As you can imagine, this mature married man found student politics shallow in the extreme, although I won’t try and justify that opinion here. Well OK, there was one young guy with long black hair and a duffle coat who used to stride into Pol. Sci. tutorials looking like he owned the place. I didn’t like the look of him.
It wasn’t so much that I disagreed with the student activists as they seemed to be opposed to everything. They were tiresome. Why did they hate the engineering students, for example? Apart from the fact they were piss-heads? Sit-ins and love-ins just sounded silly.
Even so, like all good people I started off on the left — a happily married, man-of-the-field, environmentally conscious, democratic socialist with a kid. In 1969 I volunteered and voted for Labour, and for my History Professor, Keith Sinclair, a fine man who lost by 67 votes. My first election.
Three years later I should have voted Labour again — Norm Kirk was inspiring — but that was also the year the Greens’ predecessor, Values, was formed, and I suspect I wasted my vote on them. They did put on a good rock/folk gig in the Titirangi War Memorial Hall. Labour won anyway, and prospered until Big Norm died, as much from overwork as multifarious health problems.
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We couldn’t afford to waste our votes on minor parties in 1975, with the ghastly Rob Muldoon standing for National. He won anyway, to our utter dismay. My Dad was a Nat but despised him. My grandfather, who was Labour to his bones, said he’d lived a good life and would be happy to take Rob out. Like all good bubble dwellers Heather and I didn’t know anyone our age who would vote National, and if we had, wouldn’t have wanted to eat or drink with them.
David Lange and the Labour Party finally ended our agony in 1984. His Finance Minister Roger Douglas almost ended our infant business too. Slashing import restrictions swamped the country with manufactured and craft products at the expense of us locals. I detested Lange’s first Minister of Health, Michael Basset, another of my History Lecturers, because I’d heard him refer to New Zealand farmers as “peasants”.
Being somewhat masochistic we were nevertheless tempted to stick with Roger Douglas in the ‘90s, when he set up a new party, ACT. By that stage, like most people in small business, we valued hard work, enterprise and self-reliance above all else. Despite being largely ex-Labour people, ACT sounded like they might be the one for us. The Labour Left reckoned they were a bunch of hard-right, capitalist racists, so they did seem promising.
I decided to attend my only political meeting of these last 40 years in the conference room of a motel in Kelston, West Auckland. The room was packed. Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble (I think) spoke, surrounded by a handful of what looked like union heavies. I can’t remember what they spoke about, only the questions afterwards. A senior teacher asked a question about education policy, and to my jaundiced ears got back a supportive and constructive response. Another bloke who wanted to know what they’d do about the uppity Māoris was encouraged to shove it. I distributed pamphlets and voted for them in the 1996 election.
Excluding my anti-war conscientious objection, that was my second and last episode of political activism, and my traverse of the political Great Divide was complete. We’ve always tended to mix mainly with people from the “Left” as far as I can tell, but I’ve voted for ACT or the Nats ever since.
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When I came to understand that our leaders didn’t have the benefit of our hindsight, couldn’t see into the future, had to play the hand they’d been dealt — and couldn’t know how other players might play whatever cards they held — it boosted my respect and empathy for them. For the best of them. Rightly or wrongly.
There were a couple of interesting students in my Stage 3 Pol. Sci. class — Helen Clark, whom you may know, and Jack Vowles, who went on to become, amongst other things, Professor of Comparative Politics at VUW. A quick google suggests that the rest of us never troubled the public sphere. Certainly the main benefit to the country of my participation was straightening out my own head.
At age seventeen politics had sounded like a possible career. I could be the mandarin behind Helen’s throne perhaps. Never the front man. I knew my limitations. All I needed to get started was that conjoint BA-LLB.
But by the time I graduated from Auckland that ambition — any ambition as it turned out — had completely dissipated, and I don’t know where it went. I was happy to accept that someone else, just not me, would be running our little country, and I’d be happy simply to vote for the ones I agreed with.
