by Tom Scott
I was holidaying in Malaysia with Averil when the 2006 New Year Honours were announced. I had become an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit and I was thrilled. In some ways, I was very fortunate to make the investiture at Government House later that year. The day before the announcement was made we were in a huge enclosure housing thousands of feathered creatures. The heavens over Kuala Lumpur opened up like a spillway of a hydro dam, sending us scrambling for shelter under a spreading banyan tree. The tropical downpour was incredibly heavy and showed no sign of letting up, so gradually, one by one, flamingos, herons, ducks and pelicans took shelter with us, squeezing alongside, almost touching, avoiding eye contact like strangers on a crowded commuter train. Shaun, now a hefty six foot five with the lung capacity of a channel swimmer, asked forcefully but not unreasonably, ‘Why are we standing in Asia’s largest aviary at the height of the Asian bird flu epidemic?’
Radio stations and various news outlets tracked me down for comment. It is customary on these occasions to say that you see the award as a tribute to your profession as a whole, and that you accept on behalf of a team. I insisted the award was for me and for me alone—the cartooning fraternity could get their own bloody gong. It was obvious I was joking and that I was pretty chuffed by the whole exercise. I received warm letters of congratulation from the unlikeliest of people, which touched me.
My default setting of biting the hand I was supposed to kiss could account for the fact I have never been appointed to any statutory board or commission. Russell Marshall told me that shortly after Labour swept to office in the 1984 election, at an early cabinet meeting the subject of appointees to the board of broadcasting came up. Russell cheerfully suggested me and was shocked by the tsunami of fury that ensued. ‘Not that bastard!’ would best sum up the reaction. Nearly half his colleagues were smarting over something I had written or drawn. At the same enclave David Lange wanted a woman, a Māori and a South Islander for the board of Radio New Zealand. Judy Finn of Neudorf Vineyards fame in Upper Moutere was mentioned. Judy, Miss Massey the year I judged, had been a smart, witty broadcaster and lived in the South Island, thus ticking two boxes. Going for three in row, Lange wanted to know if she had any Māori blood at all. Mike Moore couldn’t help himself. ‘It is my understanding, Prime Minister, that from time to time she has a little Māori in her.’ He was joking, everyone knew it and laughed heartily. Some jokes are just too tempting to ignore and truth doesn’t come into it. When John Lennon was asked if Ringo was the best drummer in the ’60s, he couldn’t help himself either. ‘Ringo wasn’t even the best drummer in The Beatles.’
IAN CROSS’S RECOLLECTION OF OUR first meeting differs from mine. In the foreword to my collection of parliamentary columns, Ten Years Inside, Ian writes that I turned up in bare feet and blue jeans, a slightly bemused expression on my benign face exaggerated by the lopsided angle of spectacles held together by sticking plaster. I can’t deny the latter because I don’t stare into a hand-held mirror when I walk, only sitting down. But I most certainly was not barefooted. Exposure to James K. Baxter ensured I was only ever barefooted on a beach or in the shower.
What I do remember with a searing clarity is putting my cartoons in a folder, strapping Shaun into a baby seat and setting off in my Ford Cortina for the Charles Fergusson tower block adjacent to Parliament with Alice, our chihuahua-fox terrier cross, yapping and leaping between the front and back seats. I must have come down winding Glenmore Street too fast because cartoons sprayed from the folder and suddenly Alice was carsick. I pulled over, close to tears, and flicked chunks of partially digested dog food off the cartoons with an old beach towel, then mopped up the excess fluid, leaving straw-coloured stains on some of the drawings.
Ian was very good about it. While I paced about jiggling Shaun he opened the windows of his office to let in fresh air and placed my smelly folder on his desk. Turning the pages slowly he studied each cartoon in turn, silently and with intense concentration. After an interminable, unnerving wait, probably only ten minutes or so, he flashed me a lofty, patrician smile—somewhat inevitable when you stand well over six foot—and said, ‘Young man, you are a writer! I have a small job for you …’
Cross had the vision of a South American condor when it came to spotting raw talent from a great distance—Geoff Chapple, Gordon Campbell, David Young and Rosemary McLeod were all hired by him and quickly became stylish feature writers or stylish columnists—in Gordon’s case, both. They are all still doing great work today in plays, books and on websites.
