Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home (23 page)

‘It was very hard to see who was ahead by the 14th round, wasn't it?' Billy replied after a moment's thought. ‘Actually, there was nothing in it. Ali was so exhausted physically and mentally that he had put his feet down and said, you know, “I'm not fighting. I've had it. I've had it. I've had it.” And there was Angelo Dundee looking at him and then looking across at Joe Frazier sitting across the ring talking to his own guys — and Frazier was stuffed, too, and he was also saying he couldn't go on, that he had had enough. Frazier kept saying, “I'm going to die. I'm going to die.” But Angelo Dundee, the trainer in Ali's corner, is reading Frazier's lips; he knows what Frazier is saying. So he turns back to Ali and he says, “If you just stand up you'll be heavyweight champ of the world — just stand up, that's all it takes.” And he helps Ali up.'

The old coach let a beat go by.

‘So the moral of this story, if you really wanna know, is that you sometimes just have to stand up, sometimes you have to go one more round — and you can be champ.'

What was he reading as the work progressed? That’s what the writer Martin Amis wants to know. All halfway decent books should tell us that, routinely, in the margin or if not at the back, he declares in his memoir. I sort of beg to differ. What the writer was
listening
to, now that’s worth finding out, and I’m dead envious of my friend Garth Cartwright, who gets to release CDs with each of his books revealing to us just that.

As I wind up this work in the wee small hours with the record player turned up very loud — at about the same volume they used to pump the music out at Epuni and tuned to some of the same sounds, too, along with some of the stuff I’ve listened closely to over the two years I’ve spent immersed in writing about the same subject — it occurs to me that some readers might be interested too.

So here it is, a soundtrack for the ghosts of Epuni: Johnny Bristol: ‘Hang On in There, Baby’; James Brown & The Famous Flames: ‘Night Train’; Chicago: ‘Old Days’; The Coasters: ‘Down in Mexico’; DMX: ‘Lord Give Me a Sign’; Deep Purple: ‘Child in Time’; The Fourmyula: ‘Nature’; Jimmy Helms: ‘Gonna Make You an Offer You Can’t Refuse’; Jimi Hendrix: ‘All Along the Watchtower’; Love: ‘Alone Again Or’; The Mountain Goats: ‘Original Air-blue Gown’; The National: ‘Fake Empire’; Freda Payne: ‘Band of Gold’; John Rowles: ‘If I Only Had Time’; The Stylistics: ‘Betcha by Golly Wow’;
Donna Summer: ‘Love to Love You Baby’; The Three Degrees: ‘When Will I See You Again’; T-Rex: ‘Hot Love’; TV on the Radio: ‘Lover’s Day’; Mark Williams: ‘Yesterday Was Just the Beginning of My Life’; Stevie Wonder: ‘Superstition’; The Wrens: ‘Happy’. And where would this book be without an excellent album of the same title by one Randy Newman?

The music was important. Along with the memories of the boxing fights, it helped jog my memory about a certain incident, evoke a voice, conjure up a smell or long-forgotten conversation (the one about Jimi Hendrix being a Maori really did take place just as I described it) about an institution whose inhabitants are in many cases now dead or incarcerated or simply vanished. The understanding reader will appreciate why this makes the subject of residential children’s care so damn challenging to write about for a non-academic readership. The modern journalist’s best friend, the random computer search, sure ain’t no help, either.

Given the oddity of the exercise, it’s probably unsurprising that this book, too, had its origins in an unlikely setting: a Business Roundtable event, of all things, held one evening a few years ago in Wellington. At the function I shared a table with Chris Trotter and Audrey Young, respectively a political commentator and political editor with
The New Zealand Herald
, and for some reason we fell to talking about residential children’s care in New Zealand. The conversation took a personal turn. Between them, Audrey and Chris know a great deal about New Zealand political history, but clearly this was new turf for them. Somebody should write a book about Epuni Boys’ Home, one of them said.
You
should, added the other. I said I’d think about it. A little while later my wife made the same suggestion, at which point I became convinced, and shortly afterwards Random House commissioned the project. You’re holding the result.

