Island Life by David Slack

Each Sunday afternoon, after the inmates have watched the old re-runs of the original Star Trek and had their game of Touch, Tim Selwyn opens up the library at Unit 8, Hawkes Bay Prison.

Convicted fraudster, political prisoner, librarian. Some of the best New Zealand blogging you'll read this year is coming from a prison cell.

He wrote recently that the library is a meagre collection, offering fewer than 100 books. There are more, locked in another room, but in the world he describes, most processes are glacial, even the unlocking of a door. Until they can get at the good stuff, they have Wilbur Smith, Readers Digest condensed novels, and 80s paperback fiction to keep them going.

Half of the Stephen Kings have had the last couple of pages torn out of them as well as parts of the covers cut into to provide rigid ends to rolly cigarettes, or "other cigarettes".

Understandably, he hopes readers might like to send him any old books and magazines they can spare. I'm happy to do my bit. I will be sending him copies of Bullshit Backlash and Bleeding Hearts, and - perhaps against my better judgment - I will also be sending copies of Civil War and Other Optimistic Predictions to a man presently incarcerated by the State for sedition. I could inscribe these books with the admonition that they are intended for reading rather than for use as weapons of rioting or as tools for the smoking of prohibited substances, although Comrade Trotter would possibly not object to the notion of my 'intellectually indefensible' little book being dismantled a page at a time and slowly burned.

Knowledge has always had great value. The mediaeval libraries chained their books to the furniture. Affluence, the printing press and falling production costs changed things comprehensively, but not with quite as much as finality as one might hope. A couple of years ago Salinas, California almost became the first city in the United States to completely close down its entire library system. This, in the home of the John Steinbeck Library. Talk about your grapes of wrath growing heavy for the vintage.

Books are our friends, and a prisoner with a book in his hands is your friend too. Every post on Tumeke from prisoner number 60477981 brings a fresh volley of catcalls from 'anonymous" and his/her friends: stop your whining / you should have thought of that before you ripped off the taxpayer, as if the whole dismal experience can be salved by writing about it in a blog.

Amongst the bitter venom and Bomber Bradbury manfully fending it all off, there is the odd visiting voice of wisdom.

'1whoknows' wrote recently:

I'm an educated ex-con….
I got sent to prison for something I didn't do (the "complainant" later recanted entirely and I was booted out without so much as "sorry" from the system).

Prison for those of us not stupid is incredibly boring. Unless you want to talk about drugs and your place in the gang hierarchy it's a total waste of time. I offered to teach other prisoners to read and write. "Regulations" prevented that - I was made to work in the laundry. Because protected prisoners worked in the laundry, other prisoners would deliberately shit their underwear and even their bedsheets to "get at" people.

Violence, or the threat thereof, was a constant companion. In maximum security (Tim is in minimum) I saw one person bashed unconscious and left almost dead a few feet from where I was eating dinner and countless others less seriously bashed.

I saw no one turn their life around after getting out. I saw plenty of people resigned to returning - not those who commit violent crimes, who certainly deserve to return to protect the rest of society (even though we also fail them in not offering rehabilitation) but ordinary people overwhelmed by extraordinary circumstances.

I come here regularly to marvel at the uninformed and contradictory nonsense from that element that see nothing amiss in an opinion that runs along the lines of "prison is a bloody picnic, a holiday home, a hotel... throw more of the bastards in there immediately".

And yes, the other forgotten group in this debate are the "screws". Most I found to be washed out, demoralised and past caring, but also fair and decent. A handful I found truly amazing - dedicated, decent people determined to help those who deserved it, doing a good job in bad circumstances, and as much at the mercy of inept, small-minded prison administrators as those they were meant to guard.

Please send your books and magazines to:
Tim Selwyn
Librarian/Unit 8
Hawkes Bay Prison
Private Bag 1600
Napier, NZ

One afternoon, high on a mountain in the South Island, I almost killed the man who now prosecutes the big murder trials in Wellington.

Writing that gets me as near as my mild-mannered life can take me to “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”.

I am not tortured by the memory, but it did come back to me this past week, firstly as I steered our trusty little rental car across Arthur’s Pass, and again as I read the story of the hapless tourists who came off the road just out of Fox Glacier.

360 degree turns on ice near the top of the Mt Hutt road are full of possibility. One is: keep shoving the car into the bank, and hope it will stick. The other is: steel yourself as you and your fellow passengers look mutely out the windows of the car as it tumbles end over end, down, down, down the sheer drop into ice, rock and snow.

The fact that I am telling you this story and that Grant Burston is keeping evildoers off the streets of Wellington tells you that the car caught the bank.

I drive the South Island roads with respect. I also drive them with enormous pleasure. No tailgaters, no idiots, no crush; God, it’s a treat. And of course, there is the view. As you get down towards glacier country, the landscape and its huge dark looming mountains takes on this sense of otherness. I had not been down there in three decades, and I was expecting to enjoy it, but that word doesn’t come near describing how much we all liked our holiday there.

