Going West Audio

This session from the Going West Festival in 2018 explores creative non-fiction. Award winning novelist, essayist, academic, teacher of creative writing and the founder of the Academy of New Zealand Literature Paula Morris leads a lively discussion on writing true stories, and the demands and possibilities of the essay form and creative non-fiction at a time of upheaval and transformation in the media and publishing landscape. 

She describes her fellow panelists as “all distinguished, all opinionated and all very good non-fiction writers”.  Joining her on stage are journalist, writer and editor Simon Wilson, Susanna Andrew of Unity Books, who is an accomplished editor and reviewer, and economics essayist Shamubeel Eaqub, to discuss non-fiction writing and reading in Aotearoa.

Paula Morris Award winning novelist, short story writer, essayist, teacher and academic

In 2018 she published an essay and short story collection called False River.

Simon Wilson Editor of The Journal of Urgent Writing. Award winning journalist, former editor at Metro, former Auckland editor at The Spinoff, Senior Writer at the New Zealand Herald.

Susanna Andrew Co-editor with Jolisa Gracewood of Tell You What: Best New Zealand nonfiction. Reader, reviewer, editor (bookseller at Unity Books). Instigator of ‘True Stories Told Live’ events at the NZ Book Council, convenor of judges for the non-fiction prize for the NZ Book Awards

Shamubeel Eaqub Economist, author and columnist, economics essayist. Writer of three Bridget Williams Books Text series titles: Generation Rent, Economic Futures, Growing Apart: Regional Prosperity in New Zealand, and with AUP co-wrote with Ralph Lattimore, The New Zealand Economy: An Introduction

Sometimes at Going West, things just connect.

When writer Sarah Laing found out she was pregnant she bought a bottle of folic acid and a children’s book, Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen. 

In 2008 Associate Programmer Nicola Strawbridge, met Sarah at the Mt Albert Playgroup. Both were there with their small boys. Nicola was impressed with this freshly minted author, illustrator, and graphic novelist. 

Nicola was also aware that the award-winning poet Karlo Mila, who had agreed to be the Going West Festival’s Curnow Reader for 2008 also had young children, and a blog called the Night Kitchen. She confessed to working in the Night Kitchen due to relocating and having no daytime child-care. 

A light went on for Nicola; these two women could get together to talk about what it meant to be a writer, a creative person, while also parenting small children. Journalist David Larsen, who was home-schooling his children, was the perfect chair.

During the session, poet Karlo Mila reads from her award-winning book A Well Written Body (2008):

• Victory to the People: Nikolasi is born
• Nine Months No words
• I am not a Play Centre mother

Sarah Laing reads her short story Afterbirth, from her first published book Coming Up Roses (2007).

Sir Bob Harvey is a Westie to the core. He’s a successful writer, historian, politician, environmental campaigner, film guy, advertising gun, surf life-saver and co-founder of the Going West Writers Festival. 

In this address from the opening of the 2013 Going West Writers Festival, Sir Bob pays homage to the West coast and the role that this landscape, and the books he loves, have played in his extraordinary life, a life given over in large part to the service of his community.

If the previous episode of this series celebrated the Bogan Westie stereotypes of the TV show Outrageous Fortune, this episode celebrates all the many other facets of West Auckland. 

The former Waitakere City is also home to free thinkers, artists, writers and readers and one of the oldest literary festivals in the country. Sir Bob Harvey, recently described on RNZ by Paula Morris as “the mayor of everything”, has lived all these things as a true Westie renaissance man.

Much of the detail from this talk made it into his 2014 biography Wild Westie: the incredible life of Bob Harvey by Hazel Phillips.

In 2009, as part of an afternoon celebrating Waitakere City and West Auckland, Going West guests heard the story of iconic New Zealand television series Outrageous Fortune and the fictional West family of West Auckland. 

The multi-award winning creative team of Rachel Lang and James Griffin, along with actor Robyn Malcolm (Cheryl West), were joined in conversation by Auckland Theatre Company founder, actor and director Simon Prast.

