Steve Braunias Roosters I Have Known
To Tony Reid
Sometimes he would turn to the four red folio scrapbooks with their collection of newspaper cuttings concerning himself over a period of thirty years. Then the pale cheeks would flush and the close-drawn lips grow more menacing even than before. ‘Stupid, mulish malice,’ he would note. ‘Pure lying – conscious, deliberate and designed.’ ‘Suggestive lying. Personal animosity is at the bottom of this.’
And then he would suddenly begin to doubt. After all, where was he? What had he accomplished? Had any of it been worthwhile?
Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians
The Purpose of Roosters
Autumn was Ruth Richardson, winter was a rather sad private detective. Spring was Colin Meads, summer was a likeable twit from Shortland Street. Throughout, I held on to a souvenir of the strange experience of profiling a New Zealand identity every week for seven months: a worn, creaking ninety-minute TDK cassette tape. It’s standard practice for journalists to use a fresh cassette when they record interviews, then file it away for safe keeping; it may be required to settle grave matters of libel, or vexatious complaints about being misquoted. But I couldn’t be bothered. I used the same old tape week in, week out. One noose fits all.
Helen Clark’s confident honk was swallowed up by John Key’s vacuous chatter, in turn replaced by Louise Nicholas’s incessant complaints, then concreted over by the vain hopes of poor, doomed Dick Hubbard – in all, twenty-seven voices came and went, their words destined for oblivion. Whatever they said would be taken down and, later, taken out, buried beneath the next guest. I was destroying the evidence. I was trying to erase the strange experience of profiling a New Zealand identity every week for seven months. I was working my way towards the sweetest sound of all: silence.
A lot of those voices had talked such rubbish. They said so many boring and devious and stupid things. Warwick Roger once wrote that sometimes the only question worth asking in an interview was: ‘Are you, by any chance, insane?’ This might be construed as bad manners, so instead I would smile and nod, and think, Oh shut up. But of course I needed them to keep talking, to slip their necks inside the noose of my frayed TDK tape. They could swing later, on Sunday, when I kicked the stool away and the interview was published in The Sunday Star-Times. The profiles were loosely intended as character studies. Perhaps a few were character assassinations. I sometimes thought of the profiles as acts of revenge.
Yes, thank heavens that’s over – I’m about to head into semi-retirement to look after my baby daughter, who can’t speak a word of English – but it wasn’t so bad. I loved seeing the country. There were the usual scenic attractions, the expected poetries of Canterbury skies, Taranaki gates, Wellington bays; there was also a widespread feeling of resentment against the government, against liberalism. I met enemies of the states everywhere I travelled. Politically, New Zealand in 2007 was in flux, a work in progress. There was the illusion of order in central Auckland and downtown Wellington, and disorder in the provinces. It was a year of child abuse, a disgraced police force, and apparent bush terrorism; if you were alarmist, you could take always reach for Yeats, and declare, ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.’ But it was more convincing to be reminded of Michael King’s observation in his Penguin History that New Zealanders have a ‘fundamental decency’. That was acted out when I visited Pauline Jespersen in flood-ravaged Kerikeri.
It would only be a huge exaggeration to say I liked everyone I interviewed. It was a privilege to meet Meads; he seemed to possess a quality that I believe is known as goodness. I think Clark is some kind of genius. Pita Sharples may well be the nicest man in New Zealand. Glynn Cardy, the Anglican Archdeacon of Auckland, gave the gift of Christian kindness. If it had anything in it, I’d be happy to donate my brain to Professor Richard Faull for his research.
And I owed a lot to rustic National MP Chester Borrows. He was the second interview in the series; unwittingly, he was also my spirit guide. He described everyone in his life as some sort of ‘rooster’. I fell in love with that word. It had such an egalitarian New Zealandness to it. It took away the pomp and ceremony of honorific (professor, prime minister, etc), and found its way into just about every interview that followed. Pompously, The Sunday Star-Times page on which my profiles appeared was titled THE STEVE BRAUNIAS INTERVIEW. I wished they’d named it ROOSTER OF THE WEEK.
I took the job seriously, so I took these roosters seriously. I tried to listen intently to their wisdom and their blather. But I was also listening for signs of something else, something that became a mild obsession as I interviewed one rooster after another. It would be a cliché to say that a pattern began to emerge. I find clichés attractive; a pattern began to emerge.
In fact, it emerged straight away. The series began when I interviewed Ruth Richardson at her Canterbury home in late autumn. The former finance minister had gone into private consultancy work, and was doing very well for herself. She was on the board of this and that, her services were in demand all over the world. She was practising what she had preached: ‘creating opportunities’, otherwise known as coining it. She was like a museum curio – it was almost nostalgic listening to her devout and steadfast belief in her libertarian economic principles that brutalised New Zealand in the early 1990s.
But what most intrigued me about her – and it lay behind my inquiries of many of the twenty-six roosters I interviewed afterwards – was her sense of purpose. Richardson had enjoyed magnificent power and
