FOR SOME MONTHS, MIKE ROBSON from INL had been continually wooing me to join the Evening Post as an eventual replacement for the venerable Nevile Lodge, who wasn’t in good health. In mid 1987 Mike took me to lunch to formally ask for my hand in cartooning matrimony. It was at the Museum Hotel in its former location before they shifted it to make way for Te Papa. Rod Deane had advised me beforehand to ask for an inducement payment and nominated an eye-watering sum. ‘If they really want you, they will pay’ was his mantra. I waited nervously for the right time to drop it into the conversation, but it never came, so I just blurted it out like a burp. Mike went apoplectic with shock and outrage, turning white then purple without making a sound. He was vibrating like a tuning fork at one point. I think the shock waves shifted the Museum Hotel a few centimetres well before the big move. He eventually said yes in a low, strangled croak.
WHEN THE EVENING POST CELEBRATED its one hundred and thirtieth birthday in 1995, the paper’s publishers and senior editors made a fuss, probably because they knew full well that if they waited until it turned 150 it would have been dead for thirteen years. For the big birthday I was asked to write what I especially liked about New Zealand’s largest evening newspaper:
I like the obvious things about the Evening Post—the look and the feel. By rights, being an evening paper, we should be a downmarket tabloid but instead the layout, the graphics, the use of colour and the quality of the writing make it consistently one of the most stylish papers in Australasia.
I like the less obvious things even more. One morning I was at my desk in the illustrations department when one of the photographers arrived breathlessly with colour shots of a body being fished out of Wellington Harbour. Several days earlier, after leaving a nightclub, a young man had gone missing and here he was now, face darkened and belly distended by decomposition, bobbing like a cork just out of reach of a policeman’s gaff. One shot had two attractive young women in a rowing skiff approaching to take a closer look. The angle of the boat, the light on the water and the grim smudge in the bottom corner made it a great composition. And we were short of a good front-page pic that day.
Acting editor Karl du Fresne shook his head. ‘That body has parents who must be fearing the worst by now. I wouldn’t want to see my child as a piece of meat.’
We published a picture of a body wrapped in a sheet on a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance.
The Evening Post is thoughtful without being unctuous, intelligent without being highbrow, careful without being anal retentive, and lively without being gormless.
In 2002 the Dominion—the paper you would have an affair with—and the Evening Post—the paper you would marry—merged to become the imaginatively named Dominion Post. I am still there. It is my intention to be carried out feet first in a simple pine casket. The editors assure me there is no hurry, though they have taken to running a tape measure over me once every three months rather than annually, which used to be the case.
ALMOST INSTANTLY, CARTOONING WAS VASTLY more fun and much easier than writing. For starters, everyone can write but far fewer people can draw. Right away you are a one-eyed man in the land of the blind. But you have to settle for a different relationship with your readers. They spend seconds on a cartoon, while they have to commit five to ten minutes on an article. Cartoons are casual sex, articles are marriage. Woody Allen once wrote that sex without love was a hollow experience, but as hollow experiences went it was one of the best. Cartooning is a hollow experience that is hard to beat.
Every night I would set the alarm for six o’clock, leap out of bed at the first bring-bring, creep downstairs to my office, shut the door quietly and listen to Geoff Robinson on Morning Report, sipping coffee, with a brand-new day all to myself. When I had settled on an idea I left my desk to help Helen make breakfast for the kids and concentrate on my specialist subject: school lunches. (Over the years I have received numerous heartfelt requests from my kids for less elaborate sandwiches and for a week or so, sulking badly, I would oblige with white bread and peanut butter before falling back into my bacon and avocado bad habits.) Back at my desk doing the cartoon, I delighted in the sight of towering Shaun, willowy Jacob and Ned in their Kapiti College uniforms striding down the meadow through waddling ducks and white geese, heading for the school bus at MacKays Crossing with baby brother Sam half-running to keep up with them, their happy laughter floating in the onshore breeze from the Tasman Sea glittering in the distance.
Drawing a daily cartoon is only slightly more onerous than shaving with a dull razor. Part of its charm is that it is so disposable. You can’t luxuriate on your triumphs or brood over your disasters, as they both vanish within 24 hours. Some Monday mornings, standing under a drumming shower, I would think of a week’s worth of drawings in a matter of moments, and if my hand was working well I could dash them off in less than an hour each, which editors over the years suspected and understandably deeply resented. It meant I had more time to work with Helen restoring the house, which Barry and his missus had badly buggered. In the kitchen they had glued red vinyl panelling over beautiful tongue-and-groove timber. In the upstairs bathroom eight different kinds of tiles in eight different sizes and in eight different colours competed for attention. On the landing of the magnificent kauri staircase they had glued hideous mirror squares to the wall—creating a cheap bordello look. They couldn’t be peeled off. I had to destroy several dozen of them with a hammer. Standing precariously on the top of a stepladder, I did the sums. I would have to live seven lifetimes to use all the bad luck I was generating for myself. And it felt like that at times.
