Roosters I Have Known
Steve Braunias
Roosters I Have Known
To Tony Reid
Sometimes he would turn to the four red folio scrapbooks with their collection of newspaper cuttings concerning himself over a period of thirty years. Then the pale cheeks would flush and the close-drawn lips grow more menacing even than before. ‘Stupid, mulish malice,’ he would note. ‘Pure lying – conscious, deliberate and designed.’ ‘Suggestive lying. Personal animosity is at the bottom of this.’
And then he would suddenly begin to doubt. After all, where was he? What had he accomplished? Had any of it been worthwhile?
Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians
The Purpose of Roosters
Autumn was Ruth Richardson, winter was a rather sad private detective. Spring was Colin Meads, summer was a likeable twit from Shortland Street. Throughout, I held on to a souvenir of the strange experience of profiling a New Zealand identity every week for seven months: a worn, creaking ninety-minute TDK cassette tape. It’s standard practice for journalists to use a fresh cassette when they record interviews, then file it away for safe keeping; it may be required to settle grave matters of libel, or vexatious complaints about being misquoted. But I couldn’t be bothered. I used the same old tape week in, week out. One noose fits all.
Helen Clark’s confident honk was swallowed up by John Key’s vacuous chatter, in turn replaced by Louise Nicholas’s incessant complaints, then concreted over by the vain hopes of poor, doomed Dick Hubbard – in all, twenty-seven voices came and went, their words destined for oblivion. Whatever they said would be taken down and, later, taken out, buried beneath the next guest. I was destroying the evidence. I was trying to erase the strange experience of profiling a New Zealand identity every week for seven months. I was working my way towards the sweetest sound of all: silence.
A lot of those voices had talked such rubbish. They said so many boring and devious and stupid things. Warwick Roger once wrote that sometimes the only question worth asking in an interview was: ‘Are you, by any chance, insane?’ This might be construed as bad manners, so instead I would smile and nod, and think, Oh shut up. But of course I needed them to keep talking, to slip their necks inside the noose of my frayed TDK tape. They could swing later, on Sunday, when I kicked the stool away and the interview was published in The Sunday Star-Times. The profiles were loosely intended as character studies. Perhaps a few were character assassinations. I sometimes thought of the profiles as acts of revenge.
Yes, thank heavens that’s over – I’m about to head into semi-retirement to look after my baby daughter, who can’t speak a word of English – but it wasn’t so bad. I loved seeing the country. There were the usual scenic attractions, the expected poetries of Canterbury skies, Taranaki gates, Wellington bays; there was also a widespread feeling of resentment against the government, against liberalism. I met enemies of the states everywhere I travelled. Politically, New Zealand in 2007 was in flux, a work in progress. There was the illusion of order in central Auckland and downtown Wellington, and disorder in the provinces. It was a year of child abuse, a disgraced police force, and apparent bush terrorism; if you were alarmist, you could take always reach for Yeats, and declare, ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.’ But it was more convincing to be reminded of Michael King’s observation in his Penguin History that New Zealanders have a ‘fundamental decency’. That was acted out when I visited Pauline Jespersen in flood-ravaged Kerikeri.
It would only be a huge exaggeration to say I liked everyone I interviewed. It was a privilege to meet Meads; he seemed to possess a quality that I believe is known as goodness. I think Clark is some kind of genius. Pita Sharples may well be the nicest man in New Zealand. Glynn Cardy, the Anglican Archdeacon of Auckland, gave the gift of Christian kindness. If it had anything in it, I’d be happy to donate my brain to Professor Richard Faull for his research.
And I owed a lot to rustic National MP Chester Borrows. He was the second interview in the series; unwittingly, he was also my spirit guide. He described everyone in his life as some sort of ‘rooster’. I fell in love with that word. It had such an egalitarian New Zealandness to it. It took away the pomp and ceremony of honorific (professor, prime minister, etc), and found its way into just about every interview that followed. Pompously, The Sunday Star-Times page on which my profiles appeared was titled THE STEVE BRAUNIAS INTERVIEW. I wished they’d named it ROOSTER OF THE WEEK.
