Waiting on the night train
Every now and then, but especially when I’m thinking about the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care as it prepares for its final helter-skelter year, the old 1962 hit Night Train comes to mind.
As a one-time rock critic, I would, of course, be the first to say the surging R&B track by James Brown and the Famous Flames is worth thinking about any time. But for me, it’s also studded with personal memories of what’s at the heart of the costliest investigation ever held in our country.
Between the 1950s and the turn of this century, a couple of dozen staterun residential youth institutions were dotted around the country, from Auckland to Dunedin. These places were established with the best of liberal intentions. In the beginning, they mainly offered shelter for impoverished kids, but increasingly as the years went by, they became a makeshift response to burgeoning youth crime in the wider community (though it was not quite in the same league as the car conversions and ram raids we have been reading about in recent weeks). Among the early miscreants sent down to one of these homes was a fellow from the sticks who got booked for converting a horse.
In the event, the plan came unstuck. By the time the wind-down of the ramshackle system began in the late 1980s, things had become positively torrid.
So far, the inquiry looking at what happened has clocked up about 2000 pieces of testimony. Many have had to do with these state-run institutions, such as the one I happened to be at as a young teen the first time I heard Night Train.
The cell block, complete with reinforced doors, concrete walls and armoured windows, is a linchpin in the short-term training regimen.
James Brown) as if he’s spotting them from the jail-like confines of a boxcar. And on and on they go, instrumentalists and singer charging into a chaotic darkness deeper than anyone had ever imagined.
