Graeme Lay’s Cookbook is #1

Taking a break from editing an art essay, reading a fiction manuscript for a client, finishing writing my 17th book and wrangling the children, I just now chanced upon – i.e. was checking Twitter and Facebook – the latest Nielsen bestseller list, for the week ending 22 June. On the NZ fiction top ten, the #1 bestseller is Graeme Lay’s The Secret Life of James Cook. That’s only the second novel I have worked on to have made #1. Wine o’clock!

So here are Procol Harum in 1971 with “Quite Rightly So”:

Cross Fingers by Paddy Richardson

New in your local bookshop today is a pile of copies of Cross Fingers, the new novel by Paddy Richardson. It is a murder mystery: the murder was committed during the 1981 Springbok Tour, and the investigator is TV journalist Rebecca Thorne, whom we met in Paddy’s previous novel, Traces of Red.

Cross Fingers brilliantly evokes what it was like in 1981 for the protesters while giving equal consideration to the police’s experiences; it is very sharp on contemporary media practice; and there is a nice line in humour throughout, especially in Rebecca’s relationship with her ex. 

Here is what the publisher, Hachette, says about it. And here is what Joan Mackenzie of Whitcoulls has to say in her review:

Fake Blake

We start with this:

A school librarian has discovered that a poem widely attributed to William Blake, including in school reading lists, was not really written by him.

Rather than the work of an English poet in the 19th century, “Two Sunflowers Move into the Yellow Room” was written in the United States in the 1980s.

This mislabelling shows how the internet can replicate errors, warns Thomas Pitchford, a librarian in a Hertfordshire secondary school.

“We just accept too quickly,” he says.

True. Which leads us to the Library Spider:

A poem written by a contemporary American author is being taught in schools across the United States and England as the work of one of Britain’s most famous scribes. This innocent verse is escaping the detection of experienced educators because an error exists in a lesson plan circulating many web sites, from loosely monitored forums to highly reputed and authoritative resources including some run by government agencies.

Teachers searching the Internet for examples of poetry to use in their instruction are finding a poem entitled “Two Sunflowers Move into the Yellow Room”.  A great number of the suggested web sites claim the poem was written by William Blake.  Rather than being composed around 200 years ago, it was written by the poet Nancy Willard for her 1981 book A Visit to William Blake’s Inn which won America’s highest award for children’s literature, the Newbery Medal.  This book shows Ms Willard’s appreciation for the work of Blake and her poems make many allusions to his verse, in this case “Ah Sunflower, weary of time” from Songs of Innocence and Experience.  Ms Willard’s prowess as an author is easily proven from her large amount of published works, collection of awards and career as a teacher of writing, but attributing any work from the 20th century to one of the best known and most studied poets of two centuries previous is a sizeable blunder.  So, how did it happen?

Read on.

Next, Examples of Personification in Poetry with Analysis uses the poem as a suitable case for analysis:

Want to have something better to say than “I don’t know” next time your teacher calls on you in English class? Learn about personification in poetry with this expert analysis to make yourself look more intelligent.

Personification: “Ah, William, we’re weary of weather,” / said the sunflowers, shining with dew. / “Our traveling habits have tired us. / Can you give us a room with a view?”

Analysis: Sunflowers can’t speak...unless they’re part of a William Blake poem. These two jovial talking sunflowers contribute to the poem’s mood. They seem like jolly good sunflowers, don’t they? British Romantic poets, like William Blake, believed human fulfilment comes from being one with nature and that nature is a living thing. I’ll let you decide whether or not he’s poking fun at this notion in this poem.

I’ll let you decide whether teachers or not teaching this stuff know anything about poetry. Here is the full text of the fake Blake:

Two Sunflowers  Move in the Yellow Room

“Ah, William, we’re weary of weather,” 

said the sunflowers, shining with dew. 

“Our traveling habits have tired us.

 Can you give us a room with a view?”

They arranged themselves at the window

and counted the steps of the sun,

and they both took root in the carpet

where the topaz tortoises run.

