Derek was ginger-bearded and curly-haired and wore orange and black striped trousers. He wasn’t a hippie exactly: he was a bit older than the longhaired grown-ups I’d started to see around town, who all looked like they might be in rock groups. I remembered a phrase I’d heard Dad use once: ‘carnival anarchist’.
A man called Bill Dwyer had come to one of the political meetings my parents sometimes held in our living room and left behind his hat, a green felt object with a greasy stain on the brim. Bill Dwyer didn’t come back for his hat. My parents didn’t take the hat back to Bill Dwyer. Tim and I took to wearing it in our games of dress-ups. It became known as Bill Dwyer’s Hat.
One day I heard Mum and Dad talking about Bill Dwyer. It was the first time I’d heard the name without mention of his hat. The conversation was full of words I didn’t know: ‘arrested’, ‘convicted’, ‘deported’.
‘Who is Bill Dwyer?’ I asked.
‘He’s a carnival anarchist,’ Dad said. I had no idea what a carnival anarchist was but I liked the way it sounded. Perhaps Derek was a carnival anarchist too? He would laugh like a lunatic when something went right - for example, the paint bomb aimed at the clothesline hit its target first time - and even more maniacally when something went wrong, like the time the steering wheel came off in Bruno’s hands as a bunch of us kids dragged him from the getaway car. He also taught us fantastic swear words, and rude things to say like, ‘We‘re not here to fuck spiders.’ But after a few months the novelty started to wear off.
One Saturday Derek turned up to collect us from our homes at about seven o’clock in the morning. Before we went to Newtown to get started on the day’s perilous activities, he had to make a couple of stops. We went to a house in Webb Street where we picked up Bruno, then headed to the Railway Station. Derek explained that it was the start of the University Arts Festival, although I wasn’t sure what that meant.
As we got out of the car in front of the station’s grand sandstone entrance, with its eight towering pillars and Roman-numeralled clock, I could hear a fantastic noise. Just inside, by the statue of Kupe, a band was playing. A colourfully dishevelled crowd was gathered around them. A few people were twirling about, arms out, eyes closed, hair flicking across their faces.
‘Well, are you gonna dance?’ Bruno said, as though surprised Tim and I weren’t rushing to join in. No, I wasn’t going to dance. I just stood there amazed by the sound, the way it seemed to be moving around so much inside the huge high chamber of the station’s foyer. I couldn’t hear where the notes began, only their mesmerising echoes.
I’d seen a live band once before, when The Fourmyula had played on a summer night in the Botanic Garden near our house. Then I had recognised songs from the radio, but the music this band was making was louder and stranger and I knew none of the songs. Derek said the band was called Simon and The Mammals.
After a while Bruno went off to talk to the musicians and Derek took us to a platform where students were arriving from Auckland. They stumbled out of the carriages, longhaired teenagers, some with bare feet, some carrying sleeping bags. As they moved towards the foyer someone stretched a length of ribbon across the entrance, a man with a beard, beret and pair of scissors stepped forward and cut it, and the whole group cheered.
03
REBELS AND REFUGEES
It is my first year at Onslow College in the wind-shocked suburb of Johnsonville. In a railway carriage full of boys and girls from the city’s western suburbs - Kelburn, Karori, Northland, Wadestown - I make the daily journey seven kilometres north to the newest state secondary school in the region. The other colleges around Wellington have all existed in one form or another since the nineteenth century but Onslow opened only in the 1950s, in time to cater for the post-war baby boom. To our parents - Pākehā, middle-class, many of them public servants, some teachers themselves - it is the school most likely to provide the modern, enlightened education they envision for us. To me, it seems the school where I will find the fewest obstacles to the adventures I am determined to have.
As we straggle through Wellington Railway Station to catch the Johnsonville unit other teenagers pass us going in the opposite direction: commuters from the northern suburbs heading to the traditional single-sex institutions - Wellington College and Wellington Girls’ College. I feel superior, slightly sorry for the boys with their compulsory caps and short-back-and-sides haircuts and the girls in their shapeless smocks.
