Roosters I Have Known

by Steve Braunias

  Some or all of that was comedy. Toohey’s book is full of high spirits and ironies; it recognises the farce of life. This is only one reason why his book on the Falconio killing – five others have been published – is easily the best. It’s also very likely the last. ‘Thank God for that,’ he said.

  The first two books were whizzed into the stores immediately after the trial: ‘A case of pressing “Send” on their computers to their publishers.’ An English journalist wrote one with the tantalising title Where’s Peter? ‘We’re supposed to think he’s not dead.’ An even worse effort entitled Bloodstain was written by another journalist from England, Richard Shears, a reptile whom I saw slithering around Darwin at Murdoch’s trial. A review on Amazon enthuses: ‘It is obvious that Peter Falconio is not dead and that Bradley Murdoch is innocent! Read it!’

  Toohey’s book prefers realism. Much of The Killer Within provides an intimate guided tour of where Murdoch drank, fought, hung out, and fried his head and loins on speed. Murdoch, he writes, was ‘an all-Australian maniac’. In an electrifying early chapter, Toohey sits in on drug deals in an upstairs flat ‘in the so-called Bronx of Broome’ – Murdoch’s old neighbourhood. The dealer demands he take a ‘small white pill’ to prove he’s not a cop. He does as he is told.

  I asked him what it was. ‘It was just some pill I was given.’ Ecstasy? ‘I believe so.’ Did it work? ‘I think so.’

  In another more dangerous and volatile meeting, he’s told: ‘Go. Go while you still can, Paul.’ The threat was very real.

  ‘I tried to show a northern Australia that people may not be familiar with,’ Toohey said. ‘We have certain views about northern Australia; one is waterfalls and vast landscapes, and good old bush characters who say gidday. But there is an underbelly. And it’s quite a dark one. And that is the world of Murdoch. So it’s an attempt to show how someone like him, who has branded himself with racist insignia, is able to operate with apparent impunity across that landscape for so long. He was a greedy man. He was looking for an easy way to make money to cruise around to do the things he liked, which was, as James Hepi put very well, “driving around in his den of hell”.

  ‘You’ll notice that I dwell very briefly on the murder itself. Because murder is just murder. People like to romanticise death in the north, but in some ways – this might be hard to explain, or justify, after bringing out a book on the subject – I’m almost saying it’s not a special death if it happens in the north. The setting is vast and it is empty, but it’s not necessarily lonely. It’s just that people are able to get away with things easier up here …

  ‘I’ve been here a long time. It’s always been my aim to try and reveal a realer north than the one that resides in many people’s imaginations.’

  In his book, Toohey wonders whether Murdoch might have actually enjoyed killing Falconio. His conclusion? He said, ‘I think he really just regarded Falconio as an obstacle to get to Lees, and it was probably – unfortunately for Peter Falconio, because Murdoch wouldn’t have tied much emotion to it at all – a very perfunctory act.’

  All that apparent mystery, so many hideous speculations that Lees was somehow in on it, but it just came down to ‘an all-Australian maniac’ killing a complete stranger on the side of the road. The only issue left was whether Falconio’s body would ever be found. I asked Toohey if he thought Murdoch would volunteer that information. This question didn’t require a long answer. ‘No,’ he said.

  [July 1]

  5

  Paul Henry

  Still a Man

  Paul Henry finished his live-hosting of the Breakfast programme on Friday morning, begged a publicist for a cup of coffee because he didn’t have any money on him, took a seat on a blue couch in a room on the sixth floor of the Television New Zealand network centre in Auckland with a high view of damp, grey Waitemata harbour, and said, ‘I always wanted to be important. I can remember thinking when I was very, very young that I wanted to be the centre of attraction. I don’t anymore. I still want to be a bit important.

  ‘I used to agonise when I was a young boy, was it better to be rich, famous, or infamous? Partly that was because I was taken from New Zealand to England when my parents separated, and I went to a school that literally looked like a prison. Now I’ve got a beautiful grand piano in the living room, and I can’t play it.

