A Perilous Road to Success

The Creative Hub writing centre in Auckland recently celebrated its (pandemic delayed) 10th Anniversary. On the night, Director John Cranna told the tawdry story of its origins ... 

"The Hub didn’t have particularly auspicious beginnings. In fact the dream of an Auckland-based writing centre run by successful local authors, almost died at birth ... 

A few years before we founded the Creative Hub, I’d been invited to set up a Masters of Creative Writing at AUT University. I’d been chair of the Auckland Society of Authors for four years, and knew a few authors, so I got together a guerilla army of writers, and off we went. 

It was fantastic to be able to invite authors of the calibre of Tessa Duder, Roger Hall and Owen Marshall to come in to teach. It was a lot of fun, and within two years the course had been voted by students the best taught post-graduate course in the university.

And then we hit something of a perfect storm. 

John Cranna and guest ... 

To my surprise I didn’t really like the university environment. I’d come from a community activist background, working for many years in impoverished inner city environments. I didn’t like the elitism; I didn’t like the sense that academics were a cut above the rest of humanity and most of all I didn’t like the fact that my students, many of whom were mature people, who had lived rich and varied lives, and sometimes traumatic and brave lives, were obliged to tug their forelocks to the hierarchy. 

And then like something out of an Isabel Allende novel, my biggest backer, who had helped me establish the degree, the Pro-Vice Chancellor, who happened also to be an Anglican minister, and a lovely man, clearly a bit too lovely for his own good, decided to elope to South America with the Dean of my Faculty.

I think he was an astronomer, and I like to think they ended up on a mountain top in Chile, gazing amorously at the stars …  

Which was all very well, but not great for my writing centre, because next the Global Financial Crisis arrived, and the University decided to shut down a number of programmes, and make many staff redundant ... and we were the first to get the chop. 

It didn’t help that my chief ally was rumoured to be on a Chilean mountain top, gazing romantically at the stars with my Dean! 

To be honest, I kind of envied him. 

So we were shut down and with my guerilla army of authors, I established the Creative Hub. The first five years were tough, financially. You don’t start a boutique creative writing centre in a godless, commercial town like Auckland if you want to become a millionaire. Trust me.

But it was still a lot of fun. However, we all have to eat, and I was beginning to get pretty desperate. I had sold my house, and used the capital to establish the Hub, something my accountant told me was madness. And he was right of course, as accountants always are. So things were looking pretty grim for a time. The same year the university centre was closed down, I also lost in quick succession both my parents and my fiancée. Even my two cats ran off, never to be seen again. 

So now you know why I bang on so much about the Hero’s Journey in classes. But as you're aware, after the lowest point in the Hero’s Journey, the descent into hell, comes the reprieve, an upswing in hope, and the protagonist begins to see faint glimmerings of light at the end of the tunnel. 

Suddenly our earliest graduates started to pick up prizes in national writing competitions. What I’d left out of my calculations, of course, was how long it takes to grow a writer to publication standard. 

The prospect of having to work at a car wash, or cook up meth for a living like the teacher protagonist Walter White in the series Breaking Bad, began to recede. I’d had to evict a lot of meth and heroin dealers in my years working in Kings Cross, London, and their life-style didn’t look particularly attractive. 

Breaking Bad - unattractive lifestyle ...

Many of you will be aware of the Sunday Star Times short story award, which is the best-known and longest running award of its kind in the country. Also the richest for many years, with big prize money. Graduates of all the writing programmes in the country – including the five Masters of Creative Writing at Universities – plus many well-known authors - enter it – often up to 1,000 entries every year.

First our graduate Eileen Merriman won prizes in it for a couple of years and then began to publish a string of novels with Penguin Random House – culminating in 13 novels as of this year. She’s also just won the 2024 Booklovers Award for her latest novel. 

And then in 2018, our graduates Fiona Sussman, Eileen and Kathryn Van Beek won 1st, 2nd and 3rd prizes in the Sunday Star Times Award. The next year we won first prize again with Jill Varani, who had graduated from our Thirty Week Fiction Course only a month or two before, and had been recipient of our first Young Writers Scholarship. 

The next year we won a prize again with Katy Newton, another graduate. I’m delighted to say both Fiona and Jill are here tonight and are going to read the opening couple of minutes of their national 1st prize winning stories. 

So after quite a few barren years, the descent into hell, and the impending dole for me, the Creative Hub had finally arrived. 

Around that time, Waikato University established an even richer short story award called the Sargeson, with a first prize of  $10,000, which attracted the most entries of any award in the country. One of our graduates, Leaanne O’Brien, promptly won that too with a powerful and harrowing story of a sex worker whose father turns up at her place of work. An awkward moment, as you can imagine. 

We’d hope to have Leeanne here tonight to read from her story along with Fiona and Jill, but she has recently had a terrible car accident and a nine hour operation on her back. Speaking of Hero’s Journeys. 

Now, as of 2024, many of our graduates have won national and even international prizes, including the top NZ short story awards and also the Commonwealth Short Story Award – with Dr Himali McInnes. I don’t know what it is about doctors, but a lot of these prize-winning graduates are medical folk. 

Fiona Sussman told me a while ago that most useful thing I ever said to her was: “What makes you think, Fiona, that it will take you any less time to become a successful writer than it took you to become a doctor.” 

Jessica Wilson - Chef de Cuisine for 70

I told her I couldn’t believe I’d said anything quite so rude – but my friends tell me that it's very likely I said something that rude. Which is very hurtful!

Before you return to the banquet prepared for you by Jess Wilson, I’d like to thank all the tutors who have helped make the Hub the success it is today. The Hub is at its heart a collaborative venture, a cooperative venture, the sum of all the talented writers and editors who work here. 

These tutors currently include a number of our graduates such as Fiona Sussman, Eileen Merriman, Rosetta Allan and Ann Glamuzina; plus former Penguin publisher Harriet Allan, Lynn Davidson, Jessica Wilson, Stuart Hoar, David Howard, Judith White, Rose Carlyle, Stephen Campbell, Ruby Porter, Sarah Ell, Zoe Meager and Elizabeth Smither. 

Without these talented people, and the care and devotion they show to our students, the Hub simply could not function.

Creative Hub tutors and authors at our celebration ...

A Republican Descended From Kings of Scotland ...

In which John discovers that his royal ancestor killed MacBeth ...

There are few things more galling for a passionate republican like myself, than to uncover a gang of kings amongst your ancestors. 

So when I discovered recently a line of descent among my forefathers stretching back to King Malcolm III of Scotland (and hence to King Robert the Bruce's family), I had to go and have a quiet sit down and a cup of chamomile tea. The fact that Malcolm III killed the villainous King MacBeth from Shakespeare's play, made me feel slightly better.

Then further research revealed MacBeth had been the subject of a hatchet job by Shakespeare, and was actually not a bad chap at all, at least by comparison with the generally murderous Scottish kings of the time. 

I've nursed a life-long animosity to the British royal family ... the antiquated accents; the improbable marital dramas; the opulence and waste of their palaces, castles and stately homes - notwithstanding a chance meeting with Princes Charles in London in the 1980s. On this occasion, to my surprise, the man struck me as having a suavite and charisma that I wasn't expecting. And a damn sharp suit. Until then, I'd thought of him as a faintly risible figure, with his strangled enunciation and suspect views on a whole range of social issues.

The encounter was at the first British Conference on Community Architecture. As an activist in Kings Cross, London, intent on a saving a violent, neglected and decayed Victorian housing estate from demolition, we had approached him in a shameless attempt to get royal backing. He had gone on record as favouring the retention of 19th century buildings in the face of the wholesale redevelopment of Victorian London in the late 20th century. Teetering as we were on the brink of obliteration we would take any allies would could get. 

And whatever else you say about Prince (now King) Charles, he had a fair bit of clout.

I've written about the Hillview Estate in previous blogs. 'Kings Cross Estate of Shame' as it was known in London's daily newspaper, the Evening Post, was as desperate and degenerate a place as you could find in 1980s London.

