Roosters I Have Known

by Steve Braunias

  About an hour after the trial, I saw Nicholas and Kitchin standing on Nicholas’s hotel balcony – smokers have no privacy these days – opposite the court. I alerted a photographer and he took their picture. Did you notice, Kitchin said when I interviewed Nicholas, what she was doing with her hands in the photo? No, I said. He said they were holding on tight to the balcony barrier, and wouldn’t let go.

  She took up the story. ‘I was devastated we’d lost my trial. I was so angry at the devastation these guys had caused. And the poor cops from Operation Austin – I remember [operation head] Nick Perry saying to me, “We really thought when we started this investigation it would be over and done within six weeks.” And to see these guys crying – they’d worked so hard, and they’d proved they were just as determined to see justice served as I was.

  ‘That’s why I got angry, and I thought, “Nah, we’re not going to let these guys bring us down anymore, we’re going to stand up and fight. We’ve lost the battle, but shit, we’ve still got the war. And we will win the war.” And we’ve done that. It’s as simple as that.’

  She meant the recent conviction of former CIB officer John Dewar for obstructing the course of justice. The man who betrayed her: Nicholas thought he was a friend, ‘the best thing since sliced bread’, until Kitchin provided her with documents showing that Dewar had in fact conspired against her. Like Rickards, Dewar has threatened to take a police complaint against Nicholas for perjury. Nicholas is about to publish her book, My Story. The war continues.

  The phone rang with news that afternoon. Two men were found guilty of perverting the course of justice – they had lied to try and save the skins of Shipton and Schollum’s accomplices in the Mount Maunganui pack rape. ‘Well,’ said Nicholas, ‘it’s simple. Don’t lie.’

  ‘That woman,’ Rickards said of Nicholas over and over at his trial, ‘is lying.’ The evidence against him didn’t stack up. He was acquitted. But the innocent Rickards is now widely viewed with repugnance. As for Nicholas – Helen Clark commended her courage in speaking out, she continues to receive supportive letters, she will give more interviews to promote her book.

  She said, ‘It’s not because of any wanting to be in the limelight, because in all honesty, Steve, I hate it. I mean, I think it’s wonderful to walk into a supermarket and people come up and shake your hand and say well done, good on you, keep it up. That’s lovely. But it’s not what I want.’

  What does she want? ‘There’s no need to treat us like we get treated, the people that have had bad things happened to them. It’s got to change. If people are willing to sit up and listen to me babbling on, then hell, I’ll babble on all the time. I’ll give it my all.’

  I asked about her treatment in court, at the expert hands of defence lawyers John High and Paul Mabey. She said, ‘I think they’re nasty bastards. There was no need to be so brutal. They were re-victimising. I get so angry these people are allowed to do that. They’re putting you through the real ugliness of rape again and again and again. I just … I hate them. I really do. They’re probably the nicest people you could ever ask to meet on the street. But as defence lawyers, they can burn in hell for all I care.

  ‘After being hammered like that, I was asking, “Who the hell’s on trial here?” That’s how bad it got. There’s just no need for it. None whatsoever. You can understand why so many rape complainants, rape victims, won’t go anywhere near a courtroom.

  ‘I had a hankie – it wasn’t for tears or anything, I just needed something in my hand, because I knew I was going to get angry, and I could tear at the hankie. That hankie is just a rag now. There’s nothing left of it. And there was the little screw in the witness box. As I was asked a question, I would concentrate on this screw, think of my answer, and answer to the jury. There was no way in hell I was going to look at those defence lawyers, because if I did that I’d look at the accused.’

  Nicholas’s earliest memory of Schollum, who had been a family friend: ‘You couldn’t ask for a better bloke. Just a hell of a nice guy.’ And now? ‘The difficulty I have with Schollum is that even though he did a couple of bad things, he didn’t do bad, bad things. He was the one who made it stop. He said, “That’s enough, guys.” In some ways I’m thankful for that. I know that sounds really weird …’

  Was Shipton more straightforward? ‘Yeah. You could almost say that Schollum was two people; Shipton was an evil monster from start to finish.’

  Rickards? ‘Same as Shipton. Evil monster.’

