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Photograph of castle-like building in black and white.
Otago Boys’ High School (Photo: Benchill / Wikicommons; design: Tina Tiller)

OPINIONBooksApril 11, 2022

To be a man: a message to old boys of Otago Boys’ High School

Photograph of castle-like building in black and white.
Otago Boys’ High School (Photo: Benchill / Wikicommons; design: Tina Tiller)

Dunedin writer Breton Dukes was at Otago Boys’ between 1987 and 1991. Here, he writes of his time at the school, and of David Bond, a former teacher recently convicted for multiple sex attacks on boys.

The shoe choice at Otago Boys’ High School was between Nomads or these other sharper-toed types. If you wore another brand you were a fag. If you didn’t have short back and sides with a long fringe you were a fag. With your school bag, if you wore both straps over your shoulders, you were a fag. 

I am 48 and work part time as a cook in Dunedin. The rest of the time – my wife is a psychiatric registrar – I look after our three young children. We live in Māori Hill – pretty close to OBHS. Sometimes, around town, I see teachers from my school days. There, entering the TAB, is the teacher nicknamed for the shape of his ears. There, walking the town belt and no longer with the walrus-style moustache, is the giant who used to coach the first XV. And there’s David Russell Bond. Not in the flesh, but in the ODT, on the internet. 

Otago Boys’ back then – 1987-1991 – was maths, science, cricket and rugby. Other stuff like English, drama, debating, music came into it, but to really soar from the stone-grey turrets you had to excel in those subjects. Manual consisted of one term each of metalwork, woodwork and art. Creativity wasn’t a thing at the school. Like bullying, sexuality and emotion, it was taboo. So art consisted of drawing a sphere, then making a shadow come off that sphere. We did self-portraits. I had braces, zits and big ears. I was skinny with an oversized head. But I wore the correct shoes and I played sport and when we got to wear trousers in fifth form Mum tapered them enough to avoid me standing out.

My three books all feature exaggerated Kiwi characters set in neutral towns and cities in Aotearoa. But with the world shifting so much these last few years I can’t keep my characters in place. Trump, Covid, Ukraine, the riots in Wellington. The world I knew growing up, the world I understood and could set my characters in, no longer exists. It’s reality that is now exaggerated and my characters keep sliding off that first paragraph.

David Bond was a smiley, springy type. He had a neat head of short dark hair that looked like it wanted to curl. Tanned from the Wānaka ski fields, his features were pleasant enough, tightly packed against the dark skin, like someone had drawn them neatly onto a raisin. He drove a Pajero and taught maths and coached cricket and rugby. Recently he pleaded guilty to a slew of historic sexual abuse crimes against different boys at the school. 

I wasn’t abused, but I could have been. It was a lottery. If I’d been into cricket, if I was in the wrong place at the wrong time…

A friend told me of a time he got ejected from class and was waiting in the corridor when Bond materialised, got close, and fondled his ear.

“Had your ear pierced have you J?”

My friend froze.  

Luckily the teacher who had kicked him out of class appeared and said “That will be all Mr Bond.”

Bond departed; my friend felt weird. Weird enough to remember it after 30-odd years. But what counts is how the other teacher shooed Bond off. He knew Bond. Or suspected. 

When Bond pleaded guilty to the recent charges the ODT got in touch with a previous rector who in response to Bond’s guilty plea said: “I was aware of his reputation but I can quite freely say, if there were students who had complaints, they didn’t come to me.”

The B-side of the OBHS curriculum was binge-drinking, misogyny and homophobia. An openly gay pupil or teacher – there weren’t any in the four years I was there – would have been minced meat, because violence was also part of the curriculum. Bullying, the celebration of the battlefield aspect of rugby, fist fights, the glorification of the world wars.

The culture of the school taught me to be closed. To be stoic. To hold fear down. To be a man. It taught me to suspect those who were different. It taught against emotions and the language of emotion. It was loud. It was physical. It was the whole school out on Littlebourne doing a haka to inspire the first XV who at lunchtime or after school were some of the same fuckers bullying those who were different, who were weak, who stood apart from the herd.

Who was going to complain in that environment? And in what words, what language, would that complaint be made? And who did you go to? Someone at the school? Someone of the place that had created the atmosphere that had allowed what had happened to happen? Or, your parents? And then what? Your mum’s storming up to the rector’s office –

“Hey Smith, isn’t that your mum? Smith you fag – what’s your mum doing here?”