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So I’d drifted from radical to reactionary over 30-odd years. What a cliché. I blame University and my enquiring mind for taking me to the dark side, but also life experience — marriage and responsibilities — and hindsight.
I’d enjoyed University partly because I didn’t know that you were supposed to work out what your lecturer and tutor thought and feed it back to them. Instead I wrote what I thought myself, although it didn’t always yield good marks.
And hindsight! With another 50 years of it under my belt it’s hard to deny its utility. For starters it undermines the comfortable assumption that “our ancestors were thicker than us”, as Paul Kingsnorth puts it.1
But there’s a level of politics beyond that. Statesmanship, geopolitics, matters of life and death. I couldn’t — and can’t — imagine being General Montgomery, spending 2,250 lives over the course of the second Battle of Alamein, where Dad was among the wounded. Or then-Colonel Howard Kippenberger, a solicitor between the wars, describing his men as unnecessarily anxious when they first came into contact with the enemy in the Western Desert. After Dad was wounded at Sidi Resegh he ended up in the Whistling Wadi field hospital, which was almost immediately captured by the Germans. Kip, too, was held there briefly before escaping in a stolen Italian truck. He went on to lead the New Zealand Division in Italy. His feet were blown off up on Monte Trocchio, below which Dad was billeted at the Battle of Cassino.
And neither did I have the slightest ambition, post-school, to be part of the machinery shovelling men and resources up for the Generals to spend. Nor to be among the whispering mavens behind them.
I’ve never wanted that responsibility, not really, but somebody needs to take it up because we depend on them — depend on them to take it up and use it wisely. Perhaps our little country can shelter behind its ocean ramparts — like hobbits, far from the realms of Men and Dwarves and Elves. But it didn’t work out for the hobbits.
I do wonder what I’d have thought of the Vietnam War back then, with my present political outlook. After reading my father’s stories and letters I’m struck by how, after his initial doubts pre-call up, he expressed no misgivings about the war. It comes across more strongly in his conversation than his writing that his commitment was largely to the men around him.
I’ve often wondered whether I could be as brave as he was. Perhaps all boys wonder that about their fathers who went to war. As a signalman he never killed anyone — just showed up on the field of battle and passed messages back and forth, a nice target in his signals truck. Maybe showing up was the harder part. Not all his mates did. I registered as a “conchie” because I was worried that if I didn’t and my number came up I wouldn’t take a stand. Then again maybe I’d have made a useful staff officer — away from the front lines.
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I was a true believer right through school. King and Country, the British Empire, the Rule of Law, the Great Books and the Christian God. The Queen, I should have said, not the King — she and the Duke waved to us from the Royal Rolls as they drove through Waro in 1952.
Then the wheels fell off and those things I believed in fell away too. All except God. I clung to God.
And then I saw the movie Zorba the Greek — Anthony Quinn playing the larger-than-life, lusty, laughing Zorba. Alan Bates the callow Englishman.
“That’s me!” I thought. “God’s a crutch!”
And God fell away with the rest. It wasn’t that I ceased to believe, particularly. I just got up, threw down my crutch and walked. Put away childish things and tried to pull myself together.
How absurd that a movie should have so much impact on a kid. But Zorba helped me look at life differently. To see that society isn’t built just on rules, and anyway the rules aren’t there to protect self righteous, small minded prudes — that it’s better to be larger than life than the opposite. Life’s to be lived not avoided. No excuses.
I don’t think that attitude conflicts with my support for the rules, practices and institutions that we live under. The rules are important but they’re not of equal significance, and they’re there to support us, not constrict us. Still, over the years I’ve wished the powers that be were still as authoritarian and disapproving as they tended to be when I was a kid. Then, not being one of the “powers that be”, I could be a more comfortable rule-breaker.
