Get all your news in one place.
100’s of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
Newsroom.co.nz
Newsroom.co.nz
Lifestyle
Tony Simpson

Self-portrait: Tony Simpson

Our man in Yarra: Tony Simpson on holiday, 2018. All photos by Don Chu

A memoir by the amputated anti-establishment gay social historian with Asperger's

I have always taken the dictum of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci as my credo: “Let your pessimism of analysis be matched by the optimism of your will.”

I could read and write before I went to school.  How that happened I don’t really know but when I went off to school I foolishly and innocently displayed my precocious literary habits. I soon learned to be much more circumspect and from that point and throughout my childhood lived two lives. There was the world of school and adults in which I generally met the requirements upon me, although there were occasional outbreaks of defiance, insolence, and what was described as ‘showing off’ when I couldn’t stand adult foolishness or even outright stupidity any more and showed my hand. As a result I was expelled but by the time I left secondary school I had learned to a very fine point how far you could go without stepping over the line into punishment. 

My other life was in the universe of books where I read what and where I liked, and far in advance of my chronological reading age, particularly seeking out those things we were discouraged from reading or were actually forbidden by some fairly strict censorship laws. This included most of the works of DH Lawrence, and the writings of the Restoration poet John Wilmott.

I often used to wonder from time to time how I had metaphorically got through the restraining fence and into forbidden lands.  Many years later I discovered the answer: I had a form of undiagnosed autism called Asperger’s Syndrome. This curious condition with which perhaps 0.07 percent of the population are born enables those who have it to make connections in the real world of social activity which no-one else can see, and, as in my case to express these connections in fluent written narrative (or in other cases musical or mathematical notation). In children it is an affliction because it earns them a reputation for being a smart alec.  But as an adult it can be a considerable positive advantage.

I could pick and choose my employers, and to leave them whenever I came to dislike or even despise them

The upshot was that I arrived at the end of my university career - despite the vetoing of my original intent to major in history by the then head of History at Canterbury University, Professor Neville Phillips, on the grounds that “I had no future as an historian” – with the beginnings of the ability to write spare and ironic prose sharpened by wit. My hero in that regard was George Orwell who says in his 1946 essay “Why I Write” that good prose is like a window pane – you can see things through it.

*

My first real job was as a radio producer for one of the forerunners of Radio New Zealand. I learned about the superiority of active voice over passive, and later, a capacity for the use of statistical analysis. Throughout this time I continued to write for student magazines, and overseas publications such as the Nation Review in Australia, the New Statesman in the UK. Mostly this writing was informed by the same bolshie attitude which I have always exhibited, and I trust continue to do so.

This of course got me into trouble from time to time and life was made sufficiently uncomfortable for me to quit from broadcasting. I had by now discovered that the ability to make connections and describe them in coherent narrative was a much sought-after skill which allowed me to pick and choose my employers, and to leave them whenever I came to dislike or even despise them. This meant that I was a relatively free agent living by my writing skills.

Glass, full: the author in London

But my broadcasting stint also led to two epiphanies. The first arose from the nature of the documentaries I was making on New Zealand historical topics. What struck me most of all about the people I was interviewing – mostly elderly and usually in their seventies – was the coherence of their accounts of their own lives in which they almost always identified milestones which framed their experience. These usually involved the two world wars (this was the 1970s when there were still quite a lot of WW I veterans and others of their generation still around) bracketing their experience of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the advent of the Savage government, and the creation of the welfare state. What was significant for me in this was the fact that in six years of comprehensive social and political science at the University of Canterbury coupled with some postgraduate study in history in classics and sinology (so much for  Professor Phillips!), no-one had mentioned or drawn upon the sort of popular memory which I was mining for my documentary work.

I became fascinated by this popular folk memory. After I had left broadcasting I landed on what I thought was the appropriate vehicle to present these stories. I had run across the writings of the American oral historian Studs Terkel and it occurred to me that his work Hard Times, an oral history of the Great Depression in the US, could be replicated in similar form here. I knew enough about publishing not to embark on a project without taking it to a publisher first. Almost without exception they poured cold water on the idea.  Some expressed bewilderment at the whole notion of an oral history; they had never heard of such a thing. Others who cottoned on simply dismissed it as an idea which would not find a market as a book. The exception was Alister Taylor who I had approached warily.  I knew about his reputation for being slow to pay his bills because I had written for two magazines he had edited.  But he instantly and enthusiastically ‘got it’, agreed to the project, and I set to work.

The result was my first book The Sugarbag Years published in 1974. From the outset it was universally praised and a runaway hit - a heady experience for a tyro writer. Notwithstanding the gloomy prognostications of the publishers I had approached who turned it down, it sold many thousands of copies, and was taken up eventually by four publishers who continued to sell it in quantities when their predecessors had thought that it had run out of market. Eventually it was continuously in print for some 25 years and made me enough money to purchase my first house.

To then be suddenly immersed for a week in a culture whose first language was not English and who lived a life governed by cultural forms and requirements of which I knew nothing blew several of my fuses

It also established me as a writer - although not one who appealed to the academic history establishment. As far as they were concerned I was an interloper who should not be writing history at all, let alone making the sort of career in popular social, cultural, and political history writing upon which I then embarked and in which I am still engaged some 18 books later. Some of the new school of academic historians, who are no doubt aware of the very strong tradition of popular history writing in the US and Britain, will now concede that my work has some value. But I have always relished my status as an outsider and one way or the other I don’t give a flying fig for the opinion of most academics.