But I digress. I was telling you about my ancestors, the kings. Some years ago a relative had sent me the family tree of my grandmother, Jamesina Fraser. Jamesina and her ancestors had lived in Aberdeenshire in north-eastern Scotland for multiple generations. The family tree went back as far as a forester called Alexander Fraser, who had been born in Pitsligo in 1778 and had worked on the estate of the 17th Lord Saltoun. 

Oddly enough, the 17th Lord Saltoun was also called Alexander Fraser. 17th Lord Saltoun was descended from King Malcolm III of Scotland and also the family of King Robert the Bruce. Two Alexander Frasers, one a lord, one a commoner. Could employer and employee be related?

Lord Saltoun was a renowned warrior who had fought with the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The Clan Fraser history on the Electric Scotland website: "In the first four hours of the Battle of Waterloo ... he had two horses shot under him and a bullet through his shako. His rolled cloak was strapped across the pommel of his saddle, which was hurriedly shifted to successive mounts; and when it was later unrolled no less than seventeen French bullets were found in it!"

Lord Saltoun kept extensive journals, travelled the world on various military campaigns, and the Duke of Wellington referred to him as 'a pattern to the army both as a man and a soldier ...' 

17th Lord Saltoun

This was no upper class twit then, with a dissolute lifestyle and a habit of oppressing his peasant vassals. Despite my hostility to the aristocracy of Britain, this seemed like a man I could admire, even if much of his military career was in imperial ventures. 

I was rather pleased that my great, great, great, great grandfather had been his employee, and managed his forests while he was away dealing to Napoleon, the scourge of Europe. 

They were both called Alexander Fraser, and on further research, it became clear they were almost certainly related. 

A direct line of hereditary Lords named Saltoun (previously called the Lords Philorth) stretched back pretty much unbroken to the period when the Scots were struggling for their independence from the English in the 14th century, during the reign of the famous King Robert the Bruce. And these Scottish nobles were almost all called Alexander Fraser.

In these early years of King Robert the Bruce's reign, Sir Alexander Fraser of Touch Fraser was the head of Robert the Bruce's royal household. As a companion of King he shared his perils, fought at the famous Battle of Bannockburn, where King Robert vanquished the English. Sir Alexander Fraser sealed the Declaration of Scottish Independence in 1320 and then spawned a line of a dozen or so Lord Alexander Frasers, by marrying King Robert the Bruce's sister. 

Aside from setting up the date with his sister Mary, Robert the Bruce then conferred vast lands, confiscated from others, upon Lord Fraser, as his loyal follower. 

Alexander Fraser's wife Mary was captured by the English and spent four years in a cage in Roxburgh Castle. Edward I of England sent the following instructions: 'Let her be closely confined in an abode of stone and iron made in the shape of a cross, and let her be hung up out of doors in the open air at Berwick, that both in life and after her death, she may be a spectacle and eternal reproach to travellers.’

Water-boarding sounds like a breeze by comparison. 

Sir Alexander Fraser, Mary's husband, was killed at the battle of Dupplin 1332, and his son William killed at the battle of Neville's Cross. These were bloodthirsty times as the Scots continued to struggle to throw off the yoke of England. 

The next descendant in this lordly line, according to a chart entitled The Clan Fraser in Scottish History, the 1st Laird of Philorth, also called Alexander Fraser 'fought in the moonlight fight between the Douglases and the Percys in the Chevy Chase at Otterburn in 1388'. 

The Englishman Henry Percy, or 'Hotspur' as he was known to the Scots because of his haste into battle against them, appears as a character in Shakespeare's great play Henry IV. An ancient English ballad, 'The Ballad of Chevy Chase' retells this battle between the Scots and the English at Otterburn.

So far, these Alexander Frasers were distinguishing themselves by rabid hostility to the Sassenachs, and a predilection to getting themselves killed in battle. Remarkably, they all sired sufficient offspring before their deaths, to get my ancestors - and then eventually me - onto the planet.

The next notable Lord in this line, Sir Alexander Fraser, 3rd Laird of Philorth, who attended the Papal Jubilee in Rome 1450, 'made a mutual entail with his beloved cousin Hugh, Lord Fraser of Lovat, settling their estates on each other if their male descendants died out'. This Alexander established the 'Frasers of Memsie' - a tiny town in Aberdeenshire, in the15th century. I have a photograph of my grandmother, Jamesina Fraser, with her family in Memsie at the turn of the 19th century.

The multiple Lords Philorth (and then called Saltoun) that followed, through the 15th to 19th centuries, most of whom were called Alexander Fraser, had numerous younger brothers, called cadets, who although also called Fraser, didn't inherit the aristocratic lands, or title. This was the principal of primogeniture, which protected the hereditary booty of the lords from dissipation. Tough for the younger brothers, many of whom then went off to the colonies to make their fortunes.

But many stayed in the small area south of Fraserburgh in Aberdeenshire, and barely moved at all, and thus the birth records of both my ancestor the forestor, Alexander Fraser, and his descendants, give the same birthplaces - Pitsligo, for several generations, until my grandmother, Jamesina.

So given the the concentration of the lordly Fraser 'cadets' in the same small area south of Fraserborough, and given the disposition of the Frasers in my family tree to also remain in this small area for generations, it seems certain the Lord Alexander Fraser, hero of the Battle of Waterloo, and my 4 x great grandfather, Alexander Fraser, his forester, were related, perhaps through the 3rd Laird of Philorth who established the Frasers of Memsie in the 15th century.

All in all, worthy of at least one cup of nerve-settling chamomile tea.

It would be fair to say that King Robert the Bruce of Scotland, much lionised in legend and myth, was about as bloodthirsty as the Sassenachs he opposed. He ruthlessly annihilated his chief rival for the kingship of Scotland, Comyn and his relatives and supporters. However his achievements as a guerilla fighter against the English were unparalleled and his determination to establish sovereignty against his southern neighbours both unrelenting and successful. 

That his plucky sister Mary - kept hung up outside in a cage for four years - appears to have been my ancestor is reassuring. The independence movement of Scotland, although lead by kings - in this case Robert the Bruce - was one of the first, and most successful secessionist movements in British history, and arose from the desire of the Scots to reclaim their ancient Gaelic identity, customs and freedom.

And we can all identify with that.

Robert the Bruce's vision of an independent Scotland lasted for a several hundred years - until in 1603, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England, and established an uneasy union of the two crowns, which was finally cemented in 1707. 

Down the centuries, the Lords of Philorth / Saltoun continued to administer their estates and castles just south of Fraserburgh on the Scottish north coast, and continued to populate the small towns of Pitsligo, Rathen and Memsie with my ancestors.

It's an odd fact that my father, a Scottish musician, had an encyclopedic knowledge of the kings and queens of Scotland and England. I was baffled by his unaccountable expertise in this area, and his ability to reel off their multiple lines of descent. And yet he never knew he was a direct descendent of at least two of them - Malcolm III and David I. It is one of those strange ironies of modern life, that the internet has opened up genealogical riches denied previous generations. 

I guess there is some solace for a republican in knowing that these murderous kings were trying to protect the imperiled Scottish identity against the English. But they were as inclined to slaughter their fellow Scots as they were the imperial Sassenach. Reading the accounts of these early battles is a vivid lesson in how painfully democracy has been snatched from the bloody age of kings and autocrats. 

The perils of Japanese rope bondage ...

In which John recounts some chastening encounters with academia ...

When the professor who axed the Masters of Creative Writing I established at an Auckland University was sacked for regaling his colleagues with his Japanese sexual bondage methods, I caught a glimpse of the inscrutable workings of fate.

An Englishman and Professor of Hotel Studies, he had a disarmingly upbeat manner as he told me that my job and the centre I had established were to be extinguished. 

Hotel studies at AUT University

'We're reconfiguring the faculty,' he told me in a conspiratorial whisper. 'Sadly, there's no room for you at the inn.'  

Was this a specifically hotel studies kind of dismissal patter, I wondered?

I had known I was in trouble when another professor, who had been my staunchest ally and sponsor at the university, an Anglican vicar with a penchant for astronomy, abandoned his wife to elope with my Dean to the mountain tops of Chile to gaze amorously at stars for a year. It didn't seem to matter that he liked astronomy. This seemed to me to be a grave dereliction of duty.