  ‘You see, I’d had an upbringing in New Zealand where I saw anything was possible. I had a father who was doing brilliantly exciting things overseas in very exciting places. He was a marine engineer. And then I was living in a council flat in the worst part of Bristol with a mother doing treble shifts in a plastic-bag factory. I walked to school over ice because we couldn’t afford a bus fare.

  ‘But I knew about another place, New Zealand, and about options the other kids at school didn’t know existed. I just used to naturally assume that I was going to be great. I didn’t think there was going to be any real impediment to my becoming great. And I just blundered my way into things. I got a job at the BBC with comparative ease, just because I didn’t perceive there would be a reason why I wouldn’t: how was it possible they wouldn’t see I was enormously talented?

  ‘And you see that’s where I sit now. I’ve never really been one for pushing myself. In fact, I loathe that. But basically I just am very assured in my ability. That makes me very critical of myself too, because I let myself down all the time. But I’m very assured of my ability. That does sound big-headed. That sounds egotistical. But … yeah …’

  He had said: ‘I say what I think.’ And: ‘My mind goes very fast.’ Also: ‘I distract myself easily.’ We sat together for forty minutes. I had met him twice before, both times very briefly, but liked him at once, because he has such immediately obvious qualities – speed, honesty, kindness, cheek. So much front, but you could tell, too, that he was the kind of guy who led a secret life. He said he had ‘very few close friends’. Television work (‘There’s not a lot of following through in broadcasting; it’s mostly trying to succeed in the challenge’) and a television audience can satisfy some of those needs.

  As well as Breakfast, Henry hosted Close Up for most of the previous week, while regular presenter Mark Sainsbury reported from the America’s Cup race in Valencia. ‘I love Close Up. Absolutely love it. I love the fact that it has gravitas. It has heritage.’

  Really? I asked him about the television coverage presented by Sainsbury for Close Up, and John Campbell for TV3’s Campbell Live, on the night David Bain was released on bail. It was a circus, yes? ‘It was a circus. If I had been one of the hosts in some of those press photos from that night, I think I would be very embarrassed at the expression on my face. I hope I wouldn’t have had that expression.’

  Of elation? ‘An expression of elation, and almost a sycophantic expression.’

  The way Bain was greeted by a cheering media – that was odious, yes? ‘I think it’s reasonable to characterise it that way.’

  Did he flick that night between Close Up and Campbell Live? ‘Yeah, I did. I did.’

  Who was the more odious? ‘Without a doubt, Campbell Live.’

  I said that it was a close race, but that Sainsbury was more odious by a nose. He said, ‘Well, I thought Campbell Live had it by more than a nose. But I think there were odious aspects to our coverage as well. Without doubt.’

  It was impossible to talk about the comparative odiousness of television presenters without bringing up the name Paul Holmes. I asked Henry whether he held up Holmes as a warning.

  ‘No. But perhaps he should be. Perhaps he should be. I hold him up as one of the greatest broadcasters in this country. I have huge admiration for his work. But it’s a very interesting question: should he be held up as a warning? Is he happy? Do we know? It’s hard to imagine he would be, isn’t it?’

  Ruahine School in Dannevirke and the Eketahuna Hamua Hall on State Highway 2: what did those two places mean to Henry? He was puzzled, but made a guess: ‘Something to do with my election campaign?’ Very mu
ch so. In the 1999 general election, when Henry ran as the National Party candidate against Georgina Beyer in Wairarapa, the polling booths at the school and the hall were two of the few where Henry gave Labour’s successful candidate, Georgina Beyer – who became the world’s first transsexual MP – a sound thrashing.

  He said, ‘I should have given her a hiding in every booth.’

  How did he lose what was considered a safe National seat? ‘That’s easy. I lost because of the National Party’s stupidity and arrogance … A week before the election I was sitting down in some chicken takeaway place in Masterton with the deputy prime minister, Wyatt Creech, and I said, “Oh God, Wyatt, this isn’t going well,” and he said to me, “There is no way you, or the party, are going to lose.” It was this whole National Party thinking that actually meant they deserved to lose. It was so pervasive.’