This session also celebrated the publication of Outrageous Fortune: the West Family Album, a book by Rachel Lang, James Griffin and Tim Balme, published by West Auckland publisher Peter Dowling of Oratia Media.

Outrageous Fortune was created for Henderson-based South Pacific Pictures and ran on TV3 from 2005 to 2010. It is the longest running drama series made in New Zealand, and one of the few embraced by an Australian audience. It spawned a US and an English version, and even aired in Eastern Europe.

Starting in 2015, TV3 screened a spinoff series, Westside. Set in the 1970s and 80s, the series followed the younger years of key characters Ted and Rita West. The final episode played on November 16 2020, bringing to a close the West family television saga. 

Both Outrageous Fortune and Westside shamelessly championed New Zealand music, starting with its use of Westie favourite Gutter Black (by Hello Sailor) as its theme music. 

Both series also featured buildings and locations across West Auckland, including the brick and tile West family residence in Te Atatu South.

As keynote seeker at the 2007 Going West Festival, Tony Simpson spoke to the festival theme Food for Thought. An award-winning social historian, food critic, writer on; food history, the working class, post-modern scones, 19th century immigration and a political journalist, Simpson’s talk reveals the story of colonial cuisine and its impact on New Zealand’s food traditions and our cultural identity.

He notes that many British farm labourers and their families who immigrated to New Zealand in the late 19th century (and who had eaten a monotonous steerage diet of ‘salt beef’ and dried potatoes at sea) had experience of famine. 

They had also known full bellies at the annual harvest home feast and had witnessed, if not partaken in, the ‘farmer’s ordinary’, a hearty midday dinner traditionally served to farmers at the local Inn. This was a meal of thick soup, roast meat, large helpings of veg and potatoes, a sweet pie or pudding with lashings of cream, and followed by cheese. 

They had known what it was to be hungry and they were determined not to be, if they could possibly help it in their new home, bringing with them the desire to be self-sustaining domestically through their land holding. This was true even for the urban working class on their now near-mythical ‘Kiwi quarter-acre section’, with its home vege garden, fruit trees and chook house. This was a tradition that lasted in New Zealand for a century. 

In light of the shifts that Simpson highlights, and with the land limitations of the modern urban apartment dweller, perhaps it’s time to lobby local councils for public garden allotments and fruit trees in parks, so the self-sustaining dream can be realised for a new century?

For food assistance, or if you would like to donate or volunteer, contact foodbank.co.nz

This session from Going West 2011 is based on an exhibition and subsequent award winning publication Words Between Us -  He Kōrero by Alison Jones and Kuni Kaa Jenkins, which won the 2012 Ngā Kupu Ora Māori Book Awards. 

Both the exhibition and the book traced the first Māori conversations on paper from 1769  to 1835. As the authors’ wrote, “it is hard to imagine the shock experienced by Māori who first heard written words spoken in the local language. The startling fact about writing was that Pākehā marks could ‘say’ Māori words; Pākehā texts could have Māori meaning.”

As the speakers note, the first book ever printed in New Zealand was in Māori. 

Alison Jones is a professor at Te Puna Wānanga, the School of Māori and Indigenous Education, University of Auckland and was awarded the NZARE McKenzie Award in December 2011 for her significant contribution to educational research. She has worked with Māori scholars and students in the field of education for 25 years and has a fascination with the complexities of Māori and Pākehā educational relationships. She has written a number of books in the area of sociology of education and Māori education.

Kuni Jenkins is a professor with Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi where she teaches and conducts research. She has had a long-term interest in literacy, and her PhD involved archival study of early Māori written documents and the relationships between Māori and Pākehā. She has written a number of books in the area of sociology of education and Māori education.

The session is introduced by Rose Yukich, a Going West Trustee and academic at the University of Auckland.

Allen Curnow reads at Going West in 2001, introduced by Glenn Colquhoun who at the time was an emerging poet who had just received his first accolade. Colquhoun describes Curnow as holding within his arm-spans the history of modern New Zealand poetry, with his timeless phrases having entered the New Zealand lexicon, helping to define who we are. This was Allen Curnow’s last public performance.

In his introduction, Colquhoun eloquently acknowledges Curnow’s vital place in New Zealand poetry. He also honours the Going West Festival itself, which has provided a turangawaewae of sorts for both poets. 

Colquhoun reads the Curnow poem ‘Wild Iron’ and Curnow reads two poems from what was his latest and last publication The Bells of Saint Babel's: Poems 1997–2001. It would go on to win the 2001 Montana Book Award for Poetry. 

This was to be Allen Curnow’s last public performance. A giant of our literary landscape, he died a week after this session on the 23rd of September 2001. In acknowledgement of Allen Curnow, Going West named our annual festival opening night poetry reading in his honour.

This recording of Wild Iron, Ten Steps to the Sea, and Fantasia and Fugue for Panpipe is published by kind permission of Tim Curnow.

In this pithy and provocative address from Going West 2005, award winning novelist, writer of Tarzan Presley, essayist and renowned museum practitioner Nigel Cox reflects on a New Zealand seen through refreshed eyes.

Cox had just spent 5 years away in Berlin, where he and Te Papa colleague Ken Gorbey oversaw the creation of the Jewish Museum.

In this pithy and provocative 2005 Going West keynote address, Nigel reflects on New Zealand as he saw it on his return and before he went blind to the things he was noticing, before sameness set in.  

He talks of the spooky business of national pride and asks, ‘Have we arrived, New Zealand, at the place we were going to?’ 

Ten months after this address Nigel Cox died.  Friends at Victoria University noted that his influence on the intellectual life of the nation was immense and that Aotearoa had lost an inspiring, generous, innovative and gifted New Zealander far too early.

Barbara Brookes gives voice to a hidden history we’ve never read about. In this session from Going West 2016, she shares the story of her ground-breaking book in conversation with Judith Pringle.

Her book is the first written narrative account of New Zealand’s past from the perspective of the women who lived here. 

In relation to the story she set out to tell, Barbara says “so much of New Zealand history is written in terms of wars… but what about all the women who died in childbirth, which they regularly did in the 19th century, and what did it mean to be the mother of 8 children or 10 children… and what did it mean for Māori mothers to lose all their children in the 19th century with disease imported by the Europeans?”

A History of New Zealand Women is the story of women who spoke out against government incursion of Māori land, of women who farmed, who painted and wove, sang and wrote. It is a history that places the women of Aotearoa in the 21st century at the United Nations, at the Grammy awards, and the Olympics and in fields as diverse as themselves of women who are shaping the new millennium.

Barbara Brookes is Professor of History at Otago University. A History of New Zealand Women was the winner of the Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Best Illustrated Non-Fiction.

Judith Pringle is Professor of Organisation Studies and leader of the Gender and Diversity Group Trust at Auckland University of Technology.

At Going West 2005, Television presenter and talk-back host Marcus Lush delivers a witty account of his life-long love affair with rail, his relationship with the train-spotting fraternity, and his enormously popular television series Off the Rails: a Love Story which chronicled his journey along New Zealand's railway lines. 

This was a fitting last hurrah for a Going West tradition: a literary steam train journey from Auckland out to Helensville, echoing the train journey in Maurice Gee’s Going West that inspired the original festival. Lush spoke at the Grand Hotel in Helensville, at the end of Going West’s line. 

It also serves as a reminder that Going West has always been about the word in its meaning forms, not just books.

The Listener described Off the Rails as ‘a small beautifully shot work of art’. Lush reveals it ‘was the greatest thing I’ve ever done’ and led to an absolute passionate transformation with his love for his country.

Lush first rose to prominence on the radio, at the University of Auckland’s 95bFM. A high profile radio career followed and, after some early forays into television, he carved out his own niche as the presenter of uniquely New Zealand shows that travelled the country and explored its curious corners.

Off the Rails won acclaim and awards including gongs for best director and best information/ lifestyle programme at the 2005 Qantas Screen Awards