The heavens, I had begun to realise, were not aligned for my embryonic writing programme. It seemed fitting, somehow, that the only rooms they could find for my centre were next to the Serious Fraud Office in a faceless downtown office block.

Unpropitious neighbour

Several years earlier, I had approached the English Department at the other Auckland university (the really big one) with a group of writers, and proposed they start a Masters of Creative Writing. My group included some of New Zealand's best-known authors, so I figured I would at least get a sympathetic hearing. 

The Head of Department ushered me into his office. He wore a tweed jacket, with leather elbow patches, and had thick spectacles. He directed me to a chair, and then put both his feet up on his aircraft carrier of a desk, with the soles facing me. 

'Good of you to come in,' he said. He sighed heavily. He seemed perplexed by the sheer obdurate nature of the Universe. 'Did you know that there is already a Masters of Creative Writing in New Zealand?' he asked.

I did know that. 

I had been Chair of the Auckland Branch of the New Zealand Society of Authors for four years, and helped restructure this body after a spectacular public altercation between one of his colleagues, Professor C.K. Stead, and other writers had brought ridicule and near-collapse to the Society. The London Flat Affair, as it came to be known, was something of a notorious watershed in the history of New Zealand writing politics. (See my previous blog item, 'Autumn of the Patriarchs'.) 

Stead - baffling perversity

If nothing else, the incident demonstrated the baffling perversity of professors in the Auckland University English Department.

Also, I had talked to Bill Manhire, the architect of Wellington's renowned Masters of Creative Writing Programme. In fact the success of his programme was a prime stimulant for trying to establish something similar in Auckland. 

'You know there's really no room for another Masters of Creative Writing in New Zealand,' he went on sorrowfully. 'I can't see the authorities permitting it'. 

I pointed out that Masters of Creative Writing were proliferating all over the world, that Manhire - reputedly - had a waiting list of over a hundred applicants for the twelve places on his programme each year, and that many of those applicants would be from Auckland, a much larger city than Wellington.

He sighed again and looked at his fingernails. I gazed at the soles of his shoes. I noticed that one had a large hole in it. This seemed incongruous in a man on a six-figure salary.

'Look,' I said. 'There is a tremendous renaissance going on in New Zealand writing. Our authors are key to forming our emerging identity. We're a young nation finding its feet.' He languorously crossed his legs. 'A fascinating cross-fertilisation is occurring between Maori, Pasifika and pakeha writers right now,' I went on, trying not to focus on the hole, which had moved to the other side. 'I can't think of a more exciting time in New Zealand literature. And Auckland, with its big Pacific and Maori population is key to that. Manhire's programme at Victoria University has created a whole new generation of writers in Wellington. Surely we can do the same in Auckland.'

Some years earlier, I had spent several years living in the headquarters of Nga Tama Toa, the Maori brown panther movement, and had had my eyes opened to the oncoming Maori renaissance by the writers and film-makers I had met there - Merata Mita, Rowley Habib, Brian Potiki ... (See my blog item 'Two Years Living With Maori Activists').

'I'm sorry. That's just the way it is,' he said, taking his feet off his aircraft carrier desk. He ushered me from his office with a sweep of his leather-bound arms. 

I never heard from him again.

The next year, the Head of Department established a Masters of Creative Writing, and recruited an obscure poet from the USA to run it. A likeable, warm woman, she subsequently told me that her speciality area was 'the digital analysis of the silences between words in poetry'.

After leaving my job as editor of the country's largest circulation magazine, where I had employed many writers to do precisely what I had explained to the Head of Department - to write on issues of New Zealand culture and identity, I took up a job in the journalism programme at the Auckland University of Technology.

There I got a much more sympathetic hearing. Ironically, it probably didn't hurt that Auckland University had just established a Masters of Creative Writing ... it spurred the AUT high command to a competitive response. The Dean of my Faculty and the Pro-Vice Chancellor were supportive, and I spent a year designing the programme, approaching a variety of writers to help out as guest tutors and mentors. 

A sympathetic journalist at the national paper the Sunday Star Times profiled the embryonic programme ('Get a decent haircut and move to Auckland'), and the fact that it was being run by a group of prominent local authors, with a specific goal of celebrating our local literature, rather than the more modest goal of the digital analysis of the gaps between words in American poetry.

We got off to a great start. We had many applicants, and I was able to employ most of the writers who had been behind me when I approached Aircraft Carrier Desk Man. A number of graduates from that first year went on to publishing success, some internationally, including Fiona Sussman, who regularly wins national awards for her writing. Other graduates, perhaps infected by the spirit of entrepreneurial energy that characterised the establishment of the centre, eventually formed their own publishing collective, Eunoia Books, where they not only published several of their own novels, but went on to publish many other authors' books as well. 

The Pro-Vice Chancellor and Dean were behind me, and the masters degree was almost immediately, and to my astonishment, voted by students the best-taught post-graduate programme at the University.  

This seemed to me a vindication of the collective group-based approach I had taken, employing a variety of NZ authors to come in to teach, rather than a specifically personal accolade. It was also a vindication, I felt, of bringing in successful working authors, rather than career academics, to teach on the programme.

The other thing I was keen to do was to establish an atmosphere of equality and empowerment amongst my students, all of whom were adults, with an average age in their 40s. Many had lead rich, varied and tumultuous lives in a variety of occupations: somewhat different from the circumscribed lives of many of my academic colleagues, most of whom had been cloistered in the academy for decades. I was often bemused by the devotion of these folk to the tortured wisdom of Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and the other doyens of French post-structuralism.

It seemed like a fashionable gambit to confer mandarin status on a marginal elite, and had little to do with the raw and vigorous stories of an emerging Aotearoa. I was put in mind of the person who loses his keys on a long darkened street, and spends his time searching under the tiny area illuminated by the one working street-lamp on the road, because that's the only place where there's light. 

So all was not entirely well in the state of Denmark. I had noticed at both Auckland University, and AUT University a number of academics had family members employed alongside them, something that in the corporate world would be considered dubious. After all, universities are publically funded organisations that consume hundreds of millions of dollars of tax payers money. 

When the career academic who had helped me establish the programme proposed to personally employ his father on the Masters of Creative Writing I said I thought that would be poorly received by the literary community. 'Look,' I said. 'Writers are badly underpaid in this country. They're really sensitive to any hint of nepotism or unfairness in the dispensing of opportunities. They won't like this, it'll damage the reputation of the programme, and I don't think you should do it.' 

What I didn't realise was that I had made a bitter enemy, which would come back to haunt me. And then my two principle supporters, the Pro-Vice Chancellor and the Dean, eloped together to their Chilean mountain top, and I was all alone, with the 2010 global financial crisis bearing down on us all like a runaway juggernaut. 

For some reason I had never been able to divine, but probably had to do with the fact that I was keen to establish an independent centre, outside the AUT English department, I was required by the Faculty, and by my budget, to raise $80,000 a year in corporate sponsorship for the programme to continue. Bill Manhire, who had recently returned from a tour of North American writing programmes, told me the message there was clear - stay out of English Departments. 

When Victoria University had proposed his centre be absorbed into the English Department, he resigned in protest. Rather than lose one of the stars in their crown, they had relented and reversed their plans. It probably didn't hurt his case that Bill had an eccentric Las Vegas billionaire by the name of Glen Schaeffer bankrolling his programme.

Now, with the Global Financial Crisis, the corporate sponsorship doors slammed shut to me. Loudly. I was all alone. 

The Acting Dean called me into her office. To my surprise, she looked at me with undisguised rage. Perhaps SHE had wanted to elope to a Chilean mountain top. I knew I quite liked the idea myself. 

'You're getting the chop,' she said. 'Chop, chop, chop, chop,' she chortled. 'You'll just have to take your bunch of grubby so-called real-world writers somewhere else and annoy some other reputable, protocol-observing academics who have a keener sense than you do of the intricacies of post-modern thought.' Actually, she didn't say any of that, but it did seem to me that that was what she was thinking. 

