Duncan Greive interviews Vend’s Vaughan Rowsell, a tech titan trying to reset his industry’s notoriously problematic agenda.

News broke a couple of weeks back that Vaughn Rowsell, the extravagantly moustached CEO of retail solutions startup Vend, was stepping aside as CEO to focus on the product side of the business. I thought the decision was interesting, and the way it was transmitted even more so. He wrote a piece for his own blog about it, and announced it to staff at a meeting. It seemed very unmediated, very honest, and in the spirit of the ethos with which he has run the startup. He spoke of his role as CEO as a hat had grown heavy on his head.

“At Vend I have continued to shuffle a few hats I passionately care about. The CEO hat, the founder hat, and product visionary hat but the CEO has to consider everyone’s hat fit, even their own. I realised I don’t have enough time to keep wearing all these hats, and so I should hand one on to someone else. I realised my tour with the CEO hat is done and I want to focus on the vision of the product. Both are fucking huge hats. But being CEO of a 200 odd person company growing fast has kept me away from the product vision, which is honestly what I love and why I started Vend.”

Vend, which creates cloud-based retail sales services, is in some ways a counterweight to many of the prevailing winds circulating in parts of tech. The bro culture, the difficulties faced by women and certain ethnicities, the indifference toward humanity beyond its small world. Rowsell’s stepping aside as CEO seemed anathema to Silicon Valley culture too, which positions founders as gods within their businesses. The idea that a founding CEO would voluntarily step aside, citing an inability to personally keep pace with a company’s growth, would be viewed dimly by the more macho and ascetic end of the culture.

But Rowsell has always positioned himself differently within tech. He frequently talks of the role of his paraplegic mother in taking out a bank loan to buy his first computer, and goes out of his way to involve women in the industry, both on panels, and through OMG Tech!, the educational charity founded by he and Michelle ‘Nanogirl’ Dickinson. I thought he seemed a good bugger, and requested an interview to talk through gender, the ecosystem to support startups in New Zealand, the ever-thorny issue of tax, and whether New Zealand’s educational system was turning fast enough to face the future. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and length.

What are some changes you have seen, looking back at the evolution of the New Zealand tech sector?

When you’re in a high-growth startup, it tends to be all consuming. In the early stages there was a lot of looking out the window at what everybody else was doing. You’re trying to borrow inspiration. Because you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.

So I guess one observation was right back at the beginning there weren’t many other people doing it. I found myself trying to take pages out of Rod Drury’s playbook of what they were doing at Xero and places like that. There were very few data points. But at the same time there was all these people doing really interesting stuff. They were just kind of hidden. You had the big high profile stories like TradeMe and Xero and before that, Aftermail.

But they were kind of silent successes, a lot of them. I think the thing that’s changed the most is – and I’d like to think that Vend’s success and Xero’s success and others have actually played a part in that – is actually making it okay to talk about what you’re doing and the success that you’re having. You can see it in the NZX, you know, the number of listings of the last few years in the tech sector. So it feels like the New Zealand tech sector is feeling very healthy from an ideas point of view and people actually doing stuff.

If you were to rank the challenges facing the New Zealand tech sector, would the need for more talent or skilled people be at or near the top?

It’s pretty high up there. I don’t know if it would be at the top.

What would?

Perhaps access to funding – because you need to have money to hire people, so it’s kind of a chicken or the egg.

In terms of the ecosystem, do you think the funding – the investment side – isn’t quite there to match the number of startups?

I don’t for a second profess to be an expert around the different stages of funding here in New Zealand because we’ve only got one data point which is really our story and we’ve raised $49 mil at a variety of different stages. Early stage, seed funding all the way up to VC funding. Not that that’s easy. It’s always been quite challenging raising that money. So the position I always fall back to is – I can’t quantify how much funding is out there. It feels like there’s money there if you’ve got a great business for them to put their money into. The only way to tell if you’ve got a great business is to raise your profile and as you get other people interested in what you’re doing.

What about the tertiary education side? I talked to [Spark CEO] Simon Moutter a little while ago and he was adamant that one of Spark’s big challenges is that there’s just not enough graduates in the STEM subjects.

Over the last ten years I think we’ve been fortunate in that in the tech sector it’s predominantly been the growth of the internet – and that was just never a subject that was taught at university. You didn’t go to varsity to learn how to programme the internet. I’m sure there were programming papers, but the skills you needed to know in order to build a high tech, internet-based business, nobody taught. The best way to learn was to just go and do it.

But now the next wave of technology seems to be going back to a classical STEM, which is science and engineering. The internet of things and robotics and drones. We’re finding that the next wave of technology is all physical. In order to have highly skilled people who can build robots and hoverboards, we’ve gotta get kids interested in science and engineering, math, all those subjects. Because access to computers and code has been relatively easy for people to have access to and that’s the biggest barrier, the barrier of access.

