Lost Books

Creek Water Journal (Walking Bird Books, Wellington, 1977)

Poems I wrote about rivers and lakes I swam in as a boy. In Ohakune and environs, they were the Mangawhero, the Mangateitei, the Manga-nui-a-te-ao but not the Whangaehu; we used to go there to collect sand for the sandpit on its sulphurous banks. In the Wairarapa, we swam in the Ruamahanga, the Waiohine, the Waipoua, and at Lake Ferry. In the Waikato we boated on the river but never swam in it; but did sometimes bathe in the lakes: Hakanoa, Waahi, Ohinewai, Rotongaro and Waikare.  In Upper Hutt we used to go up the Akatarawa valley and swim in deep green pools in the Akatarawa River.

Brimstone (Vagabond Press, Auckland, 1981)

A poetry journal recounting my experiences with theatre group Red Mole and band Red Alert as we travelled from Wellington to Auckland to Los Angeles to San Francisco to New York; thence to London, with a side trip to Amsterdam; then back to New York and across the continent to LA again; coda is NZ in the summer of 1980-81. It was a source for Bus Stops on the Moon (2020) but is a different work with its own voice and its own preoccupations.

Cross Words (Pergamon Publishing, Canberra, 1984)

Six essays about politics New Zealand and Australia in the early 1980s; dealing with, in New Zealand, the Springbok Tour of 1981, the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in July 1984, and the election of the Lange Government in that same month and year. In Australia I wrote about the minerals boom of 1981 in the last years of the Fraser government; the election of the Hawke-Keating government in 1983 and its subsequent re-election, with a reduced majority, in December 1984; and the Lionel Murphy imbroglio and the many other corruption scandals surrounding the Wran Labor government in NSW.

The Inward Sun (Exilic, Sydney, 1996)

A study of Antipodean literature focussed upon works by Janet Frame (Owls Do Cry), Maurice Duggan (Along the Ridout Road that Summer), Ronald Hugh Morrieson (The Scarecrow) and Ruth Park (Pink Flannel aka Dear Hearts & Gentle People). The intention was to look at these four works, which all came early in their author’s careers, in terms of that old dialectic, identified but not invented by William Blake, between innocence and experience.

The Fantail’s Feathers (Project Printing, Ormondville, 2003)

A memoir of the women of my maternal line, from my great grandmother, to my grandmother, to my mother and to my eldest sister, who is in some respects a reincarnation of our great grandmother. She was the wife of a butcher turned farmer, a drunkard, and bore him twelve children before she died, worn out, aged only fifty years, at the turn of the century. Our grandmother was one of those twelve children and, like her sisters, most likely abused, even sexually abused, by her father. She became a primary school teacher who married a painter / decorator and had four children, of whom my mother was the second. The foregoing events all mostly occurred in Hawkes Bay or in the East Coast area, around Gisborne and Wairoa. My mother became a well-known poet and writer; my eldest sister is her first born; another teacher, she travelled widely, especially in Africa and the Middle East, before returning to NZ and re-training as a psychotherapist. She and our mother did not get on. The point about reincarnation arose because of her startling physical resemblance (as seen in the photographs) to her great grandmother.

Masked Days (Rain City Books, Auckland, 2006)

An autobiographical account of the year 2004, which I spent mostly in Auckland writing Luca Antara; based on a diary I kept while I was there. I started out living in the Ponsonby villa of an old friend but there really wasn’t room for me there, plus he had a new girlfriend and she was problematic too. Also I was mired in various disputes, some of them violent, with art world people consequent upon the book I’d published about Philip Clairmont five years before. Later on I moved into a bedsit in Mt Eden beneath the house of a rare books dealer who was just establishing himself in the auction market. He and his wife, in their different ways, tried to seduce me to their ways and means. Neither succeeded. In September I flew to Kuala Lumpur and then went to Malacca, after that Bali, Lombok, Sumbawa and Flores — before landing back in Australia, in Darwin, with a debilitating ear infection; which I have since recovered from.

Zigzag Street (Exilic, Sydney, 2012)

Memoir of literary life in the Antipodes 2005-2011; includes descriptions of a series of gatherings of poets and writers from Australia and New Zealand over that period: Fugacity 05 (Christchurch 2005);  Bluff 06 (Bluff and Rakiura, 2006); Home & Away (Sydney & Auckland, 2010); periphery / to carry around (Melbourne 2011). The moving spirit of those gatherings was Michele Leggott; this book is really a paean in praise of her; and includes a log of our interactions in the wake of the deaths of Alan Brunton, in 2002, and David Mitchell, in 2010. It is a farewell to a generation and welcome to the next.

Hokitika Town (forthcoming in 2024 from Rain City Books, Auckland)

Essays on four nineteenth century New Zealanders — Ferdinand von Hochstetter, Andreas Reischek, Walter Buller and George Grey; with interludes on the painters Charles Goldie and Gottfried Lindauer. The essays are about these men’s fluency in te reo Maori and how that facility led them to betrayal; foregrounding the betrayals of that old meddler, George Grey; in Victorian lawyer Thomas Tancred words: ‘a terrible and fatal man’. The intent is identify Grey as the progenitor of the Tory tradition in New Zealand, which is now (2024) undergoing a resurgence; its values are wealth, derived from landlordism; the theft of the land of the indigenous people; their consequent oppression; the elimination of the public service and other agents who might impede this plunder; and the further immiseration of the poor; in the name of policy objectives that are always opaque — but by means of which they and their friends will be enriched.