by David Cohen
Cameron had heard the shot fired into the sky by his colleague, and for a moment he was nonplussed. Cameron knew all about weapons. The guys at the station called him Gunner, a nod to his shooting skills, but this would be the first time, he realised, that he might be called on to parlay those skills against a couple of hot-blooded gun-toting children, now heading in his direction at a fast clip. Just kids. Then again, did it make any difference what age they were? The dog-handler decided to give chase.
Within moments, or so it seemed, he had almost caught up with them outside their parked van. As Charlie attempted to clamber inside, the cop ordered the dog to go for the younger boy. Somehow the kid managed to wrench the door open and nearly get out of harm’s way. His rifle was stuck in the door. Sensing triumph, Cameron bounded over to the vehicle, yanked open the door and made to pull the boy out. The kid darted to one side. It was only then that the young officer remembered Charlie, who now had his loaded weapon cocked and pointing straight at the cop’s chest. Only a foot separated them. He saw the boy’s body tighten, his finger on the trigger, now applying pressure to the firing mechanism. Then, as if from a vast distance, the final click.
EVERY AFTERNOON AT THREE A FULL-FIGURED, slightly stooped old woman named Colleen would emerge from the solitary lift inside the Department of Social Welfare’s district office on Lower Hutt’s High Street pushing a metal trolley clustered with cups and containers of hot water. Bill FitzGerald’s office was the first on the right after the lifts, and custom dictated that the former child welfare chief, who had taken over as director that past July, was among the first to receive a visit from the office tea lady.
On the afternoon of September 15, 1972, Colleen had particular reason to be punctual: the events of the previous evening over at Epuni had left the normally mild-tempered director in a state of considerable agitation. Not only had head office bawled him out about it that morning, details of the whole sorry episode were now splashed across the front page of the Evening Post, with tomorrow’s edition of The Dominion almost certain to follow suit.
Not that FitzGerald could blame the newspapers. It had been a close call. If the older boy’s rifle hadn’t jammed at the last moment, the department would almost certainly have had one death on its hands, maybe more. True, the immediate problem had been sorted out for the moment; the boys, handcuffed to each other, appeared in court that morning, with a lengthy sentence awaiting both of them. But that didn’t address the long-term question of what was happening over at Riverside Drive. Even the mayor of Lower Hutt, John Kennedy-Good, along with local Labour MP Trevor Young, were said, accurately as it transpired, to be planning to lead an angry delegation over to Epuni demanding its immediate closure.
Wearily, one assumes, the director picked up the receiver and dialled head office to discuss how they might best go about restoring sanity. The mild-mannered officer might even have silently offered the kind of oath he was seldom heard to say: damn. Who could blame him? The situation must have seemed like the latest in a growing pile of last straws.
The general staffing situation was plainly chaotic, as indeed it had been for some time, with just one experienced housemaster among the entire staff complement and 17 new appointments rushed through in the first quarter of the year alone. ‘It has been like trying to run the new Rangatira with a crew of barge-hands,’ FitzGerald later wrote. Sooner or later, he added despairingly, the public’s concern ‘is bound to become all too evident’.
His overriding impression, however, even ‘after making allowances for all the difficulties involved, including the increasing sophistication and defiance of the boys and efforts made from all quarters to try and improve the situation’, was that the management of the home had all but collapsed on account of what he said were the ‘inadequacies affecting its operation and purpose’. Howe simply ‘does not delegate or communicate sufficiently for senior or junior staff to feel they belong … senior staff cannot make decisions in his absence. He is not receptive to ideas from staff members’.
And on it went. Probably the only positive thing that might have been said at this point was that Epuni’s problems weren’t as noteworthy as those seen at Fareham House in Featherston, an all Maori girls’ institution, where staff became so exasperated with the behaviour of the inmates that they had simply walked out en masse. Later, the Fareham principal was even run over by a car while attempting to prevent a bunch of wards absconding, leading to an ensuing scene like something out of a nightmarish English school story: kids armed with knives swooping from the trees to conduct sorties in the main building, where a terrified matron and her seamstresses hid in cupboards listening to the children chanting ‘We hate the Child Welfare!’