  Nicholas looks healthier now than at the trial. She spoke in a flat, slightly honking voice, crouching and smoking by the fire, not keen to make eye contact – but I was nervous, too, to finally meet her. When I covered her trial, I thought of her as someone miserable and damaged, someone feral and furtive.

  Who was she really? ‘I’m big-time average,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing special about me at all.’ But this was the woman who refused name suppression to make her accusations all the more real, who put herself through a traumatic trial (‘It was beyond that’) to seek justice.

  She said, ‘Oh, it’s quite simple actually, Steve. I was pissed off. I put all this trust and faith into a cop [Dewar] who looked as though he was helping me. He never hurt me physically, not like the others. To then find out that he screwed us big-time to cover his own skin and that of his mates – I got angry. It took over my life.’

  What was her life like before Kitchin? ‘Happily married with three daughters, living on a couple of acres, milking cows and enjoying life.’ Still happily married, now with a baby boy – ‘My little mistake’ – but still enjoying life? ‘I’m getting back there now.’

  In the 1990s, Nicholas went to court to allege that she was raped by a policeman in Murapara when she was thirteen. The jury – with the help of Dewar’s meddling – delivered a verdict of not guilty. I asked her about the Murapara sex crimes, and she talked about a shattered childhood, a terrible secret, the awful half-life of the abused. It reminded me of a remark made by John Haigh, Rickards’s lawyer, at her trial. He said that during the time of the alleged rapes in Rotorua, Nicholas was eighteen, old enough to resist. ‘She wasn’t,’ he said, ‘a child.’

  I always thought that was heinous. Nicholas said of her abuse in Rotorua, ‘When the bad things were happening, I was that frightened little girl at the age of thirteen. I always went back to that.’

  The ‘bad things’ – she clung to that understatement a lot, twelve times to be exact, during our afternoon in Hawke’s Bay. It was so childish. I suppose it was the authentic voice of trauma. She said, ‘I’m like a dog with a bone; you don’t want to give it up, until you can’t chew it anymore and you’ve got to bury it. But this bone will never be buried. This will never be settled.’

  [September 30]

  18

  Bob Parker

  Celebrity Mayor Island

  Strange times in Christchurch. Very bad people have very amusingly defaced the billboards of mayoral candidate Bob Parker to make him look like Simpsons character Sideshow Bob. But he is not amused. ‘It’s a smear campaign,’ he says. ‘Join the dots,’ he says. ‘The dots would lead to the key opponent I have in this campaign … My opponents wrote me off on day one of their campaign as an MC and a TV quiz-show host, whereas they had an intellectual.’

  You might remember Parker from such shows as Skellerup Young Farmer of the Year, Miss Universe New Zealand, and This Is Your Life. As a presenter, he was genial, beaming, popular, quite absurd. He is now fifty-four. A tall charming man, honey-voiced and intense, he moved with a kind of lascivious grace; he gave the impression of a voluptuary, feeding on sensual pleasures.

  We met at the downtown apartment he shares with his slender, dark-eyed wife Joanna, thirty-seven. Nor’-wester winds had stripped the city’s cherry blossoms to pink shreds, but it was a warm spring afternoon and the Port Hills were a lovely pale lime. Parker’s balcony gave a magnificent view of his city – and it really could be all his on election day. Parker is standing for m
ayor as an independent; he is top of the polls by a comfortable margin, eighteen percent ahead of his ‘key opponent … an intellectual’, Megan Woods of the Progressive Party. ‘It would be,’ he said, ‘the ultimate job in my life.’

  His childhood was outside his apartment window – the Heathcote Valley. He talked for a long time about his earliest memories. ‘Down the end of our street was the malt works. The whistle would go at four-thirty, it may have been four, and …’ He talked for a long time about his grandfather Jack, a plumber who handed down the trade to Parker’s father. He talked for a long time about his parents. He talked for a long time about everything. He was such an emotional character. He had sudden little furies. ‘Am I boring you?’ he said, when I interrupted one epic tale. No, I lied.

