To the memory of my friend Helen Bain, 1971–2009

Everyone who enters an athletic contest goes into strict training. They do it to win a temporary crown, but we do it to win one that will be permanent. So I run — but not without a clear goal ahead of me. So I box — but not as if I were just shadow boxing.

— 1 Corinthians 9:25–26

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

OUT OF NOWHERE

WONDERLAND

MOON OVER EPUNI

LITTLE CRIMINALS

A PLACE CALLED HOME

JERUSALEM

THE BLACK LIGHTS

HEY, CHARLIE! WHERE YOU GOIN’ WITH THAT GUN IN YOUR HAND?

NIGHT TRAIN

THE GIRL WHO KICKED IN DOORS

TIME!

A BOXER’S HEART

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

NOTES AND SOURCES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Copyright

OUT OF NOWHERE

Sonny Liston, in many ways the mightiest, most mysterious opponent Muhammad Ali ever faced, was a man of strictly limited musical taste. As he prepared for his epic bouts he only ever listened to the one song: ‘Night Train’, as recorded originally by Jimmy Forrest and later James Brown. Nothing else. In Forrest’s version it’s the stiletto-sharp tenor saxophone break that defines the rhythm and blues hit, ducking and weaving around the chugging backbeat. Brown’s rendition, however, which was released a couple of years before the men first fought in 1964, is the really memorable one, not least because of its innovative use of American city names, which Brown joyously hollers out as if espied from the window of a passing train, while backing band The Famous Flames pistol-whip their instruments: Miami, Florida … Atlanta, Georgia … Raleigh, North Carolina … Washington DC … oh, and Richmond, Virginia, too! Some trip. ‘Night Train’ carried the popular song of the time to its spookiest limits, instrumentalists and singer charging into a nocturnal darkness deeper than anyone involved could imagine.

Sports writers have often puzzled over Liston’s obsession with ‘Night Train’. Almost everyone who reported on the fighter’s exercise regime made mention of his unswerving devotion to the tune, how he endlessly fed off it, allowing it to curl his mind into rugged introspection and his body into a river of sweat as fluid as the track’s arrangement. Yet nobody has ever really explained what drew Liston to it in the first place. Sure, for any boxer in training there’s an obvious play on the word ‘train’. But that can’t be all; it doesn’t explain why somebody would soak it up thousands of times, as if the track held some kind of extraordinary secret about where life can lead.

As I write these words, though, I remember where I was the first time I heard ‘Night Train’, and something occurs to me as well. Might it have been … was it possible that the obsessive chord it struck with Liston wasn’t so much to do with the hoodlum fighter he became but the persistent memory of the abandoned ward he first was, locked up as a teenager at Missouri State Penitentiary, dreaming of a better life outside the walls of the institution?

Maybe.

Writing these words down, I also remember very clearly where I was in the hours leading up to the experience of hearing that same song. It’s 1975, in the autumn, in Trentham, and I’m just shy of my 13th birthday. I’m taking the day off school, as I have more or less routinely since the close of the previous year, idling along the road in the overcast afternoon, possibly thinking about a fight I saw on television or a book or some girl who’s so attractive it’s challenging just to look at her, or that recent court appearance in which I was deemed to be NUPC — in the jargon of the time, ‘not under proper control’ — and informed that a decision would shortly be made on my future.

Then a police van grumbles into sight, and somebody tells me to get in.

— Where are we going?

— Where we’re going.

— When will we get there?

— When we get there.

By the time I reach the Lower Hutt facility the sun has dropped like a shot and the rain is sheeting down. Ray Campbell, a young housemaster at the residence, meets me at the door. Papers are exchanged and signed. Campbell ushers me through to the institution’s sewing room, gathers some old clothes and a toothbrush along with a couple of sheets, a pillowcase and towels, and gently guides me through a fortified entrance located at the back of what I later discover to be the junior wing. Next a shower room. I’m told to undress. Campbell turns on the water.

Doing as I’m instructed, I get underneath the torrent while he checks my discarded clothes for cigarettes, money and matches. While I’m in the shower, Campbell checks me for bruises or needle marks. Satisfied there are no traces of either, he produces a pail of what I assume to be body paint, but which is actually benzyl benzoate, a pungent condensation product of benzoic acid and benzyl alcohol, which is colourless but turns slightly white on contact with skin. He tells me to step out. Soon my entire body, including the scalp, is covered with the concoction, dabbed on with a brush while Campbell explains the emergency procedures for the cellblock. Next follows some powder, then a few clothes to put on — a pair of boxer shorts and a sleeveless top. Then into the cell, a little concrete cube, maybe three or four metres across with a high ceiling, its only light coming from a solitary bulb hoisted high or else through the barred window. There’s no furniture in the room, just a mattress on a wooden frame and a low-slung metal toilet. There are no books. No fucking stories.

James Brown is no longer playing on the radio. It’s The Three Degrees or some such all-female troupe solacing the night with promises of warm booty for their chosen guy just as soon as the singers figure out when they will see him again. Shortly after I arrived some men had to come in and restrain the guy in the cell directly opposite — a pigeon-chested gang recruit just in from Lake Alice Hospital, I later discover — who had been slamming his head against the steel door. Now it’s relatively quiet again. Dead air. The plastic lights flicker out in the corridor, the rain falls and the darkness spreads outside the bars of the window like an opaque veil. Gradually, I move towards sleep, rock yourself asleep, am asleep, swaying aboard the night train, powering through the endless night, the darkened desert.

Then, suddenly, just up ahead in the distance, an ocean of blue and green and pink neon lights: Las Vegas.

WONDERLAND

Arthur William Taylor has, shall we say, a certain familiarity with the New Zealand justice system. By 2010 Taylor, who was born in 1956, had spent all but five years of his adult life in one or other of the country’s jails, most recently as a long-term guest at the maximum-security prison in Auckland at Paremoremo. The sentences he has received cumulatively total more than a century. A one-time gang member affiliated with the Mongrel Mob and the Nomads, Taylor’s rap-sheet includes convictions for armed robbery, theft, fraud, burglary, attempting to pervert the course of justice, possession of various drugs and firearms and receiving stolen property.

On the inside the burly inmate has acquired a formidable if not unreasonable reputation: don’t fuck with Arthur Taylor, they say, and Arthur Taylor won’t fuck with you, and especially don’t fuck with him if you happen to be a lawyer, because the chances are — and he has the transcripts of his courtroom jousts with some of the country’s best-schooled legal minds to prove it — you may get seriously fucked.

But although Taylor is not known as a violent man — although allowing a firearm to be discharged into the ceiling in the course of one of his heists probably wasn’t such a brilliant idea — he does enjoy the dubious distinction of being one of country’s most closely monitored prisoners. His escapes are legendary, including one much-publicised episode in 1998 that saw swathes of the Coromandel in lockdown while the cops searched for Taylor and a fellow absconder, the infamous double-killer Graeme Burton.

Any author wishing to speak with Taylor is therefore guaranteed an unenthusiastic response from the prison’s tremulous overlords. Easy enough to understand why. Nearly as much in the way of public resources has been expended in keeping this ripe old adventurer in line as in housing him. Without even factoring in the additional costs of Taylor’s particular situation, the basic tab for keeping him in penal style has been enormous, somewhere in the annual vicinity of nearly $100,000, which could then be multiplied by 30 for each of the years he has been incarcerated. Add to that the cost of his various breakouts, court appearances, legal bills and lost income opportunities, and the total cost of Taylor’s enforced lifestyle might be in excess of $3 million. And still the meter ticks.

In the circumstances it seems reasonable to ask what it was, over and above the obvious choices Taylor has made throughout a knockabout life, that first got the meter ticking.

In the broadest sense it is possible to see Taylor as an individual who has intersected with a system that has long reflected New Zealand’s deeply punitive character. This is not mere sociological fancy. How else, after all, can one even start to explain why our country has one of the developed world’s highest rates of incarceration, a sanction that in all but the most heinous cases is supposed to rehabilitate lives?

To be sure, the desire to rehabilitate is the opposite of the retributive character. Yet the admirably tolerant society that in many other respects is New Zealand has so often betrayed the deep-seated urge to punish that it has to be reckoned a very powerful impulse indeed.

From the country’s curious status as one of the democratic world’s few jurisdictions to reintroduce the death penalty, as it did briefly in the 1950s, to the tenacity with which it clung a generation earlier to the judicial practice of flogging petty criminals and homosexuals; from the legislative violence with which for much of its history it angrily clamped down on Maori nationalism, whether in language, schooling, land rights or welfare eligibility, or, worse yet, Maori exceptionalism; even in the collective electoral fury seen in more recent times in response to a relatively modest proposal to remove the defence of ‘reasonable force’ from parents charged with savagely beating their offspring, New Zealand has collectively expressed this yearning so often and in so many different ways throughout its brief and sometimes beautiful history that the desire to mete out the very stiffest punishment to all-comers must be counted among the attributes of a national character that has also long subsisted on episodic outbursts of moral panic.

Arthur Taylor has hardly led a blameless life — he would be the last to claim that he has — but neither has that life taken place inside a cultural vacuum. As one might expect, the circumstances of how and why it all began for him have occupied Taylor’s thoughts over the years. One might also expect his conclusions to have something to do with his various adult activities, the style of local policing and the courts, and so forth; but apparently not so. Indeed, during a lengthy conversation held on a graceful lull of a summer morning in 2010, one of the country’s most notorious prisoners barely mentioned the particulars of his current situation or past criminal activities at all.

Instead he directed the conversation back to a far-off setting from half a lifetime ago, to a small state-run residence that used to operate in the Hutt Valley — and the colossal nationwide experiment in residential children’s care that this little institution represented — a matter that Taylor first contacted me about after word reached Paremoremo that a book on the subject would shortly be in process.

Within this country’s punitive history, few themes loom larger than its episodic infatuations with institutional children’s care, a subject that has periodically baffled the national discussion since the establishment of modern New Zealand, even dominating the headlines as relatively recently as the general election campaign of 2008, when both major parties promised to ‘get tough’ and put away young offenders. Only at one historical point did this discourse flower into a fully fledged movement. This was the period from the late 1950s through until around 1990, when the government of New Zealand incarcerated not just the worst criminal offenders, who never numbered all that many, but also more than 100,000 children and young people, mostly Maori, who were believed to be in need of getting locked away. Strikingly, however, given the size and duration of the dramatic project, it is a chapter in our history that has never been widely understood, its ongoing effects never fully appreciated, and its ultimate cost never really quantified.

Within this wonderland of state-run residences — 26 of them sprinkled from Auckland to Dunedin at one point — few loomed as large as this now discarded short-term correctional centre in the Hutt Valley, an institution that until the present day remains the quintessence of the movement’s brightest hopes and darkest experiences. As Taylor pointed out with a sigh, 40 years on from his own initial encounter with it, ‘the wings of our prisons are still full of guys from there. So really, if this experiment was ever meant to do anything it pretty obviously failed — and it’s cost the state an enormous amount of money along the way.’

Had this place never beckoned, he believes, his life would have carried on rather as it had been: he would have overcome what his records suggest were relatively minor difficulties at school and almost certainly have graduated with some kind of diploma, picked up work in spot-welding, and that would have been pretty much that. Perhaps he would never have earned a king’s ransom from the trade but, as Taylor pointed out, the New Zealand taxpayer would surely have saved a small fortune over and above the hundreds of millions of dollars it cost to administer the old youth system.

Taylor was sent to the correctional centre in Lower Hutt three times. The first time was for a few months in 1968, and by his account hardly a day passed during that initial lag when he did not want to be back with his natural family. After all, he said, it’s not as if he and his father and mother did not get on. His parents had been as startled as he had the day the social worker arrived to take him away — and the kid felt ashamed and distressed at where he had ended up simply by dint of skipping a few classes at school.

The positive recollections? ‘Oh sure,’ Taylor replied, ‘I have many good memories — all of leaving the place.’ This he usually did by running away. At first he started taking the odd item from somebody’s garden or back shed as he went, and ineluctably the boy’s offending escalated by degrees as his attitude hardened. They always caught him, always sent him back, but each time he was just a little more difficult to manage.

Then one day he clocked a supervisor with a rake, which led to him being sent to a psychiatric hospital in Porirua where, drugged up to the eyeballs, the appeal of a criminal lifestyle finally crystallised and the meter starting ticking. He was 13.

Escape artist that he is, Taylor has reached a few conclusions on how the culture might also have saved itself a lot of subsequent grief in the time since that point. ‘You can’t do a one-size-fits-all policy when it comes to children, but rather have to look at what the circumstances are and find something to fit what the perceived problems are,’ he began. ‘Another problem, of course, was the mixing of kids who simply needed care and protection with those in there for serious crimes.’ Perhaps he might have gone on, but the interview was over, the prison officials having allowed Taylor only a brief few minutes in which to hold court.

IF THIS INSTITUTION CONTINUES TO DEFINE TAYLOR and many of his fellow inmates, it remains almost as profound an experience for the men and women who administered it and others like it, and the policymakers who charted their course. It continues to cast a shadow on the present day, when the problem of youth offending remains as widely felt as ever and the country’s best minds scramble to find a reason why New Zealand fares worse than other comparable jurisdictions in getting on top of the delinquency problem, and in other significant ways too. It is currently also the subject of millions of dollars in outstanding lawsuits, a tidal wave of activity occupying an entire division of the Ministry of Social Development and a team of lawyers working in downtown Wellington representing a strikingly sad and angry clientele.

‘I’m not saying it was some kind of evil enterprise set up to destroy young lives,’ Taylor said, ‘but that’s effectively what happened because, really, they didn’t know what they were doing in running these places for what they thought of as little criminals.

‘The little criminals,’ he added knowingly, ‘who became the big criminals.’

In order to get the clearest appreciation of the source of this ongoing discontent and the system it represented, we need to approach the Epuni Boys’ Home not from the vantage of the 2010s but during its historical highpoint, after carefully selecting a pivotal date to make our entrance along curvy Riverside Drive. The bad side of Riverside, that is, the black side.

We should go there by way of Wellington, the political capital in which the purpose, direction and ultimate end of Epuni and other institutions like it were plotted, driving out along the northern highway that spits cars out near the settlement town of Petone. Making our way along the foreshore, where the now vanishing skyline seems to shout out from across the water and ask departing vehicles where they’re heading, we will turn north along Waiwhetu Road and the first glades of a forest of state houses that dominate the remainder of any trip deep into the Hutt Valley.

When we approach the institution the period should, of course, be smack in the middle of the 1970s, the weather will be fresh and expectant — as it always is when life’s full possibilities still beckon — and the time very early and still dark, as befits an operation in which every day is another strict lesson waiting to be imparted.

It was a long-held assumption that those who came here arrived spoiling for a major fight. Perhaps that might yet occur before today is out. For the moment, though, all we need to remember to carry with us to Epuni this October morning in 1975 is the one thing that so many others always forgot to bring: imagination.

MOON OVER EPUNI

The faded yellow structure looks so uninteresting, so uninviting and so forgotten that for a moment you think you’ve arrived at the wrong place. Turning into the driveway, however, you realise that impression was misleading. Though the deliciously cold, overcast day is only just breaking, Epuni Boys’ Home already buzzes with activity as dozens of boys rouse themselves on the watch of various supervisors, one of whom carefully unlocks the front door and waves you in with a grunt. Far from being the neglected institution it appeared from the road, the interior of the building resembles nothing so much as a venue busying itself in preparation for an important event — a hopefully more inspiring one than the violent episodes that, as we shall see a little later in the story, have roiled this joint in recent years.

For the moment the young inhabitants of 441 Riverside Drive are approaching the morning in what seems to be an uncharacteristic silence for youngsters, all the more so because their monastic activity is ironically set against the jaunty sounds of a radio system whose wiring runs like a Zen arrow throughout the three wings and the passageways and a nearby cellblock. In deference to the chill, perhaps, all the doors and windows are locked, and the radiator pipes along the main hallways gurgle quietly as the first of the morning’s human traffic begins to move past.

The warmth, that’s what hits you, the warmth and the smell, a full-on reek of overripe vegetables and salty male adolescence and gluey chemical solutions, coming at you in waves, like punches thrown in time to the music.

This morning the radio system is alive with the harmonies of Donna Summer, murmurous with desire, her horny timbre no doubt received with some appreciation by the contingent of boys clad only in towels and socks, now yawning and scratching themselves with tattooed hands and rubbing sleep-putty from their eyes, standing in the doorways of their little cubicles. Brown faces galore.

Here come the supervisors again, counting heads, checking to see that each bed has been stripped of its linen, favouring each of the boys with a careful stare. They’re followed by a matron to check if any clean linen is required, especially among the institution’s high number of chronic bed-wetters. Time to get dressed.

If it’s true what experts say about the so-called paradox of choice — the idea that increased choice leads to increased unhappiness — those who live here should be very happy boys because theirs is a micromanaged existence that leaves little to chance.

At 7.20 am the boys line up again awaiting further instructions. Work duties are announced. Mostly these chores, which are rotated on a weekly basis, involve cleaning of one sort or another, which if nothing else gives the institution that omnipresent scent of cleaning solutions. In the wings a small posse of pint-sized cleaners fans out along the passageway, industrial sweepers whirring, whisking any dust or dirt in the corridors or in the cubicles into neat little piles while other boys track them with a half-broom, sweeping the trash into a wastepaper basket. Next follows somebody else with a dry mop, doing more or less the same thing, and then, finally, a designated duster, brandishing a damp cloth, applying his energy to the tops of chests of drawers, mirrors and ledges.

Over in the kitchen something of the same monotonous order is taking place. Time was when this used to be the only place in the building where the radio didn’t function, but it has been fixed now, after the principal successfully requisitioned one. ‘The boys stand all day at the sink,’ he wrote in the memo, ‘and a radio alongside churning out the latest pop seems to make the job a little more bearable. Seriously, we think there is a definite need for one.’ So a battery- and mains-powered Sony TR-55, with its distinctive red logo and valued at $35, now sits next to the window, crackling out what passes for news, the latest sports results and the current pop hits.

There used to be a dog here, too. Muck, a low-rent bloodhound from some nearby house, all chunky legs and floppy ears, perpetually wandered outside the kitchen in the hope of nabbing an extra bit of ‘muck’ to eat. Seldom did he leave empty-pawed. Eventually Muck became an honorary member of the Epuni community; the cook at the time — a stout middle-aged Englishwoman with a closed, practical face — even made a point of saving food for the dog. Poor Muck. The dog’s presence used to provide some lightness in the kitchen, the lack of which has been increasingly borne in on the young workers now that their adopted pet is gone and life is back to its grey-lidded monotony.

There’s no dog to play with anymore, just these walls and benches that need to be washed again and again with hot soapy water, doormats to be taken out and shaken again and again, and let’s not forget the concrete way between the main building and the boiler room, to be hosed down and swept dry.

Who was the guy who said life isn’t one thing after another but the same thing over and over? In the back of the kitchen area, as ever, one assignee (‘the pot boy’) is washing pots while another (‘the dish boy’) rinses, dries and puts things away, and another (‘the bucket boy’) empties out the pig-tin before sweeping the floor, taking out empty milk bottles and lugging empty crates to the back gate. Next they clean their assigned areas of the bench.

By this time the cook will have posted a list of vegetables for the day’s menus, along with the quantity needed, which the children are required to fetch from the storeroom. Next a couple of them feed the itemised vegetables into a machine that shreds their outer skins (and periodically emits small electric shocks), after which they’ll be expected to dismantle the machine and clean it thoroughly for the day ahead. Stifling a yawn, the other boy twiddles the radio dial. 2YA: a woman with a fruity voice, Jessica Weddell, is introducing something called Viewpoint. Boring. 2YC: ‘Richard Strauss,’ the announcer intones, ‘was something of a child prodigy, playing the piano at four and composing his own music by the age of six.’ Weird. 2ZM: rock’s most flamboyant black performer is declaiming verses from the Book of Isaiah. Now that’s more like it.

— He’s a Maori, y’know?

— A Maori? Who’s a Maori?

— Jimi. Did you know he’s a half-Maori?

— Hendrix?

— Yeah. His old lady was a hori. Father’s Negro.

— No?

— True. Rangi told me.

— What does he know?

— Knows enough to give you a hiding.

— Fuck you, cocksucker!

Jimi Hendrix the Maori? It makes sense. Everybody here is Maori. The relatively few boys who aren’t Maori to begin with are honorary Maori, as it were, so why can’t the guy singing ‘All Along the Watchtower’ be one too?

Did Hendrix smoke? Almost everyone here does, but it’s hard on those aged under 15, who are ineligible for the cigarettes the department supplies throughout the day to the older inmates. This is why, despite the monotony of the kitchen duties, most of the younger boys jostle for the assignment, because it also allows for the opportunity of slipping into the staffroom just down the way and executing the most sought-after of duties: emptying the ashtrays, which means the opportunity to coax some stray bits of tobacco out of the butts and pocketing the proceeds for a surreptitious smoke later on.

Forty or so minutes later comes the next of the day’s lineups, this one in the more usual setting of the four-square courtyard next to the big, bald gymnasium at the back of the main building. So much converges here. The boys stand in three silent lines, either at ease (arms loosely at sides) or to attention (hands clasped behind the back, legs slightly apart, chin facing upward) until the supervisor is satisfied the exercise has been correctly completed. Perhaps the housemaster, as these attendants are known, will dismiss the kids quickly; perhaps he’ll shake his head and keep them standing in line until they get this thing straight. Depends. It can be daunting, this most common of the super-scheduled day’s correctional exercises.

At some point, though, everybody exits the courtyard, shuffling back into the building for breakfast, along the main passageway where they pass the front door, outside of which one of the few symbols of freedom — a beat-up Bedford van — is parked.

This van is symbolically interesting. It’s painted creamy mustard, an institutional colour that acts as a reminder that in its previous incarnation it served as a rural school shuttle for the Department of Education, which until recently had jurisdiction over Epuni and other centres like it. Look a little closer and you can still see the red and black coloured bands painted around the middle and the faintly recognisable DEPT OF ED lettering still visible on the paint. Inside the vehicle are a couple of rows of red vinyl passenger seats, enough to hold a dozen or so boys packed tight and one or two housemasters up front. For most of the kids who live at Epuni Boys’ Home this is the only real connection to any activities in the wider world. One week it might ferry its passengers to Eastbourne (swimming), the next to the Hutt River (swimming) or else the Naenae Olympic Pool (swimming). Epuni Boys’ Home is not big on variety.

As a senior housemaster sometimes growls with a deep-throated chuckle, ‘I want these little criminals where I can keep an eye on them.’ The epithet isn’t entirely gratuitous: a majority of these boys are here at the pleasure of the youth justice system, after all, to be analysed and assessed before a final decision is made on the future course of their lives.

But trips to the swimming pool play second fiddle to the infinitely more coveted routine each Saturday: the once-in-a-week opportunity to join the designated driver on the trip to Miramar Girls’ Home to pick up the film canisters for the weekend’s regular movie. These are the movies, generously made available from local movie houses, that the institution screens in the main lounge at 7.30 pm, with supper at halftime or between the first reel finishing and the next getting set up. The selection is seldom auspicious. Spaghetti westerns. Prissy English comedies. One or other of those dumb Elvis Presley movies where the hero breaks into song at the most ridiculous moments. The housemaster responsible for the screening fills in as usher, projectionist, bouncer and chief censor, the last of which involves halting the film and laboriously allowing the reel to move forward before once again switching it back on.

None of which, truth be told, is half as interesting or exciting as being allowed to make the half-hour drive to the girls’ home in Miramar. Where else can an Epuni boy hope to catch so much as a fleeting glimpse of blossoming hips, smoochable cellulite and pigtails? Realising as much, perhaps, the driver usually keeps these visits very brief, parking only long enough in the driveway to sprint into the residence and grab the cans before clambering back into the van for the homeward journey.

TODAY BEING WEDNESDAY, THOUGH, THE VAN remains unoccupied, and the day’s business proceeds apace, the only unusual accompaniment being what sounds like distant drums beating — from the radio system or somewhere far across the ocean — who can tell?

In the dining area the boys sit in silence, arms folded, waiting for the housemaster’s nod that allows them to queue for the food placed atop the counter in an industrial-sized metal tray with sliding lids. The wait must be painful for some of these kids; they look way too skinny. Somebody is nominated to say grace, inaudibly, ahead of the loud click and slide of cutlery, the scraping of spoons across plastic bowls, and hog-like sounds as many of the diners lick their plates clean. Once each boy has eaten he scrapes any residual food into a basin placed on each table for this purpose and flings his cutlery into another plastic bleach container (decorated with pictures) before the containers are taken away. Invariably the routine will be punctuated with threats from the supervising housemaster warning that various foods will be withheld unless everybody keeps things quiet. Eventually the diners are dismissed in table-groups to get ready for school or, in the case of ‘home boys’, prepare for the morning’s chores.

Unlikely though it would be for all 23 staff members, who normally work eight different rosters across two shifts, to gather together at such an early hour, let us assume that circumstances have conspired to draw out the full complement from the nearby staffroom to share in this morning’s breaking of bread.

Housemasters dominate the group, of course, since it is upon these residential social workers’ shoulders that the practical burden of running the 16-year-old institution largely rests. Sometimes the strain can show. Joe Bartle, for example, looks somewhat tired this morning. Hardly surprising. It’s an incredibly demanding existence, the beefy housemaster likes to say, keeping on top of the day-to-day operation. It’s a responsibility symbolised by the beeper the 31-year-old warden with the slicked-back hair has taken to wearing on his belt, as if he were an emergency repairman or some kind of medical doctor, perhaps like one of the specialists Joe used to work under in his previous job as a hospital orderly at a psychiatric institution in Nelson.

In a sense he’s a bit of both, and there’s no doubting the vigorous presence he brings to these various manifestations. A casually dressed, powerfully built man with a stentorian voice and something of a lumberjack manner, Joe is seldom seen without a cigarette in his hand — a lifelong habit that will eventually catch up with him in the early 2000s when he suffers a stroke — and a five o’clock shadow on his face. A rough diamond, in the view of some of his colleagues, he prides himself on calling a spade a spade rather than chuckling up to people and trying to make sweet; in another, later era, he would have had little time for political correctness, preferring instead to take the most direct route for getting any job done and using the most unvarnished language for explaining why. In short, big Joe has all the desirable attributes that Epuni Boys’ Home looks for and values among its frontline staff.

Another housemaster keeping an eye on things would be Graeme Stewart — lordly of baritone and gloomy of countenance, with a liability to press the fingers of both his hands together while holding forth like some grand old duke — who, like most of the highly strung employees at this institution with such a notably high staff turnover, is a recent hire. Like most of the others, too, Stewart looks to be in good physical trim. As well he needs to be. A number of the younger housemasters have in the not-too-distant past been hospitalised by their wards, with one of them still bearing the imprint of a towel railing that a freaked-out teenage gang member tore from the wall one morning just this past May and used to nearly throttle him.

Alas, the same can’t be said for the chief nightwatchman, a hulking Dutchman who calls himself Mr Tjeerd but whose actual name might be Mr DeJhers, the matter being the subject of some confused speculation. To the watchman’s barn-like physique is added the appearance of tobacco-stained fingers and a thick European accent that few here can successfully interpret as he mutters through a large mouth stopped frequently with hand-rolled cigarettes, salaaming and gesticulating as he goes, like some angry mute. Tjeerd oversees the employees who start work around 10 each evening and stay on until the first of the day’s housemasters show up the following morning, and whose role it is to provide a supervisory presence during the night.

Sometimes they are also required to wake kids to administer medication or escort them to the toilets to provide urine samples for a mandatory medical analysis. This last duty Tjeerd usually effects by entering the chosen room at around midnight, flashing a big torch into the occupant’s eyes and enjoining him to ‘Piss in da jar, half full!’ Still, it’s not as if the incumbent watchman’s lack of English skills is an entirely bad thing. One of Tjeerd’s predecessors used to routinely enter the bedrooms after dark and rummage through the dresser drawers in search of comic books, especially war comics. These he would read in his office (recliner chair, feet on table, cup of instant coffee to the side, spare hand drumming the desktop without rhythm) while passing the hours. So accustomed were some of the boys to his regular nocturnal rummaging that they took to leaving their comic books on their dresser tables before going to bed at night — the comics were duly taken, but always returned before sunrise.

Rounding out the staffing complement are various operational staff, including a gardener and general maintenance guy and a couple of women with the décolletage of middle-aged barmaids — the last of the red-hot mamas if you’re a hormonally charged 13-year-old and care deeply about such mysterious things — who are, you correctly assume, the matron and cook. The much younger woman standing next to them, the one with the beehive hairdo and the frankly inappropriate short skirt? That must be the psych student who recently completed a survey on the boys’ mental states. Joining the others, as well, would be those who work at the on-site school on the watch of the physically imposing chief educator, Dave Kelsey, one of three teachers employed at the little schoolhouse adjoining the main building.

Finally there comes the man who brings this disparate group of individuals together. Maurie Howe is not only the institution’s principal, or chief executive, but also one of the pioneers of residential children’s care as it has come to be practised in New Zealand. Mr Howe is a YMCA man through and through — not, one hastens to add, in the louche sense of the song of the same title popularised a few years later by the Village People, but in the strictly New Zealand sense of the era. An impressively fit, undemonstrative man, quick of movement and speech, he is never emotional or anxious — or poorly dressed. This morning he emerges from his office (that’s the one located on the right-hand side of the main corridor near the front entrance) bedecked in a hat and tweed jacket and coordinated tie, in the fashion of John Steed from the adventure series The Avengers. For good measure, too, he is clutching an umbrella as Steed might a walking cane.

A man in control. A sphinx without any secrets. The style never varies. He’s the rock that doesn’t move, isn’t moved, won’t be moved, can’t be moved: Maurie Howe casts his professional shadow throughout the buildings here as powerfully as the tune now being pumped out of the radio system, ‘If I Only Had Time’, the high and lonesome French standard that will eventually be covered by scores of Anglo-American acts. As sung today, in a smouldering voice, by a 21-year-old Kawerau kid, John Rowles, whose uncle is a Black Power member, but who has somehow made the song his own, taking it to the upper reaches of the UK hit parade seven years ago before rocketing to the summit of the pop charts on both sides of the Tasman Sea, and now casting its charms over this group of boys. The tempo is slow and quivery, the melody very lush, and the singer’s vocal delivery as straight as a bowling ball rumbling down the polished floors of any of the institution’s endlessly scrubbed wooden passageways.

If they only had time. In fact, both the staff and the inmates of Epuni Boys’ Home have all the time in the world. Epuni is among the oldest of the country’s 16 processing centres for delinquents, an institution of short-term correctional training, the term used to refer to the Ministry of Works-designed structure spread out across 1.5 hectares of grounds. The residence is charged with assessing and classifying the estimated 350 children aged between seven and 16 who at this historical point are pushed through its doors each year before passing out again, usually to some other form of state-sponsored residence or foster situation.

About half of the boys are state wards — which is to say, children who have been committed to the care of the Department of Social Welfare by a magistrate in the Children’s Court — while some of the others are among the 354 kids around New Zealand whose guardians have signed a voluntary agreement under which the department has custody of the children for a while. Most of the kids have been sent here by the courts from a wide area of the North Island and the upper South Island, a catchment area basically falling just short of the similar institutions in Hamilton and Christchurch, but often taking in kids from other areas that lack the facilities to provide residential care.

Practically speaking, Epuni is as much a holding pen for an overloaded youth justice system as any lofty setting for therapeutically based observation of the wards who live here for anything up to eight months at a time. Of the 38 inmates held here just a half-dozen years ago, for example, 23 were state wards, eight were on adjournment in child welfare cases and just seven were on remand; now eight out of every 10 boys are remand cases from the children’s courts. A majority of these inmates will remain in an officially supervised environment for the remainder of their early years, with a significant number going on to lengthier stretches of long-term training, borstal and jail — the institutional pathway for which, since the 1950s, a stint in ‘short-term correctional training’ is typically the curtain-raiser in respect of kids aged between eight and 17 whom the government has placed in care. In the department’s view, according to its official literature, it can be taken as read that these children are ‘disturbed, retarded or delinquent youngsters’.

The institution, as you’ve already seen, has three residential wings, known as Rata, Totara and Kauri (respectively, the senior, intermediate and junior wings), a small school, a large courtyard, a gymnasium, and a recreation and television area. Each inmate has his own small room. Typically there are about 35 youngsters in this ‘open’ part of the institution, although the numbers fluctuate between 20 and 40; their median age is 13. Detailed inspections of the operation are relatively rare. Supposedly, the institution is meant to produce an annual report, written to a common format, which allows the principal to unburden himself over what happens to be concerning him in any particular year — but these, too, are largely pro forma exercises only ever really changing in the aftermath of some scandal attaching itself to the residence.

The institution is also required to keep a set of diaries to record daily comings and goings, the names of the individual kids who receive corporal punishment, and other facets of day-to-day life. Here again few of the injunctions are ever followed to the letter. Crises of one sort or another often seem to be crowding in. Some days it’s as if it’s all Howe and his hard-working colleagues can do to keep the place from resembling one big happy Manson family.

Making their jobs all the harder are the questions that are starting to be raised in the wider culture about the use of facilities such as these, the usual criticism being that an institution such as Epuni is no place for children, the most recent complaint being that kids like these should be kept in their own communities.

But such reservations are out of step with the prevailing wisdom of the time and the assumptions of the department. As two of the era’s best-known researchers, Rosemary Dinnage and M.L. Kellmer Pringle, recently argued — and Howe likes quoting their words — there is ‘little basis for such sweeping rejections of residential homes. On the contrary, there is some evidence that certain children may find it easier to accept, or cope with, a larger, less intimate environment since it makes less intensive emotional demands.’

MID-MORNING. A KINGSWOOD POLICE VAN SWINGS through the main gates to deposit the latest addition to the institution’s ‘closed’ quarters, the relevant housemaster having already been alerted to the drop-off. The moment the van grumbles to a halt he is striding towards it, clipboard and pen in hand, to exchange a few words with the driver about the new boy. Is he a nail-biter? A bed-wetter? Will he be disruptive? The boy, hands shoved deeply in his jacket pockets, gets led off to the institution’s welcoming ‘secure’ block.

Once past the 42 beds in the main part of the institution, one cannot help but be taken a little aback at this readymade prison, which we saw a bit earlier, with its four cells, a shower and a day room. It’s among the institution’s busiest wings. Virtually all newcomers undergo what administrators describe as a three-day ‘induction programme’ in this hated part of the residence, designed, it is said, to thwart the chronic problem of absconding and provide an ‘individual oriented’ environment for newcomers, as well as a dedicated area for health checks. Because Epuni is almost perpetually strapped for cash and short of qualified staff, however, these programmes are infrequent at best, and the cellblock appears to serve little practical function beyond what its name suggests.

But that gluey tinge to the smell that hovers in the air, like the whiff of gunpowder after a fireworks display, owes something to the cellblock administrators’ commitment to their health-related duties. During Epuni’s first decade, head lice had never been considered a serious problem. But the number of cases of human louse infestations, or pediculosis, has apparently been on a roll since the construction of the cellblock, leading some of the institution’s growing legion of critics to wonder whether the supposed epidemic might simply be an excuse for what by any other reckoning appears simply to be a humiliating initiation ritual. Cases of head lice among kids of Polynesian descent, after all, are considered rare on account of the particular hair consistency of the ethnic group that accounts for the lion’s share of the Epuni cohort.

Nevertheless, the condition is considered sufficiently prevalent that every last resident in Epuni quickly becomes familiar with the Maori-language appellation — kuta — for the microscopic brown creatures that cause itching, sores and skin breaks. Accordingly, every newcomer is coated with a thick lotion, smothered across his entire body, almost as soon as the police deposit him on the doorstep and a staff member has managed to bundle him into the first available shower. The lotion needs to be applied only after the boy is dry, however, so first he is required to stand naked until the water has evaporated from his head; only then may the supervising housemaster dip a paint-brush into a pail of cream and use it to coat the boy’s entire head and body.

Because there is no product or method which actually guarantees the destruction of these eggs or hatched lice after a single treatment, the youngster will go without a shower for the next seven days while the lotion supposedly does its work. So while the ubiquity of the treatment may or may not arrest the spread of the kuta, the presence of the paste on so many unwashed bodies lends the institution its notably pungent air.

Like everything else at Epuni, the kuta ritual is performed strictly according to the book — or more precisely, the manual — with something approaching the same degree of attention a medieval schoolman might have given the works of Aquinas. Over the decades, first on the administrative watch of the Child Welfare Branch of the Department of Education and more recently the Department of Social Welfare, these weighty black- and green-bound tomes have been promulgated for the guidance of staff.

These manuals enjoy a certain pride of place inside the main administrative office, a room of neatly typed instructions, official papers and 121 separate key sites, which otherwise resembles nothing so much as the cell of a slovenly monk. The Field Workers’ Manual, dating back to the late 1950s, is one; another is the venerable Social Workers’ Manual, which was first produced around 1970. Together they sit among other duty books and daily logs of activity recording significant events relating to a child (health checks, corporal punishment, time spent in solitary confinement) that staff working on one shift might need to communicate to others.

Workers are expected to know, as well, the content of the new Children and Young Persons Act 1974, passed with some political fanfare last November and effective from the previous April, in the interests of revising and consolidating the earlier Child Welfare Act of 1925. Finally, for good measure, this past year has seen a new Residential Workers’ Manual and a Principal’s Handbook, which like all the others are already evolving and growing over time with various insertions and modifications as the official mood dictates.

Heaven help any nocturnal prowler who encounters a staff member brandishing one of these volumes! Not only are a number of the housemasters reputed to be proficient in various of the martial arts, the sheer weight of any of the manuals swiped across the head could stun an ox — as one would expect of instruction books containing regulations and guidance on every conceivable aspect of a child’s perpetually supervised life during the three or so months he will typically be housed at Epuni.

‘Understanding Polynesians’, the title of one such entry, offers a taste of the general content. ‘Generally speaking,’ the section begins, ‘Pakeha children are taught from early infancy that they must respect other people’s property — “Jimmy, you leave Mary’s ball alone!” But it would never occur to Polynesian parents to say anything so restrictive …’ Given that the overwhelming majority of the young wards here are brown-skinned, such insights are presumably weighed carefully, and gratefully, by a complement of staff that is just as overwhelmingly white.

In the main, the manuals offer more straightforward advice on everything from dispensing weekly pocket money (75c) to perfecting a child’s work skills in, for example, correctly using a cloth to apply polish to furniture. A dedicated page in the Principal’s Handbook describes how this should be done in accordance with institutional policy, which in the first instance means spreading White Lily cleaning solution onto the cloth and applying the cloth to the surface until it has fully ‘become black’. Thereafter a dry cloth must be deployed to wipe off any excess polish: ‘If this is being done correctly, the area will be slightly polished but a little smeared.’ Finally, the handbook counsels, another dry cloth needs to be used; however, ‘if this gets damp,’ the guide warns, ‘the area being polished will continue to get smear marks on it’. And what if the kid at work gets fed up with all this and simply decides to slosh hot water on the wood — or, his wits at an understandable end, register his disapproval by heaving a chair through the first available window? ‘Well, YOU will have just WASTED the White Lily — and your time!’

The handbook is also big on making the boys feel occupationally special, offering names that distinguish their services from the rank and file. The child who reports to the kitchen at 7.15 am to help prepare the food, for example, is not referred to as such in the manual, but rather at all times as The Tea and Toast Boy or possibly The Morning Pots Boy. Similarly, for reasons that are never made entirely clear or else have been lost in the mists of time, the boy responsible for emptying trash and cleaning the pig buckets goes under the name of The General (or The Assistant General for the younger ones). Also contained within the volume’s 1000-plus pages are slightly cryptic copies of historical material relating to tattooing practices in ancient Greece and modern psychiatry, tips and instructions for staff, and the correct procedures for minuting and initialling individual files.

Replacing the manuals and continuing to wander around the buildings, something odd begins to dawn on you. Having dizzied oneself in these bulky tools of written instruction, the penny slowly drops that these tomes represent the only published words to be found virtually anywhere in the institution.

Neither in the play areas nor in what passes for a recreational lounge near the front doors, nor even in the classrooms, may printed material of any readable sort be espied, or indeed any published juvenilia at all. Especially troubling for some of the boys, you suppose, must be the absence of literature, apart from comics, in any of the bedrooms, because it’s here that they are required to spend an unusual amount of time, not just in the nights but for up to two hours each weekday afternoon, as part of a practice known as ‘rest therapy’ that is peculiar to Epuni.

Still, as the institution’s managers are always quick to point out, it’s not as if the wards are bereft of real exercise. The institution’s largest building, after all, is a customised gymnasium, which is often put to use at the end of the mid-morning and mid-afternoon lineups after the housemaster has first passed around a bucket of apples and dispensed the quota of cigarettes for the older boys.

The gym used to be such a fun venue. Once it even provided the setting for a game of basketball in which a local team faced off against members of the police training academy in Trentham; a humdinger of a game. The match took place on a cool spring evening, a see-sawing contest where the lead changed frequently until the final couple of minutes when the Epuni team scored the net. (The winners were not gracious in victory.) Nowadays, though, the usual activities are less auspicious, mainly comprising the physical exercise sessions that first became a part of the daily grind in the early 1970s.

The wards run in circles, or sprint from one wall to another, until they are told to stop. Climbing up a large ladder rack and then climbing down the other side, sometimes while using one arm to carry a large medicine ball, is another regularly prescribed activity. So is clambering up a thick gym rope that hangs down from the ceiling — and then sliding down again. Finally, perhaps, there will be a long round of press-ups, with the duty housemaster picking his way between the grunting exercisers and commenting on their performance.