'Look,' I said. 'This programme has been many years in the gestation. It's only been running two years, and just been voted the best post-graduate programme in the university by students. Surely that counts for something?' Her look turned to one of glee. She had a PhD. I didn't even have a Masters degree, and here I was, running a Masters programme. This was a perturbation of the academic universe that was almost certainly contrary to the divine order of things. 

'Sorry,' she said, with the smile of a wildebeest. 

'I'd like to talk to your superior, please.' And this is where the Professor of Hotel Studies, and exponent of shibari, or Japanese sexual rope bondage stepped in.

'You've been a naughty boy, John,' he said. 'You don't fit into our robust, rope-loving, pristine culture here. And I'm afraid you need to be punished.' Actually, he didn't say that at all, but I felt that that was what he was thinking. 

So the programme was closed down, and the Masters of Creative Writing absorbed into the English department, where it has been presided over for the last ten years by the career academic who employed his father. To my knowledge, this person has not published any contemporary New Zealand fiction. 

I took my band of merry writers, and founded the Creative Hub, a small independent writing centre, with a fraction of the resources of the universities, based on the same principles I had established on the Masters programme. 

The Creative Hub is poetically located on Princes St, a few hundred metres from both universities. We now have many hundreds of graduates, and they have many successful published novels to their names. I have a growing stack of them in my office.

I had gone to both Auckland universities with passion and an excitement at the possibilities of helping them spawn a new generation of kiwi writers. I was particularly keen to harvest the wisdom and generativity of the previous generation of authors, to help the tyro upstarts on their way. 

I came away with a sense of disillusionment with the structure and practices of these places. Perhaps things have changed. Perhaps the English departments of these two universities are now hot-beds of joyous experimentation. But I came to the reluctant conclusion that in the literary realm at least, there was something about universities that was fundamentally hostile to creativity. 

My grandfather Darcie: thwarted murderer ...

My grandfather was a man inclined to direct speech. So when he issued instructions for the murder of his wife, he didn't beat around the bush. 

Some men might have said: 'Son, I've been reflecting for some time on the state of my marriage, the conjugal and other responsibilities I feel my wife is disinclined to discharge, and on reflection, after due consideration and some consultation with other interested parties, I've decided to do away with her.'

But that wasn't my grandfather's style.

Darcie Cranna. War hero. Thwarted murderer.

'Son,' he said, to my father, who was fifteen at the time, 'Get out to the woodshed and bring me that axe. I'm going to kill Jamesina right now.'

My father didn't go to the wood shed, but leaving Darcie in an alcoholic stupor on the floor, walked instead to the police station in Peterhead, Aberdeenshire and dobbed him in.

Darcie was brought before the courts, where the decorated WW1 veteran listened to his fifteen year old son give evidence of his murderous intent. Darcie was summarily dealt with, and my father became family breadwinner as a clerk in a local law firm.

He never forgave Darcie for any of this, and spoke of the humiliation of having to give evidence against his own father in a public court of law. 

Twenty years earlier, in August 1915, at the age of 23 and part of the Scottish Horse, the handsome Darcie had landed at Gallipoli, where the Scots received heavy casualties at Suvla Bay. Much has been written of the botched Dardenelles Campaign, presided over by Winston Churchill. Many young New Zealanders were also killed or wounded on that beach. 

Darcie's unit was so badly decimated it was disbanded and reabsorbed into a larger force. Three year's later, Darcie's beloved younger brother, William George, a member of a machine gun unit know as 'the suicide squad' was killed on the front line in northern France. In his memory, my own father was named William George.

My father, a passionate musician, who escaped the torment of his family through retreat into the arts, and as a teenager was organist for the churches of Peterhead, was playing Chopin's Funeral March one night on the family piano. Darcie entered the room and punched my father so hard that he was pitched backwards off the piano stool onto the floor.

'Never play that again in my house,' said the war hero.

Its hard to escape the conclusion that Darcie was traumatised by war, by the death of so many of his comrades and his beloved brother. At the time, shocked and traumatised soldiers who ran from the battlefield were put before a firing squad and summarily executed by their seniors in the British Army. 'Pour encourager les autres'.

Darcie - handsome devil

Jamesina came to live with our family here in New Zealand. She was so affected by the continual diet of violence visited upon her by Darcie that she had entered a state of helpless dependency. I watched her as a teenager, puzzled by the rarity with which she left the house. She went out once a week to play bowls. Everything had to be done for her. Her only companion was my younger brother Andrew, who as a result acquired a broad Scottish accent at the age of five.

Eventually, she took a substantial overdose of sleeping pills and had to be rushed to hospital, and was rescued again from premature death by my father.

Arguably the largest influence on gender relations, and in fact on 20th century culture in New Zealand more generally, were the two world wars - particularly WW1, where New Zealand lost a larger proportion of its men-folk than any other British dominion. The cenotaph in every small New Zealand town, with its marble gold-lettered roll of honour, speaks of the trauma of countless families.

Only in recent years have psychologists begun to reveal the intergenerational impact of this kind of trauma. The legacy of violence, depression, anxiety that emerge in the wake of these major conflicts. In his magisterial study of returned soldier trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, tells of the incomprehension that greeted traumatised soldiers (in this case Vietnam veterans) as recently as the 1980s.

These vets were medicated to the eyeballs, ostracised, or otherwise relegated to the back wards of mental hospitals. No one knew how to treat them. Van der Kolk writes of the uncontrollable emotions these veterans suffer, and their retreat into a myriad of substance abuses. Van der Kolk writes: 'They ... alternated between occasional bouts of explosive rage and long periods of being emotionally shut down."

Had my father been able to understand this, he might have been able to forgive Darcie. William Cranna served in the Royal Navy in World War II but was spared engagement in battle. His subsequent life was defined by his hostility to his father: emigration to another country; utter commitment to the role of reliable family bread-winner; distaste for the use of corporal punishment against his children. 

But his fulminating rage at Darcie persisted to the end; and in an ironic mirror of his father's eventual demise, also drank himself to death, perhaps driven by the demons of his childhood. 

And thus is trauma, undiagnosed, and untreated, visited upon the future generations, and the vicious cycle continues.

As for my own more nuanced experience of all this; at the age of 23, after leaving Wellington with a degree in sociology, I went to live for the 1980s in London's most violent red-light district. Hillview estate, Kings Cross, was a centre of immigration; political refugees and other foreigners, many of whom had fled war zones in the developing world. 

My job was to evict a bunch of violent drug dealers and pimps who ran the Kings Cross heroin trade, one of the most active in London. Big Jo stalked the estate clad only in luminescent green shorts, a machete tucked into the waistband. His wingman, Sparky, aka Mr William Patterson (a lavish brass name plate on his door) had acquired his moniker from his Molotov cocktail attacks on fellow pimps.

For several years I lived with a rope ladder under my bed and a steel box bolted to my front door letter-slot to repel Sparky's special cocktails. One morning, from my first floor window, I observed Sparky attacking an underling who he had cornered in his ground floor flat. On this occasion, Sparky's instrument of correction was a carving knife. The man punched out windows in his desperation to escape the onslaught.

At the end of this impromptu execution attempt, Mr William Patterson, himself a Scot, looked up and into my eyes.  His own eyes seemed flat and reptilian, devoid of emotion. I called the police, packed an overnight bag, then walked smartly to the station, took the tube to Heathrow, and caught a flight - any flight - out of the country. Hunkered down in Palermo, Sicily, I lay low for a couple of weeks until the dust had settled. 

The sound of that smashing glass is still rivetingly present, forty years on.  

After ten years, I returned to New Zealand with case of what Van der Kolk calls hypervigilance -  evidenced for many years by a tendency to walk down the middle of Auckland roads at night (the safest place to walk in Kings Cross). I had also become a heavy drinker. 

My dependence on alcohol was a chilling echo of the habit that had killed both my father and grandfather, so eventually I sought out an expert in the field.

