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At the 1997 Going West Festival, author Keri Hulme made a rare public appearance to discuss and read two excerpts from her unpublished novel BAIT, a story of “death and fishing”.
Having New Zealand’s first and notoriously media shy Booker Prize winner at New Zealand’s first literary festival was something our founder Murray Gray had been doggedly pursuing for a number of years.
Hulme eventually acquiesced, appearing on the festival stage for a reading from what was to be her second novel, BAIT. In two engaging excerpts, she carries the audience away to a remote part of the country that’s home to a shifting lagoon, larger than life characters, mystery and whitebait.
BAIT was never published, but her reading is a tantalising taste of what might have been.
Thanks to Bowmore Islay Malt, who sponsored the original session back in 1997; to the executors of Hulme’s estate, who gave their generous permission for us to share this recording; and to Huia Press, Hulme’s publisher, for their support in bringing her words to a new audience.
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Beloved west Auckland poet Serie Barford was nominated in the NZ Book Awards for Sleeping With Stones, traversing oceans of feeling, expressing the tragic loss of her lover.
Michael Steven’s third poetry collection in five years, Night School, won the Kathleen Grattan award. His live delivery of his work embodies judge’s David Eggleton’s comment: “lucid precision”.
On the night, as we recorded these readings live at Going West’s Shifted Ground event in April 2022, Michael and Serie held the audience enthralled with every line. We know they’ll do the same for you.
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Lucy Mackintosh, Richard Shaw and Pita Turei discuss stories of Taranaki and Tāmaki Makaurau, both ancient and personal, with journalist Tania Page.
Lucy’s Shifting Grounds: Deep Histories of Tāmaki Makaurau and Richard’s The Forgotten Coast both discuss – from their Pākeha perspectives – the deeply contested narratives of Aotearoa, and how histories become rewritten over time.
In this engaging, illuminating and at times challenging conversation, they unpack the past with manu kōrero Pita Turei — who brings perspectives grounded in the stories of mana whenua — and Tania Page in the interviewer’s chair.
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Casting lines out into Moana Pasifika and pulling words back to West Auckland, Tongan, Samoan and Pālagi poet Karlo Mila reads from her book The Goddess Muscle and Fijian poet Daren Kamali performs his poetry and accompanies himself on traditional Fijian musical instruments.
These two exceptional performance poets trade poems across the stage of the Glen Eden Playhouse and the imagined waves of Moana Pasifika as part of Going West’s 2021 Gala Night, touching on the personal, the cultural and the political.
The session is introduced by the evening’s MC, Pita Turei.
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A deep dive into the life of Robin Hyde, aka Iris Wilkinson, exploring her contribution to New Zealand literature, her travels, motherhood and her life in Auckland, including her relationships, homes, and the time she spent in Whau Lunatic Asylum (later Carrington Hospital and now the Unitec campus).
Hyde’s story is told by author Paula Morris, with archival photographs curated by Haru Sameshima. In 2020 the two worked together to produce the book Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde.
We apologise for the slightly distorted audio quality of this item.
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From Going West’s second year in 1997, master storyteller Maurice Shadbolt, celebrates the near forgotten lives from New Zealand’s history, and talks of his path to writing history to life, particularly in the context of his novel The Season of the Jew.
Shadbolt, is a major New Zealand writer with an international reputation. He published numerous books and won every major New Zealand literary prize, some multiple times, and sometimes to the chagrin of other writers. His most renowned work is his trilogy on the New Zealand Land Wars. The first book The Season of the Jew, is a semi-fictionalized account of the story of the Māori leader Te Kooti, told from the perspective of one of his pursuers. It explores issues of racism and injustice and is told as a romping read. Shadbolt was one of the few writers of his time to feel at home with the myths, stories, and legends of his own country, and championed bringing those stories to life and to a broad readership.
His home in Titirangi, at 35 Arapito Road, where much of his work was written, is soon to become a writers’ residence and form part of the West Auckland literary landscape, thanks to the mahi of the Shadbolt House Trust, the Waitakere Local Board, and the Waitakere and Auckland Councils. Tino pai rawa atu!
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The magic of weaving poetry and music together is on show in this Going West session from 2017.
Paula Green, poet, anthologist, reviewer and children’s author, with her newly minted honours and awards, shares the stage in a charming conversation with poet, short story writer and academic Bill Manhire, and jazz composer and performer Norman Meehan, as they disclose the alchemy of setting poetic text as song. They discuss their latest collaboration, the riddle project, Tell Me My Name, and along the way Bill Manhire reads two of his poems Frolic and I am quiet when I call.