Late afternoon. More chores. Moving from one allotted task to another, drifting from one corner of the building to another, is for many of these wards, you now begin to suspect, a kind of sleepwalking of no particular significance or importance, even though Epuni Boys’ Home may well be the cleanest institution in all of greater Wellington as a consequence of the endless attention. How to relieve the boredom? Rata Wing, the newest addition to the building, is fitted with fire sprinklers both on the ceilings of the passageway and in each of the cubicles, offering a perennial temptation. Those red glass phials, which release torrents of water in the case of fire, cry out to be interfered with. It isn’t unknown for somebody to road test the system by tampering with one of the valves and, inevitably, flooding the passage.

Alternatively, somebody might break open the firehose cupboard in the foyer that separates Rata and Totara wings and initiate a furious water fight. Alas, this could lead to a night in the cells, though, so more often than not the temptation is resisted in favour of some music, assuming the stereo is working. Time was when the main source of music was a portable record player shaped like a fat briefcase, complete with handle and inside speaker and powered by battery or electricity. Now there’s an actual cabinet record player, securely mounted on the lounge wall, made out of fake wood with a couple of little speakers and a storage compartment inside for albums. Unfortunately it’s broken.

Little matter. Soon it’s time for more duties, another couple of lineups, the evening meal. Outside the dusk gathers underneath a rising moon that this evening is only a narrow crescent, a pencil stroke of light against the New Zealand sky, and still the distant drumbeat from somewhere across the waters sounds ever more loudly.

THIS BEING A WEDNESDAY NIGHT, HAIR SHAMPOO will be the order of the evening, as it is on Saturdays as well, a process adding long minutes to the 7.30 pm shower, for which all the inmates are required to strip and form a queue with towels draped around their necks. Always the boys are carefully instructed by the housemaster on the correct use of soap and the hair product (‘this may be a new experience for many of them,’ the manual warns), with the supervisor measuring out a portion of shampoo from a used kitchen container and sprinkling it on each of the heads clustered together in the one shower. For the youngest kids this will be the day’s final activity before supper and bed. For the older boys, at least those who haven’t misbehaved during the day, there’s some television time before turning in as well.

Rare is the moment when anything changes in the little universe that is 441 Riverside Drive. This evening, however, those distant drumbeats have moved nearer, an anxious rumble now much closer at hand, the noise of a distant world that is not so distant any longer.

Though much of what passes for scheduled life inside Epuni Boys’ Home tends to be intentionally uneventful, evening times are often a bit of a treat. This part of the day is also a lesson in practical economics, because those who get to savour it the most tend to be the ones who have earned their pleasure. This evening, as every evening, each boy taking a seat next to the old black and white TV set has already presented the 9 x 12 centimetre ‘credit card’, which he is meant to keep with him at all times, to the relevant supervisor. The housemaster then awards a predetermined number of clips for good work performed or other emanations of satisfactory conduct during the day. Earn 40 clips over the course of seven days — the weekly tallies are usually announced at lunchtime on Wednesdays — and a bedazzling new world of privileges opens up.

Among the regular rewards are the opportunity to shoot pool in the lounge area and the right to enjoy a few additional cigarettes, above and beyond the daily allowance that all boys aged 15 or more are allowed, to puff between work duties. The kids generally like the system, and that’s how it’s meant to be; the token-economy initiative is what one might call an exercise in behaviour modification, treating the ‘what’ rather than the ‘why’ of behaviour, to be sure, and disabling bad habits. Originally devised for similar correctional facilities in the United States, it has proved so popular locally that a number of the other New Zealand institutions have taken it up — including the Weymouth centre in Auckland and Wanganui’s Holdsworth School — since Epuni first adopted it in 1972.

On this particular evening what’s most coveted is the opportunity to enjoy a ringside place on one of the orange plastic chairs arranged around the small television set in the recreational area next to the dining room. As usual the bigger boys go for the seats in front, the smaller ones just behind. There’s Charlie, still wearing a cast from the car crash he had the last time he absconded. Next to him slouches Rangi, none too smart but extremely strong, complete with what looks to be a large handkerchief pointlessly wrapped around his head.

Odder still, at least for anyone with an inkling of what they signify, are a number of crude Nazi symbols tattooed on his massive arms, as opposed to the usual four green dots on the knuckles (the four F’s, remember: find her, feel her, fuck her, forget her) that younger gang members typically plump for. All the same you do have to marvel at the menace the boy effortlessly exudes, dusky arms loosely folded, black hair still wet and draped across an already muscular neck.

You find yourself thinking about everything you’ve seen today, and you think about life. What does it mean to be a child in that moment when those diamond-hard certainties breathed into us at birth first start to slip away? The kids, however, are gaping at the hazy little box, breathing in the energy of what’s happening half a world away — the distant drumbeat now frighteningly close at hand — with all the force of the 28,000 televised fans sucking the air out of the sweltering Araneta Colosseum, in the Philippines, and you should be, too.

EVERYTHING THEY EVER TOLD YOU ABOUT HEAVYWEIGHT boxing — about power, beauty, reach, intelligence and creativity — points to an early victory by Muhammad Ali over Joe Frazier in tonight’s bout, the third of their epic clashes in the middle of an era that began, as it happened, at precisely the same time as Epuni Boys’ Home, and even now casts an ever-powerful presence over so many of its wards. But everything they told you isn’t necessarily so.

The opening few rounds confirm as much. Ali, the taller and heavier fighter, disdaining his trademark butterfly approach but still keeping his hands characteristically low, moves in confidently on his more economically packaged, rugged-looking opponent with cruel insults and disdainful jabs. Why else would he be fighting flat-footed in the middle of the unusually large ring?

But Frazier, sweat bouncing off his body, is complex, full of surprises, ominously laconic in the exchanges grunted back and forth during the early rounds, and cutting much more of a verbal presence than one has been led to believe of the man sometimes dismissed as twice as black and half as smart as his more popular foe. (Ali: ‘They told me you was through, Joe, they told me you was finished.’ Frazier: ‘They lied.’) And Joe, as they say in the business, has a cold motor; Ali ought to have remembered that from their previous fights.

By the fifth round, the time for verbal jazzing is way over. Ali, anxiety growing in his black-marble eyes, looks to be in trouble. Frazier — pitter-pattering, crouching, snorting, weaving, slinging lefts and rights to Ali’s body and the occasional bomb to his head — is a baggy propeller, arms whirring faster and faster around a deadstill gaze. Peek-a-boo, the standard bobbing and weaving style where the hands are placed in front of the boxer’s face, it might be, but that doesn’t really do full justice to the superhuman performance Frazier is putting on. How can anyone punch a hole through that?

The minutes tick by along with the mounting physical traces left by one of Frazier’s signatures: a mighty left hook. Now the bullets are flying. Ali seems unable to find a way out. The assault continues until the bell signals the end of the 10th; the champion, head bowed low, staggers to his corner.

Times like these are when a cornerman is faced with the difficult task of convincing a younger man to find it in himself to continue fighting after he has suffered a series of terrible blows. In this, as incredibly gifted a boxer as Ali is, he’s really no different from any young man, whether among the onlookers in Manila or those in Epuni. But these kids never had anyone like Bundini Brown, Ali’s flamboyant, booming cornerman since 1963, who loves and chides his champion like the father figure that virtually all these far-flung fans lack, and now presents himself at the ring apron, his face damp with emotion.

‘Go down to the well one more time,’ Brown yells, tears running down his face; ‘the world needs ya!’ Ali kind of nods and rises to his feet.

At first the advice doesn’t really help. Ali’s 11th round again proves to be a disaster. But then, something finally clicks: he produces six shots to Frazier’s head, ripping another eight for good measure shortly afterwards. Now it’s Frazier’s legs that seem to be searching for the canvas, his punches losing steam as he attempts to ward off the onslaught. The bell is the only thing that saves him in the 14th round.

Now the two fighters collapse in their respective corners, heads hanging down like broken dolls that resemble nothing so much as Epuni’s newly inaugurated little criminals, while Ali’s trainer, Angelo Dundee, whispers something in his ear. What is he telling him? Who will prevail? How did we all end up in this fight anyway?

LITTLE CRIMINALS

Who we are and what we call home are different things. But the two realities are inextricably intertwined, circling and jabbing each other throughout our lives. ‘After all, anybody is as their land and air is,’ Gertrude Stein wrote. ‘It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn.’

If that’s really the case, if this idea of home explains so much about our true selves, then it’s significant that the flagship correctional training centre in which our young friends are drinking in Ali and Frazier in the final, drawn-out moments of their historic death waltz should be indigenous to New Zealand’s Hutt Valley, a region where the theme of juvenile delinquency sometimes feels as old as the rugged hills overlooking the premises.

It’s also significant, perhaps, that our young friends have seldom been regarded as our friends.

Juvenile delinquency as an identifiable term dates back to the early 19th century when it appears to have been coined to describe a slightly ambivalent concept relating to children — which is to say, those aged 14 or younger — and youngsters who threaten the social order. On the one hand it suggests a hesitancy about whether such youngsters should be regarded on an equal footing with adults. At the same time, though, it seems to identify a particular problem while hinting that what is under discussion might ultimately be more socially harmful than many other types of offence.

The term was advanced not by an academic but by an agitated American popular press, in the 1810s, and in fairly short order the politicians of the time took up the emotional cue and pressed the concept towards its legislative debut, in the statute books of New York City in 1824. Thirty years later the expression started appearing in the New Zealand vernacular, serving as an inspired phrase for the youthful masses supposedly laying siege to the new antipodean dream. This was a scourge against which the moral stewards of the time would anxiously gird themselves, in a colony in which by the end of the century 42 per cent of the population was under the age of 15.

From a typical editorial in the Poverty Bay Herald of May 14, 1895, for instance, readers discover that ‘the children of the poor today have less regard for law or authority’. Increasingly, many such youngsters were giving themselves over to ‘acts of wanton mischief’ and ‘rudeness, incivility, indecency and profanity are more than ever features of their speech and behaviour’. Indeed, the growing social pestilence shown by the children of the poor was ‘disappointing and regrettable’, the paper said. Not to mention a sure sign of criminal conduct to follow.

Another piece from 1870 predicted that New Zealand would soon fall prey to an army of children who were beginning to embrace the vagabond lifestyle. ‘It has been shown again and again,’ this correspondent wrote balefully, ‘that these social pests are the offspring of dishonest, intemperate and profligate parents.’ Nor did the media of the day believe any effort should be spared in dealing to those associated with the problem. The case of three boys in Wellington caught throwing stones at a house, for instance, called for nothing less than ‘very decided repressive measures’, thundered a leader-article in the Evening Star.

Here, as ever, New Zealand newspapers essentially echoed the received wisdom of their American counterparts, which by the late 1800s had started to spice their own editorial offerings with academic seasoning. In Juvenile Offenders, published at the end of the century, the criminologist W. Douglas Morrison offered that ‘whether we look at home or abroad, whether we consult the criminal returns of the Old World or the New, we invariably find juvenile criminality exhibiting a distinct tendency to increase. It is a problem which is not confined to any single community: it is confronting the whole family of nations; it is arising out of conditions which are common to civilisations.’

But just as America supplied the lingo for identifying and understanding the issue, American culture was also seen as fomenting the problem. Among New Zealand’s first debates over censorship, for example, was the controversy caused by a plan to screen a film of the heavyweight boxing championship fight between Tommy Burns and Jack Johnson. Twice the National Council of Churches inveighed against the screening, arguing that the film should be banned on account of what would be the injurious effect on ‘the small boy inhabitant of the community, who is generally panting for gore and plenty of it’ — and twice this ecclesiastical intercession caused no small public debate.

Of course every recorded era has experienced a strikingly similar collective headache in respect of its young, along with the conviction that the problem is drastically worsening, starting with Socrates famously complaining about young men of his time contradicting their elders, gorging on the fat of the land and hatching schemes to ‘tyrannise their teachers’.

In one of the more thorough popular examinations of the same theme to be published in recent years, the British author Jon Savage traces similar blasts of chill horror across centuries of Anglo-American literature, beginning with Rousseau’s 1762 tract Emile and its scandalous characterisations of puberty as ‘a change of temper, frequent outbursts of anger, a perpetual stirring of the mind’. (In a compassionate aside that might have been better studied by latter-day ‘child savers’, Rousseau also chided adults for ‘always looking for the man in the child without considering what he is before he is a man’.) The American scholar who in the late 1800s more or less invented the modern discipline of adolescent studies — the term was his — was a genetic psychologist named G. Stanley Hall, who also popularised the same conviction with a Rousseauesque mantra: ‘Every child is a little savage.’

Onward the narrative extends through time and cultural space, and with it, always, the most ancient of questions has been posed: What is to be done? What is to be done about those whose young minds, as the Christchurch Press put it in 1896, appear ‘laden with immeasurable possibilities for evil’? But such clamour has usually tended to be restrained by what we have already seen to be the ambiguity of the concept of delinquency, for no society — certainly not New Zealand — has ever fully agreed on whether it constitutes crimes to be punished or problems to be treated.

It is in no small part due to this lack of agreement that one of the most historically popular measures for dealing with the problem — residential institutions for the young — has usually ended up serving the twin purposes of reformatory and shelter. Part of the justification for simultaneously using such institutions for these apparently contradictory purposes has been the fact that problematic children of both types in the western world have long been cared for by people other than their biological parents.

So why not, the reasoning has gone, bundle both kinds of kids together in the one place? Periods of rapid urbanisation — and the associated social alarm over the new levels of delinquency created by the newcomers from the sticks — have tended to be the eras when this argument has found its greatest purchase. Even so, along with the understandings of what ‘delinquency’ means and how it might best be treated, popular enthusiasm in New Zealand for putting into service the solution of customised residences has waxed and waned.

Officially, sanctioned care for neglected or indigent children dates back to the 1840s, when government resources were set aside for the establishment of schools for the offspring of wayward settlers. The move mirrored changes in Britain, which allowed for reformatories and ‘schools of industry’ to be dedicated to prevention and to some kind of rehabilitation for those impoverished children who ‘become the curse and trouble of all places where they live’.

In 1867, the industrial school arrangement was strengthened with the passage of legislation allowing the state to house perceived ‘larrikins’, the early Australian term for delinquents. Religious education, language instruction and industrial training became the main focus of these new facilities which, in addition to a naval training camp, included 10 such schools in which kids under 15 — some as young as two — could be required to live for up to seven years.

In 1873, the head of any of these schools in New Zealand became the official guardian of the child in place of his parents. The Naval Training School Act of the following year introduced a provision for wayward boys to be detained in the naval training schools or, in certain cases, simply sent to sea. By the following decade the government was boarding-out most of the 4000 children who were in these schools, and soon only one in five of them remained in state care.

Shortly into the 20th century, however, as a result of public disquiet over the treatment experienced by some of the boys in private care, the situation changed again. This was when the government took control of all residential establishments for children under 16 years of age who had been found to be, in the language of the day, destitute, neglected, vagrant, in a detrimental environment, associating with persons of ill repute, uncontrollable or convicted of offences against the law.

Officials at the Department of Education, which oversaw these residences, did little to hide their contempt for those placed in their correctional charge. As in the United States, which also invented the concept of a children’s court in Illinois in 1899, mainly as a way of addressing youth crime in the city of Chicago, the guiding judicial principle in New Zealand always was that such children needed rescuing rather than punishing. ‘I endeavoured to act in each case,’ said one American judge of the time, ‘as I would were it my own son who was before me in the library at home, charged with some misconduct.’

In practice, according to Mike Doolan, a one-time residential care manager turned senior fellow at the University of Canterbury’s Department of Social Work, this country’s implementation of the doctrine of parens patriae, or ‘the state as parent’, has often been put to work in New Zealand in a somewhat less benevolent fashion. While the aim of the burgeoning movement, which saw residential admissions catapult from 800 in 1880 to 1700 by the turn of the century, was in keeping with the good American judge’s sentiment, the evidence suggests that our own Child Welfare Branch administered its duties with a somewhat more gnarled Calvinist hand. It was a hand calloused by the imprint of the international social reformers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but motivated to a degree by a strictly punitive attempt to morally corral the lives of its wards as much as any desire to liberate and dignify them.

As one General Brett, a whiskery old member of the colony’s Legislative Council, put it, residential solutions were well suited to ‘those ill-conditioned and corrupt lads’ for whom reformatories would provide a much-needed ‘terror of the rod’. Practically speaking, too, the idea seemed to offer a way to keep the country’s more impressionable delinquents away from the welter of bad new social influences.

Among the chroniclers who captured what this meant through the eyes of a kid was the maverick Labour MP John A. Lee. A one-time resident of the notorious Burnham Industrial School, where he was sent at age 14 after being convicted of petty theft, Lee went on to become a decorated war hero and oratorical gun for hire. A committed socialist, ‘Bolshie Lee’ produced a number of works lightly fictionalising aspects of his residential experience, most notably his 1936 book The Hunted, which moved George Bernard Shaw to sing Lee’s praises.

The book was based on Lee’s time at Burnham in the early 1900s. He writes of endless lineups on the watch of one Mr Denton, an unusually panicked sexual moralist even by the standards of the time, who claimed he could tell if a boy indulged in masturbation simply by staring into his eyes. This, Mr Denton would frequently do. He was convinced that God had gifted him with special insights into the spiritual effects of a habit that he believed would first drain away the substance of the masturbator’s spine, then the wretch’s brain and immortal soul, consigning the youth to a stint in the mental asylum followed by almost-certain premature death.

And while the housemaster’s language for the act itself was obscure, the punishments he meted out were vivid, at least by Lee’s account. ‘Now if any of you boys have done certain things you should not have done, you must come and tell me,’ Mr Denton is heard to bark in the story. ‘If you tell, I’ll let you off and help you. If I find out myself, I shall flog severely.’ And flog them he did, apparently, as if his life depended on it. Sadly, recounts Lee, this was never without reinforcing the sexual depravity that so exercised his imagination. Thus:

As the branch grows crookedly to avoid an impassable obstacle, do did [our] sex life grow warped. The boys were the victims of an urge as old as life. Boys were thrust back on the fact of sex, however they tried to escape. They could not achieve forgetfulness in literature, in music, in exercise of the crafts. They had to sit down in leisure hours or lie  down in bed at night with no book and with no competing interest, thoughts went unerringly to certain manifestations of dawning manhood. And as the primal urge hypnotized their attention they knew they were unclean, for were they not told so by the manager. They were caught in the toils of foul sex, and turned upon themselves with secret loathing. As they were virile and healthy, so were they self-convicted. In their ignorance they believed they were not as other boys, and racked themselves with contrition.

Mr Denton had his political supporters. In the same year Lee was sent down to the Christchurch correctional facility, a parliamentary report by the country’s stipendiary magistrate and commissioner, H.W. Bishop, made a ferocious case for punishing boys of ‘low morals’ with indefinite imprisonment.

After all, Bishop reasoned, ‘it is no more right to endanger the community by giving such a person unrestrained liberty than it would be to release a savage wild beast into a school playground’. Nor should legal adulthood be an impediment to the state holding on to these degenerates. ‘I can imagine no greater incentive to reform in the case of most of these young people,’ Bishop raved, ‘than the fear of indeterminate detention. I believe it would do more to help forward the work of the reformatories than anything else.’

Well, why not? Didn’t all the available official evidence confirm as much? The social historian Bronwyn Dalley’s account of the same period includes the improbable but apparently true story of a visiting delegation to Otekaike in North Otago being awoken on their first morning at the school by a squad of children singing in unison ‘The More We Are Together (The Happier We’ll Be)’ while polishing the linoleum in the passageway outside the bedroom doors.

From around 1916 the pendulum had begun to swing again. This was spurred by a couple of developments. One was the lingering disquiet in the wake of an official inquiry into conditions at a girls’ residence in Christchurch known as Te Oranga, later Kingslea. It was found that female inmates were routinely stripped and flogged, forced to wear grotesque outfits and to undergo humiliating haircuts at the punishing hands of a notably joyless matron, Harriette Petremant, who told her accusers:

Corporal punishment is the only punishment that tells. [The children] have neither brains nor consciences for any other form of punishment to have effect. They rather enjoy being sent to bed than otherwise. The things they do I am sure no normal child would either think of or dare to do.

A far more positive development at this time was the intercession of the reform-minded John Beck, a Scottish immigrant who felt the colonies could be doing better in respect of their most vulnerable lives. Beck was determined to show the way by fashioning a Child Welfare Branch whose main objective was to ensure that the kids it dealt with required no future contact with the authorities. Taking their cue from both developments, officials soon stopped using the term ‘industrial school’ altogether. By 1920 there was only one such institution for boys anyway, in Caversham, Dunedin, with another centre for older boys located in Levin. Institutionalisation had come to be seen as a last resort.

At the same time the government decided to systemise what residential work it did control by promulgating the Child Welfare Act of 1925, arguably Beck’s most enduring legacy, which gathered pace with the introduction of the notion of the social security system introduced in the 1930s and was to hold sway for the next 60 years. This Act also legislated for a separate children’s court for offences other than manslaughter or murder — typically a small room in a regular courthouse where a uniformed cop read out the evidence to a magistrate seated behind a small desk facing the relevant guardians and social workers, and the child, who was usually required to stand in front of him while the case was heard.

Here again, the word ‘court’ was a bit misleading, since those who appeared in them enjoyed no presumption of innocence, had no right of appeal and sometimes were not even informed what decision had been made, except in cases where the court decided to show leniency and place a child under supervision, in which case a copy of what became known as Form E. 5/118 was duly sent to the ‘offending’ parents:

Today your child .............................. was placed under the supervision of a Child Welfare Officer for .......... year(s), and this information in the form of a legal order will be sent to you later.

During the period of supervision, any instructions of the Child Welfare Officer, or any conditions imposed by that officer, must be complied with. If the Child Welfare Officer is not satisfied with your child’s conduct, or with living conditions, your child may again be brought before the Court.

If this should happen, the child could possibly be taken away from home, a step best avoided by your co-operation with the Child Welfare Officer in the interests of the child.

Legislation provides for a right of appeal against the Order, and should you wish to exercise this right, I suggest you consult a solicitor immediately.

However, the government remained a stern taskmaster. The petty nature of much of the offending — theft, truancy, drunkenness — disproportionate to the very considerable power of the children’s courts; as well as dispatching these high-handed edicts in minor cases, they committed children to institutions and could order that the names of boys be gazetted by the police in order that their occupational movements could be tracked through their adult years, thus making whatever sentence they passed a lifetime ruling. The child welfare agency also had its functions expanded; the Act granted institutional managers the right to administer whippings, for example, a practice only outlawed in the early 1940s but still permitted to be administered by the agency’s own welfare officers.

Following the war, and especially from the time of the country’s first National government in 1949, the so-called child savers began agitating for even more emphatic solutions to the problems that were now dominating the political chatter.

According to a report presented to Parliament in June 1949, the preceding year had seen 2520 young people in residence in ‘orphanages’ — just 104 of these cases related to children whose parents were in fact deceased. Rather, these kids were in institutions because some perceived weakness, ill fortune or irresponsibility on the part of the parents had led to their offspring being committed to care. And their number was clearly on the rise, well up on the fewer than 300 mostly female wards in institutional settings over the previous two decades. The government responded by ordering the Department of Education to upgrade and expand its residential capacity, which would see the number of institutional cases over the next few decades eventually treble.

Liberal New Zealand was not entirely impressed with the policy moves afoot. Among the impassioned media correspondences of the time, the response sparked by a dissenting leader-article published in the New Zealand Listener in 1949 was reckoned to be of such consequence that a small book was eventually published reprinting both the piece (‘Orphanages Without Orphans’) and the tsunami of letters it provoked. The article’s author, child welfare lobbyist Doris Meares Mirams, had said that the care of wards overall was open to serious criticism, specifically in regard to whether the government had adequate powers of inspection and, if it had, whether those powers were being put to good use by throwing kids into large ‘homes’. Mirams argued for the abolition of big institutions in favour of smaller foster-care arrangements that would see problem children in more natural settings. While advocating better staff-training opportunities, for the most part she argued that these ‘costly, long out-of-date and in no way satisfactory’ establishments shouldn’t exist at all.

Questions of ethnicity were also starting to inform at least some of the discussion. As recently as the mid-1930s just 8000 Maori people, or one-tenth of the officially designated Maori population overall, lived in any of New Zealand’s urban centres. Only a very few of their offspring were in any kind of state care. This was generally off-limits to the country’s indigenous inhabitants, who received virtually no discretionary welfare services from their white political overlords and were excluded from most forms of charitable aid administered by local governments.

Over the next couple of decades the Maori presence in the cities and towns swelled, and with it a host of social problems blamed on the accelerating process. Within a few years, according to Bronwyn Dalley, the number of Maori kids appearing before the courts was growing and child welfare officers were already speaking of ‘juvenile delinquency’ as a particularly Maori problem, initially more so in the case of young Maori women and their supposedly loose moral attitudes.

No doubt, juvenile crime figures among Maori were rising after remaining roughly on a par with the percentage of Maori in the total population throughout the young country’s history. But as the process of urbanisation grew, so did the Maori share of offences tried in court, which by the mid-1950s was up to nearly one in every five cases; by the end of the decade it would be up to a quarter of the judicial workload, with Maori boys leading the statistical way, just as the clearly destabilising urban drift of their families into the cities was the era’s major demographic shift — both factors, of course, being sides of the same cultural coin.

But perceived problems among Maori youth were not the only factors at play. As much as any specific piece of legislation, committee findings or demographic shifts, it was the sweaty moral climate of the period that put the wind into the sails of the burgeoning system that would hold sway for the next 30 years.

Viewed in retrospect, this deepening moral panic seems amazing in light of the economic bounty and social tranquillity of the period. New Zealand stood among the world’s wealthiest countries on a per capita basis, with full employment an economic fact of life until at least 1967. And serious crime was rare, at least as far as can be told given that precise figures on youth offending were virtually impossible to track down, and what data was available often seemed contradictory.

Among the obstacles encountered by the writer Eileen Philipp in compiling her landmark 1946 study, Juvenile Delinquency in New Zealand, for example, was what the researcher described as a chronic departmental muddle of statistics that left researchers little the wiser about what was the actual problem. Philipp complained that the lack of reliable information served as an impediment not only to her own work, but also to the practical business of making any sense whatsoever of the problem at the heart of what was fast becoming a national obsession. Indeed, she hinted it was almost as if public concern was surging in inverse proportion to the real problem.

Thus began a banner period in the official search for a residential plan to deal with wayward youth. By 1954 the government had opened its first ‘family home’, the name for the larger residential houses owned, furnished and maintained by the state, and run by a couple of foster parents who received a special board rate for the children in care. The plan was that these residences would provide temporary care for kids in transit, and long-term care for others who, while not thought to be in need of institutional training, were unsuitable candidates for fostering.

Next the government convened what it called the Joint Committee on Young Offenders, an interagency initiative comprised of officials drawn from the departments of police, justice, child welfare and education, to nut out a more durable solution. The committee looked at the efficacy of the children’s courts and, in the time-honoured tradition of political leaders picking out safe issues on which to cut a tough posture, announced the constitution of a dedicated research group to consider the problem afresh.

Part of the political answer was also the hasty passage of another Child Welfare Amendment Act, spurred in part by yet another public outcry after 29 children were found to be in the care of a single woman who was subsequently convicted on a charge of neglect. The legislation tightened the rules surrounding childcare, allowing greater opportunities to streamline more young offenders into ‘correctional training’ institutions.

The next big challenge was to identify the best geographic setting in which to build a new institution.

HISTORICALLY, WHAT WE KNOW TODAY AS THE SUBURB of Epuni was named for Honiana Te Puni, a Te Ati Awa chief who was among the signatories of the Treaty of Waitangi and of the deed of purchase of the land about Wellington. Epuni (as he was known) was just about the best friend the English settlers could possibly have asked for. Along with his nephew, Wharepouri, he turned up in 1839 to welcome the New Zealand Company traders from the Tory, the first colonial ship to anchor in Port Nicholson, assuring the newcomers that he would be only too happy to do business with them.

Unfortunately, the two sides had strikingly different ideas of what doing business meant. For Epuni, the bedazzling natural setting in which they met was not among the commodities to be traded; still less were the river and valley lying to the immediate north, an expanse of few souls and deep shadows, items to be bartered like so many muskets. No, the land stood as a sacred gift, a treasure that the Maori received from Hands they did not have a chance to see clearly but in whose thrall they lived and moved and had their tribal being. The river in question they called Te Awakairangi, or the watercourse of greatest value, a mirror of their own legendary journey to the new isles. This was their papa kainga tuturu, an earth home where one can stand.

The settlers did indeed have other ideas. Within days they had renamed the same river after one of their company directors back in England, William Hutt, and soon they began reconstituting the area they named for him as their own market garden. Epuni saw the writing on the wall. Gathering some of his fellow chieftains and their sons, he headed back to his ancestral lands in Taranaki, arriving in time for some of the worst bloodletting between the European settlers and the Maori during the 1860s as they put their respective ideas of what constituted a home to the military test.

As disenchanting as this must have been, the record suggests Epuni never entirely lost the belief that things could have been different, enjoining his people, in the words that were read out at his mist-shrouded funeral, to remain ‘kind to my European brothers and sisters, be patient, be tolerant’.

Generous sentiments. Whatever the confidence the European settlers had in their own strength, they were at the time seriously outflanked by Maori. Epuni’s intercession, spurred by his belief in the inherent benevolence of the settlers, clearly saved a great many lives and influenced things for the better, not only in Taranaki but also back in Wellington, where uncommitted Maori were still doing a brisk business in violently settling scores with the newcomers. The city’s Evening Post was sufficiently moved to respond in kind at the time of his death, admitting that, while it was ‘not often that we say much on behalf of the Maoris, in this instance it would be unjust not to allude to the services of the venerable chief who passed away’.

Over time the white establishment would kindle a variety of incense around his memory, including the naming of a far-flung native horticultural reserve, located to the north of Wellington and prized for its fertile earth and comfortable microclimate, after the memory of the man who, the Evening Post also wrote, ‘when the spirit of trouble brooded over the Hutt Valley, helped to keep harm from the Europeans’.

Despite the Maori desire to stay on and cultivate that same hamlet, the colonial imprint quickly deepened. Among the first of the owners to snatch a significant parcel of farmland — the same stretch of land where portions of modern Epuni now sit, including the site for what would become Epuni Boys’ Home — was Baron C. Alzdorf. The Baron later died during the city’s big earthquake in 1855, apparently felled by a giant mirror in his own Wellington Hotel, but not before he had welcomed scores of other colonialists to help cultivate his fields with their 20 varieties of vegetables, in what would become the new country’s second borough and soon enough one of its fastest-growing urban centres.

Alzdorf’s offsiders cultivated their airs too. Or as much as circumstances allowed. Unlike the surrounding suburbs, many of which had been identified for what would later become the largest state-housing project in New Zealand’s history — an urban ribbon eventually stretching down from what became Stokes Valley to the Petone foreshore — the pioneering residents of Epuni were different, better.

They were the custodians of nothing less than a gentrified holdout against the great Fabian housing experiment going on around their enclave. Not for them the petty brutalities and bad manners of nearby Naenae, the city’s fastest-growing neighbourhood, or persistently ugly Taita. And their conceit, partly nurtured by the fact of the area’s chronic drainage problems, which rendered parts of Epuni unsuitable for the kind of state-house forests that had grown in these suburbs to the immediate north, remained long after it was absorbed into wider Lower Hutt in 1941.

Walking along some of the suburb’s main arteries in 2010, including those abutting what became the neighbourhood’s most infamous correctional facility, one is struck by the larger properties and more ample vegetation that is to be found there in comparison with the immediately surrounding suburbs.

As one resident of the time later put it to Ben Schrader, the author of a recently published history of state housing in New Zealand, it was as if the people of Epuni in the 1940s and 1950s somehow ‘saw themselves as more refined than those of Naenae and Taita. I think it was to some extent due to the fact that it was an earlier development than those further north in the valley and … in close proximity to privately owned and occupied dwellings. This effectively minimised the “ghetto effect” and stigma of being state tenants.’

Another local history, published as relatively recently as 1990, makes no mention at all of the suburb’s past importance to Maori, much less the thousands of mainly Maori youth who lived at its namesake institution, opting instead to recall a bygone era when Epuni served as a bustling centre of colonial commerce. Here gentlemen of great means and prestige strolled the streets, silhouetted against the blaze of the empire’s sun. Here grateful tradesmen delivered their goods by horse-drawn carts, and an occasional Chinese greengrocer, complete with pigtails, was seen with his baskets balanced on a pole across his shoulders. Here the children knew where all the birds’ nests were, who grew the tastiest tomatoes, walnuts and fruit, and, the writer marvelled, ‘the settlers were good hearted and industrious citizens’.

Elsewhere in the Hutt Valley intimations of something altogether darker flourished in the mid-1950s, even as the population of the region had nearly doubled to around 8000 in the previous seven years. The problems began on June 20, 1954 when, shortly after her mother and stepfather had reported her as missing, a 15-year-old girl turned up at the Petone police station to file a historic report. Unhappy at home with her stepfather, she told the cops, she had hooked up with a ‘milk bar gang’, whose members met ‘mostly’ for sex purposes at Elbe’s Milk Bar in Lower Hutt’s High Street — jukin’, as the Americans first called it, that rather socially ominous word denoting not only the piece of machinery in which records of the era were played very loudly, but the Gullah dialect of the American South in which juke means both ‘wicked’ (in the same sense as jazz) and ‘sexual intercourse’.

All of this was naturally viewed with great alarm by a parental generation that had freaked out about every Kiwi manifestation of black American culture since the jitterbug. But now this young girl had become tired of the jukin’, too, worried about the lipstick traces it was leaving; she wanted the police to intercede, and how.

THE AUTHORITIES OBLIGED. PARTICULARLY ENERGISED was one Senior Sergeant Frank Le Fort. A report published at the time in Truth had ‘sources close’ to the crusading cop vowing that there ‘would be no end to the investigation’ of the immoral behaviour radiating out of the Hutt Valley. Eventually, some 65 teenagers involved in sexual misconduct were identified and 107 charges laid. Virtually all of the prosecutions involved consenting individuals, with many relating to trivial offences, such as the case of the young man who was charged after admitting to touching his girlfriend’s breast. The country was scandalised.

As Le Fort told The New Zealand Herald: ‘These incidents revealed a shocking degree of immoral conduct which spread into sexual orgies perpetuated in private homes during the absence of parents, and in several second-rate Hutt Valley theatres where familiarity between the youths and girls was rife and commonplace.’ Among the revelations were stories of teenage girls wearing make-up, drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, even reading comics.

Down in Canterbury, a saga with purportedly similar overtones involving a couple of teenagers, Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker, unfolded only a couple of days after the ‘Petone incident’. Hulme and Parker, who were arrested and charged with the murder of Parker’s mother, had bashed the older woman to death with a half-brick, each of the girls having taken turns at holding her down by the neck while the other swung the makeshift weapon — 45 times in all.

Worse, almost, the assailants were — in the terminology of the time — abnormally homosexual in their relationship, a fact that seemed to gather some kind of relevance given that neither of the teenaged offenders expressed any remorse for their crime. Never mind that this was a peculiar crime committed in faraway Christchurch. The moral menace already emanating out of Wellington’s satellite city was spreading, or so tabloid wisdom had it when holding forth on the ‘killer instinct’ — a term originally coined to describe the boxer Jack Dempsey in his prime — apparently taking hold of the young.

Then along came Oswald Mazengarb. The residential movement existed well before the conservative barrister’s arrival on the scene, but his work hastened its progress. His Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents, better known as the Mazengarb Report, investigated the ‘conditions and influences that tend to undermine the sexual morality of children and adolescents’.

Much the same general ground had been covered 10 years earlier in a similar inquiry hatched by the Wanganui Education Board, and indeed the Hutt Valley had already been the subject of a couple of smaller surveys looking at juvenile ‘immorality’ in 1951 and 1953. But the changing cultural times meant the last of these inquiries attracted greater funding and commanded far more national attention; certainly, it was constituted with greater urgency on the ultimate watch of Prime Minister Sid Holland, whose government appointed the seven-member committee on July 23, 1954. Holland, who believed that delinquency had become a grave national problem requiring immediate investigation, said he wanted action.

The group got to work just four days later. In all, evidence was heard from 145 witnesses and 120 written submissions were received. The subsequent 69-page report, served up with rich sauces of indignation and very high in conservative political cholesterol, offered 27 conclusions and around 20 recommendations. So important was the offering deemed to be that copies of the 185-gram document were delivered to each of New Zealand’s 300,000 families. Posties grumbled about the physical weight. The country groaned under the document’s moral weight, a load made all the heavier by the daily stream of reports and pronouncements about juvenile delinquency that appeared during the hearings.

Some of what Mazengarb had to say wasn’t so objectionable. His report despaired over the growth of materialism, the loss of moral absolutes, and what he saw as a faddish devotion to indulging children in notions of uninhibited self-expression. He was hardly the first person to suggest that this was a state of affairs that had ironically been made possible by the nation’s growing economic bounty. The report pointed out that suburbs in places such as the Hutt Valley, which had been centrally planned and quickly settled, tended to lack anything of a community spirit (associations, church groups, sports clubs, parks) and this had been exacerbated by the exclusion of wealthy people from the socialist paradise. These were the kinds of citizens who might be benevolently inclined to help their neighbourhoods evolve. Young people in such places, he argued, were always going to be a bit more aimless than their counterparts in more organically established townships.

But the Mazengarb Report was never intended as a sociological study. Yes, it acknowledged, getting to the main subject at hand, juvenile delinquency was a worldwide problem, and probably always had been. Yet what was ‘entirely new’ in New Zealand was a young generation collectively convinced that ‘they are not doing anything wrong’. So what was to be done?

Here the committee joined some interesting dots. Among the trends it noted was that, during this recent period of moral decline, the number of children in residential state care had been falling. Were these two facts related? Mazengarb seemed to think so. Among his recommendations: a radical strengthening of child welfare work and the powers of the children’s court, especially in respect of finding new ways to protect other children from the nefarious influence of young delinquents.

This would be significant, because while the report may not have achieved its immediate political goal of highlighting public morals as a possible election issue, it did, as popular historian Redmer Yska notes, cast the shadow of juvenile delinquency over the remaining portion of the decade. Despite having only played a minor role in the morals hearings, the Child Welfare Division thereby found its hand unexpectedly strengthened like never before, and Lower Hutt was the obvious geographical candidate to open a significant new chapter in its residential work.

What could possibly go wrong?

A PLACE CALLED HOME

Maurice John Howe. Maurie. Everybody called him Maurie; it was in fact a sign of great ignorance to call him Maurice, though he was not informal by nature, he did not exude a familiar air and he did not grant intimacy easily, if at all. Always the boss, always in charge. For a time he was known as the ‘manager’ of Epuni, but Maurie preferred principal, for that is what he was, a point he was only too happy to make in his finger-wagging memos reminding the overlords at the local Child Welfare Office who was in educational control. Although Maurie, a note-perfect civil servant, would never actually change his occupational description on the Electoral Roll until after the title became official.

As far as Maurie was concerned, Epuni was an educational service to the wider community first and a correctional facility last. Nevertheless, his initial success in founding Epuni on both fronts was impressive. More than that, though, for the thousands of boys and hundreds of staff who would experience life on his watch, Maurie Howe was Epuni, not only in the sense of how the institution was practically run and the policies it enforced but also in the very spirit of 441 Riverside Drive.

For him, Epuni was not only a place of work but also a living philosophy, church, club, sport, extended family; it was the place where he and his wife Margaret raised their two kids, a son and daughter, and where the couple had some of their profoundest personal challenges. Whatever good things Epuni achieved over the quarter-century he ran the show were thanks to his tireless efforts; whatever the problems, and there would be many, they never fatally undermined his claim to being a well-motivated, honourable public servant working as best he knew how to make the country a better place.

Comes the man, comes the time. It was the year of the microchip, the birth-control pill and the space race, the year Pop art, indie films and ‘sick comics’ arose. Yet Wellington itself seemed a pretty quiet sort of place at the start of 1959. Among the major items from the city’s afternoon newspaper: a prediction from one Admiral J. Dufek, the commanding officer of Operation Deep Freeze, that population pressures in the northern hemisphere would soon force millions to ‘spill over from the equator’ into countries such as New Zealand, possibly accompanied by creatures borne on UFOs. ‘I don’t think we can discount flying saucers,’ the old admiral averred.

Another report served local notice that the Post Office would shortly be testing equipment that automatically answered incoming telephone calls and recorded messages. ‘Once the recording mechanism starts,’ the paper’s technology correspondent marvelled, ‘the machine continues to record until there is a silence lasting for at least eight seconds. If the caller does not speak during this period, it shuts down with a closing announcement to that effect. The subscriber can play back messages left for him by turning a knob and he can erase the tape in a similar way.’

This was not to say that the perennial delinquency theme had entirely dropped from sight. In the United States, a former ward of a boys’ correctional facility in upstate New York named Floyd Patterson was commanding media time with his ineluctable march to becoming the first boxer ever to regain the world title. Patterson, a likeable young man with a hard-scrabble past, seemed to suggest the potential his chosen sport had for turning around troubled lives. Meditating on Patterson’s career trend (‘boxing is a sport that has allowed the coloured man to rise above his day-to-day living conditions’), one local sports writer wondered whether boxing could yet become instrumental in the official effort to combat the youth crime his colleagues were pulling out the stops to report on.