My therapist listened with patience to my stories of  mayhem on the streets of Kings Cross, including two attacks I had experienced myself. Once I was dragged backwards out of my office chair by a self-described 'servant of Lucifer', and kicked with a fair amount of satanic energy to the floor. When I put up my hands up to protect myself he shattered my fingers. He was eventually dragged off me by other office workers. On another occasion I was attacked in an estate stairwell by a man with a welding hammer. As I looked at him through a veil of blood, I had the distinct impression he would have been quite happy to kill me. A glancing blow, another trip to University College Hospital, and seven stitches in the head. 

My therapist had trained in the 1960s, prior to the recognition of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which as Van der Kolk points out only became truly understood in the 1980s. After some time listening to these tales, my psychotherapist, in despair of a solution, prescribed anti-depressants ... which I declined, convinced that I wasn't really depressed. 

That there was something else wrong.

Recently, I came upon the body - stiff with rigor mortis - of a friend who had died of a heart attack, one of his feet was lifted strangely in the air, like a mast. Richard lived on his own and had failed to answer his phone. I rang him several times, sensing something was amiss. When I got into his flat, I discovered he had been dead for 18 hours. Slipping into my Kings Cross pattern, I managed the situation with efficiency, searching his desk for contact numbers, talked to the ambulance man and police for hours, rang his shocked relatives, informed the neighbours. 

I was pleased at how well I had managed the situation. 

Three days later, my car and some possessions were stolen from outside my workplace in central Auckland. The car was found shortly afterwards, written off; my belongings suitably pillaged – in Dargaville. On going to survey the vehicle, I observed with detached surprise the mess the thieves had left. The loss of the vehicle was an echo of Kings Cross, where my car had been stolen five times. On one occasion I had caught the thief, and over the course of an hour, had dragged him bodily and resisting to the local police station. 

That weekend, my girlfriend didn't answer her phone, when I knew she had walked home alone at night from her office.

I watched myself with detachment as I fell to the floor, unable to stand. I began to let out the most abject groans. Lying on the rug, my body was wracked with convulsions. My heart went into extreme palpitations. This went on for half an hour or so until I shakily got to my feet - a sense of having been projected sideways into a parallel universe of uncontrollable fear. 

My girlfriend had been talking to a flat-mate in another room, and a de facto arrangement to talk had slipped her mind. But the body keeps the score, and years of proximity to violence and death in Kings Cross and the recent discovery of Richard's cold, blue body, had left their mark ...

What this taught me, and what is so eloquently laid out in Van der Kolk's book, is that violence is deeply encoded in the body, and that triggers can release the traumatic pattern involuntarily, even if that trauma has been laid down decades before. 

Since then, reliably and painfully, I have been doing trauma therapy every two weeks, aware that I have a unique opportunity denied my father and grandfather. My new therapist gets me to recall the events from the past, and to tune in through a 'felt sense' to the visceral signals in my body when I do so. Like many writers, and in fact many New Zealand men who grew up in the latter 20th century, I have a tendency to work from the head - to analyse my experience through the higher brain.

But emotional shock is encoded in the limbic system, and only through a more sensory attunement and adjustment can this 'ancient brain' be eased out of its stage of frozen trauma. After eight sessions or so I observe some progress. My girlfriend reports a more likeable person. I no longer walk down the middle of Auckland streets at night. The palpitations are less severe if she misses a late evening call. But I sense the beast is still lurking there in the undergrowth.

Whether I will ever be free of the demons of Kings Cross remains to be seen. 

I recall sitting in the Kings Cross police station and talking to Inspector Bill Nelson about one of my neighbours who had been murdered. Patsy Malone was a lesbian prostitute who boasted of never having had normal sex with a man in her life. Her body was found in three plastic bags in the Epping Forest. A few months later it was revealed she had been killed by a policeman during a violent sex session. Constable Swindell was a member of the diplomatic corps and had once guarded No 10 Downing Street. He was acquitted of manslaughter but sentenced for disposing of her body. 

Patsy's killing has stayed with me ever since. 

Sometimes, Kings Cross prostitutes would sleep in my stairwell. A refuge if their pimp (Sparky, Big Jo) became too violent. I had a deep compassion for these women who, like my own father, were often in flight from violent families. Many had been been sexually abused by their fathers. Most of them were substance abusers, usually heroin, who used the drug as a brief and delusional respite from their emotional pain.

Van der Kolk, with his remarkable book, has done a great service to trauma sufferers. These are truly the benighted of the earth. Ostracized and imprisoned for their actions. Unable to live - or love - civilly, tormented by their past, prone to visiting their inexplicable rage upon those they care for most. Truly cursed and deeply misunderstood. When I think of the young Darcie, getting back on his troop ship as a callow 23 year old, leaving behind the tortured shapes of the bodies of his friends in the Turkish sand, I think of a whole generation who were changed in ways that were inexplicable to both themselves and to their loved ones. 

In the final scene of All Quiet on the Western Front, the great anti-war novel by Erich Maria Remarque, the hero of the novel reaches out to touch a butterfly in the mud and degradation of the trenches. The German soldier Paul is traumatized by the acts he has had to commit and by the death of so many of his friends. At the precise moment of reaching for the butterfly he is shot dead, his hand stretched before him. “His face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come ..." 

What great healers like Van der Kolk and his colleagues have offered is a respite before death for the most severely afflicted by trauma ... a butterfly that can truly be touched, gently, and taken into the heart for healing.

The Tale of the Black Poodle

In which John looks at the temptation to sup with the devil ... 

It is Easter in Germany, a chilly spring night, and sounds of celebration are in the air. Faust is out walking, and a stray poodle follows him along the street. To his surprise and pleasure it accompanies him all the way home to his study. There, the poodle turns into a demon - a particularly talkative demon, with a notably seductive verbal style. He makes Faust an attractive offer: 'I will use my supernatural powers to provide you with everything you want here on earth while you are alive - but on one condition.' 'And what is that?" asks Faust. 'When you die, you will pledge to serve the devil in Hell.'

Faust and the poodle

So goes the opening of one of the greatest ever works of literature to come from Germany - 'Faust' by Goethe. 

The play was published in the early 1800s, but has had a curious resonance for Germany throughout its history. In 1914, a hundred years after its first performance, the people of Germany pledged their allegiance to Kaiser Wilhelm, their last emperor. The Kaiser promised to make Germany great, to restore pride in the face of the other superpowers of the day - France, Britain, Russia. He had a pathological hatred of foreigners, and was, in the words of a German historian of this era: "unsure and arrogant, with an immeasurably exaggerated self-confidence and desire to show off ..."

He was the reality TV star of his day.

Almost every New Zealand town, however small, now hosts a marble or granite monument bearing a list of the names of young men who died as a result of this particular Faustian transaction. 

Twenty-five year later, the German people did the same once again, with another charismatic populist leader, and with an even more catastrophic war. 

Erich Fromm

Thus was born the notion of the Faustian Pact - something that arose from German literature, and was enacted by its peoples in the most calamitous and literal way.

It was as if this great German writer had discerned something in the soul of his countrymen that made them vulnerable to this kind of obedience - and had issued a chilling warning. 

In 1941, at the height of WWII, another great German writer, the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm published 'Fear of Freedom', in which he explained how at a time of uncertainty and economic chaos, the people of a nation may willingly give up their freedom and autonomy and blindly follow an autocratic leader - largely out of fear. 

Rather than embrace their own power and agency, the populace may voluntarily surrender their democratic and tolerant principles, for the illusion of stability promised by a 'strong man'. A truly Faustian bargain, because such a leader brings repression, chaos and collapse as he pits himself - and his subjects - against symbolic and imaginary enemies at home and abroad. As a psychoanalyst, Fromm saw this behaviour in the population as a regression to a childlike state, an abrogation of the responsibilities of adulthood and maturity.

'Please look after me ... and make my decisions for me, because it is too troubling and difficult to make these decisions for myself.' At its core, the Faustian pact is an act of cowardice. Every day, throughout the world, vast numbers of people retreat from the chance to determine their destiny, and instead delegate this responsibility upwards to authoritarian leaders.

