Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home (21 page)

Not surprisingly, the 1970s looms as the period from which former state wards dealing with the unit tend to be drawn, with Epuni the most notable among the short-term training residences at issue. (Among the long-term residences, Kohitere and Hokio figure largest.) Which begs the question of why, given their shared sense of righting historical injustice, Garth Young and Sonja Cooper aren’t on the same side?

‘We should be,’ Young agreed. ‘Sonja would say that her motivations are the same things, to get justice and whatever for her clients. And that’s what we’d like to think we’re trying
to do. One of the things we don’t perhaps share the same view on is how to get there.’ He also mentioned another government initiative, the Confidential Listening and Assistance Service, established in 2009 as an additional avenue by which the same goal could be realised.

‘Our view,’ he continued, ‘is a slightly different one in that we don’t see any evidence of systemic or endemic abuse or system failures. We see a system of care, both residential and otherwise, that most of the time worked but obviously some of the time didn’t. So I guess what we’ve tried to do is apply some of the principles of natural justice in that, you know, if there’s information there to support someone’s allegation or claim then we’ll absolutely do the right thing.’ He paused for a moment and laughed, not unkindly. ‘But we’re reasonably confident that one or two came through without being abused.’

The types of ‘client’ Young tends to meet — those who once lived in the likes of Epuni Boys’ Home — often strike him as people who have suffered. ‘I wouldn’t want to say they’re broken individuals but they’ve certainly got some kind of issues — dreadful word, I know — going on. And you know, some are extremely needy, extremely vulnerable. So yes, you’ve got some who are functioning very, very poorly’ — he paused sadly for a moment before brightening — ‘right through to people who are as sane as you and me.’

‘THE PLACE DIDN’T EXIST AS AN ISLAND,’ GARY
Hermansson recently said of Epuni’s continued controversies. ‘It was a piece of society. And if you think about it, the 1950s and 1960s were a steady-as-she-goes kind of time, a conservative environment. The 1970s started to push boundaries. Then, of course, in the 1980s you had all this turmoil around, the market economy and people kind of looking out for themselves. And
Epuni was part of that. It was a building in which people of the time lived. So you had a representation of what was going on in society manifesting itself there, too.’

‘Think about it,’ the Massey professor continued, warming to his theme. ‘Probably the institution lagged behind society a bit, but not by that much. So you might have corporate chaos going on a lot more, and at the same time crime increased, brutality increased. You could argue people had less regard for each other. And some of the mores and norms that we held, you know, the glue to our environment, suddenly started falling away and it became almost like an everyone-for-themselves sort of social mentality.’ The Epuni-related litigation he sees as part of a new social environment in which ‘it’s like, okay, let’s see if we can look backwards and blame whatever for how things may or may not have turned out’.

Tyrone Marks, the former ward who turned his life around in an impressive fashion, took a slightly different view. ‘The bigger picture here is that most of those people who went through the social welfare system are inadequate,’ he said of the residual social aftermath. ‘They left the system with nothing. They had no skills, they had fucking nothing. Their education was held back because the focus wasn’t on education. The focus of these places was on babysitting, basically. Taking these kids who were terribly, you know, dysfunctional, fucking dysfunctional people and their families are dysfunctional as well. And we couldn’t do anything with them so we kept them for years and years, then kicked them out. And what happened then? Nothing. Half the people still can’t even read and write. So how can they look after people? How can they look after their families? How can they sign forms? How can they live in the modern society? That’s the issue.’

Sure. But it is a measure of Epuni’s significance when you see how the institution lives on in nearly
everyone
who intersected
with it, not only so many of the thousands of boys it housed, but also the men and women who worked there and those who created the policies and conditions it operated under — and not least the one individual whose presence hovered above everything the old residence represented.

Conventional wisdom might have had it that Maurie should have been dead in fairly short order after retiring from his life’s work in the mid-1980s. He had, after all, led a more stressful life than most, not only on account of the enormous strain of running Epuni Boys’ Home, but also in struggling over many decades to cope with his wife Margaret’s debilitating manic depression, which only really came to end with her death in 2008. But here he was in 2009, in his 84th year, still managing to play golf on a regular basis (he had only recently cut down from 18 to nine holes), notably quietly spoken and deliberate in his physical movements, but hadn’t he always been?