On board we squeeze into facing seats. My bare knees bunch up against those of the fellow first-year sitting opposite. The train clatters north away from the city and the harbour, over the bridge at Ngauranga, through short tunnels, past the state houses of Ngaio and lush gardens of Khandallah, towards the new subdivisions of Johnsonville.
A poster above the window declares it is compulsory for every New Zealand male to enrol for military training by the age of twenty. Ballots based on birth dates will then be conducted. This means some of the boys in this carriage who will be leaving school at the end of the year will later go, against their will, into the army. Well, they’re not going to make me do that. New Zealand has troops in Vietnam, fighting a war that’s nothing to do with me. I’ve joined OHMS, Organisation to Halt Military Service. I have the badge pinned to the canvas army surplus bag I use to carry my schoolbooks and I’ve been on marches, mobilisations as they’re called.
I’ve also mobilised against The Bomb. The Americans and Russians want to blow each other up and take the rest of the world with them, and now the French have nuclear weapons and are testing them in the South Pacific. And then there is The Tour. Last year there were protests to try to stop the All Blacks going to play rugby against the Springboks in South Africa. They have apartheid over there, which means black people don’t have rights. They’re not even allowed to vote. HART, that’s Halt All Racist Tours, reckons the only way to make those white South Africans change is to take away the things they love, like rugby.
A guy called Tim Shadbolt got arrested running on to the tarmac at Wellington Airport, trying to stop the All Blacks’ plane from taking off.
The New Zealand government won’t stop the war, the bomb or the tour. The prime minister, Keith Holyoake, has been in parliament since 1932. Everything about him — his short hair, his suit, his pompous voice - belongs to the past. I bet he hasn’t even heard The Beatles. And then there’s Muldoon. The Pig, we call him. He’s minister of finance but people say he’ll take over from Holyoake in the end and that will be even worse.
Back then, my way of expressing dissent was refusing to cut my hair. I looked like a haystack with a pair of arms poking out. These were usually wrapped around a couple of LPs. After school and on weekends I’d wear a combination of torn jeans, an outsized seaman’s jersey and a poncho purloined from my mother’s wardrobe. From mid-autumn I usually had an oilskin parka over the top, which I kept on all day. At school I dressed in whatever variations on the school uniform I could get away with. For a while I wore a pink tie-dyed T-shirt underneath my regulation grey long-sleeved one, until my maths teacher, Miss Barnes, who was also a Sunday school instructor, caught a flash of colour and sent me to the Glass Box, a holding pen outside the principal’s office, where miscreants went to await sentencing.
The Glass Box was a good place to make friends. That’s where I met Bruce. He was a few years ahead of me, one of the few senior students who could be bothered talking to juniors. He wore love beads, kept his shirt untucked, and asked me what music I’d been listening to. Although obviously smart, he had failed School C so was repeating his fifth form year; he seemed to have his own seat in the box.
One day another student popped his head around the side and told us about a guerrilla theatre event being planned for school assembly the following Monday. On a given cue, rebel students would storm the stage. The student representative, who was in on the plot, would be symbolically slain and carried from the hall draped in a flag, while someone else rushed down the aisle throwing hand-rolled raspberry-l
eaf cigarettes into the crowd. Would I participate, perhaps be one of the pallbearers? Fuck, yeah!
As much as I fancied myself as a teenage rebel taking a stand against a world of crazy rules and warmongers, the truth was that the principles I stood for had for the most part been formed, fought for and handed on to me by my family. I would have shown more independent thinking if I’d I cut my hair and joined the Young Nats.
My mother, Marei, had stepped off the boat in Wellington in 1939, a bright bewildered three-year-old who could understand and speak some German but not a word of English. She had just escaped from Hitler. With her were her mother, father, six-year-old brother and an elderly woman dressed entirely in black and known as Loelein.