Bond put his hands down your pants to check if you were wearing a box. Bond jiggled up against you in the computer room. 

If something happened to you and you went to someone in authority, if you shone that particular light on yourself, then you were a fag. 

It’s on the school. They, those in charge, as well as knowing about the Bond rumours, knew how we, the boys, communicated, they understood our language and how we lived that language, and never once, during my time, was “fag” addressed, nor was there any effective intervention regarding all the bullying, nor was it pointed out that being good at tiddling a rugby ball up and down Littlebourne didn’t make you anything except good at tiddling a ball up and down Littlebourne. 

So, since I can’t seem to to write about the modern world, I am setting my next project in that ocean of young, decent, smart, and terrified young boys that Bond sharked about in. Fiction or non-fiction, I don’t know yet. But if you went to OBHS between 1987 and 2000 or if you taught there and you have stories to share, good or bad, I am keen to listen – BretonDukes@outlook.com

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Illustration of a woman sitting, very relaxed, leaning back, with book. She's drawn in light blue and white, on an orange background.
(Main illustration: Wachiraphorn via Getty Images; books illustration and design by Archi Banal)

BooksApril 8, 2022

The Unity Books bestseller chart for the week ending April 8

Illustration of a woman sitting, very relaxed, leaning back, with book. She's drawn in light blue and white, on an orange background.
(Main illustration: Wachiraphorn via Getty Images; books illustration and design by Archi Banal)

The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.

AUCKLAND

1  Grand: Becoming My Mother’s Daughter by Noelle McCarthy (Penguin, $35)

Number one in both fair cities! It’s Noelle McCarthy’s new memoir, which books ed Catherine Woulfe reviewed in lavish fashion recently:

“I think Noelle wrote Grand at speed … it reads like she wrote because she was compelled to. As if her recovery from alcoholism, the birth of her daughter, and the death of her mother generated a great howling momentum. The force she exerted, to get to this point.” 

Although there are no photographs in the book, Noelle frequently writes about taking photos, and uses that as a device to frame a scene. She kindly let us publish some of the photos – including, those who’ve read it will be rapt to hear, the one with the ginormous dahlia – and wrote us a terrific essay to go with:

“The last time I saw my mother, I sat alongside her on a narrow hospital cot, stretched my arm out and took several photos. Timestamped a few weeks before Covid locked the world down, they show us with our heads close together, filling the frame, hers tiny, mine bigger. Death has already started to creep into her face, but there she is – alert, narrow-eyed, game still, even with the sunken cheeks and balding temples. I look like a grieving bullfrog, eyes red and bulgy.”

2  Toi Tu Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art by Nigel Borell (Penguin, $65)

Did everyone go to the fantastic Toi Tu Toi Ora exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery? 

Yes? Well then, you simply must get this book as a memento.

No? Well then, you simply must get this book so you don’t miss out.

We know, we know – we’re extraordinary booksellers. 

3  Shifting Grounds: Deep Histories of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland by Lucy Mackintosh (Bridget Williams Books, $60)

Shifting Grounds has been shortlisted for the Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction. (Winner of this and all other Ockhams to be announced mid-May). The judges call it “a fresh and timely study that weaves multiple narratives into a highly readable story”, and we call it “deeply researched”, “lively” and “beautifully laid-out.” Not a bad collection of compliments. 

4  Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35)

Another Ockhams shortlister, and one we would be very pleased to see win the $60,000 golden crown for fiction.  

5  Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (Corsair, $25)

A beautiful novel about marshes, birds and child neglect that sold like hotcakes in 2018 has risen from retirement for another round of applause, after the movie trailer for the film adaptation arrived in internetland a few weeks ago. The film stars Daisy Edgar-Jones, aka star of another novel-to-screen smash, Normal People. 

6  Actions & Travels: How Poetry Works by Anna Jackson (Auckland University Press, $35)

A glowing (and informative) review from Chris Price: “In Actions & Travels, Anna Jackson hosts a literary dinner party that takes place both on the page and online. As she seats poets from different times and places next to one another and deftly draws them into conversation about their dress codes, values and behaviour, we find ourselves part of one big family arguing and communing in the eternal now of poetry.

