I DIDN’T travel outside of Hawke’s Bay, win Lotto, or change jobs to something higher paying and more in line with my skills and dreams, and I only ticked off 6/10 of my goals for the year.
I DID catch Covid, albeit thankfully all but asymptomatically, made more money here and there, and did some things I wanted to do and bought some things I wanted to get.
It wasn’t a fantastic year, but it wasn’t terrible either.
So here are some of my highlights, events and thoughts from 2022:
Loveliest moment of 2022: Planting Harakeke with my daughter.
As part of my job I’ve gotten to volunteer to go out once a year with a primary school for Conservation Week. We go on a bushwalk at Hawke’s Bay’s White Pine Bush, then do a tour of the Guthrie Smith Arboretum at Tutira and plant some native flora there.
I’ve done this with my old school, Tamatea Primary and, this year, when I saw my daughter’s school on the list I offered to go with them. A week later (without telling her what I was doing at work) my daughter said we had to give permission for her to go on a field trip. “Oh, where?” we asked. “To White Pine Bush and Tutira” she replied.
She seemed happy that I was coming along, but I was expressly “forbidden from embarrassing her on the trip”! (she still has a lot to learn about parenting) and on the day I sat on a different part of the bus to her and her friends, but I was allowed to help chaperone her group on the bushwalks.
The penultimate event before heading home is the plantings, and she wanted me to help her plant her harakeke – NZ Flax, which I did, then we planted another spare flax and I took a selfie of us to commemorate the occasion. I loved it!
A Year of Constructive Confidence…
I got to make lots of stuff this year, stuff I had wanted to make for a while, stuff I’d only dreamed of making, and other stuff I just did to prove to myself that I could.
Finally, a-semi spur-of-the-moment idea resulted in a fantastic looking “Beached Spitfire” diorama and involved my first experience using clear casting resin and making gel waves.
I was fortunate that (almost) all the models I built this year went together so well – It was a boost to my confidence in using known and new skills in creating cool stuff!
Bay Buzz has been able to employ a number of journalists in the last few years under the Public Interest Journalism fund, which is great for keeping multiple sets of investigative eyes regularly focusing on and writing about Hawke’s Bay regional issues which NZ’s commercial media networks have failed to do over recent decades. But I have still missed being involved and getting commissioned to write more.
I still appear to be persona non grata with Radio NZ and still don’t know why and, as for local commercial network media, it can’t be long before our regional paper becomes a couple Hawke’s Bay pages in the NZ Herald and local airwaves regurgitate Jono and Ben 24/7 across the country. Spare us!
I have kept writing, too. If for no other reason than my own entertainment, or to keep myself sane and not feel like I’m just completely, continually screaming into the void.
And I do still seem to be pretty good and capable at it:
I think I only saw three movies at the cinema this year – Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, Top Gun: Maverick and Thor: Love and Thunder.
Doctor Strange and Thor both had their good points – I got to see Love and Thunder in a cinema all to myself, after taking an afternoon off work to see it, and the Guns n’ Roses soundtrack throughout was gloriously nostalgic – But were reasonably cookie-cutter Marvel fare overall.
Sitting in the darkening cinema as the opening credits started rolling for Top Gun I wondered for a second if the whole movie was just going to be the 1986 original remastered and played in full as the Top Gun Anthem again crescendoed into Kenny Loggins’ epic and timeless “Danger Zone”.. Until F/A-18 Hornets and F-35 Lightning IIs rolled through the carrier deck steam.
The movie was great, and packed with yet more nostalgia, but also more emotionally mature themes – Pete “Maverick” Mitchell had grown, as had his original audience, but still held some old scars and memories, as did his audience.
A scene I loved was where Pete and his old flame and love interest in the movie, Jennifer Connelly’s ‘Penny Benjamin’ are getting intimate when Penny’s teenaged daughter (from a previous, non-Maverick, relationship) comes home unexpectedly.
Pete and Penny are nervous and embarrassed, not wanting her daughter to learn about the rekindling of their relationship, Penny makes Maverick sneak out her first-floor window like a teenager, comically slipping and falling off the roof. He stands up, dusts himself off and come’s face to face with Penny’s daughter – The audience laughs – Busted!
The daughter, stone faced, tells Mitchell “don’t break her heart again” and the laughing stops dead because the audience has been there, too, since 1986.
But, yes, awesome flying scenes, CGI, explosions and a fair chunk of heart also helped make Top Gun: Maverick my movie of the 2022.
Mood of the Year: S.A.D.
Hawke’s Bay saw one of its wettest winters on record in 2022.
Not that it was completely a bad thing – I remember “proper” wet winters growing up in the 80s and, by comparison we’ve had insanely dry years over the past decade where it rained in April and that was it until October, turning Central Hawke’s Bay hills peroxide blonde by November, and outright dead and dirt brown by February, so rain wasn’t altogether unwelcome.
But rain for days and weeks on end made many people sad, or even S.A.D.
Not to be confused with “Unhappy”, though the two can go hand-in-hand, Seasonal Affective Disorder is a form of depression that is often triggered by a change of the seasons, usually in, or towards the winter months.
And in 2022 the winter months just seemed to go on, and on, and on.
Days and weeks of persistent (rather than heavy) rain disrupted events, canceled sports and ruined thousands of plans.
It was the last thing we needed after thinking we had recovered sufficiently from Covid for normal life and events to largely recommence.
All the while the skies remained a morose overcast grey and rain continued to drizzle and drip, dragging the “winter blues” into spring and summer as well.
Score of the year: A Kane Williamson SignedCricket Bat!
I bought myself a Funko Pop! figure of Indian cricketer Virat Kohli for my birthday this year.
Well, I actually bought TWO.
They were on special at EB Games in Napier for only $15 each, and one’s box was a bit smushed so, in the spirit of my “Year of Creativity” I bought a second one intending to put it into a cricketing diorama of some sort, like I’d done with a Marty McFly Pop! recreating a scene from Back to the Future a couple years ago:
But before I even did the diorama, I made another creative change.
Looking at the figure I realised it wouldn’t take too much to change India’s cricket captain into New Zealand’s captain, Kane Williamson!
They both have similar hairstyles and beards and are both renowned batsmen, so it wouldn’t take much to change one to the other with some paint and finer details.
So that’s exactly what I did!
Other than repainting the head, hair and body the other changes I made were adding Gray-Nicolls stickers to Kane’s bat to make it look like his current NOVA blade and using 1/72 scale model aircraft decals for his shirt number (22) and “New Zealand” branding.
I was happy with the prototype and hoped to show it to and get it signed by the man himself when Napier got its sole men’s international game for the season but, sadly, captain Kane had other plans.
Never mind. I ended up being busy with work and other projects, and the Pop! went on display in my house.
Coincidently I entered a competition to win a signed Kane Williamson bat through Auckland’s Players’ Sports on Instagram a few weeks later..
AND WON IT!
It was a great, fortuitous way to finish off the year!
Now I just have to figure out what sort of display case I’m going to design and make for this full-sized cricket bat in 2023!
Here’s hoping your 2023 is creative, fortuitous and supportive, and thanks for reading Napier in Frame in 2022!
Ever since the 1986 blockbuster Top Gun catapulted Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, Nick “Goose” Bradshaw and their Grumman F14 Tomcat off the deck of an aircraft carrier and into action film folklore with Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone blaring through the speakers I have loved the movie and, especially, the F-14 Tomcat.
With twin engines, twin seats, and variable-sweep wings (they move – “Swing” in and out: Out-stretched for slower and more stable take-offs and landings; Swept back, like an arrow for getting places faster than the speed of sound), in my opinion, the Tomcat remains one of the sexiest pieces of aeronautical jet engineering ever.
Undeniably the coolest scene in Top Gun is in the opening minutes when Tom Cruise’s Maverick flips his F14 Tomcat upside down and flies very close to scare off the newly discovered “MiG 28” enemy fighter jet that is locked onto, and has spooked, his wing-man Cougar.