*

My second epiphany was to do with one of my radio documentary programs – an exploration of the reasons why the Māori prophet Rua Kenana was arrested by armed police in his Urewera settlement of Maungapohatu in 1916, to the accompaniment of serious bloodshed on the Māori side (possibly as a result of deliberate provocations by the leaders of the Police expedition). This required me to visit Ruatahuna and to interview some leaders of high mana about this subject. I have since come to understand the impudence of this visit but I was young, had at least the nous to take advice on how I should proceed and, luckily, followed it to the letter.  In retrospect I can see with what kindness the Tuhoe treated this ignorant stranger who had come enquiring all unaware into some very sacred things. And so for whatever reason, instead of telling me to go away they acceded to my request for an interview with a senior rangatira which took me into some astonishing territory of the mind.

The program was, I believe, an interesting and informative one at a time when some Pākehā were beginning to come alive to the fact that New Zealand was home to two cultures - and that the prevailing mythology of New Zealand as “the most successful multi-racial society in the world” was a hollow sham and alibi for what had really happened here in the 19th century and into the present time. The effect on me personally was shattering and life changing.

Consider my situation: a young lad who had grown up in Christchurch where nary a brown face was to seen in the streets and with no friends or contacts in Māoridom. Nor, with a single exception as I grew up, did the Treaty of Waitangi get a mention. The exception was a primary school teacher of Māori descent who on a couple of occasions mentioned injustices arising from its non-observance but I recall that only because it was unusual and he could never in any event be induced to explain further. Coming to Wellington, of course, increased the number of brown faces in the street exponentially but I was still acquainted with few Māori and that superficially. (James K Baxter was much in evidence but although he wrote some fine poetry he was not a Māori, whatever his pretend credentials; I always regarded him as a charlatan when it came to his political causes, and so I gave him a wide berth).

To then be suddenly immersed for a week in a culture whose first language was not English and who lived a life governed by cultural forms and requirements of which I knew nothing blew several of my fuses.  But what did stick with me was here was the other end of the Māori concerns hinted at by that long ago primary school teacher. I returned from Ruatahuna determined to learn more. It wasn’t all that difficult to do so when I set my mind to it; the information I needed was everywhere when you took the trouble to look. And what I discovered was a whole new country living inside the country I lived in and thought I knew about, with its own culture and a history of the relationship between themselves and the Pākehā. Not only that, but the injustices to which my interlocutors in Ruatahuna referred were real, palpable, and remained unresolved.

Since that time I trust my writing has been informed by that knowledge. It has led to two books Te Riri Pākehā: The White Man‘s Anger (1980) and Before Hobson (2015). The former is a straightforward factual account of how Māori came to lose most of their land between 1840 and 1970 which I wrote because I could not find another overall account. I also wrote it while living for some years in London to remind myself of what it meant to be a New Zealander. 

Recently I had the bottom half of my left leg amputated

Before Hobson deals with what I have come to call the Pākehā whakapapa of the Treaty of Waitangi, which is now much more widely known although not everyone is happy with the outcomes of that knowledge. I wrote that book because I thought, and continue to think, that the present orthodox reading of the Treaty lets the authorities and others responsible for inducing Maori to sign it in the first place off much too lightly, when that process is most kindly described as less than honest in its motivations. It is one of history’s most amusing ironies that a document described at the time by Joseph Somes, chairman of the New Zealand Company as “a harmless device for pacifying naked savages” has returned to bite the Pākehā authorities in the bum by way of an insistence that its terms be honoured (something which I heartily endorse).

*

I have been fully aware since I was 15  that I am gay. However until after 1986 I was in the closet to other than my closest friends for the obvious reason that you could go to jail for up to seven years for practising homosexual acts. That notwithstanding I do not regard being gay as defining my identity; my principal identity is that I am an anti-establishment writer. I am with Gore Vidal in that regard. Vidal once said that ‘homosexual’ to him was not a noun but an adjective i.e. a description of a particular sexual preference which although inherent from birth does not of itself define the person.

Tony and his cat Typo

That said, however, it does determine the genre of writing in which I am most at home. Writing fiction would have meant drawing too much on my personal experience and risked revealing myself in a society where it was dangerous to do so. But it also explains in part my stance as an anti-establishment writer. I have no motivation to praise the intolerant and bigoted society which was my experience in growing up here (and hasn’t improved as much as some would like to think), and every reason to point out the hypocrisy of those who condemn or persecute others while being themselves at best the passive beneficiaries of past injustices towards children, towards Maori, towards women, the disabled, kids growing up LGBTQ+ and a general and miscellaneous crowd of the alienated, and the dispossessed. My task is not to comfort the afflicted; my task is to afflict the comfortable.

And so I go on writing, because that is what I do. I hope that it will make a difference, and I try not to let adversity or anything else get in the way of that object. A rather spectacular instance of that occurred in the 1970s when I lost my job in a dust-up with Prime Minister Robert Muldoon (something I described at the time as “going to the stables one day and finding my horse had died in suspicious circumstances”). I decided it was prudent to go and live in London for a while, which I did; while I was there I passed my leisure evenings writing my book Te Riri Pākehā

More recently I have had the bottom half of my left leg amputated because of diabetes. This has not slowed me down. At night when the pain of the notorious ‘phantom foot’ wakes me I use the opportunity to work on a collection of my essays which I hope will be published later this year. As I remarked to the surgeon when we discussed the fate of my leg: “I’m a writer and although I’d rather keep it I don’t need my leg to write.” 

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.