  But he also told good stories. One in particular was like a moving episode of This Is Your Life, starring Bob Parker. I had asked him about another TV programme. With luck, you might not remember Parker from The Today Show – his last, wretched hurrah at Television New Zealand. It was a chat show featuring lots of product endorsements. It was a dreadful piece of mindlessness that screened at 11.30 a.m. and became the model for that contemporary dreadful mindlessness, Good Morning. I had written about The Today Show in 1991, and interviewed Parker over the phone. I had been terribly mocking. To defend himself, Parker had said, ‘I happen to think I’m an entertaining, enjoyable person. I feel good about me.’ But he didn’t.

  I asked him at his apartment why he had agreed to present such rubbish. He said, ‘I was desperate for money. It was after my divorce. I had given my house to my family in Wellington. I had committed to pay a level of maintenance to my ex-wife and my children that was vastly in excess of what I had to pay. I sold my iron and my ironing-board, which were the last two really nice things that I had left, for $50. I was down. I was flatting in Auckland. I had an old beat-up car. Then the job came along.

  ‘Drinking? No. I was completely focussed on trying to grow up. Earlier on, I was a bit of a party boy. I might do a TV show one night, then head down to a bar and drink with a few mates down there, then head off to a restaurant, and drink and drink and drink till the early hours of the morning. Having a great deal of fun. But I remember driving home and looking up at the lights on the side of the hill, and thinking, ‘Why can’t I just be really happy like those people up there?’

  ‘I’d got married at twenty-one. Well, before that I had a child with Anne, so I was a dad at twenty. So, straight into a marriage, straight into a mortgage. Moved back down here, bought my first house. I was wallpapering, fixing things up, working really hard. Got up to Wellington, built a house once again, worked really hard, painted it myself … And I came up against that point in your life when you say, “Am I going to stay a boy, or am I going to become a man? Am I going to embrace the fact that my dreams, hopes and aspirations will never come true?”

  ‘I don’t want to create the impression I was a deep dark wreck. I was having a great life. I was starting to earn some really good money, I had a stunningly wonderful group of sons, my three sons, magic young guys, I’m so proud of each of them today, and I get on really well with my ex-wife Anne. I love Anne and she loves me, and we actually have a better relationship now.

  ‘But I had a restlessness in my soul. Life is all about the search for love. I wanted to see myself on the cover of the Woman’s Weekly. That way I knew I was alive. I was proving to other people that I was okay, but the person I needed to prove that I was okay to was me.

  ‘So I went up to Auckland, attempted a couple of rather desperate and sad relationships, did that show. It was a pretty bad time.’

  Which is when I would have phoned, mockingly, and heard him say, plaintively, ‘I feel good about me.’

  He was a bored pharmacy student driving along the Hutt motorway when he decided to enter broadcasting. He saw presenter Brian Edwards driving the other way. Edwards, he figured, was doing something he enjoyed. ‘I thought, “I can’t just settle for this. I’m sure there’s a good buck in being a pharmacist, but I’ll be stuck behind a counter, counting out pills.”’

  That restlessness again. He got into television. Was that satisfying? ‘I realised very quickly within TVNZ you would be treated like garbage as long as you had no power over the system.’ A chance meeting led him to Hollywood, where he bought the rights to This Is Your Life. He co-produced, wrote and hosted thirty-six episodes, until TV1 programmer Andrew Shaw phoned.

  ‘I was living in Akaroa,’ Parker said. I got a call one day from Shaw. He said, “Oh, hi Bob, how are you doing, and hey listen, who owns the rights in the States to This Is Your Life?” Well, a few weeks later I get another call saying, “Hey, TVNZ don’t want you to front the show anymore, and we’ve spoken to the production people in Hollywood and told them you won’t be able to make this programme with anybody else.” I’d tried to go to TV3, but they closed that door. So, without a broadcaster, whatever you’ve got is worth nothing … I extracted a little bit of dosh out of them for the rights. But I had the show ripped out from under me. It was a pretty scummy thing.’

  He loved working on that show, even compared its biographies to Shakespeare. He told a story. ‘One of my sons reminded me recently that I used to get frustrated by the bad speech habits they’d bring home, so in the mornings I would make them do speech exercises, and make them read Shakespeare. It was one thing I learned from my grandfather. He’d read all of Shakespeare, and he took me aside one day and said to me, “Robert, everything you ever need to know is written inside Shakespeare, and everything you ever needed to understand people is written in Dickens.”

