I was born a virgo and a golden rat in Warkworth a small town 40 miles north of Auckland on the 8th of September 1960. My two older brothers and one older sister were born in Devonport in Auckland so it must have been sometime after my sister was born in 1957 that my parents made the shift away from the big smoke to live on a farm above the township.
Dad had a got a job teaching woodwork and technical drawing at the local high school. He had trained as a carpenter with George Hayden when he left school and built a lot of houses on Auckland”s North Shore. He was then a soldier in the Second World War and after the war retrained as a woodwork teacher bless him.
I don”t know that my mother ever got over the shift to an isolated farmhouse on the side of a hill in Warkworth.The thing I quite liked about mum was that she was a frustrated artist to the point of accusing famous artists of ripping off her work.
Her parents were both born in England and emigrated to Central Otago in the early 1900s. I remember my grandfather saying it didn’t snow in England. There was kind of a stubborn streak in the family which at times defied reality.
I was always been proud to have been born overlooking the Mahurangi river because it gave me i thought a spiritual connection with the land and the mountain Tamahue at Matakana. My most spiritual place was Casnell Island at the end of Scotts Beach on the peninsula. The presence there was palpable.
Because I was the youngest I think my mum was a bit fatigued by the time that she had me. It’s a year since she died and I thought it would be nice to write my story as a tribute to her and dad and also because my good friend RF who looks over me said I should do it and that he would read it. I thought that”s good enough for me I will do it.
X and I have had a few battles in court so far successfully. I remember when he dressed up as Osama Bin Laden and attended the opening of Apec in Auckland. It was probably the backpack that sealed the deal.
We were fortunate to come before Judge Cecilie Rushton a judge i always admired for her resolute and outspoken opposition to the Auckland Casino. She could see the position in a flash and discharged xxxxx without conviction. We were both very happy.
I have defended a number of my friends over the years sometimes with success sometimes without and some people who I have defended have become very good friends such as Karen and Elaine Ngamu and their whanau, Jamie Lockett and the Urewera Four.
So there I was a small child in the mid sixties in a small rural township in New Zealand. I remember flatly refusing to stay at playcentre after the first morning.
Somehow I was born with a stroppy streak which is not surprising as my paternal great grandfather was a sephardic jew from London, my paternal grandfathers ancestors were protestant in a Catholic ,my maternal grandmother was a Hugenot running from Catholic France and my maternal grandfather was a crypto jew from England. So it was not that surprising that somewhere in my genes pulsed a contrarian spirit.
I was already writing words on the walls of the garage at a really young age and I can remember feeling affronted at the idea of having to do finger painting all morning at play centre. I simply refused to stay there anymore after going for one morning. Besides I really enjoyed being at home in my own domain with my mother.
I got really sick when I was quite little with an illness called Johnsons syndrome which was caused by aspirin and nearly died.
One of my earliest memories was going to the Auckland hospital for an operation for a hernia and there was a french bubble car three wheeler outside the hospital doors. I think that hospital has been knocked down now. I can remember going along the corridor but for obvious reasons everything after that was a bit of a blur.
My next door neighbour was the editor of the local paper and I did publish my own news paper before I went to school.
I lived on an a large section on a house that my Dad built and spent endless hours playing in the garden, in the empty section below us and with the other kids in the street. tThe garage was a favourite spot as it was about the only flat spot. I lived in a sporty dream world. Played a lot of tennis and rugby.
I never went to playcenter or kindergarten but I did go with Mum to Kaipara Flats School where she would teach and I picked up an education before I officially went to school myself.
I eventually actually went to school myself. being born in september I think I started school for a term in primer one with Mrs Hughes. I think I did a year in primer one and then I remember walking past the other classrooms in the block and ending up at what was standard one. I am pretty sure I walked past a couple of classrooms to get there. From there i went through the normal class rooms. I had the nicest teachers throughout.
When I arrived at secondary school I was a year and a half younger than everyone else and very small. I was actually frightened as my father taught at the school and I had to kind of become invisible to avoid being bullied. Nobody was ever that mean to me probably cos they felt sorry for me wondering whether Dad was the same at home as he was at school.
He wasnt. He was the nicest father. A little detached not being one to get down on his hands and knees and play and quite self absorbed. But we all have our faults and he did his best.He was on a continuous quest to better himself. I am not sure what his motivation was self centred or selfless but any way i used to spend a lot of my time on my own and so did my mother.
My life developed a certain rythm where as I started a particual school my siblings would all have left which continued to the point that when I started univesrity later in Auckland they had all moved away form theri tiem in auckland to go overseas or eleswhere.