I took my time building it slowly and carefully, not wanting to make any errors. It came together really easily and well! There were no problems from construction to painting.
I even masked and painted canopy lines for the first time ever, with the results far better than I had expected!
The decals went on without issue and, again for the first time, I sprayed clear coat over the plane to seal them and stop the decal insignia from eventually flaking off like has happened on a few of my older kits.
I even painted the figures with colored helmets to resemble Mav’ and Goose, tilting their heads back with pliers to look like they are looking (up/) down on the MiG’s pilot.
The continuity in Top Gun’s opening dog fight scene flips and flops a bit – The plane that Maverick sneaks up on is rather clearly a single-seat E variant from the distant shots:
But then, seconds later, as the inverted Tomcat and the “MiG” are almost canopy-to-canopy, the MiG has miraculously morphed into a twin-seat F-5F!
(We’ll forgive them – It was the 80s and lots of movies that tried to replicate Top Gun’s aesthetic made far worse errors – At least Tony Scott had the same model of plane…)
Try as I might, I was unable to find an Italeri F-5F – the ideal twin-seat kit for what I wanted, but I was able to get a single-seat “MiG 28” from Twitter friend Justin Ryan who had ordered some kits from Japan and kindly added a Hobby Boss F-5E kit to his order for me.
Once again, an easy uncomplicated build, paint and marking job had two elements of my dream diorama all set.
Now for the diorama itself!
I had seen a couple model recreations of the “inverted” scene online that used clear plastic rods as the supports for the planes, with the rods drilled into a wooden base and heated and curved up and around before slotting into the planes’ jet exhausts to give them a near-horizontal (the rods inevitably drooped under the weight of the planes along the long length of the acrylic rods), mid-air appearance.
But these displays were all open and uncovered – A disaster waiting to happen when it came to dusting, which they would inevitably need in short order.
So I started thinking of covered alternatives.
Boxes were too cumbersome and framing could block some angles of view or wreck the illusion of flight that in was trying to replicate.
So I considered a clear plastic tube, or perhaps the whole thing in clear plastic!
In Napier we have a plastic fabricating company called Classique Plastics who I previously used for the clear sheet on the front of my recycled Rimu Pint Sized Hero display case.
When I went to scope my.plans out they happened to have a cut-off of the exact diameter and length of clear tube I was after already in their stocks!
I asked for them to make an all-acrylic display I had planned amd sketched out, but they ended up being very busy with commercial jobs and after a few weeks I decided I wanted to try something different, as i was uncertain the plastic rods would hold the weight of the planes as I had imagined.
So I designed something more multi-media.
I bought a slightly longer than originally planned length of clear plastic tube from Classique (this alone was over $100, so I dread to think how much the whole thing in clear acrylic would have cost!) and went in search of some round Rimu and stainless steel rods.
I got recycled Rimu floorboard “plug” ends made to fit on a CNC machine by local woodworkers Stim Craftmanship.
I had one edge of the round Rimu trimmed flat so the display could stand by itself without rolling everywhere.
Then I took one of the plug ends to my father-in-law’s workshop and very carefully measured and drilled holes for the stainless steel support rods to fit into, making sure they would be close enough together to replicate the inverted scene from the movie, but not so close that the planes touched.
The results were pretty neat perfect:
I’ve been fortunate this year to have a very successful streak of crafty creations.
Aside from a few speed bumps along the way with this project everything went exceptionally well and i am really happy with the result!
As usual, I went to my local hobby shop, Cool Toys, who have a fantastic range of radio-controlled kits and ready-to-run vehicles.
After watching far too many YouTube videos I decided to get a Tamiya TT-02 kit, as it is very adaptable to different forms of bodies and on-road and off-road formats.
I must say I was still quite intimidated when I opened the box and was confronted with numerous bags of screws, multiple sprues of parts and an instruction manual the size of a novella.
The first part of the kit I made were the shock absorbers.
I had been tempted to get oil-filled performance shocks but decided to start off easily (and cheaply – Oil-filled shocks are over $100 for a set of four). They were also an easy part of the kit to build and give a sense of the kit’s construction being well under way.
(This wouldn’t ACTUALLY be the case until I started on the drivetrain.)
Gears, grease, screws and repeat, gears, grease, screws and repeat!
This is one of the parts of the build I feared stuffing up the most, as it appeared so fiddly.
As we know, however, appearances can be deceiving, and everything seemed to fit together without too much hassle, stress, blood or hair loss.
Next the motor went in (and out a couple times later on testing out the wheels), and the gear housings covered up all the greased-up bits.
The shocks I made up first off were no longer held in suspension (see what I did there?) as they were finally attached to the wheel assemblies on either end.
Universal joints and drive shafts will also provide power to all four corners of my RC beastie!
Giving the car some direction was next.
Steering set up was another rather intimidatingly technical bit, not least because I had heard and read several times about over-tightening screws de-threading softer plastic parts, so there was some added caution in this part of construction.
I think I got it all Goldilocks – I.e. not too loose, not too tight, JUST RIGHT!
On went the wheels (the smell of Tamiya rubber tyres has always been intoxicating!) and we were pretty much done! (after disassembling and reassembling half the bloody drive assembly because I unknowingly had the driveshaft and wheel bearings around the wrong way until trying, unsuccessfully, to fit the rims on..)
With the steering servo connected up It was time to give the chassis some cover and curves.
The kit I chose came with a 1998 Ford Escort shell.
After buying the special curved polycarbonate scissors from Cool Toys I carefully cut around the exterior of the body shell to get it the right shape.
This body came with the wheel arches pre-cut, which made life easier, and the kit look smoother than my later work on the other body I bought.
After masking up the windows (also one of the more stressful parts of the build – you don’t want to get this far then ruin its appearance!) I sprayed the body (you spray the INSIDE of these models – the plastic body helps shield the finished paintwork) in four coats of Tamiya PS16 Metallic Blue giving it a similar color to the Subaru Impreza WRC rally car of the same era.
I managed to avoid any paint bleed under the masking and once that and the outer coating were peeled off and decals were added to the outside of the body the results were STUNNING!
I sprayed the windows in Tamiya PS31 Smoke to help hide the electronics inside the car.
One of the underlying reasons I chose the Escort and painted it in metallic blue is that my first long-term car (my very first car was a Ford Anglia that Dad and I partially restored in my last year of high school until it died of rear crossmember rust about a year later) was a metallic blue 1983 Ford Laser – kind of the Escort’s Mum/Dad.
It was an awesome, incredibly reliable car that served me really well, so I built this kit as a homage to that Laser.
I even used a label maker to recreate its number plate!
Is it a Bird? Is it a Plane? Not it’s V8 Supercar!
While scoping out my RC car purchase, I noted that Glen at Cool Toys had a Tamiya TT-02 Ford Mustang body shell and an after-market sticker sheet with the livery for Dick Johnson Racing modern Kiwi legend Scott McLaughlin‘s Australian V8 Supercar:
Despite being a fan of DJR arch-rivals Holden Racing Team from back in the Peter Brock and Mark Skaife days I couldn’t resist – I had to have a go at replicating the awesome looking DJR Mustang!
So, once I had completed the Escort, I moved onto the more complex task of cutting out, masking and painting (, and masking and painting, and masking and painting) Tamiya PS1 White, PS2 Red, PS6 Yellow and PS31 Smoke onto the Mustang to give it DJR’s iconic three-tone paint scheme.
With several coats, different colors, respraying, decalling and a few whoopsies I was finally able to make a realistic recreation that looked pretty bloody awesome if I do say so myself (just don’t look at the back of it..)!
Final Thoughts
Over-all this was a really easy, enjoyable experience with almost everything going right!