That is so, like, awesomely like William Blake. Not. Especially the rooting in the carpet.

Musicians snarking on musicians

Noel Gallagher makes terrible music but gives good soundbite. He says of Jack White (above):

He looks like Zorro on doughnuts.

That’s from The 30 Harshest Musician-on-Musician Insults in History, which is doing the rounds. Ace guitarist Elliott Randall (the solo on Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ In The years” – that was him) has his own list of Musicians on Musicians, mostly from the classical world. All gems. Here is Sibelius explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his home:

[They] talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every time. They really are interested in music and art.

Lake Heron Station

It’s high country and this is the farmhouse at 1:55pm today – 70cm of snow and more to come. We stayed there (highly recommend it) over Christmas and on Christmas Eve we sat out on the veranda  in T-shirts and shorts drinking champagne with the owners. Don’t think they’ll be doing that tonight. 

Denis Edwards on Truth

This is the first Thursday since June 1905 that Truth hasn’t appeared. To mark the sad occasion, here is the 65th in this occasional series of reprints from Quote Unquote the magazine. Many people wrote for Truth over the years, among them Denis Edwards, who wrote this article for the October 1995 issue to mark Truth’s 90th birthday. 

The intro read:

Dinosaurs of print, the tabloids are passing because the rest of the print media – and, increasingly, television – have taken over both their territory and their tone. But Truth, which turns 90 this year, is a survivor. It has swung from left to right, and back again. It has championed the underdog and been a bigoted bully. It has bordered on the pornographic, and called for pornographers to be locked up. With Sunday News pushing slightly upmarket, Truth is now alone in the tabloid market. Denis Edwards takes a look at an unacknowledged side of our literary history

THE LAST TABLOID          

Hedley Mortlock is 53. From here he can see retirement in the distance, and was looking forward to a clear run through to the finish line. The last thing he needed was a jarring reminder of exactly how fragile the tabloid market is in this part of the world. Then he heard that his paper’s Australian equivalent, the Melbourne-based Truth, had closed after 104 years.

The similarities were worryingly close. Circulation in Australia was a comparable 40,000 a week. It too was laden with page after page of lucrative advertising and had a solid sports section. But there was one big difference. Inspired by London’s Sunday Sport, the Australians had begun making the stories up, with headlines like “London Bus Found On Dark Side Of Bronte Beach”, “Elvis Tattooed My Unborn Baby With Star Of David” and “Two-headed Woman – Non-smoking Head Declares War On ‘Filthy Smoker’ Head”.

The readers weren’t having it: even in Australia, there would appear to be a floor level to the media’s “dumbing down”. The end, advertising or not, came quickly.

This ended talk at Truth’s New North Road offices of following a similar line. If Mortlock is to keep Truth from joining the long list of defunct newspapers and magazines, it will be by turning to the basics of the newspaper industry: knowing your market and serving it with journalistic integrity by doing straight, accurate and interesting stories.

Truth’s previous editors must be thankful they are long gone and far from the work facing Mortlock. Tabloid legends Alan Hitchens and Judy McGregor are in the US and academia respectively, leaving Mortlock as probably the only person with the experience for the job. He worked at the English Sun “as a working staffer, not there on some sort of scholarship to see how tabloids operate” before coming back to New Zealand in 1968. He has been at Truth ever since.

His arrival was pure tabloid. He had been hired as Truth’s sports editor on a Friday. He was to start on Monday and had popped in to the Wellington newsroom to say hello and shake a few hands. “The editor came running out of his office, gesturing to me to clear off. He wanted me out of there, because he hadn’t sacked the bloke I was replacing. When I came in there was a new editor. He’d been sacked too!” Welcome to the world of the tabloid.

Truth’s struggles, which have seen its circulation slowly slide from 250,000 in the 1960s to its present level of just over 40,000, are the result of vastly increased competition. “For years there had been the Woman’s Weekly, the daily newspaper and Truth, and there wasn’t much else,” says Mortlock. There is now. The Auckland Sun pushed the Herald into putting out a brighter, livelier paper, including a sharp boost to its interest in spectacular court cases. The new magazines, including Metro and North and South, also thoroughly understood the circulation-boosting potential of solid investigative work and of a brisk scandal, preferably in combination. They certainly weren’t about to turn their backs on a spectacular rape, robbery or murder.