Despite my historical connection with the subject, I figured
what would work best would be if I went about assembling the basic material in as detached a manner as possible. There was a practical reason for this. For some time my idea had been to create a sweeping examination at all the various ‘homes’, at least until it became clear that this would require the better part of 20 separate chapters simply to introduce each residence. Much better, it seemed, to concentrate on the one place I knew best and let the wider theme radiate out.

Perhaps it is a mark of whatever modest skills I’ve picked up during nearly a quarter-century in journalism — or more likely a depressing commentary on the assumption that most of the kids who experienced the system first-hand ended up in rather worse shape than your typical workaday reporter — that virtually nobody I dealt with ever thought to ask whether I had any
first-hand
experience of residential children’s care in general or Epuni Boys’ Home in particular. Given that my last book made some mention of Epuni, as well as my having once written about the subject for a national publication — which is to say, it was already a matter of public record for anyone sufficiently moved to research the subject — I was happy to leave it at that. But I also hope that the material I gathered has been used as responsibly as anyone I dealt with might reasonably have expected.

Numerous people assisted in one way or another along the way, and however definitive I try to make a thank-you list, somebody will get missed out, so I apologise in advance for any notable omissions. And I gratefully acknowledge from the start the support of Creative New Zealand.

I was assisted, firstly, by the former wards I spoke with, along with scores of others whom I was unable to meet but who made their case notes available to me. Of particular note: Matiu Baker, Kelly Blomfield, Les Kiriona, Tyrone Marks, Demetrius Panapa, Arthur Taylor and Keith Wiffin. Especially helpful was one-time Epuni
resident Jonathan Foote, whose phenomenal memory of far-off events significantly improved the retelling of several key incidents. My conversations with Jonathan’s brother, Orion, who was never a ward of Epuni but who shares his sibling’s impressive gift of recall (in his case to do with boxing) were also of great assistance.

I am grateful to the Epuni staffers and Social Welfare employees who agreed to be interviewed: Maurie Howe, obviously, but also Audrey Barber, Geoff Comber, Mike Doolan, Gary Hermansson, Lorraine Katterns, Dave Kelsey, Aussie Malcolm, Denis McLeod and Carol Sedgewick, along with several other individuals involved with the operation who, like a number of former wards, asked not to be identified by name.

Over a period of several weeks I spent time at the office of Sonja Cooper, reviewing thousands of pages of case notes from the files of former wards who had agreed in advance to my looking at the material. In addition to Sonja herself, I was helped by two of her offsiders, Sarah Mitchell and Rebecca Parker.

Over at the Care, Claims and Resolution unit of the Ministry of Social Development, Garth Young was unfailingly courteous and prompt in helping me access information from the ministry’s own records and those held by Archives New Zealand. The same, alas, cannot be said for the Ministry of Social Development’s communications division, which was singularly unhelpful and indeed incommunicative.

Simon Edwards and Rosemary McLennan, editors of the
Upper Hutt Leader
and
Hutt News
respectively, allowed me to visit their offices to currycomb and clip articles from the files of their community papers.

A number of other people deserve a shout-out just for giving me a great steer, providing an unexpectedly illuminating tidbit of information or some other act of practical assistance: Michael Bassett, Deborah Coddington, Carolyn Henwood, Warwick
Johnston, Bernard Lagan, Chris Lamers, Stewart Macpherson, Gordon McFadyen, Teresa McLeod, Kathryn McPherson, Wayne Mason, Belinda Milnes, Paul Newrick, Matt Nippert, Janine Pickering, Kara Puketapu, Carol Selwyn, John van den Heuvel, Nick Venter, Denis Welch and Virginia Wilton.

I owe a real debt to the social historians Bronwyn Dalley and Redmer Yska (and Mike Doolan) for offering incredibly helpful pointers for my historical sketch of the children’s residential system, the city of Lower Hutt and the prevailing social and political atmosphere of the 1950s.

