JAMISON GIBSON-PARK’S childhood on Great Barrier Island was idyllic.
The remote island sits 100km northeast of Auckland in New Zealand. It takes about four-and-a-half hours to get there on the ferry. You can fly in 30 minutes, but Gibson-Park doesn’t recommend that way. He’s had a few hairy trips in the little planes that go from the mainland and it’s more expensive nowadays.
Great Barrier Island has got busier than when Gibson-Park lived there with his family. Back in the 1990s, the population was under 800.
It’s a stunningly beautiful island of unspoiled wilderness surrounded by crystal-clear water. If you want to do real stargazing, this is your spot. ‘The Barrier’ is a subtropical paradise. It’s about twice the size of Achill Island, but it’s very sparsely inhabited.
The Barrier’s homes and businesses run on solar power or wind turbines, with no mains electricity. It’s truly off-grid.
Gibson-Park used to get up every morning and head off barefoot. He and his three siblings, their big group of cousins, and all their friends would venture out on their bikes, the key form of transport for kids on the island. There were roughly 35 children in Gibson-Park’s school, Mulberry Grove School.
After classes, they would all congregate at the boat shop in their settlement of Tryphena, to the south of the island.
If they wanted to get up to the Great Barrier Island Sports & Social Club to play touch rugby, they’d just stick a thumb in the air on Medland Road. Anyone who stopped, they knew. Up at the club, kids of all ages played together, the three-year-olds in with the 15-year-olds.
Gibson-Park spent a lot of time around the ocean. His family always had boats. His father, Billy, was big into scuba diving. His uncles, aunties, and grandparents were all into their fishing. Gibson-Park and all his cousins loved to surf too.
“The world was your oyster,” says Ireland and Leinster scrum-half Gibson-Park now as he reflects on his youth.
They operated on ‘Island Time’ out on the Barrier. It was a slow-paced life and everything was relaxed. Gibson-Park points out that he is punctual when it comes to meetings and rugby now, but no one was ever in a rush on the island.
When you consider where he comes from, the fact that Gibson-Park is such a laidback character, both on and off the pitch, is no surprise.
“It’s certainly to do with the way of life and how I was brought up,” he says.
“And it’s a reflection of my parents as well, in the way that they’re very much people who just take things in their stride and kind of just crack on.”
Gibson-Park’s mother, Tara, has Irish roots.
Her father’s family moved from County Armagh to New Zealand in the 1880s, so there was a connection to the country that Gibson-Park and his wife, Patti, became official citizens of in 2023. They have had three kids in Ireland too.
Even given its remoteness, it’s no surprise that the Barrier has an Irish pub, The Currach. It was founded by Kerry woman Maire Burns and her Kiwi husband Phill Judd, before Dublin native Orla Cummiskey took it over in 2020. Gibson-Park is a hero on the island, so the Currach tends to be hopping for big Ireland games, even with the time difference.
His mother, whose surname is Gibson, started retraining as a midwife six or seven years ago, finally pursuing something she always wanted to do. His father, whose surname is Park, worked on the roads on Great Barrier Island.
Tara’s father had his own roadworks company on the island, so Billy got into the family business.
“Once upon a time, it would have all been gravel and sort of stony roads, pretty dicey, particularly when you get tourists over there who don’t know how to drive,” says Gibson-Park.
“There’s a few pretty dicey places on the mountain where the roads are kind of winding through the hills and there’s a few big steep drop-offs and skinny roads. So it’s quite often you see a tourist end up off the road.”
Gibson-Park laughs at the memories of stranded tourists, adding that the roads are all tarseal now, so it’s easier.
Gibson-Park has only been back in New Zealand a handful of times since moving to Ireland in 2016 and getting to the Barrier is “a bit of a mission” when you throw in kids, but he’s happy to report that his two daughters, Isabella and Iris, have been there. His son, two-and-a-half-year-old Jai, will see the place someday soon.
