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At the 1997 Going West Festival, author Keri Hulme made a rare public appearance to discuss and read two excerpts from her unpublished novel BAIT, a story of “death and fishing”. Having New Zealand’s first and notoriously media shy Booker Prize winner at New Zealand’s first literary festival was something our founder Murray Gray had been doggedly pursuing for a number of years. Hulme eventually acquiesced, appearing on the festival stage for a reading from what was to be her second novel, BAIT. In two engaging excerpts, she carries the audience away to a remote part of the country that’s home to a shifting lagoon, larger than life characters, mystery and whitebait. BAIT was never published, but her reading is a tantalising taste of what might have been. Thanks to Bowmore Islay Malt, who sponsored the original session back in 1997; to the executors of Hulme’s estate, who gave their generous permission for us to share this recording; and to Huia Press, Hulme’s publisher, for their support in bringing her words to a new audience.

Beloved west Auckland poet Serie Barford was nominated in the NZ Book Awards for Sleeping With Stones, traversing oceans of feeling, expressing the tragic loss of her lover. Michael Steven’s third poetry collection in five years, Night School, won the Kathleen Grattan award. His live delivery of his work embodies judge’s David Eggleton’s comment: “lucid precision”. On the night, as we recorded these readings live at Going West’s Shifted Ground event in April 2022, Michael and Serie held the audience enthralled with every line. We know they’ll do the same for you.

Lucy Mackintosh, Richard Shaw and Pita Turei discuss stories of Taranaki and Tāmaki Makaurau, both ancient and personal, with journalist Tania Page. Lucy’s Shifting Grounds: Deep Histories of Tāmaki Makaurau and Richard’s The Forgotten Coast both discuss – from their Pākeha perspectives – the deeply contested narratives of Aotearoa, and how histories become rewritten over time. In this engaging, illuminating and at times challenging conversation, they unpack the past with manu kōrero Pita Turei — who brings perspectives grounded in the stories of mana whenua — and Tania Page in the interviewer’s chair.

Casting lines out into Moana Pasifika and pulling words back to West Auckland, Tongan, Samoan and Pālagi poet Karlo Mila reads from her book The Goddess Muscle and Fijian poet Daren Kamali performs his poetry and accompanies himself on traditional Fijian musical instruments. These two exceptional performance poets trade poems across the stage of the Glen Eden Playhouse and the imagined waves of Moana Pasifika as part of Going West’s 2021 Gala Night, touching on the personal, the cultural and the political. The session is introduced by the evening’s MC, Pita Turei.

A deep dive into the life of Robin Hyde, aka Iris Wilkinson, exploring her contribution to New Zealand literature, her travels, motherhood and her life in Auckland, including her relationships, homes, and the time she spent in Whau Lunatic Asylum (later Carrington Hospital and now the Unitec campus). Hyde’s story is told by author Paula Morris, with archival photographs curated by Haru Sameshima. In 2020 the two worked together to produce the book Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde. We apologise for the slightly distorted audio quality of this item.

From Going West’s second year in 1997, master storyteller Maurice Shadbolt, celebrates the near forgotten lives from New Zealand’s history, and talks of his path to writing history to life, particularly in the context of his novel The Season of the Jew. Shadbolt, is a major New Zealand writer with an international reputation. He published numerous books and won every major New Zealand literary prize, some multiple times, and sometimes to the chagrin of other writers. His most renowned work is his trilogy on the New Zealand Land Wars. The first book The Season of the Jew, is a semi-fictionalized account of the story of the Māori leader Te Kooti, told from the perspective of one of his pursuers. It explores issues of racism and injustice and is told as a romping read. Shadbolt was one of the few writers of his time to feel at home with the myths, stories, and legends of his own country, and championed bringing those stories to life and to a broad readership. His home in Titirangi, at 35 Arapito Road, where much of his work was written, is soon to become a writers’ residence and form part of the West Auckland literary landscape, thanks to the mahi of the Shadbolt House Trust, the Waitakere Local Board, and the Waitakere and Auckland Councils. Tino pai rawa atu!

The magic of weaving poetry and music together is on show in this Going West session from 2017. Paula Green, poet, anthologist, reviewer and children’s author, with her newly minted honours and awards, shares the stage in a charming conversation with poet, short story writer and academic Bill Manhire, and jazz composer and performer Norman Meehan, as they disclose the alchemy of setting poetic text as song. They discuss their latest collaboration, the riddle project, Tell Me My Name, and along the way Bill Manhire reads two of his poems Frolic and I am quiet when I call. This session took place the day after Manhire, Meehan and friends delivered a captivating opening night performance, https://t.co/Kb3PUgKKtX?amp=1 (Small Holes in the Silence )for the Going West audience. Paula Green describes Bill Manhire’s poems as ‘music chambers’ and when she asks Norman Meehan to describe the words that characterise their collaborative partnership he replies: “The first word I would use is ‘work’. I love work... to paraphrase Margaret Mahy, who said stories confer structure upon our lives. I think work confers a kind of structure on our lives, it gives us a still turning-point… So it’s wonderful work... And the other side of it is I suppose, love, or affection… and that permeates everything we do... So I would say ‘work’ and ‘love’… for me they are big themes in life really, they’re our pole stars.”