I took the job seriously, so I took these roosters seriously. I tried to listen intently to their wisdom and their blather. But I was also listening for signs of something else, something that became a mild obsession as I interviewed one rooster after another. It would be a cliché to say that a pattern began to emerge. I find clichés attractive; a pattern began to emerge.
In fact, it emerged straight away. The series began when I interviewed Ruth Richardson at her Canterbury home in late autumn. The former finance minister had gone into private consultancy work, and was doing very well for herself. She was on the board of this and that, her services were in demand all over the world. She was practising what she had preached: ‘creating opportunities’, otherwise known as coining it. She was like a museum curio – it was almost nostalgic listening to her devout and steadfast belief in her libertarian economic principles that brutalised New Zealand in the early 1990s.
But what most intrigued me about her – and it lay behind my inquiries of many of the twenty-six roosters I interviewed afterwards – was her sense of purpose. Richardson had enjoyed magnificent power and influence during her years in government. Now what? It was false to think she was suffering. She was a merry soul, a good sport – she stripped down to her togs at the photographer’s request – and her hospitality extended to a delicious batch of home-baked muffins. But she once had such big plans, a vision. She had seen herself as a gladiator, a Maximus in the coliseum. She accepted her time had gone. She was happy, active, committed to spreading her knowledge. And yet her sense of purpose felt … reduced, almost fanciful.
There is seldom a second act in New Zealand life. In the last year of his political career, former Labour MP John Tamihere was duped, disgraced, and inevitably dumped; he is now a talkback host on Radio Live. He’s a refreshing presence, funny and warm-hearted, but that kind of job really only has the status of a professional clown. I interviewed him at the station. He said inexplicable things, he was all over the shop – he seemed totally bereft of purpose. A couple of months later he ran back towards power, towards some purpose in his life, as a mayoral candidate in Waitakere. He lost.
Bob Parker won, in Christchurch. This tumultuous rooster, with his addictions and his sensual enthusiasms, had come the opposite direction from Tamihere. Parker was a very popular clown in his long years as a TV presenter. Duped and dumped, he entered local politics, where he has most assuredly found his purpose. Good luck to the citizens of Christchurch. Dick Hubbard lost, in Auckland; he had been guided into the mayoralty three years ago by a burning but hopelessly naïve sense of purpose. In his mayoral office there was a terrible metaphor of his impending doom: the pair of mountain boots he wore when he climbed Mount Cook. It was painfully clear when I interviewed him that he had lost his confidence, lost his footing. It was all downhill.
Recent polls say that another keen mountaineer, Helen Clark, is headed the same way. If she does lose at the 2008 election, what purpose will she find to serve? An ex-prime minister can be a pathetic sight, a ghost haunting the corridors of power and trying to summon a frightening boo – do please take off that white sheet, Mike Moore. Power becomes Clark. Her sense of purpose was as solid – and stubborn – as a rock when we met in September. Everything was in place. The steady blue eyes, the honking laugh, the bad teeth; wh
en she listens, her top lip rests over her bottom lip, her chin lowers, and she looks as though she has just swallowed a large potato. We have all become so familiar with that face. It’s like a town you have to drive through every day. The 2008 election threatens a motorway bypass.
The following week, I traipsed to Napier to interview John Key. He’s a nice fellow. I also thought he was an empty vessel, floating on nothing more substantial than his own ambitions: politics was something to do, it occupied the hours, it daubed him in purpose, like a fake tan. He was laughable, a nonsense. So why was he so popular?
After our interview, I watched him address a hundred or so Hawke’s Bay tykes at a waterfront bar. It was a bad performance. Yes, agreed a sharebroker who was knocking back the Bolly, he was a blithering idiot. But she didn’t mind that in the least. She saw the real John Key, detected his shining example of wealth. ‘Bullion,’ she said, ‘shines from within.’
As Key chuntered on, I was reminded of Norman Mailer’s campaign diary when Richard Nixon ran for the US Presidency in 1972: ‘It was possible that no politician in the history of America employed so dependably mediocre a language in his speeches, nor had a public mind ever chased so resolutely after the wholly uninteresting expression of every idea.’ Mailer talked of Nixon’s followers ‘who are so proud to have chosen stupidity as a way of life’. Nixon won that year by a landslide.