Gibson-Park was 10 when his parents made the tough decision to leave the Barrier. His sister was about to come into secondary school age and while many kids from the island headed off to boarding school in Auckland, Tara and Billy wanted to keep the family together.
They had some family and friends in the little town of Gisborne on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island, where the population is under 40,000.
‘Gizzy’ is where Gibson-Park’s parents still live now. Much like the Barrier, it’s an isolated place, around a six-hour drive from Auckland.
Once he started playing rugby properly for the first time, Gibson-Park and his team-mates would have to take eight-hour bus trips down to Wellington or six-hour spins over to New Plymouth in Taranaki every second weekend.
“But it’s beautiful,” says Gibson-Park. “It’s similar to the Barrier in many ways, where it’s a pretty big surf community.” Gizzy is also where Gibson-Park met his future wife, Patti, in high school.
He got massively into surf-lifesaving, which is basically lifesaving in a competitive format, when he moved to Gisborne. Indeed, he was as serious about his watersports as rugby for most of his teenage years.
Gisborne Boys’ High School isn’t private like some of New Zealand’s best-known rugby schools. It’s not flash, but they’re good at rugby. Rico and Hosea Gear came through Gisborne Boys’ High, as did one-time Connacht out-half Miah Nikora.
Just ahead of Gibson-Park when he was in school were Charlie Ngatai, who he later played with in Taranaki and Leinster, and Blade Thomson, who went on to play for Scotland and Scarlets.
So there was a pathway from Gisborne to the professional game, but Gibson-Park didn’t realise he could potentially take it until his last year in school. He had barely been to a gym at that stage and weighed only 60kg.
“I was pretty small and I think it was probably to do with the era as well,” he says. “They were looking for big blokes like Byron Kelleher and Justin Marshall and these kind of guys, Piri Weepu’s era, Steve Devine, who’s a little bit smaller but a lot of these guys were still pretty big for nines.
“And then it just so happened that through the early years of me finishing school was kind of when Aaron Smith was bursting onto the scene. He changed the game, I think, massively.”
Gibson-Park playing for the Māori All Blacks in 2012. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Gibson-Park had talent, but when he finished school in November 2010, he didn’t have an academy offer from anywhere. He was looking to apply for university and just play club rugby when a man called Michael Collins changed the picture completely.
At the time, Collins was working for the Taranaki academy, which had a link to Gisborne Boys’ High. Gibson-Park’s school coach, Tom Cairns, had been in touch with Collins, who drove all the way to Gizzy to meet this small, fast, creative young scrum-half.
And so, at the start of 2011, Gibson-Park signed for the Taranaki academy and moved away from his family for the first time in his life. It was tricky getting used to the city of New Plymouth, but he started to shine in local club rugby with Tukapa.
When Gibson-Park landed in Taranaki, the head of strength and conditioning was a Welshman named Aled Walters, who is now Ireland’s head of athletic performance and was part of the Lions tour alongside Gibson-Park last summer.
“He was the same as he is now,” says Gibson-Park. “He’s a gas man. He’s such good craic and he provides unbelievable energy for us, particularly when everybody’s tired and things can be a bit sluggy. He’s unbelievable for that, as well as being good at his job.”
Gibson-Park broke through with Taranaki in the ITM Cup in 2012, playing alongside a local young gun by the name of Beauden Barrett. He would go on to help the ‘Naki win the ITM Cup in 2014 and says he loved that level of Kiwi rugby, which also involves the Ranfurly Shield, which is won and defended in challenge matches. He reckons a similar shield in Irish rugby would be a great thing.
But Gibson-Park had his first big setback in 2012 when he looked set to make the New Zealand U20s squad, doing well at a series of training camps, only to miss out to someone who was parachuted in for the very last camp.
A young fella from Nelson called James Lowe was the other player who surprisingly missed the cut. The Ireland internationals have laughed about it many times since, but it cut to the core back then.
