Going West Audio

In her book The Infinite Game: how to live well together, psychology professor and activist Dr Niki Harré asks us to imagine our world anew. What if we are all part of a different type of game entirely – a game in which playing matters more than winning, where anyone can join at any time, and where rules evolve as new players turn up? 

At Going West 2018, Niki was joined on stage by her sister, political activist and former MP Laila Harré. In a provocative and interactive session, the Harrés open a conversation on what we value most deeply, how we keep those values in play and how we engage with the world and with each other.

The session included an audience participation section, where everyone present got to join a paper dart game that helped illustrate and inform the conversation.

The infinite game project was started by Niki Harré at the University of Auckland. The project was inspired by James Carse’s book Finite and Infinite Games, a wonderful work of scholarship and poetry that offers a new metaphor to help understand our time. 

The Infinite Game was the winner of the 2019 Ashton Wylie Mind, Body & Spirit Literary Award.

Award winning writer Greg McGee, best known for his play Foreskin’s Lament, came to Going West in 2015 to talk on writing, rugby, toxic masculinity, female pseudonyms, life in Italy and his novel The Antipodeans - an intergenerational tale of love, blood and betrayal. 

For this conversation, he is joined by well-known and well-read journalist David Larsen.

McGee, an almost All Black, is known for works that have challenged the social norms of masculine behaviours in New Zealand, most notably his hugely  popular play Foreskin’s Lament. First performed in 1981, his dark drama set in a rugby club changing room stripped New Zealand masculinity naked and began the demise of the once popular slur "Whaddarya?”

McGee went on to be a successful screenwriter, writing based-on-true story dramatisations and mini-series based on the Erebus disaster and the infamous Lange Government, as well as contributing to several popular New Zealand TV shows including Marlin Bay, Street Legal, and Orange Roughies. He also penned the screenplay for Old Scores, a rugby-based feature film.

As a novelist, McGee first wrote under the pseudonym Alix Bosco, winning the prestigious Ngaio Marsh Award for his debut, CUT & RUN. He also wrote All Blacks captain Richie McCaw's 2012 biography, one of the bestselling New Zealand books of the last decade

Working class heroes and poets Serie Barford and Glenn Colquhoun celebrate their working class roots as part of the Going West Oblivion Express as it steams to Helensville Station. Passengers along for the ride were entertained and charmed by this witty pairing of two of New Zealand’s finest performance poets.

It is pure working class gold, sprinkled with a West Auckland flavour, as they celebrate their whānau, friends, and community with poems about ceramic swans, the knicker factory, bullrush, and bog filled cars, grapevines and the alchemy of Assid Corban’s orchids. 

Both Barford and Colquhoun are long-time friends of the Going West Writers Festival and have been regular guests throughout the years.

Serie Barford is a poet and short fiction writer of European and Polynesian descent, with a background in performance poetry. She has published four poetry collections: Plea to the Spanish Lady (Hard Echo Press, 1985), Glass Canisters (Hard Echo Press, 1989), Tapa Talk (Huia, 2007), and Entangled Islands (Anahera Press, 2015). Her work is also published in multiple journals and anthologies.

Glenn Colquhoun is a doctor, and an award-winning poet and children’s writer. His first collection The Art of Walking Upright (Steele Roberts, 1999) won the Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry award at the Montana Book Awards (2000). Playing God (Hammersmith Press, 2002), his third collection, won the poetry section of the same awards in 2003, as well as the Readers’ Choice Award that year. His latest book Late Love, (Bridget Williams Books, 2016) is an adaptation of a speech given at the APAC health conference in 2013, outlining the relationship in his life between poetry and medicine.

Rewi Alley, a quiet bloke from Canterbury, a dabbler in poetry, a farmer, fireman and soldier went "to go and have a look at China" and ended up becoming the architect of one of the world's greatest labour movements. 

In her book A Communist in the Family: Searching for Rewi Alley, Rewi's cousin Elspeth Sandys presents a layered biography of the Kiwi who became a Chinese hero and "the great friend of the people of China". New Zealand has Special Nation Status in China entirely because of Rewi Alley and his work.

In conversation with New Zealand Herald investigative reporter Matt Nippert, Sandys recounts her 2017 visit to China to trace her cousin’s life there. On that visit, she was told there were more statues of Rewi than Mao Zedong. While she thought it an exaggeration, it certainly seemed possible in China’s North West.

Intrigued by what he had read about China, Alley left New Zealand in December 1926 to see the Chinese revolution up close. He would stay for 60 years, becoming one of China's best-known and best-loved foreigners.

In his first decade there, he worked variously as a fire officer, factory inspector and relief worker, labouring among the Chinese and trying to improve their living and working conditions. 

He came to greater prominence during the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, after he was involved in efforts to found the Association of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives (INDUSCO), commonly known by the slogan Alley coined, ‘Gung Ho/Work Together'. Gung Ho aimed to organise small-scale self-supporting cooperatives which created employment for workers, while continuing production to support resistance against the Japanese.

In the following decades he worked tirelessly to elevate the lot of the working people of China. Before and after his death in 1987, both the New Zealand and Chinese governments honoured Alley for his work in China and have continued to do so in recent decades, with commemorative events in 1997 and 2007.

150 years on from the original landmark study of New Zealand’s birdlife, Buller’s Birds were re-imagined and J G Keulemans re-discovered in Geoff Norman Buller’s Birds of New Zealand. 

This revision and revisiting of Walter Buller’s original ornithological study includes exquisitely reproduced water-colours by JG Keulemans, the most renowned ornithological artist of the 19th century.  

In this Going West session from 2013, Geoff Norman is joined in entertaining and enlightening conversation by writer, satirist, ornithologist and journalist Steve Bruanias, author of How to Watch a Bird. 

Many of the birds reproduced in Norman’s book are now extinct; all we have of them are snippets in oral history, scraps of texts, a few feathers and the odd stuffed carcass in a Museum. And, of course, Walter Buller’s book.

It was incredibly popular, especially from the second edition, due to Keulemans’ illustrations - though these were poorly reproduced through the printing process of chromolithography. 

Norman’s new edition of Buller's Birds of New Zealand includes the complete works of J.G. Keulemans, exquisitely reproduced from the original paintings held in the British Museum and re-discovered by Norman while on a trip to England.

Geoff Norman has a background in science and environmental studies, works in the publication business and is a keen tramper.  His Buller’s Birds edition published by Te Papa Press has been reprinted three times and won a raft of awards.  His latest book Birdstories: A history of the birds of New Zealand was a finalist in the 2019 Ockham NZ Book Awards.

Te Papa Press were able to secure the services of bird lover Stephen Fry to write the foreword for Norman’s book. In it, he heaps praise upon the importance of the book and its place in history:

 “There can be no finer example of the pinnacle of Victorian cataloguing than the stupendously fine work of Buller and Keulemans in their monumental collaboration… This wondrous, perfectly fashioned masterpiece marks a kind of dividing line between the old New Zealand of slaughter and extinction and the new New Zealand, which is one of the most conservation-minded, eco-aware and environmentally progressive nations on earth.”

“I am dizzy with pride at being offered this opportunity to introduce it to you. This precious and beautiful book is a perfect celebration of the precious and beautiful birds of the precious and beautiful islands of Aotearoa.”

Marilyn Waring delivered the Gala Night oratory at the Going West Books and Writers Festival in 2002, speaking to the theme Tracking the Vernacular.

Made a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2020, and a former politician, scholar, feminist, farmer, author, academic, and activist for female human rights and environmental issues delivers, Waring is an exceptional and inspiring New Zealander.

Her keynote address is wise, compassionate, insightful and witty as she tracks what is her personal vernacular, a vernacular partly expressed through her writing. The address is part memoir and part love letter to Aotearoa.

This appearance was the first time Marilyn Waring had been invited to speak about her writing in New Zealand - but wouldn't be the last. 