A year or two ago, Steven Joyce had a rather testy exchange with the University of Auckland about the proportion of resources going into engineering versus other areas. Do you think that tertiary institutions are sympathetic to the way that you and other startups might perceive their role in the ecosystem?

To answer your first question, I don’t have a lot of conversations with people but I think it’s a very sensitive subject for universities, where you’ve seen over the last ten years that people are able to bypass the university and go and self-teach. If you want to get into technology, because the institutions couldn’t actually teach you anything, you had to go and self-teach.

But now because we’re coming back to more classical forms of engineering and electronics, there is a really big role again. I think the model is changing for how people learn and I think that’s what the universities are sensitive to because in five years time it probably will seem crazy to sit in a lecture theatre to learn when you can learn most stuff at your own pace at home as long as you’ve got access to a device. But having a lab where you can take things apart and build circuit boards and particle accelerators – that’s the stuff that’s not very easily accessible to kids at home.

I went to the launch of OMG Tech and I thought it was very impressive the way it articulated what it is you guys are trying to do. It doesn’t feel to me like there’s been much of a culture of that form of philanthropy in New Zealand. Who was your target and how do you think they received it?

Essentially our target is kids. Getting them inspired.

I’m more talking about the funders.

The other audience was the funders, people who want to help put money into it. Most of those have been corporates, and they’ve come from the angle that they too see the problem. It’s a ten year problem. So people like Spark and Huawei and Microsoft wanna make sure that there’s a deep talent pool here in New Zealand for whatever the future of technology is going to be. So the young adults that they’re going to employ in ten years time are the ten year olds today at school. So for them it’s about making sure that pipeline is full of inspired kids who really want to get into this stuff.

The other audience is the educators. We set our goal initially to be primarily a role of inspiration. Prove that kids wanna do this. Prove that kids want to pursue these careers into science and technology and build robots and things. And so then we can prove it to the educators. And also prove to them that kids learn this stuff really easy and the biggest barrier is having access to the tools, the particle accelerators and robots. The actual learning is the easy bit. It’s all the same stuff, it’s problem solving, learning to work with people, a lot of it iss coding. So getting the educators less afraid of it because one of their biggest fears is that technology is changing so fast and the system isn’t designed in a way that can keep up.

We’re starting to get a lot of traction there. We’ve got a list so long that we just can’t keep up with. Almost 50% of the schools in New Zealand have expressed an interest that this is something that they want to do. They just don’t know how to do it.

Do you feel that the education system is well geared up to handle something as epoch-defining as the impact of technology? I’ve got young kids at school and it seems like they are being taught largely the same subjects in largely the same way as when I was in school 20, 30 years ago. 

It’s happening very slowly. My oldest daughter has just started intermediate and not only is she going to my old school, she’s in the same classroom, learning the same subjects – the exact same subjects – that I learnt thirty years ago. But part of the school is going digital so they’re actually starting to use devices but. I don’t know if that’s just schools having to keep up with kids because are so, a lot of the kids are digital natives. They learn better with devices. But they’re still learning the same things and subjects. It’s a completely different delivery mechanism. But if the school wanted to teach kids how to programme robots or work 3D printers, that’s a considerable cost for a school.

Turning to Vend, over the past five or six years, it’s not only starting a business but being focused on growth and having to care about capital raising and all kinds of things. What are some of the things that you have learned as a result that you didn’t understand?

Lots. Because you normalise to it, you’re in the almost glamourised ‘startup life’ of ‘startups are so cool’ – startups are cool, they’re fun. But shit it’s hard work. And I’m constantly having to remind myself – everybody here is constantly having to remind themselves – that what we do here is not normal, the pace we move at. People always ask me ‘what are the biggest mistakes you made’ or ‘what are the biggest lessons you learned’ and there are so many of them. Literally every month is a new big mistake, a new big lesson, and a new big success.

Because in five years we’ve grown from one person to a couple hundred people across five different offices around the world. Literally every month we were having to solve a big problem. So like, how do we open an office in Canada? I dunno, we’ve never done that before.

Do you think that you have attracted people who are naturally seeking out that kind of dynamic working experience? Or is there a cultural adjustment that’s needed to happen – because it didn’t really exist.

Yeah. I think we’ve always had a big focus around culture. Doing this is hard work and we want to make sure that we’re having a good time all time. Not having parties every day, but making sure that we’re surrounded by people we like and we enjoy each other’s company. Because otherwise how are we going to be in the building with each other for 10-12 hours a day? Because we’re so fun loving and we’re really passionate about what we do, that attracts a lot of people. It attracts a lot of younger people. So for a lot of people this is their first or second job.

I guess a lot of them don’t realise how unusual this sort of environment is. This is not your typical work environment. Things are moving really quickly and, like everybody, they have to normalise to it, the constant fast pace and change, or they just can’t cope. Then they have to leave and go get a more stable job where maybe things don’t move as fast.

