Geoff Murphy: A Life on Film - I'm taking this bloody car to Invercargill

Dedication

To my dearest wife, Diane

Contents

Dedication

Preface

Beginnings

Beethoven, Colditz Castle and the Military

Back to School

Finding Myself

Going Professional, and Hitting the Road with Blerta

Mixed Media

The Commune

New Zealand Movies, the New Film Commission, and Extending the Commune

Goodbye Pork Pie

After Pork Pie

Hollywood

Back to Reality

European Odyssey

Return to America

Leaving Hollywood

Working with Peter Jackson

Other Projects

Flying Off Again

Moving On and Looking Back

Index

Photo Section

Copyright

PREFACE

People have been known to ask some difficult questions. One of my least favourite ones when I was a boy, often asked of a young lad by a well-meaning uncle or family friend, was ‘What are you going to do when you grow up, son?’

I could never think of an answer.

After a while I learned to get by with stock answers such as ‘fireman’ or ‘bus driver’ or some such. None of these answers seemed to be received with much satisfaction. To some they seemed to demonstrate a lack of ambition, and this was not too far from the truth. I was never particularly ambitious. I had no desire to be an All Black or the Prime Minister or anything like that. Truth be told, I was more interested in being a fireman.

In my youth, I did go through periods of dreaming of being an artist or a musician, but neither of these solicited much of a response in the place where I lived. My father was an engineer. Being an engineer was a ‘proper’ job. Painting and making music were not ‘proper’ jobs. No one would pay decent money for you to do those things. You’d be better off as a fireman.

When I began to show interest in filmmaking as an occupation, this was received with little enthusiasm. Filmmaking was not a ‘proper’ job either. I was, by now, married, with children. What did I think I was doing? Was I intent on starving my wife and kids? Not really, but there was a considerable period of time when we didn’t eat that well.

It wasn’t that I had no ambition at all. What I was looking for was a profession in which I could excel. I wanted to be appreciated by my peers. After a few forays into filmmaking, I found that it was something I was good at. People took notice of what I did and even began to pay money for me to do it. Not much money, of course. There was very little money in film back then, but we were eating better. It wasn’t until over 20 years later, when I got to Hollywood, that I began to earn significant money.

Once I had become a successful film director and fairly well known, people began to ask me another of those difficult questions. My son Hepi, then about five years old, was one of the first. He must have become aware that being a director in Hollywood was quite a big deal. He asked, ‘Dad, how did you get your job?’ Through the years it became a common question. Usually it was phrased more like, ‘How did you learn to direct films?’ The question arose because, until quite recently, there were no film schools or college courses teaching film.

I could never think of an answer to this one either.

The answer I would later give was that ‘I learned it on the side of the road.’ This was sort of true. There are a number of things that a person wishing to be good at directing films needs: skill, talent, creativity, common sense, perseverance and luck. Interestingly enough, apart from some skills, I’ve never come across a film course that could teach any of the others on the list. You have to learn to recognise these qualities within yourself. You can do this on the side of the road, or in a classroom. For me, the side of the road is a more stimulating environment, and, as I said, there were no film schools.

One of the skills you have to learn as a filmmaker is how to write down your ideas. This takes a while. At first I would avoid it, writing only the dialogue parts and jotting down short descriptions of the action. In many circumstances I would avoid mentioning what the camera was doing, and this is still a pretty good rule, as camera description tends to clutter the page and make getting a sense of the story and drama more difficult.

After you have been involved in a few scripts, you become quite good at it. You realise that the script is a document that is required to fulfil a number of very different duties. It is the document that is used to sell the idea to a financier, so it is incumbent on it to be a good read, and to tell the story compellingly. It is the document that is used to excite the interest of potential actors. (These people often use a yellow marker pen to highlight their own lines and from this point on show little interest in the rest of the script.)

The script is used by the accountant as a guide to working out the budget. Various technicians use it to list costumes, props, cars, animals and special effects that will be needed. It becomes the backbone of the entire production. If you want something to be in the movie, you have to make sure it is in the script.

