There were very many sell-out events at this weekend’s Christchurch WORD books festival including my talk on bloody old Polkinghorne, and not a dry eye in the house when RNZ’s Susie Ferguson spoke of the anxieties of motherhood, and evidence of pure comedy genius when novelist Duncan Sarkies gave a powerpoint talk on potato chip packaging—but the festival belonged to Dame Anne Salmond, who gave one of greatest talks I have ever seen at a NZ literary festival.
There was something epic about it. The regular Newsroom columnist’s cultural commentary on New Zealand in these times of a Pākehā resistance was wise and profound. She spoke not with fire or polemic, but with joy. “I fell in love with te ao Māori at 16, 17,” she said, and that love had only deepened over the years, for herself and many New Zealanders who shared a deep conviction that the way forward was a partnership between two peoples.
Questions from the audience looked to her for guidance and reassurance. Salmond occupies the role of public intellectual but is also regarded as a kind of sage. About a dozen people gave her a standing ovation at the end of her hour on Friday afternoon. Long before then I had a vision of her repeating the performance in a national tour, filling halls and auditoriums, touching a nerve in the New Zealand psyche. Someone should put her on the road. It would be a knock-out, just as her event was at The Piano Bar in downtown Christchurch, chaired by publisher Nicola Legat.
Legat did not chair it in the Western tradition of Q + A. It was more like a kōrero I suppose. She did ask questions, but only at the end of quite long wonderings out-loud about the cultural climate; and Salmond now and then gave direct answers, more so preferring to tell stories. They were a good match. Legat spoke in a posh girls school accent, Salmond in broad provincial Kiwi. And that was the thing about Dame Anne: she’s never worked from an ivory tower, has always worked on the ground, has a real sense of New Zealand history as a living thing that does not belong shunted to the past.
Also she’s a lot of fun. There were laughs throughout her hour, as well as spontaneous applause and a general feeling of awe. Festival bookseller UBS wheeled in four boxes of her book Selected Writings. There was only half a box left after her signing session.
Huzzah to Dame Anne. Great historian (The Trial of the Cannibal Dog is her masterpiece, maybe), regal on stage—I sat next to her Devonport neighbour Diana Wichtel at Salmond’s event, and asked whether she was a great beauty in her youth. Yes, definitely, Diana said, and remembered something an in-law said about Dame Anne striding through Devonport when she was pregnant, “looking like a galleon in full sail”. Her talk at The Piano Bar felt like that, too, had that kind of magnificence.
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Christchurch was shiny and blue, 16 degrees and windless, all camellias and lemons. WORD went off. The volunteers contributed a calm, funky vibe. The snacks were woeful. I met a woman I last saw in 1985 when she was 25 and she literally had not aged a day, which I took as a sign of very high standards of cosmetic surgery in Christchurch. I met Sean and Vivienne from Birdwood Crescent, Parnell. They were in town to visit family and made themselves at home at The Piano Bar. Many authors were there. Damien Wilkins was there, also Tusiata Avia, Catherine Chidgey, Emily Perkins, Rachael King, Naomi Arnold, Kate Evans, and Michelle Duff, who I ran into at the airport carrying a surfboard.
I was there, to chair Diana Wichtel in a discussion about her memoir Unreel, and to be chaired by Lianne Dalziel in a discussion about my book on bloody old Polkinghorne. In-between I saw two events. There was Dame Anne’s command performance on Friday. On Saturday afternoon, I saw memoirists Ali Mau and Suzie Ferguson chaired by Michelle Duff, who was so poised and steady on her feet that it was easy to imagine her on a surfboard.
Duff and Mau worked together on the #metoo investigations at Stuff. Asked about the negative response from media men when it was launched, Mau referred to the “extinct bird theory”, and explained, “The patriarchy is under pressure and it’s dying and of course it’s going to fight back hard.”
All three discussed “systems that allow violence towards women” as normalised behaviour. It was a solid, thoughtful event that most came alive when the two authors read from their books. Mau told a long yarn about some old sexist pig she worked for in Australian TV, and Ferguson told a short and powerful story about feeding her first baby.
I clean forgot to ask Diana to read an excerpt from her memoir Unreel. That was a shame. The book has so many zingers. On childhood: “Ours was a family more nuclear than the ones I saw on television.” On meeting her second husband: “Chris and I met at an encounter group in a tree house on Waiheke.” And on an aspect of her character which came out as a TV critic: “Sometimes I suspect I was born a bit of a bitch.”
But she was able to deliver fresh zingers live on stage. I asked her about the long uninterrupted line of sometimes belligerent male presenters on NZ TV from Paul Holmes to Paul Henry to Mike Hosking. Diana suspected they were encouraged to be belligerent: “The persona required them to be obnoxious, to not apply thought to anything. Perhaps it was the Pākehā pioneering culture where we can’t afford to look back too much. You just have to get the job done.”
The next morning I caught the 92 bus out to the riverside town of Kaiapoi. I wanted more than urban and urbane Christchurch, I wanted Canterbury with its big regional skies, its flat earth, its sons of the marshland sod. Also I wanted food. There was a Saturday market. I bought a bacon sandwich farmed from honest Rangiora hogs. I also bought a cactus in a pot from a man who ran a finger across the side of his car door, raking a path through a mustard-coloured dust, and said: “Pollen from the pine trees. It’s going to kill me. I live in a caravan park and it killed my neighbour. Gets in your lungs. Blows off in a nor-wester. The pines are old and tall, so there’s a lot of pollen.” I mused on his precarious existence as I set off on a long walk along the banks of the Kaiapoi River. It was at high tide. It turned aqua blue in colour where it joined the banana bend of the Waimakariri River. I got into conversation with a son of the marshland sod. He talked about the salmon that swam downstream and then he cut himself short, and asked where I was from. The answer brought a hoot of derisive laughter, and he said: “Yeah. You dress like an Aucklander.”
Poor old garish Auckland! In many ways it’s the subject of my book Polkinghorne: Inside the trial of the century, which I spoke about on Sunday at high noon. It concerns Auckland decadence, Auckland money, Auckland hobbies (methamphetamine, sex workers). If my book was an examination of Auckland, then chair Lianne Dalziel examined the author: the former MP of 23 years and three-time mayor of Christchurch put me on the rack, and I joked that it was like appearing before a select committee. Gosh she was good. She seemed determined to seek out the truth. I felt compelled to give honest answers to all her questions. Fortunately she ran out of time before she could ask, “So do you think he killed his wife?”
I signed books for 35 minutes. Other big sellers at the UBS bookstall were The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey, and a surprise hit in the festival, Rosemary Baird’s excellent social history of the Manapōuri hydro project, In the Middle of Nowhere. Just before I left town on Sunday afternoon I looked around the book tables to see how many copies of Anne Salmond’s Selected Writings were left. I didn’t see any. She came, she thrilled, she sold out.