In 1885, three years before Kaiser Wilhelm came to power, an illegal emigrant left Germany for the USA. He had avoided compulsory military training - he was a draft dodger - and was stripped of his citizenship as a punishment. He worked as a barber for six years, then gathering his life savings, he bought a piece of property in Seattle - a restaurant - with a particularly resonant name: The Poodle Dog. 

This was the grandfather of the American president Donald Trump, and it was the first of many pieces of property acquired by the dynasty that followed; which developed into a massive empire riddled with fraud, dishonesty, corruption and labour violations, and financed by loans that were never repaid.  

Right now, we are at a cross-roads in history.

Right now, the three most powerful men in the world, the Presidents of the three most powerful nations, including Donald Trump, are strong-man leaders, whose instinct is to humiliate, denigrate, imprison ('lock her up!') - and even kill (nerve agent in perfume bottles) those amongst their populations who dare to oppose them. In the last few weeks, a great nation, perhaps the most influential nation on earth, has teetered on the brink of forming a Faustian Pact with its leader, and has narrowly stepped back from the brink.

No wonder that some historians have seen the recent US elections as the most consequential since the German presidential elections of 1932. 

Our best writers have illustrated the price a populace pays for entering such an agreement. In his timeless tragedy, 'MacBeth', Shakespeare laid bare the anatomy of such leaders, men whose 'vaulting ambition o'erleaps itself' and whose exercise of power is delivered with the explicit or tacit collusion of their followers.

MacBeth, a man animated by an insatiable desire for power, and who refused to recognise the legitimate authority in the land, is driven to deceive and murder the sitting king of Scotland. To cover his tracks, and cement his victory, he must execute a string of additional murders. By sheer force of character and - like Faust - after consulting demonic figures, MacBeth moves from one act of evil to the next, all the while demanding slavish loyalty from his court.

Eventually, spurred by their repugnance and horror at MacBeth's deeds, the opposition coalesces against the tyrant: he is held accountable for his crimes and brought to account.

In these fictional narratives, Goethe and Shakespeare invite their audience to contrast the better angels of their nature with the seductive demons that may beset them - loyalty to a leader who may deceive, lie, or establish tyrannical power over them. Since WWII, there has been little doubt that in the West, at least, these better angels have been in the ascendancy.

What is astonishing and unprecedented in post-war history, is that a major Western power, a nation looked to as a beacon of democracy around the world, has come so close to stepping out of that arena and into the realm of chaos. 

Autumn of the Patriarchs

Death threats, erotic whippings, far from ordinary scenes  ... eminent historian Michael King interviews PEN President and poet Kevin Ireland on writer politics in 1990. Why did Lieutenant-Commander Alistair Paterson, poet, threaten to kill the National President? Why did C.K. Stead, Professor of Literature want to beat up Creative Hub director Cranna? Was it over a woman? Was it the London flat affair? Hear the full recording here. Below, John Cranna offers a lightly fictionalised version ...

When he was sober, which wasn't that often, the National President-In-Waiting had some chilling news for me. We were hunched over the bar at Wellington airport, waiting for our flight north.

'Old Baldy would like to take out Young Baldy. Or to put it another way: Stead wants you dead,' he said.

Emeritus Professor C.K. Stead. Assassin in waiting? 

'Onomatopoeia,' I said.

'Assonance,' he replied.

He was a poet, I was a fiction writer. He knew about these things.

'Does he have a preferred method of dispatch?' I asked.

'Strangulation, suffocation, electrification. I don't think he's bothered.'

'The French have a term for that. Rime couee.'

'Yes. Very good. End rhyme. God knows why Stead came clean on this. The aggressor professor became a confessor,' he said.

Why an eminent professor of literature at Auckland University, and internationally lauded poet would want me maimed or dead was puzzling. I had just published my first book, a collection of short stories. I was something of a literary nobody, who had just been elected Chair of the Auckland branch of PEN aka The Society of Authors.

'And Alistair Paterson wants to kill me,' Kevin Ireland went on lugubriously.

'Lieutenant-Commander Alistair Paterson, Royal New Zealand Navy? The man who turned up to our meeting the other night in full ceremonial dress to recite his poetry. With a sword?' I asked.

He nodded. 'Yes. Have you seen the photo on his first poetry collection? He's holding an antique firearm. I'm taking the threat very seriously.'

'Why do these people want us dead?' I asked.

Kevin Ireland shook his head. 'Because we're changing things. It's the Autumn of the Patriarchs. They don't have long to live, and they can see it.'

We had just finished a harrowing four hour meeting of the writers' national executive (PEN) in the bowels of the National Library in Wellington, which Kevin likened to a meeting of the Central Presidium of the Soviet Union. In the chair was another rogue academic, a Professor of Russian Literature oddly enough, who had ruled the meeting with a bull-whip, and given us all thoughts of the Gulag.

Lnt-Commander Paterson (rtd). Poet & pugilist.

'What is it about these academics,' said Ireland thoughtfully. 'They all seem so unhinged.'

I pondered that one.

'But Alistair isn't an academic. He was in the Royal NZ Navy.'

'Another total institution,' said Ireland. 'Into which light rarely penetrates.'

'Yes,' I said. 'Those nematode worms that live in caves underground. They don't develop eyes of course. They're stuck there for life, so they get about by rubbing against things. They have a great sense of smell, however. Outside the caves they would be completely lost. But they're amazingly effective in their niche.'

Ireland nodded again. 'That's it. Niche-dwellers. The sooner we can get them out of our organisation the better.'

As it happened, left to his own devices, the Emeritus Professor got himself out of the organisation with amazing speed. That summer, operating under clandestine instructions from the Minister of Culture, and without telling any other writers on the national executive, Professor C.K. Stead flew to London and purchased a very expensive flat in Bloomsbury, in which he briefly installed himself, before advising New Zealand authors of his triumphal act.

Kevin Ireland. President. Extreme poet. Bibulant.

The short-coming in this admirable scheme was that he had written scathing reviews of the work of many of his peers, particularly a cadre of senior Wellington women writers, including Fiona Kidman and Lauris Edmond, and had shown regal contempt for the emerging Maori and Pasifika writers who were beginning to flourish at that time.

Stead, in short, had zero credit rating with his peers. Actually, his credit rating was lower than a nematode's tummy.

The result, from Wellington, was instantaneous. How dare the eminent professor make this purchase at the seat of Empire without consultation? How dare he ignore the many pohutukawa-ringed inlets on our own fair coastline that would make far more suitable retreats? This was cultural cringe of the most abject kind!!

Marshaling their impressive media resources, the Wellington matriarchs issued a stinging press release, dissociated themselves from this reckless act of colonial obeisance, and causing the Minister to have to answer some very tricky questions in Cabinet. The Minister, Michael Basset, was appalled, decided in the quiet of his own heart to exact long-term revenge on writers for his humiliation, and promptly sold the flat. The nation's journalists, always a little envious of their literary siblings, covered the debacle lavishly, and with smirking schadenfreude.

Michael King: Pacifier. Giant.

A little later, I chaired the meeting of Auckland PEN where the white-faced Stead was called to account.

He sat at one end of the room, ringed by the giants of the literary scene - Michael King, Maurice Shadbolt, Kevin Ireland, Dick Scott. Even journalist Sandra Coney, scourge of the patriarchs, was hovering in one corner, her notepad at the ready.

It was like Mount Rushmore made flesh. Granitic profiles abounded. Also present, so far as I could discern it, were the ghosts of Bloomsbury-dwelling Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, and John A. Lee. The court went into session.

'Um. Welcome, Karl,' I said. 'Now that Pandora's Box in Wellington is open, and the demons have been released, I wonder whether you would like to say anything?'

'Could we discuss this matter without resorting to dire literary cliche?' he said, fixing me with his ireful brows.

'Ok,' I said. 'I'll keep it simple. You've fucked things up. It's hard to imagine a more stupid act. You've infuriated the Minister of Arts and Culture, who will undoubtedly exact a terrible revenge on literature funding for decades to come. And through one act of hubris, you've created a lurid media carnival that has touched every writer in the country. I also understand from our President, that you have threatened to maim or kill me. Are there any other plans you'd care to share with us?' (Actually I only said one or two of those things.)