We’ve been through a huge change over the last twelve months. We grew rapidly and then we contracted rapidly. We grew our headcount to be well over two hundred then we had to scale back because we made some bad calls. We opened a support centre in Berlin and grew that team rapidly then realised that actually it was really hard doing business out of a Berlin base so we had to back out of that. That created a lot of change here.

Also when you’re five years in, because everything’s moving so fast, everybody’s jobs, especially at the upper level, you’re kind of having to level up five levels every year. At some point you reach your maximum level because you can’t level fast enough to keep up with the demands of where the company needs to go.

Tell me about the decision to step away from the CEO role.

I’ve found myself in that exact same space. Because I could level up another five or ten levels in the CEO role, but I figured there’s probably somebody out there who’s already mastered those levels. They don’t have to learn it on the job. And to be honest, that frees me up to go and level up in things where my passion is. That was a big call to make but logically it was the right thing to do. It was like ‘yeah, why wouldn’t I bring in a more seasoned CEO who’s got a lot more experience than me.’ Who’s got that experience now.

The traditional model is you found a company, you grow with it, you remain in the big chair until you retire or can sell the company or you’ve decided that it’s time to move on. So most people assume that I’m leaving the company because I’m stepping out of the CEO chair. No way, I wouldn’t want to go anywhere, we’re having such a great time.

You talked about the struggles the company experienced, the growing pains of last year. Did some of that feed into your decision and how did you respond emotionally to be able to make that decision for yourself?

Yeah. I think I’d be slightly hypocritical to say that a lot of the lessons I learnt over the past two years didn’t play a part or didn’t highlight the fact that this is the sort of role that you are learning on the job. With each level of scale that you go through, the potential risks of the mistakes that you make also compound. We’ve got two hundred people who are here. If we make a decision which means the company runs out of cash then that’s kind of disastrous. So we are now in the position where we are considered, in the industry, to be one of the leading players. We’ve got our eyes set on the number one position and we wanna be the number on solution for retail technology worldwide. I want to minimise the mistakes that we make. By putting somebody in the role who’s got a lot more experience – not to say that we won’t make mistakes, that she or he won’t make a mistake – but if we can avoid the stupid mistakes then that gets us a lot further.

You said ‘she or he’ there, and you refuse to work on a panel where it’s just men speaking. Tech has historically been a boys club, it’s been quite exclusionary to women and to certain ethnicities. How important is it to try to counter that and how difficult has that been? 

Yes. It’s really important, it’s really hard to solve, and again it’s not something you can solve overnight. Just little things, by the words you use. That’s part of the reason I did OMG Tech! as well, not only to make sure that there’s a good pool of future talent. We make sure that half of the kids that go through the programme are girls and half of the kids that go through the programme are from lower socio-economic areas to try and level the playing field. Technology isn’t something that’s inherently more attractive to guys than it is to girls; it’s just that kids make their mind up really early on, as they go through the education system, that they’re gonna be a doctor or a nurse or a teacher or an accountant. I don’t think it’s something we can change overnight. To be honest, especially in senior leadership roles, it’s really hard to find women to put into those roles. Not because there aren’t talented people out there – there just aren’t as many of them.

I don’t know that I have all the answers but if everybody makes a small effort, like I refuse to speak on a panel that’s just filled with guys because I kinda like the company of women, you know? And it makes it more interesting. I can’t think of how many panels I’ve sat on which are just four or five guys – more often white, more often middle-aged – who kind of all agree with each other. It’s not just a gender diversity thing – it’s just a diversity of views and opinions as well.

Tech sort of has these two elements to how it’s perceived. One is that it’s this amazing force for good, that it makes things much easier for consumers and all the rest of it. The second is this side, that rapacious lust for growth at almost any cost can lead to behaviour that – I’m thinking in particular of Uber recently, taking 15% off its already fairly low paid drivers’ wages – seems generally terrible. Do you feel like the industry as a whole is thinking about people as much as you are or as it should?

I don’t know.

I’m thinking also about the base erosion and profit shifting, which isn’t confined exclusively to tech – but tech is one of its major innovators, if you can use that term. Structuring their taxes in a way that can suck as much profit out of an entity without paying any tax in a jurosdiction. And often so they’re not only disrupting an industry that might have been very labour-intensive, in reducing the jobs, but they’re not replacing that revenue on the corporate tax end. Do you think about that kind of thing? Does it give you pause, in terms of how we actually fund our society?

Okay I’ll tell you the stuff I do think about. In business, without specifically commenting on Uber or those sorts of disruptive workforce-type technology players, it’s that balance between the two competing forces of profit: the business, which if you put on your pure business hat, you don’t think about the people you think about the best interests of the company and what will make the company more successful, and thus more revenue.