Rush hour in Blackball was a sight. At 5.00 pm, the proprietor of Blackball Salami climbed into his 4x4 ('salami’ on the licence plate – the only personalised plate I noticed anywhere on the West Coast) and made the long journey down the factory driveway, out onto the street and into the driveway on the other side. Honey I’m home! You wouldn’t believe the traffic today.

We ate like kings at Café Neve in Fox Glacier and you just know I had to have the whitebait. We walked through still air, stood at glacial lakes, climbed up to the conveyor belts of snow. We sat on the beach at Okarito under a perfect blue sky and Mary-Margaret and I skimmed stones over the breaking waves.

We went home each night to a splendid motel and read the Greymouth Evening Star, famous all these years later, at least in my eyes, for its war time editorials. “We have warned Mr Hitler before…”

In an age of bland standardisation, there is still a West Coast flavour to the news. For three weeks, the court in Greymouth had been hearing about a helicopter pilot who landed his vehicle perilously close to the chopper of some bloke who had been carrying on with his missus. Or something like that.

In glacier country, your taxi is a helicopter. This guy had landed his machine in a way that was comparable to bringing your car to a smoking stop alongside another, Dukes of Hazzard style.

The evidence was suffused in testosterone, except perhaps for the witness who Civil Aviation had brought all the way from North Carolina; a plastic surgeon by vocation, an innocent tourist caught in the crossfire. His testimony sounded to be good theatre. He was characterised as “flamboyant”, and prompted “snickering" from the West Coast jurors of Greymouth.

Not guilty.

In Hokitika I walked out along the plank to this guy

and asked him about the little construction on the other side of the river. It was the first whitebaiter’s hut I’d seen with a Sky dish.

Does it work, I asked him?

Oh, yeah. I think he runs it off a car battery.

I said I’d never seen anything like that before.

Yeah, well, it gets pretty fucking boring doing this all day long.

We had a fascinating chat. The season so far was shithouse. Three storms in September had ruined it.

I love them I said.
I don’t like eating them, he said.

He fucking hates DoC. They all fucking hate DoC.

When I realised it could not be evaded any longer and I disclosed my place of residence, he was measured in his response. You’d pay a lot for them up there. He offered me his morning’s catch at 60 dollars a kilo. A bargain.

Even though it’s boring doing it all day long, and even though he doesn’t like eating them and even though he fucking hates DoC, he told me he still likes to see a school come sweeping around the bend and into his net.

It’s a lovely little pastime, he said.

In all the flurry of the political turmoil, you may have missed a little gem. Wammo - who recently moved up from Christchurch's RDU to host a show on the bigger and brighter reincarnation of Kiwi FM - shares a talent with Noelle for relaxing Don Brash into a disarming candour.

Last week, Wammo dug up some old audio and shared it on air with Scoop's Kevin List, who subsequently posted it on their site. You'll find it here

In it, we hear Dr Brash, Love Guru, providing agony aunt advice to anyone having trouble with their sex life. He's an awfully good sport, and it really is very entertaining.

Once a week on RDU breakfast, Wammo and his sidekick Spanky would have a chat with Don. Perhaps it's fair to assume that hosts styling themselves Wammo and Spanky are not going to give you the grilling you'd expect from Sean Plunket and Geoff Robinson. But appearances can be deceptive. Wammo is very well informed, and he has his wits about him. Spanky was mostly doing it for laughs.

They hit on this wheeze of making up letters from their listeners asking about problems as varied as a woman with a preponderance of body hair and "a dude in a wheel chair" having relationship difficulties, and getting the leader of the opposition to weigh in with some advice.

Wammo would lead off with a question about the current account deficit, or preferential funding based on race, and then Spanky would chime in with a letter from a lovelorn listener.

Don had a decent and sympathetic word to offer all of them, and along the way he confided a few turbulent experiences of his own. His upbringing was clearly at least two universes removed from the licentious steaminess of Hot Springs, Arkansas where William Jefferson Clinton came to manhood. But there's no doubt that Don is a man of the world. His reminiscence about a night out with a beauty queen is magnificent. Steve Braunias would never be the same again, to coin a phrase.

All good things must come to an end, though. Wammo is pretty sure that the day Bryan Sinclair came along was the kiss of death. Within a week, the slot was dropped. One can't help pondering what Matthew Hooton would have advised.

And so to Howick yesterday afternoon. I was invited there by Ken Gillingham, a man with a lot on his troubled mind. Ken is the foundation president of Kiwi Bigots For Brash, and erstwhile ardent supporter of Don’s doctrine on things Maori.

That changed on Sunday morning, as Ken was reading his paper. “He’s lost the plot,” he says, stabbing the offending story with a nicotine-ringed finger. “He says there’s no such thing as a full-blooded Maori any more . Christ almighty, can’t he see what that means? How I can we tell any hori jokes if there’s no such thing as a hori?”