I spent a large amount of time trying to catch my family and in the end I gave up. I suffered from an extreme excess of freckles until I was fifteen when they thankfully started to blend into each other and faded. This made me feel really self conscious and kind of ugly in a way. I remember two girls asking me if I had freckles all over.
My life began more seriously when I got my drivers licence at fifteen. I was able to travell and dad was really generous with the car. I had friends throughout the country side and we liked to party.
I remember taking the car to the beach at Tawharanui on a school trip. I can remember exactly who was in the car but Ido rememember we got into a race on the way back and even now I can feel the back of the car starting to slide as we went around a corner at pretty high speed. There was no way I could control it but thankfully it didnt spin out over the bank and kill us all.
A number of my friends didnt make it past 20 dying in car and motorcycle accidents. One was my school friend Brendon Darby who died in a motorcycle accident. Brendon used to dance on the desks during maths class and eventually the teacher gave up trying to stop him. I was shocked when he died. There were many times when I could have died either at sea or on the road.
Around 13 I discovered first david bwoe had all his albums up to diamond dogs then discovered harvest and had all neil youngs albums up to american stars and bars.
I probabley gave my aprents post traumatic stress with the harvest album as besides the album I had the sheet music and I used to play the album continuously and learn all the guitar parts and if that wasnt rough I then learn all the haromonica parts as well. What my parents lacked in passion they made up for in tolerance
There was a culture of learning in the housee up with a good collection of books and a lot of tv. my mother used to paint and my dad used to drawhouses and work on poetry. It wasnt all bad but there was an emotional emptiness which I made up for with music.
After Neil young Imoved onto Bob dylan and blues music and had a lot of albums. Needless to say I had discovered weed at high school. We didnt consume a lot but we drank a lot of tequila.
I did okay at school but did nothing. I wasnt really that worried cos i knew how it was. I vividly remember at the end of the first term of high school in the third form a boy leaving at the end of the first term. I just could not understand why. We had only been at school for two months. Then I realized that he had turned fifteen and he was going to leave school ot work on his fathers fishing boat as a deck hand.
At university in symonds street fell into two phases what I call the hippie phase and the punk phase. I dont think people realize how hard it is to come to large city and feel accepted. Everyone I knew was from out of town and had come to auckland. It was hard to meet the locals.
My personality didnt help as i suffered from a combination of shyness and a sort of reverse snobbery feeling a terminal lack of coolness from not growning up in auckland. At the same tiem it was tempered by a blissfull sense of innocence and naievity.
being in auckland for the first time I only ever stayed in the city. I would walk up to symonds street corner of krd and drink at the parrot bar. Even then I was not up to going along further krd which seemed almost out of bounds.
i was extremely introverted and had I remember my mums friend saying your the last person i would have thought would have become a criminal lawyer and she was right I was a total dreamer. My passion was William Blake and american confessional poetry.
I was extremely repetitive. If I liked a song sweet bonnie brown off 69 live I would literally play it over and over agian non stop for weeks. a good friend of mine. I could feel the electricity of words
I studiously avoided anything to do with law but i was remotely interested in a few law cases like the emirali case where they found some weed in a fireplace or a vacuum cleaner. I read a few constitutional cases and liked Jane Kelsey. I had a lecturer who was goregeous looking and that was fun.
I went from crush to crush I had been told at school that I had no rrewpect for women and that my female teachers thought I had some sort of problem. But I was suspeicious as the teachers telling me were male. I loved women wee just made the world go around and I had strong female role models at law school. It never quite added up to me.
I worked at Watties in Hawkes Bay and made friends with some workers there who came up and stayed at our flat. Their car was fall of weed. I only wroked there a wek and was promoted to soem sort of position. I did the 12 hour shifts sewign up bags of peas and carrots.
The forst year was the Nmabassa festival and the year that dire straits first album came out and that was on high reotate as the boys workked a twelve hour shfit.
I dindnt get up to nambassa but the next year was the first wsNgauruawahiaweetwaters festival in. I hitched down with a friend of mine who waswho apparently dropped a lot of acid. I caught a ride into the festival itself and I think I caught up with some friends of mine.
The diuds played I didntl really know there music so well. I remember Midge Marsden band they were going hard but the big event was Split enz who were riding the wave of true colours. Needless to say there was a fairly chemical atmosphere when they came on stage in the later afternoon and there was a massive crwod on the hill. their intor was twist and shout by the beatles and the whole place just went bananas. degrebecame pretty much lifel long friend s
I lived in various flats in auckland with some really lovely people who pretty much became life long friends.I may not see them very often but we know each other straight away because we know what we went through. But the one flat that stood out above all others was Haultain street. and that was for one really big reason which I will come to in a minute.