This session took place the day after Manhire, Meehan and friends delivered a captivating opening night performance, Small Holes in the Silence for the Going West audience.
Paula Green describes Bill Manhire’s poems as ‘music chambers’ and when she asks Norman Meehan to describe the words that characterise their collaborative partnership he replies:
“The first word I would use is ‘work’. I love work... to paraphrase Margaret Mahy, who said stories confer structure upon our lives. I think work confers a kind of structure on our lives, it gives us a still turning-point… So it’s wonderful work... And the other side of it is I suppose, love, or affection… and that permeates everything we do... So I would say ‘work’ and ‘love’… for me they are big themes in life really, they’re our pole stars.”
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Women in Aotearoa New Zealand. Five leading women meet in the 125th year since the 1893 granting of female suffrage in New Zealand. Feminists Fiona Kidman, Sandra Coney, Lizzie Marvelly, and Golriz Ghahraman join Carol Hirschfeld to explore the position of women in Aotearoa now. What’s led us here, what’s changed, what hasn’t, and what’s still to be done?
The session brought together a diverse range of women with a wealth of lived experience. A self-confessed radical feminist and pioneer of the women’s rights movement, a literary legend with more than 30 published books, an Iranian born NZ human rights lawyer and Green MP, an award-winning columnist and campaigner for presenting credible information on sex, sexuality and relationships. Together, they talked with a current affairs maestro on the legacy of female suffrage in New Zealand and what it means to grow up feminist in Aotearoa.
Hirschfeld introduced this 2018 Going West session, in a venue packed to capacity, with the following provocation: “Just a year before Kate Shepphard and her fellow suffragists achieved the vote, the electoral law in New Zealand excluded women from the definition of ‘person’. So, when we cast our minds back, what do you think these suffragists would think about where we’re at, and what we’re proud of”.
The Women Then, Women Now session was inspired by the publication of Women Now: The Legacy of Female Suffrage, which featured essays from Coney, Kidman and Ghahraman; and Marvelley’s That F Word: Growing Up Feminist in Aotearoa.
This podcast contains a brief but explicit discussion of sexual practices
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In 2017, Going West was the first festival to invite award winning journalist Diana Wichtel to talk about her newly published memoir Driving to Treblinka: a long search for a lost father. It would go on to rave reviews, awards and accolades.
It tells the story of her father Ben Wichtel, a Polish Jew who was rounded up by the Nazis but jumped to safety from a train on the way to the Treblinka death camp. But later in life, now a father and husband, he would simply disappear.
As one reviewer said this is a story that “will make all who read it a better human being”. It is an ode to remembering; to never stop fighting against forgetting. Reviewers declared it the best non-fiction book of the year and won both a 2018 Ockham Award for Non-fiction and the E H. McCormack Best First Book Award for Non-fiction.
At Going West, Diana appeared in conversation with her long-time friend, colleague, and fellow writer Steve Braunias.
Steve regards Diana as a writer of genius and considered the book to be something truly exceptional. “Diana knew something of her Dad’s story, and not much more as a little girl growing up in Canada. Her Mum was a Kiwi. The family immigrated to NZ in the 1960s, but Ben stayed behind, and Ben suffered, and Ben became a kind of ghost, alive, then dead, his story barely remembered. That’s the thing about life, it just gets on with it, but history has a way of creeping up on you and making demands, and Driving to Treblinka is a record of Diana’s journey to the past. It’s profoundly moving... It’s beautifully written, it allows for a lot of black comedy, and it’s a wonderfully told story, from a writer who is really without parallel in this country.” -
Appearing at Going West in 2002, Max Cryer talks about New Zealand’s vernacular English and its origins. As he notes, “We live in New Zealand. We speak a language of our own. We think we speak English, but then so do the people in Texas.”
An inimitable lover of language and a writer, columnist, linguist, singer, and entertainer, Max takes the audience a wry tour of our New Zealand English dialect. He tells us why we say cuzzie, kindy and mozzie (hypocorism), why our inflection goes up at the end of our sentences (terminal lift), and why we can’t pronounce ‘colonisation’ correctly (metathesis).
In his decades-long career, Max has been a household name in New Zealand as everything from an entertainer to an expert etymologist. His books on words and phrases are best sellers, some in their second editions including in 2020’s The Godzone Dictionary of favourite New Zealand words and phrases.
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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
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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 bornNine Months No wordsI am not a Play Centre motherSarah Laing reads her short story Afterbirth, from her first published book Coming Up Roses (2007).
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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