I asked him what it was. ‘It was just some pill I was given.’ Ecstasy? ‘I believe so.’ Did it work? ‘I think so.’
In another more dangerous and volatile meeting, he’s told: ‘Go. Go while you still can, Paul.’ The threat was very real.
‘I tried to show a northern Australia that people may not be familiar with,’ Toohey said. ‘We have certain views about northern Australia; one is waterfalls and vast landscapes, and good old bush characters who say gidday. But there is an underbelly. And it’s quite a dark one. And that is the world of Murdoch. So it’s an attempt to show how someone like him, who has branded himself with racist insignia, is able to operate with apparent impunity across that landscape for so long. He was a greedy man. He was looking for an easy way to make money to cruise around to do the things he liked, which was, as James Hepi put very well, “driving around in his den of hell”.
‘You’ll notice that I dwell very briefly on the murder itself. Because murder is just murder. People like to romanticise death in the north, but in some ways – this might be hard to explain, or justify, after bringing out a book on the subject – I’m almost saying it’s not a special death if it happens in the north. The setting is vast and it is empty, but it’s not necessarily lonely. It’s just that people are able to get away with things easier up here …
‘I’ve been here a long time. It’s always been my aim to try and reveal a realer north than the one that resides in many people’s imaginations.’
In his book, Toohey wonders whether Murdoch might have actually enjoyed killing Falconio. His conclusion? He said, ‘I think he really just regarded Falconio as an obstacle to get to Lees, and it was probably – unfortunately for Peter Falconio, because Murdoch wouldn’t have tied much emotion to it at all – a very perfunctory act.’
All that apparent mystery, so many hideous speculations that Lees was somehow in on it, but it just came down to ‘an all-Australian maniac’ killing a complete stranger on the side of the road. The only issue left was whether Falconio’s body would ever be found. I asked Toohey if he thought Murdoch would volunteer that information. This question didn’t require a long answer. ‘No,’ he said.
[July 1]
5 Paul Henry
Still a Man
Paul Henry finished his live-hosting of the Breakfast programme on Friday morning, begged a publicist for a cup of coffee because he didn’t have any money on him, took a seat on a blue couch in a room on the sixth floor of the Television New Zealand network centre in Auckland with a high view of damp, grey Waitemata harbour, and said, ‘I always wanted to be important. I can remember thinking when I was very, very young that I wanted to be the centre of attraction. I don’t anymore. I still want to be a bit important.
‘I used to agonise when I was a young boy, was it better to be rich, famous, or infamous? Partly that was because I was taken from New Zealand to England when my parents separated, and I went to a school that literally looked like a prison. Now I’ve got a beautiful grand piano in the living room, and I can’t play it.
‘You see, I’d had an upbringing in New Zealand where I saw anything was possible. I had a father who was doing brilliantly exciting things overseas in very exciting places. He was a marine engineer. And then I was living in a council flat in the worst part of Bristol with a mother doing treble shifts in a plastic-bag factory. I walked to school over ice because we couldn’t afford a bus fare.
‘But I knew about another place, New Zealand, and about options the other kids at school didn’t know existed. I just used to naturally assume that I was going to be great. I didn’t think there was going to be any real impediment to my becoming great. And I just blundered my way into things. I got a job at the BBC with comparative ease, just because I didn’t perceive there would be a reason why I wouldn’t: how was it possible they wouldn’t see I was enormously talented?
‘And you see that’s where I sit now. I’ve never really been one for pushing myself. In fact, I loathe that. But basically I just am very assured in my ability. That makes me very critical of myself too, because I let myself down all the time. But I’m very assured of my ability. That does sound big-headed. That sounds egotistical. But … yeah …’
He had said: ‘I say what I think.’ And: ‘My mind goes very fast.’ Also: ‘I distract myself easily.’ We sat together for forty minutes. I had met him twice before, both times very briefly, but liked him at once, because he has such immediately obvious qualities – speed, honesty, kindness, cheek. So much front, but you could tell, too, that he was the kind of guy who led a secret life. He said he had ‘very few close friends’. Television work (‘There’s not a lot of following through in broadcasting; it’s mostly trying to succeed in the challenge’) and a television audience can satisfy some of those needs.
As well as Breakfast, Henry hosted Close Up for most of the previous week, while regular presenter Mark Sainsbury reported from the America’s Cup race in Valencia. ‘I love Close Up. Absolutely love it. I love the fact that it has gravitas. It has heritage.’
Really? I asked him about the television coverage presented by Sainsbury for Close Up, and John Campbell for TV3’s Campbell Live, on the night David Bain was released on bail. It was a circus, yes? ‘It was a circus. If I had been one of the hosts in some of those press photos from that night, I think
