Hamilton Press Club #1: Alison Mau

The Wintec Press Club is dead. Long live the Hamilton Press Club!

The full story of the change is here. Full credit to Steve Braunias for the revival, fuller credit to Sri Lankan dynamo Chamanthie Sinhalage and fullest credit of all to Brian Squair of Chow:Hill architects who has stepped in as sponsor to keep alive the idea of a national press club in Hamilton.

The new premises are Gothenburg, a restaurant on the riverbank beside the museum with two fully glazed walls looking over the Waikato river. It is a lovely room – or, as architects say, “space”.

The speaker was Sunday Star-Times columnist Alison Mau: here is the column she published next. Trigger warning: contains Meghan Markle.

In his introductory speech which strived to praise Hamilton, Braunias said the city had two safe Tory seats – here he glared at Tim McIndoe, MP for Hamilton West – and a succession of “deadshit mayors”. Bit harsh on Julie Hardaker, the previous incumbent, I thought, but then I am not a ratepayer there.

Playing to the groundlings, he made several slurs against Tauranga. Steve is from Mount Maunganui, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I have never understood the chippiness of those from that side of the Tauranga harbour against those of us from the better side, but here we are. Chow:Hill has long had an office in Tauranga, not the Mount, and designed the Tauranga police station, so I feel the sponsor is with me on this. 

Jonathan Mackenzie, genial editor of the Waikato Times, introduced me to Sinead Bouchier, Fairfax CEO: she seemed nice but then I don’t work for her. I praised his paper’s new look and he praised my old magazine Quote Unquote, wondering if his collection of magazines might be worth a few bob now. (I wish.)

There were eight tables of 12, possibly one or two extras squeezed in, so perhaps 100 guests. At my table were the poet Therese Lloyd (current Waikato University writer in residence) whom I heard read beautifully at the launch of Vincent O’Sullivan’s All This By Chance),  short-story writer Tracey Slaughter, editor Vanessa Manhire, and what seemed to be the entire staff of Sunday magazine. Also present: Mihingarangi Forbes, Annabelle Lee, Te Radar, Rachel Stewart, Lisa Lewis and half a dozen or so journalism students from the Wintec course.

We had canapes (e.g. “Arancini, turmeric roasted cauliflower, smoked gouda, confit garlic aioli”), tapas (e.g. “Spicy Kim Chi and pork dumplings, Octovin, peanuts, coriander”) and dessert (“Chocolate cups, Belgian chocolate mousse, banana toffee, hazelnut praline”). All this, and constantly flowing Prosecco.

The invitation said that speaker Alison Mau “will discuss the Stuff #metoo investigation. A freewheeling Q&A session will follow, also drinking.” After Braunias’s introduction, Mau’s opening words were: “Thank you Stephen but fuck, the inaccuracies in that speech!” Well, she is an Australian by birth and upbringing so I suppose some coarseness was to be expected.

She couldn’t tell us much about Stuff’s #metoo investigation  because, understandably, her bosses had told her not to. They want the story, when published, to be a scoop, not live-tweeted in advance by every non-Fairfax journalist in the room. But she could – and did – have a crack at David Cohen for his NBR column about the project. She kept calling him “Dave”.  He is no more a Dave than I am a Steve. He had been invited but sadly could not make it. Pity. Would have been a livelier Q&A session. David is one of those rare people who can dish it out and take it.

But Mau did say – or as Stuff would say, “reveal” – that 400 people, some of them men, have contacted her team in the last three months, most of them terrified of losing their job if identified, even if only their company was named. And she made the very good point that only support from a large media firm can make this kind of long-term investigative reporting possible.

Question time. Jarrod Gilbert asked if Mau thought that Blackstone’s formula, “the foundation of Western democracy”, no longer applies. It all got a bit Auckland Writers Festival from here, frankly: no one understood the question, Mau tried to answer and He Would Not Give Up. Kept banging on about Blackstone’s principle or, occasionally for variation, Blackstone’s formula. Mau explained that what she and her team were doing was a journalistic investigation, not part of the the justice system.

Mau hinted darkly that one newspaper columnist had accused her of offering counselling to people who contacted her. She wouldn’t say who, but it was a woman.

Like its much-mourned Wintec predecessor, the Hamilton Press Club was a convivial occasion and I met poets, journalists, editors, academics and some normal people. Best of all, I met Lippy Linguist who writes about language at SciBlogs. Here she is on the deep history of numbers and counting.

So here is how to count sheep in Yorkshire:

Yan, Tan, Tethera, Methera, Pimp, Sethera, Lethera, Hovera, Dovera, Dik (10);Yan Dik, Tan Dik, Tethera Dik, Methera Dik, Bumfit (15); Yan Bumfit, Tan Bumfit, Tethera Bumfit, Methera Bumfit, Jigget (20).When the shepherd got to twenty he would raise his index finger and start again. When he had all five fingers up it would mean he had got to 5 x 20, or one hundred. Then he would put a stone in his pocket and start again.

Harrison Birtwistle got an opera out of that, Yan Tan Tethera (sadly not recorded so not on CD, DVD or YouTube).

The one musical guest I spotted was James Milne, aka Lawrence Arabia. So here, as a place holder for Harrison Birtwistle, is Lawrence Arabia with “The Listening Times”: