Going West Audio

With a cannabis reform referendum planned for September 2020, this 2017 session where journalists Colin Hogg and Russell Brown discuss marijuana legalisation is more relevant than ever.

Interested in how legalisation was playing out in the USA, Colin Hogg hit the road to see what moral decline had descended upon those parts of America where the drug is now legal. 

As high times hit America with laws shifting and attitudes changing, his 2017 book The High Road took readers on an adventure that’s one part Hunter S. Thompson and one part Bill Bryson. Riding shotgun to discuss the book at Going West was journalist Russell Brown, who has written extensively about the issues surrounding cannabis law reform.

The session includes a Q and A discussion on where legalisation might take New Zealand.

Colin Hogg is one of New Zealand's best-known journalists. Hogg grew up in Dunedin and Invercargill where he joined the Southland Times as a cadet reporter. He has written columns about being a man for the New Zealand Woman's Weekly off and on for over 30 years and also worked in television as a writer, producer and occasional presenter and director. The High Road is his ninth book.

Russell Brown is a broadcaster, journalist and web publisher. He was the host of Māori Television’s Media Take, and before that TVNZ’s Media7, and is the founder of the Public Address group blog. He writes regularly about drug policy issues for various publications and was central to breaking the story around predatory meth testing companies whose work resulted in the eviction of many Housing New Zealand tenants. He has been writing and publishing internet content for nearly 25 years.

Business journalist Rod Oram was our Sir Graham Douglas Orator for 2017, and shook off all preconceptions of what he might do by delivering what Metro magazine described as an “impassioned performance” as part of the “opening night of the year”.

This piece is highly poetic and jumps backwards and forwards in time, with extensive quotes from diverse characters from the history of Tāmaki Makaurau. Alongside Rod’s words, the performance includes a soundscape by Rod’s daughter Celeste Oram.

Rod draws on the ideas explored in his book Three Cities: Seeking Hope in the Anthropocene for this piece. In that book he looks at the fundamental changes required in politics, economics and technology in order to sustain the human population in its current habitat: planet Earth.

Rod Oram has over 40 years’ experience as an international business journalist. He has worked for various publications in Europe and North America, including the Financial Times of London. He is a frequent public speaker on business, economics, innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship.

Celeste Oram is a composer whose work explores new media and strategies for composition and annotation. Her work has been performed, recorded and broadcast in Aotearoa, Australia, America and Europe.

With ruthless wit and compelling insights gained as a writer and writing teacher, Paula Morris argues that the skilled use of language is a more powerful ally for writers than ideas or feelings. She draws on persuasive examples of technique grounded in human experience. 

Paula (Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Whātua) is an acclaimed novelist, memoirist, short story writer and creative writing teacher. An insightful and incisive interviewer, she has been the face of the 2020 Auckland Writers Festival and its COVID-19-mandated shift online.

She is a writer of powerful opinion pieces, and the author of the story collection Forbidden Cities (2008); the essay On Coming Home (2015); and seven novels, including Rangatira (2011), fiction winner at both the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Awards and Ngā Kupu Ora Māori Book Awards. Her most recent book is an essay and story collection, False River (2017).

Paula teaches creative writing at the University of Auckland and is the founder of the Academy of New Zealand Literature.

Auckland Museum’s Dina Jezdic invited four contemporary writers and cultural critics to explore - and respond to - the Museum’s documentary heritage collection. Saraid de Silva Cameron, To'asavili Tupiutala, Louise Tu'u and Lucy Zee present their responses which deal with diaspora, distance and culture shocks with both wit and insight.

For the very first session at the very first Going West Festival in 1996, it felt appropriate to open with the original language of Aoteroa, te reo Māori, with a session on Māori oral and written literature called Breathing Words.

We were very proud to bring three stellar Māori voices to the stage to explore important Māori oral and acoustic traditions through te reo and taonga pūoro, and examine how they inform written literature and what ‘literacy’ means in the context of Aotearoa.

Guests for this session were Ngāhuia Te Awekotuku, Robert Sullivan and Bernard Makoare.

Ngāhuia Te Awekotuku (Te Arawa, Tūhoe) is a leading feminist writer, lesbian-rights activist and advocate for Māori sovereignty. She has contributed to many international feminist journals and published both fiction and research-based works internationally.

Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi) is a poet and academic. He is a significant internationally published Māori poet with seven collections of poetry released. His poetry is also widely anthologised. Sullivan's writing explores dimensions of contemporary urban experience, including local racial and social issues. His writing has a postmodern feel, where history and mythology, individual and collective experience, become areas of refined focus. Sullivan’s work has won or been nominated for many awards

Bernard Makoare (Te Waiariki, Te Kai Tutae, Te Rarawa, Ngapuhi-nui-tonu) is a traditionally taught wood carver, taonga pūoro musician and practising artist and designer. His work is a reflection of his heritage, his environments and the importance he places in whanaungatanga and relationships between people, places and significant objects.