Still, things were bad enough at Epuni. A blistering four-page memo dispatched by the department’s national director-general, Ian Mackay, concluded that it was high time for the Epuni chief to take stock of his career and decide ‘whether change is personally palatable or not. We clearly cannot continue to experience the succession of emergency situations which, among other things, have embarrassed the Department and the Minister, if there is a chance that changes could bring about any improvement.’ Lest the point of the message be lost on Howe, the director-general added, ‘He should be shown this memorandum.’
That was a bit difficult to do, however, for by this point Howe was on sick leave. Mackay’s next move was to summon a posse of experienced operators — including Hokio Beach’s assistant principal, Mike Doolan, and Howe’s old offsider from the 1960s, Gary Hermansson, who had since moved on to become a senior counsellor at Kohitere — to ride in and sort out the mess, with strict instructions not to leave until normality had been restored.
With a grimace, Doolan recalled the scene that greeted them on their arrival. ‘People were leaving that institution more quickly than they were coming in. It was an absolute hellhole of a place. And because the staff were under pressure to deal with it, they were doing some ludicrous things.’ One night Doolan was awoken by the nightwatchman banging around in one of the corridors. Intrigued, he slipped on a dressing gown and padded off to see what was happening. It turned out that the watchman had waited until all the inmates were asleep before going around their rooms and removing everyone’s shoes. ‘What he didn’t realise, of course, was that he woke everyone up.’ Doolan laughed sardonically at the memory. ‘This was the kind of stupid, stupid stuff that was going on.’ Not that there was that much he could do: ‘Every day I prayed that this cup would pass me by.’
Added Hermansson: ‘I think by that stage things were fairly chaotic. I’m not sure exactly where Maurie was at this stage but there’d been quite a staff turnover and the kids were much more … well, the fine line between being in control and being out of control was fading. It was almost like the inmates had taken over the asylum.’ Rather than dutifully going off to their rooms or whatever else was required of the wards on a particular day, ‘they all just ran off twt anywhere. So we had to call the police while the kids were all out in the community or wherever.’
Hermansson pursed his lips at the recollection. ‘I remember standing there and thinking, you know, there’s just nothing you can do about this. We had once had this kind of agreement between the kids and ourselves that we were in charge and they were able to follow what we did and we could negotiate.’ The social contract had been broken? ‘Exactly, yeah, it was kind of like suddenly everything had turned on its head.’ The institution had become a place of ‘tension, conflict and negativity’.
As far as Hermansson and the others were concerned, the problems seemed almost entirely to be a factor of management and staffing problems brought about by the institution’s inability to face up to, as their report put it, ‘the changing attitudes of youth’. There was, they wrote, an unattended need to meet their desire for ‘self-expression and independence within the limits of what is reasonable in an institutional setting. The frustration at the lack of [this] is expressed in their rebellious and sometimes violent behaviou
r.’
There followed a salty assessment, signed in the name of Denis Reilly, the acting assistant-director of residential services at the time, which began its managerial critique thus:
[Howe] has built the institution from the start on his own design of rules and systems, and now unfortunately sees any suggestions for change from his staff or senior officers as a personal judgement or criticism of his methods. He is, quite expertly, able to neutralise these suggestions by his verbose rationalisations …
His immediate controlling officer has been unable to penetrate the protective barrier Mr Howe has built around himself and his administration of the home, although he disagrees with the general rigid, negative tone of the institution. This in turn has helped Mr Howe to reinforce himself in his management cocoon, which may have been prevented if more stronger direct control with follow-up action from his district office level had been given over the past few years.