  Henry then found other reasons for his loss – voter misunderstanding of MMP politics, Beyer’s high profile, and his decision to follow bad advice. I asked whether bad advice led him to make his infamous declaration on the campaign trail about Beyer’s sex change: ‘I’m still a man!’

  He said, ‘Oh, that was just gross misreporting. I mean, no, I did say that, but if I’d been counselled correctly I’d have been advised not to take part in that interview.’

  The journalist, he said, had fed him a barrage of questions along the lines of, ‘Georgina Beyer’s been through such pain and anguish. What have you done?’ ‘So I said, “I’m still a man, so clearly nothing.” The funny thing is someone from the National Party was with me when I answered that, and we walked away afterwards, and I said, “We just fucked up.” And they said, “No, that was brilliant!”’

  I asked him if he would have liked making it into parliament. He said, ‘I’d have loved it. Absolutely loved it. It was a real shame, especially when I see what a golden opportunity in the National Party that would have been. I mean, there was so much dead wood that needed to be culled. A lot of them are still there! I could have flown to the top. I could have achieved significantly. And I would like to think that National still wouldn’t be in opposition had I got in. But of course you never really know …’

  The man who might have changed the face of New Zealand politics. Was this incredible gall, or just happy chatter? It was probably both. He was such a fantasist.

  He told a story. He said, ‘I was devastated when I lost at the election. And this panic comes over you – how will I feed the family? But there were lovely things that happened that year. The prime minister came to my house in the country. Jenny Shipley, yeah. And we had a beautiful Gone With The Wind staircase, it was a magnificent home with a great big formal lounge and great big formal dining room, and halfway through the evening, we probably had eighty loyal National Party members there, my daughters were dressed up beautifully, they were really young, too young to know it was important, but young enough to know it was exciting, which is how I would have liked to have been able to treat the evening, and Jenny Shipley stood at the bottom of the staircase, at the first rung of this lovely staircase, and gave a speech, and one of my daughters got up and gave her a little New Zealand flag which she’d got in a $2 Shop, and actually that one moment was almost worth the entire year’s campaigning.’

  I really had to ask him whether he knew himself very well. He said, ‘I’m worried to search myself too much. When I start to, I stop. I don’t have to look far to see potential problems.’

  He said his father died two years ago. Did they get on? ‘No. No. He was never around.’ Was there an issue of forgiving him for leaving home? ‘No, because I admired him so much. The enormous admiration I had for him clouded the fact that I never really determined whether I should love him or not.’

  Did his father love him? ‘I hope so. I think towards the end, he started to appreciate me. I think. I think.’

  [July 8]

  6

  Pauline Jespersen

  The Good Samaritan

  The funny thing is that a few days before the July storms that shattered the Far North – flooded homes, closed roads, fallen trees and cut-off power, a state of emergency, and a flying visit to Kaeo from Helen Clark in her prime ministerial gumboots – Kerikeri woman Pauline Jespersen went to The Warehouse in nearby Waipapa and noticed candles were on sale, and then saw batteries were also on sale, and thought, Oh, I might as well get some of those as well. She said, It was almost like I was leading up to the storm.

  The storm hit on Monday night. She said, All my deck-chairs and everything were flying around. It was thundering all night, she said, trees and rubbish crashing against my windows, and I was awake from midnight all night thinking, what the heck?

  Pauline is fifty-two. Local cowboy band Puha and the Bandidos, who played at golfer Michael Campbell’s wedding, played at her fiftieth birthday – there are photos of the party on her fridge, including one of Pauline dancing in a blue bikini top. Her house is on Stone Hill, overlooks the Stone Basin, and is the closest home to the oldest house in New Zealand, the Stone Store. Her house is for sale, listed on Trade Me.

  The storm rumbled through Monday night. I got up at six the next morning, she said, and decided I better cook some food in case I end up with all the locals again. She meant the floods on March 29. I was getting phone calls, she said, people saying we can’t get home, so I said to them, Oh come down here. People were coming and going all night, she said. I don’t mind, she said, I enjoy meeting people.