If anything the one big downside of the build is that I’m really annoyed at and disappointed in myself that my fear of inability kept me from building one of these kits a lot earlier in life!
(This is probably moot, though, as it wasn’t until recently that I had anywhere near the disposable income to afford making one.)
My Twitter friend Justin Ryan very kindly donated a hand controller and receiver he had spare to help get me going, so now I just have to get a nickel metal hydride battery, and I can start burning RC rubber!
MASK, or “Mobile Armored Strike Kommand” (sic) was an American toy line and kids’ cartoon series that began in 1985 and featured regular-looking vehicles that transformed into fighter planes, helicopters, boats, submarines and other types of offensive and defensive mobile weapon platforms.
It was very cool and very popular!
I was fortunate enough to collect several of them over the years, mainly on birthdays and Christmases (I got Rhino for Christmas in 1985 or 86), eventually holding onto four that I liked the most:
Condor – The smallest, cheapest and first MASK toy I got turns from a cool green motorcycle into an even cooler mini helicopter!
Thunderhawk – Quite possibly the coolest, Thunderhawk was the “hero vehicle” of the series and the prime vehicle of MASK leader Matt Trakker
Jackhammer – The only VENOM (Vicious Evil Network of Mayhem), “baddie” vehicle I got, but also one of the coolest looking, being a black Ford Bronco 4X4. I got this for my 8th birthday.
And finally, the biggest and best:
Rhino – MASK’s big-rig mobile command vehicle. Huge, with lots of chrome, buttons and spring-loaded features!
While they were very cool and I loved them, they had also spent the better part of 30 years in boxes in various wardrobes, seldom seeing the light of day, which was a shame because they should be out being appreciated and enjoyed.
I decided my MASK toys deserved that and, maybe, the money I made from selling them could help finance my new radio-controlled car goal, so I shared some pictures of them on an 80s Toys Facebook group I belong to and, from the reactions listed all four of them on Trademe.
With starting prices amounting to around $250 (not unreasonable given their age, rarity and great condition – I loved and looked after my toys) I was stunned to earn over double that when the auctions ended!
All the toys were ultimately bought by the same bidder, so it was good to be able to keep them all together in their new home.
With the money raised I had enough to buy the Tamiya RC car I desired!
Napier’s “Broadcasting House”, now renamed for current tenants NZME. Bay City Radio occupied the top floor. The studio I did the kids’ show in was the windows directly above the main ground floor door.
Or even volunteering at Radio Kidnappers Access Radio while in high school.
In August 1984 I got to be the “Co-Pilot” on Bay City Radio’s Sunday morning kids’ show.
Bay City Radio 1278AM was THE local radio station for Hawke’s Bay for years and years. This is back when radio was broadcast locally, the announcers were locals (and some became minor local celebrities) and its constant focus was the local community.
There was a weekday breakfast show, talkback radio from about 9am until midday, with music in the afternoon and evenings.
On Saturday mornings all the upcoming local sporting fixtures for the weekend were promoted or dissected and commentary of big games, like the HB Magpies playing at McLean Park were often broadcast live in the afternoons.
On Sunday mornings there was a kids’ show, which had a local kid as co-host, or “Co-Pilot” (I don’t remember pressing any buttons, or taking charge of any controls, though.)
The Tamatea Hawks! I’m middle, back row (as always) Robert Stewart is to the left of me with the rounded collar. That’s his Dad, the radio announcer who coached us that year.
My friend Robert Stewart’s dad worked at Bay City Radio for a bit (they moved away not long after) and I though radio was pretty cool – I listened to the kids’ show every week, so must have written in, like so many others, asking to be part of it and I got selected.
I remember excitedly reading the letter we received confirming my selection in the driveway of our home one Saturday morning.
There was a few weeks’ notice of my appearance on the show, but I don’t remember much more than that, or the events of the big day itself.
Dad took me to the station early on Sunday morning (it was after dawn, but not by much), while Mum stayed at home and recorded the event on a cassette tape (kids, if you don’t know what one of these is, ask your parents…. Actually, you might be best asking your grandparents.)
I had found the tape when I was clearing out things at Mum and Dad’s place years ago but more recently looking through the mementos in my shed, I couldn’t find it and thought the tape was lost to the ages.
A couple weeks ago we gave away a large pinboard we had been given by a friend, but never got around to using. It had been leaning up against some garage cupboards that I had limited access to.
I looked inside the cash box AND FOUND THE CASSETTE TAPE!
However, I didn’t know if it would even still work – We no longer had any cassette players in the house, the tape itself was close to 40 years old, and I remember it got tangled up at least once or twice during replays years ago, so I wasn’t certain if any audio was recoverable.
I took the tape into Dean Mardon at Electric City Music in Napier, just down Dalton Street from Bay City Radio’s old studio, now “NZME House” (see top picture, ECM is down the road to the left in the picture) to see if he could digitize whatever was on there for me.
The condition of the tape wasn’t nearly as bad as I had feared and there was almost a full hour of recording!
I gave the file to a work colleague, who happens to be a former TVNZ audio man to clean up and, to avoid copyright infringements, remove any songs so I could upload it to YouTube.
For those playing at home the songs removed are: The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, “Flick the Little Fire Engine”, “You’re a Pink Toothbrush “, Rolf Harris’ “Two Little Boys” (hindsight is 20/20 etc…), “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” from Mary Poppins and the show closes out with, quite prophetically, Kermit the Frog singing “Rainbow Connection”.
You can listen to the edited version of it here:
I cried listening to it for the first time in over 35 years.
It’s a bit funny, a bit cringey, certainly nostalgic and, today, a bit sad, because I can hear my Mum’s voice, or rather her speech patterns in how I talked back then, and I can remember Dad sitting quietly in the corner of the studio, over my right shoulder, pleased as Punch.
For years I remembered it as my friend Robert’s dad as the host of the show, but it was a man named Colin Harris.
We talk about my school, Tamatea Primary, my apparent bus driving career aspirations (??), what I was doing in the school holidays (my studio stint was in the middle of the second and third term of the year – there were only three school terms back then), I say “Hi!” to my friends and <Gasp!> girlfriends (I was only six, OK?!)
I even got to do the weather!
Time has sadly robbed my memory of some of the finer details – I have no recollection whatsoever of a couple of my friends and one apparent “love interest” mentioned, and the fact I had to Google the movie “Sword of the Valiant“, which I say I wanted to see (most likely at the State Cinema diagonally across the Dickens / Dalton Streets intersection from the station) probably indicates I never got to see it.
Mrs Unwin’s class, 1984. I, back row, middle, look like a serial killer in waiting because the photographer kept telling me to “look down” so I would fit in the picture. I took stage instruction seriously.
My first foray in front of a microphone probably wouldn’t win many awards with several long, thought-filled pauses (dreaded “dead air” as it’s called in the industry), but there are still some moments of brilliance for an almost seven-year-old that make the likes of today’s simulcast announcers sound like a pack of un-funny men-children (#SpoilerAlert: That’s not hard to do, but sadly no one better is given the chance to!)
It was, however, the start of a lifelong dream for me to be on radio. A dream that has mostly only seen failure over the last three decades, as local radio in Hawke’s Bay has been cut back and cut back, undermined and undermined.
I have said that I don’t suffer from the “old pain” of nostalgia, but some recent events do poke at old wounds, gnawing “what-ifs” irritate and sometimes you just miss your Mum and Dad who did lots of little things like taking you to a radio station, and recording you on a cassette tape years ago.
I would be “almost seven, still a bit six” in this photo
On Thursday 8 September public submissions to the Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media Bill closed.
The bill relates to the merging of broadcasters Radio New Zealand and Television New Zealand – something that doesn’t sound too dissimilar to the old NZBC – New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation that I grew up watching and listening to the germinated seeds of as a child in the golden days of New Zealand broadcasting and media creativity of the 1980s.
