Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home

by David Cohen

  THE LATE DOUGLAS ADAMS ONCE SAID: ‘ANYTHING invented before your 15th birthday is the order of nature. That’s how it should be. Anything invented between your 15th and 35th birthday is new and exciting, and you might get a career there. Anything invented after that day, however, is against nature and should be prohibited.’ I suppose that made Epuni, along with a variety of foster and family homes, health camps and an orphanage, part of the order of my early nature, even though I’m not sure I would describe getting sent there in 1975 by the children’s court as a terrific invention as such. And between my 15th and 35th birthdays, I had another invention, journalism, which at least landed me something of a promised career. By early 1990 I was into my third year working full-time as a newspaper journalist, a career turn that first began six or seven years after Epuni when I started freelancing articles and columns about music, including a long face-to-face interview with the singer Billy Joel that by great good fortune led to the initial job offer.

  Joel wasn’t my kind of recording artist. Aspects of his background did interest me, though. The Bronx-born performer grew up rough in the neighbourhood of Hicksville, a tough fishing community in Long Island, New York, the son of an immigrant Englishwoman. His father left the family home when he was young, an experience that devastated Joel and blighted periods of his early life with depression. (He briefly committed himself to a mental institution after attempting to take his life.) The boy found a refuge in music. He taught himself to play piano by ear — at the time I interviewed him he still couldn’t read sheet music — later using his newly acquired skills to support his mother and sister financially after dropping out of high school. But the passion came at a social price: the kids from the neighbourhood thought it marked Joel as a weakling. In response he took up boxing. He competed successfully on the amateur Golden Gloves circuit for a number of years, winning 22 out of 24 bouts before retiring early after getting his nose broken. By this time nobody from the old neighbourhood was picking on him.

  We had been talking about this and other incidents in his life for an hour at an upmarket bar in Auckland when a pretty young woman, his wife Christie Brinkley, came over and sat on Joel’s knee. ‘Hey,’ Joel said, ‘why don’t you come along to the show tonight and sit at the back of the stage?’ It sounded like a great idea. That evening I had the time of my life, seated a few feet behind Joel with his wife and young daughter, taking in the thousands of joyous fans, the warm spring air and a memorably wired two-hour set. The unusually close proximity to the performance gave me a lot of good material to fashion the first halfway decent feature article of my then fitful career.

  Exciting times. Soon enough the memory of Epuni dropped away in the rear-view mirror. Perhaps that was just as well. It was a time and experience I never felt proud of, a searing moment lost somewhere between childhood and adulthood, and as far as I could see it was probably best kept there. The fact that heavyweight boxing died a kind of death around the same time no doubt helped, because for me it was always a bit hard to think of one without the other. If my retelling of the story of a boys’ home has entailed some necessary blurring between the institution and the sport — hopefully not to the point of total distraction — it’s because for me the two remain somehow inextricably intertwined.

  Yet in retelling the story, I admit, part of me has striven to be in the thick of the subject while the other has remained somewhat outside the fray. Part of this has to do with approaching the theme journalistically, but, sure, there remains a strong personal ambivalence for me as well. While I’d probably like to say that the residential experiment represented a wholesale failure on every front, it has to be acknowledged that it was a genuine attempt, in however misguided and haphazard a form, to create some kind of calmer universe for children and young people who lacked adequate care and protection in their home setting.

  What’s more, in the 20 or so years that have elapsed since the main story ended, the problems Epuni and others set out to resolve have hardly disappeared, especially those statistically distinctive to Maori. In 2009, the last year for which data was available at the time of writing, 56 Maori children were hospitalised because of violence meted out at home and two of the four children beaten to death that year were in Maori households. Of the nearly 21,000 substantiated cases of neglect and abuse, 11,003 were Maori, according to government figures. More than half of Maori children during that period lived in ‘whanau care’ — with another 16 per cent of Maori children in the care of Maori, but not with whanau.

  So, when a friend asked recently if Epuni and Kohitere and Hokio and Kingslea and all the rest of these places were really the worst thing to happen to a good part of a generation of young New Zealanders, I had to think about it for a bit. Yes they were, I said eventually, and no they weren’t, and who cares anyway? To a large degree I’m with Geoff Comber, who said this to me about the old system at one point during my initial research: ‘I remember it positively. Those kids were withdrawn, they were away from their troubled homes, their mates, the streets they had inhabited. They were in a closed, confined area, eating food they weren’t used to, being looked after. And I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them, some I hope, would remember the fair treatment, the care when they got bruised, when they got hurt. That’s really all you can hope for.’

  True enough. And yes, I share the concern of people like Mike Doolan, who has said he worries about the current system in which so much turns on protecting children from their caregivers — a new moral panic, if you will — rather than firstly encouraging well-trained professionals to get in close and support families deemed to be ‘at risk’. One can only hope that the Whanau Ora initiative might yet strike the right balance, which has for so long eluded the state.

