by Tom Scott
They waited. They waited. And they waited some more. Finally, there was a collective sigh of relief when Jim simultaneously bellowed and mumbled—something only he could do, ‘In conclusion, fellow delegates, lemme say thish! We’re not on a collishion course wiv the Gummerment! The Gummerment are on a collishion course with us! Thank you! Thank you very mush!’ Severe leg cramps prevented most of them from leaping immediately to their feet to applaud, and in that critical micro-hiatus Jim turned the page.
‘Fellow delegates! I have been coming to Federayshun of Labour conferences now for twenty-five years in concussion …’ It was too late. He was already reading the entire speech again. I stole this incident for my screenplay Separation City.
The weirdest National conference of all was just after Marshall’s dumping by his own caucus. The party at large didn’t know it was coming. They weren’t consulted and were still sentimentally attached to their former leader. Matters weren’t helped at their Sunday church service when Muldoon gave the sermon and quoted scripture to the effect that if a limb was diseased it needed to be cut off, while the Marshalls sat stoic and stony-faced in a pew below him.
It was more of a poor man’s Sodom and Gomorrah back at the South Pacific Hotel at the bottom of Queen Street, where most of the press and National MPs were staying. The BCNZ’s silver-haired and utterly charming current-affairs maestro Des Monaghan used the company cheque book to shout a huge swag of us to a raucous meal at the ritzy rooftop restaurant. Wild parties spilled down the corridor I was staying on. I remember being shocked when people poured champagne they couldn’t be bothered finishing down the ventilator shafts. One MP’s wife, half out of her frock, rolled around in a wardrobe with a young reporter. Pat Talboys, the wife of the gentlemanly, universally well-regarded former senior cabinet minister Brian Talboys, slurred tipsily, ‘I hope we don’t get back into government. Our sex life is so much better now we’re in opposition.’
‘Darling, darling …’ demurred the horrified Talboys. So much for power being the ultimate aphrodisiac. You got the feeling National had done something precipitate that they felt slightly ashamed of.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
GOING ONCE …
BACK IN WELLINGTON THE FOLLOWING Monday, I braced myself for my first ever prime ministerial press conference. It hadn’t been possible earlier because Norm Kirk had been absent overseas or convalescing after varicose-vein surgery. At the appointed hour the Press Gallery trooped upstairs to the Prime Minister’s suite on the third floor of the old Parliament Building and loitered nervously in the marble and columned foyer like novitiate priests waiting for an audience with the Pope. I never saw this degree of caution with any other Prime Minister. With Lange there was always excitement, and with Muldoon apprehension, but nothing on the scale Kirk induced.
Twenty minutes of low, stilted conversation took place before we were ushered down a gold-carpeted corridor and allowed into a large office with windows that looked down on a drab internal courtyard with olive-green walls. It reminded me of Colditz. The windowsills were carpeted in pigeon droppings.
We waited silently in this room, notebooks, tape recorders, lights and cameras at the ready, for quite some time before a door at the back of the room opened and a big man entered and shuffled slowly to a huge brown desk, where he lowered himself gingerly into a chair. He had one foot in a large, shiny, black leather shoe, the other in a sock and sandal.
I had never been this close to him before. I was shocked by his appearance. You didn’t need half a degree in veterinary science to see that this man, if not terminally ill, was close. He was chalky white. His hair was plastered to his temples by sweat. It wasn’t a hot day and he was the only person in the room perspiring. When people asked questions he spoke so slowly and the gaps between sentences were so protracted there was room for whole separate conversations, had anyone dared.
At the finish, Ian Templeton from the Auckland Star, a dear man and shrewd journalist with impeccable sources, rose and said, ‘Prime Minister, I’d like you to meet a new member of the gallery.’ I approached the Prime Minister’s desk and put my hand out to shake his. Wearily, he raised his giant hand off the desk. It was damp and limp.
Outside in the safety of the corridor I expressed an alarm that none of the other reporters seemed to share. Kirk’s health had been deteriorating slowly and inexorably for so long the gallery barely registered the decline any more.
