Mr John Clarke

New Zealand is the most beautiful country in the world, as is clearly stated in the UN Charter. (I think it’s in Article 17). The land is nourished by warm sunshine each morning and receives the benediction of good rainfall around lunchtime. It is an egalitarian nation made up of well over four million rugged individualists and naturally gifted sportspeople and is run on alternate days by the government and whoever bought the national infrastructure.

Like Australia, New Zealand was established as a colonial economy by the British. This meant they bought our wool and our meat, although not for our benefit. It was purchased from the farmers by British companies, shipped on British ships and processed in British factories before being sold in British shops in British currency. The money then went into British banks. I think we can probably all see the problem here. The British made more out of New Zealand than the New Zealanders did. This changed slightly in the early 1970s when Britain went into the Common Market. Kids had been doing school projects about this throughout the 1960s but it came as an enormous surprise to the New Zealand government and it has taken them some time to adjust. The principal business in New Zealand used to be sheep but the country has now moved into milk in a big way and if you’d like to enjoy the beautifully clean swift-flowing New Zealand river system, you should make every effort to get out there before the dairy industry gets any more successful. New Zealand also produces a large quantity of fruit, wine, fish, coal, wood pulp, flightless birds, cups of tea, middle-distance runners and other people’s film industries.

Before the British, the Maori people arrived from Hawaii in the year 1273, at about quarter past 4 in the afternoon. There were allegedly people here before that, called the Moriori, and there may have been people even before that. Harry Armitage has been a stock agent up around Raetihi for at least that long and he tells me his father had the pub at Te Karaka.

Like most of the world’s major democracies, New Zealand is run by international capital and a few local big-shots who tickle the till and produce a set of annual accounts in a full range of colours. There is a national parliament in Wellington, which looks like the hats in the Devo clip ‘Whip It’, although very little of any importance has ever occurred there. The country works a lot better during the weekends than it does during the week, there are no states and the senate voted itself out of existence after the Second World War. When the Lower House eventually follows their excellent example, constitutional experts agree the next step will be beers all round.

In 1893, women in New Zealand were the first in the world to get the vote and in more recent times women have had a run as Prime Minister, Opposition Leader, Chief Justice and Governor General. Even the Queen is a woman. The country’s most famous pop singer, best known opera star, most famous short story writer, greatest novelist and most consistent world champion athlete are all women. They’re not allowed in the All Blacks as yet, but don’t be fooled. It’s just a matter of time. New Zealand women are stroppy, imaginative and a major strength in both the Maori and Pakeha cultures. In some New Zealand families, women are practically running things.

During the 1970s, New Zealand was confronted by very serious economic and political crises, although according to police records, there’s some suspicion these were both inside jobs. During that period New Zealand rugby administrators were ex-forwards who looked like spuds in their jackets and when they announced that they were sending an All Black team on a tour to South Africa, there were suggestions it might be time to go and get some new spuds, and maybe some who’d played in the backs. At this stage Nelson Mandela had served about ten of his twenty-seven years in prison and the rest of the world took the radical left-wing position that democracy might be worth a try in the region. New Zealand Prime Minister Norman Kirk went to see the Rugby Union.
‘I’m the Prime Minister’ he explained.
‘Is that right?’ said the spuds. ‘Take a number’.
‘We’d rather you didn’t go to South Africa’ said Norman. ‘It will look like an endorsement of the white supremacist policies of the South African government, to which we are opposed’.
‘So what?’ said the spuds. (I’m summarising a bit here, obviously).
‘So it’s not going to happen’, explained Norman.
The spuds were furious. They saw this action by the government as a direct threat to the way the country was run, and after a smaller Prime Minister had been elected in 1975, the tour went ahead. As a result of New Zealand’s endorsement of the white supremacist South African regime, the Montreal Olympics in 1976 were boycotted by twenty-six African nations.
‘So what?’ said the spuds and the smaller Prime Minister.
And so it was that the return Springbok tour of New Zealand in 1981 was a famous disaster, for the spuds and the government did not have the support of the people and the nation was divided and brother spoke not to brother, nor sister to sister, nor yet generation to generation, each of its kind. And there was a gnashing of teeth and the scribes were thrown into a great confusion and there came a heavy sadness upon the people and upon the land, and upon the face of the deep.

The economic crisis of the 1970s occurred over the issue of debt. Was the New Zealand economy borrowing too much overseas? While this question was being considered by economists, a Debt for Equity Swap was organised by a group called ‘I Just Drove the Getaway Vehicle’. At the time government policy had not yet been out-sourced; we still owned the infrastructure, the power, the gas, the water, the phones, the post office and the national airline. The Bank of New Zealand was still a New Zealand bank and one or two of the newspapers were still owned in the country. During the early 1980s however, the New Zealand economy was put in the hands of finance ministers due to a filing error, and authorities are still looking for the black box. A social democracy with only one previous owner was asset-stripped and replaced by a series of franchises. Even rugby sides stopped being called Canterbury, Wellington, Otago and Auckland and were instead given the names of animals, colours and weather conditions. The next thing anyone knew they’d appointed a currency dealer as Prime Minister and the equities market became a place of worship.