Currently Radio NZ operates as a commercial-free public / “state” broadcaster, while TVNZ is far less beholden to the government and public, operating far more on a commercial basis.
Under the previous Labour government TVNZ had a charter that required more public interest content and less focus on ratings after years of profit-driven commercial desolation.
Extra channels, TVNZ 6 & 7, took up most of that slack, but when National took power following that administration the charter was ditched, unique content on TVNZ 6 & TVNZ 7 was scrapped and replaced with “+1” (one hour delayed broadcasts) versions of TVNZ 1 and 2’s purely commercial, cheap, “hyper-reality” television and imported shows for yet another decade..
At least public submissions give those with concerns, interests (vested or purely platonic) the opportunity to have their say on the makeup of the new bill and organisation.
Particularly how a minority of voices in New Zealand’s main centers get amplified and platformed in multiplicity, while the majority of news, views and issues in regional New Zealand get ignored, or told they don’t matter.
I couldn’t let this opportunity to have my say heard (or read), so I wrote up and sent in a submission last week.
It might not make a difference, or it may. At least I had the opportunity to try and make a difference, so I did!
The following is my submission to government on the Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media Bill (the links I have referenced here were not included in my submission, as it was delivered in PDF format):
I support the combining of Television New Zealand and Radio New Zealand into one entity, providing it provides true “Plurality of Voice”.
“Plurality of Voice” is a term that has been so overused by media managers and political pundits in recent years that it has become a cliché.
Rather than meaning a platform for numerous voices (plural), it has continued to be the same select few voices platformed in plurality across television, radio, internet, and print, as has become far too common in commercial New Zealand media – An echo of one.
Under the proposed new public media model, I would not expect to see Radio New Zealand announcers appearing regularly on Television New Zealand or vice versa, as we currently see with the same people from commercial NZME radio regularly appearing on state-owned TVNZ, just as regularly happens in the commercial sector with what was formerly Mediaworks having the same few people on their radio brands also making up large portions of their television talent roster.
This is NOT a plurality of voices.
Having a government-funded Radio New Zealand presenter criticizing their employer’s television operations’ funding on his other commercial television job is not a professional look for anyone involved.
Too few people across too many media formats for too long is not a realistic media representation of Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Especially considering the tiny geographic area and demographic most nationally broadcast and simulcast staff come from being pakeha, middle-upper-class Auckland.
The revitalized New Zealand public media entity needs to be a truer representation of ALL New Zealand providing the news from all around Aotearoa and telling the stories of Dianne from Dunedin, Tane from Te Awamutu, Andrew from Hawke’s Bay, Waverly from Waverly, or Clive from Cromwell.
The parochial main-centre mindset of commercial New Zealand media that has done so much to undermine the relevance of and trust in New Zealand media over the past two decades must be disposed of under this new entity if trust is to be regained.
When Newsroom’s Mark Jennings wrote in 2017 that he didn’t believe TVNZ having reporters in regional centres is a good idea because:
Failing infrastructure has become of national significance – The Havelock North Water Crisis, Wellington water woes and Three Waters Reforms have caused coverage of the issue to go from a trickle to a flood.
Are we expected to just accept failings, ineptitude, cronyism or corruption at local government or business level in regional New Zealand, because it doesn’t affect those in Auckland, or it doesn’t matter because it’s not at central government level in Wellington?
Of course not!
It is the role of media to expose these issues and failings at ALL levels in ALL places.
A true public interest media with true nationwide representation is what Aotearoa deserves.
What viewers in Invercargill, or Whanganui “don’t give a toss about”, to quote Mr. Jennings, is traffic troubles and house prices in Auckland – something that has been given vastly disproportionate commercial media coverage for years. Largely, the rest of New Zealand must assume because it effects the majority of the country’s media industry people based in Auckland.
It is not without reason that Television New Zealand has often been chided as “Television Auckland”.
Regional New Zealand matters and its stories and issues deserve far more coverage than they currently get from commercial media models.
Which is why the reliance on commercial media industry input in the planning for the new Aotearoa Public Media entity concerns me.
In 2019 Newshub’s former Chief News Officer Hal Crawford opined via one of his own network’s many platforms at how they were struggling to survive, while Television New Zealand no longer had to produce a dividend to their shareholders (the NZ government).
For the last 20 years Aotearoa’s commercial media networks have actively gutted regional coverage & newsrooms to increase operations in their big city headquarters & profits for their shareholders.
If half to two-thirds of New Zealand (the population outside of Auckland) is good enough to be an income stream for these commercial media networks, then surely, MORALLY, they are good enough to deserve equal news coverage.
If these media outlets started paying more attention to their local consumers again, then the locals might become more interested in buying their LOCAL paper/news content again, rather than turning to the much-commercial-media- vilified social media platforms where concerned locals massively underrepresented by commercial media started voluntarily doing the job their local media no longer did.
These same networks now readily take advantage of Radio New Zealand’s largesse reprinting the state broadcaster’s regionally relevant Local Democracy Reporting news items amidst waffling opinion pieces from network talkback and breakfast radio hosts.
Radio New Zealand and Television New Zealand already have staff and facilities in many regional cities in New Zealand. Under the new combined entity, I would expect to see these hubs increase and expand in size and number, giving greater voice to a greater plurality of people, issues and areas, allowing breaking news and ongoing issues to be broadcast and reported on firsthand with greater ease and frequency.
I realize most of the issues I have raised concern commercial media in Aotearoa.
But these are the major issues that a new, combined public media entity must deal with and rise above, as New Zealand’s commercial media model has done so much to damage its own industry, market, and the public’s trust for too long.
Journalism and media are ultimately public services, not profit gathering exercises.
They provide information, entertainment, and company to millions.
I believe combining Radio New Zealand and Television New Zealand under one umbrella is a good idea, as I lovingly remember the rich creative, media and cultural output the similar, earlier NZBC (New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation) and early iterations of TVNZ provided generations of 1980s kiwi kids like myself before all that wonderful local content became “too expensive” to produce.
I want to see and hear this same and greater levels of exposition, creativity, culture, news, and issues from all across Aotearoa for current and future generations on current and future modes of media platforming.
But it needs to be literally broad-casting in its talent and content, reaching and serving all across Aotearoa.
It can no longer be the plurality of echoes of a few, but a true plurality of New Zealand voices broadcast across the country and the world!
“The Saddle Road” linking Hawke’s Bay (via Tararua District) with Manawatū ever since the 2017 closure of the Manawatū Gorge in a constant state of repair
Slowing access to our region from the south, north and west (approaching from the east you would likely flood the carburetor.. and the rest of the car.. in the Pacific Ocean.)
“Wasn’t designed to carry the frequency and weights of modern-day trucks and other heavy transport”
Well, naturally!
81 years ago (1941, for those playing at home) we didn’t have multi-wheeled, thousand-horsepower, 60-tonne trucks hauling cargo across the country.
But in more recent decades we DID have a New Zealand Transport Agency whose job it was to monitor issues like the integrity of state highway bridges and fix them before they became an issue.
“The “temporary” limit will be put in place on Monday and apply until further notice”.” the release said.
Quotation marks around “temporary” give a sense of insincerity, and the fact it’s “until further notice”, with no indication of how long that could actually be don’t fill you with confidence for a quick resolution, or one at all.
Because other wording in the release was quite concerning:
“”While we understand this will be an inconvenience for road users, it is critical everyone complies with the temporary 30km/h speed limit to keep vibrations to a minimum to reduce the impact on the bridge structure and prevent further deterioration.””
30km/h is very slow, considering this is a 100km/hr zone, but it is standard practice and a safer speed for vehicles passing sites where road workers are active.
But saying it’s critical for the hundreds of light and heavy vehicles that travel across the Esk River bridge every day to slow down by over half the regular speed limit there to “reduce the impact on the bridge structure and prevent further deterioration“?