Scriptwriting is quite a specialised task.

By the time I returned to New Zealand from Hollywood, I had participated in the writing of some 50 scripts and had directed some 17 feature films in five different countries. Now I was being asked another of these confounded, difficult questions. This one was, ‘Why don’t you write your memoirs?’

I had trouble with the answer to this one too.

There were a number of reasons for this. The first was that writing a memoir would require a completely different set of skills from those needed for scriptwriting, and I wasn’t sure I was up to it. I had made several attempts over the years to write some sort of book but had given up every time. I found my own writing dull. I just didn’t seem to be able to get the hang of it. Also, it seemed like a strange thing to do. Who the hell was going to be interested in my life story? It seemed arrogant to assume any great number of people would. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing a decent, fair-minded Kiwi bloke should do. It was a bit wanky, like skiting.

My wife Diane’s son, Paul, was probably the keenest to see my history recorded in some manner. He absolutely rejected any of my objections and began turning up at home with a small dictaphone and asking me questions. This went on for some months before he tired of it. I don’t think he had a mind to write anything himself. He really needed me to be more enthusiastic if anything was to become of it. Well, he succeeded. A few months later I sat down at my computer and began to struggle with the complexities of writing a memoir. If it hadn’t been for Paul, this would never have happened.

Diane supported me and from time to time would read what I had and give me an opinion. I found these opinions very useful. She wanted it to be poetic and emotional. I wasn’t that good at those things. After probably a year of toil I had about 150 pages. At this point Diane began contacting publishers, and struck oil almost immediately. Finlay Macdonald of HarperCollins offered an advance and we signed a deal.

So, my answer to that last difficult question is: ‘Okay, here it is.’

Geoff Murphy

BEGINNINGS

Slender, silent fingers of light stabbed upwards into the night sky. Dancing circles flittered across the sullen, low clouds as the shafts swept to and fro, crossing each other, sometimes pausing, sometimes clustering around an intersection where several beams crossed. They roamed the sky seemingly at random, creating a mesmerising and fascinating pattern in the heavens above us.

Standing in our front yard in Inglis Street, Seatoun, I watched in awe. I was nearly four years old. It was late 1942.

I had no idea what I was watching.

Later, my brother John, who was seven at that time, told me that they were searchlights. I imagine his explanation was fairly garbled, as his understanding of events would not have been particularly sophisticated either.

They were searchlights that were looking for possible Japanese aircraft. These aircraft intruded over Wellington Harbour from time to time, looking for whatever shipping might be sheltered there. They came from submarines that carried seaplanes with wings folded in a watertight cylinder on the deck. They would surface about 50 miles offshore, assemble the aircraft, and send it off to see what there was to be seen. Later, the seaplane would land beside the sub and they would recover it. Records show that a number of these operations were flown by the Japanese around this time, although the display I was witnessing was probably just an exercise. I can’t imagine we would have been allowed to stand out in the open, unprotected, and watch the display if there was any likelihood of an enemy plane being present.

Not that its reality would have made any difference to me as those luminous images burned themselves into my memory.

I was becoming aware that something was going on. It was something big. It was called World War II.

At that age, I would not have understood what war was; it would have existed as a series of abstractions, and its impact was because the adults took it so seriously. My father even dressed for it. He was a lieutenant-colonel in the Engineers, stationed at Fort Dorset, and he left for work each day in full military uniform.

At this time, it was feared that New Zealand was about to be invaded by the Japanese. This fear increased as the Japanese forces approached, moving seemingly inexorably south through the Pacific Ocean. Part of my father’s task was to help prepare the country for such an event. I don’t know if it was part of this preparation, but I dimly recall there was a lot of digging and manipulating of corrugated iron in our back yard. He had decided that we needed an air-raid shelter.

As we were just across the valley from the fort, he reasoned we were certain to be bombed if the Japanese attacked. He wanted us safe if an errant bomb hit our place. In later years, I realised we were a considerable distance from the fort and it would be a very inaccurate bomb indeed that would hit our place. From what we knew, the Japs were not into missing their targets. Was my father being paranoid? Probably. But then the whole country was paranoid at that time. Whatever, he was not taking any chances with his precious wife and sons.

My father was a territorial in the New Zealand Army, and with the advent of war had been called up as a full-time soldier. With war raging in Europe, he now faced the prospect of being sent overseas to be shot at by Germans. This prospect must have caused him and my mother considerable anxiety. However, in December of 1940, this anxiety was relieved when my younger brother Roy was born, and now we were a family with Mum and Dad and three sons. Men with three children would not be called for overseas service until all those not blessed with such bounty had been drafted. Actually, Roy was their fourth child. Their first-born had been a daughter, Audrey. However, in 1937, at the age of seven, tragedy struck: Audrey had a fall and died from her injuries. They must have been utterly devastated. This was the year before I was born, so I never knew my sister. I have often missed not having that sister in my life.

My father didn’t have that much time to become complacent about dodging the draft, however. Within a year the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and were heading our way. Now it seemed inevitable he would be facing Japanese bullets rather than German ones, and facing them here in New Zealand. His only consolation was that, according to the racist attitudes of that time, the Germans were much better shots than the Japanese. Fortunately, in the middle of 1942 the Americans arrived. They came in their thousands. Huge military camps sprung up all over the country. We were saved!

In 1943, my father was transferred to Linton Military Camp, and the whole family moved to Palmerston North. I don’t remember a lot about Palmerston North, other than that the train ran right through the middle of town. The big black locomotive belched steam and smoke as it moved majestically down the main street. The carriages seemed full of soldiers, and you could feel the mood of the onlookers lightening. Optimism flooded onto the scene like the sun coming out from behind the clouds after a long and miserable winter. Only the most diehard pessimist could fail to believe that these swaggering young Americans would stop the Japs.

My father was working with the Americans at Linton, driven about in a big American V8 painted olive green with army numbers on it. His driver was Roxy. They didn’t call them drivers in the army, though: he was my father’s batman. This was long before the caped crusader made his appearance, and he bore no resemblance to him as he wore a standard green military uniform. Still, my father had a batman called Roxy. How cool is that? They would arrive in that wonderful car and unload all manner of goodies. My dad had a gun, a pistol that was standard issue to all British Army officers, and a swagger stick. When we got out of hand, we got to know that stick a lot better than we would have liked.

One day, they unloaded a movie projector and a stack of round metal cans he had been given by the Americans. What was this? We had never seen such a contraption. We watched avidly as my father set it up. Out came a spool of film, and this magic ribbon wormed its way through the machine, over rotating little silver wheels, past the gleaming lamp and onto the empty take-up spool. Whirring with a sound like a chaff-cutter, the machine began to project images onto a screen. It was the movies.

That first film had a powerful effect on me. I can remember it now almost as well as if I were sitting in front of it and watching it still. It was a Donald Duck cartoon. Donald Duck was in the army. He had a very nasty sergeant who was huge and looked like Black Pete. All he did was bellow orders in the most belligerent manner.

Parked in the courtyard outside was an enormous artillery piece. It was new from the factory and unpainted. Donald was given the task of painting it, although he was not briefed particularly thoroughly. All he was told was to paint the gun. So he goes into the paint store, where there are hundreds of cans of paint of all imaginable colours. What colour would he pick? The sergeant had failed to mention any colour, so Donald proceeded to mix his own. He opened a large can of white, then dipped his brush into some red paint and flicked it across the open can of white. Red dots appeared on the surface. He then got some blue paint and trickled stripes of it across the red-dotted surface. Satisfied, and feeling very pleased with himself, he then began painting this mixture onto the gun. Of course the paint brushed on to become red polka-dots and blue stripes over white.

At this point the sergeant came out to see how he was progressing. When he saw what Donald was doing he was apoplectic with rage. ‘No! No! No!’ he bellowed. ‘The gun is meant to be camouflaged, you idiot! It is meant to be invisible to the enemy. Paint it again!’

Crestfallen, Donald returned to the paint store. He had no idea what camouflage was, and looked at all the cans for one labelled appropriately. There were none by that name. However, he did find one labelled ‘Invisible Paint’. ‘This must be right,’ he thought. He opened it, and to his surprise it seemed empty. He put his finger into the tin. The top of his finger disappeared! Carefully he wiped the very tip of his finger. The tip appeared again although there was an invisible bit in the middle. Satisfied that what he had was, in fact, a can of invisible paint, he returned to the gun and began painting. Sure enough the gun began to disappear.

The base of the gun was quickly accounted for, but the barrel, which was some 30 feet long, thrust up into the air at a steep angle. Donald was not deterred. He climbed onto the barrel, and then began painting the barrel behind him as he propelled himself up the barrel backwards. Soon he was near the top. He was trapped! The only way down seemed through the gun, so he climbed into the barrel.

Now was the time for the sergeant to appear again. By now the gun was completely invisible. When he looked towards the gun, he could see nothing. ‘Oh no!’ he cried. ‘Someone has stolen the gun! Sound the alarm!’

At this point, Donald stuck his head out of the barrel to see what the commotion was about. The astonished sergeant looked up to see Donald’s head apparently floating in mid-air.

Strangely enough, although I have been able to remember this movie in great detail for over 70 years, I had no memory of how it ended. However, not to worry: these days you can look it up on the internet. It was a Walt Disney production called The Vanishing Private. Seeing it again took me right back to where it all started.

In October 1943, I had my fifth birthday. About this time, my father was transferred back to Wellington and the whole family moved into a house in Highbury. I was to live in this house for the next 16 years. I started school at the Rigi Convent School at the beginning of the following year.

The Highbury house was at the end of Moana Road, perched at the top of the hill, with a magnificent view over Wellington Harbour and the city. It was at the edge of Wellington, where the suburbs gave way to gorse- and bush-covered hills that stretched all the way to the south coast. John, who was nine by then, took to the hills immediately, and it wasn’t long before his younger siblings followed. Over the next 10 years these hills became our playground. We roamed freely up the ridge to Fitchett’s farm and beyond to where the windmill now stands, down to the adjacent valley into the water-works reserve with its two water-filled dams (now the bird sanctuary), and even over to Wrights Hill with its gun emplacements, and into Karori beyond. We never tired of these long hikes, exploring unknown places, building forts, fighting imaginary wars and climbing trees. We had many an adventure in these hills and gullies.

We discovered a tunnel that went from just above the hairpin bend on Raroa Road, through the hill to the lower reservoir in the next valley. The entrance was blocked with a grille of iron bars. It wasn’t long before someone had loosened them enough for us to get in. It was pitch black in there, so someone had the brilliant idea of making flaming torches from rolled-up newspaper and oil. The smoke from the torches rose to the roof of the tunnel, which, unknown to us, was thickly populated by cave wetas. They were not keen on smoke and, by way of escape from it, they dropped from the roof onto our heads as we fled in terror.

In those brooding hills, there were lakes, dams and streams, and many an adventure lurked there. In the streams were ‘crawlies’, or small freshwater crayfish, and eels, and above the water large dragonflies hovered. It was a great place for a young boy to grow up.

The war seemed ever more distant. We never saw an American; they didn’t frequent Highbury. I do recall looking out our front window, though, and seeing the harbour filled with ships. It must have been a convoy heading for the front.

At night, our family huddled around the radio to listen to the news. I was more interested in the radio serials, though. I vaguely remember an announcement that the war was over. It caused great delirium amongst the adults, but had little impact on us kids. Apparently, a Lancaster bomber flew over Wellington dropping pamphlets celebrating the war’s end, but I never saw it.

The following year, I was enrolled at the Marist Brothers’ School in Hawkestone Street, in Thorndon. I attended this school for the next six years, from Standard One through to Standard Six (later known as Form Two). This was a serious business. We had to wear uniforms with caps and ties, and keep our socks pulled up. Keeping your socks pulled up was deemed very important. Kids whose socks were around their ankles were called ‘slovenly’ and were consequently in trouble and often got the strap. This was all a great puzzle to me, as socks tended to end up around your ankles as a natural progression of things. Why should that be regarded as wrong? Clearly, the rule was stupid, and as a result of my attitude I was punished regularly. It was about this time that I began to form attitudes about authority that were to cause me great trouble for the rest of my life.

The teaching methods were medieval enough to make any modern educationalist cringe. Times tables were learned by rote, with the whole class chanting them. We copied down six words a day to learn for homework. The next day we were tested. If you got one wrong, you were strapped once, two wrong merited two straps, and so on. I often was on the receiving end of three or more. My spelling today is still atrocious, but these days the computer spell-checker looks after me. Although this teaching method was simple and direct, I am living proof that it didn’t work.

I was also a very slow learner when it came to reading, and I had trouble with physical activities. I couldn’t catch, kick or throw a ball with any degree of skill, and I was not a fast runner. The same modern educationalist, on reading this, could easily conclude that I was dyslexic or had motor problems in the hand–eye co-ordination department. Maybe both. I certainly suffered from attention deficit. They may well be right, but in those days such problems were attributed to laziness and lack of application, and there was probably a fair amount of this, too. All in all, my academic record during these years was less than stellar.

It came as some surprise, therefore, that, at the age of about 10, when we were given an IQ test, I scored very well. I had ranked second in the class with an IQ of about 120. From this point on, any academic failure of mine was attributed to idleness.

I had always done reasonably well in arithmetic, and achieved well in art and music. Art was a particular strong point. I used to copy the large British Railways posters that my father collected. They were beautiful, quite classic examples of poster art of the 1920s and 1930s. He let me use his own set of high-quality Winsor & Newton’s poster paints. I was a good copyist, and so the results were quite spectacular. I would take them to school where they were greatly admired and adorned the classroom walls. The teacher, Brother Bernard, was puzzled that a boy, capable of such splendid art, could have such appallingly bad handwriting. The only possible explanation was that my father was doing the paintings. Now my father, at that time, was chairman of the school committee, so Brother Bernard asked him directly. Assured by my father that the paintings were my own work, Brother Bernard could only conclude that my handwriting was due to being careless and untidy, the cure for which was the strap. Although this method, again, has the virtue of being simple and direct, I am living proof that it didn’t work. My handwriting is still terrible.

At the age of 10, at the urging of my parents, I began to take piano lessons. Once a week I would go up to a house at the back of Saint Mary’s College to be taught by one of the nuns there. I was fortunate to have a very kind teacher, and at first did quite well. However, as the year progressed I found it more and more difficult to give up sunny afternoons to the smell of varnish and incense that characterised Catholic institutions, when I could be wandering the hills with my good friend Victor Middleditch. So at the end of the year, I gave up the lessons.

Victor Middleditch lived in Northland, so I probably met him when I was at the Rigi school and thus had already known him for some years. After school, we would take off and head for the Tinakori hill area. This was an area of wilderness on the large ridge that dominates Thorndon and stretches from Northland to Wadestown.

One afternoon, we came across a recently bulldozed track around the western side of the hill that overlooks Wilton. We set off along it, and after a short distance we discovered a huge boulder perched precariously on the downhill side of the track. Could it have been 10 or 12 feet in diameter? It is hard to say, as we were a couple of 10-year-old boys and not that large ourselves, so it looked pretty enormous to us. The boulder was lying where the bulldozer had left it, and it seemed that it would only require a bit of a nudge to dislodge it and send it trundling off down the hill. It also seemed to us that we were the perfect agents to supply such a nudge, and, relishing the possibility of seeing that great rock in full flight, we went to the boulder and nudged it.

Nothing happened.

It probably weighed quite a few tons, and no nudge was going to shift this baby. So we decided it needed a bloody good shove. Taking a deep breath, we gave it a bloody good shove.

Nothing happened.

It seemed that something other than brute strength and ignorance was going to be needed to shift this sucker. We were going to have to use our brains. There was not a boulder in the world that could withstand the combined intellects of Murphy and Middleditch. Besides, it had annoyed us. Giving up was not an option.

We examined the base of the rock more thoroughly. There was no obvious reason why it wouldn’t move. Perhaps the weight of it was such that it had compressed the earth beneath it to form a sort of bowl that held it in place. If this was the case, we would need to remove some earth from the downhill side to create a channel it could roll into. We began to dig. Although using only our bare hands and perhaps the odd stick, the loose rubble came away quite quickly. Soon we had a channel; we climbed up and put our weight to the back of the rock. We heaved.

Nothing happened.

This was a bit of a blow. We were getting tired, and the ground where we had been digging was getting harder. Besides, we both needed to be home in time for dinner or we’d face dire consequences. Regretfully, we concluded we would need to return the next afternoon with a few tools.

The following afternoon we arrived with a spade and a metal trowel. We picked them up from Victor’s place at the top of Orangi Kaupapa Road, and set to work on that recalcitrant boulder, alternating between digging and pushing. For two or three hours we toiled, but that stubborn rock just sat there as though it were concreted into place. By now it is getting late again and we had to consider our position. We had seriously underestimated the task we had set ourselves. What would we do? We examined that rock and concluded that it couldn’t possibly withstand another day’s assault on it, and so set off home determined to deliver the coup de grace the next day.

The next day we attacked the task with great vigour. Quite quickly we detected a slight movement in that behemoth, and, pulses racing with excitement, we applied ourselves to pushing. Gradually it began to move and then, quite suddenly, it was free. It seemed to bound forward and then hurtle down the grassy slope.

We had been aware of a row of houses below, but they had seemed so far away as to be irrelevant. Now with the boulder leaping and tumbling down the slope in such a way that it seemed the very ground was shaking, they suddenly seemed a great deal closer. The boulder was ploughing through a thick stand of gorse without noticeably slowing down. We watched in growing horror as it burst through a six-wire fence, snapping the wires. We could hear fence staples pinging as they were ripped from their posts for about a mile in either direction. Now we watched, paralysed with fear, as the boulder ploughed into a stand of manuka, heading for the houses beyond.

To our everlasting relief it was here that the boulder stopped. The manuka and the ground levelling out had killed its momentum — only a hundred or so metres from the nearest house.

Very quickly, we grabbed our tools and headed off out of there.

I learned a number of things from this incident. One was that we were not as smart as we thought we were. Another was that if you wish to avoid unpleasant surprises, it is best to think rather carefully about the consequences before taking any action. On the positive side, we did learn that perseverance will win out in the end.

While attending Marist Thorndon, I stumbled across politics. Now politics is not something that concerns the average 10- to 12-year-old, but force of circumstance brought them to my attention. The 1949 election had been won by the National Party, and Sid Holland became prime minister. My parents, or mainly my father, were staunch National supporters. He was by now the Chief Structural Engineer for New Zealand Railways and, having recently been a lieutenant-colonel in the army, regarded himself as being a cut above the mass of society. Although he had pretensions to being upper-class, being basically pig Irish and not that wealthy, he decided to settle for upper-middle-class.

His kids, however, were being educated at Catholic schools, which tended to be populated by working-class kids. Marist Thorndon had predominantly working-class pupils, many coming from families whose breadwinner worked on the wharf. The prevailing ethos amongst these folk was definitely to the Left. So we tended to identify with our mates who were working-class. We were both deluded of course: we were about as middle-class as they come. New Zealand was often described as a classless society, but this has never been entirely true. The stratification of society took on a much sharper definition under the new National Government, however.

The trouble between management and the wharfies had long been brewing. In 1951 it exploded into the largest and most bitter industrial dispute in New Zealand’s history. Initially, it was about pay rates, but as the dispute progressed it descended into a deeper, more general animosity. The government announced that it was going to deal with the unions once and for all, and shut the workers out and brought in the army to unload the ships. There were demonstrations, even riots, but the government held firm: they were determined to smash union power, and they were going to achieve this by starving the workers into submission if necessary. Consequently, they passed laws making it illegal to supply striking workers with food or even give food to their hungry kids.

Back at Marist Thorndon, this did not go down at all well. It posed quite a dilemma for the Marist Brothers. If they were seen to condone the sharing of food amongst the children, they could be open to charges of sedition. They would be breaking the law and could be sent to prison. Such was the level of paranoia at the time that even we kids believed that if we shared our lunch with a ‘wharfie’ kid we might be sent to borstal. However, the Marist Brothers’ Christian doctrine obliged them to feed the needy as an article of faith. So they informed us that the sharing of food was against the law, and then steadfastly turned a blind eye to the practice.

We kids thought that any government that used the starving of kids as a political tool was despicable. The people of New Zealand thought otherwise. After it was over, National held a snap election and was returned with an increased majority. The propaganda of the National Party had carried the day. The wharfies were a bunch of communists whose greed would destroy the economy. They were traitors to the country. It was never mentioned that the majority of them had fought for New Zealand in the first and/or second world wars. The starving of kids had never been a problem to the enemy we thought they had defeated.

Parliament was just down the road from the school. Sometimes we would wander down there if something was happening. I remember seeing surging crowds in the Parliament grounds — the shouting of slogans, the banners and all. I even saw a car pushed over on its side and the police running to intervene. It was a violent and unsettling time. Worse, I was left with the feeling that the bad guys won. As a result of this experience, I have never voted National in my life and find it difficult to imagine a circumstance where I would.

By the time it was all over, distrust for authority had become part of my character. In the years since, little has happened that would modify this distrust.

The years I spent at Marist Thorndon, the immediate post-war years, were a special time in New Zealand’s history. Up until then, apart from the odd hitch, society had progressed in a fairly orderly and conservative manner. Nothing much changed from year to year. Everyone dressed according to a rigid set of rules. You were brought up to expect to have a steady job and to live in the suburbs. You listened to the radio, went to the rugby or the races, and behaved yourself. Anyone who had no job, dressed differently or had unusual behaviour patterns was a weirdo, and was shunned from polite society.

These were the days before consumerism. Our home, although steadfastly middle-class, had none of the trimmings a modern home possesses. We had no TV, no telephone, no fridge, no car, nothing made of plastic, no washing machine, dryer or dishwasher. This was normal. This was how it had always been for over a hundred years.

The man of the house went to work and brought home the money, and the wife ran the household. Often the woman had no idea of how much her husband earned. She was paid a weekly allowance, called ‘housekeeping money’. Running the household was in those days a complex business. The average suburban kitchen had a gas stove, a sink and a ‘zip’ water heater. There was a ‘safe’, a cupboard that was open to the outdoors, with the opening covered with a fine mesh. This enabled the cool air from outside to circulate around the cupboard interior, but kept out flies and other insects. Meat and other perishables were kept there, the meat in there keeping a few days longer without going off. This meant that shopping every few days was essential if you wanted fresh produce.

When certain fruits — apples, peaches, apricots, pears — were in season, my mother would buy large quantities, and then spend several days peeling, slicing and putting them in jars with sealable lids. They would then be boiled for several hours in the copper in the laundry. The result was a cupboard with row upon row of beautiful jars of bottled fruit, waiting for us in the winter.

Milk arrived each morning delivered by a milkman, who usually had a horse and cart. We would put out the empty, washed milk bottles with tokens in them that we purchased at the local store, and he would replace them with full bottles. If we were lucky, the horse would have a shit near our place, and Mum would send one of us out with a hand shovel and an old sack to collect it for the compost. Nothing was wasted. Stale bread was soaked in milk and water, and baked back to freshness in the oven. Food scraps, peelings and any food deemed too stale to eat went out to the compost, for my mother’s vegetable garden, where, tended to by my mother, cauliflower, cabbage, lettuce, carrots, chives, radishes, strawberries and rhubarb flourished. Mum would get us to dig it in the spring, and dig a trench for the compost from time to time, but apart from that she did everything herself.

The laundry was a set-up all of its own, with a wood-fired copper for boiling water, and two concrete tubs with a handringer mounted between them. After soaking, the linen was boiled in the copper, then transferred to the first tub, where stains were attacked with the aid of soap, a scrubbing brush and a washboard. It was then fed through the ringer into cold, clean water. Once thoroughly rinsed, it passed back through the ringer again into the clothesbasket, and thence was hung on the clothesline. This was hard physical work. Once the laundry was dry, she would then iron everything, fold it and put it away. While she was washing the clothes, she kept a sharp eye open for any missing buttons or tears. Any such garments were put aside and fixed later. Any garments that were beyond repair had all their buttons cut off and saved, and any areas of useful material trimmed and put aside for patching other damaged garments, or for patchwork quilts or cleaning rags. Monday was washing day, and it took all day and often more. If it was raining on Monday, the wet clothes would be hung on a large wooden frame that was then hauled up to the ceiling in the kitchen, using a pulley arrangement.

In what spare time she had, my mother would knit jerseys and socks for everyone, and sew new clothes for herself and others, and curtains, bedspreads and anything else that was needed. She would crochet mats and doilies and do embroidery. The whole house was a work of art, and she was an artist.

My mother was also chief provisioner, and at least twice a week she would go shopping, and lug all the groceries and produce up the zig-zag to the little house perched at the top of the hill. She did all the cooking, made our school lunches, and kept the house clean and tidy.

From time to time, she would go to the front room and sit at the piano. There, she would play beautiful classical music, which would waft through the house.

Who is this extraordinary woman I am talking about? Is it Superwoman? Nope, it’s my mum. She was a housewife. That’s what they did.

The daily routines were designed to suit my father. They seemed to be lifted straight from the New Zealand Army Manual. Mum and Dad would get up at about 7am, whereupon Mum would head for the kitchen and Dad for the bathroom. Here, he would wash and shave, using a cut-throat razor which he sharpened on a leather strop. At about 7.30am he would head back up the hall to his bedroom, calling out ‘Going up!’ as he went. This was a signal to the whole house, but mainly my mother, that breakfast should be on the table in the next 10 minutes.

Breakfast consisted of porridge, or a cereal followed by bacon and eggs and sometimes a sausage or two. Once consumed, it was time to watch for the bus out of the dining room window, with its view of Highbury and the bus terminus for that run. We would be able to see the eight o’clock bus sitting there waiting. When the bus took off, it disappeared from sight for about 30 seconds, then reappeared coming around what we called ‘Diamond’s Corner’, named for the plumber who lived there. This was the last moment we could leave if we were catching that bus. The time it took for us to get to the bus stop was almost exactly the same time the bus took to get there from Highbury. My father would catch that bus to the top of the cable car, then travel down to Lambton Quay, where he would get a tram to the railway station, where he worked for the New Zealand Railways. When we started secondary school, we would catch that bus, too, and then get the tram from the bottom of the cable car to the Basin Reserve where Saint Patrick’s College was in those days.

We loved the trams.

It was always an adventure, going for a tram ride. Trams dominated Wellington’s streets for over 50 years. The network was comprehensive, the tracks going from Karori Park right through to Seatoun, with plenty of side branches. Clanging their bells, these things lurched and clattered their way through Wellington’s narrow streets at rush hour, with astonishing numbers of citizens crammed into and hanging off them.

I remember a cartoon drawn by Neville Lodge, Wellington’s most popular cartoonist of the 1950s and 1960s. It showed two puzzled-looking workers looking at the Wellington City motto that was part of the coat of arms on the side of a tram. It read Suprema a Situ, indicating that Wellington is supreme by virtue of the fact that it is situated at the geographical centre of New Zealand. One worker has turned to the other and