Certainly, one can’t help but be impressed by the volume of news pages turned over to the problem: young men fined for using obscene language, shoplifters apparently without number, the ‘wanton’ case of a teenager who pleaded guilty to stealing a copy of a magazine, and children everywhere making pests of themselves by ringing doorbells and vanishing before the owner of the house appeared. Here again, though, the official data told a different story than the newspapers. The year recorded just 83 court appearances by children and young people per 10,000 population, or 3904 appearances overall. Forty years on, by comparison, the number of prosecuted cases involving young people, excluding minor traffic offences, stood at 6044; the prosecution rate per 10,000 population was 313, according to Ministry of Justice figures.

But perception was reality. The government needed to act. Tucked away in the NZ Gazette of March 19, 1959 was part of its response, a small notice announcing that, pursuant to Section 7 of the Child Welfare Act 1925, the Minister of Education was duly notifying the country that the premises located at 441 Riverside Drive North, Lower Hutt, had been established as an institution within the meaning of that Act and would henceforth be known as the Boys’ Home, Lower Hutt. The institution had in fact been operating for nearly two months by this point.

What to call the new residence had been a matter of debate at the Hutt Valley district office of the Child Welfare Division. ‘Beck House’ had been suggested — and rejected — in honour of the old Scottish visionary remembered for helping frame the 1925 child welfare legislation. (That name would eventually go to a small residence near Napier that the department purchased 12 years later.) Somebody put forward an apparently serious proposal for the Lower Hutt operation to be known as the Anderson Shelters, named for the division’s portentous, dark-suited national director and future superintendent. But not even the lure of a positive mark in the successful officer’s personal file yielded a better suggestion. Soon enough people started referring to the new facility as Epuni, and from 1969 this would be its official name, too.

Epuni brought to five the number of short-term training centres for boys, the smallest being in Dunedin and accommodating 16 boys; the largest, in Auckland, housing 42 inmates. It was modelled after another existing residence in Hamilton. None of these residences, the national superintendent, Charlie Peek, promised, would provide for ‘the more seriously disturbed or delinquent children and adolescents who require long-term training’.

That would continue to be the province of a couple of national centres, as they were known, the major one being the Boys’ Training Centre at Weraroa, later known as Kohitere, located a few kilometres southwest of Levin and covering 5 hectares of property along with a 110-hectare farm that was also operated by the department. Kohitere accommodated up to 36 boys, and its emphasis, as the 1958 Field Officers’ Manual put it, was to encourage positive methods of self-discipline and control, and for inmates to organise much of their own time, even their meals, as part of an overriding philosophy to allow each individual ‘to work out his own salvation’. At least that’s how it remained until one Christmas Eve when some of the wards ordered in liquor, the effects of which provoked a brawl inside what had until that point been described as the department’s most modern institution.

Things were slightly more peaceful 8 kilometres down the road from Kohitere, at Hokio Beach School, a smaller unit housing up to 34 younger boys in just the one dormitory (with extras sometimes put in the dining room) for anything up to two years. Even by the elastic standards of the time Hokio was something of an embarrassment for the department. It was later acknowledged that the institution had been all but ‘uninhabitable’ since opening in 1941; its buildings, which had been thrown up in an ad hoc manner over the years, set amid rolling sandhills and rough scrub, were dilapidated and the wind-swept exterior looked as if it hadn’t seen a lick of paint in the decades since it began life in the 1920s as a retreat for staff at the Weraroa Training Farm, back in the days when staff used to bring the occasional boy down for a weekend. Theirs was a busy workload. At this point the Child Welfare Division, which oversaw these boys’ residences, operated 22 district offices staffed by just 181 officers and a similar number of clerical workers to process admissions.

Hinting at what was to come, Peek wrote of the ‘disturbingly high’ delinquency rates, especially among Maori boys, sugesting as he did that Epuni might yet play some part in arresting a problem he believed had been spiralling since he assumed his position in 1948. By the definition of the day, which had a Maori person as one of ‘half Maori blood’, the country had just 1660 Maori boys who had attained the age of 16 in the previous year; of these, 319 boys — 19 per cent of the total — had made at least one court appearance for a ‘serious offence’ (the term was never quite defined) during their lives.

Maori boys living in rural and small-town areas did no better than their urban counterparts, Peek noted, adding that among delinquent Maori youth there had been ‘a much higher incidence of unsatisfactory living conditions, evidenced by overcrowding and broken and disturbed homes than among non-Maoris’. And while lack of good schooling did not tend to characterise young Pakeha delinquents, he wrote, the same couldn’t be said of the Maori youngsters; unlike their non-Maori counterparts, ‘educational retardation’ was all too common among the Maori boys now coming before the courts.

‘Such facts,’ the superintendent concluded in his annual report for the year, ‘are a challenge to all who deal with Maori boys … to try to understand the special strains and temptations to which many of them are subjected, and to give them the greatest possible measure of personal help.’

In light of these perceptions, and the Maori character that Epuni and its four sister institutions would quickly acquire, one might naturally suppose a high degree of outside Maori involvement from the start. According to one popular version of the official record, the new institution long enjoyed strong links with local Maoridom. As this narrative has it, Epuni from the start benefited from the input of respected Maori figures and the ongoing presence of supporters drawn from the local Waiwhetu Marae. The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography celebrates the late Ralph Love, a Te Ati Awa leader and a prominent public servant of the time, as one of a number who ‘helped establish’ the institution.

Alas, as somebody once said, myth is what we believe naturally but history is what we must painfully learn and struggle to remember. And the tease between the two is as evident in this corner of the early Epuni narrative as the wider context in which it was established.

A search of the official documents and media of the time, for instance, fails to unearth any specifics on Love’s pivotal role at Epuni. Pressed for further information, the author of the Dictionary piece, Catherine Love, who is also the subject’s daughter, directed me to historian Dr Claudia Orange. Contacted in turn, however, an assistant to Dr Orange reported that she, as well, had no material or recollections on the matter, suggesting instead that the best person to approach would be yet another academic, Sir Ralph Love, a professor of business studies at Victoria University and the namesake son of the late figure.

Here, too, no information — or response — was forthcoming. Finally, a telephone conversation with Kara Puketapu, the veteran Maori leader in charge of the Waiwhetu Marae, drew a similar blank in regard to any possible tribal involvement. This absence is also reflected in the institution’s own logbooks, which over many years appear to contain few references to visiting Maori groups other than the occasional performing cultural party.

All in all, one would think, this seems a particularly significant cultural omission, all the more so in light of the only other interesting press clipping from the media files of 1959: the news that as of late March bulldozers and tractors had finally put paid to the native setting of Maungapohatu, the last remaining stronghold of the Tuhoe people and, effectively, the old Maori nation, from which — as we shall see — a sizeable chunk of Epuni’s cohort would be drawn.

EPUNI OPENED FOR BUSINESS LATE IN THE SUMMER OF 1959, which also happened to be — and every young ward worth his salt knew this — the same year young Cassius Clay, the child prodigy turned early pro, snared his first national Golden Gloves championship while still at high school in Kentucky, a milestone achievement that helped set the stage for what was soon to become the sport’s last golden era. As far as the Department of Education was concerned, Maurie Howe seemed like a champion in the making, too — a relatively youngish administrator who would help guide what was already shaping up to be something of a busy new era on the institutional front — and all the stops were pulled out to recruit him as Epuni’s chief executive.

Maurie never intended to end up in the Hutt Valley. The native-born Timaruvian had first worked as a physical therapist in the same region for the Department of Internal Affairs, and he might have remained in that role had an incoming National government not served notice that his corner of the department was under threat. Sensing the writing was on the wall, Howe took a residential social worker’s position in one of the few institutions then operating, in Auckland, and, enjoying the challenge of the work, successfully applied in 1958 for a similar position in Hamilton.

The division’s superintendent had another idea. Charlie Peek called to ask if Howe would consider transferring the Hamilton placement to a planned youth facility in Lower Hutt, which was to replace and significantly expand the guardianship of wards who until that point had been looked after in an ageing house in Austin Street, Wellington. Peek wanted the position filled right away. The new buildings had already been vandalised, he pointed out, and he didn’t want a repeat performance ahead of the formal ceremony inaugurating the new residence that he fervently believed would mark a new era in residential children’s care.

Howe felt flattered but dubious. Wasn’t the Hutt among the country’s most monotonous urban zones? Hadn’t the region received an atrocious press at the time of the Mazengarb Report? On reflection, though, he figured that any town was what you made of it. As for delinquency, well, that was something that happened anywhere, surely, and besides, wasn’t squelching delinquency the reason for his work? So that settled it. He lit out for Wellington.

On the morning of Thursday, January 29, 1959, the boys at Austin Street began packing and loading furniture on the watch of their new guardian for the move out of the capital. The journey was complete by five o’clock that afternoon. Fifteen kids were now resident in the new institution, built to accommodate 22 boys. It had been ‘quite a scramble’ completing the move, the inaugural entry scribbled in the new institution’s logbook noted: ‘Boys excited but settled reasonably well. Supper and lights out at 9.30 pm.’ More of the same followed the next day. Elsewhere in the records, kids are referred to by their first names, the talk is of movie outings, trips to the local baths and softball games, a sweet and light record that dovetails nicely with the recollections of others of the institution’s initially relaxed environment.

‘My management style was mostly the necessities,’ Howe later recalled. ‘I wanted to provide for the kids who came into Epuni, have them better dressed or at least to have footwear, and to look better for being with us. It was partly based in my schooldays, when the poor little beggars there used to have bare feet or sandals most of the time, particularly in winter. They were all so very poorly looked after. And that sort of clouded my position at Epuni, made me want to do things differently. My kids would be well dressed. My kids would be well looked after.’

Howe’s emphasis on ‘the necessities’, obliquely reflecting the economic collapse of the 1930s, is telling, because it’s easy to forget that we are now much further removed in time from the world that shaped him. Howe was raised amid the realities of the Great Depression. The Depression had been unforgiving, it caused many a young life to totter; it wiped out his father’s business, too. Maurie’s old man used to paint vehicles, spring carts they called them, a fancy name for horsecarts, which he would delicately decorate along the shafts. Afterwards he did whatever he could to scratch and save. One of Maurie’s brothers went into accountancy; the other became a chemist. Maurie wanted something with a degree of security — but also the opportunity to offer security to others.

Meanwhile the new operation, which was designed and built to similar specifications as the facility in Hamilton, was taking shape. Among the new principal’s first duties was convincing the neighbours that the project posed no threat to life, limb or, especially, local property values. This was all the more pressing since the plan was to purchase more adjacent land to build staff housing and extend the capacity, first to 28 and ultimately to 42, along with a new gym. The neighbours weren’t an easy sell. Some of them thought Howe was a liberal do-gooder.

This wasn’t entirely incorrect. He was liberal by the standards of the time, or at the very least a man of many parts, and many of the staff he worked with in the early years saw themselves in a similar light. ‘You have to keep in mind that, yes, the Child Welfare Division and some of its employees, by today’s standards, might be seen as awfully conservative, schoolmarmish or whatever, but in the day they were terribly progressive, or that’s how we saw ourselves,’ one of his early colleagues recalled.

For proof of how relatively liberal the residential crew in Wellington was, one only needed to consider how wards were attended to at a similar ‘receiving home’ in nearby Palmerston North, where the regional office kept an imposingly large leather-bound book in which the various punishments meted out to kids in care were duly recorded: John Doe; date; such-and-such an offence; punishment: six strokes on bare breech or, alternatively, ‘covered rearquarters’.

Among those charged with administering the corporal punishment, at least until he moved to Auckland in the mid-1950s, was H. Lucas Hunt, JP, as he invariably introduced himself. The father of future Labour Party MP Jonathan Hunt, Hunt Snr was a portly man with a stentorian voice who took his work seriously. He used a pushbike to get around town — a cane clipped on the crossbar — and dispensed his corporal duties with a swinging arm likened by one person who knew him to a roast of lamb. This was certainly not the kind of Dickensian style Howe wanted to see introduced at the new institution.

Maurie arranged a number of neighbourhood meetings in the hope of putting paid to the idea that, as he later expressed it, ‘even in this enlightened age, residents in the immediate vicinity consider the Home to be something between a penal institution and an industrial school’. Fiddlesticks, he argued, appealing as eloquently as he could to any residual local sense of noblesse oblige. This was to be an open institution, he told them, a progressively minded venture dedicated to the care and nurturing of young lives damaged largely through no fault of their own, and even those who had committed offences were hardly in the big league, usually nothing more spectacular than shying some rocks through a window, shoplifting or truancy, in one case even converting a horse. Bad luck in getting caught, some might have said — and some still do.

Decades later in Britain, a distinguished senior doctor caused a mild controversy after he admitted to the Guardian newspaper that he burgled his school twice at the age of 16, commenting that it did not stop him having a successful medical career — because he was never incarcerated for the offences. The consultant paediatrician, who went on to become a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, made the confession in light of a familiar controversy in which a youngster from an economically disadvantaged background was denied a place at medical school simply because he admitted committing a burglary as a boy. The doctor said he would not be surprised if others in the medical profession had committed similar crimes — it was simply a matter of good luck in having not gone down the reformatory track, he suggested.

Yet it’s easy to see why Epuni’s construction in the late 1950s might have been viewed with unease in a neighbourhood that had expended considerable effort over the decades to keep at bay the socialist spectre that had enveloped much of the Hutt Valley. Howe felt no small satisfaction when many of those same individuals agreed to give him the benefit of their very large doubt. But he had also been concerned that ignorance of the institution’s work would be detrimental to the happiness of the kids he hoped to enrol in one or other of the local schools.

The older boys, too, he wanted to see working at local businesses. So he put up as convincing a case as he could muster (his departmental supervisor later lauded it as a ‘very fine piece of public relations work’) and the locals pronounced themselves moved. Indeed, one of the neighbours who began as a fierce critic of the new venture ended up climbing over his back fence adjoining the grounds and joining in the sporting activities with Howe and his boys.

To Gary Hermansson, a young residential social worker at the time, Howe came across as a ‘good fellow, somewhat severe at times and authoritative, you know, perhaps a bit over-strong on the kids’. The new manager was ‘slightly aloof, but he had his heart in the right place’. Another of the short-term placements of the time was a young trainee social worker named Aussie Malcolm, who in late 1964 had a brief stint as an acting housemaster at Riverside Drive shortly before heading north to become a welfare officer in Palmerston North. Both positions offered the future government minister a vantage point from which to observe the Howe style.

‘Maurie was a product of the YMCA culture, very straight down the line and conservative in his personal life,’ Malcolm said. ‘He saw things in very simple terms, without excess, and he lived by the schedule: shoes are to be cleaned, beds are to be made, and so forth. He must have been passionate, but I don’t remember him showing that passion in any other way than being there day after day after day. He didn’t get angry with any kid. He didn’t get soppy with any kid. He didn’t show any emotion to any kid. He just … was.’

Years later, as a Cabinet minister in the National government of the early 1980s, Malcolm had an unusual encounter with his former boss. At this point he had a foster son ‘who was not without his problems’. Eventually, the Department of Social Welfare decided that the boy should be sent to Epuni Boys’ Home. Malcolm, who was opposed to the idea, said he would accompany the child to Epuni rather than having his ward carted off by a social worker. The day before the scheduled drop-off, however, then Social Welfare minister George Gair became ill, and Malcolm unexpectedly found himself appointed in his colleague’s stead. When Malcolm and the boy arrived at Epuni, Howe was on duty and greeted the pair. It was a historic meeting of sorts, for there on the doorstep in the one person, accompanied by a tearful 12-year-old, was an ex-colleague, a reluctant parent and the Minister of Social Welfare. And how did Howe respond? ‘He was just Maurie,’ Malcolm recalled. ‘That was always the thing.’

For all the Zen stillness, though, Howe believed in discipline, increasingly so as the years passed. Observers saw it in the little things. ‘Things like rugby in the gym,’ Malcolm said. ‘I mean, these were healthy boys playing full-on tackle rugby on a hard floor with hard walls. Boy, did those guys go for it. But, you know, all I had to do was raise my hand in the air and there would be instant silence. That always impressed the heck out of me. And that was to do with the style of Maurie Howe and the staff. They’d somehow inculcated this tradition, if you like, that when the supervisor or the housemaster’s hand went up, you stopped and you were quiet.’

And it was there to be seen in the bigger things, too. Despite the relatively trifling offences that many of the designated youth offenders in care may have been sent down for — only about one-third of the inmates had been committed to state care because of offences against the law, usually in the order of petty offences against property, truancy or, occasionally in the case of older inmates, carnal knowledge — Howe knew how to bring a reprimanding hand to bear.

A random search through some of the early records throws up the typical case of 11-year-old Donald, who was committed to the institution early in 1962 after being caught shoplifting a pack of cigarettes. Arriving at the institution that March, he was promptly locked in what was a precursor to the future ‘secure’ block, a makeshift little room separated from the rest with a permanently locked window and a bed that was taken out during the daytime, while he was sent to work in the garden.

For reasons that are not explained, he was neither enrolled at a local school nor allowed to socialise with the other inmates. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, he soon attempted to escape — three times over an eight-day period at one point — which only seemed to stiffen the institution’s resolve to stick to its original course of confinement, which well pleased his adult supervisors. ‘Epuni Boys’ Home,’ Howe wrote, ‘has given [Donald] a better appreciation of what could be expected following any future misbehaviour.’ Presumably it did, for readers emerge none the wiser on the boy’s ultimate fate.

Howe wanted to manage the operation in as relatively easygoing a fashion as possible. This he achieved for some considerable time. The kids went to their local schools and jobs, returning of their own accord in the afternoons and settling back in for the evening routine. Problems of note were few and far between. Newcomers were processed in a similarly easygoing style. In an arrangement that would have been unimaginable in the following decades, boys often arrived under their own steam. Such was the case with an unescorted 15-year-old ward sent down from Wairoa, who simply hired a taxi for the final 30-kilometre leg of his journey from Wellington railway station to Epuni. Alighting at the door, the boy realised he had no money; Maurie stumped up the fare.

Relatively few serious problems showed up in the early years, the worst to be found in the existing records being a long complaint about the tendency of some parents to show up unannounced and demand to take their offspring on an impromptu outing. One Christmas a chapter of boy scouts swung by to present their counterparts at Epuni with £20 they had raised doing odd jobs for the less fortunate. The religious people came by, too, with their songsheets and biblical tracts and whatnot.

For its part the institution appreciated the outside attention — keeping the operation open to public scrutiny was an important principle — sometimes even soliciting local reporters to come and see the experiment unfolding within the new buildings. A profile published in the Evening Post captured the project in suitably rosy colours, gushing:

Opposite the Waiwhetu Stream, with its well-tended grassy banks, the Epuni Boys’ Home is set in spacious grounds, the lawns of which are cut by the boys. The boys also help with the care of the flower and vegetable gardens, in which they take pride. All types of work tend to show traits of character which are valuable for assessment purposes.

The article made further revelations: among the spare-time activities most enjoyed by the lads, ‘clay modelling, carpentry, art, aeroplane models and stamp-collecting’ enjoyed pride of recreational place, occupying many during the hours in which they were not forging ahead in the one-teacher school, in which some were even performing remarkably well on account of not being ‘in competition with more clever children’.

Even the ‘highly polished corridors that are maintained by the boys’ warranted favourable mention, with writer Rita Thomas perhaps being unaware that employing children as young as seven to work with industrial-sized floor polishers contravened international labour laws. Nevertheless, Thomas warmed to her theme, praising the institution’s initiative in having established a dedicated secure unit, used only, according to the reporter, in cases

where boys are sent by the court following serious offences, to be held for further court appearances, or when boys’  behaviour and attitudes deteriorate so badly that security is needed to protect themselves … The staff attempt to use this block in a therapeutic way and special attendants are employed to look after the area.

The piece concluded on a hopeful note. While many of the inmates ‘felt a sense of shame’ at their predicament, some of them yet ‘seemed to have tremendous initiative and drive and if channelled into voluntary community work it would probably help them while helping others’.

JONATHAN FOOTE, A BOY FROM NAENAE WHO would be placed in the centre four times between 1968 and 1974, was the type of kid Thomas probably had in mind when she filed her piece. A boy of 10 when he first arrived, he was, by his own recollection, as innocent as a rabbit. Not that Jonathan’s life experience up to that point had been a hop in the park. One of the youngest of 11 kids, he had little abiding memory of being part of a regular family. His father, Ernie, a returned serviceman, was an alcoholic, sluicing his nights away at the Taita pub; his mother eventually took off with someone else. That’s when the welfare people took charge.

If only the war hadn’t happened things might have been different for Ernie, whose real battlefield ought to have been inside the squared circle. Boxing ran in the Foote family, after all, most notably in the case of Ernie’s brother Harold, a two-time national champion in the featherweight division and by all accounts a fleet-footed terror in the ring with a formidable long left delivered from a crouching position straight out of the extended shoulder. Ernie might not have been quite in his brother’s league but he boxed ‘splendidly’ when the spirit moved, as one reporter from the Evening Post put it in 1938. Later, he tried to instil some of the same enthusiasm in his boys, even setting up a makeshift ring in the backyard of the Naenae family home and putting his offspring through the fistic paces.

The seed found fertile ground. Chuckling, Jonathan recalled his years at elementary school in Naenae, where a schoolyard game involved imitating the great heavyweight boxing bouts of the era, in particular the first of the Ali-Frazier encounters, in 1971, an event so drenched in hype that even pre-bout prayers were florid beyond belief. ‘God, let me survive this night!’ Frazier, down on bended knees in his dressing room, loudly beseeched the heavens. ‘God, let me protect my family! God grant me strength. And God … allow me to kick the shit out of this motherfucker.’

And verily, the Lord attended unto Frazier’s supplication. ‘Nothing beat that fight,’ Jonathan believes. ‘I mean, there you had Ali coming back, trying to win the fight. And there’s Frazier, this huge gorilla, the title-holder. Even long after the fight, we used to re-enact it all in the playground, you know, imitating the fifteenth round where Ali goes down, hits the canvas and gets back up again. It was that big in our psyche.’

As the son went through the imaginary paces, the father battled his own mental demons; he was running low on money and drinking away what little spare cash he had. Reflecting on the old man many years afterwards, Jonathan finally came to see that he probably was experiencing some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder related to his military service in the Solomon Islands. At the same time, he was clinging to the hope that boxing could yet provide the kind of lifestyle for his young family that working as a painter, labourer and freezing worker hadn’t.

‘Actually, he did a whole lot of other things for work as well early on — none of them for very long,’ Jonathan said with a boyish grin. ‘But my father was someone who always had a fighting spirit. You know, not letting anyone beat him, that’s for sure.’ But life beat him, right? ‘Unfortunately, yeah, with the war, alcoholism, psychological problems and all sorts of things going on, it was hard — he couldn’t keep his children anyway.’ Plainly Jonathan still retains affection for the old man, a photograph of whom, in a bare-knuckled boxing pose, enjoys pride of place in the hallway of the Manawatu home where he invited a visitor to share his reveries.

‘I remember how he used to come to visit me during my time there,’ he said, leaning back in his chair as he recounted the old days with undisguised enthusiasm. ‘He never had a driver’s licence so he used to bike down to the home, in various degrees of intoxication. And they’d go, in a familiar voice, “Mr Foote is here!” and in he’d come, unshaven and worse for wear, carrying confectionery and comics and things. It was nice of him. I mean, to bike down in that stage of intoxication, to come and visit me for two hours and then go all the way back home again, that was something. Don’t you think? I mean, some kids didn’t get any visits at all.’

Some of the people who did arrive — ‘all sorts of siblings, bogus relatives, furtive girlfriends, old Uncle Tom Cobblers and all’, as one memo testily characterised them — were more problematic. On one occasion a couple of flabbergasted staff members chanced on a local teenager attempting to break in to Epuni; it was for the experience, the boy explained as he was led away — presumably with some sense of gratitude — to spend a night in the cellblock.

Another memorable occasion involved a ‘special technical tour’ of the residence arranged for 19 tourists from the Japanese city of Nagoya. They descended on Riverside Drive on the morning of Monday, September 14, 1970, with the Japanese wife of a local New Zealander in tow as the group’s spokeswoman and interpreter. She barely got to do any work. Several party members detached themselves from the conducted tour and wandered back to their waiting transport; most of the others showed little or no interest in the brave experiment they had been invited to behold. Eventually the Japanese guests shuffled off, leaving the travel agency that had arranged the ill-starred tour to fire off a letter apologising profusely for the ‘peculiar’ behaviour of its charges.

As far as visitors dropping by the institution went, however, it was neither his old man nor any other occasional oddball that Jonathan remembered most clearly — or even in later years a slightly earnest young television presenter from the nearby Avalon studios named Bob Parker, who had an obvious passion for inspiring youngsters. Rather, it was a surprising musical moment in the week leading up to Christmas in 1968.

These were the formative days of 2ZM, a local AM radio station that was looking to distinguish itself from the middle-of-the-road format of its precursor station, 2YD. Stewart Macpherson, recently returned from Britain and working as a morning jock, had been charged with coming up with ideas on how this might best be achieved. A newsworthy event was especially needed during the festive season, when the rival ZB network made a big deal out of associating itself with some establishment charity. ‘Because we were attracting young people,’ Macpherson explained, ‘we had determined that we would do a live breakfast session with live musical elements to it put on by someone who could perform.’

The challenge was to match the right act with the right venue in such a way as not to drag the event down to the level of cheap parody that is often typical of such charity initiatives. Eventually he hit on the idea of a young up-and-coming band from the Hutt Valley turning in a surprise performance at Epuni. The group he approached quickly agreed to the gig. A short while later, along with a technician, they loaded up an old Cortina van, headed for Lower Hutt and, by the dawn’s early light, presented themselves to Maurice Howe.

The boys had no idea how their morning routine was to be disrupted. The morning had passed typically enough up until this point. The usual tasks and lineups, the filing in for breakfast — scrambled eggs all hot and milky — had all been attended to in the usual monastic silence. Halfway through the meal, however, the boys were told to face the concertina sliding doors that separated the dining room from the recreation lounge. Worried looks were exchanged. What could this mean?

Soon enough they had their answer. The doors clattered opened to reveal the host of Macphersonland seated behind a mixing desk next to a group of youngish performers decked out in frilly shirts and poised with their instruments. As the drummer counted four, the band swung into a sweet and anxious version of ‘Reach Out I’ll Be There’, the Motown track popularised a couple of years earlier by the Four Tops. The worried looks dissolved into unalloyed pleasure. You could feel the small joy sweeping the room. Awriiight! The band took a deserved bow. Thus began the loveliest of breakfast meetings with the soon-to-be-famous The Fourmyula.

‘I don’t think the boys believed what they were seeing,’ Macpherson reflected 40 years later, ‘but it was at least as much a buzz for us too. I mean, it was crude, in the nicest sense, but it worked. And we were doing something different, something special, something with a bit of risk involved.’ In the end the band performed three 20-minute sets. A snapshot from the emotion-filled performance shows the kids looking on in obvious rapture, riding the music for everything it was worth.

‘I guess it was unusual for everyone,’ added band-leader Wayne Mason, reflecting on one of the more unusual performing turns his group took before parlaying its natural youth and verve shortly afterwards into the plangent psychedelic melodies of the evergreen hit ‘Nature’. Most dramatic of all was the set’s showstopper, the climax to a climax, an unapologetically raucous rendition of ‘Born to be Wild’ delivered without apparent irony and eagerly lapped up by a pipsqueak crowd now shucking and jiving to the era’s on-the-road anthem.

The Fourmyula were of course bound for greater things; some decades later, for one, ‘Nature’ would be selected as the ‘best’ New Zealand pop tune of all time, and scarcely a month now passes without some kind of tribute to the group’s pioneering work. Yet it’s probably safe to say no performance ever given by the group aroused quite such a heroic response as its Christmas 1968 appearance at 441 Riverside Drive. Nobody appreciated it more than Jonathan Foote, a runny-nosed 10-year-old at the time, who many decades later has a framed photograph of the band in pride of place on the wall of his study in Palmerston North. ‘We were in heaven,’ he said.

Or something close to it. Studying other photographs from the period, as much as the old newspaper clippings, one is struck by the other-worldliness of the era. How can one not be impressed? Here we see what at the time passed for very troubled boys from half the country impeccably decked out in grey shirts and shorts, crisply ironed (possibly even starched), a uniform worthy of an English comprehensive school. Every kid appears well groomed, hair cut short back and sides. No exceptions. Not a piercing or a tattoo in sight.

Away from the premises, at the Christmas camp held each year in the bush out near Paraparaumu, a similar picture emerges. The security is non-existent; indeed, as Aussie Malcolm noted approvingly, the conditions are probably in breach of every imaginable government requirement, but again, the boys are visibly relaxed, friendly, almost affectionate to each other … and happy.

‘What strikes me is that the change, in the course of one generation, has been immense,’ Malcolm reflected in a late-night email drawing comparisons between the delinquents of that earlier time and the early 2010s. ‘So immense that it deserves terms like “faultline” or “sea change” or “cataclysmic”. Such terms, and the extent of change that lies behind them implies that, whatever the change was, it was not just gradual.

‘It was not creeping. Some thing, or some small combination of things, out of all that has happened socially in the last 50 years, has turned young New Zealand males from friendly, compliant, vulnerable little chaps who sometimes made mistakes, but loved and responded to love, into angry, violent, unattractive, self-destructive deviants that are extraordinarily hard to rescue.’

Whatever the ultimate answer to that question, Epuni Boys’ Home was positioning itself to reflect the changing times.

JERUSALEM

The early 1960s were productive years for Epuni Boys’ Home; it was like a rocket taking off, nothing but official praise, interesting new staff members, good times. But with success came new challenges. Among the few persistent problems were schooling and teachers. Not surprisingly for an operation administered by the Department of Education, Epuni’s mission had long been freighted with euphoric talk about creating new academic opportunities for the disadvantaged. But that was easier said than done.

At the start Epuni made do with enrolling half the wards at any one time with one of the local schools, either the nearby primary school on Waiwhetu Road, one or other of three intermediates, or Naenae and Taita colleges. Having a variety of institutions to draw on was the key. It meant there wouldn’t be a crew of Epuni wards in just the one place, an arrangement that Maurie saw had the potential to spook the regular pupils and lend itself to all kinds of mischief-making on the part of the wards. So that was the original plan, and for a time it worked.

At Taita College the principal used to draw the boys aside on their first day and tell them in so many words: ‘You and I are the only two at this school who know what you’ve been up to before you came here. Now, if you keep your mouths closed as far as that’s concerned you’ll go through school and nobody will know the difference.’ Such gestures were appreciated. Yet in practice many of the kids would find that even with the most determination in the world they simply couldn’t keep up with the regular pupils. Soon they would drift, ineluctably, towards the lower end of the spectrum.

Reading ability probably rated as the biggest factor. Rare was the ward whose literacy was not retarded by anything up to seven years. Another issue was what later came to be known as ‘churn’, kids being transferred, sometimes quite abruptly, from one institution to another, an arrangement that would obviously have disastrous consequences for a boy’s education. Making any headway in a conventional class was therefore a long shot at best.

Perhaps remedial instruction might have helped at Epuni, but really, where was the perpetually cash-strapped institution going to find the money? Yes, the boys could always be enrolled in a ‘special’ class at one or other of the schools. But that would mean others labelling them as slow learners, which was guaranteed to exacerbate problems. Another nettlesome issue was the growing number of school-age boys who remained in the institution for several weeks, sometimes months, without receiving instruction at any local school. As the rationale had it, the ‘home boys’ needed additional time to settle down before receiving any schooling, but this was hokum and everyone knew it. More to the point, it also left Epuni Boys’ Home in the position of breaking the laws its own parent, the Department of Education, existed to uphold.

‘I felt that introducing a school into the Home was the best thing we could have done,’ Howe explained many years later. ‘It sort of removed that attitude that physically a boy might have to prove that he was a big tough or whatever. It meant he could settle down and get on with it without any pressure.’ That was at the heart of it. And Howe’s reasonable argument convinced the department.

As Brian Fitzgerald, a supervising child welfare officer, admitted in a memo, the situation of a boy being resident in the institution for many months without receiving schooling was unconscionable in light of the department’s role in zealously prosecuting parents for allowing the same situation at home. ‘This seems to me to be a contradiction in terms and an injustice to those parents concerned,’ he admitted. So the educational die was cast. The three-teacher unit Fitzgerald agreed to establish would eventually cater for up to 30 inmates, with the yearly class-size total sometimes exceeding 150 pupils, virtually all of them academic under-achievers at best and usually complete dropouts. But founding the new unit presented terminological challenges. Strictly speaking, initially at least, what it would offer was ‘activities and assessment’ rather than education in the legal sense. Nor, oddly, were the instructional spaces to be referred to as classrooms, despite the intention that they be occupied on a daily basis for the purposes of learning.

This regrettable situation was not unique to Epuni. With the exception of the Otekaike Special School, in North Otago — a residential institution for ‘feeble-minded’ boys that opened in 1908 and remained under the supervision of the Department of Education even after Social Welfare assumed control of the other residences in 1972 — every recognised school associated with a youth correctional facility technically operated under the control of a district or school board and was administratively separate from the management of the institution; the ‘headmaster’ of the school therefore did not report to the ‘principal’ of the institution.

(In the case of Otekaike, the principal, who was employed by the Child Welfare Division of the Department of Education, was simply in charge of everything and he reported directly and internally to whichever departmental officer had the task of approving recommendations from outside organisations. This line of authority allowed the school to have its own sewerage system, gym, indoor pool, music rooms, movie theatre, central heating, and an old house in which the principal had his office retrofitted at some considerable cost. This he achieved by the simple expedient of firing off a memo to the Department of Education every time it issued new guidelines and demanding that the department maintain its standards in respect of one of its more troubled institutions.)

For all these bureaucratic distinctions, the intention was always to run the Epuni Boys’ Home school along similar lines to institutions of elementary learning on the outside. Even in the best of circumstances this would be no easy matter. Clearly the flexibility and tolerance required by a teacher would need to be manifestly superior to that in any normal classroom. Even a model pupil, assuming such types ever entered Epuni, would be grappling with a raft of procedures they were unfamiliar with, including medical exams, interviews with police and social workers, court attendances, the strict institutional procedures and the general pressures of any residential life.

And the wards at Epuni needed basic life skills such as budgeting, food selection and basic hygiene pointers, and some kind of system by which they might measure their improvement. How else would the institution make good on its ostensible task of returning a child to a normal setting in the outside world?

The search began for a suitable candidate to take up the position of Epuni’s inaugural schoolmaster. Fortunately, or so it appeared, it wasn’t necessary to look far. Vincent Calcinai seemed to offer just the mix of qualities that Howe had in mind. Calcinai, who was born in July 1941, hailed from a well-regarded establishment family; he had worked at Epuni once before as a housemaster and had since won the testimonial blessing of the place he switched to, Khandallah School, where his teaching skills and ability to enthuse youngsters with a love of outdoor pursuits were held in sufficient regard that his lack of any formal qualifications other than School Certificate didn’t seem a problem. The Department of Education signed off on the appointment with the same enthusiasm with which Howe had once welcomed Calcinai as a housemaster.

Certainly, there was nothing to suggest to anyone that the balding, fair-haired housemaster with chubby fingers and slightly pointed ears who presented so well in interviews could be anything but a timely catch in the new classroom block that was completed in 1968. As well as somebody with a working knowledge of how the institution worked, Epuni needed an educator who possessed communication skills and had enough in the way of boyish energy to forge some kind of meaningful bond with those under his supervision.

Calcinai’s teaching style suggested he had been a great hire. He was creative in, for example, the innovative use of vinyl and reel-to-reel recordings, which he used to acquaint the boys with historical events such as the fall of the Roman Empire. To many of the kids, now decked out in Epuni’s new uniform of grey shirt and pants and socks with double yellow stripes, he came across as affable if at times a little intense. What sporting man wouldn’t be?

Calcinai played squash, he was a hiking enthusiast and a talented cook (he would later spend a year running the Bengal Tiger restaurant in downtown Wellington) as well as something of a skilled hand at clothes design. Faced with such an embarrassment of attributes, the only question probably worth asking might have been why somebody so manifestly overqualified would want to come back and live on the premises, devoting all his occupational energy to working in an inauspicious schoolhouse alongside particularly vulnerable young children. Unfortunately this was the one question that nobody thought to ask of the curiously opaque, passionless man who only ever really seemed to come alive when on the subject of children and his own aspirations as a thespian.

SOMEBODY WHO KNEW SONNY LISTON WAS ONCE quoted as saying: ‘I think he died the day he was born.’ So it was too with Leslie Kiriona, and much of his younger experience was spent unsuccessfully trying to find air in the most biblical of settings.

At the time of his birth, in 1959, Les’s parents were separated. Within a year the old man had died. His mother’s health was feeble and she showed little interest in caring for the boy. Times had been hard on Ivy Kiriona. Les had been the last of 10 children born over a punishing 20-year period.

So the people from the government said they would help. Les was taken into welfare care, first as a foster kid living with a local family on the banks of the Whanganui River, in Jerusalem, the hamlet popularised by the cult figure James K. Baxter shortly after the years when Les padded amid its magnificently lush vegetation. It was a spectacular natural setting guaranteed to ‘quicken the dullest intellect into awe and reverence’, as one turn-of-the-century writer put it, resplendent in every shade of green, fringed with thousands of ferns — and, for the young boy, a place shrouded in sorrow.

The family he was placed with there rejected him because, his adoptive parents said, he did not appear to be progressing normally. It was his hearing, they said, he just couldn’t hear properly. A doctor agreed. Indeed, the doctor wondered if the child was in any way normal at all. ‘My feeling,’ he wrote, ‘is that there is some mental backwardness … I certainly wouldn’t be willing to label him as such, but merely to give a clinical impression at the present time.’ Tentative as the diagnosis might have been, it was to have a considerable impact on the boy’s life.

Within a year Les was a fully fledged ward of the state, living in foster care and being attended to by a visiting teacher from the School for the Deaf, who also seemed to share the good doctor’s view of the toddler’s apparently dim chances of ever experiencing a normal life. As his report concluded: ‘Slow development, almost completely deaf. Made no attempt to use his legs at all until well after 15 months old. Mental: retarded.’

The case notes offer no clue how one might make a diagnosis of such a young life without at least using a standardised test or seeking the opinion of a qualified doctor. Indeed, his first educational establishment, Wanganui’s Holy Infancy School, reported that the boy spoke at a satisfactory level for a kid of his age and had settled in pretty well, all things considered, even if he seemed not so adept when it came to socialising. According to one psychological assessment, administered on September 14, 1967, Les may have possessed an above-average IQ. A marked flair for mathematics was also noted.

Still, the boy was also stealing things from school, or rather, perhaps, merely taking things, bringing them home or else giving them away to other kids. ‘Perhaps I was trying to buy their friendship,’ he later said. A report on his file from this period records that he was experiencing difficulties in trusting adults; there had been tantrums, and other behaviours described as ‘a bit of puzzle’.

By this stage Les had lost his birth name as surely as his ancestors had lost so much of their tribal lands. People started calling him Bobby. The teachers called him Bobby, the social workers and speech therapist called him that, too. Perhaps his caregivers ought to have known better, but they were tiring of their diminutive ward. A social worker’s assessment from the time notes that the family no longer felt they understood the boy and simply wanted him off their hands, in order to socially replenish what disruption Les had brought to ‘their high standards of behaviour and standing in the community’.

On May 29, 1969, the decision was taken to send Les to Epuni Boys’ Home — and the place hit him like a punch.

No doubt contemporary psychologists’ casebooks could shed more light on these things, but it would seem reasonably clear that this nine-year-old kid was firstly, and probably nothing more than, a victim of external circumstances. Yet to the authorities he simply exuded a promiscuous spray of disrespect for authority. At Epuni they decided to medicate Leslie with Tegretol, supposedly for epilepsy but also to get him in the right frame of mind for some kind of education.

For the first six months Les was at Epuni he received no schooling at all, and the situation might have continued had Vincent Calcinai not been made aware of his situation and demanded that it be rectified. So concerned was the teacher that he even began spending additional time with the kid. Les let the attention wash over him, taking comfort in the older man’s concern. ‘He took great interest in me from the start,’ he later recalled.

Shortly after he started classes Les was surprised to receive a visit from his new teacher at an unusual hour, during one of the periods of enforced rest when Les was in his bedroom. He flashed his teacher a smile that dimpled his cheeks and squinted up his eyes. The older man didn’t say anything. Calcinai, anger in his eyes, just stood there for what felt like a long time before making off. Nothing else. The next day another visit. Then another.

Les began to worry about what this meant. Then one afternoon Calcinai appeared again. This time, he beckoned for Les to follow him. The teacher turned on his heel and the kid scampered after him. He was led through the car park, into the foyer, through the lounge area’s big rolling door to the dining room and, finally, along the short passageway leading to Calcinai’s bedroom. The smell of dry air. Calcinai waved the boy in. The young teacher followed his favourite pupil into the room, remembering to turn the key in the lock.

SEXUAL MISCONDUCT WAS NOTHING NEW AT EPUNI. In 1963 the institution was briefly closed to new admissions following the discovery of as many as 17 boys involved in various lewd acts, including something described as nocturnal group sex along with other unspecified incidents in corridors and the dining room, ‘with masturbation in the toilets and in the laundry’ apparently running rife. According to an internal memo of the same date, the situation had been ‘a grave one’, although all things considered it may have ultimately been no more shocking than the night-time adventurism at a regular boarding school.

On November 14, 1968, Howe telephoned the regional office to let them know that he had been approached by a 12-strong delegation of boys about ‘what appeared’ to be another episode of unusual sexual conduct, this time involving a staff member on night shift. By the children’s account, they had been awoken at various times by a man who we shall call X, for legal reasons, to go to the toilet, a common enough duty in the case of known bed-wetters, but on this occasion extended to other kids who had no known problem. In any event, as Howe pointed out, X’s preferred method of rousing the wards — by touching them on the penis — was hardly by the manual book.

