The Herald on Sunday is about to celebrate a significant birthday. Hayden Donnell takes a look back at one of its most defining moments.
When the Herald on Sunday turns 20 next month, current and former staff will gather at their usual haunt, the Shakespeare, to reminisce. They might talk about the paper’s award-winning investigations or its breaking news coverage of everything from the All Blacks’ Rugby World Cup victories to the Christchurch earthquakes. But when the clamour of nostalgia dies down, they’ll likely turn their minds to one report that stands head and slimy gelatinous body above the rest.
The Herald on Sunday’s 2012 story about a man with an eel in his bum is perhaps its most singular and well-read contribution to New Zealand journalism. It’s notable first and foremost for being centred on a man who had an eel in his bum. But it also contains four of the most memorable lines in our media’s history. The first is the headline above, which went out for display at dairies and newsagents around the country. “Man had eel in his bum” is striking, and still more so for the decision to go with the word “in” rather than “up”. The terminology is somehow both more dispassionate and precise, and yet far more confronting and unsettling.
Another standout passage is the product of an anonymous sub-editor at the Herald website. Below a stock photo of a small brown eel, a caption reads: “An eel like this had an adventure”.
That sentence will go down as one of the most extreme examples of understatement put to print. Though being plucked from a waterway and plunged into a man’s anal cavity certainly counts as an adventure, that word fails to capture the full enormity of the eel’s experience.
Somehow all this content comes before the first words of the story itself. The writing doesn’t disappoint. Four paragraphs in, an unnamed hospital source describes the eel. “The eel was about the size of a decent sprig of asparagus,” reads their statement. Local news outlets have sometimes struggled with size comparisons. Perhaps the nadir came in 2014, when the Herald described a 6.85kg baby as “nearly the size of seven 1kg blocks of cheese”. Asparagus, on the other hand, is visceral and evocative. You can grasp the eel’s size, literally and figuratively.
The last standout line comes courtesy of the article’s author, journalist Russell Blackstock. His closing paragraph starts off listing seemingly mundane eel facts. “Eels migrate up streams as elvers to find suitable adult habitat,” it says. “After many years they migrate to the Pacific Ocean to breed and die.” So far, so boilerplate. After a rambunctious, freewheeling beginning, it seems we’re soberly trailing off into some zoological info. But it’s a bait and switch, aimed at setting readers up for a gut punch coda. “Eels are secretive, nocturnal and prefer habitats with plenty of cover,” says the penultimate sentence, before adding: “They hunt by smell rather than sight.”
Blackstock is now working at the Scottish paper The Sunday Post. Even 12 years on, he still remembers the moment he wrote that line. He’d realised that, as a Scotsman, he knew very little about New Zealand’s eels. So he went hunting on the Department of Conservation’s website for some information to add to the story. “And there it was; they hunt by smell, rather than sight’,” he says. “The final two lines of my story leapt out at me as if they had been written in neon. And when I dropped them on to the end of the copy, I laughed out loud. I just knew it was a winner.”
Other literary victories were more hard-won. The paper’s editor Bryce Johns and his deputy Jonathan Milne weren’t sure how to headline the story. Despite the obvious comical elements, there was a real-life medical emergency at its centre, and they wanted to get the balance right. “Arse” was immediately discounted, Blackstock says. Alternatives such as “nether regions”, “rear end” and “rectum” were bandied about. “In the end, Bryce went with ‘bum’. The soon-to-be famous headline also went on the advertising bills outside the newsagents countrywide on Sunday,” he says. “I never knew that such an everyday word could cause such a sensation.”
The editorial decisions struck a perfect note with readers. The paper sold like hotcakes. A tsunami of clicks hit the Herald’s website, and the floodwaters only rose when the story was picked up by international publications from The Independent to the Anchorage Daily News. Herald web editors recall transitioning from excitement to concern as the story clung stubbornly to its perch atop the website’s “most read” leaderboard for days on end. Jeremy Rees, the paper’s online editor at the time, says just like in real life, the eel started off fun and became painful and embarrassing. “I remember the bloody thing kept going and going for days as most read,” he says. It started presenting editorial dilemmas for Rees, who was tasked with providing a list of the website’s most-read stories to be printed in the paper edition of the paper. “I have this vague feeling I felt in a quandary about providing the top stories to the Weekend Herald.”
In the end, editors were forced to take drastic action. The bum eel was unshakeable at number one, and it was becoming a source of commentary. Rees’s deputy, Cathy O’Sullivan, says they decided to take their own trip into the website’s backend and remove the eel from “most read” contention. Rees remembers coming up with a creative excuse for the face-saving manoeuvre. “I think we used some sophistry — like yes it was ‘top story of the day’ or ‘top story of the week’, but the same story over and over was clearly not the top story of THAT day,” he says.
Blackstock was also inundated. His inbox clogged up with messages from people all over the world who’d enjoyed the story. He got emails from journalists from Anchorage to Hong Kong praising the way it had been written, and the story’s last line in particular. He took it in his stride, partly because he’d been through something similar before. ‘Fart Sparks Domestic’, his story for the Queenstown paper Mountain Scene about a flatulent husband who’d been attacked by his wife with a can of air freshener, had also garnered headlines in papers around the world.
Since then, eel-up-bum stories have become surprisingly commonplace. In 2021, a man from Xinghua in East China’s Jiangsu Province almost died after inserting a 20 centimetre eel into his anus in what he said was an attempt to alleviate a bad case of constipation. Just this year, Vietnamese surgeons removed a 65-centimetre-long eel and a lemon from a man’s rectum.
But there was one eel that started it all, and it came from Auckland. Thanks to Blackstock and the Herald on Sunday, we know its story. This eel was about the size of a sprig of asparagus. It never got to go to the Pacific Ocean to breed and die. It hunted by smell rather than sight.