My mother’s mother, Maria, had grown up in Berlin, the youngest child and only daughter of an intellectual Jewish family. Loelein had been Maria’s governess. Maria became a successful actress, playing classical roles in Germany’s major theatres. When the revered poet Rainer Maria Rilke died, she was asked to read at his memorial. In 1931, she married a German Catholic magistrate and moved to Hamburg. Loelein went with her.
A little later the trio moved to Cologne, where my mother and her brother were born. In 1938, as the Jewish persecution intensified, Maria left for England, pretending she was going on holiday. She would not return to Germany. After several months Loelein followed, bringing the children with her. They had nothing with them but a few clothes and some money Loelein had hidden between the pages of a photograph album. Eventually my grandfather left Germany as well. The family took shelter in a convent in Newcastle until 1939, when they were granted visas to emigrate to New Zealand just before the outbreak of war.
Despite being Jewish refugees, once in New Zealand the German nationals were treated with suspicion. As ‘enemy aliens’ they were required to report regularly to the police, especially whenever they planned to venture outside Wellington. This compounded their strong sense of being different in a country where simple things like coffee beans and pumpernickel bread were considered exotic, and recreation meant watching rugby, not reading Rilke.
They met others suffering from similar cultural dislocation, among them Harry Seresin, a Jewish refugee from Russia who had arrived the same year and would start Wellington’s first European-style coffee shop, as well as its first professional theatre. A visitor to the Seresins remembers Harry shaking his head and muttering, as he picked up a broken beer bottle someone had left on his front lawn, ‘Ah, the New Zealand national sport.’
My grandfather was forbidden by war regulations from practising in the legal profession. He took a job as a double bass player in a dance band. His training had been strictly classical, and it had never been his ambition to play professionally: mastering an instrument had simply been part of his broad education as a cultured young German. The other musicians in the band were not unfriendly, although they laughed at his inability to play the simple popular songs of the day without a notated score. When he told them his name — Adolf Dronke — they shook their heads and grimaced. He became John.
But my grandparents also made many friends, especially among poets, actors, painters and composers, New Zealanders who, even though born in the country, shared some of their estrangement from the prevailing culture. My grandmother Maria began teaching speech and drama and giving poetry recitals; by the 1950s she had begun to include the works of new friends such as Denis Glover and James K. Baxter alongside those of European poets. The artist Colin McCahon did a lighting design for her production of Ibsen’s The Master Builder, and she collaborated with composer Douglas Lilburn on settings of Rilke. John became a founding member of the National Orchestra. This was the environment in which my mother grew up: the arts were the essence of life, and the world could be divided into those who were for you and those who were against.
My father, Conrad Bollinger, who was always known as Con, was already a rebel by the time he met the teenage Marei in the mid 1950s. His father had died before he was born; he and his elder brother and sister had been raised by his mother and a large assortment of aunts who lived near the family’s Khandallah home. Surrounded by books and strong intelligent women, he immersed himself in history and literature and began to develop a world view based on humanist ideals. The journal he kept in 1946, the year he turned seventeen, begins with quotes, copied by hand, from John Stuart Mill, Albert Einstein and George Loveless of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Con came to the attention of the Security Intelligence Service a couple of years later when he placed copies of a pamphlet he had written opposing conscription in the foyer of the local Anglican church. By then he had joined the Communist Party, although he would resign in protest in 1956 after the Soviets invaded Hungary.
In the early 1960s Con became publicist for the New Zealand branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and chaired two organisations, the Socialist Forum and the Committee on Vietnam. Through most of the decade he worked for the Public Service Association, the union for the country’s civil servants, eventually leaving it to teach English at Victoria University. He was always going to meetings, or hosting political gatherings at our house. Before I could walk I had ridden on his shoulders on CND marches. I grew up in a household where war and apartheid were condemned, Holyoake was an American puppet, and Bill Dwyer’s hat hung in the hall.