Thanks to Nina Fowler, a gifted young journalist who worked for me on some of the early transcriptions and archival research.

Special thanks to Random House publishing director and ace editor Nicola Legat, whom I was fortunate enough to meet as a magazine editor not too long after I began Grub Streeting back in the late 1980s, and with whom I’ve been lucky to work twice now in her capacity as a highly regarded publisher. I’m also grateful to Nicola’s offsider, the company’s literary evangelist Sarah Thornton, and copy-editor Susan Brierley deserves special mention for her tact and editorial eye along with project editor Alexandra Bishop. Once again it was great to have Catherine Griffiths create the book’s cover design.

Helen Bain, an honest friend, respected journalist and inveterate Hutt girl, never lived to see the end result of this project, but we talked about it a lot in the months before her untimely death in December 2009. This book is dedicated to her with much affection and considerable sadness.

Another friend and one-time Hutt Valley resident, Lloyd Jones, encouraged this project from day one, including making time for much jawing together about juvenile offending and (something he is hugely well informed on) boxing. Lloyd is equally inspiring to rap with on the subject of imagination, a theme he explored
with outstanding success in his novel
Mister Pip
. While I never explained this book’s schema to him in as many words, his comments during these sparring sessions helped sharpen my focus, as well as reminding me what a powerful shared experience it was for some of us growing up in the cultural shadow of those old fights.

So, here’s to Ali and Frazier and Foreman and Liston and Norton and Tyson, and all the rest of them too.

Pamela, my wife, sat through more late-night conversations about Epuni Boys’ Home than any one person ever should, and she did so with great enthusiasm and an ongoing commitment to the project. Okay, Pam, so the final bell’s gone now. Wanna take a walk in the park?

This book is based on first-hand reporting, original research, published material and my own experience living at Epuni during the winter of 1975. It is not an authorised account or meant to serve as a work of historical scholarship. The text was not vetted by any outside organisation or individuals. No person I interviewed was given copy approval on how their quotes might be used, although I invited everybody I interviewed to contact me within a reasonable period of time if they had second thoughts about anything that had been discussed on the record. Nobody did. All the main interviews were taped.

In order to get the fullest access to some of the records held by the Ministry of Social Development (MSD), I agreed not to identify by name any former ward whose details I came across in the ministry’s files.

Except where noted, any official and internal correspondence I have quoted from was contained in files made available to me by MSD, Archives New Zealand or else provided in response to requests made under the Official Information Act. In addition, I drew on hundreds of pages of ‘discovered’ material and records relating to some of the abuse cases brought against the MSD, as well as published newspaper reports. Finally, I reviewed virtually all of the annual parliamentary reports on residential children’s
care tabled between 1902 and 1990, and read through all the available annual reports filed by Epuni between 1960 and 1991.

The opening scene of this book is based on my own experience of being admitted to Epuni. Sonny Liston’s fixation with the song ‘Night Train’ has been written about by others, most notably the American writer Nick Tosches in
The Devil and Sonny Liston.

The brevity of my interview with Arthur Taylor — two scheduled interviews with him were cancelled by the prison before we finally managed to speak, and the word to me was to keep it
brief
— made it necessary for me to glean some of his background information from other published sources, most helpfully the profile ‘My wasted years of crime’, by Paul Yandall,
The New Zealand Herald
, September 29, 2001.

The question of how many inmates passed through Epuni and the wider residential system is somewhat stymied by the lack of data on readmissions or multiple admissions to different institutions. Officially, 130,065 admissions were processed nationwide in the 40 years to 1990, roughly 90 per cent of them in the years covered in this book; the Ministry of Social Development gives the number of individual admissions during the same period as 106,985. No overall data exist for Epuni, but working through what statistical analyses and annual reports remain suggests the number of admissions at that institution was at least 8000.

My recreation of a typical day at Epuni Boys’ Home is based on dozens of conversations and emails with former inmates and staff members, reading the relevant departmental manuals and my own memories. To imaginatively retrace the Ali-Frazier fight, I reviewed footage of the event and combed through press reports and other published accounts, in particular Mark Kram’s
Ghosts of Manila
.