That first writing assignment turned out to be a financial writers’ seminar held by the New Zealand Society of Accountants at the James Cook Hotel called ‘Fact, Figures and Fallacies’. Hold me back! I hoped that it would be held in a large ballroom with a standing-room-only crowd, allowing me to hide down the back, but it transpired that the Discovery Room at the Jimmy Cook was not much bigger than a large lounge and only three-quarters full. The intimate setting and my early arrival meant a full gauntlet of introductions. With my blond afro, flaming-red beard, platform-sole shoes and flared jeans I stood out from the chartered accountants and stockbrokers. Everyone was perfectly civil but it was long, dull day. This was my first job with the Listener, I was desperate to do well and here I was fighting to stay awake. All I could do was send it up, which may well have been Cross’s intention all along. He could be very Machiavellian. It was part of his charm.
He was pleased with the piece and the next week I was sent off to cover the United Women’s Convention in Auckland, with baby Shaun and Christine. It was so earnest and well intentioned it made fun of itself. All I had to do was write it down accurately. Cross was delighted with my mockery. Middling pieces on assorted topics of my own choosing followed and I chose poorly. My new career was in danger of dribbling to a halt until Cross set me another test—though he was too shrewd to frame it like that. I was dispatched to cover the Royal Opening of Parliament in February 1974.
The piece began with a true account of a conversation between middle-aged ladies and the gentlemen of military bearing, whose contribution was mainly body language, that I eavesdropped on in the foyer of Parliament Buildings as her Majesty entered.
‘She’s a country girl at heart.’
‘Yes, she’s a country girl at heart.’
‘Spirited she can be too, just like her dear old dad, George.’
‘Yes, just like her dad, a country girl at heart.’
‘Mind you, there’s a touch of Mary in there.’
‘Oh yes, there’s no denying that.’
I finished the article on the Queen hoving into view after exiting the old Legislative Council Chamber. A curious soft moaning emanated from the same watching women. I wrote that it was unlike any other sound that I’d heard before—exhaled from deep in the larynx, it could only be likened to the sound young children make when holding a kitten. It morphed into language as the Queen approached.
‘Isn’t she beautiful?’
‘Oh, look at that.’
I wrote that as an infidel I had been witness to a very special communion.
I must have passed the test I didn’t know I was sitting because Ian immediately made me the Listener’s parliamentary correspondent. I got my own column right up the front of the publication, emblazoned ‘TOM SCOTT’S PARLIAMENT’, with my photo printed alongside it. I am all hair and spectacles. I was once described in a comic debate televised live on a New Year’s Eve, quite possibly by Jim Hopkins, as resembling a rat peering through a toilet brush, an apt description that was shouted out joyously in the streets by strangers for years afterwards. Muldoon even borrowed it once for a speech at a National Party conference, but with the inexorable passage of time the description no longer fits and it has fallen into disuse. I am no longer recognisable, and a hairless, neonatal possum peering through a toilet brush with white plastic bristles doesn’t have the same ring to it.
BACK THEN YOU ONLY GOT to work in the Press Gallery if you had done tours of duty reportin
g on court proceedings, city council meetings, industrial disputes and the return of the much-feared Island Bay dog poisoner. Only a handful of elder statesmen—they were all men—got to write their own political columns. I was a virgin in a brothel with the instant status of a madam. It was galling for the older gallery members, some of whom made no effort to hide their dislike and suspicion of me.
Accreditation was confirmed annually. In what may have been just coincidence, when Muldoon came to power these older members challenged my membership at a Press Gallery AGM. I don’t pay much attention to these things so I wasn’t present to defend myself, but I did run into TV reporter Spencer Jolly shortly afterwards. He was still ropeable. ‘It was an outrage, mate!’ he railed. ‘I bloody told them so! I said this is a kangaroo court! You are acting as judge and jury! If this vote goes ahead, I want my abstention recorded in the minutes!’ Thanks, Spencer.