Purpose lost, purpose found, purpose wanted – this search to act out a significant role, to do something worthwhile, went beyond the farmyard of politics. I came across other roosters with a cause. Auckland University academic Paul Buchanan wanted his purpose back, and something more tangible, too: his livelihood. When I met him at his home on Auckland’s west coast, he was like a man stripped bare. The bizarre circumstances in which he lost his job came as he suffered a physical breakdown. At the time of writing, he has yet to appear in the Employment Court, where he hopes to regain his position in the political studies department. New Zealand needs public intellectuals of Buchanan’s stature. I really hope he wins his case, which is also to say I really hope the pathetic little university authorities lose. Shown the door, tossed aside, he was like a bear with a sore head as he raged and ranted in his Karekare cave. He seemed very glad to have company.
Buchanan’s cause was his own. Social issues attract the purposeful intent of visionaries, quiet everyday heroes, bureaucrats, lunatics and the emotionally unstable. The year’s biggest apparent crisis – child abuse – quite rightly galvanised the nation. To do what, exactly? Three-year-old Nia Glassie’s awful death added fuel to Garth McVicar’s holy fire of punishment. As head of that restrained lynch mob the Sensible Sentencing Trust, McVicar gives genuine and invaluable support to the families of victims. But he also has some wretched ideas. When I talked to him, McVicar had just returned from Arizona, where he saw merit in tent prisons. New Zealand needs those, he said. Whereabouts? Middle of the Desert Road, he said.
It’s not going to happen. It was mere whimsy. At worst, he was playing make-believe with his sense of purpose. I also thought that of Cindy Kiro, the Children’s Commissioner. We spoke on the day of Nia’s death. Education, she said, was the best prevention. She despaired about some of the antics of the Sensible Sentencing Trust: ‘It’s galling to have that organisation try and take an initiative around child protection.’ It was more beneficial, she said, to have ‘public dialogue … public conversation … public discourse’. To achieve what, exactly? Her office has no authority, no powers. It has a voice. It has optimistic little pamphlets such as ‘Hey! We Don’t Hit Anybody Here’.
More make-believe: Greg O’Connor, secretary of the Police Association, sold his nimble intelligence short of the mark as he settled into yet another monotonous avowal of utter faith in every single serving police officer. Yet more make-believe came in the shape of Ross Meurant, the former hard-line cop and right-wing National MP who performed a complete about-face by slamming police for their surveillance and arrest of alleged terrorists. What knowledge did he have? It just didn’t sound right, he said, and he phoned up a couple of other retired detectives, and they agreed it was fishy. Ex-police work at its finest.
The interview was held, at his request, in a discreet corner of a cafe inside a garden centre. Meurant damned pretty much every aspect of police culture. It was like he was making things up as he went along. I thought he was an unstable sort of rooster, and that was even before he started talking to me about his nervous breakdown. What was the cause of it? Well, he said, he had just felt so powerless, so invisible, since he was dumped out of parliament. Purpose lost. But now the media had renewed their interest in him, and given him back his identity, restored his fragile purpose.
A High Court jury had dismissed Louise Nicholas’s rape accusations against – here goes that squalid threesome, groping into print once again – Clint Rickards, Brad Shipton and Bob Schollum. Was her story make-believe? The New Zealand Herald named her woman of the year. John Haigh, the QC who represented Rickards, wrote to the paper to say that decision was ‘truly insane’. Well, he would, but Haigh’s letter was a worthwhile reminder that Rickards had actually been found not guilty.
It’s entirely possible to feel sympathy for Rickards, once the assistant commissioner of police, now one of New Zealand’s most prominent gargoyles. Sympathy for Nicholas, however, seems to be compulsory. I gave in to it when I interviewed her on a winter’s afternoon in Hawke’s Bay. We sat in front of an open fire in an adobe house owned by Phil Kitchin, the journalist who broke her story and became her friend. Kitchin refilled her glass of rum and Coke. His wife came home from work. Nicholas brought along a friend, a woman who also claimed she had been abused by Shipton. The whole set-up was overbearing, a kind of church service devoted to Nicholas.