Horiana Te Puni’s eulogy was quoted in the
Evening Post
of December 10, 1870; the same edition of the newspaper described the weather conditions on that day.

My account of Lower Hutt in the 1950s relies on a variety of standard accounts while also drawing on my personal knowledge of the region I was born and raised in. I read several accounts of the Mazengarb inquiry, by far the best being Redmer Yska’s
All
Shook Up
. The social historian Bronwyn Dalley’s
Family Matters
presents many of the historical pivots in the evolution of state guardianship that I follow in a more haphazard fashion.

Some of the data I use in relation to the industrial schools first appeared in the lengthy article ‘Our industrial schools: Opinions of the Education Department’,
Evening Post
, September 6, 1900.

For my description of Te Puni’s political and tribal activities, I leaned on Angela Ballara’s useful online entry about the ‘paramount chief’ in the
Dictionary of New Zealand Biography
.

To describe the opening of Epuni Boys’ Home and some of its initial challenges, I drew on archival material and interviews with the individuals identified in this section. Reporter Rita Thomas’s upbeat observations on Epuni were published in the article ‘Time spent in boys home can be a turning point for many young men’,
Evening Post
, December 17, 1969.

My descriptions of Kohitere and Hokio are based on a number of visits I made to these institutions in the late 1970s, including an impromptu three-night stay at Kohitere in 1979. I also drew some of the information I use from the annual reports produced by each of these places.

My description of Ernie Foote’s boxing skills relies on local press reports: ‘Highlight on first night’,
Weekly News
, September 20, 1939; ‘Match for Newtown Cup’,
Evening Post
, June 9, 1938.

To describe the educational challenges at Epuni, I drew on internal memos and the recollections of individuals quoted. Here, as elsewhere, I opted for the standard (mis)spelling of ‘Wanganui’, both for the sake of stylistic consistency and because it was standard usage during the period.

To describe the activities of Vincent Calcinai, I relied on interviews with a number of former colleagues and the recollections of pupils he taught in Epuni, Khandallah and Pipiriki. The description of Calcinai’s time in Pipiriki and Jerusalem, including his friendship with James K. Baxter and his opinions of the place, are drawn from court records and newspaper reports published after his death. Calcinai’s educational resume was in a file I chanced
upon in 2010 at the Ministry of Health.

The issue of sexual problems among some wards was first raised in a July 10, 1963 memo — ‘Sexual misbehaviour’ — from Maurice Howe to the Child Welfare Division’s district office in Lower Hutt.

The line about Sonny Liston dying on the day he was born first appeared in Nick Tosches’ Liston biography.

The scene at Epuni during the screening of
Romeo and Juliet
was described to me by the teacher Dave Kelsey.

The activities of the disgraced doctor Selwyn Leeks have been the subject of a number of media reports published in New Zealand and Australia. Especially helpful here were two articles filed by the Melbourne
Age
reporter William Birnbauer: ‘Anger as
child-shock
doctor avoids scrutiny’, July 23, 2006; ‘“Shock” doctor loses appeal against payout’, March 2, 2008. I interviewed three of Leeks’ former patients, as well as discussing the subject at some length with Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia. Another source of information on the controversial aspects of ECT was Linda Andre’s
Doctors of Deception
.

An account of the bellicose young fatherless elephants appeared in the report ‘An elephant crackup?’, by Charles Sierbert,
The New York Times
, October 8, 2006.

The material I present on autism was first gathered in an interview I did in England with the Cambridge University researcher Simon Baron-Cohen for a report I filed for an American newspaper, ‘Men, empathy and autism’,
The Chronicle of Higher Education
, March 5, 2004.

My account of the armed boys returning to Epuni is based on court reports and several internal memos, an account of the incident prepared for the then Social Welfare minister Lance
Adams-Schneider
, as well as interviews I did with Paul Newrick, one of the policemen dispatched to the scene on the night. I also spoke with a ward then living at the institution. ‘Charlie’ was not the boy’s real name, although the other details are factual.