The women’s magazines, in a take-no-prisoners war, shoved and elbowed to be first with the female perspective on anything newsworthy, and chequebooks were ready to help smooth the way to the saddest and/or the most inspiring stories. In a word, the other print media have been tabloidified – as has television. Mortlock has come to dread watching Holmes in particular: “Every night they are doing our stuff, pure Truth stories.”

There is the memory of once-lavish and now-banned cigarette advertising, the defection of brewery advertising to television. And there’s talkback radio. Who needs a newspaper to be the voice of the downtrodden and oppressed or to an air a grievance when you can dial up and be heard, immediately and nationwide?

The response has been to brighten up the paper, filling it with colour and celebrities. The showbiz coverage is boosted by extensive and exclusive clipping rights with UK tabloids. Sex scandals are still prized, although these days they need to be exclusive (nearly impossible, with the women’s magazines and their chequebooks aggressively competing for stories) and make only modest demands on journalistic resources. This is because Truth’s staff is at skeletal levels: Mortlock, three sub-editors and two journalists. These are usually in their late teens or early 20s and from unfashionable polytechs. Turnover is high: people learn and move on.

They are joined by a sports editor, a photographer and several freelancers. They have made Truth a motherlode for those tapping New Zealand’s popular culture, roaming into our social byways: dog shows, brass bands, Freemasonry, trucking and anything likely to be of interest or to affect those at the bottom of the heap.

Truth has, for instance, become the fast-food industry police. “KFC Fries Workers” claimed one story, while another declared New Lynn to be the world’s fast-food capital. More serious is the Captain Cash column, a weekly look at life below the bottom rung. Readers write in with often heart-wrenching requests for money. A 62-year-old widow, supporting a 40-year-old handicapped child, is on a benefit and washes the laundry by hand in the bath. She gets $150 towards a new washing machine. It’s humbling, says Mortlock. “You see the letters coming in, and believe me, you stop complaining about your lot.”

Truth’s coverage of local television is an index of that medium’s departure into the maw of the public relations industry. Truth used to have a free run with the likes of Gloss interviews and profiles. Now, in the Shortland Street era, Truth is B-List. The big stories and big names are given to the A-List: TV Guide, the Herald, the big three women’s weeklies and, further back, the Listener.

Being pushed back from the table has turned into a journalistic plus for Mortlock. It has freed him. If a star is foolish in public, has a spot of bother with a breathalyser or credit card, or tells a fan to “f— off”, others might have to look the other way to ensure an uninterrupted flow of good stories. Mortlock enjoys the prospect of going back to journalism’s roots, the ability to publish and, libel laws notwithstanding, be damned. The official stance from the PR people has been to ignore Truth.

Mortlock isn’t worried: “We’ll just keep going as the stories come along. We have to be doing the best we can for our readers, turning over stones and coming up with good interesting stories. Now and again we trip over the rich and powerful.” For example, when Julie Christie, then sweeping ageing and terrified hacks from the screen as part of her brief to rev up TVNZ’s sports coverage, had some difficulty with officialdom over a hotel she has a financial interest in, Truth ran the story. His competitors wouldn’t have dared.

As editor of Truth, Mortlock is custodian of the most raucous history in the New Zealand media. The paper has swung from left to right wings, and back again. It has championed the underdog, and then been an overbearing bigoted bully. At times ‘it has bordered on the pornographic, and at other times it has called for pornographers to be hurled into jail. It has also been caught in the middle. During the bitterness of the 1951 waterfront lock-out, Truth editors were startled to find themselves the moderates, against an Auckland Star editorial advocating the shooting of the watersiders.