This makes it sound like this bridge, which has done a great, solid, bridgey job over the last 81 years, could now suddenly give way at any minute – Which is extremely concerning!
A Vital Link
It’s concerning because a kilometer or so up the road is one of Hawke’s Bay’s biggest industries, Pan Pac Forest Products, also one of the region’s largest employers, which relies on a fleet of around 100 trucks of different configurations (mainly logging trucks) each crossing the Esk River bridge several times a day carrying thousands of tonnes of products vital for the mill’s operations, as well as the mill site’s staff, who number in the hundreds, commuting to work each day.
But more importantly the bridge is the only sealed route north of Napier towards Wairoa, popular holiday spot Māhia (home of Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1) and Gisborne with a combined population in excess of 60,000.
For the most part if you want to get to Wairoa and Gisborne you have to get there via Napier, SH2 and this bridge.
The North Island’s East Coast region, north of Gisborne is accessible by road from south eastern Bay of Plenty, but it would be a hell of a detour to get to Wairoa that way.
A Long-Standing Problem
Issues with his section of road aren’t new.
For decades the intersection of State Highways 2 and 5 just south of the Esk River has been considered a dangerous spot.
An angled approach for those coming from Taupò limits clear visibility for crossing onto SH2 continuing south towards Napier.
A sandstone hill on the right limits views of north-bound traffic, while the heightened, curved Esk Railway Bridge, which leads onto the troubled river bridge cuts visibility to the northeast to less than 50 meters. Far from ideal when 50 tonne logging trucks stream over it towards the intersection.
There have been numerous crashes at the intersection but, apparently, not enough serious crashes to warrant drastic remediation by Waka Kotahi.
The rail bridge climbs quickly to get over the East Coast railway line and Esk River stopbanks and it is curved – nerve-wracking at the best of times, let alone when you are trying to share the narrow curved bridge with fully loaded 18 wheelers coming the other way.
The bridges are even less than ideal when you are not driving over them.
Cycling over these bridges is dangerous enough sharing the narrow concrete walled spaces with cars and trucks, but especially so just after dawn when crossing the river bridge north-bound faces drivers straight into the rising sun all but cutting off visibility at times.
Walking over the bridges doesn’t even bear thinking about.
This section of road has been like this for decades and successive transport agencies have known about it for decades, but chosen not to fix it.
Now it may be too late.
A Civil Engineering Emergency
Mid-morning on March 8 2018 all non-operstional staff at Pan Pac Forest Products’ Whirinaki site were told to leave as a storm had flooded the neighboring Esk River valley and the water level was getting dangerously high. It was decided that staff should leave before high tide, as the river getting any higher could threaten travel across the Esk River bridge.
Flash forward four years and who will now feel safe or secure crossing this potentially structurally compromised bridge the next time there is significant rainfall in the nearby hills?
Recent severe weather events have proven that Napier’s infrastructure is not up to handling even current standards. It’s not too surprising sadly though, given years of successive council administrations being hell-bent on keeping rates down at the expense of repairing and replacing their beloved city “assets”, turned major liabilities.
But when it comes to roads Hawke’s Bay pays its’ share.
Fuel tax, income tax, Goods and Services Tax.
Hawke’s Bay truck owners pay Road User Charges.
So why doesn’t Hawke’s Bay get a fair return on our regional roading infrastructure for the taxes and charges we pay for using it?
The numerous drop-outs on our under-invested high country regional highways is bad enough. Losing such a crucial bridge will literally be the straw that breaks State Highway 2.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
A few years ago there was word that the SH5/2 intersection was going to get a massive upgrade and redevelopment.
It never occurred.
With such a dire situation now upon this section of road why not revisit those plans and make then a reality now?
“Roads of National Significance” were a big deal under the last National government when the Waikato Expressway section of State Highway 1 was redeveloped.
Surely State Highway 2 must be the nation’s second most significant road by numerical order at the very least.
I believe the canceled concept involved an over/under pass for access to / from SH 5 and one big bridge spanning both the rail line and Esk River, rather than the current two inferior smaller bridges.
Lining this new, longer bridge up with matching bends that already exist north and south of the river would make the section of road straighter and give motorists better, safer vision along this area.
The slight change of angle would also lessen the chance of sunstrike for those traveling north across the bridge as the sun rises.
Pedestrian / cycling lanes on this new bridge would also be extremely advantageous.
Having a bigger, better, newer bridge will also go some way to future proofing this section of road to imminent climate change, sea level rise (Hawke Bay is only few hundred meters downstream of the current bridge) and the ever-present threat of flooding from upstream and the Hikurangi Subduction Zone off the east coast of the North Island
As it currently (barely, according to Waka Kotahi) stands the Esk River bridge won’t withstand too many more trucks going faster than the suburban speed limit over it.
That is simply not good enough.
Rebuild the Bridge and Get Over It
I am a passionate advocate for all things Hawke’s Bay.
I’ve seen my region ignored and undermined for years and I’ve been writing about it, trying to get these inequalities fixed for almost ten years now.
It’s just so sad that a government agency like Waka Kotahi lags so far behind in recognizing regions like Hawke’s Bay need far better roads and transport infrastructure than what they have.
If it really is critical that traffic traversing the Esk River bridge must now travel over it at 30km per hour to prevent further deterioration of the structure as Waka Kotahi said in their statement, then we can assume it’s too late and the bridge is doomed.
State Highway 2 is a nationally significant road.
To allow such a major, important structural part of it to degrade to this level is inexcusable.
This is a Civil Engineering Emergency.
Hawke’s Bay deserves better!
Footnote (Nov 2022):
Since writing this piece Waka Kotahi has limited the speed and weight limits on YET ANOTHER Hawke’s Bay State Highway bridge!
Mayoral aspirant Nigel Simpson a first term, Taradale ward councilor declared in his running for the mayoralty ‘I entered local politics last election because I couldn’t figure out what was wrong in Napier City Council, after a short period inside I figured it out alright, that’s why I’m running for Mayor.”
“Taking major items in and out of the long-term plan and having a considerable number of unbudgeted items is simply poor leadership and inappropriate governance of Napier, it’s time for change.” he said.
“A significant number of opportunities have been missed by the current Council, it’s time to get Napier back on track.”
If that’s the “Mayor Dalton and CEO Jack Track” he’s referring to getting back on then I think his train is going in the wrong direction, and voters with a memory longer than three years will likely leave him at the station.
And thoughout all those issues this council term you may have forgotten about the global pandemic that closed borders and workplaces, disrupted workflow and supply chains and killed and incapacitated millions.
The Jack / Dalton administration also saw a number of high-level managers and experts leave, or be made redundant, but Councilor Simpson chooses to ignore this in his “serious culture issue” claim.
His urging the council to leave selecting a new CEO until after the local body elections is also disingenuous, as he, the council and even the Hawke’s Bay Today know “July is the start of a three-month hiatus in which councils cannot make major decisions in the three months leading up to the local elections”as reported in another council article in HBT barely a month earlier at the end of June.
Sometimes it takes a shot of penicillin to cure a bad culture, other times a new broom to sweep out all the dead wood, or clear a new path.
Chris Hyde, who had formerly been Hawke’s Bay Today news director before moving over to Stuff in Hawke’s Bay for a few months will return to take over the local newspaper’s reigns.
Recently the paper has not only been “burying the lede”, but burying local opinions under not necessarily as relevant reckons from outside the region.
Prior to 1997 live weekday morning news television in New Zealand was pretty much non-existent. We were aware places like America and Australia had it, but it wasn’t on the NZ public, or media radar.
The only similar programme I can think of in terms of live production in the mornings with such a long legacy is What Now! which has been going on Sunday mornings (originally on Saturdays) for almost 40 years.
1997 was long before the 24 hour news cycle, the spread of the internet (we still had dial-up at our house until the late 2000s) and social media, so if there was live television on New Zealand televisions in the morning it was either an All Blacks game / the Olympics on the other side of the world, or something very bad had happened locally.
