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Fergus (left) and Peter (right), dazed, sodden, alcoholic survivors - minutes after being rescued from obscurity, having tequila on the rocks!

Autobiography - A (relatively) brief history of my life

The 1970's
 
I love the front page we've loaded on Fergus.
 
Me too,I say.
It's ten to one on an average Miramar Wednesday night. Clenching his ten inch El Montezuma cigar, not able to lean back in his contour enhanced, polymer resin software chair, or it'll fly into viral meltdown, he's moving in for the kill - traditional Private Investigator style ... Why have you shrunk the 70's down to just three paragraphs in Bouncing with Billie?
 
 

 
/Biography/Mother Neilson.jpgAnd so to Wellington in 1971 to see what Aunt Dot was doing and it was so startlingly immediate, and unpretentious, I moved here to live. But Dad got terminal cancer a couple of months later, and I thought it was important to look after Mum and Dad, so I returned and worked in Balclutha until the end of 1973.
 
And one night mum said the magic phrase Fergus, I love you, but you've gone totally bad ever since you left school. She read all my mail. She'd picked up the letter from my nurse buddy in Wellington, Robyn, where she said I'd love to come and see you. Your mum always wanting to be numero uno is a bit of a worry. As long as it's not carnal. It's okay to join up with you in Gore for Bill and Daphne's wedding in Riversdale?
 
Because of the way she unerringly needled me about anybody she knew who I was fond of, I told mum all the wrong things. Instead of saying Mum, I have given up the best three months of my life to look after you both, I told her she was a possessive bitch, and all my friends thought so too, and got into my car and drove back to Balclutha, before I got goaded into giving her a wee smack. Neither of us apologised, and there was nothing real to say until after she died in 1994. When I said to Mum lying in her box, looking accusing and disappointed, Mum, I think you know now. I think you understand. Heaven is filled with rich diversity.
 

 
This is a drawing I made of myself in bed and Mike bringing me in a cup of Mike's teaIt's time to get life moving, and see what will happen with Robyn, and me, so I moved back to Wellington. She thinks signing on at Victoria University will open up my brain a bit, and it did. Nothing was safe or predictable ... all the friends I'd made in a Christian commune had moved on into bland suburban nuclear families, and I missed the soaring, renewing joy I'd had belonging in a small country Pentecostal group, before my pastor buddy David Patterson shifted on.
 
Wellington was damned lonely for me at the beginning but very very slowly, it got better. In 1976 Mike and I moved into a decaying vicarage, squashed between the Jewish Synagogue and the Apostolic Church. He wanted to be less mercurial, more Fred Dagg, more spiritual ... it was over the back fence from Tonks Ave, Wellington's inspirational 1860's slum.
 
Tonks Avenue.  The white building in the background with the red roof was where I lived in 1976.Fred Dagg stinks. If you don't stop quoting his ... but lets not get hysterical ... at me, I'll kick your balls to pulp. We're supposed to have brotherly Christian compassion for each other.
I loved having fun, sly Mike, I heard where he's coming from telling me
God has done heaps for you. You don't have to be so cynical. In fact if you want to, there's a British guy at Elim praying for people. He's a total sweetie, not aggro like most road-show evangelists ...
I don't like myself - there is an icy feeling knowing this, under all the other growing up things. He said I used to be like that too, Precious Lord Jesus, I ask you to heal my friend Fergus' self image ...
 
There's a new man in our The Nightmare on Elm St. bathroom mirror. He's adorable! I notice growth, and healing start, stop deflecting compliments. Dame Janet Paul, my Mummy Superior at work saying Beautiful Boy... here she is defying the brown frumpy dreariness of 70's fashion, writing about Molly Morpeth Canaday. Studying, drawing Life together.
 
Mike. He'd leave Wellington, scrap prurient, syrupy Christians are only nice people who watch television all day, every day, second hand emotional censorship. Be killed near Rotorua on Wellington Anniversary Day 1977, give me the ultimate accolade
You're the only real person I've met in Wellington, love staying in touch.
 