Then at the other end of the scale it’s all about the people. If you don’t have the people then you don’t have a business and you don’t have profits. I’m somewhere to the left hand side of the scale – which is it’s all about the people. I was raised by my mother who taught me that you treat people well and, whether it’s karma or whatever, what goes around comes around. So that’s very much guided me. I’m not a ruthless businessman, don’t tell my shareholders, but I will more often err on the side of looking after my people.

We went through some hard times last year and if the team didn’t have the trust in the leadership and if we didn’t have an amazing team of people out here then we probably would’ve lost everyone. Going through a big change in business can be pretty frightening, especially for young people who this is their first or second job in the industry. It’s being able to weather those storms through a strong culture where everybody trusts you, you’re honest and you’re up front with people about your motivations. Then that, I believe, enables you to go on and build and amazing successful company that generates a truckload of profit.

Sorry to harp on the tax thing, but it’s a bit of an obsession of mine. It doesn’t feel like the sector pays its share. I understand that because there’s a slice for growth and every dollar you can avoid paying in tax you can use to supercharge your company – but ultimately the hospitals and the roads and all the rest still need to run.

It kinda sucks if it’s a direct result, you know, high tech companies can avoid paying tax and then they reach a liquidity event and then you get lots of off shore investors who benefit from that and that money doesn’t find its way back into the system. So I think that sucks.

My philosophical view is that everybody should pay their way. We don’t have anybody within Vend whose job is to avoid paying taxes. On one hand, though, here in New Zealand we’ve got over a hundred highly skilled jobs that we’ve created. Everybody here pays PAYE, so as long as we’re increasing the pool of highly talented people who pay tax then there is that input back into the system.

I guess I’m thinking less about NZ headquartered companies, than say, Facebook. Which has had this extraordinary impact on any number of different sectors yet is still a tiny workforce and its NZ tax bill is still well under six figures. Do you think that the industry as a whole could stand to think harder about how it contributes to society?

Yeah. But I think that can be done through indirect means as well, it doesn’t have to be through taxes. I like seeing tech companies who give back in other ways as well, whether it’s through philanthropy or whatever, but coming back –

It’s nice when they do that – but we don’t want to be relying on the kindness of strangers to run a country.

No, that’s right. It’s kind of a trust thing. I don’t know what it is about American companies – whether it’s an American ethos – but they just don’t like paying tax. And any way they can avoid paying tax. That’s my view as an outsider. They don’t see the value of it, it’s somebody else’s problem to make sure that there’s an infrastructure and facilities.

Do you feel like the fact that there are these prominent examples of companies which, whether it’s through their tax structures or the way that they treat employees or the kind of bro culture, give the industry a bad name which makes it harder for companies which are trying to be both extremely high growth and kinder employers.

It does make it harder because quite often I’ll come up against that bro culture where people assume that because we’re a tech company that we embody that culture. It’s something that we work really hard to make sure that we’re different. We’re equal opportunity, it’s not just a bunch of dudes hanging out and goofing off.

It seems to me, and I may be wrong, that there is the sort of coming New Zealand economy – just as there is the global economy – and the going one. Do you feel like at a media and governmental level there’s enough emphasis placed on the new economy?

No but again, I don’t know if it’s a chicken or an egg thing. It feels like there’s enough stories out there, it doesn’t have to be Fonterra all the time in the business papers. There was Diligent last week who had a significant exit, those sorts of stories I think are really interesting. You only hear about the big exit of Diligent but where was the interesting backstory or the commentary in the main media outside of the NBR and very specific media outlets about the story of Xero or Diligent or Vend or others?

There’s probably some really interesting stories about things that tech companies are doing, rather than just reporting on the price of milk. There’s a big risk. You’ve got economies like South America and China. Who’s to say that in ten years time we haven’t lost a milk industry or dairy industry because maybe the supply can be generated closer to home for those bigger markets, and then what are we left with? A lot of grass and some fat cows.

Returning to that decision to step aside, do you recall when the idea first entered your head? Just describe the gestation process and how you feel at the end of that, and how it’s been received.

I can’t remember when I first started thinking about it, probably just before Christmas, as you probably do when you go into the holiday period. It’s like well, end of a year, I wonder what next year is going to hold. It’s been one of those things which sits in the back of your mind.

One of the things we talk about here internally is that you do a tour of duty. Because it’s a fast moving environment, maybe your tour here is only two years. And maybe in that two years maybe you’ve levelled up, you’ve levelled up and you wanna move on and go take your new skills, because you learn a shitload here. You wanna take those skills and apply them somewhere else. Or maybe the job has grown and you’re not the right person in that role anymore, and that’s okay, it’s not a bad thing.

That made me think, well, do I have the right skillset to be able to keep doing that? And do I have the energy to keep doing that? Then I felt that I probably wouldn’t be able to keep up. So I made the call to keep the vision hat and offload the day-to-day running the business hat to somebody else who’s more skilled at it than I am.