As for the boys themselves:
[They] are more sophisticated today than ever before. They sense the lack of confidence in staff and react to it aggressively as well as out of a fear for their own security. They resent rigid out-of-date limitations on their independence and their ‘rights’, and express themselves in their own way. They are bored by the lack of positive stimulating activity and see most of their programme for what it is: a time-consuming occupation to help keep them occupied and see the day through. Their lack of ability to conform to this builds up frustrations to the point where they express their emotion in violence or abscond to flee from it and seek excitement and satisfaction elsewhere.
There followed a number of recommendations and yet another blunt assessment of the chief executive’s future prospects: ‘If he is unable to respond to the help that is given, I see no alternative to his transfer.’ Neither circumstance was to eventuate.
A few months later, on April 2, 1973, yet another report was filed by the department’s assistant director, concluding in much the same vein and recommending the chief executive’s transfer out of what was becoming one of the department’s most problematic works in progress. ‘I reluctantly join the long list of those whose unanimous opinion it is that Mr Howe is not adequate as a Controlling Officer,’ Bernard Baker wrote of the principal’s ability to cope with such ‘extraordinarily demanding’ times.
Maurie was devastated. He asked for another chance to sort out the problem. Baker was impressed, and not unsympathetic. He agreed to give him another shot. Partly this was because of Howe’s ‘great strengths in the verbal expression of his ideas’, as he later put it, but also, one suspects, because to have dumped him at this point would almost certainly have meant closing the institution altogether, something the mayor and the police may well have been agitating for, but which the department could not countenance. But it had been a close call.
ON THE AFTERNOON OF JULY 23, 1973, SOCIAL WELFARE inspector Elsie Feist turned up at the door unannounced to see how things were progressing since the events of the previous winter. What followed made for interesting reading in the report she subsequently filed.
The young man who greeted her at the front door may have been an attendant or he may have been a ward — it was a bit hard for her to tell. Little matter. Feist was duly escorted along the main passageway, whereupon she espied another woman of a similar age to her own, shoulders hunched and hands jammed in pockets, shuffling along in the opposite direction, who turned around and frowned at the newcomer.
‘Who are you?’ the woman demanded of the inspector.
‘I was just going to ask you the same question,’ Feist parried.
She was, it transpired, the resident matron, Edith Sweatman, and by Feist’s account what followed was not much of an improvement on their introduction. A somewhat stilted conversation ensued. Sweatman seemed in an oddly lethargic mood, but also angry, in a subdued kind of way, as if she secretly wished her unexpected guest might do everybody a favour by smuggling herself out of the premises in a laundry truck. During their desultory exchange, the inspector made mention of a planned staff meeting; might she attend?
This seemed to rouse the matron from her torpor. Well, yes, she snapped at the guest, there was a regular management meeting, but only male staff members ever went. Why on earth would a woman wish to attend? Feist was no spring chicken — she had been with the department since 1941 and was shortly due to retire — but even she was aghast at the idea of male-only meetings in an era flush with the first wave of feminist consciousness. Could this woman not appreciate that men and women had a contribution to make?
The matron shook her head. No, she said firmly, having women in the boardroom was simply an invitation for a ‘gossip and nag session’. Feist looked at the clipboard she was carrying, noting Sweatman’s age. Fifty-seven. Hmm. This could mean another eight years of service.
Their doubtless informative conversation might have gone on longer had the pair not been interrupted by a car turning in the gate with a new arrival from Palmerston North. As the relevant papers were handed over, the social worker accompanying the boy began dropping hints that it had been a rather long drive and both he and the new inmate were hungry. There was a brief silence. Eventually, the matron half-heartedly offered a cup of tea and, taking the obvious hint, the social worker declined, made his excuses and left as a housemaster bundled the boy off to the cellblock.
