Drawn Out
Page 15
The Qantas trip could not have come at a better time. Another old chum from Massey, Greg Bunker, then earning a king’s ransom prescribing pills to pampered poodles in Manhattan, put it best when he warned, ‘At your present rate, you’ll get here playing mah-jong on the sun deck of the Mariposa.’
I was a nervous traveller. Getting out of the Manawatū was a wrench. So what if the world was my oyster? With my luck I would be allergic to shellfish.
It helped that in Sydney all the journalists on the Belgrade junket were given a guided tour of the Qantas base at Mascot. When I discussed safety issues with a man from Qantas he said I had nothing to fear—my worries about flying were groundless. I said it was the groundless bit that worried me. To demonstrate the principles of flight, he blew across a piece of paper. ‘There,’ he said proudly, as the far edge rose, ‘the Venturi effect—that’s what keeps these seven hundred thousand pound babies forty thousand feet aloft.’
Shortly after take-off, most of the press party had managed the spiral staircase to the Captain Cook lounge in the bubble. Before we had left Australian air-space, they had drunk the bar dry of beer. It was thirsty work flying for hours over parched sand and rock, albeit hidden in inky blackness far below us. Then they uncomplainingly switched to spirits and that was all gone before we reached Singapore. It was my first exposure to the Aussie media and you couldn’t help but love them.
Apart from Australia, which barely counts, and Singapore, which was just a stopover, the former Yugoslavia was the first country I ever visited. Much like a duckling or gosling believing that it is the same species as the first living creature it sees on hatching, I imprinted on Yugoslavia. I want to return to Lake Bled and Dubrovnik and take Averil with me. George Bernard Shaw once said that if there is a heaven on Earth, it is Dubrovnik.
I came close to heaven when I played in a doubles match on clay in Dubrovnik with the great John Newcombe, Ken Rosewall and Rod Laver. I partnered ‘Rocket’ and it was largely thanks to his speed around the court that we won the first set seven games to five. We were no match for Newcombe and Rosewall in the second and third sets, however.
The match was played on a private court in an exclusive suburb of Dubrovnik before a highly partisan but surprisingly knowledgeable crowd consisting of two ball boys, a whitewash-application man and a suspicious head groundsman. They watched us in contemptuous silence. The tennis wasn’t worth keeping an eye on, but the hired sandshoes and expensive hired racquets were.
I should point out that for the purposes of the match I was Tony Roche, and my new Aussie mates played the other Aussie tennis greats. We had to stay in character the whole match. I should have been completely outclassed, but being Tony Roche for the morning I lifted my game to previously unscaled heights. In short, it was the most enjoyable tennis match I have ever played.
I was impressed with the Australians’ ability to weave and sustain an elaborate schoolboy fantasy. It eventually got to the stage where Rosewall began to argue with an imaginary linesman, and Newcombe began shouting his hotel room number to imaginary girls in an imaginary crowd. The whole trip, the guy playing Newcombe had only one answer when you asked him how he was: ‘I’ll be OK, mate, when I’ve had a root.’ When we drove through the streets of Zagreb in a bus he crouched at the front like Queequeg, the harpoonist in Moby Dick, spotting attractive girls and awarding points out of ten. ‘Nine pointer on starboard, boys! Holy fuck! Eleven pointer on port!’
Watching the news fifteen or more years later, it was horrifying seeing beautiful landscapes and glorious medieval towns that had seemed calm enough to our naive gaze descend into sectarian violence, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and a genocidal barbarism unmatched since the charnel houses of World War Two. I did some of my better cartoon work on this more recent bloody chapter in European history.
If you want to be sickened again, read Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West by David Rieff. He recounts a chilling moment for members of my generation in particular, who believed in the redemptive power of music, where Serbian troops head off for another day of rape and butchery with Bob Dylan blasting through their Sony Walkmans.
