Why is an ordinary ballpoint pen held in the collection of Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland Museum? For The Single Object, Madeleine Chapman learns it has a story to tell about the power of privilege.

This story was first published in July 2018.

In 1978, young brown men were being arrested. With unemployment rising and the economy faltering, blame drifted through the streets of central Auckland looking for a home, and it found one with immigrants. Not all immigrants, though, just the ones from the Pacific Islands, particularly Sāmoa and Tonga. Immigrants whose temporary visas had expired were being arrested and deported. The dawn raids – early morning police raids on Pasifika homes in search of overstayers – had begun in 1974 and escalated in 1976. ‘Random’ checks were being conducted on those suspected of being in the country without a valid work permit.

In the early 1970s, the Polynesian Panthers, an activist group formed to fight for racial equality in Aotearoa, printed 1500 copies of a booklet written by their legal adviser, a young lawyer by the name of David Lange. Among the many pieces of advice, the booklet instructed young Pasifika that, if stopped and questioned by police, “Do not go with him! Only go if arrested.” Adding “go quietly – otherwise they might add more charges.” Sage advice that, even if followed to the letter, didn’t guarantee a positive outcome.

On a Tuesday night in March 1978, seventeen year old Niue man Iki Toloa was heading home after a day of work at Consolidated Plastics. After working late he had missed his last bus, so was walking home along Karangahape Rd when he was stopped by a police officer. The officer asked to see a work permit. Toloa replied that he didn’t have one as he didn’t need one. He was Niue and Niue people are New Zealand citizens. Then, according to reports published in the Auckland Star later that week, the officer “asked about three identical combs which were protruding from his pocket.” Toloa handed them over to the officer and explained that one was his own and two were from his work. The officer arrested him for theft from his employer. The combs were valued at 20 cents each.

Young Pacific Island men being arrested was nothing out of the ordinary at the time. One of the original members of the activist group Polynesian Panthers, Tigilau Ness, who was expelled from Mt Albert Grammar in 1971 for refusing to shave his afro, remembers it as a time when being brown and poor was a crime. “Back then there were charges like ‘idle and disorderly’, where brown people stood out,” he says. “If we were hanging around in the streets, which was a common thing to do, we’d be stopped and questioned and asked for identification. If we didn’t have money in our pockets then we were suspected of casing a place out or attempting to case a place or we were up to no good.”

Following his apparent confession and subsequent arrest, Toloa was convicted of theft from his employer and awaited sentencing. The police had failed to contact Toloa’s employer and when they eventually did, after his conviction, they were told that Toloa had taken the two 20 cent combs from the reject bin at the factory. This was a common practice among employees and one that management allowed.

While Ness and the Polynesian Panthers tried to figure out how to fight the conviction, the rest of Auckland, including the Pasifika community, accepted the judicial process as it played out. This came as no surprise to Ness. In the time of the dawn raids, Pasifika people were “more or less a religious lot who felt that the government was right.” Despite the monocultural system that was being enforced, there was a hesitancy to fight back “even though it was oppressive to the Pacific Island people. I think a majority of them were ashamed of the stigma put on us being Pacific Islanders.” For many Pasifika people, particularly recent immigrants, those in charge couldn’t be wrong. It took the first generation children, many of whom were secretly participating in Polynesian Panthers protests, to show their parents that being arrested didn’t always mean you’d committed a crime.

Those who saw the ‘random checks’ and dawn raids for the racial discrimination they were joined activists groups. For Pasifika, it was the Polynesian Panthers. Other predominantly Pākeha groups included the People’s Union, Halt All Racist Tours (HART), and the Citizens Association for Racial Equality (CARE). In 1978, the secretary for CARE was David Williams, a young law lecturer at the University of Auckland who was providing free legal advice to the Bastion Point protest groups.

Williams read about Toloa’s arrest and conviction in the paper and called a friend who, in his frustration, said “I mean for heaven’s sake! Even if he did steal it it’s not worth more than a university pen.” And at 20 cents, it wasn’t, which gave Williams an idea. He called the reporter from the Auckland Star who’d written the original story and told her that the next morning he’d be at the downtown police station, handing himself over for arrest after confessing to stealing from his employer. The stolen goods? A single University of Auckland pen.