How did you make the announcement to staff and how have they received it?

I just stood up in front of the company. I did an all-hands last Thursday and took them through the story of Vend and my decision and why I made it. Everybody took it really well which, I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. When I say I mulled over it the last couple of months, it wasn’t mulling over the decision – before Christmas I knew that was the right decision. It was really trying to figure out how to make it happen. How to get investors comfortable with it, how to get the board comfortable with it, how to get the team comfortable with it.

Because if people didn’t accept it then it would be the wrong decision. So yeah, I agonised over that for months. But then in the end I just stood up, was frankly honest with the team as to why I made the decision, and everybody understood it. Because it was the truth.

The Spinoff’s media and society coverage is brought to you MBM – an independent media agency for the digital age.

The live email interview is a form which no one seems to practice but will almost certainly revolutionise journalism, possibly. It has the zip and tension of meeting in the flesh, and writing questions and answers adds a kind of literary dimension.

This interview with Angus Gillies took place last night (Monday). Gillies is a TV3 news producer, and also the author of Ngati Dread, his remarkable trilogy of self-published books about the killings, arsons and general weird shit that went down in Ruatoria in the late 1980s. An excerpt appeared yesterday. It was a very FFS kind of excerpt: it detailed the beheading of Lance Kupenga by fellow Rasta, Joe Nepe. 

Angus in my introductory remarks to your excerpt from Ngati Dread on the Spinoff yesterday, I described the events in Ruatoria during those five years from 1985-1990 as “a kind of Maori Rasta uprising”. How would you put it?

There were a lot of things happening at the same time. Some guys had brought dope and Bob Marley’s music back to the East Coast from the city. Chris Campbell had learnt about Rastafarianism in prison. There were a lot of young guys coming through who felt that the land that should have been theirs had been allowed to fall into the hands of the Williams family and other Pakeha families by their elders.

In the early 80s there was a big Black Power hui in Ruatoria and that is also seen as one of the important formative moments in the emergence of the Rastas.These young guys were reading the Bible and seeing parallels in there to what they felt they were going through. Smart guys like Chris Campbell, Beau Tuhura and John Heeney started talking to their elders and trying to find out the Maori prophecies from that area and mixing it with Te Kooti’s Ringatu religion, Rastafarianism and the Bible. They began to develop a rebel religion with gang roots. In the early days they started out chopping fences and burning hay barns on stations belonging to the Williams family as a protest about the land alienation.

There were all sorts of other things too, weren’t there? I mean in part the wider context of the times – Rogernomics had laid the East Coast to waste, and the theme running through the daily lives of Rastas and loads of other people on Ruatoria must have been dispossession. A less fancy way of saying is that were was a lot of unemployment.

But also, what about the influence of a woman called Sue Nikora? You interview her in the book and she talks the most alarming bullshit – Maori came from outer space, the waka was a UFO. And yet it seems she was a kind of ideological godmother to the Rastas, filling their head not just with nonsense but also genuine grievances as well. Was she an instigator?

Yes, Sue was definitely an instigator of the Rastas. You might remember Sue from news stories. She believes she is the rightful Prime Minister of New Zealand and has sent relatives around to motels in Gisborne that she doesn’t own to collect rent. She believes she has a claim by blood to a lot of the land up the coast and she was able to get the boys to park things up on the coast. Almost everyone I talked to up the coast, from all walks of life, said that Sue was influencing and guiding the Rastas in those early days.

When I was about to meet Sue I expected her to be some fearsome, baleful character but she seemed very nice and harmless and all I could get out of her were her very imaginative stories. They were always such great stories, I felt, and in keeping with the coast, that I felt I had to include them. Harry Crews wrote a childhood autobiography called The Biography of a Place and a lot of stories people told me I put into the books because they were part of the biography of the place.

It’s said that Sue led the boys until they got their own mana and realised they could get their own way by their own means and they eventually moved on from Sue. Bob Kaa, one of the vigilantes, said that he was once invited by Sue and her family to a woolshed to talk about what to do about the Rastas and when he got there there was actually a really nice house inside this rundown old woodshed.

There were a lot of other things. I was the same age as the Rastas and a lot of my friends in Gisborne were on the dole. When I moved to Wellington and would return to Gisborne it always struck me that there were more and more boarded up houses. A lot of people had left the Coast to find jobs in the city but also, the East Coast lost generations of their most amazing leaders to war. The soldiers in C company from the coast in the Maori Battalion were legendary. John Heeney was a nephew of Moana Ngarimu, the VC winner, on one side and Tom Heaney, who challenged Gene Tunney for the world heavyweight boxing title on the other.