“If you’ve ever questioned what poems are up to when they ‘wax poetical’, or wondered what Keats and Hera Lindsay Bird would say to each other if they actually met, or what would happen if Patricia Lockwood and Tayi Tibble traded jokes on Twitter, this book is for you.”

7  Imagining Decolonisation by Rebecca Kiddle, Bianca Elkington, Moana Jackson, Ocean Ripeka Mercier, Mike Ross, Jennie Smeaton and Amanda Thomas (Bridget Williams Books, $15)

Auckland has rejoined the Imagine party bus. Destination? World decolonisation. 

…Sorry. Wines have been consumed.

8  The Promise by Damon Galgut (Chatto & Windus, $37)

The 2021 Booker winner, described in a stunning and spoiler-rich review by The New Yorker:

The Promise is drenched in South African history, a tide that can be seen, in the end, to poison all “promise”. The book moves from the dying days of apartheid, in the 80s, to the disappointment of Jacob Zuma’s presidency of the past decade, and the tale is told as the fable of a family curse: first the mother dies, then the father, then one of their daughters, then their only son …

Like a number of early 20th century novels (Howards End and Brideshead Revisited come to mind, along with To the Lighthouse), The Promise turns on the question of a house and its land (in this case, the Swart family farm), and who will live in it, inherit it, redeem it. But Galgut’s novel most closely resembles the work of predecessors like Woolf and Faulkner in the way it redeploys a number of modernist techniques, chiefly the use of a free-floating narrator. Galgut is at once very close to his troubled characters and somewhat ironically distant, as if the novel were written in two time signatures, fast and slower. And, miraculously, this narrative distance does not alienate our intimacy but emerges as a different form of knowing.

9  The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (Canongate, $33)

A feel-good fiction bestseller from 2021. 

10  Kurangaituku by Whiti Hereaka (Huia Publishers, $35)

We said we’d be pleased to see Greta & Valdin win the fiction prize at the Ockhams, but we would be thrilled if Kurangaituku won. Catherine Woulfe raves, “If the judges are out to recognise innovation, audacity, brilliance, give the Acorn to Whiti Hereaka for this book she spent 10 years building.”

WELLINGTON

1  Grand: Becoming My Mother’s Daughter by Noelle McCarthy (Penguin, $35)

2  Imagining Decolonisation by Rebecca Kiddle, Bianca Elkington, Moana Jackson, Ocean Ripeka Mercier, Mike Ross, Jennie Smeaton and Amanda Thomas (Bridget Williams Books, $15)

3  Wellington Architecture: A Walking Guide by John Walsh & Patrick Reynolds (Massey University Press, $25)

A brand-spanking-new pocket guide to the architecture of Wellington, covering five walking routes of the windy capital. The guide digs into the detail of more than 120 buildings and the architects who designed them, and includes full-colour maps and photographs. Give it to a visiting friend or learn to love your own city on a new level. 

4  Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35)

5  The Promise by Damon Galgut (Chatto & Windus, $37)

6  Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr (HarperCollins, $35)

The most recent novel by the author of All the Light We Cannot See. We loved it. 

7  Give Unto Others by Donna Leon (Hutchison, $35)

Escape to Venice with Commissario Guido Brunetti on his 31st detective case (that’s Donna Leon’s 31st case, too). 

8  The Magician by Colm Tóibín (Picador, $38)

Sample:

As Heinrich grew taller, he came to let Thomas know more emphatically that his younger brother’s efforts to behave like a Mann were still a pose, a pose whose falsity was increasingly apparent when Thomas began to read more poetry, when he could no longer keep his enthusiasm for culture a secret, and when he would fitfully allow his mother to accompany him on the Bechstein in the drawing room as he played the violin.

Time passed and Thomas’s efforts to pretend that he was interested in ships and trade gradually crumbled. While Heinrich had grown defiantly unequivocal in his ambitions, Thomas was nervous and evasive, but still he could not disguise how he had changed.

9  Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout (Viking, $35)

Another fiction goodie has returned! 

10  I Am Autistic: An Interactive and Informative Guide to Autism (by Someone Diagnosed with It) by Chanelle Moriah (Allen & Unwin, $30)

A simple guide to autism, written for autistic people and those in their lives. When Chanelle Moriah was diagnosed at 21, she found it difficult to find any information about autism from the perspective of someone who is autistic. She’s gone ahead and filled the gap, creating an essential illustrated guide based on her experiences.

But wait there's more!