But I hit Haultain Street at a low point in my life. I had spent the previous year living as a hermit in a student flat in parnell. I had a room of my own and started to go a little crazy. I was doing paintings on the floor and would eat at the university by myself. I had some good friends around the corner and I look at it now emabarrassed because I was so lonely I would go around and see them so often they must have thought my god cant that guy leave us alone.
They were fun and one friend of theirs in particular was good value. Another friend was drop dead gorgeous He specialized in large blocks of hash and unfortunatelyy they all got busted.
Many years later I acted for my friend when he got busted driving a hearse with a body in it while over the alcohol limit and disqualified from driving. Judge Augusta wallace was not impressed at all. It deeply offended her
sense of right and wrong dear I say it her religion but nevertheless I was grateful she found it into her heart to not send my friend to jail. Hard to keep a straight face though
So at Haultain St I was down to living on pies and chips. Noone really cooked at all. I had a tin y room with a single bed and no money left after the rent. I had to beg a few dollars off the old man. I think it was about five hundred dollars for the whole year just to buy food. well my god you would have thought that i was given a fortune. to this day my sister still goes on about it as if was somehow favoured. This was from people who had been paid all the way through training college and then straight into a well paying job.
Any way the house was where Dragon lived when they were in Auckland. It was about 20 metres from the western railway line and at night it felt like the devil was coming through the front door. .I gradually trained myself to drink a flagon of fairhall river claret smoke a few joints and have a good time. A friend bought his drumkit round and proceeded to nail it to the floor and we had some great jams.
My good friend Brent Mcdonald was a regular visitor and we would travell to parties in the Auckland region on most weekends. We would end up at some party in Parnell which we had not been invited to and things would roll from there.
I had been a hippy or I like to think a progenitor grunge person for my first year and a half at university and then I succumbed to peer group pressure and got all my hear shaved off. I paid the price though and got beaten up on great north road because people thought I was a skinhead. If it wasnt for a security guard who was checking a caryard and who had a large alsation dog and held our attackers off I might have died as i was on the ground getting a good kicking.
I had made the move at a krd barbers and began to embrace punk music and although I had spent many afternoons at the Windsor Castle watching the likes of toylove sheerlux and other bands I was to timid to fully embrace the punk skinhead culture which was funny because I now realize that it was just a social club and although there was a violent element in it most of the people were more intellectual than violent.
One of my favourite bands was the Spelling Mistakes. But the most inspiring band was the Clean who I saw play at the New Station Hotel in Symonds Street. they were loud and like a chainsaw. The loudest band I saw play was the swingers at the student
When I graduated had absolutely no confidence left. I was drained of all self est.eemlooking in the news pa. For five years I had been hammered with the fact that I did not amount to much that I was not that bright a poor student a bad law student pretty much a medioocre human being and I belived it. I remember looking in the newspaper for a job which was really meanial.
Certain people at certain times have made a huge impact on me, I remember looking at some jobs in the paper and my good friend Simon Woodhouse saying I think you are a little better than that Jem. I remember those things and they still fire me today.
At Haultain Street the most important person came into my life. I was walking through Albert Park when i saw a girl walk past me wearing overalls with paint on them. I went the gallery down to the Auckland Art Gallery because there was a major exhibiiton by Rita Angus showing. I went into the gallery and I am pretty sure i dint follow her in there but while i was in there I noticed this girl was also in the gallery as well and I noticed her looking at the exhibition. It was when she left that I decided to follow her.
It was not my usual thing to follow women around but I thought I would. see where she went to so I followed her and she went back up to university
When she was back up at the university i sprang out from behind a pillar and said what did you think of the Rita Angus exhibition. It was a genuine question but nevertheless it was all I had. we had a chat and I took her up to the public bar of the Globe hotel where my good friend Alistairown a Russel was playing pool.
I dont think she was impressed because she didnt ring me again so I tracked her down at her art history lecture the following week. She was a gorgeous girl. There was something about her. She had a spirit and confidence that I did not have outwardly. my life began again. I had someone to share my life with and my loneiness abated.
Later in 1996 I acted for Ricardo Sannd when he was accused of robbing the auckland art gallery at gunpoint on a sunday morning of a very expensive painting by James Tissot which was badly damaged during the robbery.