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Anyway, I saw Zorba the Greek in 1964. Fast forward eight years and I was about to graduate — leave school again — and do what? A happier life and a healthier outlook weren’t the same as a sense of direction. I knew I’d be teaching for two years to pay off my bond, but what then?
It never occurred to me until later that I had no ambitions, and didn’t want a career. I’d seen off the University Gremlin thanks to Heather’s support, we were playing Happy Families and we just wanted to get on with life, both of us.
But actually I had an overweening ambition — it shames me to admit it, and it took far too long for me to realise what a false god it is: I wanted to be Me. What was the point of family, society, country, except for individuals to live their lives? Family wasn’t the point, it was the seed bed. I wanted to be Me — but not a Lawyer, Diplomat or Accountant, or anything else that involved wearing a suit and tie.
Compare our friend the KC. The young man who’d enrolled at law school more or less on a whim quickly proved that he was good at the law, and spent his entire working life in it.
People like me had to be creative, or so I thought. Ken was a painter but I wanted to write, and the only writing that counted, as far as I could tell, was fiction and poetry. Novels and short stories. That’s where I’d find Myself. I wrote quite a bit over the years but it was all quite embarrassing, and I soon decided that novels and short stories were a dry well.
As it turns out the closest I got to the creative classes — narrowly defined, and barring Ken, a few photographers and Graeme, the script writer — was dinner at a friend’s place one evening, sitting next to a man who shared my interest in Bob Dylan. I tend to get over-enthusiastic when that sort of thing happens, and I gave full expression. My new friend was impressed and asked about my own interest in the business: Singer? Musician? Agent? Producer?
Oh no, I said, I just like the songs, and the only thing I can play is the Jew’s Harp. But I do love Bob.
We kept on talking, and I reeled off a few more of my favourites. We’d just bought the Bootleg Series vol. 1-3, so that was front of mind. Blind Willy McTell was wonderful. How could it be an outtake? Heather’s favourite was Every Grain of Sand — the demo version with the dog barking in the background, not the one on Shot of Love.
“Oh yeah,” said my new friend. “He decided he wanted to play piano on that track and the mics weren’t set up for it, so I had to grab one on a stand to hold overhead.”
It turned out that he’d produced Shot of Love, which would make him Chuck Plotkin. Maybe I’ve got that wrong, I can’t remember, but as I say sometimes, never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
I seem to remember another story, how a writer and his wife were dining with a friend when they were interrupted by news that the friend had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Not many people get to tell stories like that, and certainly not us. Being Real People ourselves we hang out with the sort who, barring car crashes and other happenstances, don’t make the news. While we’re beyond fortunate with our friends we’d all like to meet our heroes.
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Well! I’ve been rambling, when all I wanted to say was that here I was — graduating — and still pretty aimless. But at least I’ve established my credentials and can move on.
I’ve talked about the ideas that hung around from Political Studies, but what I really enjoyed at University was History, my other Major, particularly the time we’d spent studying the American and Russian revolutions.
Professor Jim Holt was my favourite. His specialty at the time was American history. He was a softly spoken, deliberate, friendly man in his early thirties, and as he said himself, half-blind. He seemed to like my stuff, and I remember him saying one day that if I was interested he could put my name forward for a scholarship to Harvard, where he’d gained his own Ph.D.
I was flattered and told him I’d think about it, although I had a wife and family to consider, and that commitment to teach. What I didn’t tell him was that we were thinking about building a boat and sailing it around the world.
- “Whatever the precise components, I grew up believing in things which I now look on very differently. To put career before family. To accumulate wealth as a marker of status. To treat sex as recreation. To reflexively mock authority and tradition. To put individual desire before community responsibility. To treat the world as so much dead matter to be interrogated by the scientific process. To assume our ancestors were thicker than us. I did all of this, or tried to, for years. Most of us did, I suppose.” — Paul Kingsnorth, Atheists in Space or why the future is religious, Dec. 24, 2023. ↩︎