There have been times when it sided with the bigots. “Stop The Yellow Swarm” and “Drive Out The Communist Irish”, it called. When Ian Milner a New Zealand-born academic then working in Czechoslovakia returned home briefly, Truth said he was a “known Communist and must be destroyed or stopped”. Later it pitched enthusiastically into Tim Bickerstaff’s “Punch-a-Pom” campaign. There have been attacks on “state house bludgers”, “reds under the bed” and “idle students”.

That Truth did well with stories like those was a glimpse into the darker side of the gruff, friendly, she’ll be right New Zealand character. For Ronald Hugh Morrieson, who blended knockabout comedy and appalling violence in novels like Came A Hot Friday, Truth was a prime influence – he never missed a copy.

Now and again Truth paid a price for its stands. From 1974 to 1982, under the legendary Russell Gault, a redbaiter and sloganeer extraordinaire, Truth waged campaigns against every group finding itself in the news: students, workers, unions, the lot. Each time the circulation dropped, as those attacked ceased to buy the paper. The biggest drop was when Gault waded into the then white-hot abortion debate. Readership plummeted.

Mervyn Thompson caught the flavour of the old Truth style, using it as a guide through our social history in The Great New Zealand Truth Show. The 1982 play includes, among other gems, a stress-demented Truth editor, short of material and reaching into the past to produce a Truth stand-by, an investigation into the appalling state of housing in areas of rural poverty. Whew, another week saved!

IT ALL STARTED in 1905. The Australian Truth had been founded by John Norton, a colourful figure who had served in the New South Wales parliament, sprinkling his public service with several appearances in the Sydney Criminal Court, charged will drunkenness, assault, criminal libel and sedition. His Truth was described by another, more respectable, paper as “the typical gutter sheet, distilling a crude potstill of pornography from a ferment of sex crimes and divorce suits”. Not surprisingly it was an instant hit and soon turned up on this side of the Tasman. The Wellington agent was quickly whisked into court, charged with “selling an offensive newspaper”. He was found guilty and fined.

This brought Norton to Wellington, blustering, furious and all righteous indignation. The case was re-opened, with the same result. Guilty and a fine. Norton announced his solution: New Zealand would have its own Truth.

The first issue appeared in June 1905. The New Zealand Truth took the Australian paper’s lead. Sex scandals were number one, with divorce cases a close second. Passionate campaigning was all. Its list of campaign causes has a distinctly modern look: higher salaries for teachers, better conditions for nurses, improvement in the lot of the policeman on the beat, and vigorous attacks on “filthy food” served in restaurants.

One early contributor was Bernard Freyberg, later to be a member of Massey’s vigilantes, recruited to break the 1913 waterfront strike, then general and Governor-General. He did the swimming stories, with much grumbling over the sub-editor’s hand on his copy.

The relationship with the police catches Truth’s editorial flips. Things began with a love affair. In 1931 the police were “agents of the oppressive government”, getting a special lambasting for the handling of the riot by Wellington’s unemployed. In 1953 it took on Police Commissioner Eric Compton, accusing him of corruption: though Compton was officially cleared, he took early retirement. The police would henceforth be run by a civilian, Sam Barnett, who did a thorough house-cleaning. Transfers away from any suggestion of temptation were frequent, and links with bookmakers were cut after later evidence showed they were organising themselves to divide territory and to co-ordinate bookmaking and other crime. Thus Truth can make a reasonable claim to having hamstrung the arrival of organised crime in New Zealand.

Though Truth has lowered its sights, it can still sting. It ended Brian Edwards’ chances of being an MP when he stood for Miramar in 1972, by revealing that the woman he lived with was not his wife. Later, it outed maverick National backbencher Marilyn Waring. This revelation eventually became a plus for Waring, hoisting her profile, bringing her support from the women’s movement and the left. The then-PM Robert Muldoon used her enhanced profile as a threat and an excuse to call a snap election in 1984. He lost to Labour’s David Lange.