New Zealanders don’t have much trouble working out what they think. It’s the next bit that might need some work. In 1969 I was standing in a pub in a country town in Otago. They’d run out of Speights and we were drinking a beverage produced in the north. The man next to me was deeply unimpressed and made a number of uncharitable statements about the quality of what was on offer.
‘You don’t like it? I said.
'I don’t’ confirmed the man. ‘It’s bloody terrible’ he said. He then thought for a moment and resolved the matter in his mind. ‘This the worst beer I’ve ever tasted’ he said. ‘I’ll be glad when I’ve had enough’.
This probably wasn’t the answer. Complaining about what’s wrong but not taking action, has the same effect as not noticing what’s wrong.

Incidentally, New Zealand remains the most beautiful country in the world. There’s no question about this. You can go to any part of it with confidence, at any time of year, with the possible exception of Hawera at Christmas, Otautau in August and Taihape in a stiff westerly.

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Last weekend in a beautiful area just north of Brisbane, Marcus Craig died, aged 73. Marcus and I worked together in the mid 1970s at a club in Auckland called ‘The Ace of Clubs’, an allegedly sophisticated barn in Cook Street run by Phil Warren. In business terms the stage entertainment was part of a smoke and mirrors argument designed to help obtain a liquor license. As I was leaving one night after the show, a quite small and very drunk patron was engaging in racial abuse and attempting to punch the very large and extremely sober bouncer. The bouncer, who had clearly dealt with sophistication before, grabbed the front of the man’s shirt with one hand and turned it slightly so it became a handle and then he ran the surprised loudmouth about a foot and a half up the wall behind him so his feet were off the ground. ‘Listen mate’ he said softly to the man. ‘If you hit me. And I ever find out about it. I’m going to be fuckin annoyed. Now, go home’. And he left the man to crumple gently on to the ground and consider the position in its many aspects.
Marcus was the main entertainment at the club in those years. He appeared in drag as a character called Diamond Lil, often with the excellent Doug Aston as his partner and a house band led by Doug Smith. When I was there the marvellous Bridgette Allen was also on the bill. Bridgette could sing anything and could still the room to pin-drop or light it up like a Christmas tree. Doug Aston came from a British music hall tradition and often added form and structure to what Marcus was doing. What Marcus most wanted to do was sing opera, so he’d get the drag schtick working and then repay himself with an aria so unrelated to anything else in the show or to the way he looked, that the audience was delighted to find itself somewhere it had never been before.
Aside from being a terrific performer, Doug Aston was a caring and perceptive man who knew Marcus well and looked after him when he struck the occasional iceberg. For Marcus, the club and his work on-stage were life itself. He threw all his energy into it, his timing was fabulous, he was very generous on stage and he could really sing. Danny la Rue and many others specialised in glamorous costume changes and in Danny’s case in representing a cavalcade of great female stars. Marcus simply went out as Lil, with the burners on high and the safety catch off. His costume and demeanour were exaggerated to a point where you wondered whether he was impersonating a female or impersonating a female impersonator. Whatever he was doing, he was very good at it and the audience loved it. I don’t know when it all came to an end but some time during the 90s he moved to Sydney and after a period working at the Australian Opera Company, he moved to Queensland where he had a classical music show on Brisbane radio.
He remembered his days on stage with great fondness and with some pride. He was right to do so.
Shalom Marcus.

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When I was at university the form guide provided to students of the novel was produced by the Cambridge flat-earther, F.R. Leavis, who named the great novelists as George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence and Jane Austen. Lawrence was probably an honest mistake and rehabilitating George Eliot after the Dickens/Thackeray boom was at least courteous but what Conrad was doing in the side no-one knew and selecting Henry James was obviously a cry for help.
It was some time before I returned to reading of any kind and it took decades before I could get near Jane Austen, approaching only at night, through biographies.
During the 1990s, however, many of Austen’s works were adapted for the screen and it was possible to actually respond to them rather than be told what the examiners would be looking for.
The novel I knew best was ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ (Discuss. 30 marks).
In the BBC adaptation it is observed that if the writer’s asides to the reader are removed from a novel, what is left is the plot. Beefing this up and pouring music through it can elevate it slightly but the writer has gone and in the nineteenth century, before the writer was the subject of the novel, the relationship between the writer and the reader is the key part of the arrangement.
In the TV version Elizabeth is beautiful and her mother is a neurotic shrike who insists that her daughters marry the richest men they can find. Elizabeth then marries the richest man she can find, a smouldering stallion she can’t stand until she sees the size of his huge house. In other words we are invited to view Mrs Bennet as a hysterical peabrain with the values of a provincial snob and to imagine somehow that Elizabeth undercuts these values by fulfilling them. This is not terribly ironical and diversionary tactics are employed by the BBC to distract us; extra scenes are added which are not in the novel, such as Darcy peeling off a few laps in his own personal lake and then wuthering off through a Constable landscape.
The main problem here is not the silliness of Cartlandising the story but a misreading of Elizabeth through the removal of the writer. Like Anne Elliot in the more faithful movie adaptation of ‘Persuasion’ beautifully written by Nick Dear, Elizabeth Bennet is not conventionally beautiful any more than Jane Austen was. She is wise and perceptive and she sees folly in idle foreplay, manipulation and dissembling.
In ‘Persuasion,’ the Elliots' house is being rented by an admiral and his wife, who talk to Anne about being at sea together. Jane Austen had two brothers who became admirals and most of the men in ‘Persuasion’ are in the navy, so she knows whereof she speaks. The wife of the admiral tells Anne what it’s like going all over the world together, making a life, charting a course, defining a relationship outside the conventions of English society. Anne listens with keen interest and is persuaded. Like Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, Anne is rather assured, so when she behaves badly or makes a mistake, she does it in spades. Hence the self-knowledge lesson, when it comes, is exemplary.
The movie ‘Clueless’ catches this better than the film version of ‘Emma’, the novel on which it is based, because it doesn’t mistake film for a visual medium and it concentrates on the language of the central character and narrator. So we hear the mockery, the fun, the difference between what is said and what we see. In the BBC ‘Pride and Prejudice’ there is no narrator, no irony, no Austen. And to save you the trouble of reading Leavis, it’s not the stories; it’s the way you tell them.