The only real difference was that the slightly foreboding look he once wore had been replaced by the more benign gaze one sees in the very old, of whom there are many in the sprawling retirement village just outside Hamilton where he now makes his home. The experience of driving into the village is not entirely dissimilar to that of arriving at another institution which once stood nearly 500 kilometres south of Maurie’s current residence.

Late one slate-grey drizzly morning in the winter of 2009, I found my former Epuni chief in his room watching a sports programme on television with the sound turned off. Introductions were made — but no pleasantries exchanged — and he waved me to an easy chair, after which we chatted over a tape-recorder for a couple of hours.

He also seemed content, possibly relieved, to be speaking about Epuni after such a long lay-off from the subject, eager to correct the earlier record of his comments about Calcinai (‘I was completely
let down by his ability to double-cross me’), venture opinion about the recent flood of Epuni-related litigation (‘I get a feeling that there had been a group of them in prison and that they decided that they could get a lot of money’), and brimming with deserved pride over the accomplishments of his own son and daughter, an engineer and travel agent respectively. He hated the way in which the institution he had dedicated his life to improving had acquired such a controversial reputation in his own autumn years.

Asked toward the end of the conversation whether Epuni was a subject he had thought much about in the intervening
quarter-century
, his shoulders slumped for a moment. ‘I think about it a lot — and I do miss it, yes,’ he responded, pausing for a moment, breathing heavily. ‘And sometimes, you know, I curse Epuni, too.’

And Maurie said one other thing. He asked, ‘Do I know you?’

O
n the morning of February 11, 1990, in the Tokyo Dome, at 1:30 in the 10th round, a complete outsider, James ‘Buster' Douglas, threw the devastating four-punch combination —
right-left-right-left
— that put paid to the man and the last of the invincible legends that was Mike Tyson, effectively signalling the end of the last golden era of heavyweight boxing. Tyson never saw the final blow coming. You never do.

I never did. On the day in question I was trying to pay as much attention as I could to what was happening while seated in a cubicle of the
Evening Post
office, knocking back cups of instant coffee and drinking in the sporadic announcements of a sports reporter seated nearby reading aloud from snippets coming through on the wire service. I was half a world away from the action taking place in East Asia, far from guessing that this would be the era's final call and further still from realising this was more or less the same moment when the curtain fell on Epuni Boys' Home.

THE LATE DOUGLAS ADAMS ONCE SAID: ‘ANYTHING
invented before your 15th birthday is the order of nature. That's how it should be. Anything invented between your 15th and 35th birthday is new and exciting, and you might get a career there. Anything invented after that day, however, is against nature and should be prohibited.' I suppose that made Epuni, along with a variety of foster and family homes, health camps and an orphanage, part of the order of my early nature, even though I'm not sure I would describe getting sent there in 1975 by the children's court
as a terrific invention as such. And between my 15th and 35th birthdays, I had another invention, journalism, which at least landed me something of a promised career. By early 1990 I was into my third year working full-time as a newspaper journalist, a career turn that first began six or seven years after Epuni when I started freelancing articles and columns about music, including a long face-to-face interview with the singer Billy Joel that by great good fortune led to the initial job offer.

Joel wasn't my kind of recording artist. Aspects of his background did interest me, though. The Bronx-born performer grew up rough in the neighbourhood of Hicksville, a tough fishing community in Long Island, New York, the son of an immigrant Englishwoman. His father left the family home when he was young, an experience that devastated Joel and blighted periods of his early life with depression. (He briefly committed himself to a mental institution after attempting to take his life.) The boy found a refuge in music. He taught himself to play piano by ear — at the time I interviewed him he still couldn't read sheet music — later using his newly acquired skills to support his mother and sister financially after dropping out of high school. But the passion came at a social price: the kids from the neighbourhood thought it marked Joel as a weakling. In response he took up boxing. He competed successfully on the amateur Golden Gloves circuit for a number of years, winning 22 out of 24 bouts before retiring early after getting his nose broken. By this time nobody from the old neighbourhood was picking on him.

We had been talking about this and other incidents in his life for an hour at an upmarket bar in Auckland when a pretty young woman, his wife Christie Brinkley, came over and sat on Joel's knee. ‘Hey,' Joel said, ‘why don't you come along to the show tonight and sit at the back of the stage?' It sounded like a great idea. That evening I had the time of my life, seated a few feet behind
Joel with his wife and young daughter, taking in the thousands of joyous fans, the warm spring air and a memorably wired two-hour set. The unusually close proximity to the performance gave me a lot of good material to fashion the first halfway decent feature article of my then fitful career.

