Roosters I Have Known

By Steve Braunias

Well crafted and piercingly insightful, this collection of Steve Braunias’s 2007 interviews of New Zealand's famous and infamousboth publicity-seekers and those desperate to hide from the spotlightis a humorous and biting survey of the national psyche. Ranging from the disturbingly naïve to the gloriously vain, from food critics to politicians, these profiles are uniquely New Zealand focused.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Awa Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781877551253

Steve Braunias

Steve Braunias is a well-known writer who works for the New Zealand Herald, serves as books editor at Newsroom, and is life president of the Hamilton Press Club. He has won over 50 national writing awards and is the author of 10 books, including Civilisation (winner of the 2013 NZ Post award for best book of non-fiction), and The Scene of the Crime, published by HarperCollins in 2015. His 2021 book, Missing Persons, won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Non-Fiction.

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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; when 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