IT WASN’T ALL GRIM—the first summer was glorious. We invited all of our friends and their children to a picnic in the grounds. It was like the scene after the grain harvest from one of my favourite films, the Russian masterpiece Burnt by the Sun. And Footrot Flats premiered to great acclaim. When John Barnett rang me somewhat ruefully to say they couldn’t justify the expense of flying me to the Australian premiere because no one had heard of me over there I immediately got on the phone to Bill Darcy and Dennis Grant, who was working in the Canberra Press Gallery, and between them they arranged sufficient radio and press interviews for me to tag along. Murray Ball was relieved. Naturally shy, he was more relaxed when he had me around to joke with and tease unmercifully.
Together we went on Channel 9’s show Midday with Ray Martin. Ray loved the film and commented that New Zealand farm fences had five strands of wire while Australian farm fences had only three—why was this? ‘Our sheep are smarter than your sheep,’ was my response. The audience roared. It was my biggest single contribution to the Anzac spirit since Muldoon borrowed my line about Kiwis migrating to Australia.
Another television crew interviewed us at our hotel on William Street just off Hyde Park. The reporter was blunt, cheerful and matter-of-fact, as only Australians can be. ‘Jesus Christ, mate. What the fuck happened to all your hair? You’ve got shitloads in the publicity stills!’ It was true. Just a few years earlier the photographer Paul Roy was commissioned by Pat Cox to take press stills for the upcoming film. In these I am sporting an afro, albeit thinning at the temples. My hair was going to fall out anyway, but instead of abandoning ship gradually over ten years it walked the plank in eighteen months, accelerated by stress. I was also in one of my fat Elvis periods. Given my unkempt beard and remaining hair it would probably be more accurate to say I was in one of my fat Charles Darwin periods.
One of the consequences of feeling unloved is you become unlovable. Helen and I had been going to relationship counselling in Wellington, which more often than not made for long, frosty drives back to the farm. As Bob Dylan would say, Helen was right from her side, I was right from mine, but we were both just one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind.
Helen began spending more and more time in Wellington, taking sweet little Rosie with her. One day the van wouldn’t start for her. It refused to crash start when I pushed it down the long, sloping driveway. I had to push it some more along Emerald Glen Road. It wasn’t light. It took several more Herculean efforts for me to finally get it up to enough speed to roar into life when Helen slipped it into gear. Gasping for air, I leaned against the driver’s window while she revved the engine.
‘I can’t do this much longer,’ I croaked.
‘Neither can I,’ responded Helen crisply, and drove off. I was speaking metaphorically. She was speaking literally. Not long after that she took the children and moved back into town for good.
I remained at Emerald Glen on my own and prepared it for sale. We had made many improvements to the house, including replacing weatherboards and painting it. It looked a treat. I walked every day to the top of the property where the creek babbled down from the ranges. I sat and looked at the sea in the distance. Through spreading oaks, sinewy gums, slender poplars and gnarly macrocarpa I watched smoke curling up lazily from brick chimneys and knew I would miss it despite being desperately unhappy there at times.
An elegant transplanted English stockbroker zoomed up the drive one day in a Bentley, Audi or BMW (or quite possibly all three), expressing keen interest in purchasing the house. We sold it privately for a considerable capital gain. We were incredibly lucky with the timing. Like every other stockbroker in the world he never saw Black Monday coming—the 19 October 1987 fall of the Dow, when the New York Stock Exchange lost $500 billion in a single day—the biggest fall in its history. A few months later and he would have tramped up the drive with all his worldly possessions in a sugar bag and asked if he could sleep in the barn for free.
Helen bought a large, nicely appointed house in Wilton. Dividing the chattels was easy. Out of guilt I had given Christine everything. Out of exhaustion I did the same with Helen. I was the last of the Mohicans when the moving firm arrived at Emerald Glen with a huge furniture truck to take everything to Helen’s place. They packed it expertly to full capacity and the Māori foreman asked me cautiously where my stuff was. I pointed into my office where books, records, a typewriter, an anglepoise lamp, pens and pencils, original cartoons and clothes were stacked in a modest pile. I said I could handle it and not to worry. He whistled softly and patted my shoulder gently. ‘Geez, tough, bro …’
I followed his truck into Wilton and assembled Rosie’s and Sam’s beds for them as an endless stream of Helen’s friends arrived bearing gifts of maidenhair ferns, quiche and wine. The kids seemed settled and Helen and her friends looked to be having a good time when I walked out to my car and drove off. I was 41 years old, a second-eleven celebrity and everything I owned fitted into the back of my Toyota Corolla. Not for the first time the needle on my self-pity gauge was jammed on full.