Then there was the 1981 move from Wellington to Auckland. The colourful Alan Hitchens had taken over as editor. Out went the Wellington-centric stories: government, education, social welfare, employment and so on. In came an Auckland look: faster, lighter and frothier. The plan was for Truth to ride the new freedom in supermarket opening hours, becoming the New Zealand version of the National Enquirer, sold in all US supermarkets. It didn’t work. The women’s magazines breezed past through that fight, although Truth has gone on to pick up useful sales from service stations.

Another convulsion was in 1987. Mortlock had taken over from Hitchens. Things weren’t going well. Circulation was dropping; advertising was soggy. Closure was being discussed. This threat was real. INL, owner of Truth, has a long record of taking strugglers off life-support. One of Truth’s mainstays, its legendary court coverage, had had to go. Court coverage is expensive. A journalist sits in court all week, to produce one or two stories: too meagre a return for a paper with a tightening budget. That court coverage had been both comprehensive and riveting, especially in its enthusiasm for sex and murder cases, and preferably in combination. I know. I had been under orders to study it.

In the mid-60s I was a mint-fresh police cadet. Our instructor, a veteran sergeant, sternly informed us that Truth was essential reading for its police cases and for its details of the judgments in sex trials. This was all a class of teenage cadets needed to hear. Sales of Truth at outlets in the vicinity of the Police Training School at Trentham continued at high levels.

Nowadays, while the horizon is still scanned for those sorts of stories, day-to-day practicalities force attention to the light, the fast and the humorous. Typical is the headline when Hinemoa Elder left television’s Bugs Bunny Show to enter medical school. Truth caught it all in three words: “What’s Up, Doc?”

Truth’s circulation trails the other papers coming out of INL’s New North Road building. ABC (Audited Bureau of Circulation) figures have the Sunday Star-Times at 187,227 copies a week, Sunday News at 135,229 and TV Guide, Truth’s offspring, at a whopping 257,986 a week. Truth is off the pace at 41,825, down from its peak in the early 60s, when it had virtually sole coverage of the finer details of the John Profumo-Christine Keeler sex and spy scandal.

Truth’s readers are solidly at the lower end of the socio-economic scale. Mortlock has a solid Maori readership, “and we are very strong in places like the East Coast and West Coast, where they see Auckland as a sort of distant ‘sin city’.” Even with that relatively small group of readers (although pass-on figures are said to be high – one person in a large family buys and hands it on to everyone else) Truth makes money. It has 11 often-electrifying pages of vigorous pitches for sex equipment, massage parlours, adult video and meet-a-mate-for-a-romp advertising.

This is the place to check for information on the very latest from the far frontiers of sexual preference. There are massage parlours catering for the pensioner market. There are exchange programmes – “Cassandra, early 40s English aristocratic blonde, elegant, private apartment”, though exactly what is to be exchanged is not specified. There are long lists of specialised lonely-person products able to vibrate, penetrate and lubricate and sometimes do all or most of them at once. The videos on offer cover a startlingly wide range of sexual options. If it’s been so long since you had sex that you can’t remember who gets tied up, then fear not, the Truth ads will clarify things for you, or give you the phone number of someone who can help. (Truth and its sex ads give an oblique insight into life on Auckland’s northern slopes. Each August sales in the eastern suburbs rise sharply. The theory is that the family has been packed off to Fiji or the snowfields for the school holidays, leaving father at home to graze the sex ads in peace.)

Though the sex ads are lucrative, and ensure the paper’s survival, they are a mixed blessing. They can crimp sales because parents may fear that taking the paper home will corrupt their teenagers. Putting the ads in a throwaway insert didn’t work – understandably, the advertisers didn’t like it. Mortlock’s problem is how to keep the journalism going, and to persuade people to buy it for its stories as much as for its ads. So far his mix of celebrity stories and sharp bites at the rich and famous is keeping heads above water. Or better – an extra eight pages has just been added.

But if ever he needs a reminder that tabloid journalism is a day-to-day struggle, he need only look in the direction of Melbourne, where they have crated up Truth’s files for the archives and sold off the desks and chairs.