The two women continued walking. In the kitchen they spotted another couple of mainstays, the chief cook, Mrs Ambrose, and her offsider, Miss Hart, hunched over the bench furiously paring what was left of a case of Brussels sprouts for the evening meal. The yellowing vegetables appeared to have been in store for some considerable time. Feist turned up her nose. How did these cooks think the boys would feel about getting served such appalling mush? The correct answer, she was told, was that they usually wouldn’t know, because women who worked at Epuni tried to avoid being anywhere within eyeshot of the ‘revolting’ spectacle of the children eating.
Extricating herself from the scene, Feist finally found her way to the staffroom where the regular meeting was about to begin. Apprised of her presence in the building, Maurie and the guys had been waiting a tad impatiently. A projector was set up for the screening of a short film called Discovering Individual Differences. As soon as Feist entered the room, Maurie nodded for the projectionist to hit the lights and start the film. Feist sat down and waited in the dark. And waited. The machine had given up its ghost.
Minutes ticked by as the nominated operator attempted to fix the machine. No luck. Finally somebody made the suggestion to go to the next room for a cup of tea, and out trooped the team. By this point Feist felt her presence was becoming a major distraction. A little later she took her leave to write up yet another critical report on how life was progressing at Riverside Drive.
Her perceptions were no doubt correct as far as they went, but in a way reports such as these also saved the government from looking too hard at its own role in the situation. As one long-time child welfare officer of the period, Michael Lyons, wrote after conducting a similar inspection of Christchurch Girls’ Home, any typical children’s institution in the 1970s was ‘handicapped in almost every way conceivable against doing a reasonable job’, whether on the staffing or budgetary front, a situation that was hardly of their own making. Epuni’s political masters really ought to have been saving some of their verbal violence for themselves.
Not everyone was entirely insensitive. On December 1, 1975, Maurie’s one-time critic, Bernard Baker, the assistant director of social work at the Lower Hutt office, dispatched another of his by now perpetually exasperated memos to the department’s director-general demanding to know how and why the use of Epuni as a ‘holding paddock’ fitted the general purpose of child welfare in New Zealand. ‘There are serious misuses and impossible demands on the place now,’ Baker wrote of the ‘chronically overcrowded’ centre.
The memo spoke of non-existent psychological services, careless police work and an institution ‘coping with
everything from big, bad police baiters, through 13- and 14-year-old persistent absconding, car convertors, to psychiatrically disturbed, very upsetting boys [supervised by] an indifferently trained staff’. The memo demanded that a meeting be convened in the new year to urgently address the problems.
The meeting never took place. But the matters raised could not be so easily ignored. Another of the persistent problems highlighted yet again in this report was what appeared to be a chronic lack of staff training both on the job and in terms of academic background, a situation that if anything appeared to have become more pronounced since the operation was absorbed into the new Department of Social Welfare in April 1972 following the amalgamation of the Social Security Department and the Child Welfare Division of the Department of Education.
Not that everyone within the operation saw himself in this way. As former child welfare officer Aussie Malcolm used to say, the country’s social workers — and by extension residential housemasters at Epuni and other institutions like it — had up until this point tended to see themselves as professional, even academic, in their approach. ‘Whether looking back we were as clever as we thought we were might be debatable,’ he added with a chuckle. ‘But at the time we thought we were taking an academic, principled professional approach to managing social work issues in a society that was positive and constructive and forward looking.’
Yet even during that purportedly golden age real training opportunities had been relatively sparse. In the year of Epuni’s establishment, just six child welfare officers around the country had been allowed leave to pursue a two-year diploma course offered by Victoria University in Wellington, the only programme of its type then in academic operation and one that was viewed with scepticism by those in the welfare business who questioned whether formal training of any kind was necessary or even desirable. As one former director, Merv Hancock, used to half-jokingly tell the troops: ‘Consider the rose bush. Its roots are massive and thrive in rotting horseshit. But if you prune the bush it will produce beautiful blooms.’ What this meant, apparently, was that one didn’t need to be highly trained in order to be a cook or cleaner.