“That was a stinger,” says Gibson-Park. “I remember driving home after missing out and I was like, ‘Far out.’ I drove all the way back to Gizzy, which was like six hours in the car, so I had a lot of time to reflect.
‘I was kind of thinking, ‘Was that it?’ and all this kind of stuff.”
But it lit a fire under him and after going on to impress in the 2012 ITM Cup, he caught the attention of the Blues and ended up signing a Super Rugby contract.
With Weepu still at the Blues, Gibson-Park didn’t start many games in his first two seasons, but he had earned first-choice status by the end of the 2015 Super Rugby campaign.
Still only 23 and having played for the Māori All Blacks, he was being tipped as a potential senior New Zealand international. But then, all of a sudden, he found himself jettisoned.
Gibson-Park had a big setback when the Blues let him go. Photosport / Anthony Au-Yeung/INPHO
Photosport / Anthony Au-Yeung/INPHO / Anthony Au-Yeung/INPHO
“I was the starting nine. Things were going well for us as a team, and I thought things were going OK for me personally,” says Gibson-Park.
“John Kirwan finished up as head coach after that ’15 season and things just changed really quickly.
“Tana Umaga came in and he didn’t want me.
“So it was a pretty rough time because I was renegotiating to sign on for another couple of years and then all of a sudden it was like, you have nothing and all contracts were pretty much done at that stage and it was tough trying to find something.”
Chris Boyd, the same coach who had left him out of the New Zealand U20s, gave him a lifeline at the Hurricanes.
“It’s weird how things go in circles,” says Gibson-Park of that deal to cover the 2016 Super season.
But before he even played for the Hurricanes, the scrum-half had signed for Leinster. He was back-up to TJ Perenara for that one season in Wellington, which he and Patti enjoyed. Helping the Canes to win Super Rugby was a sweet way to say goodbye to Kiwi rugby.
Gibson-Park admits that he didn’t know much about Northern Hemisphere rugby when Leo Cullen first reached out from Leinster.
Isa Nacewa was back with the province for his second spell at the time, so there was a strong connection. Gibson-Park had been coached by Nacewa at the Blues before the latter’s return to Ireland and rated him highly.
Gibson-Park says he felt like a bit of a fish out of water when he arrived in Dublin, but Nacewa and their fellow Kiwis, Hayden Triggs and Michael Bent [who Gibson-Park had played with in New Zealand], helped him and Patti to settle in.
“I’m a pretty quiet guy, so it would have taken me a while to adjust to things. But I knew these guys and that helped for my missus, she got to know their partners.
“When things are easier at home, it makes things easier when you come in to work.
“But it certainly took me a while to find my feet and on reflection, it probably didn’t happen for quite a while in rugby terms.”
Iris, Jamison, Isabella, and Jai Gibson-Park. Billy Stickland / INPHO
Billy Stickland / INPHO / INPHO
Gibson-Park found his feet eventually and the rest is history.
Ireland is now home and the Gibson-Parks love life in Dublin. Patti made an attempt to revive her judo career this year, targeting a place at the 2026 Commonwealth Games, but unfortunately suffered an ACL injury during the summer.
Gibson-Park had just landed in Australia for the Lions tour when Patti called to let him know the bad news. The timing was terrible but she had surgery and is now on the mend.
Their kids are unbelievably well settled, says Gibson-Park, and all three have “flat out Irish accents.”
10-year-old Isabella plays hockey at school and a bit of football, while six-year-old Iris is into ballet and stage school. Jai does Rugby Tots and refuses to go anywhere without his rugby kit on. They all love going onto the pitch with their dad after his games.
Gibson-Park’s current contract expires at the end of this season and although he was linked with a move to the proposed R360 league – “I didn’t see any of the cash anyway!” he jokes – it’s clear that he has unfinished business where he is.
“I’m pretty happy here and keen to stay, but we’ll see how things go,” says Gibson-Park.
“I’ve got this dream. I love it too much and with the World Cup on the horizon, I’d love to be a part of that.