  ‘Later on I read Shakespeare, and it was the ability of Shakespeare to allow people to transform that I absolutely loved. Shakespeare understood that people change and are affected by life, and in a way that was what used to fascinate me about This Is Your Life. I always loved that transition where you would bring somebody on stage and you’d show a photograph of them when they were present in the story you were retelling, maybe they were twenty, and now they might be wrinkled, and slightly stooped … I just found the passage of time incredibly moving. And I think that’s the quality that Shakespeare had.’

  This story was, of course, headed for hubris. He recalled a TV review of one particular episode of This Is Your Life which slated him for crying crocodile tears. That comment really stung. He went to see Brian Edwards, who he knew would be sympathetic. ‘And I went away and thought about it, and I thought, why am I making this fuss? The reviewer wrote the truth. I know I was pretending at the end of that programme. I know I was faking it. It was a shallow piece of television.’

  This was the man who won the 1980 Kensington Carpets Male Personality of the Year. ‘The only person who remembers! The last time I saw the trophy it was in the garage in Akaroa and bits were peeling off it. But no one’s ever mentioned it from the day I got it. Sometimes I got the feeling that there was something in TVNZ, something about me, that meant I would never get recognised for any of the things I did. I made a big, big contribution, and yet very rarely do I find there’s a mention of that at TVNZ. That kind of intrigues me. Did I step on somebody’s toes? Or was I just eminently forgettable?’

  After The Today Show, Parker moved back to Christchurch and set up his own television production company. He also entered politics. He became mayor of Banks Peninsula, then merged the council with the Christchurch City Council. I asked him which was more ruthless – TV or politics?

  ‘There’s very little difference,’ he said. ‘The school committee in Akaroa can be just as dramatic, just as scary, just as ridden with politics, as can the UN or television … TV was ruthless, but in an appallingly shallow and amateur way … a little group of unsophisticated people with fairly large egos. I’ve found a far more sophisticated ego battle is fought in politics. In fact, I would have to say I’ve seen some of the most out-of-control egos in politics by a country mile.’

  He gave a campaign speech. It was, of course, very long. Sample:
‘I’ve been in local government for sixteen years. I haven’t lost an election yet. I won the merger, I won the mayoralty against the sitting mayor, I was re-elected.’ And then he said, ‘The greatest asset I’ve had is that people always underestimate me. Politically, it’s been tremendously useful.’

  [October 7]

  19

  Ross Meurant

  Make Love Not War

  Look what the cat dragged in. It was thought, and hoped, that Ross Meurant – one of the most loathsome figures in modern New Zealand history – had disappeared into whatever ether of his choosing. But he performed an unlikely return to public life last week. There he was on Morning Report, then on Campbell Live, then on John Tamihere’s Radio Live show, but not to talk the windy militant trash he used to spout as a cop who was voted into parliament as a right-wing National Party MP for three terms. Bizarrely, eloquently, he re-emerged to pour scorn on the arrests of suspected terrorists in the Ureweras, and to blame it on a self-serving, deluded police culture. He was concerned about the abuse of our civil liberties. He warned Helen Clark (‘a wonderful prime minister’) not to tread on our dreams. Dreams and civil liberties from Ross Meurant? He said: ‘I’ve changed my way of thinking.’

  Interesting. I called him for an interview. He rambled for a long time, and said, ‘No.’ He phoned back approximately twenty minutes later, rambled for a long time, and said, ‘Yes.’ We arranged to meet on Wednesday morning. His chosen venue was vaguely clandestine: a café inside a garden centre in Remuera. The day’s specials were German pots and flowering clivias. Meurant, sixty, barrel-chested, narrow-eyed, dressed in black, slow and deliberate in his movements, was delivered to the door in a four-wheel drive driven by a pretty young blonde. Two hours later, when she picked him up, I remarked that he had a very attractive driver for a man his age. He said, ‘I run every morning, don’t drink grog, so …’ What, I asked, is she your girl friend? He smiled, and said, ‘That’s my personal life.’