As promised, the next morning Williams took a university pen from his home and confessed to the officer on desk duty at the Auckland police station his crime of stealing from an employer, a serious offence. As Williams recalls, the following exchange took place:

Williams: I’ve come to provide you evidence of a serious crime called theft from my employer, which is punishable by ten years’ imprisonment. Seeing that I’m confessing it, you have got sufficient evidence to arrest me and prosecute me.

Officer: What’s going on here? Why should I be bothered with you?

Williams: Well you were bothered with Iki Toloa yesterday, weren’t you?

Officer: Oh, this is political, is it?

Williams: Whether you call it political or not, the fact is that I am giving you a confession to having committed a crime which is a serious crime in the crimes act.

Officer: Well, you were probably doing work with it at home.

Williams: No, I wasn’t doing any work with it at home. If you look at the end of that pen you’ll see it’s got green chalk in it. That’s my four year old son playing with it and he banged the pen into the chalk and the chalk is still there. I wasn’t using it for any work at home. I stole it.

Officer: We better ring up your employer and find out whether they want you prosecuted.

Williams: You didn’t do that for Iki Toloa.

Officer: Well we’re going to do it for you.

So they rang the vice chancellor of the university, who rang up the dean of the law faculty, Dr Jack Northey. Northey said to the vice chancellor, “for Christ’s sake don’t get him arrested, that’s what he wants.”

And it was what Williams wanted, but he didn’t get it. The police refused to arrest him because his employer didn’t want to press charges. For Williams the hypocrisy was clear. “Here’s me, I confessed to having committed this same offence with an item of about the same value, and yet my employer gets approached and I don’t get prosecuted. Whereas a young Niue man working in an Auckland factory does get prosecuted without reference to his employer.”

The arrest of Toloa had absolutely nothing to do with theft or criminal activity, says Williams. It was simply an excuse to prosecute yet another brown person in a decade marred by racial inequalities. “Basically anyone who was brown on the streets was liable to be stopped, especially people from Sāmoa and Tonga. They called it random, but it wasn’t really all that random. It was quite targeted.”

Following a front page story on Williams’ visit to the police station the police commissioner agreed to refer the case back to court. Once there, the police offered no evidence and so the conviction was vacated. Toloa never finished up with a conviction, which Williams considers a bittersweet victory for human rights. “The good part of the story is he got off in the end. The bad part of the story is that he was treated like that in the first place.”

Watching it unfold, Ness knew that only a “hard headed white person who has empathy for brown people” could not only follow through, but get away with what Williams did. The fact that Toloa was stopped and questioned at all proves his point. In a New Zealand where overstaying immigrants were being blamed for all societal ills, the selective targeting of certain immigrants was increasingly hard to ignore. As Williams remembers, the supposedly random checks “always wound up finding brown people to check on and not all of the British or Canadian overstayers.”

In a time when few were standing up for human rights for all, David Williams joined the Polynesian Panthers and other activist groups in following up sentiment with real action and tangible results. While the Panthers used charity work and protests, Williams used a pen. It’s not a special pen. The University of Auckland pen looks much the same as any other. But it’s also an artefact, a piece of history. In 2015 the pen was acquired into the Auckland Museum’s Pacific/Ethnology collection, and it will be on display to the public as part of the museum’s renovation and exhibition refresh over the next two years.

I got to see it in the basement of the museum. Its ink is blue and there’s plenty still left in it. The chalk Williams’ son mashed into the pen is still visible 40 years later. Whatever historical weight it may hold, it’s still just a pen. And though it’s often quoted that the pen is mightier than the sword, Williams took such a statement literally. But he also knows, and stresses to this day, that it was privilege that allowed him to enact change with only a pen. And those who share his privileges have no excuses for not doing the same.

“Silence is a form of condoning. If you’ve got a chance to stand up, you should be willing to do so. For me to stand up and make a fuss, what are the consequences going to be? Actually not very serious. It’s quite important that people who are given a certain status by society do try to speak truth to power at times.”

Having declared Sherlock Holmes deceased, the writer turned to the spirit world, bringing his lectures and psychic photographs to the antipodes. Redmer Yska writes. 

The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand

Original illustrations by Anna Crichton

When Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sailed into Auckland a century ago, he arrived in a land reeling from grief. More than 18,000 New Zealanders died in the first world war over four years; the flu epidemic of November 1918 killed half that number, including many rural Māori, in two terrible months.