My account of the breakdown in relations between the institution and its departmental overseers is based on a flurry of internal correspondence, including an October 10, 1972 memo — ‘Deficiencies in the Epuni Boys’ Home’ — from Bernard Baker to Lewis Anderson. The sequence of events culminating in the riot of June 23, 1972 was described by Maurie Howe in an internal report he filed on June 27, 1972, as well as an unsigned document detailing the incident which I obtained from the Ministry of Social Development by way of a request made under the Official Information Act.

My description of Anderson’s loquacious reputation is based on a number of accounts of his administrative style published in a collection of departmental stories and reveries edited by D.J. McDonald,
Working for the Welfare
.

My account of the typical afternoon routine at the Lower Hutt divisional office of what became the Department of Social Welfare is based on my own knowledge gained from having worked at the same office in the late 1970s. The details of the chaotic inspection of Epuni conducted by Elsie Feist appeared in the report she subsequently filed.

The evolution of cellblocks at residential institutions is the subject
of a fact-sheet put together by the Ministry of Social Development. In addition to this, I drew on official accounts of similar practices that appeared in several editions of the annual
Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives
published between 1900 and 1959. My descriptions of the girls’ residences are based on interviews with former residential manager Mike Doolan and a reading of a 1977 departmental report,
Weymouth Girls’ School: A study of what is, with a view to what might be
, by Nicola Atwood.

My account of Ali’s arrival in the Hutt Valley is based on a conversation with Bernard Lagan, who covered the visit for
The Dominion
, a trawl through other newspaper articles and snippets that appeared at the time in
The Dominion, Evening Post
and
Upper Hutt Leader
, and my own recollection of the visit.

The remarks about visiting Maori parents at Epuni were made in a December 19, 1980 memo — ‘Public relations visit to the Epuni Boys’ Home’ — from G.C. Underwood to the assistant director of Wanganui’s Department of Social Welfare.

The official reports and inquiries of note here included the transcription of a public forum held in Auckland on June 11, 1978, convened by a group called the Auckland Committee on Racism and Discrimination; a 135-page independent report looking at the practices and procedures of the children’s institutions, which was released on October 29, 1982; and the department’s 89-page blueprint for reform, titled
New Horizons
, which also appeared in October 1982. Another 70-page report dealing with the Maori perspective on residential care,
Puao-Te-Ata-Tu
(‘day break’), was released in September 1988. For a much fuller discussion of these documents, see Bronwyn Dalley’s
Family Matters
.

A useful summation of Epuni’s relationship with the local community appeared in the article ‘Fear in the neighbourhood’, by Barry Hawkins,
Evening Post
, August 18, 1997.

For my account of Vincent Calcinai’s arrest and the final hours of his life, I interviewed the officer who led the investigation, John van den Heuvel, and drew on a couple of relevant media reports: ‘Awful things at boys’ home’, by Erin McDonald,
Evening Post
, December 27, 1996; ‘Toddler’s HIV anguish’, by Donna Fleming,
New Zealand Woman’s Weekly
, December 23, 1996.

The commentator Matthew Hooten offered his opinion on Sonja Cooper’s firm and the abuse claims it handles in a September 4, 2009 piece in
The National Business Review
entitled ‘The $4.4 million advertisement for legal aid reform’.

Trainer Cus D’Amato’s words about Mike Tyson first appeared in Reg Gutteridge and Norman Giller’s study
Mike Tyson: The release of power
(Harpenden, UK: Leonard Queen Anne Press, 1995).

On the history of boxing as a means of addressing juvenile delinquency, I drew on a couple of published newspaper accounts: ‘Boxing for boys’,
New York Police News
, April 25, 1905; ‘Delinquent boys: Special club formed in Auckland: Encouraging result’,
The Dominion
, October 7, 1940.

Billy Graham’s current work was also the subject of this illuminating news profile by sports writer Nick Venter: ‘Academy of dreams’,
The Dominion Post
, September 16, 2006.