FOOTNOTE

Denis Edwards later worked for Truth and in the course of his duties attended a lunchtime event in Auckland’s Fort Street when an American “porn star” was performing. A few minutes into her act she fell writhing to the floor. The audience cheered. But in wasn’t part of the act – she was having some kind of seizure, an ambulance was called and she was rushed to hospital. Denis wrote the story for Truth and the billboard that Thursday was:

PORN STAR GOES DOWN ON STAGE

Keith Stewart on Pat Hanly

The 64th in this occasional series of reprints from Quote Unquote the magazine is from the October 1996 issue.

The intro read:

The veteran protester is as stroppy as ever, but Pat Hanly has retired from painting. “Once Were Warriors came along and did what I was trying to do in the paintings. I thought, oh, I’ll take a rest,” he tells Keith Stewart.

A NEW FREEDOM

The large Mount Eden villa is hunkered into a mas­sive garden which threatens to become spectacular with summer, and there is a slogan on the front door protesting against floodlights at nearby Eden Park. Pat Hanly may be a retired painter, but he has not stopped sticking up for his ideas, and in many ways his fighting career has been as illustrious, and as successful, as his painting career. As one of the stars of New Zealand painting in the second half of the 20th century, his reputation rides in a cohort which includes McCahon and Hotere, and will always be associated with the revolution in painting which surged into national promi­nence during the 1960s.

Hanly springs open the door with a flourish, bright in an orange robe, and as enthusiastic as you would expect from his paintings. The house is packed, wall to wall, room after room, with a collection of paintings by the painting stars of the last 40 years: McCahon, Hotere, Ellis, Clairmont, Fomison, Maddox, Harris, Reynolds... “I am in an interesting position now, not trying to win any awards or anything, and I don’t have to any more,” he says, obviously relishing retirement’s freedoms. But retirement was not just a matter of feeling tired.

“Years ago I thought about people who had gone on far too long. Picasso! The last 10 years for him were a waste of time, a jerk-off on the same old stuff he’d been doing for years. He should have had the sense to give it up, but being almost totally animalistic, he just kept on. I don’t think he got anywhere in that time, and he lost me as a supporter. Then it started to happen to me, when I felt I didn’t need to do anything, there was no urgency. I knew it was time.

“I don’t have to get up and do the old ego trip out in the studio any more, because I’ve seriously been in the retirement mode for two years now. You can imagine going around the shows now and not having to respond. If I see a Maddox show, or a Reynolds, I don’t have to rush off and use up all that energy to respond to it.

“Strangely enough, the 65-year-old’s responses are very selective, because I don’t have to take on board rubbish. All those also-rans now I just ignore, because I can’t waste any time with unimportant work. Whether it goes on or dies, or whatever happens, is not my concern any more. All I’m concerned with now is the weather.”

It was if his unique contribution, his exuberant vision of this corner of the world, was running out of steam with him. Or perhaps that the sophistication he and his compatriots fought to arouse, which provides a broader awareness of art than New Zealand had in the 1950s, brings with it a darker side.

“At about 55 I began selecting out the stuff that I was doing, which was mainly in the social commentary area, the poor, or whatever. And I sort of started to get fed up with it, because it’s all a bit negative. And then Once Were Warriors came along and did what I was trying to do in the paintings, and I thought, oh, I’ll take a rest. Then I found that all the urgency, and the gift I had had all my life, it just went away. It was amazing.”

It was a confrontation with the gloom which weighed so much on McCahon’s work and infiltrated it with self-effacing pessimism, a gloom which Hanly more than any of his contemporaries banished from a glowing South Pacific fresh with life and light, and the thrill of individual flair expressed with ease. “I didn’t want to do, if you like, the blues stuff. I didn’t want to have to talk about beat-up families, beaten women, pissed and drugged people, and a lot of other people who aren’t making it. It was too negative for what I felt my spirit was about, which was preserving things.

“And even back then I didn’t want to carry that blues thing around with me all the time. The war was over, and there was going to be no more war for me, and I was never going to be another van Gogh. His work is so passionate, but I never wanted to go that way. I thought, there’s got to be a smarter way of doing this. If we think this art is so terrific and great, then people need to be part of it, and we want to make the whole thing as approachable as possible.