“I feel great and I suppose that’s testament to the Leinster and Ireland set-ups and how well we’re looked after. My body’s never felt better, so I’m excited for the next little bit.”
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Jamison Gibson-Park's idyllic island childhood on the Barrier
JAMISON GIBSON-PARK’S childhood on Great Barrier Island was idyllic.
The remote island sits 100km northeast of Auckland in New Zealand. It takes about four-and-a-half hours to get there on the ferry. You can fly in 30 minutes, but Gibson-Park doesn’t recommend that way. He’s had a few hairy trips in the little planes that go from the mainland and it’s more expensive nowadays.
Great Barrier Island has got busier than when Gibson-Park lived there with his family. Back in the 1990s, the population was under 800.
It’s a stunningly beautiful island of unspoiled wilderness surrounded by crystal-clear water. If you want to do real stargazing, this is your spot. ‘The Barrier’ is a subtropical paradise. It’s about twice the size of Achill Island, but it’s very sparsely inhabited.
The Barrier’s homes and businesses run on solar power or wind turbines, with no mains electricity. It’s truly off-grid.
Gibson-Park used to get up every morning and head off barefoot. He and his three siblings, their big group of cousins, and all their friends would venture out on their bikes, the key form of transport for kids on the island. There were roughly 35 children in Gibson-Park’s school, Mulberry Grove School.
After classes, they would all congregate at the boat shop in their settlement of Tryphena, to the south of the island.
If they wanted to get up to the Great Barrier Island Sports & Social Club to play touch rugby, they’d just stick a thumb in the air on Medland Road. Anyone who stopped, they knew. Up at the club, kids of all ages played together, the three-year-olds in with the 15-year-olds.
Gibson-Park spent a lot of time around the ocean. His family always had boats. His father, Billy, was big into scuba diving. His uncles, aunties, and grandparents were all into their fishing. Gibson-Park and all his cousins loved to surf too.
“The world was your oyster,” says Ireland and Leinster scrum-half Gibson-Park now as he reflects on his youth.
They operated on ‘Island Time’ out on the Barrier. It was a slow-paced life and everything was relaxed. Gibson-Park points out that he is punctual when it comes to meetings and rugby now, but no one was ever in a rush on the island.
When you consider where he comes from, the fact that Gibson-Park is such a laidback character, both on and off the pitch, is no surprise.
“It’s certainly to do with the way of life and how I was brought up,” he says.
“And it’s a reflection of my parents as well, in the way that they’re very much people who just take things in their stride and kind of just crack on.”
Gibson-Park’s mother, Tara, has Irish roots.
Her father’s family moved from County Armagh to New Zealand in the 1880s, so there was a connection to the country that Gibson-Park and his wife, Patti, became official citizens of in 2023. They have had three kids in Ireland too.
Even given its remoteness, it’s no surprise that the Barrier has an Irish pub, The Currach. It was founded by Kerry woman Maire Burns and her Kiwi husband Phill Judd, before Dublin native Orla Cummiskey took it over in 2020. Gibson-Park is a hero on the island, so the Currach tends to be hopping for big Ireland games, even with the time difference.
His mother, whose surname is Gibson, started retraining as a midwife six or seven years ago, finally pursuing something she always wanted to do. His father, whose surname is Park, worked on the roads on Great Barrier Island.
Tara’s father had his own roadworks company on the island, so Billy got into the family business.
“Once upon a time, it would have all been gravel and sort of stony roads, pretty dicey, particularly when you get tourists over there who don’t know how to drive,” says Gibson-Park.
“There’s a few pretty dicey places on the mountain where the roads are kind of winding through the hills and there’s a few big steep drop-offs and skinny roads. So it’s quite often you see a tourist end up off the road.”
Gibson-Park laughs at the memories of stranded tourists, adding that the roads are all tarseal now, so it’s easier.
