Saturday in downtown Whanganui. A gunshot rings out. A chair crashes through a first-floor window. A young man yells, “Help! I have been shot.” He is seen to struggle with an older man. Engineer Colin Cameron and labourer Sydney Sykes bound up the stairs.
“Mr Mackay has shot me,” says the young man. “Get a car and take me to a doctor.”
“I accidentally shot him while I was demonstrating an automatic revolver,” says the older man.
“I am dying,” says the younger man. “I feel I am going. Give my love to my mother.”
The opening to Paul Diamond’s Downfall is unashamedly melodramatic, but the story of the attempted murder of 24-year-old soldier-poet Walter D’Arcy Cresswell by Whanganui Mayor Charles Mackay on May 15, 1920 remains a mystery mired in fear, secrecy, political rivalry and homophobia.
“As a gay man in New Zealand of my generation, there is this curiosity about other gay lives,”