At the other end of the telephone line the director mulled over the situation. Maybe the best thing to do was to call the cops, Maurie suggested. His superiors wouldn’t hear of it. They told him, ‘As it would appear from discussions with the boys concerned that no irreparable damage has been done [and] in the absence of any real corroborative evidence this would only serve to bring opprobrium on the institution and possibly give rise to considerable speculation on the part of the public.’

While there had been no evidence that X had masturbated any of the kids, Howe wrote later, there seemed little doubt ‘that this was his intention’. Each boy had offered a strikingly similar story, after all, and there was some suggestion in at least a couple of cases that this had not been the first time. Yet the wards occupied single rooms; where was the corroborating evidence? It sounded like something best left for Maurie to quietly sort out.

The evening following this decision, Howe was waiting to confront X when he arrived for work. The man was plainly taken aback. A pointed discussion followed. Eventually he admitted to having ‘inadvertently’ touched a number of the boys. It had all been an accident, he explained. So why had he been doing as much even to boys who never needed to be woken up in the first place? Maurie asked. He couldn’t say. Howe sensed the man was ducking the issue. Even so, he reflected as he stood eyeing his employee, was it reasonable to assume this was part of a regular pattern of behaviour?

As far as Howe could see, the man had long carried out his duties in a reasonable manner. Then again, as some staff members had confided to him, there had been evenings when he had shown up for work ‘smelling strongly of alcohol’, if not blind drunk, weaving from side to side along the corridors as he went about safeguarding the institution’s young wards and no doubt chugging back the odd nightcap to boot. That alone seemed to warrant some form of immediate sanction. So he was told to pack his bags and leave, and there the matter was politely allowed to rest.

The decision was reinforced in a confidential memo subsequently sent on November 28, 1968 by the local child welfare officer, Denis Reilly, counselling Howe that any mention of the incident to the police should be made ‘not for the purpose of having an information laid against this man but ensuring the police know of it so that something can be done if future employment is found where offences against children are made easier to commit … I think our obligation would end there’.

As worrying as the implications of the case had been, they were small beer in comparison with the offences committed by Calcinai. Initially he had appeared to get on so well with the kids, although, as residential housemaster Gary Hermansson later remembered, ‘He teased them quite a bit and always ensured he was in the one-up position. And occasionally he would have an outburst, which was obviously kind of a bit controlling. But he was very outdoorsy and would take the boys off to do things as well. So, yes, he stood out as a bit of an eccentric around the edges, but that was all.’

And he was nothing if not businesslike. Among Calcinai’s first decrees was that children in his classroom would no longer eat their lunches in the main dining area, but rather stay at their desks for the meal. Howe liked the sound of that: this was a teacher who loved spending time with his little boys.

At the time, ‘the worst I thought about him was he had his favourites’, Howe admitted with a heavy sigh many years later. ‘And I used to say to the staff that we can’t afford to have favourites because it’s upsetting to the other kids. And I was trying to be a bit more difficult about him taking kids out, which he used to do when he went tramping. So, I guess I had a sort of a gut feeling — but I had no proof.’

Why didn’t he do something? ‘Without proof, you can’t do a damn thing,’ he responded. ‘And no one complained. He had the kids so damn scared, they wouldn’t complain. He thwarted that completely.’

AS A MATTER OF FACT THEY DID COMPLAIN, AT LEAST according to one of his victims. ‘He raped me,’ Les said, pausing for a moment to rub his eyes. ‘It hurt, it hurt, and it made me angry, but what really hurt was that when I said something to the matron, she said, “Children should be seen and not heard.” And that stayed with me, right through to adulthood. Don’t forget, all this happened before my 10th birthday and it really, I mean, it screwed me up. I was always screwed up anyway. I had no sense of belonging. I didn’t know where I was going to go to, who would take me away, how I could become a normal boy again.’ And neither, apparently, did anyone else.

Nevertheless, the warning signs were there for anyone with eyes to see, not least in the growing amount of time Calcinai was asking to spend with Les — and other boys like him, always Maori, always small — outside of class, including weekends away with the oddly subdued child. One weekend Epuni’s deputy principal, Geoff Comber, paid a surprise visit to the area to check on a ward domiciled at a nearby foster home. Arriving at the front door, he was surprised to learn the child had gone camping — and doubly surprised to learn that his camping companion was Calcinai.

Comber felt uneasy. He reported his finding back to the supervising district child welfare officer, who shared his impression that this arrangement appeared somewhat ‘inappropriate’. Yet nothing was to come of it.

Dave Kelsey, who would succeed Calcinai as head teacher, offered a similar recollection of the man whose position he later filled. ‘I remember him coming down one time, it was six months or a year after, I don’t know, and he had a little boy in tow with him. But I didn’t know anything. I thought he was just looking after the kid for a particular reason. I don’t know, I never gave it any thought, I only met him once.’

Might it have been worth asking for a criminal check? ‘No, I don’t think so at all,’ Kelsey said with a shrug. ‘If you had a criminal record, I think that would have had to have been a statement you’d have to make, but I don’t think there would have been. There were no police checks or anything like that. And I think that’s something that should have happened, but we were still relatively naive then about this sort of thing. Nothing had hit the fan at that stage.’

By this point Calcinai knew he was on borrowed time at Epuni, and the months he had spent abusing Les gave him an idea of where he might best head in order to find fresh young Maori boys. As luck would have it, he was offered a teaching position at Pipiriki School, near Jerusalem, the area where one of his last victims had spent his earliest years.

The area also had the attraction of being a hot-button destination for somebody like Calcinai, who harboured ambitions of becoming a playwright, thanks to the newfound presence there of James K. Baxter and a growing band of impressionable followers looking for a slightly easier version of the supposedly spiritual quest that was taking some of their better-heeled peers off in the footsteps of The Beatles to the Himalayan foothills.

In Wellington, Baxter had been a charismatic drunk and a poet with a knack for spouting sub-Blakean verse, excellent qualifications for the success he would soon enjoy as the settlement’s resident cult figure. Relocating to Jerusalem in 1969, he had reinvented himself, as one biographer put it, as a saintly commune leader of uncertain appetites. Not least among these were rampant sexual indulgence and personal uncleanliness.

As many as a thousand pilgrims passed through the commune during its existence. Naturally, given the era, narcotics also featured on the agenda, but here the Christ-figure, as Baxter was explicitly styling himself by the time of Vince’s arrival, had some reservations, cautioning his followers that ‘drug-induced despair is not something I groove on’. Fighting, too, was ‘not okay’ under any circumstances.

For their part, many Maori were bemused. This was Jerusalem, a name that arose out of one of their most profound spiritual experiences of the previous century, and in recent decades the area had also doubled as a haven for the neglected young children who, until the time of Baxter’s arrival, had been cared for by the local Catholic nuns. The nearby Operiki Pa stood as a stately reminder of earlier battles waged by the Maori. Baxter’s pacifist communitarian effort — an orphanage of sorts for the children of the disaffected white middle class — verged on being a parody of what the settlement historically represented.

Vince was not impressed by what he initially saw in Jerusalem, either, at least among the Maori. He would complain that the native children appeared poorly looked after. He said the education standards left much to be desired. Historically speaking, the latter accusation was particularly offensive. As a number of older Maori pointed out to their unimpressed guest, this was an area where children had once attended the school in a literal state of starvation, during the potato blight of the early 1900s, rather than risk failing.

Perhaps sensing that he might have a fight on his hands, Calcinai resolved to concentrate on the positive — and he surely didn’t need to look far to find it. Baxter was an actor after the new schoolmaster’s own heart, a performer possessed with obvious stagecraft who no doubt also saw in the remote settlement an opportunity to work through his mid-life sexual crisis far from unwelcome outside eyes. The two men became friendly.

According to testimony that was later offered at his trial on a variety of sex charges, Calcinai worked hard to improve his standing at the school that had employed him, though some of the parents were never won over by his style — his insistence on personally conducting routine ‘health checks’ of the children, for example, and the camping trips with some of the more troubled boys. Calcinai didn’t think much of those parents, of course, but as the judge told him at the trial: ‘It ill becomes you now to plead the low standard of the children and their parents.’ The police prosecutor added, ‘You have grossly abused trust and authority to satisfy your own perverted desires.’ In 1973 Calcinai was convicted and jailed for five years on six charges of sodomy and eight of indecent assault on three of the Maori boys he taught at Pipiriki.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT EPUNI, CALCINAI’S SUCCESSOR had his hands full attempting to get what vestiges of an educational arrangement as Epuni had up and running.

Dave Kelsey, now retired and living in the Far North after a career in teaching, knew as soon as he arrived that he faced daunting hurdles. For one thing, EBH School, as it was sometimes known, was graded as a primary school despite the bulk of its pupils being high-school age. Staff and pupils therefore enjoyed no automatic access to college materials. Another issue was the lack of teachers — there were never more than just the three — who were yet required to teach a full syllabus while also being part of the institution’s senior management team, partaking in endless case-planning meetings, preparing assessment reports, dealing with specialists and planning programmes tailored for kids with special needs — which was to say, virtually everyone among the 60 per cent or so of admissions who were put in the school.

Finally, no outside help was ever available to the school other than just one part-time educator who was available for five hours each week. Sometimes it seemed as if the relevant departments neither knew nor cared what was being done educationally with the boys who were being admitted.

Small wonder that outsiders sometimes thought of Kelsey as a man who was being paid to drive himself crazy. But Kelsey never viewed it that way. As he saw it, there was no magic bullet, only a series of steps one needed to take. His style was to home in on developmental sequences — the clusters of operational thought one needs to master in order to progress to the next level of learning — which in his case meant taking kids back to the last area in which they had any proven competence. Pupils who achieved something tangible received a certificate, complete with the Epuni logo, showing the particular goal they had achieved: reading at a 12-year-old level, evincing a basic command of addition or subtraction, or decimals.

It felt like a good system, and the evidence was that Kelsey worked against considerable constraints to use it well. He had three classrooms at his disposal, a woodwork room and a large gymnasium. But the school had no library and purchasing new books was out of the budgetary question. So he and the other instructors made do with what they had. Thankfully, paper and pens were in good supply, so these they adapted as best they could to suit the school’s behaviourist approach.

‘I had a series of cards, English-based with drawings,’ he recalled. ‘We’d all sit in a circle or in a small group. Then I’d show some of these cards to the kids, and I might ask what was happening in them. What I was waiting for was basically some kid to say, “Oh, that’s what I used to do, this is what I did.” Shoplifting or something like that. And then we’d talk about it. At first there would be lots of bravado, but then we’d talk it through and the kids would become more serious.

‘I wouldn’t actually comment on whether it was an ethical thing to do, I would just say, “Well, why did you do that? How do you think the shopkeeper felt? What happened? What did your parents say?” Then we’d get down to the fact that some of the parents couldn’t care less, or some of them were acting a bit like Fagan. So we’d discuss those things, as well, but never as a moral issue. It was just about really wanting to give them an additional dimension from the action they had taken, to start thinking about it, to get their empathy going.’

Friends used to ask Kelsey why he bothered. Oh, you’re not going to be able to do much with those kids, they’d tell him. Just give them art all day or something like that. And he would say, ‘Listen, you know, we’ve got these kids here at the moment with these needs.’ Meeting those needs was what he was being paid to do. ‘So I said, “We’ve got to try and find some way of helping these kids to get further ahead, because I’m a firm believer that work is therapy. If you’ve got a job to do, if you’ve got something to do, you get your status, you get more money, and you get your feeling of worth in society.’

Did he ever notch up any notable success stories? The head teacher corrugated his brow for a moment. ‘Do you remember Peter Kelly, who used to be the racehorse caller?’ he asked me. ‘No? You know, the guy who used to call the races in that sing-song voice that never missed a beat?’ Kelsey smiled at the recollection.

‘Well, I had a kid who could do that, too, although initially, we had problems with him not even doing anything, not wanting to do anything. But he was super-bright. And once he realised that he could earn points to use the tape recorder to do this sort of thing, he was away. So we took him in to NZBC, as it was known at that stage, and they put him in the sound studio, gave him a go, and he was like, Woah! So things opened up for him. So that was a success.’ At least Kelsey hoped so; among the persistent frustrations of his position was not being able to track the later success of his wards.

Kelsey cared about the good things that the boys opened themselves to outside the classroom too. One never-to-be-forgotten night, he recalled, one of his colleagues hit on the inspired idea of showing them Franco Zeffirelli’s dazzling Romeo and Juliet, the great movie that turns Shakespeare’s traditional love story into a thoroughly modern tale of two street toughs crushed by their fight with The System. Through love the kids in the film manage to find an ideal, something they can fight and, ultimately, die for. But death enlarges them, even as it diminishes their parents’ hatred, the kids becoming, as Juliet’s father puts it in the epilogue, ‘the poor sacrifices of our enmity’.

Zeffirelli, himself the illegitimate son of a textile salesman and a seamstress, declared in interviews that his work would see him regarded as a ‘flagbearer of the crusade against boredom, bad taste and stupidity in the theatre’, and many critics seemed to agree.

But how might the residents of Epuni Boys’ Home regard the effort? As the final reel clattered to a halt — blue cigarette haze hanging in the air — the youngsters seemed to be getting progressively quieter. Too quiet? As soon as the credits ended, the lights were hastily turned on and the front couple of rows given a searching look by the supervising educator. He nearly fell over at what he beheld: some of the country’s toughest kids were seated in what appeared to be a state of abject aesthetic shock, the tracks of tears visible on many of their faces.

THE BLACK LIGHTS

Tyrone Marks was always a fighter. That much still comes through in his direct manner of speaking, the forceful way he makes a point, his careful appraisal of a visitor before he leads him into an upstairs room of his Hamilton home for a couple of hours of animated conversation. No surprises there. For a long time Tyrone parlayed his considerable physical skills, initially honed through various exercise regimes at Epuni Boys’ Home and more recently through his training as a kick-boxer, into making a living out of security work, while also raising a family of five girls. Yet his early life was anything but triumphant.

These days Tyrone is also a trained counsellor as well as having read psychology at the nearby University of Waikato, where he discovered the writings of Auguste Comte, the 19th-century French philosopher and founder of the modern discipline of sociology. Taken together with the insights he gained growing up as a state ward, these accomplishments give him an unusually keen perspective in assessing the institution he lived in during the turbulent 1970s.

Turbulent is the word for recalling the era waylit by the lingering traces of the American civil rights movement, the terrorists in Munich, wars and rumours of wars in the Middle East. Not to forget — speaking of fighters — Ali’s emergence from forced retirement seven years after he was stripped of his heavyweight title for refusing induction into the United States Army and 43 months after his last official fight. Ali later did triumphant battle with George Foreman in what used to be called Zaire, in front of 55,000 delirious fans, screaming and hollering and waving at the makeshift ring where the resurrection took place under the African moon, regaining his title during the eighth round of a slightly surreal bout staged in a somewhat surreal country at the entirely surreal hour of 2 am.

Epuni was changing too. Since its establishment the residence had been well supported by influential people in government, ministers and senior civil servants. This wouldn’t change markedly after the Child Welfare Division of the Department of Education, as it had been known since 1948, was replaced on April 1, 1972, morphed into the new Department of Social Welfare.

As a future minister in charge of the department, Venn Young, glowingly put it at the time, successive political administrations had been only too aware of Epuni’s ‘excellent standards’ and the ‘high regard’ in which it was held by the local community, circumstances due in no small part to the ‘attention and devotion of the staff in settling down youngsters who are unhappy and wanting to be somewhere else’.

For all the palmy notices, though, Epuni remained an institution alone; like the country’s other youth facilities it was left largely to its own managerial devices in creating what it believed to be the best living conditions for the 350 wards now coursing through its doors each year — and to work what it felt was the best kind of magic on the youngsters whose lives it was assessing.

If we are to believe the archival records of the time, what greeted the boys was a strikingly different set-up to the one that had been operating even a few years earlier.

Officially, only one in three boys at this point was being sent on to another institution, whether a long-term correctional facility such as Hokio or Kohitere, or the recently constituted Holdsworth School in Wanganui, or one of the country’s special schools, with the remainder going ‘home’. But those figures were a bit misleading. Kids who returned to the community often ended up in group houses or short-term foster placements rather than their original family environment, an arrangement typically leading to readmission to one or other of the correctional facilities or at the very least further contact with the authorities. Tyrone’s experience was a case in point.

Tyrone, who is Maori, fitted the institution’s new ethnic bill, too. Epuni kept no records of ethnicity, but anecdotal observation, the recollections of residents and what records are still available from similar institutions all point to an overwhelming Maori presence by this point. In 1959, for instance, around one in every four boys admitted to a similar correctional facility in Auckland, the Owairaka Boys’ Home, was Maori; over the following decade the figure rose to seven in every 10 admissions, and by 1978 it had reached 80 per cent. Nobody in a position to count heads disputes that Epuni followed a similar trend.

By teacher Dave Kelsey’s recollection, ‘about 98 per cent, more or less’ of the inmates at this point were Maori, a process that had been accelerating since the institution became an adjunct for a youth justice system overwhelmingly processing young Maori males of frequently indeterminate age. (Boys often inflated their ages in order to skip classes or smoke, or both, so that many of the admission forms contained false information.)

Tyrone also came from a family that was very large by the standards of the day — seven brothers and six sisters — another Epuni signature of the time. According to one study, nearly a third of the wards at Epuni at this time had seven or more siblings, and nearly one-tenth of them had more than 10. This raised a frequently asked question. Were kids from larger households more prone than others to end up in trouble, or was the system more prone to zero in on these households?

‘That was the way it happened anyway,’ Tyrone began, pausing for a moment to fish for a cigarette. He popped a Pall Mall from his pack and lighted it. His eyes glistened. ‘You’ve got to remember,’ he continued, dragging thoughtfully, ‘this was the early sixties, and colonialism was still happening, you know. Well, I think it hasn’t really stopped, it’s just that those processes are probably just about over, you know. It’s been a long process but in that particular time, you know, that’s when all the state houses were coming along and all that socio-economic stuff happened then. So people were on the low-income thing, just like they are now, and there was an expectation that because they had big families that financially they probably couldn’t take care of them and weren’t taking care of them.’

Tyrone’s old man was an Italian immigrant who met his young Maori bride in New Zealand shortly after the war. They found it hard to make ends meet. That’s when the people from Social Welfare got in on the act. One day they dropped by the family home in Hastings and told Tyrone they wanted to buy him some new clothes. Jump in the car, they said, so in the boy jumped. Child welfare officers tended to prefer it this way, since it was not unknown for parents like Tyrone’s to have a change of heart at the last moment and stage an awkward scene in response to seeing their children taken away.

In any event the boy never went back. Pretty soon the various institutions he passed through began to haze into a soft grey blur. In Nelson he ended up at an orphanage called Sunnybank, a rambling, spooky old edifice run by nuns on the edge of town. They sent him to Campbell Park in Otago. They put him in the Holdsworth School in Wanganui. At Holdsworth he and a few other kids ran away. Tyrone got hit by a car. He suffered a dislocated hip, spine and some scarring to his left side. They kept him in hospital for nearly five months, during which time he had several other operations and a skin graft. Then it was on to Epuni Boys’ Home for some serious evaluation at age 12.

WHAT ELSE MIGHT A DILIGENT SOCIAL WORKER HAVE done? ‘He might have taken a picture,’ Tyrone growled. ‘And he could have looked at a picture and thought about it. He might have thought, Okay, so you’ve got a big family. Mum has to stay at home and work. Dad has to go to work and do whatever, but he’s obviously on a low income. So what you might do, perhaps, is bring in some resources in a different way instead of just whipping the kids off, no questions asked … but unfortunately that’s the way it was with me and so many others; there were no forms, nothing.

‘It’s the same thing they did to the Aborigine children, you know — taking them off to state institutions because, they said, these kids were from large families and couldn’t be dealt with any other way. So we ended up in places like Epuni, and all those other homes, festering over a number of years, feeling like shit, and you know, ending up in a life of crime after years of being repeatedly told that we were useless, you know, and no good for anything else. That’s what happens if you tell someone that for long enough. It happened to me too. Same thing later on when it comes to jobs. You’ve got this background and then, because of it, you don’t have a degree or a diploma or anything, so you’re basically useless. You’re a non-contributor. You’re fucked.’

Taking kids out of their community environment in this way effectively put the kibosh on any serious hope of a boy forging a relationship with a credible father-figure, maybe even his own father. Indeed, as others like Tyrone Marks mull over the personal cost wrought by the damaging domestic circumstances of their youth, many experts continue to examine the cost of father-absence that removing kids from a family setting effectively seals. And their conclusions about the likely effect on boys, irrespective of economic circumstance, ethnicity and place of residence, invariably point to the single-biggest predictor of a boy’s success being just this one thing.

A boy doesn’t need parents who are especially civil to each other. He doesn’t need parents who particularly like each other. He simply needs parents who, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, in bad times and good, stay together. And most of all he needs his father to be around — and he needs to be around his father. Yet not once, ever, during New Zealand’s long experiment with institutional childcare did any political or elected figure draw attention to the overwhelming data supporting this conclusion.

From the United States National Center for Health Statistics, a federal agency, we learn that children living away from their fathers are 375 per cent more likely to require professional treatment for emotional or behavioural problems and twice as likely to flunk school. They are also considerably more likely than their regular counterparts to suffer from chronic asthma, frequent headaches and bed-wetting, to develop a stammer or speech defect, suffer from anxiety or depression, or be diagnosed as hyperactive.

As for criminal tendencies, the likelihood that children will engage in illegal activities doubles if they are raised without a present-father, according to Anne Hill and June O’Neill, co-authors of a report published by the City University of New York. Another study, published by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, found that father-absent kids are twice as likely as others to become high-school dropouts.

If anything the data becomes starker in the case of father-absent boys. From a British study called Tomorrow’s Men, a project supported by the University of Oxford and involving 1500 teenage boys, comes news that successful ‘can-do’ kids — taken to mean those with high self-esteem, happiness and confidence — almost invariably come from backgrounds with a high level of father contact. Indeed, more than 90 per cent of boys who believed their fathers spent regular time with them and took an active interest in their progress fell into this can-do category; by contrast, nearly three-quarters of those who believed their fathers rarely or never did these things fell into the group with the very lowest self-esteem and self-confidence, were more likely to suffer from depression, get in trouble with the law and dislike school.

How else to put it? Comparisons are invidious, of course, but still. In 1996 The New York Times reported on what, for want of a less anthropocentric term, it characterised as a singular perversity of aggression among young male elephants in South Africa’s Pilanesberg National Park. In an entirely uncharacteristic act, the paper reported, these calves were raping and killing rhinoceroses. What could it mean? Elephant researchers discovered that the younger animals were suffering a form of chronic stress brought on by the lack of dominant adult male elephants to keep them in line. (The older bull elephants had been kept out of the park because of their weight and size.)

Sure enough, when the web of familial relations by which young elephants are traditionally raised in the wild was reintroduced, the youngsters quickly settled down and the problems ceased. It doesn’t require an acrobatic psychological leap to draw a human parallel. Indeed, if a child in the womb were to choose just one factor about his parents that would most help him stay out of places like Epuni — with available options including wealth, elite education, sporting prowess or a particular skin colour — the best choice he could make is that his parents will stay together. In the United States, 70 per cent of boys in juvenile hall were raised in father-absent households, as were around the same percentage (the figures shift slightly depending on the survey) of younger murderers, rapists, dropouts, suicides and runaways.

According to yet another American survey, published in Village Voice, a boy raised in a father-absent environment is five times more likely to commit suicide, 10 times more likely to abuse chemicals, 14 times more likely to commit rape and 20 times more likely to end up in a correctional facility. One of the major reasons for this is because father-absent boys are statistically less able to delay gratification and show impulse-control over anger and sexual activity, leading in turn, almost ineluctably, to a weaker sense of conscience, according to E.M. Hetherton and B. Martin, contributors to a report on therapeutic interventions for pathological childhood disorders.

THERAPEUTIC INTERVENTIONS. BY THE MIDDLE OF the 1970s Epuni was nuts about them, falling for their trappings with much the same velocity as Ali’s opponents were hitting the canvas. At one time it had been enough for the institution to provide shelter and schooling, offer a bit of respite for the young and the restless. No more. Epuni had long been charged with offering some kind of credible assessment of its wards, and if a quarter of those suffered some moderate to serious psychiatric disturbance — as was believed — then the institution needed to be in on the therapeutic act. Social Welfare expected no less.

Part of the institution’s problem, and really the problem of any of the country’s residences, though, was finding people remotely qualified to offer any credible psychological assessment. Up to a point this was a factor of the professional psychiatric culture at large. In New Zealand, as in Australia, psychiatrists by a ratio of four to one, according to a 1972 report published in the ANZ Journal of Psychiatry, preferred the trendier areas of neurosis and psychosis to the comparatively unglamorous world of working with young people. The same study found that as many as one-third of all psychiatrists preferred not to work with kids at all, believing as many seemed to that they were simply lost causes, dim-witted to a degree, even beyond help.

Same as it ever was. Go back if you will to a celebrated address on the subject of juvenile delinquency given in 1921 by Dr W.A. Potts, a medical adviser to the Birmingham Justices. In his address the good doctor announced that 37 per cent of all cases he had examined in Britain showed the offenders were mentally defective, which he went on to define as those who might be classified as ‘idiots, imbeciles and feebleminded’. While Dr Potts allowed that some cases he examined might be explained by physical suffering or circumstance, the overwhelming condition as he saw it was innate mental retardation.

Yet it would be surprising if anyone who worked for any great length of time at Epuni entirely bought into such blithe assessments. Few may have harboured upbeat expectations that many of their wards would ever join the ranks of the middle class. But that was always a different matter to whether such kids were stupid.

A more relevant issue for Epuni in the 1970s seemed to be finding the right therapeutic intervention to sort out problems that were believed to lie solely in the realm of mental dysfunction.

Maurie was keen. His antennae told him that the cultural changes afoot were ripe for integration into the programme. He went methodically to work. The Epuni chief had always been a whale for the briefing paper or official memo. Now he looked for a reliable source of information on the workings of the juvenile mind, and quickly seemed to find one in the notion of ‘reality therapy’, a concept based on a set of ideas first advanced by the American psychotherapist William Glasser involving personal choice, responsibility and ‘transformation’, which in its simplest form simply meant encouraging people to live in the here and now. All well and good, but the idea lent itself not only to a school of literature that continues until the present day, but also to a raft of extrapolations and applications, not least the perception that those undergoing the therapy were often to some degree crazy. Maurie became smitten with Glasser’s most famous book, titled Reality Therapy and published in 1965, currycombing screeds of it into the institution’s manual and circulating them among the housemasters in the hope they might press these ideas into service. Unfortunately, perhaps, few of the typically unskilled administrators seemed to understand what the technique actually was, let alone how it might be applied or administered.

But it was easy enough for anyone to follow the precepts of another of the principal’s therapeutic discoveries, ‘sleep therapy’, which essentially involved shutting the wards in their rooms for as long a period as was practically possible. Initially, the idea may have been reasonable, or at any rate understandable. A couple of kids arriving at the institution in a state of chronic exhaustion, perhaps, who needed to recoup their natural resources by sleeping off a police chase, parental breakdown or whatever, might require some additional rest not only for their immediate peace of mind but also, who knows, later life. According to one school of thought, sleep is a kind of bank account that all of us invest in when we’re young and draw on during adulthood’s abrupt awakenings and departures.

Over time the practice took on a slightly obsessional edge, with inmates spending increasing periods of time in bed each afternoon. Howe thought it was a necessary and useful practice; his supervisors at head office were less impressed. ‘For your information,’ one wrote, ‘I can tell you that I have never seen or heard of the general habit of resting all children irrespective of age every afternoon. I have visited hundreds of institutions in many countries over the past 25 years. I have not supported … this practice.’ The order was sent out for sleep therapy to be discontinued.

Another proposed innovation was ‘sexual therapy’, the idea for which had initially been put forward by Howe’s offsider, Joe Bartle. ‘A large number of boys passing through Epuni Boys’ Home have been found to be suffering from sexual confusion,’ Bartle told him in a memo. Bartle put the issue down to one of two things: lack of knowledge about ‘normal’ sexual development, or else ‘apparent or potential difficulties relating to confusion in sexual identity, e.g. homosexuality, bisexuality, transvestitism, festishism’.

Bartle proposed that a programme be established involving ‘suitable autoio-visual [sic] aids, reading material and work books’ along with carefully handpicked participation from ‘outside agencies’. Once again the suggestion was nixed by head office.

‘Art therapy’ was yet another big deal. As an instructional handbook put it, the treatment’s benefits were at least fourfold. One was that it allowed a boy to therapeutically deal with issues of grief. Another was that it helped bridge his inability to form one-on-one relationships. Third, it improved cultural understanding — and also improved sexual identity. Given the right amount of time, a familiar setting and the correct materials (clay, paint, brushes, crayons, paper and pencils), it would help create what the handbook suggested would be an environment ‘in which it is safe to be male!’ As for the instructor:

Art therapy gives … a chance to see the boys from a different viewpoint, which can help them come to a greater understanding of how to deal with their clients’ situations. Clients often express things in Art Therapy which they may not express elsewhere. For example, if a boy’s Case Worker is male, and the boy is having problems with his father, he may transfer feelings about his father on to the Case Worker and, initially, feel safer in expressing those feelings to the Art Therapist.

Whew!

Whatever criticisms might have been levelled at forcing kids into bed or getting them to throw paint at a canvas every now and then, nobody was being actively harmed as far as could be told. These practices were hardly in the league of the more controversial therapies the department did sanction at Epuni.

Among the few people who would not be interviewed for this book was Alan Frazer, the Australian-based psychiatrist who used to provide a lot of Epuni’s external psychiatric expertise as well as helping out occasionally on Saturday mornings as the institution’s general practitioner. ‘In view of Epuni Boys’ Home being a very sensitive issue over the last few years,’ Frazer wrote in response to my interview request, ‘I am loath to become involved.’ However, he did suggest that his past writings on residential care could be of some interest, in particular a lengthy paper he had authored, Psychiatric Needs of Disturbed Social Welfare Children and Adolescents and Consultative Psychiatric Practices in Social Welfare Institutions.

Frazer’s work makes for illuminating reading. Among the immediately interesting aspects are its recurrent descriptions of boys ‘poor in communication skills’ and ‘unable to communicate their thoughts, feelings, and observations. Some of the adolescents,’ he wrote, ‘appear not to have learnt some of the basic rules which regulate communication. This process seems to have impaired learning and socialisation in many cases.’

Although he allows that it would be all too easy to misdiagnose these kids as psychotics rather than youngsters with specific learning disabilities, the study is short on clues as to what these deeper issues might be. Descriptions like these crop up a lot in the Epuni case notes, and not just those signed off by Frazer. A typical example — taken almost at random from more than 100 files of former inmates — apportions the blame for one boy’s erratic intelligence tests on ‘some brain malfunction’ that had affected his emotional faculty, causing him to suffer an ‘inability to perceive or analyse whole situations’; in addition, it was felt that ‘his inability to handle everyday social situations’ was also a powerful deficit. Frazer remarks on the ‘intelligence and specific learning disabilities’ suffered by other wards; such factors, he posits, are ‘probably traceable back to the parent-child relationship’.

What’s most evident in all this talk about poor communication skills, lack of empathy and odd behaviours is that these descriptors neatly fit the diagnostic criteria of an entirely different developmental disorder: autism.

Autism was first described in 1943 by Leo Kanner, a child psychiatrist at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who spent five years studying 11 children possessed with an ‘extreme aloneness from the beginning of life’. Kanner borrowed the word ‘autism’, derived from the Greek autos, meaning ‘self’, from the Swiss researcher Eugen Bleuler, who had used it in another context some three decades earlier.

Unbeknown to Kanner or any of his American colleagues, the same condition was being studied simultaneously in Europe, where it was identified with the same term only a year later by Hans Asperger, a Viennese paediatrician, whose name is sometimes applied to a ‘high-functioning’ version of the neurological malady. Today the condition is estimated to afflict as many as one in every 100 children, with boys up to four times as likely to be affected as girls.

Among the behaviours most linked to the disorder are poor language and social skills, and a propensity for repetitive, frequently obsessional behaviour and self-injury. Autistic kids will often repeat the same words or phrases over and over, or immerse themselves in weirdly narrow interests.

No two young autists are the same. Some will manage to lead relatively ordinary, even intellectually exceptional, lives, while others may require a lifetime of constant support. But what such youngsters share, both men saw, is an iron-walled detachment from the physical environment and an indifference to other people, along with profound difficulties with communication and imaginative play. Put another way, in the words of Frazer’s case book, such individuals are almost always ‘poor in communication skills’ and all but ‘unable to communicate their thoughts, feelings, and observations’.

Clinicians since Kanner have debated the degree of conventional intelligence possessed by autists. The historical assumption has usually been that most of them exhibited some mental retardation. But this has been somewhat superseded by more recent research by the likes of the University of Cambridge’s Simon Baron-Cohen, who has shown that a great many scholars may themselves be autistic. (Baron-Cohen, along with the mathematician Ioan M. James of the University of Oxford, made scientific headlines in the early 1990s by arguing that at least three of the well-known personality traits of Einstein and Newton — obsessive interests, difficulty in social relationships, and profound communication problems — suggested that these men were autistic.)

One of course should avoid the popular fetish for offering long-range diagnoses of supposedly autistic people. But the overriding point here seems to be that the malady requires a little lateral thought on the part of others when it comes to defining intelligence. It also requires a particular form of understanding and support from the wider community.

It is not unreasonable to suppose that the incidence of the condition at Epuni was no lower than in the general population, and possibly a bit higher if the case-book studies are any guide. Even more striking is the significant number of those cases that, rather than receiving the kinds of intensive intervention treatment and support that nowadays would be universally recommended for the condition, were simply punished, drugged or shipped off to psychiatric institutions.

Frazer himself had warned of the potentially disastrous dangers of misdiagnosis. In his paper, he wrote about the tendency to ascribe all ‘delinquent’ behaviour to what at the time were known as psychiatric diseases. Frazer inveighed against the temptation for unqualified people to prescribe some entirely irrelevant treatment. Still, there’s not a lot to suggest he actively discouraged the practice in every instance.

Tyrone Marks wasn’t autistic, and he wasn’t crazy, either, but he did bear more than the usual brunt of Epuni’s attempts at psychiatric evaluation when he first clambered into its ring. Seen in retrospect 30 years later, one can’t help but be struck by the punitive language of the reports along with the underlying confusion between routine behavioural issues and genuine mental illness. ‘This boy has not made any effort here to do something for himself, and has shunned any assistance or guidance from staff,’ one analyst pronounced. ‘He needs something firmer than we are able to offer.’

What to do? ‘Perhaps consideration should be given … to a period of psychiatric hospitalisation.’ So off they sent him to Lake Alice Hospital, a rural psychiatric facility near Bulls that at the time was held in considerable awe by the nearby youth facilities.

Despite the low rate of professional interest in child psychiatry, and the paucity of available psychiatrists, Social Welfare still managed on average to have around 90 of its wards in psychiatric care at any time during the 1970s. Lake Alice took the lion’s share of its junior cohort from nearby Wanganui and Lower Hutt, the two places where Tyrone spent a lot of his early welfare years. The reason for the unusual degree of activity in these two urban centres was the high regard that the respective youth institutions had for the brand of tough-love dispensed at the hospital’s child and adolescent unit, which specialised in shock therapy as a therapeutic technique and a form of punishment.

In the case of Epuni it is possible to trace this enthusiasm back to its earlier infatuation with reality therapy. The book of the same name makes much of the efficacy of hospital treatment for unresponsive clients. It conjures an ideal scenario in which a suitably respected therapist ‘deliberately takes a vigorous directive role and tells the group that they have the job of trying to handle him. He warns that he plans to be tough so that if they can handle him they will be able to handle almost anybody.’ Moreover, the work advises, it is important that such patients be shown no sympathy ‘because sympathy emphasises their unworthiness and depresses them even more’.

No doubt contemporary studies have more to say on this, but simple decency suggests it is a dubious starting point for dealing with troubled boys without any credible psychiatric diagnosis to begin with. In the person of the unit’s chief child psychiatrist, Selwyn Leeks, however, such ideas obtained enthusiastic purchase. Leeks’ preferred version of ‘aversion therapy’ involved using electroconvulsive treatment as a way of putting wayward young patients back on the straight and narrow.

Electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, had been in use for many decades. The treatment was first introduced in the late 1930s as a last-ditch method of helping severely depressed adults by way of inducing a seizure. Then, as now, the efficacy of the shock treatment had never been definitively shown, and even at that point in its history it had already attracted its share of bad notices. Yet at no point was it ever intended to be used on anyone other than consenting adults, and then only under a general anaesthetic.

During Tyrone’s time in Lake Alice he was subjected to ECT as many as three times a week. The procedure, typically administered after the boy was first given a biscuit and a cup of tea mixed with a drug to stop drooling, involved strapping electrodes on his head with bandages that had been dipped in salt water in order to avoid leaving burn marks. Leeks oversaw the performance. Usually it would be given without anaesthetic and without niceties, although the doctor was always careful to make a point of explaining that what was happening was intended as a punishment, sometimes pausing between zaps to ask quietly, ‘How many times do I have to ask you to behave?’

And it hurt. Tyrone thought he knew a thing or two about pain, especially in the wake of his accident back in Wanganui, but this was agony of a different order, something so wild and punishing it cannot be reduced to a descriptive line. Sometimes the boy’s legs would be so numb afterwards that he would half-roll down the stairs. ‘It was like a couple of boxers in the ring,’ he said, reaching for a familiar metaphor, ‘and the guy who gets knocked down, when he gets up, he doesn’t know where the hell he is.’

Indeed. The black lights, Ali used to call it, that dull glare of sub-consciousness that leaves one spiral-eyed on the canvas, aware of nothing other than a referee’s spread hand flashing close to your face, fingers extended as he counts loudly to eight, in accordance with the sport’s ancient protocols, and the fallen fighter wants nothing so much as the opportunity to roll under the bottom rope and collapse on the outside floor. The black lights can lead, as they did with Ali and many others, including those who experienced this form of ECT, to the loss of one’s most sensitive tool of cognition: memory.

In fact the boxing metaphors for ECT go back even further than that. Writing about the treatment as early as 1942, the psychiatrist Roy Grinker warned of profound emotional and intellectual changes in patients from a procedure whose effect he likened to injuries wrought by the sport: ‘Those who have seen fighters that have been in many battles,’ he wrote, ‘know the punch-drunk of slap-happy conditions and may recognise a similar state in some patients after shock treatment.’

Expressing the same criticism in more refined language, the Boston psychiatrist Max Fink added that, based on the data he had studied in 1958, the mechanism ‘seems to knock out the brain and reduce the higher activities, to impair memory and thus the newer acquisition of the mind, namely the pathological state, is forgotten’.

Never did either of these specialists foresee a situation in which such a procedure would be used without appropriate sedatives on unwilling children — and never did the Department of Social Welfare imagine a time when the government of New Zealand would end up paying millions of dollars, as it did in 2001, to nearly 200 former inmates who in many cases literally lost their young minds, and in almost every case lost what remained of their childhoods, as a consequence.

‘I still fucking hate touching battery terminals,’ Tyrone admitted at the end of a long conversation. ‘Even light switches are the same. So yes, that did have an impact on me — it’s really quite scary. But who I feel the most sorry for, and I have a lot of empathy for, [are] the kids who were only kids with me who never made it. That’s a lot of people we’re talking about, too — thousands have been institutionalised. And you know, they went on to have their own children and stuff but they never see them, so their kids are, you know, they’re the ones out murdering fucking pizza people and stuff like that. And people ask why. People don’t know what happened to create all this anger.’

HEY, CHARLIE! WHERE YOU GOIN’ WITH THAT GUN IN YOUR HAND?

The following item appeared in a Wellington newspaper on July 3, 1972:

Eight of 11 boys who escaped from the Epuni Boys’ Home on Wednesday night appeared in the Lower Hutt Children’s Court today.

All the boys were apprehended between Lower Hutt and Wairoa but since then one has gone missing.

A 13-year-old boy admitted 24 charges before Mr B.S. Barry, SM, 17 charges of unlawfully taking motor vehicles worth a total of $28,200, two charges of interfering with motor vehicles, three charges of burglary, one of theft and one of escaping from lawful custody.

Damage amounted to $1000, Mr Barry was told.

‘In all my years on the Bench I have never seen a list like this for a 13-year-old boy,’ he said, and recommitted the boy to the care of the Social Welfare Department.

Five boys, who each admitted three charges of unlawfully taking motor vehicles and one of interfering with motor vehicles, were also returned to the care of the Social Welfare Department.

At a lunchtime address to a local chapter of the Rotarians a few weeks earlier, Maurie Howe had struck what for him was becoming a typically gloomy note. ‘A lot of people might shudder,’ he told the Petone gathering, ‘but I can tell you with all honesty that there are some eight- or nine-year-olds who have a foolscap page of crimes attributed to them. Children of this age,’ he continued, ‘shouldn’t know about these things, let alone be involved in them. It reflects a pretty serious disturbance in the home background.’

Fortunately, Howe indicated, the institution was doing its best to steer things in another direction, a big ask when one considered that it had the task of turning around the lives of a group of boys and young people whom the principal variously described as hardened toughs or borderline psychotics.