An older cousin recently told me of an occasion, before I was born, when my father had taken him to watch a rugby game at Athletic Park. Footing it home afterwards, Con had said they could walk down the middle of street if they wanted to because they were New Zealanders and the All Blacks had just won a test. From as early as I can remember, though, the national sport was rarely mentioned in our household without some reference to South Africa, and how New Zealand should be boycotting it as long as the racist apartheid system remained. When it was reported in the newspaper that a cricket pitch in Wellington had been attacked with shovels on the eve of a visit by a South African team, my father whispered to me that Mum had driven the getaway car. Dad never learned to drive.
As kids, we were encouraged to ask questions and express opinions. At the big wooden dinner table in our house at Kelburn’s North Terrace the atmosphere was egalitarian and loud. I sometimes had arguments with my parents - Dad once stopped me leaving the house before I’d finished my homework by closing the living-room door and gently but securely sitting on me as I kicked and yelled helplessly - but I knew they were really on my side. My schoolmates seemed to like coming around. My father would emerge from his study, or my mother from the garden, to question them about their lives, their families, their dreams. Some, like my friend Dave, would spend hours in conversation with my father. I’m not even sure what they talked about. I began to realise that to most of my friends having an adult treat you as an equal and take an interest in your ideas was unusual.
My father had a certain way of greeting everyone, whether his students, colleagues, family, countless acquaintances or friends of his kids. He would say, ‘Are you happy?’ then pause long enough for them to consider the question. I’d hear him ask visitors if they were happy before they set foot in the front door, and people we met in the street. For one of his political cobbers the answer might be, ‘No, I’m bloody not,’ followed by an anti-government diatribe. If it was one of his students, the question could be taken as invitation to confide a problem they were having with an essay, a flatmate or a lover. To this day, when I meet people who knew my father they will inevitably tell me: There’s something I always remember about your father. He asked me if I was happy. I really had to think about it. It seemed like he really wanted to know.
If he asked me, I’d consider my situation, weigh up the things that seemed to be going right against the things that were going wrong and conclude that on balance, yeah, I was happy.
04
FELLOW DISSENTERS
From my college timetable it might have looked as though I was studying English, French, maths, science and art, but whichever classes I attended what I was usually thinki
ng about was rock music. Even in a school with Onslow’s progressive reputation, that put me in a minority. I felt surrounded by boys who were far more concerned with playing rugby or drinking beer. A few, like me, grew their hair long in rough imitation of a rock star but most still wore it short in the manner of an All Black or an accountant. Some were bullies. There was a hulking stubble-haired fifth-former who could not pass me in the corridor without pausing to grab the front of my jersey, lift me in the air and drop me violently to the ground.
When I met a boy called Martin I recognised him as a fellow dissenter. As a sign of liberalism Onslow had done away with ties, and regulations required male students to wear the top button of our grey shirts undone. Martin always wore his done up. He looked oddly formal. ‘It’s a statement of my individuality,’ was how he explained it to me.
We had become friends during a PE class, jogging around the bottom field. ‘I don’t mind physical exercise but I have a moral and philosophical objection to competitive sport,’ he said as we ran side by side. By the time our circuit of the field was complete he had quoted, from a newspaper clipping he carried in his pocket, the Jewish immigrant and social agitator Dr Erich Geiringer on rugby and the Kiwi male psyche, and we had established a mutual interest in The Beatles.
After that, a small group of us started gathering at Martin’s place after school, on weekends or even during class time to pursue our study of a small but growing collection of albums. Peter McLuskie had the first Doors album and The Who Live At Leeds. Andy had The Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet and a Folkways record by a blues singer called Blind Snooks Eaglin. Dave had a Mothers of Invention album called Weasels Ripped My Flesh. Martin liked The Kinks, which I thought had something to do with the fact his dad came from London. I had my Beatles albums and singles.
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