Exciting times. Soon enough the memory of Epuni dropped away in the rear-view mirror. Perhaps that was just as well. It was a time and experience I never felt proud of, a searing moment lost somewhere between childhood and adulthood, and as far as I could see it was probably best kept there. The fact that heavyweight boxing died a kind of death around the same time no doubt helped, because for me it was always a bit hard to think of one without the other. If my retelling of the story of a boys' home has entailed some necessary blurring between the institution and the sport — hopefully not to the point of total distraction — it's because for me the two remain somehow inextricably intertwined.

Yet in retelling the story, I admit, part of me has striven to be in the thick of the subject while the other has remained somewhat outside the fray. Part of this has to do with approaching the theme journalistically, but, sure, there remains a strong personal ambivalence for me as well. While I'd probably
like
to say that the residential experiment represented a wholesale failure on every front, it has to be acknowledged that it was a genuine attempt, in however misguided and haphazard a form, to create some kind of calmer universe for children and young people who lacked adequate care and protection in their home setting.

What's more, in the 20 or so years that have elapsed since the main story ended, the problems Epuni and others set out to resolve have hardly disappeared, especially those statistically distinctive to Maori. In 2009, the last year for which data was available at the time of writing, 56 Maori children were hospitalised because of violence meted out at home and two of the four children beaten
to death that year were in Maori households. Of the nearly 21,000 substantiated cases of neglect and abuse, 11,003 were Maori, according to government figures. More than half of Maori children during that period lived in ‘whanau care' — with another 16 per cent of Maori children in the care of Maori, but not with whanau.

So, when a friend asked recently if Epuni and Kohitere and Hokio and Kingslea and all the rest of these places were really the worst thing to happen to a good part of a generation of young New Zealanders, I had to think about it for a bit. Yes they were, I said eventually, and no they weren't, and who cares anyway? To a large degree I'm with Geoff Comber, who said this to me about the old system at one point during my initial research: ‘I remember it positively. Those kids were withdrawn, they were away from their troubled homes, their mates, the streets they had inhabited. They were in a closed, confined area, eating food they weren't used to, being looked after. And I wouldn't be surprised if many of them, some I hope, would remember the fair treatment, the care when they got bruised, when they got hurt. That's really all you can hope for.'

True enough. And yes, I share the concern of people like Mike Doolan, who has said he worries about the current system in which so much turns on protecting children from their caregivers — a new moral panic, if you will — rather than firstly encouraging well-trained professionals to get in close and support families deemed to be ‘at risk'. One can only hope that the Whanau Ora initiative might yet strike the right balance, which has for so long eluded the state.

The important point in respect of the Epuni era, it seems to me, is that those residences as they were back then reflected a lack of imagination for all concerned, and imagination is the one thing that a kid most needs to make some sort of reasonable transition to a functional adulthood, and it's what societies need to function
best. This was the real problem, that lack of imagination. This was the real bruise. This was the real theft. This was the thing that took something away from many of the boys that they never quite got back. And this, finally, is probably the reason why Epuni and other institutions like it were often unable to do much more than groom too many of their wards for a life of ongoing institutionalisation.

Epuni is a vivid memory I was pleased to be rid of. Sometimes, though, it all comes back. I might be driving out of Wellington, as I was one evening in late 2010, heading along the northern highway out of the capital, making my way along the foreshore, following the course of the night trains that depart Wellington every half-hour for the Hutt Valley, and for an instant the windscreen mists over with old images. The people. The voices. The drumbeats. I could drive around this place with a blindfold on, but that would be to miss what still remains for me the most important stretch of road.

Compulsively, almost, I'll find myself detouring along Riverside Drive past the multimillion-dollar high-security facility — Little Paremoremo! — now standing in the stead of what was Epuni Boys' Home. The new-style residence caters exclusively to a small number of supposedly hardened-beyond-belief offenders, although the official literature doesn't quite put it that way, preferring instead to describe it as a setting where young people are ‘to be encouraged to take power in dealing with their inappropriate behaviour and staff have a responsibility to develop plans, after consultation, which will encourage young people to achieve positive outcomes'.

