I WANT TO EXPRESS MY gratitude to my writing chums David Young, Murray Bramwell, Greg McGee and Dean Parker for taking the time to read early drafts and offering me prudent and timely advice on the tone and content of this book.
I am indebted to a legion of editors on the New Zealand Listener, the Evening Post, the Auckland Star and the Dominion Post for giving me the freedom to leave my office desk in pursuit of stories I thought worth telling. I am grateful to a small army of sub-editors who took pages and pages of copy coagulated with white-out and fashioned them into useable prose.
I am honoured that Murray Webb and Trace Hodgson, caricaturists whose work I have long admired, have given me permission to reprint their work. I am chuffed the Ball family have consented to the use of Murray’s cartoon of me as a breastfeeding dad.
I thank John Barnett, Pat Cox and Magpie Productions for permitting me to use a fragment of the screenplay Footrot Flats that I co-wrote with Murray, and a cell from the finished film.
I thank my partners in crime, the political journalists Barry Soper, Dennis Grant, Pattrick Smellie, Richard Griffin, Phil Melchior and Mark Sainsbury for refreshing, confirming and correcting where necessary my memory of events.
I thank my daughter-in-law Jessica for the perfect title, and my son Sam for bullying me into using it and for roughing up an indicative layout that proved his point … sigh.
I want to thank Jenny Hellen at Allen & Unwin for gently hounding me until I consented to write this book, then hounding me even more until I finished it, to the point where I’m wondering if perhaps she and Sam are related.
I thank Averil, who never stops believing in me even when all the evidence suggests her faith is misplaced.
Finally, I thank my sweet and funny darling twin sister, Sue, the family historian who drew up the gnarly family tree and collected and collated the few and far between Scott and Ronayne family photos. This small tome will keep her busy for months spotting errors, distortions, falsehoods and wild fabrications, none of which are her fault.
Tom Scott
Wellington
November 2017