I DIDN’T TAKE THE QANTAS flight back to Sydney with the other journalists. Instead I flew on to London, where I hung out with friends on Fleet Street and spent an afternoon in the Press Gallery in the British Houses of Parliament. It was hardly an in-depth investigation, yet when I got back to New Zealand, fighting back tears when we descended over the Marlborough Sounds on a crystal-clear morning towards Wellington’s dear rugged coast, Ian Cross decided to put me on the Listener cover. I am wearing the tan suede jacket Christine bought me in China, I am sucking a cigar Winston Churchill fashion, I am saluting, I am wearing a pith helmet, and I am photographed against a large Union Jack. The tagline is ‘Tom Scott and other New Zealanders in London’. Visually it was cheesy overkill and, given the ordinary copy I submitted, quite unmerited, but Ian was determined to milk whatever star status I had. And if I didn’t have any star status he was determined to manufacture some.
To my shame, I was a more than willing accomplice. Over a two-year period either my cartoons or my likeness appeared on the cover of the Listener nine times. There was a head and shoulders photograph, two cartoon versions of me, and five other illustrated covers on subjects as various as the Commonwealth Games in Christchurch and Muldoon’s first prime-ministerial trip to the People’s Republic of China—in which I depicted him striking a heroic, Mao-like pose on a wall poster, in the bottom right-hand corner of which some creature has recently emptied its bladder.
It was very nearly ten covers. Ian commissioned an election-year cover then rejected it as too provocative. I drew a movie poster with a jovial Muldoon as King Kong on the top of the old Parliament Buildings, snatching biplanes out of the sky, while in the foreground an equally jovial Bill Rowling pilots a circling Sopwith Camel. The tagline was: ‘NOW SHOWING: PARLIAMENT. G. Certificate’.
Ian was absolutely right on one thing—the censor’s rating was far too lenient. That year in politics there were scenes of graphic violence, coarse language and naked, full-frontal appeals to greed and fear. Ian could see coming what the rest of us couldn’t—Muldoon was shaping up to overturn Labour’s seemingly impregnable majority, so there was little to be gained depicting the next Prime Minister as a giant ape and pissing him off unnecessarily.
I was the one pissed off. I decided to print it as a poster that would make me rich and teach the Listener a lesson. I ended up with a pile of them in my garage sitting alongside the stacks of unwanted copies of Masskerade 73. They came in handy as gifts and I have only one badly creased copy left.
AFTER KIRK’S DEATH, ON 6 September 1974 the Labour caucus voted for Bill Rowling to be their next leader, with Bob Tizard as his deputy. They were the best choice at the time. It was impossible to dislike Bill, but harder to be impressed by him. With Bob it was the other way around.
During the 1975 election campaign, I was with Prime Minister Bill Rowling when he opened a new gymnasium at a high school in Tokoroa. Afterwards, as people were streaming out, I must have looked lost because he asked me how I was getting to his rally in Taupō that night. In those days, the Listener’s largesse extended to typewriter ribbon, litres of white-out, modest hotel accommodation and airfares, but not rental cars. I replied sheepishly that I was hitch-hiking and he immediately offered me a lift in his LTD. I became wildly excited—here I was, little Tommy Scott from Feilding, riding in the Prime Minister’s limousine!
As we crawled through cheering crowds in the school grounds, a local Highland pipe band formed a guard of honour on either side. Accompanied by the stirring skirl of bagpipes, we swung out onto the street. Heroically they kept pace with us as we gathered speed, almost sprinting in the end, not fluffing a note until oxygen debt kicked in and they fell away one by one.
It was then that I felt a joke coming on that I just had to share with my new best friend.
‘Have you noticed, Bill,’ I beame
d, ‘the only two things they pipe out of town are politicians and sewage!’ The car rocked with hearty laughter. I was too busy slapping my thighs and dabbing my eyes to appreciate that it was coming only from me and the snickering driver. My new best friend had gone puce with indignation.
‘Fuck you, Scott! I’ve a bloody good mind to make you get out and walk from here!’