Of the earlier institution little architectural trace remains. What used to be there only exists in the minds of the thousands of those who floated through Epuni, a bit like the ghosts of those Shakespearean bouts some of us came of age watching on nights like October 1, 1975. We remember, for instance, the famous line Ali gasped out to sports reporter Mark Kram after the Manila fight, the one about how the two fighters had arrived in
the ring as young champions and left as old men. We especially remember that line. If you only ever heard it once you never forget it because it foreshadows a universal experience: even as we grow old we remain the young people we once were, the only difference between people being how abruptly that revelation takes place and how old they might have been. In this sense, at least for me, I guess boxing provided some of the imaginative inspiration that Epuni otherwise lacked. The only thing I never quite worked out was what it was about the end of that particular fight that so excited that process in me.

ON THIS PARTICULAR RECENT JOURNEY, HOWEVER
, there was an entirely positive and practical reason for dwelling on such weighty cosmic matters. I was out in my old stamping ground to interview another great performer named Billy.

A lord of the rings, as he is sometimes referred to, Billy Graham has probably done more to help disadvantaged boys than all the institutions in the old residential system combined, and what's more, his own background encapsulates every stage of the Epuni story, given that he stayed there on occasion as a kid and worked briefly in it as a young man. Since that time he has established a model of pastoral care for disadvantaged youngsters that, if widely adopted, could put the youth-justice system that remains almost completely out of business.

In this and much else Billy reminds me of Cus D'Amato, the man who saved the souls of the two fighters — Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson — who bestrode both ends of the heavyweight boxing era in which Ali was the centrepiece, the era that chronologically shadowed the Epuni Boys' Home operation.

On the face of it Patterson and Tyson could hardly have been more different. Patterson, a violent, monkishly mannered guy, emerged in the 1950s as the face of the future, the youngest
heavyweight champion of all time (at least until 20-year-old Tyson showed up on the scene a generation later). Yet Patterson was also a character plagued with self-doubt. ‘Freudian Floyd', they used to call him. Once after losing a title fight he snuck out of the stadium like some kid absconding from a correctional facility, zipping out the back door wearing a false beard and glasses as a disguise. Tyson was outwardly very different. Tyson was a blast from the past. At a time when boxers were flamboyantly styling aspects of their promotion after the fashion of professional wrestlers, his typical entrance — black trunks, no socks and old-style boots, with a white towel draped across a pair of shoulders that seemed to go on forever — evoked the flickering black and white films of the great fighters of the early part of last century, the ones Tyson used to stay up night after night watching on the old reels. Self-doubt? Tyson's only psychological issue seemed to be menacing self-confidence.

Yet the route that took Patterson and Tyson to the top was strikingly similar. They grew up in materially impoverished households. They scuffled in the same New York neighbourhoods. They fell into the same wrong company. And they found themselves as teenagers incarcerated in the same state-run boys' home system upon which the New Zealand model was largely based. Most of all, though, when every other form of state-sponsored intervention had failed them, they found a new life and career through the same trainer who rescued both of them from juvenile hall. Indeed, without the intervention, intercession and insight of Cus D'Amato, there might never have been a final golden age in the sport to speak of at all.

‘I knew,' D'Amato once said of Tyson, ‘that a kid who loved pigeons couldn't be all bad. You had to peel away a few layers of mistrust and prejudice left by his tough experience in Brooklyn. But then, underneath all the anger and suspicion, you found this kid wanting and willing to learn. I've had to show him how to
talk to deal with people. Few had ever really bothered to try and converse with him and so he didn't know how to react except in a hostile way. I taught him to talk to people and be nice to them, but warned him about who he trusted. One of his major problems had been one of communicating but, once I got him opening up, I knew that he was not only a helluva fighter but also somebody worthwhile as a human being. And d'you know something, that was just as satisfying and rewarding to me as discovering the kid could fight.'

This sounds a lot like the Billy Graham whom I first encountered a long time ago.

The ‘Mayor of Naenae' was seated at the back of his chambers looking just as I remembered him, a small, compact man with jug ears and an enormously strong presence. ‘I grew up in this town, right against those hills,' he told me, glancing as he spoke toward the elevations surrounding Naenae and Epuni. ‘I set fire to those hills a few times, too, and got into all sorts of other trouble. Like,' he added, ‘finding things before they were lost, which entertained the local cops and everyone else down the neighbourhood.' The coach still chuckles at the childhood memories he often shares with visitors to the boxing gym he runs nowadays for similarly troubled youngsters in his old stomping ground.