The 15th woman elected in New Zealand and one of only four women in Parliament at the time, her nine tumultuous years as a National Party MP boiled over in 1984 when she backed the Labour Opposition's nuclear-free policy, prompting then-Prime Minister Robert Muldoon to call a snap election he would lose. 

She is best known for her 1988 book If Women Counted, and she obtained a D.Phil in political economy in 1989. Through her research and writing she is known as the principal founder of the discipline of feminist economics. Since 2006, Waring has been a Professor of Public Policy at the Institute of Public Policy at AUT in Auckland, New Zealand, focusing on governance and public policy, political economy, gender analysis, and human rights.   

Since 2006, Waring has been a Professor of Public Policy at the Institute of Public Policy at AUT in Auckland, New Zealand, focusing on governance and public policy, political economy, gender analysis, and human rights. She has taken part in international aid work and served as a consultant to UNDP and other international organisations.

In her prizewinning debut novel Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings Tina Makereti confronts the complexities of cultural heritage, the past and the present, and Moriori, Maori and Pakeha identity. The novel is a compelling, powerful and haunting work.  

In 2014, Makereti came to Going West to discuss her book live on stage with colleague, scholar and poet Selina Tusitala Marsh - who began the session with a poem penned for Tina and her extraordinary novel. 

The session was an insightful, thoughtful and inspiring one, delving into the process behind the writing.

Tina Makereti writes essays, novels and short fiction. Her most recent novel is The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke (longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards Fiction Award, 2019) and optioned by Taika Waititi’s Piki Films for development. 

Alongside Witi Ihimaera, she is co-editor of Black Marks on the White Page, an anthology celebrating Māori and Pasifika writing. In 2016, her story, Black Milk, won the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize, Pacific region. Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings was her first novel and it, won the 2014 Ngā Kupu Ora Aotearoa Māori Book Award for Fiction, also won by Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa. 

In 2009, Makereti received the RSNZ Manhire Prize for Creative Science Writing and the Pikihuia Award for Best Short Story in English. She teaches creative writing and Oceanic literatures at Massey University

Roger Shepherd, the founder of iconic Kiwi independent record label Flying Nun, joins lifelong music fan, journalist and TV personality John Campbell to share the story of his life with the independent and much loved music label that has been taking the sounds of Aotearoa New Zealand to the world for nearly 40 years.

For a worldwide community of music fans, Flying Nun is one of the most iconic independent record labels from outside the mainstream, defining a particular voice and sound of New Zealand. 

In 2016, the label’s founder penned his memoir In Love with these Times: My Life with Flying Nun Records. We invited Roger along to Going West for an animated and good-natured discussion with Flying Nun fanboy (and award winning journalist) John Campbell.

The session begins with a heartfelt monologue from John, recounting his own discovery and deep love for “the Dunedin Sound”, as Flying Nun’s iconic output has often been called.

Roger’s dry humour, honesty and humility shine through in the course of the conversation as he tells some fascinating tales from the label’s formative years.

This session was a classic example of Going West at its best. A bright and sunny Titirangi afternoon, a friendly and engaged crowd, two relaxed guests swapping stories and jokes and insights, with the occasional interruption from a feral rooster strutting back and forth past the doors of the Titirangi War Memorial Hall.

Dame Anne Salmond and Moana Maniapoto take to the Going West stage for a kōrero on Salmond’s landmark publication Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds. They discuss the convergence of Te Ao Māori and Western thinking in Aotearoa, helping us to inform our future together.

Salmond’s book explores how lessons from the past can inform our future, providing us new ways of tackling global challenges. It illuminates how the power of transformative thinking, combining Te Ao Māori and Western world views, can bring about a pioneering approach to living in Aotearoa informed by our bicultural past.

In this warm, intelligent and provocative conversation with kindred spirit, musician and documentary filmmaker Moana Maniapoto, Salmond recounts her own life and experiences as a Pākeha academic seeking to better understand and connect to Te Ao Māori. 

The book - and this conversation - pose a significant question: can different worlds converge in Aotearoa? It explores the difficulties, challenges and successes since the first contact between Europeans and Māori, and presents ideas on how the two worlds might successfully build a future together.