“Look at this one” he says, lifting his heavy frame from the La-Z-Boy and lurching across the lounge to the computer. A few taps at the grimy keyboard, and up comes a long file of jokes.

“This one’s a cracker”, he says, “and a smirk snakes its away across his stubbled face. “100,000 people at the funeral for the Maori queen and only five people take time off work! I’ve got a mate who’s a Maori. He didn’t get upset when I told it to him.”

“And look at this! You just type ‘Maori Jokes’ into Google and look at all the stuff you can get.”

how do u put 100 maoris in a mini?
put fish in chip in there
how do you get them out?
tell them they have to pay for it

“Mate, I only got the internet for the nudie pics, but I tell you what, some days I’m too busy pissing myself at the jokes to bother.”

All very interesting, I said, but where did Don come into it?

“Mate, I thought he knew the score. You know and I know that the Maoris are different from the rest of us. Always will be. I’m not complaining. They make good bus drivers and that, except for the Maori overdrive of course - they’re rough as guts on the gearbox. But we all know what One Law For All meant. Maoris were getting more than the rest of us. That just wasn’t on.”

“So I was right behind Don on that one. But now he’s trying to pretend we’re all the same. We’ll he’s dreaming. Never were, never will be.”

Ken’s not an easy man to trade ideas with, but I have a try. Let’s say Don has a point – that cultures are being blended. If you’re half Pakeha and half Maori, does it inevitably follow that you will adopt the Pakeha aspects of your life and abandon the Maori ones?

Ken looks at me quizzically. “Why wouldn’t you?”

Things we can't talk about are all the rage at the moment, so get a load of this shovelful. You'll have to make your way through this first paragraph, though, because mail censorship programs make it quite impossible for me to mention them until we are over the break. To fill the time, let me just say: I thought TVNZ had an unfortunate turn of phrase in one of their marketing releases last week. When you're describing the way your film crew in Tonga will be bringing news of the late king's funeral, is "in-depth coverage" really the best choice of words? I may lack a sense of reverence, but I couldn't help thinking of the uses you might make of those little TV sports action cameras. Two feet, three feet, four feet, down we go. Look out! Here comes the dirt!

Shameful disrespect, I know. But at least I didn't call anyone a slug.

If you found that unedifying, stop now. Things will only get worse from this point. My subject today is the male member. Mr Freud, may we have the first slide, please.

We read today on the Internet, thanks to Boing Boing, that a man in China met with a distressing fate some months ago. He was shorn, in some unspecified - but surely ghastly - accident, of his penis. But all was not lost. You can wait years for a heart or a kidney in most western nations, but in China, it is notoriously easy to lay your hand on a spare part. The surgeons got hold of another Johnson, and they skilfully and successfully attached it to the patient. (Yes, this will be a journey through the lexicon of penis euphemisms.)

Anyway…man and manhood were brought together, and science continued its proud march forward. But science, it appears, counts for not a lot within the sanctity of the bedroom, or the bathroom, or wherever it was that the man and wife of this tale paused to reflect on the foreign presence in their life. They beheld something new and It Was Not Good.

They freaked out; the doctors removed it.

Tell me you didn't flinch a little, men. I regaled this story to the women who were drinking wine here earlier tonight. They speculated about impaired performance. Nerve endings and the like. I believe this is as good an example as you will find of the difference between men and women when it comes to shopping.

Reading that sorry tale got me to thinking about Don Brash, the old goat. That picture of him in Saturday morning's Herald depicting him as a young blade in charge of Trust Bank, with two paternal arms around the shoulders of pretty young models sporting the new tellers' uniforms had a lot to say, much of it about testosterone and this mortal life of ours.

The sad truth, of course, is that if you play, you pay. I have been idly wondering what might happen if this undeniably upstanding and estimable man were inexplicably to surrender to the lusts and impulses of the flesh (which God knows can be a mighty temptation) and find himself in a full-scale Clintonesque bimbo eruption. More scary yet, what if there should be a Bobbit-like denouement?

In other words, suppose he should get himself into the very worst kind of trouble and end up in need of a transplant? We know there's a spare in Beijing. Would he accept it, and if he did, do you think he would make a point of telling all and sundry what part of the world it came from?

We don't want to hear about anyone's testicles, quite frankly, but the notion of a fellow walking around with another man's pecker in their trousers is, it must be said, a thing to ponder. Ian Wishart, it would seem, thinks of little else some days.

A man's pride and his self-esteem can be a fragile flower. Take a look at this video, of a man proposing to his girlfriend in front of several thousand people and being turned down. More instructively, read the comments beneath to see how people responded to it. Men's solidarity can quickly veer to the brutal. The joke, if you want to call it that, is that the whole thing was just an act. The basketball people, like all the other sports enterprises these days, are filling every spare minute at their games with bread and circuses. It leaves people with no empty time for contemplation, and heaven knows we can't have people contemplating.

But if contemplation is your preference, then I recommend this photograph by John Selkirk which appears at Stuff. It has more eloquence than almost anything anyone has written this past week about the people in the frame.