This was hardly pure hyperbole. Gone were the days when the institution made a practice of never referring to an inmate as ‘bad’ or, worse, a ‘little criminal’, but rather ‘troublesome’ or at most ‘disturbed’. By now Epuni was far more involved than ever before in handling crisis cases, the kind of kids who had been taken into custody on a police or social welfare warrant or because, in the wheezy language of the time, the court had determined that behavioural symptoms were such that the community demanded the temporary removal of the child.

This changing reality created something of a vicious circle: if the residence had become, almost without realising it, an operating arm of the youth justice system, the residential realities at Epuni meant the institution was creating further work for the courts. The economics of the place meant that housing different individuals according to their experiences and problems was out of the question.

So somebody with a relatively stable disposition, including those sent down by the courts for fairly light offending, would therefore find himself in the daily company of others with serious criminal records. This included Epuni’s first known killer, a baby-faced 14-year-old Pakeha who in 1977 abducted and murdered a six-year-old, Lynley Stewart, whose body was later found under the floor of the nearby Johnsonville School.

The arrangement also had the potential to cause serious problems among the boys who were simply in Epuni because they required temporary shelter. If a kid of 10 whose worst offence was having a violent mother ended up living cheek by jowl with a 17-year-old murderer — or future murderer, as was the case with Epuni ward Jules Mikus, who in 1987 went on to rape and murder five-year-old Teresa Cormack — it didn’t take a Harvard-trained criminologist — or so it could be argued — to figure out who was going to come out the worse for the experience.

But Howe’s immediate problems weren’t confined to his wards. A rift was also brewing between the institution’s management and its governmental masters. Some of the officials who might once have been counted among its warmest admirers would soon be openly expressing their doubts about what had formerly been the department’s poster-child residence.

Howe’s problems first came to a head barely a week after he had offered his gloomy assessment to the local Rotarians, in an episode that by rights ought to have been a relatively humdrum case of disobedience and punishment. It began when a housemaster caught a group of inmates smoking cigarettes that appeared to have been stolen from a colleague. The boys were told they would lose a few privileges; one of the culprits didn’t like this, and promptly flipped his lid, and for his efforts got frogmarched off to the cellblock. Feeling the treatment of their friend had been a bit harsh, a number of wards made their way over to Howe’s private residence to protest the imposition. No joy.

As the day wore on, the feelings deepened; by the time evening rolled around many of the 37 inmates had decided some form of direct action was now necessary. When the housemaster who had earlier spurred the discontent turned up to supervise the early-evening duties, he was promptly jumped by three of the boys, who in turn were jumped by another group of inmates attempting to save the housemaster from any further physical damage.

Watching the unfolding action from a short distance, the duty matron let out a terrific scream before waddling off at breakneck speed to call the cops. Another staff member sprinted across to the kitchen and armed himself with a carving knife before calling in reinforcements, even as the housemaster who had originally been set upon, his three assailants and those who were trying to save his bacon continued struggling in the passageway.

The cops arrived. Rather than restoring order, though, their presence only prompted a fresh round of pandemonium as the officers strode towards the wings to subdue the ringleaders, with the first of them on the scene suffering a broken nose for his effort. Some of the kids had barricaded themselves inside. Others ran out into the garden and yanked out the wooden stakes to use as makeshift weapons. The fight for Epuni Boys’ Home was on. It lasted half the evening. At least one inmate suffered serious facial injuries and a number of police vehicles were extensively damaged. In the end the leaders of the uprising were restrained, sedated and put into the cells, and order was restored. But it had been a close call.

THE INCIDENT ONLY STRENGTHENED THE DEPARTMENT’S perception that one of its flagship correctional facilities was out of control. Howe had been nowhere to be seen during the strife, it was noted, and the chief’s eventual presence did little to calm matters. Moreover, his absence on this particular night only seemed to underscore a far wider problem: the institution on his watch seemed to be turning loose as hell.

A suitably sarcastic communiqué was duly dispatched by the department’s assistant director-general, Lewis Anderson. He complained loud and long about, for example, Howe’s insistence on rigid punctuality on the part of his wards being in almost inverse proportion to the lack of timeliness he had long observed toward colleagues and his departmental superiors — this type of inconsistent attitude in no small way was felt to have contributed to the recent fiasco. The relationship between these two men, in particular, was clearly spiralling downwards. ‘Personally,’ Anderson raved in the memo, ‘Mr Howe is a nice chap, one can’t help liking him.’ But, as ‘a principal of a boy’s home he doesn’t measure up … One outstanding deficiency in Mr Howe’s make-up is his complete lack of any sense of time. Punctuality is not a word that exists in his vocabulary. If given an appointment, he is likely to turn up one or two hours later and it never seems to enter his head that he should apologise. Those of us who know him well make allowances for his shortcomings because he has been subjected to stress over the years through the mental health of his wife.’

Anderson was shirty about other matters, too, of course, not least the news media. Newspapers and television ‘played up the irresponsible, anti-authority but colourful personalities in our midst’, he reasoned, and it ‘is no wonder that impressionable children think it is smart to be in revolt against decent standards of morality and good citizenship’.

Such criticisms of course need to be seen in the light of Anderson’s reputation — which was made much of in a book of departmental reminiscences published in 1994 — as something of a windbag whose fondness for dispatching slightly hyperbolic judgements from head office was well known within the operation. Outside the department he was perhaps best known for having airily dismissed a group of concerned parents protesting against the use of ECT on some wards as ‘silly people’ and ‘dangerous cranks’. Within the department it was sometimes said that one had not really arrived in the service until a thunderbolt of such criticism, presented in Anderson’s tiny, meticulous handwriting and sage with the author’s intellection, had been received and duly pondered. Recipients sometimes didn’t know what to make of these missives, and were often bemused. Yet whatever the sociological and literary merits of the chief’s insights, the problems he was writing about on this occasion were real and could no longer be swept under the carpet.

The persistent issue of inmates absconding had also taken a depressing turn. In the course of just one month no fewer than 22 boys had escaped from Epuni — more than half the entire cohort — leaving in their wake a slew of burgled houses, converted cars (in one case, a Porsche uplifted from a local showroom) and ransacked commercial premises. Some kids had been known to escape as many as six times. One of the little criminals had fled the country altogether, to Australia, whereupon he proceeded to mail postcards back to the institution boasting of the time he was enjoying.

Indeed, had the correspondent not grown careless and left a return address on one envelope, he might never have been located and shipped back to the Hutt Valley. Another boy, embarrassingly for the department, decamped for the Wellington Town Belt, building himself an impressive bivouac near Duncan Terrace, an arrangement that only came to light weeks later after he was nabbed for the last of 18 shop burglaries, three home burglaries and an assortment of car thefts.

SHORTLY AFTER THE RIOT, ANOTHER MAJOR INCIDENT convinced the department that Epuni Boys’ Home had a full-blown crisis on its hands.

Charlie was the reason for the incident. Charlie was a 15-year-old who had earlier escaped the institution by way of a stolen truck. Charlie was the big kid who really ought to have been hundreds of miles away but instead decided to return to Epuni with a runny-nosed 13-year-old companion with the intention of freeing all his comrades, or at least those who wanted to come with him.

Utu. There’s just no end to those crazy thoughts …

… They turned their backs on him just like they turned their backs on all the Epuni kids. He’s just a nutcase Maori, they used to say, he’ll never be any good for anything but a Maori life and if he’s lucky maybe he’ll get a Maori job. Doesn’t learn. Always getting into trouble. Roaming the streets. So they arrange a meeting with some shrink who gets him to draw pictures and talk about family shit. Epilepsy, the shrink says. The next thing Charlie knows they’ve shoved him away in a fucking mental hospital. In Porirua. Why? All he had done was rob a few places and felt up some girl and firebombed the odd place. Epilepsy? What the fuck did they know about epilepsy? Isn’t that when people go spastic and start shaking? That had never happened to him. Then he ends up at Epuni, with its weird smell of milky chemicals and polished floors, and guys who try to throw blankets over your head and beat the shit out of you. What the fuck were they thinking? Hadn’t he tried to be good? Hadn’t he done everything they told him to do? Didn’t make a fuss. And how did they respond? Had him checked out just the other day by some white joker: ‘We think you should go back to the hospital, sir’ — yeah, ‘sir,’ that’s what this creep said — ‘for further treatment’. The cunt. They’d take him back to Porirua over his dead fucking body. Maybe their dead bodies too. Tonight he was going to fetch out his mates and if anyone got in the way they could expect to pay. Talk about a Maori job fucking well done!

This was the Charlie who came barrelling down Naenae Road seated behind the wheel of a stolen van (the truck had got dumped the day before) at 2.30 am on Friday, September 15, 1972. Riding shotgun sat his younger sidekick cradling a .303, one of a bunch of firearms the pair had stolen the previous evening from a house in Taita. It was their second visit back to Epuni. The first trip had been aborted at the last moment after they caught sight of a senior patrolling the property.

The van pulled to a sudden lurching halt on Riverside Drive. Switching off the ignition, Charlie leaned over and grabbed another weapon, a .22 rifle, checking to see both guns were loaded before giving the nod. Quietly they opened the doors, slipped out onto the street and stood for a moment near the streetlight, two little Jimmy Cagneys in baggy trousers with their collars turned up against a cold westerly breeze, cradling their weapons as they peered toward the nearby institution set under the half-moon.

Talk about luck. A door, almost invitingly left open, was clearly visible just underneath the main night-light. Perfect.

The place was theirs.

Unbeknown to the newcomers, though, the rather inviting scene they beheld was intended to appear that way. Tipped off to their possible presence, crafty old Mr DeJhers had left the door open and illuminated. No doubt the nightwatchman felt well rewarded when he heard the first of the faint footfalls coming from the doorway, whereupon the hulking Dutchman tiptoed off to rouse one of the housemasters to help him secure the troublemakers. As a precaution, they also called the cops.

Unbeknown to the men, however, the boys they were expecting to nab easily were armed and rather more alert than might have been supposed, something they only discovered after bursting through the door of a cubicle where a few moments earlier the pair had been attempting to wake up a fellow inmate. The men found themselves staring down the barrels of a couple of rifles. Freeze. The boys backed out of the building, slowly, their weapons still trained on their would-be captors.

But now it was time for the night’s third surprise: the screech of tyres announcing the cavalry’s arrival, a Kingswood car at one side of the institution, a Comer van on the other. Time to go. And if anybody got in the way, well, as far as Charlie was concerned, that was just going to be too fucking bad.

The boys sprinted through the grounds, making for the alleyway on the outskirts of the main field, the artery that connected the institution to the street leading off to the railway station, only to find their exit blocked by the first cop, who by this point had been alerted to the fact that the boys were packing heat. He fired a warning shot into the air. His quarry spun around and began sprinting in the opposite direction, back towards their parked vehicle on Riverside Drive. Alas, fate seemed to be against them in that direction, too, because another officer, Murray Cameron, was bearing down in the same direction along with his dog, Nick.

Cameron had heard the shot fired into the sky by his colleague, and for a moment he was nonplussed. Cameron knew all about weapons. The guys at the station called him Gunner, a nod to his shooting skills, but this would be the first time, he realised, that he might be called on to parlay those skills against a couple of hot-blooded gun-toting children, now heading in his direction at a fast clip. Just kids. Then again, did it make any difference what age they were? The dog-handler decided to give chase.

Within moments, or so it seemed, he had almost caught up with them outside their parked van. As Charlie attempted to clamber inside, the cop ordered the dog to go for the younger boy. Somehow the kid managed to wrench the door open and nearly get out of harm’s way. His rifle was stuck in the door. Sensing triumph, Cameron bounded over to the vehicle, yanked open the door and made to pull the boy out. The kid darted to one side. It was only then that the young officer remembered Charlie, who now had his loaded weapon cocked and pointing straight at the cop’s chest. Only a foot separated them. He saw the boy’s body tighten, his finger on the trigger, now applying pressure to the firing mechanism. Then, as if from a vast distance, the final click.

EVERY AFTERNOON AT THREE A FULL-FIGURED, slightly stooped old woman named Colleen would emerge from the solitary lift inside the Department of Social Welfare’s district office on Lower Hutt’s High Street pushing a metal trolley clustered with cups and containers of hot water. Bill FitzGerald’s office was the first on the right after the lifts, and custom dictated that the former child welfare chief, who had taken over as director that past July, was among the first to receive a visit from the office tea lady.

On the afternoon of September 15, 1972, Colleen had particular reason to be punctual: the events of the previous evening over at Epuni had left the normally mild-tempered director in a state of considerable agitation. Not only had head office bawled him out about it that morning, details of the whole sorry episode were now splashed across the front page of the Evening Post, with tomorrow’s edition of The Dominion almost certain to follow suit.

Not that FitzGerald could blame the newspapers. It had been a close call. If the older boy’s rifle hadn’t jammed at the last moment, the department would almost certainly have had one death on its hands, maybe more. True, the immediate problem had been sorted out for the moment; the boys, handcuffed to each other, appeared in court that morning, with a lengthy sentence awaiting both of them. But that didn’t address the long-term question of what was happening over at Riverside Drive. Even the mayor of Lower Hutt, John Kennedy-Good, along with local Labour MP Trevor Young, were said, accurately as it transpired, to be planning to lead an angry delegation over to Epuni demanding its immediate closure.

Wearily, one assumes, the director picked up the receiver and dialled head office to discuss how they might best go about restoring sanity. The mild-mannered officer might even have silently offered the kind of oath he was seldom heard to say: damn. Who could blame him? The situation must have seemed like the latest in a growing pile of last straws.

The general staffing situation was plainly chaotic, as indeed it had been for some time, with just one experienced housemaster among the entire staff complement and 17 new appointments rushed through in the first quarter of the year alone. ‘It has been like trying to run the new Rangatira with a crew of barge-hands,’ FitzGerald later wrote. Sooner or later, he added despairingly, the public’s concern ‘is bound to become all too evident’.

His overriding impression, however, even ‘after making allowances for all the difficulties involved, including the increasing sophistication and defiance of the boys and efforts made from all quarters to try and improve the situation’, was that the management of the home had all but collapsed on account of what he said were the ‘inadequacies affecting its operation and purpose’. Howe simply ‘does not delegate or communicate sufficiently for senior or junior staff to feel they belong … senior staff cannot make decisions in his absence. He is not receptive to ideas from staff members’.

And on it went. Probably the only positive thing that might have been said at this point was that Epuni’s problems weren’t as noteworthy as those seen at Fareham House in Featherston, an all Maori girls’ institution, where staff became so exasperated with the behaviour of the inmates that they had simply walked out en masse. Later, the Fareham principal was even run over by a car while attempting to prevent a bunch of wards absconding, leading to an ensuing scene like something out of a nightmarish English school story: kids armed with knives swooping from the trees to conduct sorties in the main building, where a terrified matron and her seamstresses hid in cupboards listening to the children chanting ‘We hate the Child Welfare!’

Still, things were bad enough at Epuni. A blistering four-page memo dispatched by the department’s national director-general, Ian Mackay, concluded that it was high time for the Epuni chief to take stock of his career and decide ‘whether change is personally palatable or not. We clearly cannot continue to experience the succession of emergency situations which, among other things, have embarrassed the Department and the Minister, if there is a chance that changes could bring about any improvement.’ Lest the point of the message be lost on Howe, the director-general added, ‘He should be shown this memorandum.’

That was a bit difficult to do, however, for by this point Howe was on sick leave. Mackay’s next move was to summon a posse of experienced operators — including Hokio Beach’s assistant principal, Mike Doolan, and Howe’s old offsider from the 1960s, Gary Hermansson, who had since moved on to become a senior counsellor at Kohitere — to ride in and sort out the mess, with strict instructions not to leave until normality had been restored.

With a grimace, Doolan recalled the scene that greeted them on their arrival. ‘People were leaving that institution more quickly than they were coming in. It was an absolute hellhole of a place. And because the staff were under pressure to deal with it, they were doing some ludicrous things.’ One night Doolan was awoken by the nightwatchman banging around in one of the corridors. Intrigued, he slipped on a dressing gown and padded off to see what was happening. It turned out that the watchman had waited until all the inmates were asleep before going around their rooms and removing everyone’s shoes. ‘What he didn’t realise, of course, was that he woke everyone up.’ Doolan laughed sardonically at the memory. ‘This was the kind of stupid, stupid stuff that was going on.’ Not that there was that much he could do: ‘Every day I prayed that this cup would pass me by.’

Added Hermansson: ‘I think by that stage things were fairly chaotic. I’m not sure exactly where Maurie was at this stage but there’d been quite a staff turnover and the kids were much more … well, the fine line between being in control and being out of control was fading. It was almost like the inmates had taken over the asylum.’ Rather than dutifully going off to their rooms or whatever else was required of the wards on a particular day, ‘they all just ran off twt anywhere. So we had to call the police while the kids were all out in the community or wherever.’

Hermansson pursed his lips at the recollection. ‘I remember standing there and thinking, you know, there’s just nothing you can do about this. We had once had this kind of agreement between the kids and ourselves that we were in charge and they were able to follow what we did and we could negotiate.’ The social contract had been broken? ‘Exactly, yeah, it was kind of like suddenly everything had turned on its head.’ The institution had become a place of ‘tension, conflict and negativity’.

As far as Hermansson and the others were concerned, the problems seemed almost entirely to be a factor of management and staffing problems brought about by the institution’s inability to face up to, as their report put it, ‘the changing attitudes of youth’. There was, they wrote, an unattended need to meet their desire for ‘self-expression and independence within the limits of what is reasonable in an institutional setting. The frustration at the lack of [this] is expressed in their rebellious and sometimes violent behaviour.’

There followed a salty assessment, signed in the name of Denis Reilly, the acting assistant-director of residential services at the time, which began its managerial critique thus:

[Howe] has built the institution from the start on his own design of rules and systems, and now unfortunately sees any  suggestions for change from his staff or senior officers as a personal judgement or criticism of his methods. He is, quite expertly, able to neutralise these suggestions by his verbose rationalisations …

His immediate controlling officer has been unable to penetrate the protective barrier Mr Howe has built around himself and his administration of the home, although he disagrees with the general rigid, negative tone of the institution. This in turn has helped Mr Howe to reinforce himself in his management cocoon, which may have been prevented if more stronger direct control with follow-up action from his district office level had been given over the past few years.

As for the boys themselves:

[They] are more sophisticated today than ever before. They sense the lack of confidence in staff and react to it aggressively as well as out of a fear for their own security. They resent rigid out-of-date limitations on their independence and their ‘rights’, and express themselves in their own way. They are bored by the lack of positive stimulating activity and see most of their programme for what it is: a time-consuming occupation to help keep them occupied and see the day through. Their lack of ability to conform to this builds up frustrations to the point where they express their emotion in violence or abscond to flee from it and seek excitement and satisfaction elsewhere.

There followed a number of recommendations and yet another blunt assessment of the chief executive’s future prospects: ‘If he is unable to respond to the help that is given, I see no alternative to his transfer.’ Neither circumstance was to eventuate.

A few months later, on April 2, 1973, yet another report was filed by the department’s assistant director, concluding in much the same vein and recommending the chief executive’s transfer out of what was becoming one of the department’s most problematic works in progress. ‘I reluctantly join the long list of those whose unanimous opinion it is that Mr Howe is not adequate as a Controlling Officer,’ Bernard Baker wrote of the principal’s ability to cope with such ‘extraordinarily demanding’ times.

Maurie was devastated. He asked for another chance to sort out the problem. Baker was impressed, and not unsympathetic. He agreed to give him another shot. Partly this was because of Howe’s ‘great strengths in the verbal expression of his ideas’, as he later put it, but also, one suspects, because to have dumped him at this point would almost certainly have meant closing the institution altogether, something the mayor and the police may well have been agitating for, but which the department could not countenance. But it had been a close call.

ON THE AFTERNOON OF JULY 23, 1973, SOCIAL WELFARE inspector Elsie Feist turned up at the door unannounced to see how things were progressing since the events of the previous winter. What followed made for interesting reading in the report she subsequently filed.

The young man who greeted her at the front door may have been an attendant or he may have been a ward — it was a bit hard for her to tell. Little matter. Feist was duly escorted along the main passageway, whereupon she espied another woman of a similar age to her own, shoulders hunched and hands jammed in pockets, shuffling along in the opposite direction, who turned around and frowned at the newcomer.

‘Who are you?’ the woman demanded of the inspector.

‘I was just going to ask you the same question,’ Feist parried.

She was, it transpired, the resident matron, Edith Sweatman, and by Feist’s account what followed was not much of an improvement on their introduction. A somewhat stilted conversation ensued. Sweatman seemed in an oddly lethargic mood, but also angry, in a subdued kind of way, as if she secretly wished her unexpected guest might do everybody a favour by smuggling herself out of the premises in a laundry truck. During their desultory exchange, the inspector made mention of a planned staff meeting; might she attend?

This seemed to rouse the matron from her torpor. Well, yes, she snapped at the guest, there was a regular management meeting, but only male staff members ever went. Why on earth would a woman wish to attend? Feist was no spring chicken — she had been with the department since 1941 and was shortly due to retire — but even she was aghast at the idea of male-only meetings in an era flush with the first wave of feminist consciousness. Could this woman not appreciate that men and women had a contribution to make?

The matron shook her head. No, she said firmly, having women in the boardroom was simply an invitation for a ‘gossip and nag session’. Feist looked at the clipboard she was carrying, noting Sweatman’s age. Fifty-seven. Hmm. This could mean another eight years of service.

Their doubtless informative conversation might have gone on longer had the pair not been interrupted by a car turning in the gate with a new arrival from Palmerston North. As the relevant papers were handed over, the social worker accompanying the boy began dropping hints that it had been a rather long drive and both he and the new inmate were hungry. There was a brief silence. Eventually, the matron half-heartedly offered a cup of tea and, taking the obvious hint, the social worker declined, made his excuses and left as a housemaster bundled the boy off to the cellblock.

The two women continued walking. In the kitchen they spotted another couple of mainstays, the chief cook, Mrs Ambrose, and her offsider, Miss Hart, hunched over the bench furiously paring what was left of a case of Brussels sprouts for the evening meal. The yellowing vegetables appeared to have been in store for some considerable time. Feist turned up her nose. How did these cooks think the boys would feel about getting served such appalling mush? The correct answer, she was told, was that they usually wouldn’t know, because women who worked at Epuni tried to avoid being anywhere within eyeshot of the ‘revolting’ spectacle of the children eating.

Extricating herself from the scene, Feist finally found her way to the staffroom where the regular meeting was about to begin. Apprised of her presence in the building, Maurie and the guys had been waiting a tad impatiently. A projector was set up for the screening of a short film called Discovering Individual Differences. As soon as Feist entered the room, Maurie nodded for the projectionist to hit the lights and start the film. Feist sat down and waited in the dark. And waited. The machine had given up its ghost.

Minutes ticked by as the nominated operator attempted to fix the machine. No luck. Finally somebody made the suggestion to go to the next room for a cup of tea, and out trooped the team. By this point Feist felt her presence was becoming a major distraction. A little later she took her leave to write up yet another critical report on how life was progressing at Riverside Drive.

Her perceptions were no doubt correct as far as they went, but in a way reports such as these also saved the government from looking too hard at its own role in the situation. As one long-time child welfare officer of the period, Michael Lyons, wrote after conducting a similar inspection of Christchurch Girls’ Home, any typical children’s institution in the 1970s was ‘handicapped in almost every way conceivable against doing a reasonable job’, whether on the staffing or budgetary front, a situation that was hardly of their own making. Epuni’s political masters really ought to have been saving some of their verbal violence for themselves.

Not everyone was entirely insensitive. On December 1, 1975, Maurie’s one-time critic, Bernard Baker, the assistant director of social work at the Lower Hutt office, dispatched another of his by now perpetually exasperated memos to the department’s director-general demanding to know how and why the use of Epuni as a ‘holding paddock’ fitted the general purpose of child welfare in New Zealand. ‘There are serious misuses and impossible demands on the place now,’ Baker wrote of the ‘chronically overcrowded’ centre.

The memo spoke of non-existent psychological services, careless police work and an institution ‘coping with everything from big, bad police baiters, through 13- and 14-year-old persistent absconding, car convertors, to psychiatrically disturbed, very upsetting boys [supervised by] an indifferently trained staff’. The memo demanded that a meeting be convened in the new year to urgently address the problems.

The meeting never took place. But the matters raised could not be so easily ignored. Another of the persistent problems highlighted yet again in this report was what appeared to be a chronic lack of staff training both on the job and in terms of academic background, a situation that if anything appeared to have become more pronounced since the operation was absorbed into the new Department of Social Welfare in April 1972 following the amalgamation of the Social Security Department and the Child Welfare Division of the Department of Education.

Not that everyone within the operation saw himself in this way. As former child welfare officer Aussie Malcolm used to say, the country’s social workers — and by extension residential housemasters at Epuni and other institutions like it — had up until this point tended to see themselves as professional, even academic, in their approach. ‘Whether looking back we were as clever as we thought we were might be debatable,’ he added with a chuckle. ‘But at the time we thought we were taking an academic, principled professional approach to managing social work issues in a society that was positive and constructive and forward looking.’

Yet even during that purportedly golden age real training opportunities had been relatively sparse. In the year of Epuni’s establishment, just six child welfare officers around the country had been allowed leave to pursue a two-year diploma course offered by Victoria University in Wellington, the only programme of its type then in academic operation and one that was viewed with scepticism by those in the welfare business who questioned whether formal training of any kind was necessary or even desirable. As one former director, Merv Hancock, used to half-jokingly tell the troops: ‘Consider the rose bush. Its roots are massive and thrive in rotting horseshit. But if you prune the bush it will produce beautiful blooms.’ What this meant, apparently, was that one didn’t need to be highly trained in order to be a cook or cleaner.

For the most part, any of the department’s childcare employees who harboured ambitions to professionalise their skills historically had to make do with a couple of in-service training courses, each lasting a week and held up at Kohitere, devoted to the institutional care of youngsters. A cadet scheme for junior officers, for example, allowed a handful of employees to simultaneously follow a course of study at Victoria while working in the field, but here the participants tended to be field officers rather than residential workers.

Matters did not appreciably improve during the 1960s, although the Department of Social Welfare was by now offering a 12-week training course for newly appointed housemasters, albeit only those who had the time to attend. In the case of Epuni this meant very few of the resident housemasters, or possibly none at all if a survey of the Ministry of Social Development’s collection of records is any guide. (Only one Epuni name features across the lists still kept by the ministry.)

‘We didn’t have a huge skills base among our residential staff of the time, although when I say that I’m reminded that the same probably still applies today,’ said Geoff Comber, noting that the time it might typically take any person to understand the behaviour of ‘delinquent’ children, acquire the skills of group control and develop the confidence to put both into action would probably be at least a couple of years — yet few ever stayed that long.

Overall, fewer than one in two staff employed anywhere by the Department of Social Welfare availed themselves of any kind of staff training, and given the unusually demanding workload at Epuni and the constant turnover of staff, it seems reasonable to assume that the uptake was even lower in Lower Hutt. Then again, it was something of an open question as to why a baker from Petone or a fruit and vegetable grower — as a couple of Epuni employees had been prior to becoming housemasters — should even want to improve his resume. The institution offered no system of performance review or even a recognisable career ladder. As a result, Comber said with a sigh, the institution ‘had more than one or two very strange’ staff members in respect of their administrative techniques.

The insistence on endless lineups offered an example of how this would sometimes play out. ‘When you’re dealing with a group of young kids, even in the best of schools let alone a group of youngsters with behavioural problems, you don’t keep them standing at attention too long,’ Comber said, recalling one confrontation he had over the subject. ‘I mean, that’s a point of organisation, right — you organise them and you move them on.’

One of his colleagues, Tony Weinberg, thought otherwise. ‘Tony was ever the disciplinarian. He was always like, “Who said this?” “Who said that?” “All right, you’ll stay there for another few minutes.” And I’d just walk past and say, “Leave it, Tony.” One day I came back and he was still at it, so I said again, “Leave it, Tony.” By this time Tony was red in the face. And in the finish, I said “Get out, I’ll take over.” And so he walked out — and I’ve never seen him since.’

Small wonder. ‘There was no induction, no training, no nothing,’ agreed Denis McLeod, a housemaster until 1986. McLeod smiled thinly at the memory of his first day on the job in the spring of 1977. Arriving at Riverside Drive after lunch, he had just two hours to be shown around the place and figure out the ropes. ‘Then it was three o’clock, when the kids came back from school, and they were standing in front of me, and I’m thinking, What the fuck am I supposed to be doing?’

McLeod, a former cop, had the kind of background to suss things out, but there were other colleagues, he believes, whose primary qualification for being there had been turning up to a job interview at the right time. ‘If there were all sorts of strange things that were going on at that time,’ he said, ‘it may have been because there were some strange people there at times, people who usually just came in off the street. And bang, that was it … you would suddenly be looking after 40-odd kids. And that’s why control became a very important thing for some of them. Their whole regime was controlled by keys. Keys to open this, keys to unlock that. Everything was centred around the key … within a managerial system that kind of operated as a head-prefect type thing with a subservient staff. But you can only work things that way for so long. Things were bound to happen.’

NIGHT TRAIN

First cell, first love. For as long as men have locked each other in fortified rooms, artists have conjured with the experience’s romantic potential. Some of the great Russian writers dined out on it for decades. At least one German pastor fashioned a deeply affecting theology out of it. The tall, evil, graceful, bright-eyed, black revolutionary writer George Jackson, sent down to Soledad Prison in 1960 for a minor offence and then later to San Quentin, made it seem positively cool.

Plenty of boxers have spent time inside too. Often their incarcerations — or in Ali’s case, threatened incarceration — have turned out to be pivotal moments in their development. But not if you’re a kid.

According to the official literature, the modern use of dedicated cells, or ‘secure units’, in juvenile correctional facilities dates back to the 1950s, when they were instituted in response to the number of absconding children who seemed to be running away from the ‘homes’ nearly as fast as the government could build them.

But a closer reading of the historical record shows the practice found favour much earlier in the piece. Similar units known as ‘detention yards’ — open-air cages designed for the containment of what the parliamentary record of the time refers to as ‘the hardened offenders and defectives of a low type’ — were first put to use by the education department in 1903. These enclosures were designed in response to ‘a recognition of the absolute necessity for exceptional treatment of a number of boys who might be termed “incorrigibles” … who are at all times and under all conditions a source of contamination’ to other inmates. The pens usually consisted of a piece of ground enclosed by a high fence with a portion covered over like a shed, presumably for use in wet weather, under which ‘the delinquents do such work as is possible … and they are subjected to, and thoroughly need, very strict discipline’.

Each yard had its special attendant who would accompany the imprisoned boys out for meals in the shared eating space. The period of confinement would last for anything from a few hours to 17 months. The authorities seemed to have liked it as much as their wards hated it. As they used to say at the Burnham school, ‘no stronger proof’ could be adduced of the success of the treatment than its massive unpopularity among the boys.

Nor did they like it at Epuni, where even some of the more initially demure inmates were known to slip out of character as soon as the metal doors were shut behind them. The institution’s notebooks abound with stories of kids freaking out, banging their heads against the wall until they bled, falling on the floor and assuming a foetal position for hours on end, or screaming every time they heard a sudden noise. According to one government survey conducted years later, as many as 90 per cent of suicide attempts in all residences at the time occurred in the ‘secure’ blocks.

In the early days Epuni had made do with a couple of rooms that were relatively secured, with thicker glass and a pine-edge ceiling. Alas, one of the kids hit on the idea of standing on a tallboy and pushing his head through the ceiling, clambering onto the roof and making off. After one too many such escapes the department decided something more secure was required, and in 1968 called in the concrete layers. The resultant yard, located at the end of the institution’s junior wing, was indeed a proper cellblock, complete with reinforced doors, concrete walls and armoured windows in each of the four tiny rooms, two on either side of a small passageway that was always kept lit, surrounded on the outside by another security barrier in the unlikely event that somebody managed to break out of a cell.

At the end of the cellblock was a larger cell, or activities room, where the boys would be allowed for brief periods of silent exercise. So much silence. So few books. Boys who had been placed in the unit for absconding, in particular, would not be allowed to read any literature until their second day, ostensibly because they were said to be in need of sleep, but possibly as a way for them to better meditate on their transgressions.

Among the other rigidly enforced rules was a ban on other boys attempting to communicate with their cell-bound fellows, a prohibition that introduced some fear but also a kind of mystique for those stuck inside, who were also forbidden to communicate with the boys who brought in the meals on a metal trolley, which was typically unloaded and placed on top of a plastic toilet seat which served as a makeshift table.

Even staff members were urged to communicate wherever possible using only nods and gestures. Thus, the only sounds usually to be heard tended to be the jingling of keys, the unlocking of doors, and perhaps the music of James Brown & The Famous Flames.

Epuni saw itself as simply working as best it could to get its kids to stay put. Besides, it was not as if it was the only institution to have reached this conclusion. Soon enough, without any overall policy guiding them, most of the other youth facilities had followed suit. By the 1970s 14 out of the country’s 21 youth facilities operated a ‘secure’ unit of some description, ranging in size from two to 19 cells and totalling 98 overall. Over the course of any given year during this time the cells held around 2500 wards, typically for a period of up to a few days but in some cases for up to a month.

Some institutions made greater use of this system than others. Kohitere, for example, kept boys locked up for an average of 11.7 days, while girls admitted to places such as Kingslea tended to stay longer, in at least one case for up to 10 weeks, partly because of what was seen as the unusual trauma involved in admitting females. Nor was the prospect of getting pasted down for lice the worst experience associated with the cellblocks. At the Bollard Girls’ Home in Auckland, for instance, new admissions — without exception and irrespective of age — also underwent examinations for STDs, a procedure dating back to the industrial schools of the early 1900s based on an assumption — and a blatant double standard when compared to boys — that sexual activity had something to do with the girls’ admission.

At Bollard the girls were stripped, given dressing gowns and taken to the residence’s nursing clinic for a vaginal examination. ‘Mick Jagger’, they called it. These examinations were conducted with the child in foot stirrups or restrained by staff members. Many girls found the experience upsetting. According to Lorraine Katterns, a social worker at the institution, they would often act up after they were taken back to the cellblock, leading in turn to other deprivations, including the confiscation of the girl’s mattress, leaving her to sleep on the floor, or longer time in the cells.

And yet, from the department’s point of view, the practice enjoyed the support of the people who counted. Law enforcement officials were okay with it. Judges sometimes went as far as stipulating that wards be kept in the secured facilities for appreciable periods, although this would create its own problems given that the facilities had never been designed with longer stays in mind. Most social workers and various mental-health experts didn’t see any problem with it, either, and even those who had reservations tended to be ambivalent at worst. The same appeared to be true of the general public.

After all, as the department’s director-general would sometimes remind listeners rhetorically, how else were these youngsters ever to be defused, treated, evaluated and even protected from themselves? All new admissions tended to be ‘generally aggressive and/or bewildered, high on adrenalin, resistant to being there and far from in tune with the aims of the institution’, Mackay argued in one public statement.

‘While they are in the secure they are given a chance to eat and sleep on a regular basis, something they have probably been missing for some time, get close individual attention from the Attendant who is always there, and generally have the opportunity to think about why they are in this predicament. In other words they are faced with the reality of the cause and effect of their behaviour … As in general social welfare work, the punishment motive is non-existent as far as the institution itself is concerned.’

Epuni’s principal agreed. ‘If there were problems with the boys,’ Howe later explained, ‘we might use the secure unit for a day, or two days, or even for a three-day period. And yes, that went on for quite some time. Then at the latter stage, the number of offences seemed to be on the increase with the kids. We were getting assaults, drugs and car conversions and burglaries and so on. So I used to admit them to the secure unit, and my secure staff had the job of discussing these issues with them. I would usually pop in at least once a day, as well, and spend a wee bit of time having a chat to the various boys. I would expect to hear from the staff within a day or so what they thought. “Do we keep this lad in here any longer then?” I’d ask. “Is he responding? Is he showing an interest in coming out and staying put?”

‘And so forth. They had the task of discussing the future, the sorts of behaviour that we expected in the Home, and that this was an experience as far as they were concerned. The first time having a door shut on them without a door handle or a key by which to get out, a point was sort of brought home to them where they now were. You know, trying a bit of the old tough-love thing if you like, to a certain extent. And then we would bring him to the open institution to take part in the group we had there.’

ONLY MUCH LATER WOULD THE MINISTRY OF SOCIAL Development acknowledge that — with the exception of the odd arrival who might have been in a genuinely agitated state and in clear need of pacifying — this perceived solution almost certainly exacerbated the problems it was intended to address. What’s more, the increased numbers of inmates being shipped to ‘secure’ often led to overcrowding in a wing supervised by a staff who were more often than not untrained.

It has been speculated that the units were always as much a response to the inability of these staff to cope with the everyday routines and regulations of the homes as fulfilling any serious purpose. From as early as 1974 the department was issuing communiqués to staff reminding them that children in cells were entitled to daily showers, adequate clothing and food, and regular visits, stipulations that were not only fitfully followed at best but extraordinary insofar as they suggested that the government was entrusting some of the country’s most vulnerable young lives to the care of individuals who might be unmindful of such requirements.

‘Close custody’ — the preferred locution — was supposed to be terminated as soon as the ‘emergency period’ had passed and the child’s behaviour was deemed to be stable. But what constituted an emergency period? A night? Three days? A fortnight? Not even the voluminous manuals shed much light on the question.

Despite its wards’ kaleidoscopic variety of backgrounds, Epuni doggedly kept to the practice of incarcerating virtually all newcomers, regardless of age, mental state or their actual reason for being admitted. At the same time the secure wing lacked even a full-time staff presence, with the unit being checked on every half-hour or so by an attendant working in the main building.

The boys were only ever allowed out of their cells, briefly, to complete an exercise regime consisting of press-ups or running on the spot, or else being assigned to cleaning the unit, before being shunted back inside, a monotonous routine only broken by the arrival of meals brought in on trays and served with plastic cutlery.

Administrators at Epuni could at least have argued that their cellblock was more attractive than those in operation at some of the other youth centres. At Weymouth, a long-term girls’ institution that had been established during the early 1970s in South Auckland, for instance, not only was there a 19-bed cellblock but the back and front of the rest of the grounds were also ringed with a three-metre-high barbed-wire fence. Marek Powierza, the principal at Weymouth, used to argue that the fence was a comforting touch for the institution’s wards because it gave them a sense of freedom, in that so long as they were enclosed within it they did not need to be locked up in the cells.

Others had a different view of what the experience might be doing to the wards, or at least those who managed to break out. Speaking to the first of several inquiries into the practice, in 1977, a Mrs Lyall shared the story of discovering a boy who had somehow managed to escape from ‘secure’ and hide himself in her backyard. The child, she said:

was like a cringing animal. He was also bleeding from barbed wire scratches he got escaping, and soaking wet. He said, ‘Don’t let those men get me.’ ‘What men?’ ‘Those men chasing me.’ He was covered in bruises, old and new ones. The muscles of his legs were knotted from PT. If I hadn’t seen it, I would never have believed it. He was wearing a pair of boxer shorts.

I bathed him and put him to bed. It was really shocking. He wouldn’t let me put sticking plaster on the cuts because he  said they’d just pull it off. We didn’t know what to do so we called the police.

They took him back to the Home, wrapped in a blanket — I had thrown his clothes away. He cried and held on to us, and we promised to go and see him. I felt like Judas. But we were never allowed to go and see him or take him out, we could only write to him. In the end a lady from Social Welfare rang and said he’d been shifted. They blocked all contact. You’d think they would welcome somebody taking an interest in a child and wanting to develop a relationship.

He was a tiny 11. He didn’t seem to know why he was there — probably for truanting or something. We asked why he had run away.

‘I want to go home. I want my mother.’

We should have taken him to a doctor, I see now, but sometimes you don’t think straight.

They aren’t homes, they’re prisons.

To critics like these the exercise seemed to be as much about letting newcomers know what awaited them if they ever stepped out of line as it was an isolated technique for dealing with the odd inmate in a state of high distress. As a mandatory policy, it was ‘sick’, complained Bill Olsen, a self-described concerned citizen, in an impassioned letter to justice minister Martyn Finlay. ‘Most of these boys come from homes where they have never been given any warmth or love. Their greatest need is to have a sense of security and belonging rather than a cold cell. It’s no wonder that so many of the young offenders are going on to become adult offenders if the current practice of Social Welfare institutions is to be a junior prison.’

Added V.H. Colgate, another ‘concerned citizen’ who lodged one of a number of official complaints: ‘These cells smell more of retribution administered in prison rather than a “boys’ home”. While a few boys might be unsettled and need special arrangements, it is criminal for the state, as a matter of routine, to place boys in cells. Some day in a future enlightened age we will look back as we now do on birching. What research evidence has the Social Welfare Unit come up with to show that this type of prison cell placement cuts down on the rate of re-offending?’

The department had no such research-based evidence. Rather, it argued, the incarceration period offered a ‘well-defined programme’ designed to prepare a new ward for entry to the wider institution. Yet the evidence for this, too, was pretty thin. Yes, there was a requirement that these children in cells be ‘constructively occupied’ with suitable activities. But in the scores of testimonies reviewed and former inmates interviewed in the course of researching this work no former ward recalled the existence of any such programme other than an hour of daily ‘PT’, consisting largely of push-ups and running on the spot.

As for the plan for using the period of incarceration to foster social awareness — in, for instance, the sharing of meals in some common room — this, too, seems to have been more anticipated than actual.

It was only as relatively late as 1985 that the department’s own literature acknowledged that the cellblocks at Epuni and elsewhere were a form of punishment and it no longer behoved the institutions to bandy about therapeutic terminology in describing their function. ‘It pays to be aware that if parents created a spartan lockable bedroom in which they punished their children for long periods of time, the department would prosecute and probably gain guardianship of the children,’ one memo acknowledged.