I never saw Norm Kirk at anywhere near full strength, but even unwell he was a commanding figure in the House. His mere presence seemed to charge the air of the chamber with a strange tension and expectation. He always entered the floor of the House through the side door and they were especially grand arrivals, as he did so behind an escort of shorter colleagues. He would pause to joke with people like Joe Walding. Even when in considerable pain he would reach his bench grinning broadly, and before taking his seat he would turn and give an exaggerated wink to those in the back rows behind him. It was a performance of a captain telling his men they had nothing to worry about.
If he rose to speak he was granted an immediate respectful silence. Few dared to interject. Even Muldoon was cautious. Members from both sides of the House sat up straight and paid close attention to what he had to say. Should he begin to shout, the Press Gallery filled to overflowing as if by magic. Reporters denied desks to write at would stand about exchanging grins, happy just to share in the excitement.
Kirk never warmed to the concept of journalists looking down on politicians—he thought it should be the other way around. Journalists should cover Parliament from a deep pit in the floor. I’m glad this never happened. Imagine the shock of looking up a cabinet minister’s nostrils and seeing nothing but daylight.
The only other parliamentarian who could pull a crowd like Kirk was David Lange, whose press conferences in the Beehive theatre were must-see events. There was a suspicion that numbers were swelling due to senior civil servants sneaking in to catch the vaudeville.
As Kirk’s health deteriorated his triumphant entries into the chamber became less and less frequent. His last lap began with varicose-vein surgery in April 1974. Eager to return to work, he denied himself an adequate recovery period and complication followed complication. As his strength eroded, so did party morale. Kirk felt this keenly and in private he would rage at the terrible fatigue that dogged him. He took to shooting the pigeons soiling his windowsills with an air rifle, contributing to rumours that he was half martyr and half fruit loop.
Not long after the Labour Party conference where Kirk had castigated the news media, Inquiry reporter George Andrews met him in the car park beneath Parliament. Laden with a couple of briefcases and some notes, Kirk moved with a slowness that was painful to watch. George plucked up the courage to offer assistance. Kirk shook his head. ‘George, I’ll carry these bloody things even if it kills me.’
In June he was cleared for full duties but this failed to quell growing public anxiety. Aware of the wild conjecture, Kirk joked grimly with reporters following minor surgery to treat an ingrown toenail that the same incision had been cunningly used to remove assorted cysts, growths and cancerous tumours.
On 28 August, Kirk entered Our Lady’s Home of Compassion in Island Bay for complete rest. The next day, at a parliamentary reception for a visiting sports team, I grilled junior government whip Jonathan Hunt on the real state of his leader’s health. Jonathan was more interested in dropping hints about a big story he was intending to go public on the following week, and assured me loftily that the Prime Minister was on the mend.
Kirk died two days later, on Saturday, 31 August, after a seizure. He was 51 years old and had been Prime Minister for barely 21 months.
The week after his death was the most extraordinary I ever witnessed on the Hill. Rain began falling constantly in the capital, and with it came a cloudburst of grief of stunning intensity. That grief, like the rain, seemed to endure for about a week, then abate as suddenly as it had come.
SORR
OW IS LIKE A SPLINTER in the heart, and I have often wondered if Labour would have fared better in the ’75 election if a little piece of the splinter had been left in place and wiggled at appropriate moments, or if they had called a snap election straight after Kirk’s death, when the grief was the size of a vampire stake.
Instead Labour were desperate to paint a picture of business as usual, and put Kirk behind them—as if his death were of no great consequence. He was hardly mentioned by Labour on the hustings. Significantly, on the campaign trail in Rotorua, Rob Muldoon made a well-publicised detour to pay his respects to Kirk’s widow, Dame Ruth. If there was any legacy to tap, Muldoon wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity.