Mount Rushmore. Noble, granitic faces.

There was a deep quiet in the room. Stead looked surprised. No one had called him to account before. This was outside the domain of recognised natural phenomena. Beyond the academic cave system, into which no light penetrated, there were strange events that he barely comprehended.

Michael King coughed, in the tactful way that only he could. The country's pre-eminent historian spoke: 'I do think you have some explaining to do Karl,' he said. Michael's gentle, reedy, voice on that fateful evening still haunts me to this day. He had the capacity to settle any gathering of writers with his soulful, conciliatory manner. A couple of years later he was killed in a fiery car crash with his wife on the road from Coromandel, ending the dream of writer unity forever.

I could see Karl looking at Alistair Paterson in the corner, splendid once again in full naval dress regalia, complete with ceremonial sword. I could see Stead's eye alight on the weapon.

I thought to myself, 'Hari-kari, or murder?'

Sensing Stead's interest, Paterson quickly moved his hand to the hilt of the sword, securing it in its scabbard.

Dick Scott. Defender of the Chair.

I saw Dick Scott, who had witnessed his share of mayhem, and whose account of the invasion of Parihaka Ask That Mountain, had changed our view of our own history, edging around the room, to cut off a possible sally for the sword of the Lieutenant-Commander. I had tipped him off to intervene in the event of imminent violence. He was a friend, and I knew HE didn't want me dead.

Stead began his defense. 'Only the churlish would decline this opportunity,' he said, polishing his glasses furiously. 'How often does a Government offer writers a flat in a world centre of literature? We've chewed the hand of the Minister and shot ourselves spectacularly in the foot.'

'Mixed metaphor,' I shouted, and Stead visibly winced. This talk of fire-arms caused me to glance at the Lieutenant-Commander again. Dick Scott was hovering at his elbow.

The National President-In-Waiting got to his feet. Kevin Ireland was a tall man, with a deliberate, statesmanlike manner. Again, amazingly, he was sober.

'Baldy,' he said. 'Your pukeko have come home to roost. If you hadn't shafted Lauris and Fiona so often in the pages of the nation's review journals, you callous and calculating old c*** ...'

Lauris Edmond. Poet. Spear-carrier of the Matriarchs.

'Consonance!' I cried out from the Chair.

'Sub-case of consonance,' corrected Ireland, turning to me. 'Alliteration.'

He went on:  'If you hadn't riled every second writer in the land with your heartless, sulfuric reviews, you might have got away with it. As it is, by proceeding with this mad undercover scheme you have turned everyone against this organisation.'

The heads on Mount Rushmore all nodded sagely. It was like a mountain range springing to life. Stead looked around him desperately for allies. Paterson's jaw was jutting. Would the Navy intervene?

'Look Karl,' said the Lieutenant-Commander, his eyes smouldering orbs behind his tinted spectacles, 'Why didn't you take the time to get some dirt on Lauris and Fiona - extra-marital affairs, illicit bond-trading, off-shore accounts? You would have been in a safer position. To rile them in this way without leverage, without having something over them was, frankly ... ' the Lieutenant-Commander shook his head, sorrowfully, 'Negligent.'

I looked around the gathering. There was tacit consent. To enrage other writers so blatantly, without having some means of keeping them silent - blackmail - legal leverage - shockingly personal kompromat, as the Soviets called it ... was the height of foolishness. How could Stead, who was renowned for his cunning, wily ways, have made such a miscalculation? It was truly baffling.

Historian Dick Scott was holding his station: standing so close to the Lieutenant-Commander that I began to relax. Scott was a veteran of numerous bitter trade union struggles. It was unlikely the ceremonial sword, commandeered by an infuriated author would be used to assassinate the Branch Chair (me) or the National President (Kevin Ireland) despite the flurry of violent threats that was wracking the literary community that month.

I cleared my throat. I felt a little giddy. I stood up and spread my arms, feeling briefly like the statue of the Redeemer Christ overlooking the city of Rio de Janeiro.

'Perhaps this is an opportunity to heal some wounds,' I said.

I extended a hand to journalist Geoff Chapple on my left (he was about to conjure up a national pathway Te Araroa out of nothing and knew a thing or two about bringing a nation together) and to the tiny piano virtuoso and poet Denys Trussell on my right. Denys had a huge white beard and always wore a panama hat.

I faced Mount Rushmore. I bowed respectfully, avoiding Stead's eye.

'I would like us all to sing Kumbaya,' I said, and in a sudden moment of inspiration, 'But in Maori.'

I saw Michael King perk up. As a champion of the mana whenua, this bi-cultural gambit was right up his alley. And then I realised, with a sickening feeling, that he and I were the only two people in the room of forty-odd writers, who knew any Maori. (I had learned the tongue during three tumultuous years living in the head-quarters of Nga Tamatoa, the Maori Black Panther movement.)

But it was too late to pull back. As Branch Chair I had made my gambit, and to retreat now would signal a major loss of authority.

I struck out on the first few lines, in what I hoped would be a rich baritone voice, but which went soprano with apprehension. I was hanging onto Chapple on my left and Trussell on my right with a grim, claw-like grip. I saw them both wince with pain. Michael King came in behind me, in a deep, husky bass. The other writers in the room, taken by surprise, gripped the hands of those next to them, their eyes clouded with panic, their mono-linguality horribly revealed to themselves and to the others present.

Stead took this opportunity to bolt for the door.

I still remember him cannoning into the frame, so desperate to escape from the onslaught of a Stone Age Language Without a Written Literary Tradition. He put both hands to his ears, trying to block out the sound of the song, as Michael King and I began to ramp up our volume to compensate for our mute colleagues. With his hands to his ears, he couldn't open the door and fell against it repeatedly, in the end, collapsing in a heap.

'For God's sake someone let him out,' cried Kevin Ireland, and stumbled over to the door, which gave onto Stead's home patch, the English Department at Auckland University.

At the end of this grotesque recitation, there was sporadic applause. Sweat was running down Michael King's face. Dick Scott looked like a man frozen in time, still hovering by Paterson's sword. Maurice Shadbolt had disappeared in a cloud of fine blue smoke from his pipe, utterly baffled by proceedings. One of only a handful of women in the room, Sandra Coney was hunched in the corner, trying to stay away from this effluorescence of testosterone. Trussell held his panama hat against his chest, like a man at a funeral.

'Autumn of the Patriarchs.' Our President-In-Waiting's fateful words came to mind, the words that had been uttered with such prescience so many months before in the bar at Wellington airport as, refugees from the Professor of Russian Literature and alleged KGB admirer, we waited to fly north. I looked at the tweed jackets, the naval dress uniforms, the florid, avuncular faces and redolent pipes. The half-drunk glasses of horrific cabernet sauvignon. Only Shadbolt's shoes were visible now, such was the incredible volume of blue smoke surrounding him.

How had it come to this? An era was coming to an end; an era of jackets with leather elbow patches; elegant volumes of verse printed on embossed cartridge paper; web off-set presses and fanatical literary duels. I felt torn. In a way, I had helped bring it about: "The crisis consists of the fact that the old order is dying and the new order is not yet born. In the interregnum, a variety of morbid symptoms occurs." Antonio Gramsci's famous quote from his Prison Notebooks pounded in my ears.

Although they had not yet disappeared, I felt an intense nostalgia for the craggy monumentalism of these titans; their sheer Mount Rushmore-ness. It was my very respect, which they sensed, that had helped propel me to leadership. They had put their trust in me, as a young upstart with only a couple of books of fiction to my name. And then I had betrayed them, by helping usher in the new feminised world order. Within a decade, these Olympians were in wheelchairs, their pipes and tweed jackets hocked off to Opportunity Shops for Breast Cancer Fundraising, their slim volumes of arcane verse and dusty novels of men anguishing alone in the bush, relegated to the Deep Stack in libraries, below ground water level.

Michael King and I looked at each other, squinting through the atmospheric blue haze of Shadbolt's effluvium. We knew we were the Trojan Horses in the room ... 'A variety of morbid symptoms ... '

Men can read each other. We know who our enemy is. A hundred thousand years of evolution has trained us to identify our foe.