A year later the department’s lawyers weighed in, advising that the courts had no legal basis for remanding children in cells and that the institutions were also in breach of health regulations for insisting that incarcerated wards eat meals on their own in a room with an uncovered toilet. The following year yet another memorandum was issued advising institutions that the practice probably had never had any legal basis at all.

Some of the institution’s administrators always begged to differ. Geoff Comber had few doubts about the efficacy of the practice. ‘In my view, the right place for those kids was in a secure area separate from any other group,’ he pointed out with a shrug, ‘because if you’d put them in with the rest of them as a separate group, you’d often get real difficulties.’ For the kids themselves, too, it seemed the correct thing. ‘They caught up on their sleep. They got three square meals a day. They were showered, given a change of clothes. It was quiet there.’

There were other considerations. One night Comber was called to a cell that was being shared by a couple of new arrivals, who were beseeching him to come inside to help with an unspecified problem. Comber felt a surge of apprehension. Something told him he shouldn’t accept the invitation, at least not on his own. ‘You get an instinct on these things — it was the way they were standing, the sideways looks, the nervousness.’

Comber played a bit of squash, but the slightly stooped, bespectacled administrator was no champion fighter. Leaving the door locked, he zipped back to his desk, grabbed the telephone and phoned a colleague, asking him to come and stand cover while he attended to the inmates. Sure enough, when the wardens eventually ventured into the cell, they found that the boys were packing lino-cutters.

Other employees were not as fortunate. One of the inmates, Tony, had been placed in ‘secure’ for a small offence, but for reasons that were never made clear ended up in the block for a fortnight. He seethed. Eventually, the 13-year-old decked one of the attendants with a can of Maurie’s beloved White Lily polish. Blood streaming down his forehead, the housemaster staggered back into the passageway, slamming the door shut and activating a security button, which locked all the doors and set off an alarm to call for assistance.

It had been a near thing. Asked 40 years later about the assault, and whether he regretted it, the perpetrator quipped, ‘Well, perhaps you should direct that question back to him, if he is still alive. Ask him if he is sorry for locking up children in solitary confinement for days or weeks at a time.’

It’s a question that others are still asking the relevant authorities — nowadays most often in courtrooms.

THE GIRL WHO KICKED IN DOORS

Now the years started passing in flashes, like postcards caught in the Wellington wind, things moving so fast that every time one blinked it felt like something had changed, something new had swirled into the picture. The Springbok tour. The Lange crowd. Anti-nuclear legislation and the gay rights bill. And out in the capital’s northern satellite city, an earlier postcard arrived, mailed in from a faraway place and personally delivered by its famous subject.

Las Vegas: the same town where in 1971 Sonny Liston died in mysterious circumstances, now also the final resting place for Muhammad Ali’s boxing career, impaled and embalmed after the three-time champion staged a charade of a comeback match against Larry Holmes at the close of the decade. Within a couple of years it would be known — and how sadly fitting this would be — that the decade’s greatest fighter was also manifesting Parkinson’s syndrome (tremors, slurred speech, a halting gait, glazed eyes), the result of absorbing some 20,000 shots to the head and neck, most of them received during and after the time of the Manila fight. It was a powerful reminder, if one was needed, that many professional boxers who revel in taking punishment — like many boys who come of age inside correctional facilities — die young no matter how old they live to be.

Before exiting the scene, however, Ali made a couple of interesting trips. One was to an inauspicious school in New York where a young pupil named Michael Tyson — bespectacled, pudgy and with such a lisp — was sufficiently moved by seeing his hero that he decided to dedicate his life to following in Ali’s irrepressible dancing footsteps. The other was to the Hutt Valley.

On February 23, 1979, against all expectations, Ali arrived in town to speak at a once-in-a-lifetime dinner in nearby Trentham — and great was the excitement at Epuni Boys’ Home, too, where a brisk trade was going on in the Marvel comics the fighter was now starring in. At $75 a head, the dinner was the most expensive event of its kind ever to be held in the region. But the main difficulty faced by its promoters was convincing a dubious public that Ali was actually theirs for the evening.

Yet he materialised. Not just for the planned speaking engagement itself, but criss-crossing the area over the course of a grey-lidded wet day for a slew of impromptu public appearances with a slightly bemused press corps in tow trying to figure out why, among other things, this character held such an appeal to disadvantaged young people.

In a front-page story a staff reporter from the capital’s morning newspaper, The Dominion, marvelled at the affinity darker-skinned younger fans seemed to have for the star — playfully ‘singling out Maoris’, as she put it, ‘baiting and sparring, and giving them something to boast about for the rest of their lives’.

Meanwhile back in the Hutt Valley, shortly after his arrival Ali addressed another group of his beloved youngsters at a school hall. He told them he had been very lucky because when he was 12 he had a purpose in his life: ‘Ten people with a purpose in their lives are worth more than 1000 people without a purpose.’ He might have gone on had a bell not sounded for lunch. Quick as a wink, Ali spun around, raising his guard and jabbing in the direction of a startled schoolteacher standing nearby. ‘Is that the school bell or the punch bell?’ he said to laughter.

Later he also made a point of meeting with some of the disadvantaged children in care, whose unexpected benefit from the visit would be a new minibus purchased with a portion of the proceeds.

If it is true that we feel the most for those in whom we catch a fleeting glimpse of ourselves, such gestures suggested much.

‘After all the bragging that I do, I’ve just got to win,’ the 37-year-old champion told his young followers in the Hutt Valley. ‘It’s your attitude in life that makes things happen. You’ve got to have the right attitude. Never say, “I cannot.”’

By some accounts, he didn’t fare as well at the hands of the region’s older denizens at the major scheduled event. ‘I had this feeling that a lot of the older white guys in the room, most of whom had probably never been in the presence of a black American, were throwing off at him behind his back,’ Bernard Lagan, a reporter who covered the event, recalled. ‘He was so physically imposing standing there in this funny function room among the Hutt Valley elite, really imposing but also soft-spoken and incredibly gracious, and it was like people didn’t know what to do or say.’

Earlier, a less embarrassed young soul wanted to know what Ali made of the culture he’d fleetingly seen in the Hutt Valley up until that point. What about those young Maoris who had flocked to his side at the airport? What did he make of them? ‘If the world could be more like New Zealand it would be a good place,’ the fighter responded softly. ‘The dark people here don’t seem to be mistreated, you know, they don’t seem unhappy.’

A growing number of locals begged to differ.

A FEW YEARS ON, IN MAY 1984, A TELEPHONE OPERATOR by the name of Naida Glavish hit on the idea of answering calls with the standard Maori greeting, kia ora. Disturbed by the bilingual liberties his Auckland-based employee was taking, Glavish’s supervisor asked her to desist, but she didn’t. She was promptly demoted. Soon the legal knives were drawn. But what might once have been a routine employment dispute quickly became a key moment in a wider cultural conversation that was now circling relentlessly on the race issue. Glavish’s refusal to budge set something big in motion, a national debate not just about the place of the Maori language in New Zealand commercial life, but also about the place of the country’s Maori citizens, period, and how it might be improved.

The desire for some kind of cultural dénouement was no less keenly felt on the residential childcare front. What was taking place outside Epuni was a highly charged political affair, but set-ups like Epuni were unquestionably part of the political landscape, too; their stark relevance to the Maori population was very obvious. According to one study, more than eight in 10 residential wards at any of the country’s state-run institutions were Maori or Pacific Islanders, with the same groups constituting as few as 1 per cent of all administrative or managerial staff.

Energised by what was happening elsewhere, tribal leaders were now not hesitating to let their feelings be known, buttonholing anybody within the Department of Social Welfare who would listen with the argument that these thousands of children were theirs and the time for relinquishing their care had come. ‘It’s not like they were saying these kids weren’t getting into trouble,’ recalled Geoff Comber, the former Epuni deputy principal who went on to head residential operations in Auckland, ‘but rather that they could do a better job of looking after their own.’

Not that Comber needed convincing. Sure, he didn’t always like it when the department’s Maori critics accused him and the others of doing little other than locking up brown-skinned youngsters, or pointed out that virtually everyone responsible for closing the doors also happened to be white. ‘But they were right,’ he acknowledged.

This realisation was also being borne in on John Grant, the department’s director-general in the mid-1980s. He urged the department to listen to its critics. After all, Grant reasoned, it wasn’t as if they had done a lot of listening up until that point, or really had any consistent idea of how to improve things. ‘And in the end,’ Comber said, ‘it went beyond that, to the point where we had to question the entire raison d’être of residential services. Did we really need them at all?’

In the official quest to confront this issue, the mid-1980s was already shaping up to be a banner period for Social Welfare. At the turn of the decade the department was operating 21 residences with an overall bed-capacity of 738. Thousands of kids were now being processed each year. Business was booming, literally, for the institutions came at a price: $55 million (in 2009 dollars) a year in operational costs alone, or $1.4 billion in total since the initiative picked up steam in the late 1950s.

But even as the residences clocked up historically high levels of activity, their purpose was being questioned as more and more people, including for the first time a growing number within the system, were starting to ask if these places had possibly become — never mind the costs for a moment — more of a social burden than anything they were ever intended to fix.

It wasn’t just the perennial issues of the cellblocks, inadequate staff training and the ongoing use of questionable therapeutic techniques. Rather, as the Glavish controversy highlighted, it was the wider awareness of the country’s unresolved race relations problems that was changing most significantly and quickly. An institution like Epuni, of course, was not unmindful of such matters. It could hardly be otherwise: evidence of what others were beginning to wake up to had been in front of the institution for two decades, and those who worked at Epuni were already very familiar with the disconnect, and indeed had for some time made a genuine effort to at least improve their public relations with the parents of Maori wards.

Typically these PR exercises would involve arranging visits and showing parents around the buildings, and duly writing up the more favourable notices offered by the visitors, such as one on December 4, 1980, when a half-dozen Maori parents pronounced they ‘had no idea of the extent and trouble to which we go in our efforts to better the circumstances of the boys placed in our care’. As the tenor of such notices suggests, though, the awareness carried little self-criticism, much less an awareness of how drastically things were really changing outside, the scale of the shift that was being experienced. No more South African rugby tours. No more Cool White Kids from the suburbs gathering together as they did in the late 1970s to burn the vinyl recordings by black disco artists and celebrate the pure white sounds of the punk acts. No more telephone operators losing their jobs for uttering Maori salutations. No more celebration of New Zealand’s race relations as being the envy of the world.

‘In the nicest possible way,’ Aussie Malcolm later said, ‘we were white and we knew what our role was. Our role was there to move our sooty cousins forward. There’s this delightful racist element in what I’ve just said, but we were supremely unaware of it. We visited maraes. We understood marae protocol. We were very forward-thinking liberal progressive white people. It never occurred to us that we were racist even though, looking back, it was bloody condescending, wasn’t it?’

Yet the question of how to improve the situation had the best minds of those operating the residences at an impasse, and now, finally, others a little higher in the operational chain were trying to think outside the box. Most notably among them was one of John Grant’s brightest offsiders, the one-time principal turned residential services chief, Mike Doolan.

Doolan, a sporty-looking administrator with genuinely liberal impulses and an intelligent voice that projected weight, was already convinced that the children’s institutions were fundamentally incapable of delivering the kind of outcomes that they had been set up to achieve. He sensed that another era was approaching. His feelings had begun to crystallise in the late 1970s, when he was managing the Kingslea facility in Christchurch and becoming more and more concerned with the likely legacy such institutions were leaving for the country.

An important incident for Doolan involved a young Pacific Islander at Kingslea, a strapping girl capable of taking more than one man out in a fight if the spirit so moved her, whose situation seemed to deteriorate violently with each passing week she spent inside. More often than not the girl found herself locked up in Kingslea’s cellblock. That didn’t seem to improve the situation. Lying on her back, she would rhythmically thump the steel door with such force, and over such a long period, that it would eventually spring open. The institution could not contain her. And the pathetically forceful way in which this brown-skinned youngster made the point gave Doolan pause. Brooding on the matter, he hit on what at the time seemed like a radically novel idea: rather than keeping her confined in a government ‘home’, why not send the girl back to her own home? It seemed worth a shot. He signed her out with his fingers crossed.

Over the following weeks, with growing anticipation, he waited for the middle-of-the-night emergency call that conventional wisdom held was sure to follow. It never came. Nothing more was ever heard of the ward. ‘Home was where she wanted to be,’ Doolan realised. ‘And that taught me a big lesson.’

Part of the lesson was a simple truism about life: overwhelmed with detail, we often lose sight of the individual. But there were other considerations. Doolan started to think about the residential system itself. Like any serious enterprise, whether love or war or two guys fighting, systems can be seen as games. A move is made, begetting a countermove, another move, and so on. Eventually, what one ends up with may bear little resemblance to what started it in motion, causing one to take a hard second look at the opening gambit that set the train in process.

The residences had become a bit like that, too, and Doolan was starting to think anew about how the system that had originally been intended to provide a haven for children had somehow morphed into its 1980s manifestation — untold thousands of children in ‘care’, kids locked in cells, kids getting shunted off to mental hospitals, and all the rest. And so many of them brown-skinned! It was as if the system had now become a hostile entity in its own right. Although how hostile it was — and how much dismantling it required — Doolan was yet to fully appreciate.

Suddenly, or so it seemed, nearly everything he considered appeared to be underscoring the same point as the girl who kicked in doors. The kids he saw, the parents he spoke with, the reports he scrutinised … it was like a practical example of the philosopher Ian Hacking’s notion of ‘dynamic nominalism’, the idea that as soon as one posits a new category, people and events will sort themselves into it and behave according to the description, thus contriving a new way of thinking. Doolan was starting to understand that the system that many people agreed needed fixing was in need of something more radical. All this talk of improved outcomes and better delivery of services — maybe that, too, was so much hot air. Maybe it was time for those staffing the residences to follow the example of the girl who had checked out for good and gone home?

Easier said than done, of course, but somebody, Doolan realised, had to start the ball rolling, applying the same kind of tough-love to the institutions that the institutions had been dispensing with a fairly free hand for nearly 25 years. ‘Try as you might to change it,’ he said, ‘it’s an unnatural, abnormal environment in which one ends up managing the effect created by that environment as much as the difficulties that brought these kids to you in the first place.’

All the external messages Doolan was receiving said as much too. Among the eloquent reports he carefully studied was one filed by a social worker, Lainley Cowan, in Wellington, written up in the early 1980s after visiting Kohitere:

When we sat with our young people at lunch, we looked around and there were a lot of others crying — it’s making me sad [now]. When I asked what was happening, [it] was that those young men came from more distant places and they had no contact, not only with their families, but not even the social workers who had sent them there. And … here we were kissing these young men in a Maori way, sitting down with them and bringing greetings from other colleagues … and from their families … and all around us young men were weeping, not having had contact with their families or their social worker for sometimes months … And it just reinforced my feelings … that although we didn’t know what else to do with the young people — and we had precious little to offer — that removing them from everything was not going to help them when they went back.

Much the same tune was being sung by most of those involved in a succession of inquiries and reports commissioned within the department and outside of it during this period of Doolan’s personal awakening, a period in which the Human Rights Commission was also fielding a series of complaints about the treatment of predominantly Maori children in the department’s Auckland operation — complaints that the commission would ultimately uphold.

The first of these inquiries was held on June 11, 1978, at the Trades Hall in Auckland, and was perhaps most notable for being the only forum of this type to include the testimony of any state wards. Among them was Cruise Epiha, who participated in a depressing question-and-answer session on the experience of being kept in one of Social Welfare’s cellblocks. Here, he said, he was periodically joined by

other fellas who mucked around and kept on getting sent to Secure. The PT area was pretty small. We wore shorts and a T-shirt. I had to undress in front of two or three housemasters when I got there. I was too scared to say I didn’t want to undress in front of any of them. Then you had to have nit stuff rubbed in your head and then into the showers. It was ‘thank you, sir’ all the time. But you aren’t spoken to much, only head nods — out of cell, into shower, out of shower, into cell.

Could you explain the head-nodding?

Oh, he comes in the door after you’ve had your shower. He looks at you, then he nods at your head. ‘Thank you, sir.’ Then you shake your towel out and you go like this [pulls waistband of shorts forward] so he checks you while you stand outside the door, and then he goes like that [nods] again. You go, ‘Thank you, sir,’ and you go back to your room and stand outside your door and then he does that [nod] again and then you go inside the door.

He doesn’t talk to you?

He just nods his head. I knew one guy that was beaten. He was jumped on and hit on his bed for making noises while he was lying on his bed reading a comic. Another boy has fits.

Is he an epileptic?

I don’t know. He’s a state ward.

Did you notice anything about the colour of the staff?

About a quarter of the kids were their colour [indicates white males], mostly they were my colour. The staff were mostly their colour.

This was the kind of thing that broke Doolan’s heart — and ultimately the back of the system he helped oversee.

EPUNI HAD GREAT HOPES THAT IT MIGHT YET quieten the critics by sticking to its last. The institution believed — or at any rate hoped — that things might be improved by enhancing its physical surroundings.

The late 1970s had already seen a buzz of building activity at Riverside Drive, including new accommodation for clerical and managerial staff and an increase in the facilities devoted to sewing, clothing and food storage, and more was planned. In late 1982 a one-piece fibreglass swimming pool was added.

The following year the department set aside $20,000 for the purchase of a prefabricated building to erect over the pool. A redesigned medical room was built, a dressing room added to the gym, the boys’ bedrooms were carpeted, the driveway resealed and a cafeteria-style layout was introduced in the dining area. Other improvements were successfully sought. Epuni was expanding its operation not so much as if there was no tomorrow, but as if there would be endless tomorrows just as soon as the criticisms swirling outside the institution subsided.

This air of optimistism extended to an impressive ceremony held on the evening of March 9, 1984 to mark Maurie’s quarter-century at the helm, an upbeat occasion during which three trees were planted to honour the chief’s lifelong dedication to the residence: a rata, a totara and a kauri.

To put it mildly, Epuni’s principal didn’t entirely buy into the way Maori issues were being parlayed down in Wellington. He did not appreciate the way outsiders were accusing the system he worked in of racism. He particularly disliked the way people seemed to be looking at the matter through what he felt was entirely the wrong end of the telescope. On the whole, as he later put it, he believed that the ethnic problem — if the whopping disconnect between an overwhelmingly white system and its largely brown beneficiaries could even be called that — wasn’t so much to do with a Pakeha system failing the nation’s Maori, but rather the nation’s Maori failing to apprehend the Pakeha rules and conditions. The challenge was therefore to educate Maori inmates in how to cope with the various processes of the Pakeha way that these kids were missing out on.

‘They’d come from a rural family where, you know, they were still living in the past with their right legs off the ground,’ he explained. ‘They were urbanised, they were on their own and they didn’t seem able to get back to the family or marae, and as a result they were missing out. They couldn’t actually cope with the times of stress.’ True, there had been meetings with some Maori elders to find more creative ways around the problem, but these usually went nowhere.

‘Why is it,’ Maurie asked one visiting tribal delegation from Masterton, ‘when at a time where I might have had 50 Maori boys through, I’ve had no Chinese boys through?’

They couldn’t say, or at any rate they seemed disinclined to answer.

‘I guess,’ the principal told them, ‘it’s because they’re taught to respect their elders!’

Bowing to the now considerable pressure, though, Epuni did institute an ethnic programme of sorts, for both staff and boys, called taha Maori, which included elementary lessons in the language, bone-carving classes for the inmates and a project aimed at developing a whare wananga using carvers and weavers brought in to work on site.

Doolan was frustrated with Maurie, ‘a lovely guy’, as he put it, ‘but somebody trained in a model of care that left him completely out of his depth in the new environment.’ Epuni itself had long left him cold, too, at least since his experience running the ‘hellhole of a place’ following the big disturbances of the early 1970s.

But Doolan’s frustrations were much wider than that; he felt stymied by most of the residential managers, even by himself, recognising as he did that everyone had become captured by the system they were working in. ‘If anyone was going to be institutionalised it was us,’ he later admitted with a rueful chuckle. ‘Remember that we stayed in those places much longer than the kids did.’ But what pained him the most was the realisation that he still lacked the emotional courage to apply the kind of radical solution that he knew intellectually was now needed.

SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS, IF NOT THAT ELUSIVE inner resolve, Doolan took to the road, travelling with a group called the Maori Perspectives Committee — a group of senior departmental employees who regularly toured and met with local Maori elders, inviting them to give their perspectives.

Early in 1986 Doolan and his team arrived one evening at Te Takere Marae, near Patea, in south Taranaki. A younger woman at the gathering recognised him from previous encounters, only this time she seemed to sense something was different about the man who represented the residential system that she had come to detest. He was listening more. Didn’t seem at all peremptory.

Perhaps he hadn’t really changed at all, she thought while getting to her feet, but he seemed like someone who wanted to, even as he asked those present for suggestions on how the department’s policies might better be fashioned within the existing set-up. The pair looked at each other in silence for a moment. Then the woman walked over to Doolan, tears now rolling down her cheeks, and started to speak.

‘Mr Doolan,’ she began, ‘with the best will in the world you cannot do this for us.’

Doolan was having problems keeping his eyes free of mist as well. The effect of the woman’s words had been almost devastating. ‘That was when it moved from here to here for me,’ Doolan explained years later, pausing mid-flight during an interview in his native Christchurch to point first at his head and then his heart.

She had brought home, finally, ‘the fact that we couldn’t do it, but also that we were working with the best will in the world. And hearing both of those things meant everything to me.’ It was like the girl who kicked in doors all over again. Only this time, Doolan knew, he had what he needed to make good on the conviction.

THE WOMAN AT THE CENTRE OF THIS PASSING BUT pivotal scene never fully realised the effect her words caused until nearly a quarter-century after they were uttered. ‘That’s very interesting — I never really knew that,’ Tariana Turia admitted. The Maori Party co-leader, as she had since become, did not appear at all displeased; curious, perhaps, and a little reflective, and possibly a bit puzzled why the penny had taken so long to drop.

In the 1980s Turia and her husband George had taken a very active interest in the state of the children’s residences, in particular the old Holdsworth School in Wanganui (a long-term institution for under-12s established on the site of the former New Zealand Friend’s School, administered by the Quaker Society, that cared for around 500 boys during its existence) but also the other facilities such as Epuni, from where a significant number of the Holdsworth boys were drawn.

In the beginning their interest was mainly pastoral. The couple would take kids out for afternoon trips and sometimes weekends away up the river to places like Jerusalem. Sometimes they visited the Wanganui institution to put down a hangi. As they got to know the wards, though, they also got to hear their stories, not only about Holdsworth but also the other residences, the whole system, really, and, especially, about what was going down at Lake Alice.

Their feelings deepened. ‘The whole way in which these places functioned felt really abnormal,’ Turia said. ‘I suppose one could have looked at somewhere like Holdsworth as a boarding school in some sense, but the kids weren’t there because they wanted to be there. Nor were they there because their families wanted them to be there. They weren’t happy kids. So yeah, you know, I became very critical of the way the rules were applied, the way in which the system functioned and what I believed was happening to those young people.’

Turia paused for a moment. ‘What was really happening, I mean.’

Not that she ever supported the concept of institutional care in the first place. Turia and her husband believed that locking kids up could only be really justified in circumstances where there was a provable case that the action would improve a child’s life and the life of his family. ‘And they can make a family’s life better,’ she added. ‘It’s just that they’ve never done that. They took children away. They would deal with a child in isolation from their family and then they put those children back with their families if and when they thought that they had either punished the child, or the family, sufficiently because of things that they’d done wrong. And they did more damage, in actual fact, than if they’d have left them alone in the first place.’

Years later these ideas would find expression in one of the policies the impressive minister would most closely be identified with, an ambitious political plan known as Whanau Ora. It was an initiative by which government departments would pay private Maori organisations to deliver welfare services to families, and allow them to determine what those families needed. Initially, at least, the details of how this would be achieved remained a bit fuzzy, but for anyone with eyes to see there was no doubting Turia’s background to the issue.

What about circumstances in which the family was the problem? ‘Well,’ Turia replied evenly, ‘kids are really resilient and they’ll tolerate a lot from their parents which they would not tolerate strangers doing to them. And for most of the kids who I know who have been in care, that’s a common theme — you know, it’s one thing to put up with getting a hiding off your father or even your mother but not when it is being dealt out to you by others.’

For her, the ethnic dimensions to the New Zealand experiment were much larger than even the most liberal-minded official from the 1980s — a company in which she included Doolan — ever really imagined. It was in fact little different to the plight of the ‘lost generation’ of young Aboriginal Australians, removed from their home situation, placed with strangers inside strange institutions, and for the most part never reconnecting to any kind of real family.

‘And as we now know it failed miserably,’ she concluded with a heavy sigh. ‘It just turned these kids into — what’s the word? — I mean I use bad language, which gets me in trouble — but, you know, into slaves for the colonials, actually. That’s what they were doing to them. With the best will in the world.’

MIKE DOOLAN DID NOT DISAGREE. IT WAS THEREFORE with ‘some delight’ that he set about bringing the show he oversaw to an end. But first, he realised, he had to try to take his colleagues, not least the managers of the institutions, with him. The best chance of doing this seemed to be in bringing them together in the one setting, challenging them to rethink, as he later explained it, their ‘precious precepts’. A showdown. But he was nervous: it wasn’t only the managers who were probably going to be up in arms, but the hundreds of others employed around the country by the department. For the first time in a generation the national unemployment rate was creeping up. Perhaps some of these employees weren’t doing such a great job in looking after other people’s children, but they surely had their own families to provide for, so this would be tough for them.

In 1986 Doolan convened a residential principals’ conference in Wellington. This, he realised, would either be the most courageous gambit of his career or a supreme blunder. That fact alone called for some kind of suitably auspicious venue. In the end the gathering was held at the Chapel of Futuna, a picturesque Catholic retreat centre in Karori whose central pole, rib-like rafters and low eaves consciously evoke the traditional marae setting — a nice touch in light of Doolan’s own Catholic background, the Maori theme that was certain to figure large in the discussion and the message he ultimately wanted to convey.

If anything, though, the ecclesiastical setting was most conducive to the fact that attendees were about to experience their own Last Supper, if not their last rites, as the message went out that it was past time for the system to be wound down.

By the third day inside the church, plans for the residential burial were complete, albeit with no possibility of resurrection; all the national training institutions would be destined for closure by 1990, the attendees decided (or were told, depending on which version one listened to), and that was pretty much that. On the final evening the Social Welfare minister, Ann Hercus, arrived for dinner. She thanked everyone present for their commitment over the years and wished them well for their future plans.

Many of those in attendance were devastated. Career chiefs of any kind, like champion boxers, are notorious for overstaying their welcomes, plying their ideas long after they have exhausted their usefulness, doggedly holding on to their positions when common sense dictated it would be best for everyone if they moved on. Yet their disappearance is rarely sudden, and the closure of an entire line of work — which effectively was what the Futuna gathering meant for these men and women — came as a bolt out of the blue. ‘Was there a better way it might have been done?’ Geoff Comber later reflected. ‘I don’t know. Something had to happen, yes, but I certainly observed a process of putting pressure on people; subtle it may have been but it was very real, and done without a lot of debate.’

Comber’s former colleagues at Epuni, which at the time was still operating at full capacity, were not so sanguine. Suddenly everybody had become very expendable. Maurie Howe had only recently stepped down from the position he had held since 1959, and now it seemed they, too, would be following him into some form of retirement. Shortly after the Futuna meeting, an unknown hand scribbled the following message on the Epuni noticeboard: ‘The floggings will continue until morale improves.’

Apparently that would mean a long wait, for the same year also saw a slew of similar-sounding recommendations to the Futuna gathering put forward by a ministerial advisory committee convened to chart a distinctly Maori course for the future of residential care. Its advice was threefold. One, it recommended that the official focus return to nurturing kids wherever possible within their family and tribal group. Second, it proposed that any additional funding be allocated directly to tribal trusts working in this area. Third, it demanded that per-child payments be increased to a more ‘realistic’ level.

Taken together with the other developments, this really meant that there could be no turning back. The process of emptying the existing residences, which began almost immediately after the conference, was already seeing to that. Given that so many of the institutions were effectively run on child labour they were bound to implode for lack of workers, and soon enough this occurred. First it was at the 120-bed Kohitere after its cohort shrivelled to around 40, and then everywhere else, including the Riverside Drive operation, where the first to go had been the on-site school and its three teachers after it became clear that there would shortly be an insufficient number of pupils to justify its continued existence. No doubt the inmates were happy about the accelerating trend. But the men and women who had dedicated their lives to the system were anything but.

Effectively, Doolan admitted, ‘we were saying to a lot of people that we no longer need you to do what you were doing for us’ — he laughed ruefully — ‘and I can’t say I was the most loved person within child welfare for having done it. More like the Angel of Death, I guess. But it had to be done.’ And the residential workers were frustrated, too, even frightened, for many of them were not equipped professionally for other positions within the department, let alone the wider workforce.

‘It was a funny time,’ Comber agreed. ‘I mean, you had a lot of very, very upset managers … their confidence was busted.’ What upset them the most, he recalled, were ‘these allegations about [ethnic] propriety. They felt they’d been let down by their national officers who, they thought, hadn’t really stood by them.

Lorraine Katterns, the Auckland social worker, was among the holdouts who always believed the change couldn’t have come fast enough. ‘You build the institution and you create the need, don’t you?’ she later reflected. ‘But what were they being created for? They were created for these kids that were seen to have offended and gone off the rails, or that needed care and protection. But they were actually just shunted into this building and herded around, you know.’

She laughed bitterly at her own recollections of the Auckland girls’ home. ‘I can remember things like, there was a gardener at Bollard and when they were looking for activities for the kids to do, they came up with this idea that he on his ride-on mower would mow all these lawns and the activity for the kids would be to get out there with rakes and rake up all this grass.’

So why, over and above the issue of job security, was there such resistance to closing down the institutions? ‘I think the challenges were too great for them,’ Katterns said of her erstwhile colleagues. ‘They were kind of coerced by the system to comply. And in those days residential social workers were extremely well paid compared to others in the community. So there were staff who didn’t really want to be there but they stayed because they wanted a good compensation, a payout, because they were going to lose their jobs but actually, I knew a lot of them came out of it really very well off financially.

‘Unlike,’ she added, ‘so many of the kids.’

TIME!

It was all over. In February 1990, almost 30 years to the day it first opened its doors, Epuni, which had processed just 82 admissions in the preceding year, officially reconstituted itself as a youth centre, a mixed-gender facility devoted to the needs of what the promotional material described as relevant community groups with a stake in developing further initiatives for youngsters. Whatever that meant. Within a year the historical operation would be completely mothballed.

Among the first of the female residents during the final phase was Kelly Blomfield, one of three girls shipped in from a similarly shrinking Kohitere, where she had initially been placed after being discovered living in the public toilets in Masterton. ‘I never wanted to leave,’ Blomfield said of the environment she experienced at the radically refurbished institution. ‘It got so relaxed that the staff got a bit complacent,’ she recalled with a smile, mentioning an occasion when Social Welfare minister Ann Hercus dropped by to see the workers and offer a pep talk to the wards. ‘We all took off. I remember a staff member saying to me, “Hey, where do you think you’re going?” and I said, “Wherever the hell I please, see ya!” And out I went. That was the kind of place it was.’

Times had changed. What stood there now — essentially a very large ‘family home’ — was a product of the shifting environment created not only by the events of the mid-1980s but also the previous year’s passage of the Children, Young Persons and Their Families Act. The new legislation pointed away from the old institutional regime to one in which a ‘maximum possible use of placement within family groups, and in cases where family group placement was not possible then the use of community-based placements’ would become the norm.

An internal departmental report found that the ‘risk’ population among 10- to 16-year-olds had dropped by as much as 11 per cent during the 1980s. Also in decline over the same period had been the number of children and young people appearing before the courts, down by as much as 40 per cent, a figure well in excess of the reduction in the at-risk population overall. The number of kids becoming state wards was also down by at least half during the 1978–88 period; and among those who did fall under the guardianship of the state, thanks to the initiative led by Mike Doolan and John Grant, fewer and fewer were now being placed in institutions. Given the probable population projections, the likelihood of any dramatic change to that trend seemed remote. Not that young people had fundamentally changed; rather the manner in which they were being dealt with had.

Besides, in the wake of the Futuna conference, new facts had been created on the ground; only nine residences were now left operating around the country, and soon there would be fewer. Hokio Beach School had already shut down and the rolling fields of Kohitere were soon to fall silent. Miramar Girls’ Home was gone, too, while the two residential centres in the south, in Christchurch and Dunedin, were in the process of being significantly downsized.

In other words, as of February 7, 1990, Epuni — and the culture it represented — was essentially gone.

Up to a point. Other battles remained to be fought. Thirty years after their objections first began flying thick and fast, the harried residents of Epuni finally had their chance to resolve one of the major issues that had dogged the institution from the start: had it ever really been within its rights to describe itself as a ‘home’? As far as the c was concerned the name had always been mostly subterfuge, with perhaps a little irony thrown in for good measure. But it was a question of some continued relevance for them in light of plans to turn the buildings into a new-fangled youth justice facility. The Environment Court agreed to hear the arguments.

What the court was prepared to look at was in fact only a relatively specific matter. It was not prepared to rule, as some from the neighbourhood might have hoped, whether Epuni Boys’ Home had never been anything more than a state-sanctioned crash pad for bad kids. Instead it would examine whether, in the context of the recently drafted Resource Management Act, which set more stringent standards than in the past for how an operation could describe itself, a correctional facility could tout itself as a ‘home’. Its deliberations would be of significant interest locally in light of the government’s plan to alter and add to the existing building by about 45 per cent in order to create a fully fledged youth prison that would house around 200 younger people a year, about 5 per cent of them female. Given the reluctance of the courts to hand down convictions the way they used to, and the general move away from housing anyone but the most serious offenders in institutions, virtually all of the new inmates would be taken from the ranks of the country’s worst offenders. People living nearby could hardly be expected to view this development with equanimity.

Ostensibly at issue was whether an operation could call itself a ‘boys’ home’ when it now counted girls among its charges, and also in light of its newfound purpose as a custodial detention centre staffed by youth justice workers. As Adrian Olsen and the other local residents who petitioned the court saw it, this was tantamount to false pretences. The court appeared to agree. In considering the case, it examined a number of related issues of longstanding interest. The infamous cellblock, for instance: ‘The secure unit, putting to one side modern euphemisms, is a security prison,’ Planning Judge W.J.M. Treadwell noted in his 20-page ruling of April 11, 1995. Not only that, but the prison cells the institution still used were totally out of keeping with ‘modern-day trends for the housing of prisoners no matter how bad the crime may be’. As for the kitchen facilities, these, too, appeared ‘suspect from a health viewpoint’. And the institution’s history within the wider community was just as bad: ‘In the past,’ the ruling noted, Epuni had simply not been managed ‘in a way which has enabled people in the community to provide for their social and cultural wellbeing and for their safety’. The department’s arguments to the contrary were ‘largely unsatisfactory’.

Turning to the question of whether the facility had ever been a ‘boys’ home’ in the first place, the judge ruled that the term had not ‘in any sense alert[ed] the public to the type of activity being carried out at 441 Riverside Drive’, especially with regard to ‘the custodial detention’ of children. The institution was therefore ‘well past being accommodated by the expression’, and indeed the evidence seemed to suggest that, ‘even from its inception, the expression “boys’ home” did not accurately describe’ its activities or purpose.

On the other hand, the fact that a small percentage of inmates had been girls was found to be ‘of little consequence’, although ‘for what it is worth we are prepared to make a declaration that a boys’ home is not a place for the care and protection of girls and young women’. But on the subject of the escapees who had plagued the suburb for 30 years, this, combined with acknowledged incidents whereby cars had been tampered with or broken into and residents frightened, represented ‘the very antithesis of the sustainable management model,’ Treadwell continued. ‘We were also greatly concerned with evidence given to us that at times when residents have reported escapes, institution management were either unaware of such an escape or fairly terse in dealing with the complaint.’ The court didn’t exactly have the authority to tell the department to look for another site, but it dropped a heavy hint that this might not be a bad idea. As the ruling noted, there was no particular reason why such an institution needed to exist in Epuni, or indeed any residential area in New Zealand, and the government’s arguments to the contrary simply sounded ‘evasive’.

All in all, then, it was a miserable ruling for the Department of Social Welfare and those who had been closely involved with Epuni, and perhaps it might have been more closely contemplated had it not been for another unexpected navigation of the past that was to begin some months later, when Maurie fielded a telephone call from a local reporter. How did he feel, the woman from the Evening Post newspaper in Wellington wanted to know, about the news that his old schoolteacher from Epuni had just been found dead inside a Wellington jail cell?

THE COPS HAD BEEN ON CALCINAI’S CASE FOR SOME time, but if he sensed it he certainly didn’t let it show, certainly not to his new colleagues, many of whom regarded him as an intellectual on stilts whose only apparent deficiency seemed to be his lack of shortcomings. It had been a remarkable personal reinvention for the disgraced educator: Calcinai had become, against all reasonable expectations, one of the most successful of the former Epuni employees.

After going to ground for most of the previous decade, including his stint behind bars, he reinvented himself as a journalist, and by 1987 had scored a plum position as a corporate communications adviser at the Department of Health. His professional reputation by the early 1990s was good and becoming better. In addition to deftly handling the usual round of media enquiries for the department, he produced a well-regarded AIDS Diary, a chronology of the then deepening AIDS crisis, as well as editing an internal monthly newsletter that quickly became a hit with staff members, thanks largely to a snappily written gossip column penned in a vaguely similar fashion to Metro magazine’s Felicity Ferret.

‘Molesworth Mole’, as Calcinai dubbed himself in these dispatches, was a creature confined to a dark corner of the department’s basement with an alter-ego named ‘Wendy Water-rat’. Sometimes he complained about the darkness ‘and other strange goings on in the basement’ of this life. ‘I’m looking over my shoulder as I write this,’ he confided in May 1992. ‘When doors start to operate independently I must admit my imagination starts to run into overtime. Is there something lurking in the basement luring innocent victims into a trap?’ Elsewhere in the same newsletter, Calcinai published an interview with himself, written in the third person, and extolling his accomplishment as the author of a recent novel ‘presently with an agent in the States’ and, with slightly more justification, the creator of ‘numerous radio plays’, which was substantially true.

Helpfully, the piece also explained his absence from the workforce during the mid-1970s as a period when ‘Vince took four years off to work fulltime as a writer’, a creative spin on the time he spent in jail after being found guilty of six charges of sodomy and eight of indecent assault on three boys he taught shortly after his time at Epuni.

The same piece didn’t neglect its main readers entirely, however. ‘In facing and implementing change,’ the author quoted himself as telling colleagues, ‘the department is constantly in the public gaze and therefore it’s important that it’s seen to conduct itself properly — to be proactive, knowledgeable and articulate to maintain public confidence.’ Nobody could accuse Vince of lacking in these qualities.

Soon he switched to working at the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, where he held a similar position pumping out media releases highlighting the government’s work in promoting corporate transparency. In 1993 he was also named one of four runners-up in the BBC World Service Playwriting Competition for a play, Horse on the Stairs, set in a boarding house owned by an old woman whose only visitor is a blind retired doctor. The work was later produced for radio by the British network.

But these outward successes were tempered with no small personal frustration. Among the ongoing problems faced by any committed paedophile is that as one’s sexual preferences grow up a new supply always has to be arranged. An additional inconvenience for Calcinai was that his taste ran to Maori boys, and here, one supposes, the residential system must have come as a blow. The usual sources where he might have got lucky — institutions for the intellectually disabled or places like the old Epuni — were no longer options. So he concentrated on the next best thing, befriending families with youngsters and hoping that sooner or later he could persuade one of them to entrust him with their kids. And soon he got lucky.

But Calcinai’s time was running out. On November 10, 1996, John van den Heuvel, who was then a rising star in the Wellington police force, received an anguished telephone call from a young mother out in the Hutt Valley. A couple of days earlier, she told him, a new friend of the family appeared to have molested her son at the man’s house in the Wellington suburb of Brooklyn. Van den Heuvel, a boyish-looking cop with penetrating dark eyes, was a young man on the way up; after three years on the regular beat he had switched to investigating child abuse, and this sounded like the kind of case he had taken his latest position to energetically pursue. As van den Heuvel put it many years later while reflecting on the Calcinai case, ‘Catching people like this — removing them from society and making them accountable for what they do — is what it’s all about.’

Maybe so, but after interviewing the boy the 29-year-old detective felt drained. This was no run-of-the-mill molestation. The episode had come to light after the woman discovered her four-year-old was suffering from a bloody bout of diarrhoea. It transpired that the Maori kid had been violently raped; the alleged assailant, as well as being a family friend, was a well-regarded civil servant. What was more, a background check revealed the man had previous convictions for similar offences committed in Wanganui. It seemed an ominously open question as to when he might strike again.

Yet even a tiny amount of additional time to investigate Vincent Calcinai, van den Heuvel realised, could make all the difference to obtaining a successful prosecution — if it allowed him and his colleagues, for example, to discover the whereabouts of a pool table that had been described in the child’s testimony. Over the next five days he kept in constant touch with the family as the investigators scoured the Hutt Valley and Wanganui for what they needed in order to convince the court to issue a search warrant.