“The other night at a party I was boasting to some woman that here I was at 65, almost twice as old as van Gogh, and she said, ‘And you’ve still got both ears.’ How about that? It’s very good. There are a whole lot of people out there not involved in the arts at all, but they know their stuff; their experiences and their professional lives are extended and extending. It’s terrific to be involved with these sorts of people. They can speak with genuine authority in a way not many people could back when we started.”

This expansion of the art world beyond artists to a wider audience is part of a revolution in thinking that the old protester and his contemporaries fomented with considerable success, building on a foundation laid by equally revolutionary educational ideas taking shape in 1950s New Zealand. “All those art specialists that went around in the 50s, remember them? Ralph [Hotere] was part of that early on, and Peter Smith, and all those dudes, they went right around the country and shook it up. They made the art thing part of what you could do now, and not just a wet days or difficult kids class.

“That was part of the widening out process, and we haven’t paid enough tribute to those people, a lot of them who didn’t make it as artists, but they made sure that the kids all became aware and took notice of what we were doing. Those guys, Beeby and Parker, who set it all up, who said that ordinary New Zealand kids in ordinary schools would be doing art, that was a key ingredient to opening the whole thing up.

“And we were screaming out for the freedom to express ourselves because we were these unique, egocentric individuals. That battle was fought and won, which is interesting now, because now anybody can have ago, at whatever level, which is terrific. Just after the war there were a lot of disgruntled writers, poets, who were pissed off, alcoholic, who had a terrible time here. That was before the international connections we have now. Carrying that weight of undeveloped mentality that was around then, that was a responsibility, then we overcame that, so it’s a battle nobody has to fight again.”

THEY WERE HEADY TIMES, focused on a new breed of art gallery, their activities communicated by critics who knew the artists and popularised them as never before. “Fortunately there was a small group of people here in Auckland: Colin McCahon, Bob Ellis, Don Binney — you know, the First XV of the time. None of us knew each other, except for Colin, who had been in Christchurch, and Hamish [Keith] who had come up from Christchurch, and it was him who got onto the fact that we were dealing with something quite special at the time. That sort of club, or whatever it was, just grew, everybody bouncing off each other and it was very good, with a sort of certainty that went on for along time. Too long, possibly.

“It wore itself out, because we got too old for it, won too many prizes, all that sort of thing. It had to change, because us old dudes weren’t doing anything really spectacular any more, and nothing happened for a long time, and that was when the international, head stuff, performance stuff, started to grow. Well, it had to, because the painting that we had all been trained to in the European tradition had become old hat. All the new, gifted people took on this stuff, and thank God we didn’t get in the road.”

The sense remains that there is a responsibility on the part of established artists to support the next generation of emerging talent, and the next. “I can still clearly recall the discouragement of this place that drove some people to suicide in the end, or to alcoholism. It’s only latterly that artists are being acknowledged before they fall into that romantic artist’s death thing that they can’t pull out of

“Those good artists are special. You don’t get a lot of them in a country this size, so you can’t afford to waste them. Dudes like John Reynolds, you only have about four and a half of them at any one time here.”

Four and a half. Who is the half at the moment? “I’m not telling you. You should be able to work it out for yourself.”

For all the intended support, the competitive edge survived long after success was acknowledged, and the Auckland art mafia worked in many ways to limit development outside its bounds. The next generation was very light on artists able to match the careers of Hanly and his contemporaries.

“Rick Killeen made it because, very sensibly, he didn’t get into the same game as we were in. He was one of the few who decided he was going to keep doing it after 30, and he did it. Now it’s good to see these current guys doing it, that the chances are being taken. There’s a real freedom in going to a show now and seeing Rick’s stuff, or John Reynolds’, or Bill Hammond’s, and I look at it and really enjoy it.”