The robber had driven a very powerful motor cycle around the back entrance of the gallery a parked it and proceeded to walk into the gallery with a sawn off shotgun threaten the security guards jump over the bar protecting the painting cut it out of its frame and then exit to the motor cycle making his exit back up wellesley street and out to the eastern suburbs where no doubt the motorcycle was driven into a waiting van.
The painting was discovered in the room of a house that sannd was renting between port Waikato and Raglan . To say it was an isolated area would be a great understatement. He famously said his kitten had found it under the bed.
.We parted company during the trial as with a lot of major criminals the lawyer acting for them is their initial defence. I suspect it was because the jury liked me more than they liked him and he wanted the attention.He was convicted and sentenced to about seventeen years in jail.
I had intially acted for him on an appeal from the Foodtown robbery in birkenheade which established that a person could not be convicted of robbery and receiving at the same time.
How he came to me I dont know but I suspect it was due to my acting for alistair Barr on the appeal conviction against his conviction for the murder of Gibson grace in Auckland. He was convicted along with a coaccused Richard Morgan
When Ruth and I started our relationship I was still living at the flat. My flatmates could not understand what a deadbeat like me was doing with a girlfriend like Ruth and let their feelings known but I think in the end everyone came to terms with the fact that the relationship was continuing and didnt look like it was going away. My friends who were pretty boyish I think slightly lamented my loss. It kind of reminds me of a great story told to me about peter williams my lovely friend and his great friend Alby Orme. I just wish i could see Alby again and spend time with him but unfortunately that cannot be. There are kind of two camps amongst the profession in Auckland there is the what I call the Crown camp and that includes most of the judger and then there is the Peter williams camp and that includes all the defence lawyers who have never worked for the crown.
I started off life as a defence lawyer for about three years and juniored to Peter williams in my first high Court trial. It was a murder trial and Peter asked absolutley nothing of me as I was completely wet behind the ears. He only asked me to do one thing and that was to arrange with the accuseds family to get a set of clothing for him at Court. He was one of two 16 year olds charged with murder of an old guy in Mangere.
Of course I was more than happy to do this and duly travelled to the defendants house one weekend before the trial to sort out this little errand given to me to do. I had never been to Mangere before and i found the house where the defendants parents and family.
I knocked on the door and when I went in to the house I was deeply shocked. I had never experienced such deprivation. There was literally nothing in the house. It felt really bad and i tried to look normal but deep inside i was screaming what is going on here.
It affected me deeply and I could see that that was why peter williams sent me there to see how the poor lived. It was a valuable lesson becauses in relative terms although I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth compared to this I was.
For a start i was a youny white male who was bought up in a comfortable home with parents who cared about me. I had had all the advantages of a free university education and now here I was in a profession. I had spent five relatively carefree years having fun before I had to work and i had no real idea how people lived. I had seen people at court but I hadnt had a lot of experience of their actual lives. This one trip and errand taught me more about reality than anything I had previously experienced and even then it was still a vicarious experience. It was something I could leave behind and
go back to my beautiful wife and children and chose to forget about it.
I did go back home but I didnt forget and never have. But it was not until much later in life that I came to truly experience the pain of being on the receiving end of a major blow and really learn the hard way myself.
So though I worked for the government from 1990 to 1994 as a prosecutor at the seious fraud office i was always accepted in the defence camp and regarded as a defence lawyer.
my family life blossumed and we got married bought a house at the top of the shops in otahuhu which we fixed up. We had our first child Volita in 1987. She was a special wee girl. Otahuhu was fun if a little hairaising at times.
But i was already stressed from work. I would drive into town everyday or take the bus and if I took the car sometimes I would stop at green lights going down Nelson street or I would find myself drifting off on the. motorway as I drove in or out. Practising as a litigation lawyer was relentlessly mental and consuming.
For some reason i was driven Part of the difficulty of moving outside your class was that you didnt quite fit in anywhere. We didnt have money we only had brains. I was just a worker albeit paid above average to live But there was an invisible barrier of jealously because we had risen in the eyes around us above our status and we became increasingly ostracised from my family.
For a start even tho we had very little we were happy. We were good looking and we had a beautiful baby. It seemed like we had too much. As a friend of mine said to me you have it all. My sister described us sarcastically as the intelligentsia. She meant it as a put down but it was actually true we were the inteligentsia. We both had university degrees and but beyond that people were slightly intimidated. Added to that Ruth was particularly attractive and that attracted jealousy.But we were happy. I felt that she had rescued me from my family and I had rescued her from hers.
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