By the evening of November 15 the team had amassed sufficient material to get the necessary warrants. In order to best proceed from there, though, they knew it would be necessary to nab a hopefully unsuspecting Calcinai at work so that his house could be searched without interference. They waited overnight. Shortly after seven the next morning van den Heuvel and a couple of the plainclothes team headed over to the Ministry of Consumer Affairs while the others headed to Brooklyn. Outside the Bowen Street building, which stood in the physical shadow of the Beehive, the sky was azure, blurring above the harbour twinkling in the distance, the kind of morning on which the detective might have been out diving if he hadn’t been on the assignment of his professional life. He slipped a hand into his pocket to check he had everything. Arrest papers? Check. ID card? Check. Handcuffs? Check. Time to move in. The three men strode across the foyer to wait for the lift. A few moments later a bell sounded and the doors slid open.

Nobody who was present upstairs at the ministry that morning remembers precisely what Vincent Calcinai was working on when the cops arrived. Possibly he was fine-tuning another media release having to do with the freshly drafted Fair Trading Act, a big-ticket policy of the then National-led government framed in the expectation of bringing wayward business operators to heel, the sort of liberal-minded legislation Vince approved of. As soon as the introductions had been dispensed the old actor’s plump face whitened and he began to shake. Yes, he muttered, he knew why they were there. No, he said in response to the second, third and fourth questions, he wouldn’t be making any comment, and he stayed good to his word. Sensing that the performance was heading nowhere, van den Heuvel reached into his pocket for the handcuffs.

As Calcinai was being taken to a cell at the nearby courthouse to await an initial hearing on eight counts of sexual assault, the detective jumped into his car and headed up to Brooklyn, easing to a stop outside 8 Mills Road, a 1960s-style house located on the rise above Washington Avenue. Inside, his colleagues had already unearthed a small trove of evidence inside the dimly lit rooms: along with the predictable photographic material stored on film reels and computer disks, there were a number of ‘souvenirs’ presumably taken from victims. Leaving them in the front room, van den Heuvel wandered down the passageway leading from the front door out to the back of the house, noting that the place had the musty air of a slightly sinister bachelor’s pad. In the lounge he came to a halt. For the first time that day he allowed himself a satisfied smile, for there in front of him stood a pool table. Now they had everything they needed.

Shortly after lunchtime that same day, a judge agreed that what had been amassed was sufficient to justify keeping Calcinai in custody. The case was adjourned and the accused was bundled into a waiting vehicle. Who knows what he may have been thinking in the police car on the ride across town and as Wellington Prison came into view? Did his thoughts go back to 1978 when he had been awarded a grant from the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council, the precursor to Creative New Zealand, to write a play on the life and trial of one of the prison’s notorious inmates? Hamiora Pere was a misunderstood individual, in Vince’s estimation, who was convicted of treason and hanged at the same prison in 1869.

Possibly his thoughts went back still further, to the boys whose future careers he had guided as an all-purpose teacher at Epuni Boys’ Home, kids with names like Rufus Marsh (who killed Diane Miller) and Paul Dalley (who killed Carla Cardno), young boys whose subsequent transformations into singularly vicious sexual predators and psychopaths shocked everyone who ever worked with them.

By the time he was marched through the prison door, though, Calcinai had regained some of his usual composure, at least to a sufficient degree for the receiving officers not to follow the usual precautionary practice of removing every article on his person that might be used to inflict self-harm. Nor did it seem particularly notable when he asked for a pen and paper to take with him into the prison’s remand wing, the necessary tools for completing what was to be the second-to-last creative act of Vincent Calcinai’s life: penning a brief message later that night declaring his innocence, before bending down and undoing his shoelaces.

The following morning they discovered this final self-exculpation next to his body.

‘He lived a double life,’ van den Heuvel said afterwards. ‘Everyone thought the world of him and he had a real dark side.’ Even his former manager did, too, it seemed; for despite being annoyed — doubtless with some justification — at being called at home by a reporter seeking comment, he was happy enough to offer a snap assessment of his one-time employee. After a moment’s thought, he responded by telling the reporter that Calcinai had always been highly regarded at Epuni. ‘He was a respected staff member who worked very hard and gave freely of his time,’ Maurie said. ‘He often planned extra activities for the kids.’

IT WAS ALSO AROUND THIS TIME THAT A bespectacled young Wellington lawyer named Sonja Cooper felt she had reached the point in her career where she should be running her own law practice, a decision she took after being appointed a district inspector of mental health — an ombudsman role in respect of the rights of people subject to the Mental Health Act. She had no ultimate game plan, no settled career path other than to keep pursuing the love of law she first acquired as a schoolgirl after doing a classroom project on criminal law. Nevertheless, and probably not surprisingly in view of the specialist work she was acquiring a reputation for, Cooper started receiving visits from individuals who claimed they had been abused while in care — foster care rather than institutions at this point — even though this was not an area in which she was specifically touting for new work.

Her curiosity was aroused. ‘I don’t even know how they started coming to me,’ she recalled. ‘I know there was one client who came to me by way of another lawyer who was becoming a judge and thought this was the kind of work I would do, but there were others who popped up out of nowhere.’ One claimant, she said first heard about her from a hairdresser.

That hairdresser was onto something. Family law already figured large in Cooper’s professional interests. As the child of ‘a fairly messy childhood’, growing up as the oldest of three kids in a single-parent household, it figured among her personal interests, too. True, she had grown up in one of Wellington’s wealthier suburbs and the education she received was at one of the city’s swishier high schools. But as Cooper likes to remind visitors to her modest Wellington office, ‘I’m certainly not your typical pampered rich child.’ For one thing, she grew up a Catholic girl in a house of modest means, during an era when such distinctions counted for something. The good education was thanks to her mother’s hard work and the break of having a scholarship. ‘I was the poor kid growing up with a whole lot of rich people, which I think made me sensitive to the fact that life can be different from how you imagine,’ Cooper added. ‘And I think I’ve always been kind of grateful that I was able to succeed and do well in a context where others probably would’ve ended up in the system.’

Thus began her work with those from somewhat similar circumstances who did not fare as well. She has since overseen cases prepared on behalf of hundreds of former inmates of institutions run by the former Child Welfare Division, the former Department of Social Welfare, and the Department of Child, Youth and Family Services. About one in four of those cases relate to Epuni Boys’ Home, by far the largest institutional showing among the country’s former short-term training facilities. Epuni’s high visibility relates to the institution’s ‘completely ineffectual’ style of management during much of its history.

In 2000 Cooper won her first victory against Social Welfare in the High Court. That decision was subsequently taken to the Court of Appeal, which in 2003 ruled that the government was liable for abuse, both sexual and physical, perpetrated on children in state-run institutions such as Epuni Boys’ Home. Cooper has always insisted that courtroom victories are not all that her firm has wanted, but that the refusal of successive governments to consider what she would view as an acceptable out-of-court process to address the hundreds of claims she has overseen leaves her clients with no other reasonable option.

Internationally speaking, none of this is breaking fallow ground. In Ireland, a major Roman Catholic order, the Sisters of Mercy, in late 2009 offered to pay the equivalent of more than $250 million in compensation for decades of acknowledged abuse in its system of institutions for the republic’s most-deprived children. Earlier, state investigators ruled that orders such as these — which had operated as an arm of the government over many decades — had covered up endemic rape, molestation, beatings and mental cruelty of their wards, as many as 14,000 of whom had outstanding claims topping $2 billion. Closer to home, the government of Australia has formally apologised to the migrant members of what is known as the ‘Forgotten Australians’, the term coined by the Australian Senate to describe the ‘great evil’ that befell many of the children who were brought up in the country’s orphanages, children’s homes, institutions or foster care.

In early 2010, British prime minister Gordon Brown issued an official apology for the ‘shameful’ and ‘misguided’ programme that saw thousands of young Britons resettled in Australian residential care. The apology capped years of separate investigations into British children’s residences beginning in the early 1990s when a former principal, Frank Beck, was sentenced to five life terms for sexual assaults against more than 100 children in state care, including five kids who later committed suicide. The Independent newspaper reported that as many as 67 investigations took place in the wake of the Beck case, involving 400 homes and schools, at least 2000 victims and 415 suspects, with in excess of 400 detectives working full-time on the matter.

Across the Atlantic, in 2006, the Canadian government agreed to pay more than two billion Canadian dollars to compensate an estimated 80,000 survivors from indigenous backgrounds who were forcibly removed and placed in care. The Canadians also established a truth and reconciliation commission to allow claimants to tell their stories, which would, it is hoped, provide the basis for a review of how such widespread systemic abuse was allowed to occur.

In the country where many of the modern ideas about juvenile delinquency were minted, including the concept of juvenile hall itself, some serious soul-searching was taking place. In New York, the state where juvenile delinquency first found its way on to the statute books, a damning report issued in 2009 by the United States Department of Justice highlighted abuses at juvenile residential centres similar to those in the old New Zealand system. Investigators there found that physical force was often the first response to any act of insubordination by the young residents, despite rules allowing force only as a last resort. The report suggested that acts of violence and abuse against children had been routinely covered up. It accused officials of failing to act in a timely fashion, if at all, when cronies were caught violating policy in dangerous ways.

The section of the report on mentally ill children, who have made up a significant part of the incarcerated population, was as The New York Times later put it, enough to make any American shudder — and cause a well-informed New Zealand reader to start with recognition. ‘Medications appear to be handed out almost at random, without proper monitoring or clear therapeutic goals,’ the paper reported, and while many detained youths had drug problems, these haphazard stabs at creating treatment programmes were simply ‘a shambles’.

But at least one stark difference between the situations in New Zealand and the United States remains. In the United States it is the federal government that has taken a lead in battling the state-run institutions. The government has even threatened a takeover of the state’s entire youth residential system, including the infamous Tryon Boys Residential Center, in upstate Fulton County — the same centre where Mike Tyson was briefly housed before being discovered by an old boxing trainer who tutored him in the art of the sweet science.

But successive governments in New Zealand have been reluctant to heed the international cues. Each of the cases Cooper’s firm has brought before the courts has been vigorously defended, usually by the state wielding technical defences such as the statute of limitations, which holds that after a certain period offences can’t be prosecuted, while denying the existence of any widespread abuse or indeed any pattern of abuse at all. The process has been arduous. At the rate seen up until late 2010, it would take approximately 150 years for all the claims filed by Cooper and her team to have their day in court, and that’s not counting the dozens of new ones that come in most months. The government has categorically ruled out any official inquiry. It has said it will not apologise for the treatment of its former wards, and stated that all the systems anyone might need have already been put in place for dealing with any serious issues relating to the former ‘homes’.

Media interest has gathered pace. In 2009 teleision current affairs show 60 Minutes aired what it billed, a touch optimistically, as a full investigation into the hundreds of abuse claims and various examples of official duplicity relating to the children’s institutions. The show went big on Epuni Boys’ Home, as might be expected, but in the end offered little new information or insight, although it did feature a sympathetic interview with one former inmate who said he had been subject to nothing but abuse and neglect during his time there in the 1970s. (The details of that case remain the subject of a suppression order and the former ward involved asked that he not be identified in this work.) Presumably without any intended irony, this television investigation into bureaucratic duplicity also made extensive use of phoney cutaway footage purporting to show Epuni’s passageways and bedrooms at night. Yet the programme did succeed in bringing the subject to wider public attention.

With a sharp economic downturn on one hand and a nominally conservative political administration eager to weed out wasteful public spending on the other, at least some of the debate spurred by the coverage has turned on the question of publicly funded class actions and what critics describe as the country’s credulous system of legal aid. Writing in The National Business Review, commentator Matthew Hooten homed in on Cooper for being what he considered a poster child on both fronts. Hooten has acknowledged that the substance of the claims Cooper’s firm has worked on may be correct, and that the erstwhile wards she has represented deserve to be heard and to receive some sort of apology, compensation and a chance to make the most of the rest of their lives. At the same time, however, he argued that the passage of time and the murky environments in which past abuse may have occurred simply make it too difficult to prove criminal wrongdoing.

And even if these cases had a reasonable chance of success, he added, the trauma of reliving the past on the witness stand was ‘a barrier to resolution’. Why, he demanded, had the system forked out $4.4 million in aid for Cooper to pursue historic claims at a time when other more appropriate avenues of appeal existed?

One possible answer might be that not dispensing legal aid could constitute a fresh abuse. Cooper’s own answer was slightly longer. For one thing, she pointed out, she does not work as a sole operator but as the principal of a medium-sized firm employing solicitors and administrative staff. And the claim that her firm had enjoyed no success in historical abuse cases was simply incorrect, having successfully argued a number of interlocutory applications for leave as well as settling around 30 cases in 2009 alone.

Nor was Hooten present during one of the cases argued by Cooper, in the Court of Appeal in 2009, at the end of which one of the presiding judges, visibly moved, described her standard of research and presentation over three days as ‘impeccable’.

‘We do a lot of work here that we have absolutely no guarantee we’re going to be paid for, but we do it anyway,’ Cooper said. ‘We do it because we have to protect the clients. That,’ she added, ‘is what this firm is about. We’re a human-rights firm. So believe you me, it’s not all sun and roses.’

To be sure, none of the testimonies assembled by Cooper and her team makes for cheerful reading. But one need not be a conservative newspaper critic to find at least a small number of them a bit problematic. One claimant, for instance, recounts that boys regularly had sex with female staff members, ‘either in the gym or in our rooms while no one else was about’, while another adds the intriguing detail that one of these women would sometimes insist on the boy shaving her legs for good measure.

Another litigant claims that, ‘on a date he does not specifically recall’, a staff member grabbed him by the hair and held him over a urinal while another pissed on him, apparently as punishment for some trifling neglect of cleaning duties. Here again, one supposes, the hopeful claimant doesn’t appear destined for a hefty payout, not least because of the doubt cast by the sheer logistics involved in two housemasters having to dispatch 40 other unattended wards to various parts of the relatively confined residence in order to proceed, as it were, unmolested. Stories of boys forced to mow fields with a hand-mower, or even scissors, also abound.

Not surprisingly, few of the people who were involved with Epuni buy into many of the allegations. Even Mike Doolan, perhaps the most liberal-minded and sympathetic of former administrators, admitted to being worried about how ‘a black and white memory has a way of becoming technicolour with the help of some advisers’, which he believes has in some cases led to ‘apocryphal’ recollections, such as the recurrent theme of boys being sent out to giant paddocks with hand-mowers, which is after all a staple of army folklore, too.

‘But people who say these things come to believe them,’ Doolan added, underscoring an unarguable psychological truth. As a rule, most of us romanticise the past — it’s a natural thing to do. But when one has been most horribly betrayed, or at any rate feels that way, an opposite effect kicks in, the experience becoming infinitely more tainted and rancid in recollection than perhaps it really was.

Something else. Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of some individual claims, it has to be said that this activity is oddly depressing for another reason: one of the things about growing older is the revelation of how young everyone is, all the more so when they figure as characters involved in some long-gone incident. Most of Cooper’s claimants are now significantly older than were the accused men at the time of the alleged incidents. They might say, and many do, that what happened plunged their lives into a state of crisis, but aren’t crises by definition supposed to pass at some point, all the more so as we grow to appreciate the hurt we have caused others along life’s way?

Cooper has every confidence she has good systems in place to winnow out the dubious claims — ‘hundreds’ of which she has declined to take up because of lack of corroboration or simply a professional hunch that a file might better remain closed — and bring about justice for those who deserve it. But she added: ‘I have to be careful too because I don’t also want to be someone who sits in judgement over someone else’s damage … I kind of have to be careful walking that line, really, because it’s not for me to judge.’

Yet for every tale whose retelling may include some liberties there have been many other allegations of abuse or neglect that have been supported with strong anecdotal evidence and credible testimony. Such cases can even be found in the institution’s own official files. On the evening of July 30, 1976, for instance, a note was made of a visit made to Epuni housemaster Graeme Stewart’s office by a 13-year-old boy who for legal reasons cannot be identified. The boy wanted to discuss an incident that had occurred the previous spring involving one of his caregivers. The boy said he felt ashamed of himself and scared, and unable to walk past a moving vehicle without wanting to throw himself in front of it. He was still reeling from the experience, still licking his wounds, he indicated, and could no longer sleep at night. Stewart, by his written account, didn’t disbelieve what he was hearing, but also lacked the wherewithal to do anything about it. So he sent the kid to bed. The following morning a couple of housemasters found the boy hanging in his room.

Cooper’s files include the case of a boy born to a mother confined to a mental institution and a father serving time for gang-related activities, who notched up his first run-in with the authorities at the age of seven. A predictable relocation to Epuni contributed to what a psychiatric examiner would later characterise as the boy’s profound attachment difficulties, dysfunctional relationships with the outside world, which he found unremittingly hostile, causing him to develop a lifelong pattern of narcissistic thinking, educational failure and a compelling attraction to others with a similarly desolate experience. ‘I have attacked people violently and I have hurt a lot of people,’ the former ward, now in his 40s, admitted.

‘I always have good intentions towards people,’ he continued, ‘but I always screw up. I don’t know how to respect other people. It is natural for me to rip someone off. I am not good at working with people, and my experience hasn’t made me respect women much, but I can’t say exactly why that is.’ He still wants to be normal, wants some shot at happiness. But he’s a lifelong gang member, so what chance is there of that?

Instead, he finds himself in a maximum-security cell, always mulling over what happened and what could have been — the education he missed, the skills he might have acquired and the places he might have gone — had Epuni not got in the way. Bad dreams in the day, bad dreams in the night. ‘I dream all the time. I have dreams about people chasing me and me running away. I dream about demons and keys. I dream about dead people walking about.’ And he dreams about whatever violent crime might next land him back in jail during his increasingly infrequent sojourns back into the wider community.

SONJA COOPER WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE BEING KEPT busy as 2010 drew to a close. Only a few hundred metres from her modest Wellington offices, the Ministry of Social Development also found its institutional hand hard to the plough attempting to bring some kind of resolution to many of the same cases. Indeed, the ministry’s Care, Claims and Resolution unit, which was set up for this purpose, is headed by an individual who in some respects might just as well have been cut from the same cloth as Cooper. Both are committed, likeable professionals, their backgrounds are not at all dissimilar, and both are in the prime of their careers, with each in their own way enhancing the reputation of the other’s work.

Garth Young — a soft-spoken man who peers out at visitors from behind designer glasses set underneath a rug of grey hair — hails originally from coastal Southland. He, too, was raised in the Christian faith, in his case a staunchly Presbyterian household, and there was never a time when the social values imbued in him by the church weren’t taken seriously. Very seriously. Such imperatives, he said, have hovered above his career path, propelling him on, forcing him, like Cooper, to work hard in helping to pick up the human wreckage left by the old welfare system. For all that, however, the two central characters in the aftermath of the great residential experiment find themselves barely on speaking terms.

The son of a farmer, Young was the middle child of five kids. His parents thought he had abilities beyond the sheep and cattle that had been a mainstay of the family for a couple of generations. Yet this didn’t necessarily make choosing his eventual career path any the easier. ‘I always felt a bit different,’ he said. ‘I didn’t particularly get along or fit in with the rural New Zealand blokes, and actually I’ve never identified as a typical New Zealand bloke, either.’ His father, a good National man, detested the socialist ideas the boy had already started soaking up at high school. The two clashed over issues like Vietnam or whether an employer’s first responsibility ought to be to their employees rather than the shareholders, and, most of all, whether the ‘blinkered vision’ of Southland was all there might be to life.

At the University of Otago, Young read psychology — thanks to the likes of the fashionable French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Scottish oddball R.D. Laing, the subject was on something of an academic roll at this point in the mid-1970s — but got detoured on account of his childhood sweetheart falling pregnant with their first child. He completed an undergraduate degree, in educational psychology rather than clinical psychology, rounding off his early academic experience with a teaching diploma. He picked up work at a local school in Invercargill.

Then, perhaps inspired by an older sister who was already a social worker, he successfully applied for a social-work position himself, at the local branch office of the former Social Welfare, the department with which he would remain as it morphed into what became the Ministry of Social Development. And it was here, too, that he first began working with disadvantaged kids, sometimes shunting them back and forth between Invercargill and the youth facility then operating in Dunedin, taking kids there or else picking them up.

By this time Young was in his late 20s, but still ‘naive’ about the residential system. ‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I thought too much, in terms of residential care, about, you know, was it okay or not.’ Something that just was? ‘Sure,’ he agreed. ‘And I have to say, I don’t recall ever really consciously questioning what it was about or why we used it. I have to say my experience with Dunedin Boys’ Home was always really positive. I mean, the number of times I went there, in all honesty despite the work I’d been involved with, I can’t ever recall seeing or hearing anything that gave me any cause for concern.’

By 1990 Young was no longer out in the field, but heading a small team of social workers based in Whangarei — he also completed a post-grad diploma during this period — before Wellington and a position in national office, in what was called the ministerial team, beckoned. And it was in this latter capacity that his current work took shape.

A group of people who had been in Salvation Army homes in the 1950s through to the 1970s were beginning to talk publicly about the way they had been treated and were looking to make claims against the Army. A number of them had also been state wards, under a department scheme that saw them placed in those homes. ‘So we were teamed to see what we could do to work with them positively rather than wait until they sued us,’ Young explained. ‘This was 2004, and at the time it was just myself and one of our solicitors who worked part-time. We did a specific bit of work. We went out and talked to all of that group of people who wanted to meet and talk with us, so it was a very sort of defined piece of work which came to a conclusion. But during that year it was becoming evident that more and more people were contemplating filing claims directly against the ministry.’

WITHIN A COUPLE OF YEARS THE NUMBER OF CLAIMS in their quiver had grown to 140, with no end in sight. By this point Young was heading a fully fledged team, the Historical Claims Unit, which by 2010 would comprise five advisers and a couple of administrative staff.

‘Bizarrely enough,’ he admitted with a smile, he loves the work ‘most of the time’. It takes him back to his social work days, back to the time when finding a resolution for people was the main focus of what he did. ‘I know that there are plenty of people out there who are suspicious and cynical of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, but I am really very proud of the work that the team is doing in the face-to-face interactions that they have with the people who come to us with whatever complaint or claim that they have. And clearly we don’t resolve every case to everyone’s satisfaction, but for many we do, and just seeing that is significant.’

By Young’s estimate, around two-thirds of the claims his team has worked on have ended up with some kind of agreed resolution, whether it simply be the provision of important information or the issuing of an ex gratia payment, usually at the lower end of the spectrum but in one case $30,000. By early 2010 the unit had resolved 36 such claims; a further 137 still awaited action. ‘The stance we’ve taken is that if somebody has clearly been wronged by us then, legal issues aside, we’ve got some kind of moral obligation to acknowledge that in some way,’ Young said.

Not surprisingly, the 1970s looms as the period from which former state wards dealing with the unit tend to be drawn, with Epuni the most notable among the short-term training residences at issue. (Among the long-term residences, Kohitere and Hokio figure largest.) Which begs the question of why, given their shared sense of righting historical injustice, Garth Young and Sonja Cooper aren’t on the same side?

‘We should be,’ Young agreed. ‘Sonja would say that her motivations are the same things, to get justice and whatever for her clients. And that’s what we’d like to think we’re trying to do. One of the things we don’t perhaps share the same view on is how to get there.’ He also mentioned another government initiative, the Confidential Listening and Assistance Service, established in 2009 as an additional avenue by which the same goal could be realised.

‘Our view,’ he continued, ‘is a slightly different one in that we don’t see any evidence of systemic or endemic abuse or system failures. We see a system of care, both residential and otherwise, that most of the time worked but obviously some of the time didn’t. So I guess what we’ve tried to do is apply some of the principles of natural justice in that, you know, if there’s information there to support someone’s allegation or claim then we’ll absolutely do the right thing.’ He paused for a moment and laughed, not unkindly. ‘But we’re reasonably confident that one or two came through without being abused.’

The types of ‘client’ Young tends to meet — those who once lived in the likes of Epuni Boys’ Home — often strike him as people who have suffered. ‘I wouldn’t want to say they’re broken individuals but they’ve certainly got some kind of issues — dreadful word, I know — going on. And you know, some are extremely needy, extremely vulnerable. So yes, you’ve got some who are functioning very, very poorly’ — he paused sadly for a moment before brightening — ‘right through to people who are as sane as you and me.’

‘THE PLACE DIDN’T EXIST AS AN ISLAND,’ GARY Hermansson recently said of Epuni’s continued controversies. ‘It was a piece of society. And if you think about it, the 1950s and 1960s were a steady-as-she-goes kind of time, a conservative environment. The 1970s started to push boundaries. Then, of course, in the 1980s you had all this turmoil around, the market economy and people kind of looking out for themselves. And Epuni was part of that. It was a building in which people of the time lived. So you had a representation of what was going on in society manifesting itself there, too.’

‘Think about it,’ the Massey professor continued, warming to his theme. ‘Probably the institution lagged behind society a bit, but not by that much. So you might have corporate chaos going on a lot more, and at the same time crime increased, brutality increased. You could argue people had less regard for each other. And some of the mores and norms that we held, you know, the glue to our environment, suddenly started falling away and it became almost like an everyone-for-themselves sort of social mentality.’ The Epuni-related litigation he sees as part of a new social environment in which ‘it’s like, okay, let’s see if we can look backwards and blame whatever for how things may or may not have turned out’.

Tyrone Marks, the former ward who turned his life around in an impressive fashion, took a slightly different view. ‘The bigger picture here is that most of those people who went through the social welfare system are inadequate,’ he said of the residual social aftermath. ‘They left the system with nothing. They had no skills, they had fucking nothing. Their education was held back because the focus wasn’t on education. The focus of these places was on babysitting, basically. Taking these kids who were terribly, you know, dysfunctional, fucking dysfunctional people and their families are dysfunctional as well. And we couldn’t do anything with them so we kept them for years and years, then kicked them out. And what happened then? Nothing. Half the people still can’t even read and write. So how can they look after people? How can they look after their families? How can they sign forms? How can they live in the modern society? That’s the issue.’

Sure. But it is a measure of Epuni’s significance when you see how the institution lives on in nearly everyone who intersected with it, not only so many of the thousands of boys it housed, but also the men and women who worked there and those who created the policies and conditions it operated under — and not least the one individual whose presence hovered above everything the old residence represented.

Conventional wisdom might have had it that Maurie should have been dead in fairly short order after retiring from his life’s work in the mid-1980s. He had, after all, led a more stressful life than most, not only on account of the enormous strain of running Epuni Boys’ Home, but also in struggling over many decades to cope with his wife Margaret’s debilitating manic depression, which only really came to end with her death in 2008. But here he was in 2009, in his 84th year, still managing to play golf on a regular basis (he had only recently cut down from 18 to nine holes), notably quietly spoken and deliberate in his physical movements, but hadn’t he always been?

The only real difference was that the slightly foreboding look he once wore had been replaced by the more benign gaze one sees in the very old, of whom there are many in the sprawling retirement village just outside Hamilton where he now makes his home. The experience of driving into the village is not entirely dissimilar to that of arriving at another institution which once stood nearly 500 kilometres south of Maurie’s current residence.

Late one slate-grey drizzly morning in the winter of 2009, I found my former Epuni chief in his room watching a sports programme on television with the sound turned off. Introductions were made — but no pleasantries exchanged — and he waved me to an easy chair, after which we chatted over a tape-recorder for a couple of hours.

He also seemed content, possibly relieved, to be speaking about Epuni after such a long lay-off from the subject, eager to correct the earlier record of his comments about Calcinai (‘I was completely let down by his ability to double-cross me’), venture opinion about the recent flood of Epuni-related litigation (‘I get a feeling that there had been a group of them in prison and that they decided that they could get a lot of money’), and brimming with deserved pride over the accomplishments of his own son and daughter, an engineer and travel agent respectively. He hated the way in which the institution he had dedicated his life to improving had acquired such a controversial reputation in his own autumn years.

Asked toward the end of the conversation whether Epuni was a subject he had thought much about in the intervening quarter-century, his shoulders slumped for a moment. ‘I think about it a lot — and I do miss it, yes,’ he responded, pausing for a moment, breathing heavily. ‘And sometimes, you know, I curse Epuni, too.’

And Maurie said one other thing. He asked, ‘Do I know you?’

A BOXER’S HEART

On the morning of February 11, 1990, in the Tokyo Dome, at 1:30 in the 10th round, a complete outsider, James ‘Buster’ Douglas, threw the devastating four-punch combination — right-left-right-left — that put paid to the man and the last of the invincible legends that was Mike Tyson, effectively signalling the end of the last golden era of heavyweight boxing. Tyson never saw the final blow coming. You never do.

I never did. On the day in question I was trying to pay as much attention as I could to what was happening while seated in a cubicle of the Evening Post office, knocking back cups of instant coffee and drinking in the sporadic announcements of a sports reporter seated nearby reading aloud from snippets coming through on the wire service. I was half a world away from the action taking place in East Asia, far from guessing that this would be the era’s final call and further still from realising this was more or less the same moment when the curtain fell on Epuni Boys’ Home.

THE LATE DOUGLAS ADAMS ONCE SAID: ‘ANYTHING invented before your 15th birthday is the order of nature. That’s how it should be. Anything invented between your 15th and 35th birthday is new and exciting, and you might get a career there. Anything invented after that day, however, is against nature and should be prohibited.’ I suppose that made Epuni, along with a variety of foster and family homes, health camps and an orphanage, part of the order of my early nature, even though I’m not sure I would describe getting sent there in 1975 by the children’s court as a terrific invention as such. And between my 15th and 35th birthdays, I had another invention, journalism, which at least landed me something of a promised career. By early 1990 I was into my third year working full-time as a newspaper journalist, a career turn that first began six or seven years after Epuni when I started freelancing articles and columns about music, including a long face-to-face interview with the singer Billy Joel that by great good fortune led to the initial job offer.

Joel wasn’t my kind of recording artist. Aspects of his background did interest me, though. The Bronx-born performer grew up rough in the neighbourhood of Hicksville, a tough fishing community in Long Island, New York, the son of an immigrant Englishwoman. His father left the family home when he was young, an experience that devastated Joel and blighted periods of his early life with depression. (He briefly committed himself to a mental institution after attempting to take his life.) The boy found a refuge in music. He taught himself to play piano by ear — at the time I interviewed him he still couldn’t read sheet music — later using his newly acquired skills to support his mother and sister financially after dropping out of high school. But the passion came at a social price: the kids from the neighbourhood thought it marked Joel as a weakling. In response he took up boxing. He competed successfully on the amateur Golden Gloves circuit for a number of years, winning 22 out of 24 bouts before retiring early after getting his nose broken. By this time nobody from the old neighbourhood was picking on him.

We had been talking about this and other incidents in his life for an hour at an upmarket bar in Auckland when a pretty young woman, his wife Christie Brinkley, came over and sat on Joel’s knee. ‘Hey,’ Joel said, ‘why don’t you come along to the show tonight and sit at the back of the stage?’ It sounded like a great idea. That evening I had the time of my life, seated a few feet behind Joel with his wife and young daughter, taking in the thousands of joyous fans, the warm spring air and a memorably wired two-hour set. The unusually close proximity to the performance gave me a lot of good material to fashion the first halfway decent feature article of my then fitful career.

Exciting times. Soon enough the memory of Epuni dropped away in the rear-view mirror. Perhaps that was just as well. It was a time and experience I never felt proud of, a searing moment lost somewhere between childhood and adulthood, and as far as I could see it was probably best kept there. The fact that heavyweight boxing died a kind of death around the same time no doubt helped, because for me it was always a bit hard to think of one without the other. If my retelling of the story of a boys’ home has entailed some necessary blurring between the institution and the sport — hopefully not to the point of total distraction — it’s because for me the two remain somehow inextricably intertwined.

Yet in retelling the story, I admit, part of me has striven to be in the thick of the subject while the other has remained somewhat outside the fray. Part of this has to do with approaching the theme journalistically, but, sure, there remains a strong personal ambivalence for me as well. While I’d probably like to say that the residential experiment represented a wholesale failure on every front, it has to be acknowledged that it was a genuine attempt, in however misguided and haphazard a form, to create some kind of calmer universe for children and young people who lacked adequate care and protection in their home setting.

What’s more, in the 20 or so years that have elapsed since the main story ended, the problems Epuni and others set out to resolve have hardly disappeared, especially those statistically distinctive to Maori. In 2009, the last year for which data was available at the time of writing, 56 Maori children were hospitalised because of violence meted out at home and two of the four children beaten to death that year were in Maori households. Of the nearly 21,000 substantiated cases of neglect and abuse, 11,003 were Maori, according to government figures. More than half of Maori children during that period lived in ‘whanau care’ — with another 16 per cent of Maori children in the care of Maori, but not with whanau.

So, when a friend asked recently if Epuni and Kohitere and Hokio and Kingslea and all the rest of these places were really the worst thing to happen to a good part of a generation of young New Zealanders, I had to think about it for a bit. Yes they were, I said eventually, and no they weren’t, and who cares anyway? To a large degree I’m with Geoff Comber, who said this to me about the old system at one point during my initial research: ‘I remember it positively. Those kids were withdrawn, they were away from their troubled homes, their mates, the streets they had inhabited. They were in a closed, confined area, eating food they weren’t used to, being looked after. And I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them, some I hope, would remember the fair treatment, the care when they got bruised, when they got hurt. That’s really all you can hope for.’

True enough. And yes, I share the concern of people like Mike Doolan, who has said he worries about the current system in which so much turns on protecting children from their caregivers — a new moral panic, if you will — rather than firstly encouraging well-trained professionals to get in close and support families deemed to be ‘at risk’. One can only hope that the Whanau Ora initiative might yet strike the right balance, which has for so long eluded the state.

The important point in respect of the Epuni era, it seems to me, is that those residences as they were back then reflected a lack of imagination for all concerned, and imagination is the one thing that a kid most needs to make some sort of reasonable transition to a functional adulthood, and it’s what societies need to function best. This was the real problem, that lack of imagination. This was the real bruise. This was the real theft. This was the thing that took something away from many of the boys that they never quite got back. And this, finally, is probably the reason why Epuni and other institutions like it were often unable to do much more than groom too many of their wards for a life of ongoing institutionalisation.

Epuni is a vivid memory I was pleased to be rid of. Sometimes, though, it all comes back. I might be driving out of Wellington, as I was one evening in late 2010, heading along the northern highway out of the capital, making my way along the foreshore, following the course of the night trains that depart Wellington every half-hour for the Hutt Valley, and for an instant the windscreen mists over with old images. The people. The voices. The drumbeats. I could drive around this place with a blindfold on, but that would be to miss what still remains for me the most important stretch of road.

Compulsively, almost, I’ll find myself detouring along Riverside Drive past the multimillion-dollar high-security facility — Little Paremoremo! — now standing in the stead of what was Epuni Boys’ Home. The new-style residence caters exclusively to a small number of supposedly hardened-beyond-belief offenders, although the official literature doesn’t quite put it that way, preferring instead to describe it as a setting where young people are ‘to be encouraged to take power in dealing with their inappropriate behaviour and staff have a responsibility to develop plans, after consultation, which will encourage young people to achieve positive outcomes’.

Of the earlier institution little architectural trace remains. What used to be there only exists in the minds of the thousands of those who floated through Epuni, a bit like the ghosts of those Shakespearean bouts some of us came of age watching on nights like October 1, 1975. We remember, for instance, the famous line Ali gasped out to sports reporter Mark Kram after the Manila fight, the one about how the two fighters had arrived in the ring as young champions and left as old men. We especially remember that line. If you only ever heard it once you never forget it because it foreshadows a universal experience: even as we grow old we remain the young people we once were, the only difference between people being how abruptly that revelation takes place and how old they might have been. In this sense, at least for me, I guess boxing provided some of the imaginative inspiration that Epuni otherwise lacked. The only thing I never quite worked out was what it was about the end of that particular fight that so excited that process in me.

ON THIS PARTICULAR RECENT JOURNEY, HOWEVER, there was an entirely positive and practical reason for dwelling on such weighty cosmic matters. I was out in my old stamping ground to interview another great performer named Billy.

A lord of the rings, as he is sometimes referred to, Billy Graham has probably done more to help disadvantaged boys than all the institutions in the old residential system combined, and what’s more, his own background encapsulates every stage of the Epuni story, given that he stayed there on occasion as a kid and worked briefly in it as a young man. Since that time he has established a model of pastoral care for disadvantaged youngsters that, if widely adopted, could put the youth-justice system that remains almost completely out of business.

In this and much else Billy reminds me of Cus D’Amato, the man who saved the souls of the two fighters — Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson — who bestrode both ends of the heavyweight boxing era in which Ali was the centrepiece, the era that chronologically shadowed the Epuni Boys’ Home operation.

On the face of it Patterson and Tyson could hardly have been more different. Patterson, a violent, monkishly mannered guy, emerged in the 1950s as the face of the future, the youngest heavyweight champion of all time (at least until 20-year-old Tyson showed up on the scene a generation later). Yet Patterson was also a character plagued with self-doubt. ‘Freudian Floyd’, they used to call him. Once after losing a title fight he snuck out of the stadium like some kid absconding from a correctional facility, zipping out the back door wearing a false beard and glasses as a disguise. Tyson was outwardly very different. Tyson was a blast from the past. At a time when boxers were flamboyantly styling aspects of their promotion after the fashion of professional wrestlers, his typical entrance — black trunks, no socks and old-style boots, with a white towel draped across a pair of shoulders that seemed to go on forever — evoked the flickering black and white films of the great fighters of the early part of last century, the ones Tyson used to stay up night after night watching on the old reels. Self-doubt? Tyson’s only psychological issue seemed to be menacing self-confidence.

Yet the route that took Patterson and Tyson to the top was strikingly similar. They grew up in materially impoverished households. They scuffled in the same New York neighbourhoods. They fell into the same wrong company. And they found themselves as teenagers incarcerated in the same state-run boys’ home system upon which the New Zealand model was largely based. Most of all, though, when every other form of state-sponsored intervention had failed them, they found a new life and career through the same trainer who rescued both of them from juvenile hall. Indeed, without the intervention, intercession and insight of Cus D’Amato, there might never have been a final golden age in the sport to speak of at all.

‘I knew,’ D’Amato once said of Tyson, ‘that a kid who loved pigeons couldn’t be all bad. You had to peel away a few layers of mistrust and prejudice left by his tough experience in Brooklyn. But then, underneath all the anger and suspicion, you found this kid wanting and willing to learn. I’ve had to show him how to talk to deal with people. Few had ever really bothered to try and converse with him and so he didn’t know how to react except in a hostile way. I taught him to talk to people and be nice to them, but warned him about who he trusted. One of his major problems had been one of communicating but, once I got him opening up, I knew that he was not only a helluva fighter but also somebody worthwhile as a human being. And d’you know something, that was just as satisfying and rewarding to me as discovering the kid could fight.’

This sounds a lot like the Billy Graham whom I first encountered a long time ago.

The ‘Mayor of Naenae’ was seated at the back of his chambers looking just as I remembered him, a small, compact man with jug ears and an enormously strong presence. ‘I grew up in this town, right against those hills,’ he told me, glancing as he spoke toward the elevations surrounding Naenae and Epuni. ‘I set fire to those hills a few times, too, and got into all sorts of other trouble. Like,’ he added, ‘finding things before they were lost, which entertained the local cops and everyone else down the neighbourhood.’ The coach still chuckles at the childhood memories he often shares with visitors to the boxing gym he runs nowadays for similarly troubled youngsters in his old stomping ground.

Of course I’d heard it all before.

The last time I saw Billy holding court, he was perched on a desk in a classroom at Hutt Valley High School talking to a group of ‘troubled’ pupils — not a few of them wannabe boxers — about Life’s Great Lessons. This was the special-needs class. It was a year or so after I left Epuni. I was 14 and living in a family home in Naenae, and Hutt High represented my seventh stab at a secondary education. Billy’s class was where the school tended to put the problem kids, so I got shoved in there too. I was certainly no fighter — I did a bit of judo but couldn’t throw a decent punch for toffee — but I quickly grew to appreciate his style of classroom coaching: say please and thank you, remember people’s names, make eye contact, remember it takes strength not to use strength. Perhaps such injunctions even then sounded like platitudes, but they came with the authority of stunning success.

Although Billy was well out of the competitive side of the sport by this stage, this was still the four-time winner of New Zealand titles, along with the Australasian title and the Jamieson Belt, doing the talking. People in the know still ranked him among the country’s hottest light welterweights. And here he was, the fleet-footed fighter who never took a serious punch to his head during his championship years, standing in our academic corner.

In a sense Billy was simply performing the same social service back then that others had for him, and people like him, for a very long time — a kind of mentoring that has probably turned around the lives or more young men than all the public dollars invested in residential children’s homes and other forms of juvenile-crime prevention. In Britain in the 1880s social and religious reformers promoted the idea of setting up boxing clubs in poorer areas, believing as they did that the gym might absorb at least some of the violence on the street.

Early last century, in 1905, legislators in New York picked up on the same idea, attempting to push through a bill that would have seen boxing become a compulsory subject for delinquents, in particular children of foreigners ‘who are now brought up to use knives in settling their differences’, who could yet quickly ‘grasp the American method of having it out in a much less harmful way with their fists’, as one lawmaker put it. The bill was drafted under the shadow of President Theodore Roosevelt, himself a boxer and a boxing teacher, ‘a shifty man of his weight who has a punch worth going miles to get out of the way of’, as one newspaper correspondent marvelled.

In New Zealand a similar plan was briefly put into action in 1940, after a court took the unusual decision to waive reformatory for nine boys charged with offences in favour of enrolling them in a boxing programme. Six months on, a child welfare officer marvelled, the kids were demonstrably better and fitter for the exercise, and the state had saved a great deal of money into the bargain. ‘You have built up your bodies,’ the judge later told the boys, ‘and in the process your outlook toward the law and other people has also undergone a change — a change which is undeniably apparent in your appearance. For six months you have kept free from trouble and I know you will continue to do so. You will find that there is much more pleasure from the type of activities in which you have been engaged during recent months than in that which you called pleasure before and which was gained at the expense of other people.’