  The important point in respect of the Epuni era, it seems to me, is that those residences as they were back then reflected a lack of imagination for all concerned, and imagination is the one thing that a kid most needs to make some sort of reasonable transition to a functional adulthood, and it’s what societies need to function best. This was the real problem, that lack of imagination. This was the real bruise. This was the real theft. This was the thing that took something away from many of the boys that they never quite got back. And this, finally, is probably the reason why Epuni and other institutions like it were often unable to do much more than groom too many of their wards for a life of ongoing institutionalisation.

  Epuni is a vivid memory I was pleased to be rid of. Sometimes, though, it all comes back. I might be driving out of Wellington, as I was one evening in late 2010, heading along the northern highway out of the capital, making my way along the foreshore, following the course of the night trains that depart Wellington every half-hour for the Hutt Valley, and for an instant the windscreen mists over with old images. The people. The voices. The drumbeats. I could drive around this place with a blindfold on, but that would be to miss what still remains for me the most important stretch of road.

  Compulsively, almost, I’ll find myself detouring along Riverside Drive past the multimillion-dollar high-security facility — Little Paremoremo! — now standing in the stead of what was Epuni Boys’ Home. The new-style residence caters exclusively to a small number of supposedly hardened-beyond-belief offenders, although the official literature doesn’t quite put it that way, preferring instead to describe it as a setting where young people are ‘to be encouraged to take power in dealing with their inappropriate behaviour and staff have a responsibility to develop plans, after consultation, which will encourage young people to achieve positive outcomes’.

  Of the earlier institution little architectural trace remains. What used to be there only exists in the minds of the thousands of those who floated through Epuni, a bit like the ghosts of those Shakespearean bouts some of us came of age watching on nights like October 1, 1975. We remember, for instance, the famous line Ali gasped out to sports reporter Mark Kram after the Manila fight, the one about how the two fighters had arrived in the ring as young cham
pions and left as old men. We especially remember that line. If you only ever heard it once you never forget it because it foreshadows a universal experience: even as we grow old we remain the young people we once were, the only difference between people being how abruptly that revelation takes place and how old they might have been. In this sense, at least for me, I guess boxing provided some of the imaginative inspiration that Epuni otherwise lacked. The only thing I never quite worked out was what it was about the end of that particular fight that so excited that process in me.

  ON THIS PARTICULAR RECENT JOURNEY, HOWEVER, there was an entirely positive and practical reason for dwelling on such weighty cosmic matters. I was out in my old stamping ground to interview another great performer named Billy.

  A lord of the rings, as he is sometimes referred to, Billy Graham has probably done more to help disadvantaged boys than all the institutions in the old residential system combined, and what’s more, his own background encapsulates every stage of the Epuni story, given that he stayed there on occasion as a kid and worked briefly in it as a young man. Since that time he has established a model of pastoral care for disadvantaged youngsters that, if widely adopted, could put the youth-justice system that remains almost completely out of business.

  In this and much else Billy reminds me of Cus D’Amato, the man who saved the souls of the two fighters — Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson — who bestrode both ends of the heavyweight boxing era in which Ali was the centrepiece, the era that chronologically shadowed the Epuni Boys’ Home operation.

  On the face of it Patterson and Tyson could hardly have been more different. Patterson, a violent, monkishly mannered guy, emerged in the 1950s as the face of the future, the youngest heavyweight champion of all time (at least until 20-year-old Tyson showed up on the scene a generation later). Yet Patterson was also a character plagued with self-doubt. ‘Freudian Floyd’, they used to call him. Once after losing a title fight he snuck out of the stadium like some kid absconding from a correctional facility, zipping out the back door wearing a false beard and glasses as a disguise. Tyson was outwardly very different. Tyson was a blast from the past. At a time when boxers were flamboyantly styling aspects of their promotion after the fashion of professional wrestlers, his typical entrance — black trunks, no socks and old-style boots, with a white towel draped across a pair of shoulders that seemed to go on forever — evoked the flickering black and white films of the great fighters of the early part of last century, the ones Tyson used to stay up night after night watching on the old reels. Self-doubt? Tyson’s only psychological issue seemed to be menacing self-confidence.

  Yet the route that took Patterson and Tyson to the top was strikingly similar. They grew up in materially impoverished households. They scuffled in the same New York neighbourhoods. They fell into the same wrong company. And they found themselves as teenagers incarcerated in the same state-run boys’ home system upon which the New Zealand model was largely based. Most of all, though, when every other form of state-sponsored intervention had failed them, they found a new life and career through the same trainer who rescued both of them from juvenile hall. Indeed, without the intervention, intercession and insight of Cus D’Amato, there might never have been a final golden age in the sport to speak of at all.

  ‘I knew,’ D’Amato once said of Tyson, ‘that a kid who loved pigeons couldn’t be all bad. You had to peel away a few layers of mistrust and prejudice left by his tough experience in Brooklyn. But then, underneath all the anger and suspicion, you found this kid wanting and willing to learn. I’ve had to show him how to talk to deal with people. Few had ever really bothered to try and converse with him and so he didn’t know how to react except in a hostile way. I taught him to talk to people and be nice to them, but warned him about who he trusted. One of his major problems had been one of communicating but, once I got him opening up, I knew that he was not only a helluva fighter but also somebody worthwhile as a human being. And d’you know something, that was just as satisfying and rewarding to me as discovering the kid could fight.’