Her story may very well be no more than what she claimed – she was raped, bullied into silence for nearly twenty years, and had now named names, fought back. Her purpose was to stick to that story. It was, she said, the truth; like the ancient mariner, she poured out her familiar tale as the afternoon wore on. There was something about her furtive, defensive manner that made me suspect she had a child’s cunning. But I was eventually shamed into accepting her rage, her version of her bleak past, as she threw another complaint about Rickards and his lawyer on to the fire.
You could say these are the confessions of a travelling pessimist. What was my own sense of purpose during those twenty-seven weeks? I was a harried, fretful sort of rooster, needing to find fresh blood each week – the worst thing about the job was waiting around for someone to say yes. Surprisingly, only a few declined. John Banks was the most expressive piker. He was running for the Auckland mayoralty when I called to ask for an interview. His voice rose to a squeak as he replied, ‘No, no, no, no!’ I’d long suspected he was a coward.
The work was claustrophobic, week after week of the same rigid discipline. First, catch your rooster. Then, sometimes, roast them alive. Now and again I suppose I was ruthless. But I never formed an opinion about the subject during the interview, never knew what I was going to write until I started writing. There were a couple of experiments. The story about Kerikeri woman Pauline Jespersen was an exercise in conversational prose, the story about health minister David Cunliffe was an attempt to write a profile as narrative. A man from Auckland wrote to The Sunday Star-Times saying the Cunliffe interview was a wasted opportunity. He thought the story ought to have answered the question: ‘What makes him run?’ But Cunliffe didn’t run.
Eleven interviews were held on a Friday morning. At 10 or 11 a.m., I’d switch off the TDK, shake hands, and if I were out of town, hare off to an internet cafe to transcribe the tape and then write a headline and then a story between 1500 and 1700 words, not in haste, but fast, emailing it back to the office by 5 or 6 p.m. before meeting a far more important deadline: the last flight home.
I’ve always liked the urgency of journalism – the worst thing about writing is not writing, waiting around for a word or a thought. I didn’t h
ave time to wait on those Fridays. I didn’t want or need it: the governing principle was for each profile to be an honest response, and I felt there was a better chance of that happening in a limited time. (As such, I’ve only indulged in minor literary revisions for this collection. Most of the profiles – their hostilities, their mood swings, their errors of judgement – remain as they were first published in The Sunday Star-Times.) I went by instinct. I never felt especially pressured, just intensely alert to the task at hand – selecting quotes, writing a narrative, finding the language, tightening the noose, etc. I’d stand outside the doorway of the internet cafe to smoke furiously and worry whether the profile was fair. I’d worry again when I finished the story, and make various excisions and amendments. Press send. Job done. Airport, please, driver.
Yes, yes, the usual boring confessions of a hack. Journalists rarely stick around; they make their cursory inspections, then leave, and await the next assignment. I never entertained the ridiculous notion that my profiles told the full story about any of the twenty-seven roosters, or even that they captured something – if that happened, it was accidental, or dumb luck. I favoured running very long quotes; much of the rest of the story was an attempt to follow that person around the page.
It was easy to get lost. I was far too rough on Julie Dalzell, the gracious founding editor of Cuisine magazine; actually, my profile shoved her off the page, and I ran around its 1500 words banging on about my loathing of espresso slophouses. I was far too kind to Anita McNaught, the former New Zealand TV presenter now working as a Fox correspondent in Iraq; actually, I thought I was giving her a generous length of rope to hang herself. She said the most alarming pro-American things. I quoted her at greater length than usual, and did my best to stay out of the story. The paper published a letter from a man in Wellington who wrote that this was a disgrace, that I was obviously complicit with her views. This wasn’t true, but his criticism of the story was absolutely valid. I thought I was keeping a safe distance from McNaught. In fact, it read like I was in awe of her every word. I had doled out so much rope that it fastened around my own pretty neck.