  That time, she said, I was bailing water out of the rock pools in the back yard, and heating it up so we could have a wash and flush toilets. On Tuesday morning this week, she was prepared: she filled up a great big pot of water, and then, she said, I shot down to the garage and filled up a gas bottle.

  The wind was howling. You could hardly stand up. The water in the basin was rising fast. Logs were hurtling down the river. She heard the roads were being closed. A young woman at the garage said, Oh bugger, how am I going to get back home? Pauline said, It was sort of in my mind I should give her my phone number, but I was so busy thinking about everything else. When I got home, I thought, Oh, I’ll just ring the police and say if anyone’s stuck, they can just come here. The constable said he’d pass on the message to the St John ambulance station.

  Then, she said, I got a call from Ros, she’s the head lady at the station there, and she said, could I take some people? Pauline said, No problem. They arrived at her door in an ambulance.

  There were four of them. They had been trying to take the bus further north, but were stranded in Kerikeri. There was Casey, who worked in a chemist in Paihia; Rebecca, fifteen, who had been visiting her father in Auckland; John, wanting a holiday from the snow and sleet from his home near Arrowtown – the last time he’d been to Kerikeri was fifty years ago; and Edward, a twenty-eight-year-old American, who felt he needed to get out and travel before it was too late, and who had just arrived in New Zealand.

  Tuesday was the worst of it. Flood waters pulled back on Wednesday. By Thursday, the sun was out; the SPCA second-hand shop on Kerikeri Road displayed a table of shoes on the front lawn, cheap and delicious bags of oranges, mandarins, persimmons and tree tomatoes lined the roadside, and one spring daffodil had risen outside the pretty Union Church.

  Up the line at sodden Kaeo, where the floods did their worst, everything was under mud. Officials in overalls tromped along the pavements. Inside the District Hall, men pointed at maps, and flicked at thick stacks of documents. Volunteers at the Wesleydale Memorial Church wrung out water from teddy bears. Kaeo was earth-diggers and mops and abandoned shops. The talk was of generators, gas bottles, who had power and who didn’t. It was news to one man, trapped in his house for two days, that the prime minister had helicoptered into the main street. He said, Did she?

  Pauline poured tea on her porch. Oh go on, she said, let me fix you some lunch. She made ham and tomato sandwiches with mustard. On Tuesday night, she cooked the chook and boiled potatoes on the gas barbecue, lit the candles, brought
out cards and Checkers and another game called Balancing Kiwis. There were a couple of bottles of wine. The power was out, the water was off. She put Rebecca and Casey in together, Edward in the cottage out the back, and John took the spare room, which she said was vacated by Eric the Chinaman.

  Eric the Chinaman was on holiday. He’s one of her tenants; she took them in to help pay the mortgage. She used to manage the restaurant at Kerikeri’s Homestead Hotel but it burned down. She said, My husband’s business kind of went wrong, then he left, and a week later my job burned down. One, one, one, she said, just like that. I’ve survived it, but it’s been hard yakker. Everybody thinks what a beautiful home, she said, but to keep it going – it was the only thing I had left, the only thing worth anything as in assets. I’m fifty-two now, and I need to come out with something to enable me to go on and make my next life’s choices.

  She now works as a supermarket rep for Independent Fisheries, based in Woolston, Christchurch, which specialises in frozen fish fingers, frozen fish cakes, frozen coated fillets, and frozen smoked hoki. Her email is fishnchick. She grew up in Titahi Bay, had lived in Gisborne, Ruatoria, the Hokianga, and moved to Kerikeri twenty-two years ago.

  Of course she had heard all the stories about the flood of 1981, when the yachts in the Stone Basin ended up in the gum trees, and a woman died when the floodwaters swept her out of her bed. But the north was such a beautiful place, she said. Since the floods in March, it had been like summer. Sunny as, warm as. The water truck was going around filling up water tanks, she said.