Years later I was made a life member of the gallery. If the mood takes me I can sling an identity tag with a magnetic strip on it around my neck and wander freely about the corridors of power, with the exception of a few hallowed sanctums like the Prime Minister’s lift and the members’ swimming pool—but then again, the last thing you really want to see is an MP in a string bikini or budgie smugglers.
Before I could begin my new life, I had to purchase a tie, get a haircut and trot down to the coin-operated photography booth in the foyer of the railway station in search of a suitable likeness for my first press card. When it arrived, Ian Cross guided me across to Parliament like a proud parent taking a child to their first day of school. We entered the building through an unattended rear door, of which there were several. There is only one entrance for members of the public today. You have to step through a metal detector and your bags are X-rayed. Ian knew the old building well and headed unerringly for Bellamy’s. We went down back corridors that had peeling plaster ceilings and worn carpet. Shallow wooden boxes filled with sand serving as ashtrays lined the walls, along with mysterious dark bronze tulip structures which I later discovered were spittoons. What should have taken just a few minutes took almost an hour because we kept running into politicians he used to cover as a young reporter on the Southern Cross newspaper. They invariably greeted him like a long-lost friend, including former prime minister Sir Keith Holyoake, who boomed, ‘Ian, dear boy, dear boy! How nice to see you!’ He had an incredibly deep voice for such a small man. In one edition of Masskerade, beneath the bold headline ‘TESTICLE TRANSPLANT FOR PM’, I published a news photo of him holding two hairy kiwifruit in the palm of his hand. Given the rich baritone bouncing off the plaster and marble, they should have been coconuts at the very least. I was actually quite fond of old Keith by then. I had warmed to him ever since he told Brian Edwards on television that his favourite book of all time was Origin of the Species by Charles Dickens, and that the simultaneous worldwide eruption of student protest against the Vietnam War was due to sunspots.
We eventually made it to Bellamy’s and caught up with Ian’s old chums in the Press Gallery who could give me some pointers. Bellamy’s back then was a ramshackle old wooden structure that leaned against the south wall of the main building. It was always busy. You came down rickety stairs through an air-lock of cooking smells, tobacco smoke, body odour and hops. Every evening it had the casual gaiety of a benign riot. The bar was one of those continuous-counter affairs that you can still find in the odd country racecourse. Thin partitions segregated the various castes. At the far end, messengers got a bare wooden floor. Next door to them, the press got greasy linoleum. The Members and Members and Guests bars graduated to carpet the colour of bile, sticky with spilled beer. Any pattern had long since been obliterated with cigarette burns. (Ironically, the adjacent dining rooms, similarly segregated on class lines, had grand kauri sideboards, gilded mirrors, crystal chandeliers, starched linen tablecloths, heavy silver cutlery and the finest china.) People entered the cubicle appropriate to their status, hung up coats, tucked briefcases against the walls, then checked the stainless-steel warming drawers to see what tasty morsels were left over from lunch. Sometimes there were crumbed oysters and sweetbreads but mostly it was fish in limp jackets of batter. Stomachs lined with carcinogenic lipids, they were ready to battle through a Japanese commuter crush to the bar where warm beer was served through a long hose.
That first afternoon I nursed a pint and stared about in wonder.
‘Well, young man,’ shouted Cross above the cacophony, ‘what do you think?’ It was amazing.
‘I guess it will have to do.’ I grinned back.
MY FIRST COLUMN APPEARED ON 9 March 1973. I acknowledged that, in appointing me their parliamentary correspondent, the Listener had avoided the pitfall of hiring an expert, and I would bring to the hallowed calling of political reportage much-needed bumpkin simplicity. My political philosophy could best be described as dynamic conservatism—which was akin to virile impotence. I was trying too hard.
I read those early columns today with a strange mixture of pride and embarrassment. In my own defence, they were like Bellamy’s fish and chips—best consumed hot off the press before they had time to cool and congeal. They had a galumphing energy and innocence, which automatically made them different from what everyone else was doing at the time.
