Yes, yes, the usual boring confessions of a hack. Journalists rarely stick around; they make their cursory inspections, then leave, and await the next assignment. I never entertained the ridiculous notion that my profiles told the full story about any of the twenty-seven roosters, or even that they captured something – if that happened, it was accidental, or dumb luck. I favoured running very long quotes; much of the rest of the story was an attempt to follow that person around the page.
It was easy to get lost. I was far too rough on Julie Dalzell, the gracious founding editor of Cuisine magazine; actually, my profile shoved her off the page, and I ran around its 1500 words banging on about my loathing of espresso slophouses. I was far too kind to Anita McNaught, the former New Zealand TV presenter now working as a Fox correspondent in Iraq; actually, I thought I was giving her a generous length of rope to hang herself. She said the most alarming pro-American things. I quoted her at greater length than usual, and did my best to stay out of the story. The paper published a letter from a man in Wellington who wrote that this was a disgrace, that I was obviously complicit with her views. This wasn’t true, but his criticism of the story was absolutely valid. I thought I was keeping a safe distance from McNaught. In fact, it read like I was in awe of her every word. I had doled out so much rope that it fastened around my own pretty neck.
All the pretty aerodromes, all the gabbling roosters … Wayne Idour in Dunedin, in a winter so cold that the night sky had nowhere to go – rigid and flat as iron, it bolted itself to the ground. Adam Rickitt at the Shortland Street studios in Henderson, in early summer, beside a mangrove creek at low tide, listlessly dragging itself over the mud. The series ended just a few days before Christmas, when I interviewed God. Well, the spirit of God, anyway, in the kindly presence of Anglican minister Glynn Cardy. It was a nice, easy way to go out. Perhaps a few months earlier I might have given him hell. But it was pleasant to sit in the church crypt and listen to the twenty-seventh and final voice on my TDK cassette blather gently about faith, Jesus, spirituality and other fanciful notions.
Now and then my mind strayed, and I thought: I might miss doing this for a living. There were pleasures of travel, and bringing back soft toys for the baby – a grunting pig from Wellington, a squealing haggis from Dunedin. And the best thing about the job was writing. I suppose I regard the pursuit of language as a purpose. But it was a shame that it involved interviewing people. Apart from feeling vaguely repulsed by the private detective, I didn’t hate anyone. I wished the best for each of the twenty-seven roosters I met in 2007. They said smart and touching and funny things. It’s just that as the weeks went by – to tell the truth, I thought this in the second week – I wanted to leave them alone.
1 Ruth Richardson
Shine On You Crazy Diamond
Meat Loaf was there. He was a whopper. Stephen Stills was there. He was a double whopper, who waddled lonely laps around the room. Perhaps he had the exact same thought on his mind as I did while I watched the golden star of the 1960s now pace morosely inside a basketball stadium in an Auckland suburb in 1991: how had he ended up here? It was an invite-only charity concert. Dinner tables were laid out in front of the stage. The show also featured a set from Nelson, two lean, long-haired American twins and the sons of ’50s pop star Ricky Nelson. One of them brought his delicate new girlfriend Erin Everly, the daughter of one of the Everly Brothers; she had just broken up with her abusive husband, Axl Rose. Pale and chalky, she looked so miserable that it seemed as though she was about to dissolve.
In all, it was a strange line-up of stars who were flown in to play that night, but the strangest presence and most dynamic performer of the evening was Ruth Richardson. She stole the show. Dinner had been served to captains of industry and society matrons; in conduct most unbecoming of a minister of finance, Richardson danced her way across the tables, scattering dessertspoons and champagne glasses, when Meat Loaf and Stills joined forces to play a horrible, raucous encore version of – you could say this was apposite – ‘Bat out of Hell’.
Richardson’s romp was a sight not easily forgotten. I’ve harboured a secret admiration for her ever since – secret, because she was, and remains, so notorious, such a pariah of both the left and right (Nicky Hager’s revelations that National Party leader Don Brash engaged in email contact with Richardson helped end his political career in 2006), an unacceptable name to bring up in polite circles. Another way of putting it is that no modern politician has matched her sense of daring and purpose. The current National Party leader John Key is often asked, ‘Aren’t you just Labour with tax cuts?’ A question like that was unimaginable when Richardson held the finance portfolio, and swept through her radical right-wing reforms in her famous ‘Mother of All Budgets’ in the same year she upstaged Meat Loaf.
Her antics that night made me suspect she was a good sort as well as a good sport. When I instigated an exchange of emails with her about an interview, I reminded her