It was in Rotorua that I realised for the first time that Labour could lose the election. We were sitting in the bar next to a steaming hot pool when one of National’s campaign ads came on television. To ringing balalaika music, animated Cossacks danced across the screen. A hook snatched away a ballot box, while a voiceover asked what freedoms were safe under Labour.
All the National Party ads were in this vein—extremely slick, very accomplished for their time and like nothing New Zealand had ever seen before. While undeniably clever, they were also fear-mongering, red-baiting and black propaganda—they should have been slapped with injunctions the first time they slithered out from under a rock.
Rowling’s people came into the bar shortly afterwards. They hadn’t seen the ads and they weren’t particularly bothered—everything was tracking nicely according to the feedback they were receiving. There was just no way the country would vote for Muldoon. Their smugness and naivety were deeply disturbing to witness.
It was a wild, giddy, emotionally charged, high-stakes election. On the campaign trail with Muldoon in Napier I called in to see twin sister Sue. Noticing my jittery state, she enquired gently into my wellbeing. I replied that I was hardly getting any sleep and that I was exhausted. Larry, her husband, whose contracting firm was carting boulders for the extension of the Napier breakwater, put things neatly into perspective for me. ‘Yeah, those fountain pens can get pretty heavy.’
I suggested to friends appalled at the prospect of a Muldoon ministry that they should dress as sweet, demure nuns and pack the front two rows of the Founders Theatre in Hamilton on the night of his campaign launch. When the red light came on indicating that he was being broadcast live into a million homes, they were to rise as one, chanting in unison, ‘MULDOON’S A CUNT!’ But no one listens to me. I also suggested filling a bike pump or water gun of some description with a mixture of cream-style sweet corn and ripe Roquefort or Stinking Bishop cheese and, when Muldoon was in full flight, splattering it across the front of his shirt, creating the impression that he’d just vomited on himself. With a bit of luck this would trigger a chain reaction of projectile vomiting throughout the hall of Monty Python’s Mr Creosote proportions, and the broadcast itself would have to be halted and replaced with a still of the Freyberg boat harbour.
It is now a matter of record that Muldoon never chundered over his own clothing at his campaign opening, but instead went on to win the election in a landslide. There were many reasons for this. The tide had gone out on Labour, National’s election bribes were bigger and better sold, but mostly Rob Muldoon had simply more intellectual firepower, more physical stamina, and was vastly more ruthless than his opponents—which sadly many found appealing. No blow was too low, no taunt too cruel. He had been on the receiving end of cruelty and abuse all through his school days and was determined as an adult to get his retaliation in first. Muldoon would never have offered me a lift. If he had I may not have accepted. What I know for sure is that I would never have dared make that joke.
With Muldoon’s stunning victory, Parliament, already fractious and fiercely tribal, became even more bitter and partisan. Had Rowling stepped down as leader at this point, which Geoffrey Palmer and Bill English did when their governments were heavily defeated, it is hard to imagine Muldoon endorsing let alone enthusiastically campaigning for him to get a top job at the UN—which John Key did unstintingly for Helen Clark after he defeated her.
Shortly after his big win, I met the new Prime Minister in a Parliamentary corridor—always a scary experience. He had a colleague in tow, and as much for his benefit as for mine, Muldoon paused to bark, ‘Ahhh, Scott isn’t it? I read an article of yours in the Listener! I didn’t know you could write!’
A voice, not my own, jauntily and foolishly replied, ‘I didn’t know you could read!’
His colleague grinned. ‘He’s got you there, Rob—’ then instantly regretted it when Muldoon glowered at him. We were both on the outer, though my time in the gulag lasted a little longer.
THE NAME SOWETO HAS A lovely Swahili cadence to it, but in fact it is an acronym for the South West Townships—shanty suburbs for black South African workers, servants and their families that sprawl endlessly across brown barren plains outside of Johannesburg. On the morning of 17 June 1976, Sowetan students gathered in the street to protest the introduction of Afrikaans as the official language of instruction in local schools. Their 20,000-strong peaceful protest was halted in its tracks by ferocious police brutality and murderous fire. The official death toll of young blacks killed by the police was 176. Other estimates put it as high as 700. Less than two weeks later the All Blacks, who were travelling with the blessing of newly elected Rob Muldoon, touched down in the Republic to play a four-test series and provide comfort and distraction for the ruling white minority.