Over 15 days, Doyle, a literary superstar, took the country by storm. He had pivoted to a new vocation – an expert on the spirit world and connecting to the dead. But his practice of spiritualism was controversial. As he neared Australia, the first stage of his “down under” lecture tour of 1920, local Presbyterians reportedly prayed to God to sink Doyle’s incoming ship and drown him. Once ashore, a Melbourne paper called his beliefs “witchcraft” and “a force we believe to be purely evil”.

The former ship’s doctor with the walrus moustache was utterly serious about communing with the dead; he was no hyper-rational “sleuth–hound” like his tweedy protege Holmes. Doyle lost a son and brother in the Great War, and seeking channels to the dead dominated his life thereafter. He’d claim to have spoken to his boy Kingsley in seances. He chatted away with dead people (all males) like Joseph Conrad and Cecil Rhodes, and rapped tables with Harry Houdini.

His claims resonated in English-speaking colonies like New Zealand where his name had rung out for a generation. And at the time he arrived from Sydney, our population of just over a million was still massively bereaved, made worse, in the case of the Great War, by the fact that the bodies of those killed never came home. It was not uncommon to see makeshift shrines in the corners of living rooms up and down the country, featuring framed studio portraits of the loved one, surrounded by flags and medals.

Evangelisers like Doyle insisted that it was possible for everybody to reconnect with the dead, via seances, Ouija boards, and other means. It was not surprising, then, that Doyles whistlestop tour of Aotearoa would have its moments, surely the weirdest being his session with a clairvoyant Christchurch dog.

The crowd on Auckland wharf had been waiting for 12 hours when Doyle’s ship pulled in on December 8, 1920, some there to protest against the blasphemy of spiritualism; others lifetime fans of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle was already bored with the detective, having killed him off in 1893, five years after his literary debut. A decade later, he was forced to bring him back to life, ironically an encounter with a ghostly dog in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Kiwis were early Sherlock adopters. In July 1892, the Golden Bay Argus, a daily paper based in Collingwood, serialised The Man With The Twisted Lip, as the Lyttelton Times called the stories “wonderfully popular”. Touring dramatisations of the stories drew crowds. In 1903, Greymouth’s Theatre Royal hosted repeat performances, with late theatre trains running to Hokitika, Kumara and Brunner.

By 1920, Doyle was telling the world: “Holmes is dead. I have done with him”; he wanted to concentrate on the spirit world. In Auckland, his packed two-hour long lectures featured an exhibition of psychic photographs displayed by magic lantern, the PowerPoint of its day. Some featured folk with ectoplasm issuing from their mouths. Others showed fairies, one playing a reed pipe, another turning on a toadstool. They were partly butterfly, partly human, he explained.

The Herald was tolerant: “Granted that the speaker’s guarantees of the genuineness of these remarkable pictures were accepted, it can safely be stated that the most doubting might have left the hall in the spirit of ‘I wonder’. It must also be said that the whole attitude and speech of Sir Conan [sic] spelled sincerity and conviction.”

Doyle’s 1921 memoir, Wanderings of a Spiritualist, recalls his delight with the Auckland crowds. “I could not possibly have had a better reception, or got my message across more successfully. All the newspaper ragging and offensive advertisements had produced (as is natural among a generous people) a more kindly feeling for the stranger.”

Aucklanders, like other Kiwis, had mixed feelings about the visitor. The “ragging” was a reference to vocal media criticisms from “six leading photographers” keen to scrutinise the “fairy” images. After meeting them, Doyle turned down the request: “I refused to allow my photographs to pass into ignorant hands … Their challenge thereupon appeared in the Press with a long tirade of abuse attached to it, founded upon the absurd theory that all the photos had been taken by me, and that there was no proof of their truth save in my word.”

The Sunday after Doyle’s lectures, Auckland clergy urged parishioners from the pulpit to pray for this “apostle of spiritualism”. Auckland’s Anglican Bishop Dr Averill lamented “the habit of recourse to seances, seers and mediums”. But it was restrained compared to the response across the Tasman.

In Auckland, Doyle also sat down with mothers of dead soldiers, an extremely large community. The Face of War, Sandy Callister’s brilliant study of World War One photography, describes ‘The Casualty List’, a painting featured in the Auckland Weekly News in 1916: “A solitary woman leans against the fireplace of an Edwardian parlour, her back to the viewer, her head bowed, her left hand resting on the mantelpiece and touching a framed photograph of a uniformed man, her right clutching a copy of the New Zealand Herald.”