After Kirk’s death, his government driver told me a sad story. Very near the end of his life, Kirk had an engagement at a Catholic school in Palmerston North. Several times on the two-hour drive from Wellington they had to stop for the Prime Minister of New Zealand to get out of the car, lower his trousers, squat on the side of the road and purge himself of bloody diarrhoea. Pale, shivering and humiliated, he got back into the LTD apologising profusely. What struck the driver was how alone Kirk was.
Kirk’s death came as no surprise to his driver. I learned through a terse, jarring Sunday Star headline: ‘KIRK DIES AGED 51’. I read it over and over again in disbelief. I hurried down to Parliament on Monday morning, pen and notebook at the ready. In the marble foyer there was an air of hushed, reverent chaos. Workmen in shorts and boots had been there since four in the morning making preparations for Kirk to lie in state. They jostled for space with messengers and television crews. Outside on the concourse, a crowd began to assemble quietly. As the hearse drove up the first strains of a Māori lament moved the base of public grief from one of polite containment to one of free expression. Then Pacific Island groups started singing soaring hymns. Polynesian New Zealand began acting as a catalyst and poultice for diffident Pākehā sorrow. Anyone within hearing distance who had any feelings on the matter could feel them being tugged to the surface.
Norm Kirk’s body in its huge coffin was placed in the foyer of Parliament with a New Zealand flag draped over it and potted ferns placed around it. Soldiers from all the forces stood at attention at each corner, their rifles upside down. People queued well into the night, three nights in a row, in steadily falling rain, for a chance to pay their respects. Some brought young children with them, awestruck and silenced by their parents’ grief. A few asked hushed questions.
‘What are the soldiers doing, Mum?’
‘They are changing the guard, Michael.’
‘Is that anything to do with Christopher Robin?’
‘No, dear, it has nothing to do with Christopher Robin.’
When I enquired why they had brought their kids out at such a late hour in such bad weather, the standard response was that this was a piece of history. They wanted them to pay their respects and say goodbye to a great man who would be talked about and remembered for many years.
That hasn’t been the case. Kirk slipped off the radar relatively quickly and is seldom mentioned now. The scale and the depth of the mourning for him forced many commentators into new assessments of the man, but this frenzy of postmortem punditry—I indulged in it myself—died away with the subsidence of the unprecedented sorrow.
That sorrow subsided faster for some than for others. I stood watching mourners file past the coffin for the best part of a day. I was there when Kirk’s Labour Party colleagues came to pay their respects. The queue had slowed and a small bunch of them paused within earshot. They were grinning and delighting in the fact they had the numbers to ensure that Kirk’s deputy, Hugh Watt, wouldn’t become leader. With Kirk lying just a few feet away, there was something shocking and harsh about their pragmatism.
I was still there when it was Sir Keith Holyoake’s turn. He stood in front of Kirk’s coffin booming, ‘Farewell, Norm, farewell!’ He wasn’t being theatrical or attention-seeking. There were tears in his eyes. It was a genuine and touching salute to a respected political opponent. Sometimes it is easier to pay tribute to a fallen foe than your own comrades. The French have a saying that no man is a hero to his valet.
On the Tuesday afternoon the House paid tribute to the fallen Prime Minister. Three of the most moving speeches came from Opposition spokesmen. ‘Fifty-one,’ said a pale Brian Talboys, ‘is too young to die.’
‘I find it very difficult to accept that the big man will not walk through that door and enter this chamber again,’ said Holyoake.
‘He graced the office of Prime Minister,’ said Jack Marshall, adding, ‘We treated each other with mutual respect, which is probably mystifying to our more rabid supporters.’ Through all the implied rebukes, Muldoon stared sourly straight ahead.
Kirk’s coffin was so heavy the pallbearers almost lost control carrying it down Parliament’s steep steps. It lurched forward and they had to step quickly to keep up with it. He was loaded into a hearse, driven to Wellington airport and loaded with full military honours into the belly of a Royal New Zealand Air Force Hercules, which is probably still flying today. They took off in a terrible storm bound for Timaru, the closest airport to Waimate, where he was to be buried. The weather was so bad Timaru airport was closed, and the Hercules was forced to turn back to Christchurch. The coffin was swiftly unloaded and without ceremony shoved into the back of a revving hearse, and with one police car in front and another behind, the funeral cortège accelerated south into the lashing maelstrom. My locking partner from social rugby, Phil Melchior, a reporter for NZPA, and other pool journalists followed in two additional cars. Through whipped-up spray and sheets of rain they chased screaming sirens and flashing red lights. Police on motorbikes blocked off side-roads as the convoy hurtled south, well in excess of the speed limit, to get to the Waimate cemetery before nightfall.