The room was in consternation. A schism had opened up. I glanced across at Sandra Coney. She looked down at her notebook, and then up at me. There was a glint of triumph in her eye. She knew which way the tide was running. She had seen the future of literature in this country, and indeed across the Western World. The colossi were being toppled. The Monstrous Regiment of Women was on the march and a thousand novels of unshackled domesticity, of omnipotent oestrogen beckoned. The future was fecundity.

Testosterone, at least in its Steadian manifestation, was toast.

Author's note: This is an extract from an upcoming novel, Palsy of the Patriarchs

Three years living with Maori activists ...

In which John discovers how much he doesn't know

At the end of my degree, I moved into the headquarters of the Maori brown panther movement, Nga Tamatoa, and my education really started.

The house, a rambling old Victorian villa, was perched at the top of the Dixon Street steps in Wellington. A wooden totem pole, or manaia - phallic, upright and weather-beaten, stood on the front lawn. Next to my room on the first floor, lived Hiria, recently arrived from Tuhoe country in the depths of the Urewera range, fixedly watching TV all day. In an ironic mirror of my own journey, she was wrestling, through the television, with this alien European culture she had been plunged into. Fluent in Maori, she struggled to understand my English.

Potiki centre, JC far right

Her boyfriend, the Maori singer and poet Brian Potiki, posted cryptic poems on the wall of our upstairs hallway each week, in the elegant calligraphy of black ink.

He gave me three novels which revolutionised my view of the world: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude; John Fowles' The Magus, and Yukio Mishima's Spring Snow. I suddenly saw that literature didn't have be exhumed from the dusty morgue of Eng Lit, but could be magical, wild, and contemporary.

Below me, on the ground floor lived Tiata Witehira and Liz Marsden. Liz was the matriarch of the household, a kuia descended from the first missionary, Samuel Marsden, and she sternly convened the monthly meetings of Nga Tamatoa in our living room, next to a huge web off-set printing press. The press was weighty, black and red, and smelled faintly of machine oil.

It was tended like a massive inert pet by Mark Derby, eccentric and ecstatic, a man who boasted like Potiki that he never wore underpants, and he used it to print off classics of left-wing literature, like historian Dick Scott's account of the 1951 waterfront lockout in Auckland, '151 Days'.

Prior to our moving in, the house had been home to a Black Power motorcycle gang, who had driven their bikes up and down the capacious hallway, and left large oil stains on the floor.

Dun, characteristically unclothed, at Parliament, 1976

Dun Mihaka, when he wasn't being hosted at Her Majesty's pleasure in Mount Crawford Prison, would often be crouched in our living room. He wore shorts in the middle of winter, exposing massive kauri thighs - but never the muscular naked buttocks he displayed to Prince Charles and Princes Diana at Wellington Airport in an insult or whakapohane that gave him international notoriety (and put an indelible curse on their match).

Dun had about him an intense, pugilistic manner, and he was the only visitor I felt genuinely fearful of.

After his return to Mount Crawford we would go to watch his occasional appearances in the Supreme Court on Lambton Quay, where he would defend himself from the dock against charges of assaulting prison guards in rambling, oracular monologues.

He was invariably found guilty.

Tom Scott's famous cartoon of Dun's whakapohane

The most gentle, charming person who ever graced our hallway, was Tamati Kruger, a magnetic, laughing 21 year old, who became the leader of the Tuhoe tribe, and their Chief Negotiator in their watershed $170 million settlement with the Crown in 2012. His good nature shone off him like a beacon.

One of his quotes:

"Tuhoe love to fight first and then get down to business later. They test a person's character and resolve by getting them frustrated and angry to see how they operate under pressure, what their humour is like and if they think themselves precious and pious. That way they judge their usefulness."

Others called to the high council meetings of Nga Tamatoa, to discuss the Maori occupation of Bastion Point in Auckland, and the attempt to reclaim the Raglan Golf Course, were Eruera Nia, always sporting a copy of U.S Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver's 'Soul On Ice' and the film-maker Merata Mita who when she stayed with us, brought a retinue of impossibly handsome German movie makers, Gerd Pohlmann and the Strewe brothers, who with Merata were making a documentary on the historic Bastion Point occupation.

In volley-ball games played on the street outside our house, the Germans cleaned us up, because of their height, athleticism, and because, well, Germans have a certain clinical attitude to these things that our disparate, anarchist household simply couldn't match.

Merata Mita: queen of Maori film-makers

Merata made the defining movie of the 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand, Patu! which when I saw it in a London cinema two years later, had the entire audience on its feet, cheering and weeping.

I was nearly evicted from 143 Dixon Street - not because of some failure to understand the take of the Maori activists - but because of my stereo speakers, which I had constructed out of two massive stolen concrete drainpipes, and which stood two metres tall on their ends in my bedroom.

Having grown up in a family of classical musicians, I would play J.S. Bach through these colossal improvised speakers late at night, and at the prodigious volumes that 23 year olds believe everyone wants to hear.

One night, the matriarch of the household, Liz Marsden, who was heavily pregnant at the time, stood at the top of the stairs and screamed at me to: 'Turn down your degenerate Western music.'

There ensued a furious argument on the merits of the Western musical tradition, with the two of us shouting at each other over the deafening sound of the Brandenburg Concertos. Within an hour, Liz had gone into premature labour with her first child, and had to be rushed to hospital. It was my facetious suggestion to her white-faced partner, the brawny rubbish collector Tiata Witehira, that they name the baby after me, that nearly got me the bum's rush.

They were a motley bunch, the Nga Tamatoa crew, but I had no illusion that history was not being made around me in that strange, hybrid household, full of laughter, ferocious debates, and occasional tears.

There was something about the place, and its eccentric energy that attracted the most unlikely people.

One night, the violin prodigy, Donald Armstrong, now the Concert Master of the NZ Symphony Orchestra, a slim nervy man, was playing a Beethoven sonata in our living room. Also improbably, Murray Chandler, at the time the world's youngest international chess master at 16, moved in for the summer of 1977. At the annual Dixon Street party he played a 'simul' with fifteen different players on a trestle table outside while blind-folded - and beat all but one of them.

But what struck me generally, was the good humour of the Maori I lived with, despite their revolutionary understanding of what we had done to their land, their mana, and their history. Everywhere in Aotearoa, Maori had been driven into marginalised, and often poverty-stricken communities, and the Maori renaissance was in its infancy.

Although I had grown up only a stone's throw from the site of the first Maori Parliament, established in 1917 at the Rukamoana Marae in the Waikato, I knew nothing of its history or significance.

The Parliament, which was modeled on the House of Commons, was set up in response to land confiscations after the Land Wars in the 1860s, a time when more than two million acres of prime agricultural Maori land was confiscated by the government. In my ten year's of education in Morrinsville schools, its history was never mentioned.

Until I moved into 143 Dixon Street, I, like most other New Zealanders of that era existed in a state of what can only be called 'militant ignorance'.

My first response, after I realised how deep was my ignorance, was anger.

And after that, a growing humility and sense of shame at what had been done to the indigenous culture of our land. This was a very visceral demonstration of the truth that the victors write the history books - and it lead me to a deep distrust of the official version of events, and ultimately, into a career as a journalist and writer.

It was another ten years before the NZ Court of Appeal under Sir Robin Cooke made a momentous decision in favour of Maori in 1987, recognising the systematic alienation of Maori land, and paving the way for hundreds of millions of dollars of compensation to be paid to the tribes.

What I realised at 143 Dixon Street, with a sense of shock, and dawning gratitude, was that these Maori had shattered the notion I had of the identity of my own nation; of its history and of its much-vaunted 'fairness'. In doing so, they brought about a determination to do what I could, however insignificant, to help change things.

This lead me to spend three years working with Maori as publications and media manager at the New Zealand Human Rights Commission, and then in 1993, I was privileged to help set up Mana Magazine, the first four colour glossy magazine to celebrate the emerging Maori cultural renaissance.