In this five year period there were the arsons, and Rasta dudes on horseback on the main street acting like they owned the place, and the unbelievable nature of the killing of Lance Kupenga, and the thing they did to that horse, and it seems to have ended when Luke Donnelly shot and killed Rasta leader Chris Campbell. You interviewed Donnelly quite a few times. He tells you about the first time he came into contact with a Rasta. The Rasta says, “What you fucken think you’re doing, cunt?” And Donnelly answers, “Who are you calling a cunt?” And then he grabs him by the dreads and gives him a hiding. And when you talk to him about killing Campbell, he confesses to you that as Campbell lay dying, what he really wanted to do was kick Campbell’s head in. He also said, and this is revealing, because I think maybe the greatest truth in this reply to you is in the last sentence, “I don’t go looking for trouble. I’ve never gone looking for trouble. But if trouble comes looking for me I won’t back off. “

Things ended badly between you and Donnelly. What do you have to say about him?

I knew Luke before I wrote up the whole Rasta thing. He got on well with my older brother John and my father Iain and I knew him because I covered rugby league for the newspapers and he was Kiwi league international Jason Donnelly’s dad. I knew members of Luke’s family in Gisborne and got on well with all of them. But Luke had this idea that the only part of the Rasta story that was interesting was when he arrived and started beating up the Rastas. Chris Campbell, who died on the operating table after being shot multiple times by two firearms by Luke, was a cousin of Luke’s. They were related. But Luke felt that everything should be seen from his point of view. So when he finally saw that I’d quoted a lot of people saying he was lucky he didn’t go to jail for murder, he understandably freaked. He wanted me to write a movie script with him and he would be the Clint Eastwood style character. I wrote to Luke in an email that he wouldn’t be happy until i wrote him riding into town on a white horse and wearing a stetson.

On the other side of the coin, the Rasta leader John Heeney couldn’t understand why I would want to talk to anyone about what happened in Ruatoria other than the Rastas. He kept saying, there is no two sides to this story. There’s only one side: The truth. So I just tried to tell a story that was as close to the truth as possible and walk a line in the middle of everyone. I haven’t seen Luke for a while but if I did we’d probably shake hands and have a good yarn. He’s probably the type of guy that respects you if you stand up for yourself.

I actually got on well with the Rastas too. They’re just guys my age from the coast. Pretty rough and ready, but they tell a great story.

“They’re just guys my age from the coast. Pretty rough and ready” – mate these are hard men. I wouldn’t last five fucken seconds with them. And yet there you are, writing about going to interview Rasta leader, or Rasta elder sort of, John Heeney, and there are other dreads there too, and he gets out the bong and you get so paranoid and stoned off your ass that all you can say is: “Mmm.”

I raise this also because – you’re the guy who just keeps going back for more with this story. The events all happened in the 80s but you don’t leave it alone. The pain is still intense in many households, no doubt, but you don’t leave it alone. Whitey keeps going back to Ruatoria in search of the story! It’s admirable and amazing and I dig the books big-time. But do they reveal an obsession? Is that what you became – obsessed?

Yes, I definitely became obsessed. I started out taking off three months from work at 3 News with the intention of gathering the material and writing a book about the Rastas. But it ended up taking 10 years. The reason I broke it up into three volumes because my head couldn’t handle all that info in one book. I had to finish one. Then do the next and then the last. But you’ll see in the last book there’s a section from way back about a farmer who says he was shot at by Chris Campbell. the reason that’s in the third book is because I didn’t find that stuff out until near the end of the process. Anyway, it kind of worked where it was because it showed how far Chris could go in that section leading up to where he has his big showdown with Luke.

I had wanted to interview Chris Campbell when he was alive and in prison but my father, who was the editor of the Gisborne Herald, talked me out of it. He said let sleeping dogs lie and old wounds heal. Then a publisher asked me if I wanted to write a book about Wynton Rufer, the footballer, whose mum, I think, is from the coast. Well, I saw this two paragraphs in the Dominion or the Herald in about 1999 saying that the man who had killed former Rasta Dick Maxwell had got off on self defence, even though he’d stabbed him, beaten his head with an oar and left him in a stream by the sea to drown, and the public gallery had got to their feet and cheered and I thought, “This bloody story is still going.” That set me back onto it.

I told the publisher, forget the book about Wynton I’ve got an amazing book for you. That was Ian Watt who was at Reed Publishing at the time and then went to Exisle. But by the time he said he only wanted 100,000 words i’d already written 300,000 and felt an obligation to the people involved to tell the story in a way I felt did justice to them and the material.

During the writing process over a period of years I had recurring nightmares in which I would fall victim to the anger of the Rastas. But as I said, as I met them I generally liked them. I found they were often disarmingly honest because they’d done it tough and they had nothing to lose whereas the so-called community leaders seemed shifty to protect their reputations. There’s one interview I didn’t get that I would still like to and if I do get it I’ll add it to the story. That’s Junior Paul. That’s the guy who went crazy for a while and they tried to “beat the devil out of him”. A woman contacted me once on Twitter saying her partner Junior wanted to talk to me but when I got back to her she didn’t reply.

