all sorts of huts.
Born on the same day of the year, Roy and Lewis work well together. They've been doing Alan's jobs for years now - chopping wood, hunting for meat (mainly wild goats), building. "They guard this family like hawks. They're very capable boys," Inge says, and glows.
"Roy enjoys his cars... he does burnouts, he goes everywhere in his car. He's really good, he's a champion.
"Lewis can hunt anything, he can get a knife into any beastie that comes along and cut its throat and skin it and gut it."
Twenty years of dealing with sun and rain, mould and rats and washing, have left this woman, 44, brown and tight-skinned and smart.
She was the one who insisted on ticking legal boxes - Alan, who died of cancer last year, dreamed of shunning all things man-made.
"He would not have allowed the children to have books," she says, rocking back on her haunches.
"It was a bit of an argument for us. He didn't allow us to have plastic toys and things like that... For a long time we had a policy that we only had non-synthetic clothing."
At first, Inge knitted a new woollen shirt for each child, each year. The babies had hand-knitted romper suits, the boys and Alan had jerseys which grew raggy with time.
"I did that for a long time. I got sick and tired of it."
Now they all wear op-shop clothes, they have a ukelele and a plastic keyboard to muck around with and play-money to give them some idea of finances.
Inge is on a widow's benefit and the children on a family benefit, "so we have some money coming in".
Alan would have baulked at that - a staunch "Mangamuka-gorge-Chapman", he never let the Government look after his family. It wasn't until he died last year that Inge applied for a benefit.
Inge isn't comfortable with it. She's signed up for a correspondence course in anatomy and physiology and would like to one day work as a reflexologist and write about massage.
This is the first time any of the family has spoken publicly about how they live bush by their own rules, while breaking none.
All 10 kids have birth certificates. They are educated - by correspondence and home-school - and Inge says they have never needed a doctor because they never get sick.
CYFs inspected the Chapmans recently after a complaint from a neighbour. Social workers visited, interviewed all of the children, and went away satisfied.
Inge was never worried. She shrugs, saying it's the townie kids who are missing out. They can't get their heads around the simple things, like making bread or different types of cheese. "Kids that stay here ask the most incredibly stupid questions...
They don't really know they've got New Zealand under their feet. In town, it can be anywhere in the world - Europe or anywhere." All her darling "wild children" are determined to stay on the land - this land.
Their food really does grow on trees. They don't like plastic or chippies, and when they do go into town for errands such as booking drivers' licences, they're not interested in cinemas or shops.
Inge herself, who grew up in a flat above a restaurant in Germany, spent years pining for mustard, dishwashers and colour TV.
A bath rigged-up over an open fire, and the excitement of looking forward to each season, kept her sane.
There is not much comfort in this life. Food for 10 is a battle in itself. She is constantly cooking, baking bread and cakes, bottling preserves. There is rice pudding for tea tonight. The family's favourite meal is rice, raisins and goats' milk.
If Inge had better containers she would buy in bulk - for now, a friend delivers sacks of oats, sugar, flour; vinegar comes in 20-litre tubs, they buy peanut butter in 18-litre lots.
Tea is boiled over the fire, milk and sugar are poured from a stainless steel basin.
They smoke meat to prepare for winter, and make sure they have plenty of charcoal stocked up.
When the cold hits, and the rain, Inge looks forward to the summer.
"In the winter you just go a lot slower. You just don't bother so much."
There have been nights of winter winds when she has thought the roof might blow off.
Thought, she says, not worried.
"We could have started again. There are trees out there growing, there's an axe, there's a house. As easy as that."
The children share bunks made of manuka, and mattresses stuffed with raupo.
They swim in the river daily and once a week Inge lights the fire beneath the outdoor bathtub to bathe.
Inge calls it being "in life".
"There's lots of things I really miss but it all goes away after about seven or eight years, and then you don't miss anything.
"It is quite different. I don't know if I would have done it again if I had the chance, I would have been a lot more scared than I was."
It helped that she was naive, she says. And that she thought Alan would be around forever.
No plastics, cellphones, junk food, contraception, cigarettes - in all fairness, this man should not have been cut down by cancer.
Inge says he looked like an old man when he died at 46; she compares him to a sick young goat the family wouldn't eat because it had "teensy baby horns" and a wizened, ancient face.
They found cancer all through the goat when they killed it.
As Alan's body sickened, his back ached - he would sit quietly by the fire and ask for massages to soothe it.
Since about 2000 he struggled to do a full days' work. Two months before his death Alan, "anti-doctors, anti-teachers", finally let Inge take him to hospital. Doctors were amazed.
The cancer was so advanced they could not tell where it had grown first.
"They couldn't understand that he didn't come into the hospital sooner," Inge says. "He had a lump as big as a passionfruit in his thigh. He was full of it at the end. He must have been in a horrific sort of a pain. It just ate him up."
The couple hitch-hiked home, walking a slow 10 kilometres between rides so that Alan could die happy, hurting, in the bush. They buried him on the land, his frail body lying on a bush-pole stretcher and wrapped in a blue blanket.
Wood smoke doesn't make Inge weep these days, and neither does death - not when the jam needs stirring, Rangi can't find his clothes and the older girls want some cake.
It is peach and apple, cooked sticky on purpose and covered in chocolate icing.
"In all these 20 years we've not gone hungry and we've not been as desperate as people must think," Inge says, tearing open a sack of sugar. Sugar spills in drifts on the dirt.
Grinning: "That doesn't happen often.