Today breakfast news often sets the televisual tone and topic for the day – Covering what has happened at home and overseas during the night, outlining important events that are expected to occur locally that day and interviewing those involved. The lunchtime bulletin at midday acts as a progress report and the traditional 6pm news – the pinnacle of New Zealand’s news landscape for generations almost acting more as a roundup and post-mortem of the day’s events.
Breakfast felt cool and new. It was off the cuff, like local breakfast radio, but larger, more dynamic and on screen. Live filming made it feel more genuine, original and informal than the polished, rehearsed news bulletins.
This was also before Hosking’s career and ego made the Fourth Circle of Dante’s Inferno look like broad daylight. He was more down to earth and even, dare I say it, “cool”(?) then, to the point where he was (good naturedly) parodied on What Now and the local comedy skit shows of the time.
I had dreamed of being part of TVNZ, or just TV IN NZ, ever since I was a kid growing up watching What Now, After School, Telethon, Town & Around, Children of the Dog Star and the plethora of fantastic, locally produced shows that were created in that golden era of NZ television production – the 1980s.
Watching Breakfast brought this dream into adulthood. I remember seeing a Christmas “Behind the scenes” segment at the end of the first or second season that made me want to get into television again (and develop a brief televisual crush on a bespeckled reporter named Pippa).
I’d been working in radio only a year or two before and this looked like the next logical, aspirational goal.
And now as a parent the chances of watching Breakfast much on my mornings off are few and far between, as my daughter usually wields the remote and The Moe Show, Bluey, or more recently YouTube and Disney+ rule our sole television screen, so I seldom get to see much of the show past 7am.
Missing out on a large chunk of Breakfast’s mid to late 2000s and 2010s wasn’t all bad – I did miss out the majority of the supernovaing of Hosking and Henry as hosts and their cults of “(TV) personality”.
But Breakfast did at least go where many other TV shows had never gone before – Regional New Zealand!
Breakfast has made it to Napier on a couple of occasions, broadcasting live from the Soundshell on Marine Parade, showing off our region and stunning live sunrises over Hawke Bay.
TVNZ Breakfast broadcasting live from Napier’s Sound Shell February 2020
These shows usually had one of their cast inevitably be dressed up in Art Deco attire, or some similar interactive performative element. It’s certainly something associated with the city due to the architectural style at the time of rebuilding after the 1931 earthquake, but for us locals it began to feel a bit forced, twee and repetitive, after a couple decades of being ever-present and ever-pushed by the city council’s promoters, Art Deco devotees and local tourism organizations.
Their roving reporters and weather people often get out and about, too.
During the nation-wide Covid 19 lockdown of 2020 the show helped provide a steady stream of news, information and, most importantly, personal connection at a time when we were all quarantined at home.
During that period Breakfast even had viewers Zoom, or Skype in to be “guest weather presenters” and do the forecasts for the show.
My Twitter friend, and fellow tall, hairy Andrew F, Andrew Feldon, who runs Mouthwater Coffee in Palmerston North was one of these Sky Soothsaying Skypers. It was like l’d almost fulfilled my dream vicariously!
The Dream Team
I had a recurring dream last year in which I got to meet John Campbell in person. I’ve interacted with him on social media several times, but never “IRL” (“In Real Life”, #Hashtag, YOLO GST, PhD etc…)
In the dream I meet John on set or behind the scenes at Breakfast and he promises to get me on television, either Breakfast, or my own show. It’s unclear how, or why as the dream ends about this point and the details disappear with conciousness.
Many in TVNZ’s news and current affairs talent pool have gotten their big television break, or at least worked on Breakfast at some stage in the past quarter century.
From fame to infamy and, in some cases later on in their lives or careers, being enabled to be purposefully inflammatory and even outright conspiracy misinformationy a number of people have presented and been involved in the show, but my favorite core presenters over the last 25 years has been the most recent lineup of Indira Stewart, Jenny-May Clarkson, Matty McLean, Melissa Stokes and John Campbell.
When he left the show to pursue more in-depth journalism with TVNZ, John gave a marvelous parting monologue pointing out the diversity of the show and his fellow presenters – Te Reo now being an integral part of the show’s vocabulary, the advancement of LGBTQI+ rights, recognizing the wrongs of racial discrimination and actions like the dawn raids of the 70s, and the importance of inclusiveness and multiculturalism to modern New Zealand society and media.
The more readily outraged out there would call this “woke”, or “PC gone mad!”.
It’s not.
It’s recognizing injustice. It’s being sympathetic, empathetic and supportive. It’s shining a light into dark places that need illumination for the wrongs there to be exposed and righted.
Other media networks gleefully trumpeted imminent doom for Breakfast on the eve of it’s anniversary, but that was simply never going to happen.
One fewer host does not a Breakfast show un-make.
It may be worth remembering that the stars of some of these networks had significant roles on Breakfast or with TVNZ in the past, which aided them getting where they are today. Crying “nepotism!” now may not be the stable moral high ground they think they are on.
This isn’t a true “plurality of voice”, and it certainly isn’t fair on all the voices we don’t get to hear.
2/ Keep Getting Out There!
The world is a much smaller place than it used to be.
Television shows that “had” to be produced in Auckland no longer do. Providing you have a good internet or satellite connection you can record and broadcast from anywhere – Even Hawke’s Bay!
Imagine getting your morning news fix with this as the live background!
The rapid advancement of technology also means it is far cheaper to run and maintain small-scale broadcast facilities in multiple locations. Imagine what a difference to our viewing and listening landscape reinstating teams of TVNZ and RNZ reporters across the country (not just in the main centers) would make to the diversity of news coverage!
These ideas are particularly relevant given the upcoming merger of Television New Zealand and Radio New Zealand has a strong emphasis on public broadcasting and Public Interest Journalism. There is more impetus than ever before for more NZ media to spread their wings like Breakfast has done and rove across the country telling locals’ stories.
If they need someone extra in Napier I know a guy… Even if he has a voice for television and a face for radio…
This year has been a bit of a test of stamina and fortitude and has certainly made a lot of people feel a lot older than they are.
Personally I’ve been feeling much older, tireder and sadder than usual, and that was before I tested positive for Covid a few weeks ago.
I was fortunate to be almost completely asymptomatic while testing positive, which is great health-wise (I would have gladly felt sicker if it meant those who have suffered through their symptoms could have some relief), but it was frustrating to be stuck in quarantine while feeling fine – Much like my Adventures in Tachycardia years ago.
It’s gave me some time to write, which was great after months of being too busy, or too demoralized to do it.
It also gave me some time to think, which wasn’t such a great thing.
Because I’ve been going through a bit of a mid-life crisis recently.
Feeling My Age
After all the carry-on of recent years, like everyone else, I was looking forward to a bit of a break this year – a silver lining after a couple years of cloud.
I have all their albums and the last concert I went to before the “proper adulthood” of becoming a parent was their show at Western Springs in 2011. So when then the band announced they would be touring Australasia later this year I was looking forward to going and seeing. them in Wellington.
They have had a fantastic run: 28 years, over 10 albums, millions of fans and a permanent place at the alter of Rock & Roll.
But the threat of losing a cultural cornerstone in my life suddenly made me feel really old.
It occurred to me that to my daughter the Foo Fighters are what The Eagles were to me – Memorable, good music, but old.
Like me.
Because this year I’ll be turning 45.
Where Did the Years Go?
Last year I applied for a promotion at the company I have been working at for almost two decades. I have been in what is essentially an entry-level position for the duration. I’ve requested training or transfer during this time, but have been constantly overlooked while my supervisors have move onward, upward, or outward with triennial regularity.
One manager even told me my position “wasn’t worth (external) training” during the “austerity years” of the Global Financial Crisis.