Recently he had the chance to work again on what at the time he called his “opus”, Prelude to a Journey, the giant 44-metre mural from Auckland Airport’s departure lounge — to confront a work which may really be his masterpiece, 20 years after he completed it, and to make of it a series of major pieces for galleries around the country.

“It’s surprising when the other day I was there doing the unwrapping, and these icebergs were popping up in the darkness. It was a surprisingly good event. Yeah, opus stuff. It’s good to get the chance to look at these old things, and sometimes it’s better to just say, chuck them. But this was a good feeling.”

And that other career, challenging the community not for art’s sake, but for more fundamental causes? Riding small boats against American nuclear submarines, yachts against French nuclear testing, marching along streets to stop Springboks.

“I was so angry that nations we regarded as friendly were bringing their way of doing things down here whether we liked it or not. The European experience taught me very quickly about political disasters like the last war and that stuff, and that got to me more than anything else while we were over there.

“For my art, that experience widened out my scale, my realisation of how far I had to go in my own commitment. I’ve never been back since. I don’t have to.

“I remember when we were going to see a Chagall show in the south of France, seeing a woman pulling a plough, and I couldn’t believe it. There we were, off to see Chagall — I couldn’t believe it. On one hand we were into the sophistication and joy and all that stuff that Chagall was about, which I was a big fan of, and on the way there was this great tearing thing, this harrowing, basic, primitive animalism of Europe. Those sort of contrasts upset me a lot, and I didn’t want to wear that.

“In 1961 when the Berlin blockade was happening and I was in Amsterdam on my own, and all these Dutch people were terrified, absolutely terrified that just up the road all this bad shit was about to happen. We were doing all right in Europe then. Gil was being successful in the theatre, making sets and things, I had made a lot of connections in London, and we could make it there bigger, probably, than we could back here. All those gifted, creative people like Hockney and so on, and Ralph and Bill [Culbert], let you test yourself with them, over issues and so on. That development, the excitement of developing those responses, was one thing, but against old, withered-tit Europe, I just couldn’t stay. Remember that the Pacific back then was so innocent.”

So he came back, to another, softer revolution, where he stayed and played a role that has made him less famous than he could have been. But happier?

“Yeah. Definitely. It’s been great. Still is, man.”

NZ Poet Laureate for 2013-5

The National Library is calling for nominations for the post of Poet Laureate for the two-year term July 2013 to June 2015.

The criteria:

Nominees must have made an outstanding contribution to New Zealand poetry, and be an accomplished and highly regarded poet. They must also be a strong advocate for poetry, and be able to fulfil the public role required of a Poet Laureate, which includes engaging with a wide range of people and inspiring New Zealanders to read and write poetry.

The award comes with $80,000 and a tokotoko (carved walking stick): the laurate is expected to be “an advocate and a public presence for poetry, and involved in events which promote the reading and writing of poetry by children and adults alike”, and also to produce a book of poetry. It is what is known in other areas of the arts as a “good gig”.

Previous laureates are Bill Manhire, Hone Tuwhare, Elizabeth Smither, Brian Turner, Jenny Bornholdt, Michele Leggott, Cilla McQueen and Ian Wedde. That leaves quite a few to choose from.

Download the nomination form here: closing date is Monday 15 July.

Bloomsday 2013

James Joyce’s Ulysses is the only novel whose opening sentence I can recite from memory – “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan” (which sounds like a few of my friends) – and of course I can’t recite the last sentence because it is so long, though we all know that after the rude bits the closing words are “he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

Nicholas Wilson (via Bill Manhire) has brilliantly arranged that last bit:  

he coUld

    feeL

      mY

  breaSts all perfume

     yeS and his

       hEart was going like mad and

     yeS i said yes i will yes

So to mark Bloomsday, 16 June 1904, here are Yes in 1973:

Tweet of the week

Danyl McLauchlan yesterday:

Shouldn't we respect Rupert Murdoch's right to privacy during this difficult time?

Runner-up is Judith Collins this afternoon:

Wondering how many Labour MPs joining Sky City at the rugby tonight  to express their concern. Bets anyone?