Gibson-Park has only been back in New Zealand a handful of times since moving to Ireland in 2016 and getting to the Barrier is “a bit of a mission” when you throw in kids, but he’s happy to report that his two daughters, Isabella and Iris, have been there. His son, two-and-a-half-year-old Jai, will see the place someday soon.
Gibson-Park was 10 when his parents made the tough decision to leave the Barrier. His sister was about to come into secondary school age and while many kids from the island headed off to boarding school in Auckland, Tara and Billy wanted to keep the family together.
They had some family and friends in the little town of Gisborne on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island, where the population is under 40,000.
‘Gizzy’ is where Gibson-Park’s parents still live now. Much like the Barrier, it’s an isolated place, around a six-hour drive from Auckland.
Once he started playing rugby properly for the first time, Gibson-Park and his team-mates would have to take eight-hour bus trips down to Wellington or six-hour spins over to New Plymouth in Taranaki every second weekend.
“But it’s beautiful,” says Gibson-Park. “It’s similar to the Barrier in many ways, where it’s a pretty big surf community.” Gizzy is also where Gibson-Park met his future wife, Patti, in high school.
He got massively into surf-lifesaving, which is basically lifesaving in a competitive format, when he moved to Gisborne. Indeed, he was as serious about his watersports as rugby for most of his teenage years.
Gisborne Boys’ High School isn’t private like some of New Zealand’s best-known rugby schools. It’s not flash, but they’re good at rugby. Rico and Hosea Gear came through Gisborne Boys’ High, as did one-time Connacht out-half Miah Nikora.
Just ahead of Gibson-Park when he was in school were Charlie Ngatai, who he later played with in Taranaki and Leinster, and Blade Thomson, who went on to play for Scotland and Scarlets.
So there was a pathway from Gisborne to the professional game, but Gibson-Park didn’t realise he could potentially take it until his last year in school. He had barely been to a gym at that stage and weighed only 60kg.
“I was pretty small and I think it was probably to do with the era as well,” he says. “They were looking for big blokes like Byron Kelleher and Justin Marshall and these kind of guys, Piri Weepu’s era, Steve Devine, who’s a little bit smaller but a lot of these guys were still pretty big for nines.
“And then it just so happened that through the early years of me finishing school was kind of when Aaron Smith was bursting onto the scene. He changed the game, I think, massively.”
Gibson-Park had talent, but when he finished school in November 2010, he didn’t have an academy offer from anywhere. He was looking to apply for university and just play club rugby when a man called Michael Collins changed the picture completely.
At the time, Collins was working for the Taranaki academy, which had a link to Gisborne Boys’ High. Gibson-Park’s school coach, Tom Cairns, had been in touch with Collins, who drove all the way to Gizzy to meet this small, fast, creative young scrum-half.
And so, at the start of 2011, Gibson-Park signed for the Taranaki academy and moved away from his family for the first time in his life. It was tricky getting used to the city of New Plymouth, but he started to shine in local club rugby with Tukapa.
When Gibson-Park landed in Taranaki, the head of strength and conditioning was a Welshman named Aled Walters, who is now Ireland’s head of athletic performance and was part of the Lions tour alongside Gibson-Park last summer.
“He was the same as he is now,” says Gibson-Park. “He’s a gas man. He’s such good craic and he provides unbelievable energy for us, particularly when everybody’s tired and things can be a bit sluggy. He’s unbelievable for that, as well as being good at his job.”
Gibson-Park broke through with Taranaki in the ITM Cup in 2012, playing alongside a local young gun by the name of Beauden Barrett. He would go on to help the ‘Naki win the ITM Cup in 2014 and says he loved that level of Kiwi rugby, which also involves the Ranfurly Shield, which is won and defended in challenge matches. He reckons a similar shield in Irish rugby would be a great thing.
But Gibson-Park had his first big setback in 2012 when he looked set to make the New Zealand U20s squad, doing well at a series of training camps, only to miss out to someone who was parachuted in for the very last camp.