Phil told me that racing through small country towns was quite off-putting. Local radio stations had reported that the Prime Minister’s body was coming. Heads bowed and hats removed, citizens lined main streets that had become shallow lakes. Not slowing, the convoy raced past, sending up walls of water like Moses parting the Red Sea. Mourners would have seen very little and been left drenched.
They got to Waimate cemetery just as the rain eased off and the last rays of the setting sun struck the burial plot where the Prime Minister was finally laid to rest. Almost as soon as the earth hit the top of his coffin, the Labour Party began pretending he never existed. They didn’t know it yet—no one did—but their re-election chances were being buried with him.
IN JULY 1975 I WAS wildly excited as well as nervous when Qantas offered to fly me to Australia as its guest on its inaugural flight from Sydney to Belgrade, in what is now Serbia. Apart from one trip to Auckland and back on an Air New Zealand flight, still within sight of land, I had never left New Zealand soil.
I didn’t possess a passport. When I applied, I found to my dismay that I wasn’t entitled to one. I arrived here as a toddler and it was remiss of my twin sister Sue and me not to correct our parents’ oversight and apply for New Zealand citizenship the instant we stepped off the gangplank. At the age of 28 I had to traipse to the British High Commission in Thorndon with my birth certificate in exchange for the dubious glory of a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland passport—which for years to come put me at the head of the queue should a plane get hijacked and they started executing passengers.
Back then the first Boeing 747s with their distinctive bubble were just starting to roll off assembly lines in Seattle in huge numbers. With the onset of the jumbo-jet age, passenger numbers soared exponentially as well. New Zealand, once described by Rudyard Kipling as last, loneliest and loveliest, all of a sudden seemed closer to the rest of the world. I wrote at the time:
Does constant rubbing of the shoulders with people draped in Spanish leather, Italian suede, French velvet, American denim, English check, Mexican saddle cloth, Bolivian llama hide, Japanese silk, Bali batiks, Indian saris, Mao tunics an
d camouflage jackets from the Indochina war zone tend to put you, in your Hugh Wright’s winter clearance sale viyella creams, a little on the defensive? When others talk of lovemaking with beautiful strangers on the Côte d’Azur, moonlight poetry readings at the Acropolis, being shot at by rebel tribesmen in Iran, more fornication in Vienna, dysentery in Damascus, alcohol poisoning in Munich, still more fornication in Rome and broken axles in Islamabad, do you keep your slap and tickle stories from the Foxton sand dunes to yourself? Do you also automatically assume that people are no longer interested in the time your scooter broke down in the rain opposite the Palmerston North gasworks?
If you do, you are suffering from what my sophisticated friends call OE deprivation. OE, of course, is the abbreviation for overseas experience—and no New Zealander, it is claimed, is complete without it. As well as being vital to emotional, intellectual and sexual development, OE very nicely fills that awkward gap between high school and marriage. In fact, OE must be pursued when young and is often used to force reluctant partners into marriage or as compensation when marriage plans fall through …
My sophisticated friends using the term ‘OE deprivation’ were in fact only one man, John Muirhead, my chum from Masskerade and Chaff days. I have falsely been given the credit ever since. Things even out.
In another Listener piece I wrote that when New Zealanders moved to Australia it raised the IQ of both countries. Muldoon helped himself to this line at a press conference a week later and it has been cited for years as proof of his droll genius. My joke! I have no real cause for complaint—I had refashioned it from a Will Rogers line in the first place. Besides, I was chuffed that Muldoon was reading my columns.