You interviewed one of the Rastas in prison and took your dad Iain, and you write how he gives the man’s wife $100 to spend on their kids at Xmas. Now this seems a fairly typical gesture of Iain. Everyone always says he’s a gentleman even though he’s Scottish and worked as a newspaper editor.

But what about you, Angus? I mean – we haven’t met, which seems like an oversight, because we’ve both worked in journalism for 30 years and it’s a small trade, getting smaller by the day. But I had a sense reading the book that you’re partly – and I don’t wish to insult you – downright tabloid, almost feral, a Genevieve Westcott in pants.

A former colleague of yours said you were a top man and awesome journo and also mentioned your nickname was Angus Ghoulies. The section in the book where you describe what happened to the police photographer who was lowered into the hole in the ground where Lance Kupenga’s body had been dumped…That’s pretty far-out stuff. Is it one of the reasons why you remark to former Gisborne cop Nigel Hendrikse – I went to school by the way with his brother Wayne, who’s a forensic photographer with the police in Rotorua – that your books inflamed such feeling on the East Coast? You told him, “I know I’ve pissed off Rastas, cops, farmers, vigilantes and everyone else in the community too.” Did whitey take too much relish in the more lurid aspects of this story?

Firstly, my Dad is pathologically generous. When I return to Gisborne, he still tries to pay for my petrol and put $50 notes in my hand. Last time I was there he gave the money to my eldest son with instructions to him not to let me know until we were in Opotiki so I couldn’t give it back. He gave Dion Hutana a hundred bucks when we went to see him in Hawke’s Bay prison. Dion had burned down the Ngati Porou marae. His partner and kids were there and it was Christmas. Dad and I both felt that Dion should have been leading Maori, not languishing in a prison. Dad also gave Billy Kaihe a hundred bucks. Billy was shot by Luke Donnelly the day Luke also shot Chris Campbell. If Dad’s got money and he sees someone could do with a few bucks, he gives it to them.

Secondly, you and I have met. You interviewed me for the job as your replacement as editor at Capital Times in Wellington in the late 80s. I came along with a mutual friend, Tom Scully. Mike Alexander got the job.

Thirdly, the subs at The Dom always threatened to print my byline as Anus Goolies if I didn’t do what they asked.

Fourthly, I never shy away from a good story. I probably am tabloid in my tastes. I knew the Rastas and what happened in Ruatoria was explosive stuff. As I said in the prologue: “Sometimes I feel like Aladdin in the cave full of treasure, at others like the drunken village idiot left alone in the gelignite room.” You can’t attempt to tell a story like this properly and not expect to piss everyone off. I don’t think I relished the more lurid aspects and I did hold back some stuff, believe it or not. I actually revered the material. I felt it had a power of its own that needed to be respected.

I notice you use the word whitey and there was very much a sense for me of being the Pakeha interloper. Some Maori on the coast didn’t want a Pakeha telling this story. Api Mahuika met with me but didn’t want to be quoted. I approached Monty Soutar the historian for info: nothing doing. But the real people, who were directly involved, again, the Rastas, they opened up and were generous, as were the cops. I set out on this series of books thinking it would be a bizarre crime story. But as I said earlier, it turned into the biography of a place. There was a whole spiritual aspect to it that I found fascinating. For me it was like reporting from a parallel universe.

Tom Scully…Hell’s bells. I don’t remember that – it wasn’t Mike who got the job though, and by the by I’ll mention that David Cohen was my predecessor as editor and a later editor was Philip Matthews. Tom and I were close friends in the early 1980s. I was dazzled by him. He was one of the funniest people I’ve ever met and had such an original mind and he committed suicide. It’s nice to meet someone who knew him.

Okay so anyway I went on Twitter while you replying to my questions and asked if anyone had something they wanted to ask you, and Ira Heyder wrote, “Kia ora kōrua, hope you’re well Angus. Look forward to the interview. How did Māori journos respond to the books?”

Yes, Tom was a genius and a shit hot writer and we used to argue like cat and dog. He came down to Gisborne with me and we were in the Tatapouri pub together playing pool one day when a Mongrel Mob member was put through a glass wall by one of the locals. He took it in his stride.

Hi Ira, I can’t remember talking to too many Maori journos about it. I did an interview for Maori TV at the launch of the first one. Kathy Akuhata Brown, who had brothers in the Rastas, reviewed volume one for the Gisborne Herald. We’d worked at the Herald together. She’s Sue Nikora’s granddaughter and I’d interviewed her dad in the book. She liked it although she was a bit wary that I’d described her in the book as a friend. I hope Kath doesn’t mind me mentioning this but she approached me to work with her on a film about the Ruatoria Troubles. As yet, it hasn’t come to anything. James Ihaka from the NZ Herald contacted me telling me he really enjoyed it. I’ve got to get copies of the second and third books to him.