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In 1976 I was in the vaudeville business. The odds against this were fairly high. It wasn’t what I’d set out to do and I dropped stones all the way in so I could find my way back out.
Fred Dagg was working nicely on television but the going rate for two minutes of heroically underprepared material wasn’t sufficient to trouble the scorer, despite having doubled from a base of $38 in 1974. In order to make a living it was necessary to tour the country, take in washing and live on what my father called ‘a glass of water and a look up the street’. One night after a high quality workout at a cabaret in Auckland, I got talking to Bob Hudson, a boy of about the same age who’d been in the audience. Bob was from Sydney and had just had an enormous hit across Australia with ‘The Newcastle Song,’ an ironical tribute to the city of his youth. We were both dealing with the Micawberish aspects of being writer/performers and we agreed to meet up again in Wellington the following week. Helen and I were considering moving our base from Wellington to Auckland at the time and we spent a couple of days driving around the beautiful Waitakeres imagining ourselves somewhere up there, in the bush.

When we got back to Wellington, Bob and I had various things to do and we arranged to meet after I’d finished doing a record and book signing at James Smith’s. This was to be done in character so I was dressed in a black singlet and shorts, fashionable footwear of the period and a hat. Fred had a discerning audience of all ages and a large lunch-time crowd had gathered in the great emporium. After a while I noticed that Bob had found the place and it all seemed to be going gangbusters when the police arrived. Three policemen walked purposefully up past the queue of waiting citizens and directly to where I was sitting. ‘John Clarke?’ said one, a born leader of men.
‘Yes’ I said.
‘Step outside please’ and they waited for me to stand up, put down the tools of my trade and join them on a very public and completely silent walk out into the street. The population of Wellington quickly poured into Manners Street and watched as I was taken, in full costume, to a police vehicle for questioning. I’m pretty sure the crowd would have ruled out the prospect that I was a murderer. They were probably tossing up between sex crimes with small animals and some sort of tax fraud, possibly involving the $38.
‘You are John Clarke’ checked one of the policemen.
‘Yes’ I said.
‘Thought so’ he said.
‘What’s this about?’ I asked. ‘I’m actually supposed to be in there doing a signing.'
'Are you the owner of a red Mazda car, registration number HRV683?'
'Yes'
'Can you explain why your vehicle was seen last week in the Titirangi area driving very slowly and sometimes stopping in gateways and looking up driveways?'
'Yes’ I said. ‘I was driving around Titirangi last week'
'Were you driving slowly?'
'Yes, we were looking at houses’.
‘Your vehicle was seen in that area at that time'
'Yes. That would be right. That’s where it was'
'The vehicle was reported as behaving suspiciously.'
'Suspiciously?'
'Yes'
'Who says?'
'The person who reported it. The vehicle was reported as behaving in a suspicious manner.'
'Couldn’t you have rung me or written me a letter about this?'
'We read in the paper that you’d be here today so we thought it’d be a good time to pop down and clear this up.'
'Do you mind if I go back inside now and do what I came here for?'
'No, that’s fine. Just checking. Thank you Mr Clarke'
I went back into the store and completed the signing, explaining to people that my vehicle had been behaving suspiciously the previous week in Titirangi.
I never heard any more on the matter.

Bob Hudson, who tells this story rather well but who requires oxygen around the bit where the police haul me out of the signing and question me in the street, had a radio show on what was then 2JJ in Sydney and had been playing stuff from the Fred Dagg records, so when I was looking at working in Australia I found that he’d made me quite well known. A very smart and kind person, Bob has also given me very good advice a couple of times and he and his wife Kerry opened their house to Helen and me when I knew no-one else in Sydney and didn’t know what I was doing. We worked together on various projects, notably writing material for Bette Midler’s stage show. Bob later completed a PhD in Archaeology and now works at Sydney University, specialising in the medieval Buddhist period in Burma.

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