Billy underwent a similar experience thanks to an older fighter, Dick Dunn, who took the young dropout under his mentoring wing and taught him how to be strong enough to be hard on himself. Dunn, a boxer of the old, classic school (a believer in the importance of building one’s fight on the jab, for example, rather than seeing the jab as an end in itself) picked Billy up, taught him how to throw a straight left, to keep his guard, to move and to hit and to move and to hit again without being hit. Great fighters shouldn’t take a punch to deliver a punch, he always said. And great fighters ought to leave the game in the same condition they entered it: unhurt. The old man believed in the virtue, now widely ignored if not unknown, of boxers working in pairs rather than simply belting a bag.

Dunn could talk. He drilled Billy in the virtues of work and self-denial, fierce imagination and, yes, ‘character’, because character is ultimately more important in life than performance, it’s what separates the actors from the fighters — not simply in the interests of rehashing some Victorian code, although it surely isn’t a bad one, but because nobody ever made a great champion without apprehending those truths. That’s how Dunn saw it, and Billy Graham has seen it that way ever since, too, especially since his career trend took an unexpected swerve in the 1970s.

‘I tell you what Dick Dunn said to me back then,’ he recalled. ‘He says, “Billy, you don’t read properly, you can’t write properly, you’ve got no qualifications. You’ve never passed an exam.” He told me if you get hurt in this game, you’ll pay the price. And then he says something else. Dick says, “You love people, Billy, you’re always encouraging them. So why don’t you get involved with these kids’ lives?”’ So after 18 years in the sport Billy set out on a path of motivational speaking and pastoral care for the young which, with only one exception, has proved to be a roaring success.

Thirty years on, the memory of his brief involvement with Epuni Boys’ Home still causes Billy to squirm. ‘I just hated the place, you know, every inch of it — and you know what, it seems like yesterday I was there, because I can still smell it.’ Epuni, where he worked on and off for about six months, ‘just broke my heart’, he added. ‘It was … it was just terrible.’

At first it seemed so hopeful. The kids took to him easily enough. He taught them about staying fit and fighting well. He drilled them in a martial arts technique known as sticky hands, a method of stopping punches coming on to you while moving and fending away. He got them to do sit-ups and press-ups. And most of all, again, he told them stories about the men who started life on the wrong side of the tracks, and how boxing’s deeper lessons saved their souls.

‘They needed stories,’ Billy said. ‘Tell me a story, they’d say, tell me a story. Tell me a story, please. They’d be about to go to bed, but they weren’t letting me go without a story. “You promised me, Billy,” they’d say. “Stay and tell us a story.”’

So he stayed and told them stories. Jack Johnson and his improbably named girlfriends bulleting in fast cars and getting caught speeding across state lines, for sure, but also the fact that while Johnson was inside he found need for a tool that would help tighten loosened fastening devices and so modified a wrench for the task that would later be patented. Joe Louis hiding his pugilistic ambitions from his mother by carrying his boxing gloves off to music classes hidden inside his violin case — but also the way Louis stood as a symbol of honesty and sportsmanship at a time when boxing promotions were dominated by hoodlums.

‘I grew up with that sort of story-telling stuff’cos I had an Irish nana. She used to tell me stories. But the other guys working there at Epuni would always say come on, “Come on, lights out, lights out, gotta go now.” “No,” I’d say, “I’m having some fun with these kids.” But they didn’t like that, even though the kids obviously loved it.’

Then he started to notice that everything wasn’t quite right with a number of the boys; he suspected they were being sexually interfered with. ‘I’m a street kid myself, you know, and I had a feeling that things weren’t kosher there,’ he said, ‘and so I complained about it.’ Billy shrugged. ‘They couldn’t get rid of me quick enough.’ So he left, and with him went a collection of ideas that if implemented widely enough might have saved a generation of boys and young men, along with the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on maintaining the old system — and the millions of dollars the government might yet be required to fork out if the current raft of lawsuits ultimately prove successful.

Recently, Billy revisited the newfangled Epuni for the first time in many years, and once again, the institution’s now greatly diminished cohort took to him. ‘When I finished speaking I made an offer to the person now running the place, told him it might be good to bring the boys down here.’ The offer was declined. ‘He said they didn’t want the kids to learn how to box because they might use it to beat them up. I told them that these kids didn’t need to know how to box, didn’t need to know how to beat you guys up. It’s actually the other way round, I told him, because if they learn how to fight, properly, they learn how not to beat people up.’ Billy laughed sardonically at the memory of his most recent rejection. ‘So some things haven’t changed, have they?’

But of course some things do change too. Billy’s first rejection only spurred the sense of mission that would eventually lead to the largely self-funded establishment of his Naenae Boxing Academy, the site for which he purchased in 2006 from the Salvation Army and where we met. ‘We have gang members walking through the door,’ he said of his typical clientele. ‘First thing I tell them is to lose that look. Get that damn headgear off, shake hands with 10 people — or go home. And get that patch off, too, I tell them, or I’ll make you eat it.’ He would too.

They usually stay. A good number of Billy’s hundred or so students might on some superficial level be described as failures. Or rather former failures. Many have certainly been on the wrong side of the law. ‘Almost without exception these are tough kids, kids who dare to be different,’ he explained, ‘kids who don’t want to play soccer or badminton or bowls, but guys who want to fight. They want to test themselves. And this is the game — the only game — that sorts them out.’

So most weeknights you see them assemble in this venue, one of the very few in Naenae never to have been despoiled with graffiti, skipping and hitting bags and thwacking speed balls. Fighting. As three large ceiling fans churn the air, the boys sort themselves out under the pastoral gaze of the main coach, a couple of colleagues and a galaxy of framed photographs of the great fighters, not least Billy Graham during his salad days. But at this point in his career, sadly, Billy is probably fighting as difficult a battle as he ever has in the wider scheme of things: the tastes of the New Zealand chattering-class — the one that constantly frets about youth crime and whelps on about the need for ‘solutions’ — have become dandified over the years, and boxing simply isn’t a dandy’s sport.

If only they took a little time to see what is being created here. The physical environment that Billy has made for his wards — the spiritual one too — is an inspiring one, immaculately polished on the inside and surrounded outside by dozens of painted rocks displaying the faces of the heavyweight champions of the past century. Hard men on hard stone. As Billy is always pointing out, for all the tall tales of sports writers and fight managers, virtually all the famous heavyweights of the past century or so share one overriding thing: tough backgrounds. Their origins are either dirt-poor like Joe Frazier, or desperate-poor like Sonny Liston, or crazy-poor like Tyson. Some say that Ali never quite fitted that mould, coming as he did from a relatively better-off home in the American Midwest, but Billy dismisses the suggestion with a wave of his still-impressive fist. Ali was one of the world’s most hated people — because of Vietnam, because of the Muslim thing, because he couldn’t really read or write, because of his mouth and the cruelty that too often got the better of it — and if that sounds like Easy Street, said Billy, perhaps you haven’t really thought the matter through.

Thinking the matter through — which is to say, thinking about life — is the biggest lesson on offer here at the Naenae Boxing Academy. All new entrants receive a copy of Billy’s neatly printed Passport for Success, a collection of the coach’s seven principles for a useful life: responsibility, compassion, consideration, kindness, duty, obedience, honesty and truthfulness. Memorise the lot of them, along with the attached aphorisms, and you get a free annual membership to this unique training initiative and the opportunity it promises.

For all this talk about the great heavyweights, Billy isn’t in fact a supporter of professional boxing, believing as he does that the amateur side of the sport that he has excelled in best imparts those same important principles that he has since dedicated his life to sharing: the importance of learning new things, looking after one’s body, eating properly, speaking well. ‘Simple stuff really,’ he explained, using oddly familiar words. ‘Like saying please and thank you: little words that open doors in life. Like looking at people. Really noticing them, I mean. Remembering names. Making good on what you say you’ll do.’

Not to mention the mastery of fear, the real meaning of courage, the need to concentrate energy and find purpose in what one does, about getting up after you’re knocked down and, especially, about being a man. If Joyce Carol Oates was correct when she wrote that boxing has always been a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity, all the more trenchant for it being lost, then this must be all the more powerfully the case for boys and young men whose positive exposure to masculine role models has been limited at best.

And, finally, those photographs and paintings of the great heavyweights, as we’ve already seen, serve yet another purpose, perhaps the most important purpose of all: they meet a young man’s appetite for stories, the adolescent male’s desire to leap into the imaginary. It’s an appetite as keen and fundamental as his appetite for food, but which circumstance or neglect has denied for many of the boys involved with this gym, and without which no meaningful future life is really possible. Tell me a story, Billy, they still plead. Only this time he really can, and not just to the assembled youngsters.

Billy and I had been walking around the venue chatting when we came to a stop next to an old magazine article relating to an instantly recognisable event — the Frazier-Ali fight in Manila — now framed and enjoying pride of place on the wall. What would he say, I wondered, was the lesson a young man might have learned from watching the closing moments of that fight on October 1, 1975?

‘It was very hard to see who was ahead by the 14th round, wasn’t it?’ Billy replied after a moment’s thought. ‘Actually, there was nothing in it. Ali was so exhausted physically and mentally that he had put his feet down and said, you know, “I’m not fighting. I’ve had it. I’ve had it. I’ve had it.” And there was Angelo Dundee looking at him and then looking across at Joe Frazier sitting across the ring talking to his own guys — and Frazier was stuffed, too, and he was also saying he couldn’t go on, that he had had enough. Frazier kept saying, “I’m going to die. I’m going to die.” But Angelo Dundee, the trainer in Ali’s corner, is reading Frazier’s lips; he knows what Frazier is saying. So he turns back to Ali and he says, “If you just stand up you’ll be heavyweight champ of the world — just stand up, that’s all it takes.” And he helps Ali up.’

The old coach let a beat go by.

‘So the moral of this story, if you really wanna know, is that you sometimes just have to stand up, sometimes you have to go one more round — and you can be champ.’

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

What was he reading as the work progressed? That’s what the writer Martin Amis wants to know. All halfway decent books should tell us that, routinely, in the margin or if not at the back, he declares in his memoir. I sort of beg to differ. What the writer was listening to, now that’s worth finding out, and I’m dead envious of my friend Garth Cartwright, who gets to release CDs with each of his books revealing to us just that.

As I wind up this work in the wee small hours with the record player turned up very loud — at about the same volume they used to pump the music out at Epuni and tuned to some of the same sounds, too, along with some of the stuff I’ve listened closely to over the two years I’ve spent immersed in writing about the same subject — it occurs to me that some readers might be interested too.

So here it is, a soundtrack for the ghosts of Epuni: Johnny Bristol: ‘Hang On in There, Baby’; James Brown & The Famous Flames: ‘Night Train’; Chicago: ‘Old Days’; The Coasters: ‘Down in Mexico’; DMX: ‘Lord Give Me a Sign’; Deep Purple: ‘Child in Time’; The Fourmyula: ‘Nature’; Jimmy Helms: ‘Gonna Make You an Offer You Can’t Refuse’; Jimi Hendrix: ‘All Along the Watchtower’; Love: ‘Alone Again Or’; The Mountain Goats: ‘Original Air-blue Gown’; The National: ‘Fake Empire’; Freda Payne: ‘Band of Gold’; John Rowles: ‘If I Only Had Time’; The Stylistics: ‘Betcha by Golly Wow’; Donna Summer: ‘Love to Love You Baby’; The Three Degrees: ‘When Will I See You Again’; T-Rex: ‘Hot Love’; TV on the Radio: ‘Lover’s Day’; Mark Williams: ‘Yesterday Was Just the Beginning of My Life’; Stevie Wonder: ‘Superstition’; The Wrens: ‘Happy’. And where would this book be without an excellent album of the same title by one Randy Newman?

The music was important. Along with the memories of the boxing fights, it helped jog my memory about a certain incident, evoke a voice, conjure up a smell or long-forgotten conversation (the one about Jimi Hendrix being a Maori really did take place just as I described it) about an institution whose inhabitants are in many cases now dead or incarcerated or simply vanished. The understanding reader will appreciate why this makes the subject of residential children’s care so damn challenging to write about for a non-academic readership. The modern journalist’s best friend, the random computer search, sure ain’t no help, either.

Given the oddity of the exercise, it’s probably unsurprising that this book, too, had its origins in an unlikely setting: a Business Roundtable event, of all things, held one evening a few years ago in Wellington. At the function I shared a table with Chris Trotter and Audrey Young, respectively a political commentator and political editor with The New Zealand Herald, and for some reason we fell to talking about residential children’s care in New Zealand. The conversation took a personal turn. Between them, Audrey and Chris know a great deal about New Zealand political history, but clearly this was new turf for them. Somebody should write a book about Epuni Boys’ Home, one of them said. You should, added the other. I said I’d think about it. A little while later my wife made the same suggestion, at which point I became convinced, and shortly afterwards Random House commissioned the project. You’re holding the result.

Despite my historical connection with the subject, I figured what would work best would be if I went about assembling the basic material in as detached a manner as possible. There was a practical reason for this. For some time my idea had been to create a sweeping examination at all the various ‘homes’, at least until it became clear that this would require the better part of 20 separate chapters simply to introduce each residence. Much better, it seemed, to concentrate on the one place I knew best and let the wider theme radiate out.

Perhaps it is a mark of whatever modest skills I’ve picked up during nearly a quarter-century in journalism — or more likely a depressing commentary on the assumption that most of the kids who experienced the system first-hand ended up in rather worse shape than your typical workaday reporter — that virtually nobody I dealt with ever thought to ask whether I had any first-hand experience of residential children’s care in general or Epuni Boys’ Home in particular. Given that my last book made some mention of Epuni, as well as my having once written about the subject for a national publication — which is to say, it was already a matter of public record for anyone sufficiently moved to research the subject — I was happy to leave it at that. But I also hope that the material I gathered has been used as responsibly as anyone I dealt with might reasonably have expected.

Numerous people assisted in one way or another along the way, and however definitive I try to make a thank-you list, somebody will get missed out, so I apologise in advance for any notable omissions. And I gratefully acknowledge from the start the support of Creative New Zealand.

I was assisted, firstly, by the former wards I spoke with, along with scores of others whom I was unable to meet but who made their case notes available to me. Of particular note: Matiu Baker, Kelly Blomfield, Les Kiriona, Tyrone Marks, Demetrius Panapa, Arthur Taylor and Keith Wiffin. Especially helpful was one-time Epuni resident Jonathan Foote, whose phenomenal memory of far-off events significantly improved the retelling of several key incidents. My conversations with Jonathan’s brother, Orion, who was never a ward of Epuni but who shares his sibling’s impressive gift of recall (in his case to do with boxing) were also of great assistance.

I am grateful to the Epuni staffers and Social Welfare employees who agreed to be interviewed: Maurie Howe, obviously, but also Audrey Barber, Geoff Comber, Mike Doolan, Gary Hermansson, Lorraine Katterns, Dave Kelsey, Aussie Malcolm, Denis McLeod and Carol Sedgewick, along with several other individuals involved with the operation who, like a number of former wards, asked not to be identified by name.

Over a period of several weeks I spent time at the office of Sonja Cooper, reviewing thousands of pages of case notes from the files of former wards who had agreed in advance to my looking at the material. In addition to Sonja herself, I was helped by two of her offsiders, Sarah Mitchell and Rebecca Parker.

Over at the Care, Claims and Resolution unit of the Ministry of Social Development, Garth Young was unfailingly courteous and prompt in helping me access information from the ministry’s own records and those held by Archives New Zealand. The same, alas, cannot be said for the Ministry of Social Development’s communications division, which was singularly unhelpful and indeed incommunicative.

Simon Edwards and Rosemary McLennan, editors of the Upper Hutt Leader and Hutt News respectively, allowed me to visit their offices to currycomb and clip articles from the files of their community papers.

A number of other people deserve a shout-out just for giving me a great steer, providing an unexpectedly illuminating tidbit of information or some other act of practical assistance: Michael Bassett, Deborah Coddington, Carolyn Henwood, Warwick Johnston, Bernard Lagan, Chris Lamers, Stewart Macpherson, Gordon McFadyen, Teresa McLeod, Kathryn McPherson, Wayne Mason, Belinda Milnes, Paul Newrick, Matt Nippert, Janine Pickering, Kara Puketapu, Carol Selwyn, John van den Heuvel, Nick Venter, Denis Welch and Virginia Wilton.

I owe a real debt to the social historians Bronwyn Dalley and Redmer Yska (and Mike Doolan) for offering incredibly helpful pointers for my historical sketch of the children’s residential system, the city of Lower Hutt and the prevailing social and political atmosphere of the 1950s.

Thanks to Nina Fowler, a gifted young journalist who worked for me on some of the early transcriptions and archival research.

Special thanks to Random House publishing director and ace editor Nicola Legat, whom I was fortunate enough to meet as a magazine editor not too long after I began Grub Streeting back in the late 1980s, and with whom I’ve been lucky to work twice now in her capacity as a highly regarded publisher. I’m also grateful to Nicola’s offsider, the company’s literary evangelist Sarah Thornton, and copy-editor Susan Brierley deserves special mention for her tact and editorial eye along with project editor Alexandra Bishop. Once again it was great to have Catherine Griffiths create the book’s cover design.

Helen Bain, an honest friend, respected journalist and inveterate Hutt girl, never lived to see the end result of this project, but we talked about it a lot in the months before her untimely death in December 2009. This book is dedicated to her with much affection and considerable sadness.

Another friend and one-time Hutt Valley resident, Lloyd Jones, encouraged this project from day one, including making time for much jawing together about juvenile offending and (something he is hugely well informed on) boxing. Lloyd is equally inspiring to rap with on the subject of imagination, a theme he explored with outstanding success in his novel Mister Pip. While I never explained this book’s schema to him in as many words, his comments during these sparring sessions helped sharpen my focus, as well as reminding me what a powerful shared experience it was for some of us growing up in the cultural shadow of those old fights.

So, here’s to Ali and Frazier and Foreman and Liston and Norton and Tyson, and all the rest of them too.

Pamela, my wife, sat through more late-night conversations about Epuni Boys’ Home than any one person ever should, and she did so with great enthusiasm and an ongoing commitment to the project. Okay, Pam, so the final bell’s gone now. Wanna take a walk in the park?

NOTES AND SOURCES

This book is based on first-hand reporting, original research, published material and my own experience living at Epuni during the winter of 1975. It is not an authorised account or meant to serve as a work of historical scholarship. The text was not vetted by any outside organisation or individuals. No person I interviewed was given copy approval on how their quotes might be used, although I invited everybody I interviewed to contact me within a reasonable period of time if they had second thoughts about anything that had been discussed on the record. Nobody did. All the main interviews were taped.

In order to get the fullest access to some of the records held by the Ministry of Social Development (MSD), I agreed not to identify by name any former ward whose details I came across in the ministry’s files.

Except where noted, any official and internal correspondence I have quoted from was contained in files made available to me by MSD, Archives New Zealand or else provided in response to requests made under the Official Information Act. In addition, I drew on hundreds of pages of ‘discovered’ material and records relating to some of the abuse cases brought against the MSD, as well as published newspaper reports. Finally, I reviewed virtually all of the annual parliamentary reports on residential children’s care tabled between 1902 and 1990, and read through all the available annual reports filed by Epuni between 1960 and 1991.

WONDERLAND

The opening scene of this book is based on my own experience of being admitted to Epuni. Sonny Liston’s fixation with the song ‘Night Train’ has been written about by others, most notably the American writer Nick Tosches in The Devil and Sonny Liston.

The brevity of my interview with Arthur Taylor — two scheduled interviews with him were cancelled by the prison before we finally managed to speak, and the word to me was to keep it brief — made it necessary for me to glean some of his background information from other published sources, most helpfully the profile ‘My wasted years of crime’, by Paul Yandall, The New Zealand Herald, September 29, 2001.

The question of how many inmates passed through Epuni and the wider residential system is somewhat stymied by the lack of data on readmissions or multiple admissions to different institutions. Officially, 130,065 admissions were processed nationwide in the 40 years to 1990, roughly 90 per cent of them in the years covered in this book; the Ministry of Social Development gives the number of individual admissions during the same period as 106,985. No overall data exist for Epuni, but working through what statistical analyses and annual reports remain suggests the number of admissions at that institution was at least 8000.

MOON OVER EPUNI

My recreation of a typical day at Epuni Boys’ Home is based on dozens of conversations and emails with former inmates and staff members, reading the relevant departmental manuals and my own memories. To imaginatively retrace the Ali-Frazier fight, I reviewed footage of the event and combed through press reports and other published accounts, in particular Mark Kram’s Ghosts of Manila.

LITTLE CRIMINALS

Horiana Te Puni’s eulogy was quoted in the Evening Post of December 10, 1870; the same edition of the newspaper described the weather conditions on that day.

My account of Lower Hutt in the 1950s relies on a variety of standard accounts while also drawing on my personal knowledge of the region I was born and raised in. I read several accounts of the Mazengarb inquiry, by far the best being Redmer Yska’s All Shook Up. The social historian Bronwyn Dalley’s Family Matters presents many of the historical pivots in the evolution of state guardianship that I follow in a more haphazard fashion.

Some of the data I use in relation to the industrial schools first appeared in the lengthy article ‘Our industrial schools: Opinions of the Education Department’, Evening Post, September 6, 1900.

For my description of Te Puni’s political and tribal activities, I leaned on Angela Ballara’s useful online entry about the ‘paramount chief’ in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography.

A PLACE CALLED HOME

To describe the opening of Epuni Boys’ Home and some of its initial challenges, I drew on archival material and interviews with the individuals identified in this section. Reporter Rita Thomas’s upbeat observations on Epuni were published in the article ‘Time spent in boys home can be a turning point for many young men’, Evening Post, December 17, 1969.

My descriptions of Kohitere and Hokio are based on a number of visits I made to these institutions in the late 1970s, including an impromptu three-night stay at Kohitere in 1979. I also drew some of the information I use from the annual reports produced by each of these places.

My description of Ernie Foote’s boxing skills relies on local press reports: ‘Highlight on first night’, Weekly News, September 20, 1939; ‘Match for Newtown Cup’, Evening Post, June 9, 1938.

JERUSALEM

To describe the educational challenges at Epuni, I drew on internal memos and the recollections of individuals quoted. Here, as elsewhere, I opted for the standard (mis)spelling of ‘Wanganui’, both for the sake of stylistic consistency and because it was standard usage during the period.

To describe the activities of Vincent Calcinai, I relied on interviews with a number of former colleagues and the recollections of pupils he taught in Epuni, Khandallah and Pipiriki. The description of Calcinai’s time in Pipiriki and Jerusalem, including his friendship with James K. Baxter and his opinions of the place, are drawn from court records and newspaper reports published after his death. Calcinai’s educational resume was in a file I chanced upon in 2010 at the Ministry of Health.

The issue of sexual problems among some wards was first raised in a July 10, 1963 memo — ‘Sexual misbehaviour’ — from Maurice Howe to the Child Welfare Division’s district office in Lower Hutt.

The line about Sonny Liston dying on the day he was born first appeared in Nick Tosches’ Liston biography.

The scene at Epuni during the screening of Romeo and Juliet was described to me by the teacher Dave Kelsey.

THE BLACK LIGHTS

The activities of the disgraced doctor Selwyn Leeks have been the subject of a number of media reports published in New Zealand and Australia. Especially helpful here were two articles filed by the Melbourne Age reporter William Birnbauer: ‘Anger as child-shock doctor avoids scrutiny’, July 23, 2006; ‘“Shock” doctor loses appeal against payout’, March 2, 2008. I interviewed three of Leeks’ former patients, as well as discussing the subject at some length with Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia. Another source of information on the controversial aspects of ECT was Linda Andre’s Doctors of Deception.

An account of the bellicose young fatherless elephants appeared in the report ‘An elephant crackup?’, by Charles Sierbert, The New York Times, October 8, 2006.

The material I present on autism was first gathered in an interview I did in England with the Cambridge University researcher Simon Baron-Cohen for a report I filed for an American newspaper, ‘Men, empathy and autism’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 5, 2004.

HEY, CHARLIE!

My account of the armed boys returning to Epuni is based on court reports and several internal memos, an account of the incident prepared for the then Social Welfare minister Lance Adams-Schneider, as well as interviews I did with Paul Newrick, one of the policemen dispatched to the scene on the night. I also spoke with a ward then living at the institution. ‘Charlie’ was not the boy’s real name, although the other details are factual.

My account of the breakdown in relations between the institution and its departmental overseers is based on a flurry of internal correspondence, including an October 10, 1972 memo — ‘Deficiencies in the Epuni Boys’ Home’ — from Bernard Baker to Lewis Anderson. The sequence of events culminating in the riot of June 23, 1972 was described by Maurie Howe in an internal report he filed on June 27, 1972, as well as an unsigned document detailing the incident which I obtained from the Ministry of Social Development by way of a request made under the Official Information Act.

My description of Anderson’s loquacious reputation is based on a number of accounts of his administrative style published in a collection of departmental stories and reveries edited by D.J. McDonald, Working for the Welfare.

My account of the typical afternoon routine at the Lower Hutt divisional office of what became the Department of Social Welfare is based on my own knowledge gained from having worked at the same office in the late 1970s. The details of the chaotic inspection of Epuni conducted by Elsie Feist appeared in the report she subsequently filed.

NIGHT TRAIN

The evolution of cellblocks at residential institutions is the subject of a fact-sheet put together by the Ministry of Social Development. In addition to this, I drew on official accounts of similar practices that appeared in several editions of the annual Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives published between 1900 and 1959. My descriptions of the girls’ residences are based on interviews with former residential manager Mike Doolan and a reading of a 1977 departmental report, Weymouth Girls’ School: A study of what is, with a view to what might be, by Nicola Atwood.

THE GIRL WHO KICKED IN DOORS

My account of Ali’s arrival in the Hutt Valley is based on a conversation with Bernard Lagan, who covered the visit for The Dominion, a trawl through other newspaper articles and snippets that appeared at the time in The Dominion, Evening Post and Upper Hutt Leader, and my own recollection of the visit.

The remarks about visiting Maori parents at Epuni were made in a December 19, 1980 memo — ‘Public relations visit to the Epuni Boys’ Home’ — from G.C. Underwood to the assistant director of Wanganui’s Department of Social Welfare.

The official reports and inquiries of note here included the transcription of a public forum held in Auckland on June 11, 1978, convened by a group called the Auckland Committee on Racism and Discrimination; a 135-page independent report looking at the practices and procedures of the children’s institutions, which was released on October 29, 1982; and the department’s 89-page blueprint for reform, titled New Horizons, which also appeared in October 1982. Another 70-page report dealing with the Maori perspective on residential care, Puao-Te-Ata-Tu (‘day break’), was released in September 1988. For a much fuller discussion of these documents, see Bronwyn Dalley’s Family Matters.

TIME!

A useful summation of Epuni’s relationship with the local community appeared in the article ‘Fear in the neighbourhood’, by Barry Hawkins, Evening Post, August 18, 1997.

For my account of Vincent Calcinai’s arrest and the final hours of his life, I interviewed the officer who led the investigation, John van den Heuvel, and drew on a couple of relevant media reports: ‘Awful things at boys’ home’, by Erin McDonald, Evening Post, December 27, 1996; ‘Toddler’s HIV anguish’, by Donna Fleming, New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, December 23, 1996.

The commentator Matthew Hooten offered his opinion on Sonja Cooper’s firm and the abuse claims it handles in a September 4, 2009 piece in The National Business Review entitled ‘The $4.4 million advertisement for legal aid reform’.

A BOXER’S HEART

Trainer Cus D’Amato’s words about Mike Tyson first appeared in Reg Gutteridge and Norman Giller’s study Mike Tyson: The release of power (Harpenden, UK: Leonard Queen Anne Press, 1995).

On the history of boxing as a means of addressing juvenile delinquency, I drew on a couple of published newspaper accounts: ‘Boxing for boys’, New York Police News, April 25, 1905; ‘Delinquent boys: Special club formed in Auckland: Encouraging result’, The Dominion, October 7, 1940.

Billy Graham’s current work was also the subject of this illuminating news profile by sports writer Nick Venter: ‘Academy of dreams’, The Dominion Post, September 16, 2006.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andre, Linda. Doctors of Deception: What they don’t want you to know about shock therapy (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2009).

Bates, Arthur P. A Pictorial History of the Wanganui River (Wanganui Newspapers, 1986).

Boddy, Kasia. Boxing: A cultural history (London: Reaktion Books, 2008).

Dalley, Bronwyn. Family Matters: Child welfare in twentieth-century New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1998).

Dalley, Bronwyn, & Tennant, Margaret (eds). Past Judgement: Social policy in New Zealand history (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2004).

Glasser, William. Reality Therapy: A new approach to psychiatry (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1965).

Graham, Billy. A Motivational Memoir (Auckland: Hodder Moa Beckett, 1998).

Hampton, Ross E. Sentencing in a Children’s Court and Labelling Theory (Research Section, Justice Department, New Zealand, 1975).

Jackson, George. Soledad Brother: The prison letters of George Jackson (Middlesex: Penguin, 1971).

Kaplan, Fred. 1959: The year that changed everything (New Jersey: Wiley, 2009).

Kram, Mark. Ghosts of Manila: The fateful blood feud between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).

Layden, Joe. The Last Great Fight: The extraordinary tale of two men and how one fight changed their lives forever (New York: St Martins Press, 2007).

Lee, John A. The Hunted (Wellington: Price Milburn, 1975).

McDonald, D.J. (ed.). Working for the Welfare: Stories by staff of the former Child Welfare Division (Christchurch: Social Work Press, 1994).

McGill, David. Lower Hutt: The first garden city (Lower Hutt City Council, 1991).

Mirams, Doris Meares. Orphanages Without Orphans (Christchurch: Gordon & Gotch, 1950).

Oates, Joyce Carol. On Boxing (New York: Dolphin/ Doubleday, 2006).

O’Brien, Brian F. Kiwis with Gloves On: A history and record book of New Zealand boxing (Wellington: A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1960).

Oliver, W.H. James K. Baxter: A portrait (Auckland: Godwit Press/Bridget Williams Books, 1994).

Philipp, Eileen. Juvenile Delinquency in New Zealand: A preliminary study (Wellington: NZ Council for Educational Research, 1946).

Salzman, Mark. True Notebooks: A writer’s year at juvenile hall (St Louis: Turtleback Books, 2007).

Savage, Jon. Teenage: The creation of youth, 1875–1945 (London: Random House, 2007).

Schrader, Ben. We Call it Home: A history of state housing in New Zealand (Auckland: Reed Publishing, 2005).

Tosches, Nick. The Devil and Sonny Liston (New York: Little, Brown, 2000).

Yska, Redmer. All Shook Up: The flash bodgie and the rise of the New Zealand teenager in the fifties (Auckland: Penguin, 1993).

INDEX

A

- Adams, Douglas 1

- Ali, Muhammad

- affinity with Maori 1

- ‘black lights’ and 1

- controversies of, 1, 2

- emergence of 1

- Hutt Valley visit by 1

- Parkinson’s syndrome of 1

- Tryon Boys’ Home visit 1

- Vietnam war and 1

- Ali, Muhammad, fights of Foreman 1

- Frazier (1971) 1

- Frazier (1975) 1, 2, 3

- Holmes, 1

- Liston 1

- ‘All Along the Watchtower’ 1

- Anderson, Lewis 1, 2

- ANZ Journal of Psychiatry, 1

- Asperger, Hans 1

- Auckland Prison (Paremoremo) 1, 2, 3

- autism 1

- Alzdorf, Baron C. 1

B

- Baron-Cohen, Simon 1

- Baker, Bernard 1, 2

- Bartle, Joseph 1, 2

- Baxter, James K. 1, 2

- Beck, Frank 1

- Beck, John 1, 2

- Bishop, H.W. 1

- Blomfield, Kelly 1

- Bollard Girls’ Home 1, 2

- ‘Born to be Wild’ 1

- boxing 1

- Brett, General 1

- Brinkley, Christie 1

- Brown, Gordon 1

- Brown, James 1, 2

- Burnham Industrial School 1, 2, 3

- Burns, Tommy 1

- Burton, Graeme 1

C

- Calcinai, Vincent

- arrest of 1

- crimes of 1, 2, 3

- death of 1

- professional activities of 1, 2

- Cameron, Murray (Gunner) 1

- Campbell Park School 1

- Campbell, Ray 1

- Care, Claims and Resolution unit 1

- Chapel of Futuna 1, 2

- Child Welfare Act 1925 1, 2, 3

- Child Welfare Branch/Division 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

- Children and Young Persons Act 1974 1

- Children, Young Persons And Their Families Act 1989 1

- children’s court 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

- City University of New York 1

- Colgate, V.H. 1

- Comber, Geoff 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

- Comte, Auguste 1

- Confidential Listening and Assistance Service 1

- Cooper, Sonja 1, 2, 3

- Cormack, Teresa 1

- corporal punishment 1, 2

- Court of Appeal 1, 2

- Cowan, Lainley 1

D

- Dalley, Bronwyn 1, 2

- Dalley, Paul 1

- Dempsy, Jack 1

- Department of Child, Youth and Family Services 1

- Department of Education 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

- Department of Health 1

- Department of Social Welfare 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

- D’Amato, Cus 1

- Dictionary of New Zealand Biography 1

- Dinnage, Rosemary 1

- Dominion

- Doolan, Mike 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

- Douglas, James (Buster) 1

- Dunedin Boys’ Home 1

- Dunn, Dick 1

E

- ECT (electro-convulsant therapy) 1, 2

- Einstein, Albert 1

- Elbe’s Milk Bar 1

- Emile 1

- Environment Court 1

- Epiha, Cruise 1

- Epuni (Hutt Valley) 1

- Epuni Boys’ Home

- absconding from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

- abuse claims against 1, 2

- cellblock at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

- daily routine and 1

- design of 1

- ethnic character of 1, 2, 3

- housemasters at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

- inspection of, 1

- lineups at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

- management of 1

- naming of 1

- neighbourhood and 1, 2

- opening of 1

- sexual misconduct at 1

- smoking privileges at 1, 2, 3

- staff training and 1

- tensions with department and 1

- therapeutic practices at 1, 2

- visitors to 1

- Epuni Boys’ Home School 1, 2, 3

- Evening Post 1, 2, 3, 4

- Evening Star 1

F

- Fareham House 1

- father-absence 1

- Feist, Elsie 1

- Field Workers’ Manual 1

- Finlay, Martyn 1

- FitzGerald, Bill 1, 2

- Fitzgerald, Brian 1

- Foote, Ernie 1

- Foote, Jonathan 1, 2

- ‘Forgotten Australians’ 1

- Four Tops 1

- Fourmyula 1

- Frazer, Alan 1, 2

G

- Gair, George 1

- Glasser, William 1

- Glavish, Naida 1

- Graham, Billy 1

- Grant, John 1

- Great Depression 1

- Grinker, Roy 1

- Guardian (UK) 1

H

- Hacking, Ian 1

- Hall, G. Stanley 1

- Hamilton Boys’ Home 1, 2. 3

- Hancock, Merv 1

- Hendrix, Jimi 1

- Hetherton, E.M. 1

- Hercus, Ann 1, 2

- Hermansson, Gary 1, 2, 3, 4

- Hill, Anne 1

- Hokio Beach School 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

- Holdsworth School 1, 2, 3, 4

- Holland, Sid 1

- Holmes, Larry 1

- Hooten, Matthew 1

- Howe, Margaret 1

- Howe, Maurice 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

- Hulme, Juliet 1

- Human Rights Commission 1

- Hunt, Jonathan 1

- Hunt, H. Lucas 1

- Hunted, The (Lee) 1

- Hutt, William 1

- Hutt Valley 1, 2, 3

I

- ‘If I Only Had Time’ 1

- industrial schools 1, 2, 3, 4

- Independent (UK) 1

J

- Jackson, George 1

- Joel, Billy 1

- Johnson, Jack 1, 2

- Johnsonville School 1

- Joint Committee on Young Offenders 1

- jukin’ 1

- ‘juvenile delinquency’

- boxing as an official

- remedy to 1, 2

- coining of term 1

- gangs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

- moral dimensions to 1

- historical perceptions of 1, 2, 3

- residential movement and 1

- usage of expression in NZ 1

- Juvenile Delinquency in New Zealand (Philipp), 1

- Juvenile Offenders (Douglas-Morrison) 1

K

- Kanner, Leo 1, 2

- Katterns, Lorraine 1, 2

- Kellmer Pringle, M.L. 1

- Kelly, Peter 1

- Kelsey, Dave 1, 2

- Kennedy-Good, John 1

- Kingslea Girls’ Home (see also Te Oranga) 1, 2, 3, 4

- Kiriona, Les 1, 2,

- Kohitere Boys’ Training Centre 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

- Kram, Mark 1

L

- Lake Alice Hospital 1, 2

- Laing, R.D. 1

- Le Fort, Frank 1

- Lee, John A. 1

- Leeks, Selwyn 1

- Liston, Charles L. (Sonny) 1, 2, 3, 4

- Louis, Joe 1

- Love, Catherine 1

- Love, Ralph 1

- Lyons, Michael 1

M

- Mackay, Ian 1

- McLeod, Denis 1

- Macpherson, Stewart 1

- Macphersonland 1

- Malcolm, Aussie 1, 2

- Maori

- colonisation of 1, 2, 3

- delinquency issues 1

- domestic violence and 1

- ethnic character of EBH 1, 2, 3, 4

- girls 1

- local iwi and EBH 1

- in Jerusalem 1

- nationalism 1, 2

- political view of 1, 2, 3

- Maori Party 1

- Maori Perspectives Committee 1

- Maungapohatu 1

- Marks, Tyrone 1, 2, 3, 4

- Marsh, Rufus 1

- Martin, B. 1

- Mason, Wayne 1

- Mazengarb, Oswald 1

- Mikus, Jules 1

- Ministry of Consumer Affairs 1, 2

- Ministry of Justice 1

- Ministry of Social Development 1, 2

- Miramar Girls’ Home 1, 2

- Mirams, Doris Marguerite Meares 1

- Morrison, W. Douglas 1

N

- National Business Review 1

- National Council of Churches 1

- Naval Training School Act 1874 1

- New Horizons 1

- New Zealand Herald 1

- New Zealand Listener 1

- Newton, Isaac 1

- ‘Night Train’ 1

- NZ Gazette 1

O

- Oates, Joyce Carol 1

- Orange, Claudia 1

- O’Neill, June 1

- Olsen, Adrian 1

- Olsen, Bill 1

- Operiki Pa 1

- Orphans Without Orphanages (Mirams) 1

- Otekaike Special School, (see Campbell Park School) 1, 2

- Owairaka Boys’ Home 1

P

- Parker, Bob 1

- Parker, Pauline 1

- Patterson, Floyd 1, 2

- Peek, Charlie 1, 2, 3

- Pere, Hamiora 1

- Petremant, Harriette 1

- Philipp, Eileen 1

- Pipiriki 1, 2

- Potts, W.A. 1

- Poverty Bay Herald 1

- Powierza, Marek 1

- Principal’s Handbook 1

- Psychiatric Needs of Disturbed Social Welfare Children and Adolescents and Consultative Psychiatric Practices in Social Welfare Institutions (Frazer) 1

- Puketapu, Kara 1

R

- ‘Reach Out (I’ll Be There)’ 1

- Reality Therapy (Glasser) 1, 2

- Reilly, Denis 1

- Residential Workers’ Manual 1

- Resource Management Act 1

- Romeo and Juliet 1

- Roosevelt, Theodore 1

- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 1

- Rowles, John 1

- Royal College of Physicians (UK) 1

S

- Savage, Jon 1

- Shaw, George Bernard 1

- Sisters of Mercy (Ireland) 1

- 60 Minutes 1

- Social Workers’ Manual 1

- Socrates 1

- Stewart, Linley 1

- Stewart, Graeme 1, 2

- Sunnybank Boys’ Orphanage 1

- Sweatman, Edith 1

T

- Taita College 1

- Taylor, Arthur 1

- Te Ati Awa 1, 2

- Te Puni (Epuni), Honiana 1

- Te Takere marae 1

- Treadwell, W.J.M. 1

- Thomas, Rita 1

- Mr Tjeerd 1

- ‘Tomorrow’s Men’ 1

- Tory, the 1

- Tryon Boys’ Home (New York) 1, 2

- Turia, Tariana 1

- Tyson, Mike 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

U

- University of Cambridge 1

- University of Canterbury 1

- University of Otago 1

- University of Oxford 1, 2

- University of Waikato 1

- US Department of Health and Human Services 1

- US Department of Justice 1

- US National Center for Health Statistics 1

V

- van den Heuvel, John 1, 2

- Victoria University of Wellington 1, 2

- Village Voice (US) 1

W

- Waiwhetu Marae 1

- Wanganui Education Board 1

- Weddell, Jessica 1

- Wellington Prison (Mt Crawford) 1

- Weymouth Girls’ Home 1, 2

- Whanau Ora 1, 2

Y

- Young, Garth 1

- Young, Trevor 1

- Young, Venn 1

- Yska, Redmer 1

Z

- Zeffirelli, Franco 1

Copyright

A RANDOM HOUSE BOOK published by Random House New Zealand 18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland, New Zealand

For more information about our titles go to www.randomhouse.co.nz

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

Random House New Zealand is part of the Random House Group New York London Sydney Auckland Delhi Johannesburg

First published 2011

© 2011 David Cohen

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

ISBN 978 1 86979 032 5

This book is copyright. Except for the purposes of fair reviewing no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Design: Megan van Staden

Cover design: Catherine Griffiths

Cover image: A young man inside the Epuni cellblock, circá 1975, ATL

Printed in New Zealand by Printlink