A young fella from Nelson called James Lowe was the other player who surprisingly missed the cut. The Ireland internationals have laughed about it many times since, but it cut to the core back then.
“That was a stinger,” says Gibson-Park. “I remember driving home after missing out and I was like, ‘Far out.’ I drove all the way back to Gizzy, which was like six hours in the car, so I had a lot of time to reflect.
‘I was kind of thinking, ‘Was that it?’ and all this kind of stuff.”
But it lit a fire under him and after going on to impress in the 2012 ITM Cup, he caught the attention of the Blues and ended up signing a Super Rugby contract.
With Weepu still at the Blues, Gibson-Park didn’t start many games in his first two seasons, but he had earned first-choice status by the end of the 2015 Super Rugby campaign.
Still only 23 and having played for the Māori All Blacks, he was being tipped as a potential senior New Zealand international. But then, all of a sudden, he found himself jettisoned.
“I was the starting nine. Things were going well for us as a team, and I thought things were going OK for me personally,” says Gibson-Park.
“John Kirwan finished up as head coach after that ’15 season and things just changed really quickly.
“Tana Umaga came in and he didn’t want me.
“So it was a pretty rough time because I was renegotiating to sign on for another couple of years and then all of a sudden it was like, you have nothing and all contracts were pretty much done at that stage and it was tough trying to find something.”
Chris Boyd, the same coach who had left him out of the New Zealand U20s, gave him a lifeline at the Hurricanes.
“It’s weird how things go in circles,” says Gibson-Park of that deal to cover the 2016 Super season.
But before he even played for the Hurricanes, the scrum-half had signed for Leinster. He was back-up to TJ Perenara for that one season in Wellington, which he and Patti enjoyed. Helping the Canes to win Super Rugby was a sweet way to say goodbye to Kiwi rugby.
Gibson-Park admits that he didn’t know much about Northern Hemisphere rugby when Leo Cullen first reached out from Leinster.
Isa Nacewa was back with the province for his second spell at the time, so there was a strong connection. Gibson-Park had been coached by Nacewa at the Blues before the latter’s return to Ireland and rated him highly.
Gibson-Park says he felt like a bit of a fish out of water when he arrived in Dublin, but Nacewa and their fellow Kiwis, Hayden Triggs and Michael Bent [who Gibson-Park had played with in New Zealand], helped him and Patti to settle in.
“I’m a pretty quiet guy, so it would have taken me a while to adjust to things. But I knew these guys and that helped for my missus, she got to know their partners.
“When things are easier at home, it makes things easier when you come in to work.
“But it certainly took me a while to find my feet and on reflection, it probably didn’t happen for quite a while in rugby terms.”
Gibson-Park found his feet eventually and the rest is history.
Ireland is now home and the Gibson-Parks love life in Dublin. Patti made an attempt to revive her judo career this year, targeting a place at the 2026 Commonwealth Games, but unfortunately suffered an ACL injury during the summer.
Gibson-Park had just landed in Australia for the Lions tour when Patti called to let him know the bad news. The timing was terrible but she had surgery and is now on the mend.
Their kids are unbelievably well settled, says Gibson-Park, and all three have “flat out Irish accents.”
10-year-old Isabella plays hockey at school and a bit of football, while six-year-old Iris is into ballet and stage school. Jai does Rugby Tots and refuses to go anywhere without his rugby kit on. They all love going onto the pitch with their dad after his games.
Gibson-Park’s current contract expires at the end of this season and although he was linked with a move to the proposed R360 league – “I didn’t see any of the cash anyway!” he jokes – it’s clear that he has unfinished business where he is.
“I’m pretty happy here and keen to stay, but we’ll see how things go,” says Gibson-Park.
“I’ve got this dream. I love it too much and with the World Cup on the horizon, I’d love to be a part of that.
“I feel great and I suppose that’s testament to the Leinster and Ireland set-ups and how well we’re looked after. My body’s never felt better, so I’m excited for the next little bit.”
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