In a poignant moment during the session at Doyle’s hotel, one of the mothers produced a so-called “apport”, the occult term for an article literally transferred through the air during a seance. Spirits had reportedly carried the sandstone fragment from her son’s grave at Gallipoli to a South Auckland farmhouse: “The country woman with quivering fingers, produced from her bosom a little silver box. Out of this she took an object, wrapped in white silk … She said it was thrown down on her table while she and her family were holding a seance.”

Even Doyle sounded conflicted. “A message came with it to say that it was from the boy’s grave at Gallipoli. What are we to say to that? Was it fraud? Then why were they playing tricks upon themselves? If it was, indeed, an apport, it is surely one of the most remarkable for distance and for purpose recorded of any private circle.”

In Auckland, Doyle first heard of the psychic dog. His source was magistrate and fellow spiritualist Joseph Poynton, “Poynton told me of a dog in Christchurch which had a power of thought comparable, not merely to a human being, but even, as I understood him, to a clairvoyant, as it would bark out the number of coins in your pocket and other such questions … He was a very quick and accurate thought-reader, but in some cases the power seemed to go beyond this.”

Wanderings of a Spiritualist relates how the dog was already revered in spiritualist circles: “Mr Poynton, who had studied the subject, mentioned four learned beasts in history: a marvelous horse in Shakespeare’s time, which was burned with its master in Florence; the Boston skipper’s dog; Hans, the Russian horse, and Darkie of Christchurch.”

Doyle travelled by overnight train to the capital, where he met premier William Massey, filled the Wellington Town Hall, and had his hat blown off. He then took the Lyttelton ferry for the South Island. On December 15, a packed Theatre Royal in Christchurch heard his lecture on “Death and the Hereafter, the New Revelation”. The Press reported how the speaker “piloted the audience along the uncharted coast fringing the undiscovered country”.

The following morning, from Warners Hotel in Christchurch, Doyle wrote to his father-in-law back in England: “Here I am charging like a mad bull down the length of New Zealand, only pausing to utter a prolonged bellow or to toss an occasional parson. They think (and say) that the devil has got loose and there will be a general jubilee when I disappear either over the sea or into the sea, the latter for choice … The people in the main are with me.’

The high point of the Christchurch visit, however, was his meeting with the dog. At the home of its owner, a Mrs McGibbon, Doyle heard how her son discovered the pet’s powers. “He remarked one day: ‘I will give you a biscuit if you bark three times.’ He at once did it. ‘Now, six times.’ He did so. ‘Now, take three off.’ He barked three times once again. Since then they have hardly found any problem he could not tackle.”

But the dog was having an off-day. “He was a dark, vivacious fox terrier, sixteen years old, blind and deaf, which obviously impaired his powers. In spite of his blindness he dashed at me the moment he was allowed into the room, pawing at me and trembling all over with excitement … Once he began to bark he could not be induced to stop. Occasionally he steadied down, and gave us a touch of his true quality.”

Asked how many sixpences were in the half-crown placed before him, the dog issued five correct barks. But his psychic powers failed when asked other questions about the old pounds, shillings and pence currency. Doyle was, as always, polite: “I took my hat off to him all the same … I have no doubt that the dog had these powers, though age and excitement have now impaired them.”

Like all well-behaved visitors, Doyle praised New Zealand to the skies. Wanderings of a Spiritualist celebrates “a lovely place that contains within its moderate limits the agricultural plains of England, the lakes of Scotland, the glaciers of Switzerland, and the fjords of Norway, with a fine hearty people, who do not treat the British newcomer with ignorant contempt or hostility.”

The voyaging into the spirit world continued long after Doyle’s departure. In the end, 10 of his 60 books would tackle the subject. In 1922 Doyle produced another, The Coming of the Fairies, even as his “psychic photos” were exposed – and ridiculed – as the clumsy handiwork of two young girls. The “ignorant” Auckland photographers were right.

* In 2020, Benedict Cumberbatch, the best known Sherlock Holmes of our times, jetted into the South Island to star in Jane Campion’s new film, Power of the Dog, reportedly soon to be released on Netflix.