So when one of these supervisor positions came up I applied. It was shortlisted to myself and the office’s new university graduate, who had been with us for one year. The graduate started primary school the year I started with the company (literally – we worked it out).
Naturally the graduate got the promotion and I missed out.
I felt massively disappointed and let down, but I wasn’t surprised.
Almost 20 years is a very long time to dedicate yourself to a job with unsociable hours, doing almost exactly the same things every day, week, month and year.
It felt like I have wasted a huge chunk of my working life.
These years have also seen a lot of upheavals in and effecting my life:
Understandably it’s hard to gain or maintain momentum in such choppy seas.
While it’s been an ungrateful job not letting me develop something resembling a career, it has at least been a stable job and income, allowing us to somehow live comfortably as a single-income family making just over the average wage in a time when many multiple-income families seriously struggle to make ends meet.
It feels like I’ve already lived several lifetimes in less than two decades, while, due to the unrelenting repetition of my job it simultaneously feels like I blinked in 2013 and suddenly find myself here in 2022.
Worse still, a couple years ago my my daughter’s primary school had a Kapa Haka performance. Her school hall was too small, so they used the auditorium at my old secondary school – Tamatea High.
I sat in my old school auditorium where I did lighting, theater and orchestra, had assemblies, dances and prizegivings, in the same chairs, in the same row as three women who all went to that school with me (our daughters all happen to be friends) it occurred to me it was 25 years to the day since we last all sat there at our final assembly and prizegiving in 1995.
A quarter of a century!
Where had my life gone?!
Parental Guidance Required
Losing both parents before the age of 40 hasn’t helped.
Most of my friends still have at least one, often both parents still alive. I no longer have that moral, financial, or physical support there any more.
Being a parent, my morals and values have created a bit of a paradox for me.
As I’ve written multiple time before, all I wanted to be in life (other than a radio announcer – and those aspirations have been shafted on multiple occasions) was as good a father as mine was to me.
I have gone to work for the last nine years, not for myself, but to provide a safe, warm, loving home and to ensure there is always food on the table for my wife and daughter.
(That sounds terribly clichéd, but it’s an honorable, old-school trait I got from my Dad – That said, an enjoyable job where I’m allow to develop and get to be creative wouldn’t go amiss. I continue to write in the hope that lightning might strike multiple times…)
I can’t keep wearing myself down where “appreciation” never equals advancement, because that makes me feel un(der)valued and will make me depressed, grumpy and what I would consider to be a bad parent at home.
I also can’t just give the job up, because that erases our income, support and it will feel like I really have wasted the last 18 years of my life.
Looking online for celebrity comparison is seldom helpful.
If you have grown up with certain stars or starlets they too look not greatly different from years before, as you are aging in parallel. For others, as their careers can rely to a large degree on their looks, the amount of care and work that has been put into maintaining a level of youth or vitality through out the years can somewhat skew any accurate visual age auditability.
All these famous faces also turn 45 this year. Yes, even Shakira!. #Funfact: John Oliver and John Cena (top middle & right) were born the exact same day – April 23, 1977!
At the other end of the scale, trailer-wreck television shows like Jeremy Kyle often showed the ages of people who hadn’t looked after themselves so well, making those in their 20s look closer to 60.
While nowhere near as petro-chemical an intake as those on such shows, some parts of my diet haven’t changed in 30 years – I still eat like a teenager whenever I can.
Chocolate, chips and double-coated Tim-Tams are still treat staples in my diet.
I try to justify with my wife that a $1 chocolate bar is a fair courier fee when I’m sent to the supermarket to get groceries. She never seems to agree.
Illicit snacks are probably the only food I eat that hasn’t changed over the years, though.
In recent times, with rising food prices(/supermarket profits) and differing nutritional needs our family’s diet has become largely “flexitarian”, often vegetarian for us adults, with favored frankfurters or oven-baked chicken nuggets for our daughter.
The influx of such a diverse range of cultures into Hawke’s Bay over the past decade has also ensured a vastly different spectrum of food is now available with tastes and flavors so far removed from what we grew up with.
Cabbage boiled until tasteless and translucent has happily been consigned to the depths of history.
But with so many other things from our youth making comebacks, the allure of a “second childhood” midlife crisis can be hard to resist.
Many model catalogues and video game magazines gave their pages for this and other collages I made in my teenage years.
The recent revival of so many pop culture icons, movie franchises and toy ranges from my childhood hasn’t helped.
Star Wars sequels, streaming series and retro toy lines, Top Gun: Maverick, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Masters of the Universe figurines and cartoon reboots.
I sold my original MotU collection after rediscovering it while clearing out my parents’ place several years ago.
Growing up in the 80s and the 90s was a fantastic time for tech toys, as RC cars were just coming into their element.
Japanese model making giant Tamiya were the pinnacle of those cars. Tamiya made the most amazing scale models – Tanks, cars, motorcycles, boats, planes.
Each year they released a stunning new, full color catalogue the thickness of a magazine. They were chock-full of pictures of their range of kits, fully built, painted and decaled. Sometimes there were sections dedicated to exquisite dioramas featuring their kits.
My collection of 1/35 scale Tamiya model tanks, (Except for the Sherman (second from the left) which is italeri)
What I distinctly remember about these catalogues was their smell.
They were so big and so packed full of glossy pictures that the smell of the print would just about knock you backwards the first time you opened the latest issue (and for weeks after).
It was INTOXICATING! (or a gateway drug to substance abuse given the similar levels of paint an glue fumes modelers are exposed to on a regular basis – It’s truly amazing I never got into drinking spirits until my 30s…)
But the crème de la crème of Tamiya production was radio controlled cars.
Hot Shot, Bigwig, Boomerang and Lunchbox were the names given to some of the most fantastic “Toys” anyone in the 80s or 90s could have.
These cars were so advanced and different that the first Tamiya RC kits I saw in Hawke’s Bay weren’t even even available from hobby shops, but from a service station in St Aubyn Street, Hastings! (This is more likely just because the station owner had imported the kits themselves, but it certainly added to the kits’ advanced, “mechanical” allure!)
We never had the money for Tamiya radio controlled car kits, which were worth $200-$300 back in the 80s – a substantial amount of money!
I still have two of my original Tamiya Mini 4WD: Super Sabre (L) and Hot Shot (R)
I was able to get a few Tamiya “Mini4WD” cars – small, vastly cheaper facsimiles of the bigger RC body styles, but twin AA battery powered, and only able to drive in straight lines.
I did get a relatively cheap Nikko radio controlled car called a Thunderbolt for a birthday or Christmas present once, and a I think Dad bought a similar one off a work colleague when the Thunderbolt lost its zap.
“Frame Buggy”. No relation.
But Tamiya cars were still the Holy Grail of autonomous off-roading. I can still picture in my mind going to an air show and seeing someone running their Lunchbox – a big, bright yellow “Monster Truck” van. It was iconic then and it still is now.
So when I saw one in my local hobby shop “Cool Toys” in Napier I fell in love all over again!
Amazingly the price tags for these cars have remained largely the same as 30+ years ago, mainly thanks to the advancement of technology making the formerly expensive parts much cheaper and more prevalent as time has gone by.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve started to build and tinker with more things too, something that my Dad exceled at, but I never had the confidence to, so these advanced kits that always looked so complex and intimidating when I was younger aren’t so scary any more.
If I get commissioned to write something again this year I know where that money is going to!
But, like i said, I’m a bit lost at sea at the moment.
Static
My fatherly goal is going well, but my dreams of media domination, or at least employed participation, seem further and further away as the years go by.
I had such high hopes as a “Co-Pilot” on Bay City Radio’s Sunday morning kids show one day back in 1985, or doing Saturday “Midnight to Dawns” at Hot93 in Hastings over the summer and autumn of 1996 …
But while I would still love to be on radio, I’m at least able to recognize that it is, or rather used to be, a young person’s game.