I didn’t want to write the same column twice, which was difficult because much of parliamentary life was repetitive. When the House was in recess I ransacked my childhood for columns. I wrote about my time at the CIT and grisly anatomy lessons conducted around a cadaver in dimly lit, chilled rooms at the back of Wellington Public Hospital. A morgue attendant with a macabre sense of humour played the same prank every week. I had to dash in first, crank the body out of the rust-coloured embalming fluid and rearrange the partially dissected hands before the innocent girls studying occupational therapy arrived and were confronted with a dead man masturbating. I got an official warning that the article breached the Human Tissues Act.
I was on a downward spiral. In a few short years, I had gone from libelling someone who had risen from the dead to someone who hadn’t. Had I been prosecuted I would of course have gratefully written about the trial. I wrote about anything and everything that I thought might amuse my readers. I was still trying to get the hang of things and was in a near permanent state of high excitement and low-grade anxiety. Plus I was moonlighting on my final edition of Masskerade with John Clarke.
When John rang me from a second-hand clothing shop it provided the inspiration for one of my favourite pieces—The Dead Man’s Coat. It was too good to waste so I later incorporated it into my stage play The Daylight Atheist, on the assumption that it is perfectly acceptable to plagiarise your own work.
I’m now the proud owner–occupier of a dead man’s coat. It’s a very fine coat and must have once been very expensive. I was very pleased with myself when I handed the lady the $10. I said to John, ‘The cloth alone is worth twice that!’ ‘Yes, you’ve got it very cheap, son, probably on account of him being dead and thus in no position to argue.’ It was John who found it for me in one of those small second-hand shops in upper Cuba Street. ‘I’ve got just the thing for you, lad. It’s huge. It should fit you like a surgical stocking.’ It took three assistants to get it off the hanger and across my shoulders. I cooperated from below as best I could by stepping into it with a clean-and-jerk movement. It was truly magnificent. While rummaging through the pockets I came across a discreet label: Anderson and Sheppard Limited, 30 Cellar Road, London W1, and the owner’s name. He’d been knighted. ‘He must have been down on his luck to sell this,’ I commented to John. ‘He’s dead,’ said John. ‘You don’t come much unluckier than that.’ There was no gainsaying that. ‘Is it warm though?’ he asked. ‘As toast!’ I replied. ‘Crikey! He can’t have been dead long!’
IN THE EARLY 1970s, Hunter S. Thompson’s extraordinarily visceral and brutally candid Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, covering the 1972 US presidential election, was the inspiration the world over fo
r a whole generation of fledging political journalists, including me. The young Bill Ralston was an early disciple, and you can still see Thompson’s influence in the gifted descriptive passages of Steve Braunias and the brilliant comic essays of Raybon Kan. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, except Hunter was impossible to imitate even though I tried. His book included these killer lines.
Ed Muskie talked like a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow money on next year’s crop.
Humphrey is a treacherous, gutless old wardheeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese Current.
Thompson’s approach to journalism was to swamp his bloodstream with every legal and illegal mind- and mood-altering substance he could grab, then to deafening rock accompaniment pound away at the keyboard of an electric typewriter in a hallucinogenic frenzy before sending dazzling stream-of-consciousness prose to his editors, who were white with panic as deadlines ran over, on a new-fangled invention called a fax machine.
Muldoon had one on the 1978 campaign trail. It was a closely guarded secret. It was the size of a small chest freezer. I saw it being loaded into the boot of a car at Napier airport by two men wearing sunglasses. Granted it was a sunny day, but this added to the air of mystery and intrigue. Rumours swirled that it was a gift from the CIA. Over drinks in a bar that night I poured wine into Muldoon’s press officer and he let slip that staff in National’s election HQ in Wellington could draft speeches for his boss and then transmit them to him anywhere in New Zealand over a telephone line. Holy Toledo! We were shocked and dazzled. These were the days of miracles and wonders.