But I get the most satisfaction when I hear from the Rastas or the cops or people who were directly involved telling me I nailed it. The other day a guy called Rihara Maxwell contacted me on Facebook. His profile pic was of a lot of guys with blue bandanas covering their faces giving gang signs. I thought, here we go and accepted the friend request. He was the son of Dick Maxwell, who claimed he was kidnapped by police and was later killed in a fight. Rihara said he supported everything I wrote about his father. Members of the Campbell family have contacted me with support, as has Wiki Haua, who grew up with Rasta Cody Haua. I wanted to write a book that the Rastas would enjoy reading, not an academic historical text. I’m sure there are some who aren’t happy with it though.

We started this interview at 9m and it’s now 11.05pm. While I’ve been waiting for your answers to my questions, and they take about 20 minutes sometimes, I’ve been thinking, “He’s had enough, he’s shot through, he’s sick of this, he’s saying interesting things about ‘biography of place’ but I’m just calling him feral and whitey and he’s probably still bitter I didn’t recommend him for the Capital Times job.” But no! It’s all good, and here you are.

Okay so Andrew Lumsden the top bloke also known as Radar responded to my Twitter request, and had more than one question, five or six in fact, because he has an inquiring mind. I’ll just ask you a couple. One of them was, “Ever been back to see what happened to main protagonists now?”

I’m going to step in and give a partial answer to that on your behalf and mention how you found out that John Heeney, he who did the arsons, is now a firefighter. That’s not even an irony. It’s too bizarre for irony.

I was in touch with someone who grew up in Ruatoria and they claimed, “Nearly everyone I know that was involved in that saga is today mentally unstable, addicted to weed or dead.” Is that true or a nonsense, as far as you know? Is that what has happened to the “main protagonists”?

I haven’t been back to Ruatoria since the books came out. And I hadn’t been to Ruatoria before I started researching them. I’ve had a lot of contact with people involved with the books at the launches of the books and by phone and on social media. When I contacted the Rasta John Heeney between the release of the second and third volumes, he was pretty annoyed with me. He didn’t want the third book to come out because he’d had enough by then. But I felt I had a commitment to everyone who had entrusted me with their story, people like Lance Kupenga’s dad Paetene and Chris Campbell’s brothers. I hear of people I’ve written about dying or having strokes or going to prison but I also hear of my own friends and family committing suicide or getting ill or having bad luck or going slowly or spectacularly mad.

Hey, Steve, when I read that comment about people being unstable or dead, it makes me feel good that I got that stuff down in time. My argument to people in Ruatoria who thought I should butt out was, you might resent me, but trust me, there’s an amazing piece of history here and your children and their children and the generations to come are going to thank me. And I’m not being a blowhard, I believe that.

Let’s wrap things up with two last questions from Mr Lumsden. They are: “Is there a movie in it?” You mentioned someone wanting to do a picture about it with you but nothing happened. But didn’t I read somewhere that SPP want to do a film?

He also asks: “MOST IMPORTANTLY – where can we get a copy of the book!” Did you know by the way that volume three was the second most-loaned book of non-fiction at the Gisborne library in 2015? After the Road Code.

People can order them through book shops – they’re listed on Neilsen Book Data – or through Amazon.com or Kindle. But it’s probably easiest to get them through me – angusgillies@vodafone.co.nz.

The books get passed around a lot. A Maori mate says they were getting passed around heaps in the mines in Western Australia, I also heard lawyers in Hawke’s Bay have read them, as well as punk rockers in the South Island, led by Oi Bazooka’s Mark Tyler. I’m heartened they’re reading volume three at the Gisborne Library because I reckon it’s pretty special that one.

SPP didn’t approach me about a movie. It was Screentime. They had the option on it for a few years, then we dropped that when Kath Akuhata Brown contacted me wanting to do something. Two other people have also contacted me about doing a movie with one of them even writing a script based on the first book. I subbed the script for this guy and he never bothered to get back to me to pass it on to him. I wouldn’t want to be associated with it with the script in its current state.

Everyone wants to do a movie about the first book [it’s got the beheading in it] but I think the third book would lend itself to a movie very easily. That covers the lead-up to and the final confrontation between Luke Donnelly and Chris Campbell. They were both formidable characters who would not take a backward step and they were heading for a collision for a long time. It would be pretty easy to write, I reckon.

I’d watch it. Angus, it’s 11.42pm, thanks very much for your time – and congratulations on these books, this trilogy. The author Scott Hamilton recently nominated it on his blog Reading the Maps as one of the greatest ever works of New Zealand non-fiction; the trilogy’s an incredible achievement and a terrifying, revealing read about New Zealand. I sound like a man clearing his throat and giving a very formal farewell speech. How about this instead: cheers Angus! Awesome book.

Images courtesy of the Gisborne Herald.

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