Women in Aotearoa New Zealand. Five leading women meet in the 125th year since the 1893 granting of female suffrage in New Zealand. Feminists Fiona Kidman, Sandra Coney, Lizzie Marvelly, and Golriz Ghahraman join Carol Hirschfeld to explore the position of women in Aotearoa now. What’s led us here, what’s changed, what hasn’t, and what’s still to be done? The session brought together a diverse range of women with a wealth of lived experience. A self-confessed radical feminist and pioneer of the women’s rights movement, a literary legend with more than 30 published books, an Iranian born NZ human rights lawyer and Green MP, an award-winning columnist and campaigner for presenting credible information on sex, sexuality and relationships. Together, they talked with a current affairs maestro on the legacy of female suffrage in New Zealand and what it means to grow up feminist in Aotearoa. Hirschfeld introduced this 2018 Going West session, in a venue packed to capacity, with the following provocation: “Just a year before Kate Shepphard and her fellow suffragists achieved the vote, the electoral law in New Zealand excluded women from the definition of ‘person’. So, when we cast our minds back, what do you think these suffragists would think about where we’re at, and what we’re proud of”. The Women Then, Women Now session was inspired by the publication of Women Now: The Legacy of Female Suffrage, which featured essays from Coney, Kidman and Ghahraman; and Marvelley’s That F Word: Growing Up Feminist in Aotearoa. This podcast contains a brief but explicit discussion of sexual practices

In 2017, Going West was the first festival to invite award winning journalist Diana Wichtel to talk about her newly published memoir Driving to Treblinka: a long search for a lost father. It would go on to rave reviews, awards and accolades. It tells the story of her father Ben Wichtel, a Polish Jew who was rounded up by the Nazis but jumped to safety from a train on the way to the Treblinka death camp. But later in life, now a father and husband, he would simply disappear. As one reviewer said this is a story that “will make all who read it a better human being”. It is an ode to remembering; to never stop fighting against forgetting. Reviewers declared it the best non-fiction book of the year and won both a 2018 Ockham Award for Non-fiction and the E H. McCormack Best First Book Award for Non-fiction. At Going West, Diana appeared in conversation with her long-time friend, colleague, and fellow writer Steve Braunias. Steve regards Diana as a writer of genius and considered the book to be something truly exceptional. “Diana knew something of her Dad’s story, and not much more as a little girl growing up in Canada. Her Mum was a Kiwi. The family immigrated to NZ in the 1960s, but Ben stayed behind, and Ben suffered, and Ben became a kind of ghost, alive, then dead, his story barely remembered. That’s the thing about life, it just gets on with it, but history has a way of creeping up on you and making demands, and Driving to Treblinka is a record of Diana’s journey to the past. It’s profoundly moving... It’s beautifully written, it allows for a lot of black comedy, and it’s a wonderfully told story, from a writer who is really without parallel in this country.”

Appearing at Going West in 2002, Max Cryer talks about New Zealand’s vernacular English and its origins. As he notes, “We live in New Zealand. We speak a language of our own. We think we speak English, but then so do the people in Texas.” An inimitable lover of language and a writer, columnist, linguist, singer, and entertainer, Max takes the audience a wry tour of our New Zealand English dialect. He tells us why we say cuzzie, kindy and mozzie (hypocorism), why our inflection goes up at the end of our sentences (terminal lift), and why we can’t pronounce ‘colonisation’ correctly (metathesis). In his decades-long career, Max has been a household name in New Zealand as everything from an entertainer to an expert etymologist. His books on words and phrases are best sellers, some in their second editions including in 2020’s The Godzone Dictionary of favourite New Zealand words and phrases.

This session from the Going West Festival in 2018 explores creative non-fiction. Award winning novelist, essayist, academic, teacher of creative writing and the founder of the Academy of New Zealand Literature Paula Morris leads a lively discussion on writing true stories, and the demands and possibilities of the essay form and creative non-fiction at a time of upheaval and transformation in the media and publishing landscape. She describes her fellow panelists as “all distinguished, all opinionated and all very good non-fiction writers”. Joining her on stage are journalist, writer and editor Simon Wilson, Susanna Andrew of Unity Books, who is an accomplished editor and reviewer, and economics essayist Shamubeel Eaqub, to discuss non-fiction writing and reading in Aotearoa. Paula Morris Award winning novelist, short story writer, essayist, teacher and academic In 2018 she published an essay and short story collection called False River. Simon Wilson Editor of The Journal of Urgent Writing. Award winning journalist, former editor at Metro, former Auckland editor at The Spinoff, Senior Writer at the New Zealand Herald. Susanna Andrew Co-editor with Jolisa Gracewood of Tell You What: Best New Zealand nonfiction. Reader, reviewer, editor (bookseller at Unity Books). Instigator of ‘True Stories Told Live’ events at the NZ Book Council, convenor of judges for the non-fiction prize for the NZ Book Awards Shamubeel Eaqub Economist, author and columnist, economics essayist. Writer of three Bridget Williams Books Text series titles: Generation Rent, Economic Futures, Growing Apart: Regional Prosperity in New Zealand, and with AUP co-wrote with Ralph Lattimore, The New Zealand Economy: An Introduction

Sometimes at Going West, things just connect. When writer Sarah Laing found out she was pregnant she bought a bottle of folic acid and a children’s book, Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen. In 2008 Associate Programmer Nicola Strawbridge, met Sarah at the Mt Albert Playgroup. Both were there with their small boys. Nicola was impressed with this freshly minted author, illustrator, and graphic novelist. Nicola was also aware that the award-winning poet Karlo Mila, who had agreed to be the Going West Festival’s Curnow Reader for 2008 also had young children, and a blog called the Night Kitchen. She confessed to working in the Night Kitchen due to relocating and having no daytime child-care. A light went on for Nicola; these two women could get together to talk about what it meant to be a writer, a creative person, while also parenting small children. Journalist David Larsen, who was home-schooling his children, was the perfect chair. During the session, poet Karlo Mila reads from her award-winning book A Well Written Body (2008): Victory to the People: Nikolasi is born Nine Months No words I am not a Play Centre mother Sarah Laing reads her short story Afterbirth, from her first published book Coming Up Roses (2007).