Like many others, I was appalled. I wrote an angry column about a Pākehā student uprising in New Zealand, where an oppressed white majority are subjugated by a brutal Māori minority.
Today Otara still smoulders. Many buildings couldn’t be saved, while others were deliberately left to burn. Soldiers and policemen, ironically many of them Pakeha, cautiously patrol the rubble-strewn streets. The worst of the rioting and destruction have died down now. No one seems to know how many people have died. ‘Well,’ Rangi Nathan, the Minister of Police, told a press conference in Wellington, ‘with Pakeha it’s always hard to tell.’ And the foreign press crews smiled politely.
‘I know you boys have deadlines to meet,’ he continued. ‘If you want an official death count I’d put it at seven. Remember too, one of the seven fell under a tank and the other six died of natural causes.’ ‘Natural causes?’ exclaimed the grizzled API Reuters correspondent. ‘Our information is that most of the dead were shot through the heart at point-blank range!’ The Minister merely grinned. ‘Gentlemen, I put it to you, what is more natural than to die when you’ve been shot through the heart at point-blank range?’
Unofficial sources put the death toll at over a hundred, with the number of wounded running into the thousands. The situation is complicated as Otara has no hospital or morgue of its own. The final toll will depend on what the army and police clean-up units find buried in the corrugated ruins of the three gutted primary schools.
The most vicious rioting in New Zealand’s history lasted over three days and at times spread as far north as Queen St. Often there was no purpose to it as young Pakeha gangs rampaged through the streets, smashing windows and stealing luxury items like television sets, food and clothing. The electrical goods were a popular if mystifying choice as Otara is still without power. ‘Most Pakeha don’t earn enough money yet to pay enough tax to justify such capital expenditure,’ explains Koro Rolls, the Minister of Social Welfare …
I knew Cross would hate it, so I didn’t hang around long when I dropped it off at the subs desk. I am a tireless, fearless warrior for freedom—just not that fearless.
About an hour later I was back in Karori when I got a phone call from Ian, during which he accused me of continually challenging his authority and writing deliberately provocative material that pushed my own point of view rather than mocking the views of others. He said he wouldn’t print it. I said sadly that it seemed like a parting of the ways then. Just as sadly he agreed—adding that I left him little choice. There could only be one editor and he was it. We said goodbye civilly to each other and I hung up.
I wanted to cry. Working on the Listener had become the best thing that ever happened to me. It was too good to be true, it couldn’t last, it was time for things to return to normal. I would go back to teaching or something …
Later that evening my good friend, the cartoonist Burton Silver of Bogor comic-strip fame, came to pick me up in his battered, rusting, draughty Morris van and we drove cautiously along slushy streets to the Ngaio Hall, wondering how many people would brave the snow, sleet and bitter cold to attend. In the event the place was full of loyal column-readers, little old ladies in the main, one of whom grabbed my arm tightly in her gloved hand and told me proudly she’d driven all the way from Upper Hutt. In this crowd I could do no wrong. There were gasps and anguished angry cries when I told them I had been fired from the Listener that afternoon. I kept them waiting a few moments, then added that Ian rang back 30 minutes later to holler down the line, ‘Damn you, boy! I’m going to print it after all.’ The hall erupted in cheers and relieved applause. Not half as relieved as I felt.
CHAPTER TWELVE
GOODNIGHT, DEAR BOY
AFTER I GOT FIRED FROM the Listener a second time in 1981, several newsagents told me that loyal readers of my column were announcing angrily in their shops that they were boycotting the publication until I got my job back. Apparently this stance was most pronounced in New Plymouth—these were the loyal fans after all who had cheered wildly and shouted my name when I tagged along at the rear of the Royal walkabout on Devon Street in 1976. I don’t know how long this boycott would have lasted. Mercifully it was never put to the test.