  This sounds a lot like the Billy Graham whom I first encountered a long time ago.

  The ‘Mayor of Naenae’ was seated at the back of his chambers looking just as I remembered him, a small, compact man with jug ears and an enormously strong presence. ‘I grew up in this town, right against those hills,’ he told me, glancing as he spoke toward the elevations surrounding Naenae and Epuni. ‘I set fire to those hills a few times, too, and got into all sorts of other trouble. Like,’ he added, ‘finding things before they were lost, which entertained the local cops and everyone else down the neighbourhood.’ The coach still chuckles at the childhood memories he often shares with visitors to the boxing gym he runs nowadays for similarly troubled youngsters in his old stomping ground.

  Of course I’d heard it all before.

  The last time I saw Billy holding court, he was perched on a desk in a classroom at Hutt Valley High School talking to a group of ‘troubled’ pupils — not a few of them wannabe boxers — about Life’s Great Lessons. This was the special-needs class. It was a year or so after I left Epuni. I was 14 and living in a family home in Naenae, and Hutt High represented my seventh stab at a secondary education. Billy’s class was where the school tended to put the problem kids, so I got shoved in there too. I was certainly no fighter — I did a bit of judo but couldn’t throw a decent punch for toffee — but I quickly grew to appreciate his style of classroom coaching: say please and thank you, remember people’s names, make eye contact, remember it takes strength not to use strength. Perhaps such injunctions even then sounded like platitudes, but they came with the authority of stunning success.

  Although Billy was well out of the competitive side of the sport by this stage, this was still the four-time winner of New Zealand titles, along with the Australasian title and the Jamieson Belt, doing the talking. People in the know still ranked him among the country’s hottest light welterweights. And here he was, the fleet-footed fighter who never took a serious punch to his head during his championship years, standing in our academic corner.

  In a sense Billy was simply performing the same social service back then that others had for him, and people like him, for a very long time — a kind of mentoring that has probably turned around the lives or more young men than all the public dollars invested in residential children’s homes and other forms of juvenile-crime prevention. In Britain in the 1880s social and religious reformers promoted the idea of setting up boxing clubs in poorer areas, believing as they did that the gym might absorb at least some of the violence on the street.

  Early last century, in 1905, legislators in New York picked up on the same idea, attempting to push through a bill that would have seen boxing become a compulsory subject for delinquents, in particular children of foreigners ‘who are now brought up to use knives in settling their differences’, who could yet quickly ‘grasp the American method of having it out in a much less harmful way with their fists’, as one lawmaker put it. The bill was drafted under the shadow of President Theodore Roosevelt, himself a boxer and a boxing teacher, ‘a shifty man of his weight who has a punch worth going miles to get out of the way of’, as one newspaper correspondent marvelled.

  In New Zealand a similar plan was briefly put into action in 1940, after a court took the unusual decision to waive reformatory for nine boys charged with offences in favour of enrolling them in a boxing programme. Six months on, a child welfare officer marvelled, the kids were demonstrably better and fitter for the exercise, and the state had saved a great deal of money into the bargain. ‘You have built up your bodies,’ the judge later told the boys, ‘and in the process your outlook toward the law and other people has also undergone a change — a change which is undeniably apparent in your appearance. For six months you have kept free from trouble and I know you will continue to do so. You will find that there is much more pleasure from the type of activities in which you have been engaged during recent months than in that which you cal
led pleasure before and which was gained at the expense of other people.’

  Billy underwent a similar experience thanks to an older fighter, Dick Dunn, who took the young dropout under his mentoring wing and taught him how to be strong enough to be hard on himself. Dunn, a boxer of the old, classic school (a believer in the importance of building one’s fight on the jab, for example, rather than seeing the jab as an end in itself) picked Billy up, taught him how to throw a straight left, to keep his guard, to move and to hit and to move and to hit again without being hit. Great fighters shouldn’t take a punch to deliver a punch, he always said. And great fighters ought to leave the game in the same condition they entered it: unhurt. The old man believed in the virtue, now widely ignored if not unknown, of boxers working in pairs rather than simply belting a bag.

  Dunn could talk. He drilled Billy in the virtues of work and self-denial, fierce imagination and, yes, ‘character’, because character is ultimately more important in life than performance, it’s what separates the actors from the fighters — not simply in the interests of rehashing some Victorian code, although it surely isn’t a bad one, but because nobody ever made a great champion without apprehending those truths. That’s how Dunn saw it, and Billy Graham has seen it that way ever since, too, especially since his career trend took an unexpected swerve in the 1970s.

  ‘I tell you what Dick Dunn said to me back then,’ he recalled. ‘He says, “Billy, you don’t read properly, you can’t write properly, you’ve got no qualifications. You’ve never passed an exam.” He told me if you get hurt in this game, you’ll pay the price. And then he says something else. Dick says, “You love people, Billy, you’re always encouraging them. So why don’t you get involved with these kids’ lives?”’ So after 18 years in the sport Billy set out on a path of motivational speaking and pastoral care for the young which, with only one exception, has proved to be a roaring success.