There are young people out there who want a career in NZ media and who are better and more deserving of a shot than I am, and certainly better than many currently being broadcast who have been there for far too long.
In the 90s regional commercial radio was the domain of those in their 20s. Three to five years on air was considered a “career” then you moved on to programming, management sales, or left the station and got a “real job”.
I wish this was a new problem, but it has been going on for as long as I’ve been a curmudgeon! 😉
Younger talent never got a look in or an opportunity on air and what could barely be considered average regional radio at best was nationally broadcast, claiming to be “the best” the networks could offer.
The industry has suffered for this ever since, but still to this day fails to recognize or try and rectify their own systemic errors.
I say radio “used to be” a young person’s game because I wonder if it still is?
So many have been turned off radio by the same tired old voices and shtick for years and years that they now get their audio entertainment from podcasts and music streaming services.
It has become a generational shift and seen radio listenership plummet. Not that the commercial networks have ever had the self-awareness to acknowledge why people no longer listen to a favored few broadcasters who are no longer relevant to anyone but themselves and their management mates.
I like writing and am told I’m quite good at it. I even get paid to write very occasionally but, as I’ve said, nowhere near enough to make a living out of it. So it’s more of a hobby, or a side hustle to relieve me of the repetitive monotony of my actual job.
I was inspired from an early age by great local newspaper journalists like Roger Moroney of what was Napier’s Daily Telegraph back then who had a real way with words and the public. He was Hawke’s Bay’s print version of a radio announcer – well respected and liked by many. When I started writing in my teens I sent my work to him for appraisal and feedback which he constructively gave.
I never went to university, or got a journalism diploma or degree, as it was a craft I was still perfecting and it seemed like such a waste to spend years and thousands of dollars I didn’t have studying how to write, research and interview like I already could.
Sadly they don’t really apply to middle aged men in regional New Zealand, so my chances of becoming New Zealand’s oldest Cadet Reporter are looking decidedly slim.
Were I to get the opportunity, where would I do it, though? Locally, naturally.
I live, love, breathe, and bleed Hawke’s Bay.
In high school I would have said “The Daily Telegraph” in a heartbeat.
But what was The Daily Telegraph became Hawke’s Bay Today in the 1990s, as APN, the forebear of NZME, combined Napier’s newspaper with Hastings’ Herald Tribune.
As you may already know, the story or regional newspapers around New Zealand and the world takes a bit of a dive from not long after that time as the internet, social media and the like took off and newspaper publishers struggled to keep up.
Costs were cut and newsrooms gutted, which meant less local news, which meant less local readership and advertising, which meant more cost cutting and loss of staff covering local news… and so it spiraled – You get the idea.
Sadly the media executives (often the same or similar ones who gutted local radio) haven’t.
A friend of mine told me in 2019 that I’d “picked the worst time to be this good at writing”.
More and more content in New Zealand’s regional newspapers is now imported from other sources, locations around the country like Auckland HQ, or other branches of the network with no relevance to the regions they are being published in, or even the realities of life for most of its readers.
I can’t morally justify working for a media network than shuns investment in local comment and content, but seems happy to pay its already over-incentivised radio announcers for large, irrelevant opinion pieces.
It must be a tough life working on both commercial television and state radio…
Were Hawke’s Bay Today to make a clean break from their current corporate overlords and return to their local roots, like the Wairarapa Times Age, then we could talk.
I’m not holding my breath, though.
Pro-Promotion
If you’re not from Hawke’s Bay chances are you’ve “met me” via social media.
Of all the tweets about Napier and Hawke’s Bay on Twitter I’ve probably been responsible for about 120 percent of them (*citation required).
I’ve always liked promotion / sales and have always had a pretty decent knack for it but that, like radio, never blossomed into a career (minimum wage retail in the 90s/00s doesn’t count).
While my social media exploits have led to meeting a lot of great people and some unique experiences, over 12 years on it still hasn’t been the doorway to opportunity and career change that I dreamed and worked towards it being.
Yet I still do it.
Professionally promoting Napier appears to be a closed shop, as I’ve applied for numerous roles and seldom even heard back that I’d been unsuccessfull. When I ask what I can do to improve.my chances next opportunity the silence is deafening.
But it’s been tiring and ultimately hasn’t gotten me anywhere.
“I could’a been a contender!”
What If?
How much of your life would you change if you could?
There have been a multiverse of movies, stories and shows about alternative realities in recent years.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe currently leads the pack on screens, but from way back at H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, to The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.and the recent, brilliant The Midnight Library by Matt Haig time travel and being able to change your past or future has been a literary staple and a moral mental conundrum.
In Richard Curtis’ movie “About Time” Tim learns the men in his family can go back in time and relive certain events, or fix certain things. At one point in the movie he goes back in time to help his sister who has hit rough times. He does so, and when he returns to the present his sister is much better off, but he finds his daughter is now (and always has been on this timeline) his son. He decides to go back again and let events occur as they were for his sister, who eventually comes out all right, and his family is as it always was.
One theme that continues throughout many of the time travel / multiverse movies and books I have read or watched is love and sacrifice. Especially paternal love and sacrifice.
There is a scene later on with the dad, played by the superlative Bill Nighy, which I won’t spoil for you, other than to say it’s perfect and heart-breaking and really struck home with me, as I saw the movie not long after losing my own father.
If my timeline had been different i could have been Guy Williams.
Seriously!
And not just because we both wear glasses and are about the same height…(he is ten years younger than me, though)
Guy got his big break on a show called “Dai’s Protege“, where media darling Dai Henwood mentored a bunch of prospective comedians, whittling them down to a winner.
I was working on my comedy and stand-up here in Hawke’s Bay at the time and seriously thought of entering, but didn’t because it would mean leaving my job at the time, moving to Auckland (prohibitively expensive at the best of times) with no income or place to stay, and being the “protege” of someone whose schtick I couldn’t stand let alone want to carry on as their “apprentice” (one of the only times I haven’t supported apprenticeships).
Photographic proof of my eventual, one-off stand-up comedy career Photo courtesy of Raybon Kan
If you prescribe to the multiverse theory there are realities out there where I have had nothing but success, and others with nothing but failure.
I have experienced a reasonably health balance.
I could do without a lot of the pain I have endured in my life to date.
The disappointments, the heartbreaks, the scars, the lack of faith, the micromanagement by people with no idea of what I do or am capable of, and missed opportunities.
“Life is like a heart rate – It has its ups and downs. If it’s a flat line, you’re dead!”
In the Eric Bana starring movie adaptation of The Time Traveler’s Wife (#FunFact: Rachel McAdams plays the titular wife of time traveler in both this movie AND About Time) Bana and McAdams’ characters have difficulty conceiving a baby because of Henry’s (Bana’s) time-fluid genetics. On one of his blips forward in time Henry is greeted and embraced by a girl of about 10 years old – his daughter! But she is also sad, because her father died not long after she was born.
The confliction of achieving a long held goal, but at great, or even the ultimate cost.
To be fair I wasn’t Halfway Down, more like A Quarter Up…
Half Way There
So much of what I’ve been and done seems so far away in the past, and so much of what I’ve wanted to do for a long time has always been constantly just out of reach.
My greatest goal in life and my greatest happiness had been being a father and a lot of time, effort and pain has gone into me becoming a dad like mine.
But now my daughter is older and amazing and inspiring I feel like i need to do something for myself, but that comes with a load of guilt.
I am so proud of her, but not proud of myself, and time certainly doesn’t feel like it is on my side any more.
I’m lacking traction and direction and I desperately need it.
I’ll continue writing because, if nothing else, I enjoy it and it is an outlet. The motivation and time to continue it is getting harder to find, though.
Woah, I’m half way there, but I’m stuck in the middle.
I don’t know what I wil do, but I know that, 35 years ago or now, giving up is something I’m never gonna do.