A decade and a half later it started to be all right to talk about grief. I didn't know Mike was dead until after the funeral. Would I jump into my car to be with his Mum & Dad, on their farm, over a flimsy suspension bridge out of Wanganui? They left the television running all weekend. I couldn't hear what they were saying. I'd have to be in ultra Fred Dagg mode to start thinking about trying to cope!
 
It's splintery, slash wrist/jagged hard to talk about ... Those first over the ear hearing aids had the sound intake at the back. So things I find ummm - challenging today weren't possible. I couldn't hear what the person in front of me in a cafe was saying. The core of the Wellington, beloved Buenos Aires of the heart of the tango singers, is background burble. Babble. I was left out, marginalised.
 
Those screams of pain over the back fence of a three year old boy being smashed up, an eleven year old girl being raped and beaten are also about being stuck in a 5% deaf sub-ghetto, of obliterated bass caused by violence, where you get left over hearing aid technology. Years after the other 95% whose hearing deteriorates in the treble register as they get older are given it. The moment they moved hearing aid microphones onto the front, I was down at every play Bats, Circa, Downstage, Stagecraft and Taki Rua did. They'd make sure I had a script, and I had so much surplus energy, I'd draw. As well as speed reading scripts with my cat burglar little torch.
 
Fergus listening at 250% concentration to Mrs Merepeka Raukawa-Tait opening "Un(a)bashed", an exhibition of Kristelle and my works, at Pataka Gallery, trying to wring the meaning from the scatter gun of words. (March 2001)
 
Blossoming into a Brooklyn bicultural beauty.Sociology was less statistical that Psychology, so I did that for my University Degree major.
 
Except for Bill Pearson sociably cramming the entire population of Coal Flat into one novel ... what do most Aotearoa authors write about - endless desolate repeats of novelist John Mulgan stuff, I found. It was the time between the two world wars that was bad. The worst time ... retro stuff.
 
Then there's Avery Jack lecturing in Social Administration 2 - it's what I'm really interested in. How do you make the big budget Social Welfare decisions? The ones Mum and Dad slugged it out with all the time so I could actually learn at school? What do the Social Welfare's ideas do, collide with, maybe jiggle the framework along a wee bit further, so it fits more people? By George she's got it, I use a bit of her ability to analyse, every time there's a very little Social Policy initiative -
Dole for Artists, it'll encourage all the aimless bludgers who "stilt walk" - to claim. What about Jennifer Shennan saying Michael Parmenter. At the top of the Aotearoa contemporary dance thing. Having to ask for money to buy a meat pie with on the Picton Ferry. She's outraged. So am I.
 
David, Graeme, Marilyn the long term patient people of Audiology holding my hearing loss profiles. That 25% hearing loss. You're still just above the 20% zone where there's nothing we can do to replace lost sounds. But it's near bloody impossible trying to rev your sound up reasonably without distortion. And without them screaming anywhere near maximum. Or if I laugh, smile, be animated. I'd love to have the first person say I'll talk louder. Then you can turn them down, and we can start having fun.
 
If I don't say That's the way it is.
 
The next person who is more deaf, who talks funnier than me (I have to guess how loud I'm talking all the time) could be:
More Marginalised
More Breaker Bay bus victims shivering in July shadow.
Their care barbecuing in the sun.

When Nest and me walk back they're gone. Maybe they're depressed. It's more likely they're bashed into the back of the bus before they fall over with hypothermia, and have to be flown off to Accident and Emergency in the bright red WestpacTrust helicopter. And. Ian and Clare Athfield's boy is so thrilled to be a builders labourer. He's just finished a degree, and life shouldn't be so shitty, he shouldn't have to be grateful for being spat on. The Harry Connick I'm goin' Nowhere dump in - Nelson. My wrap-up of life is that if you give people a wood-shaving size scrap of hope, and they grab it, God lovingly nurtures, applauds. And you're never going to be bored! Very non-Dunedin.
 
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That first 1974 May break, I needed to earn some money.  The very last job on my list was an unadvertised one in the art room of the Alexander Turnbull Library.  I liked needing to be versatile. 
 
What a lot I owe to these enthusiastic work mates and friends.  They bought my paintings frequently, had them over their office walls, and rang Peter McLeavey, New Zealand's top art dealer, and asked him When are you going to show this guy? Peter was initially interested but I changed direction!
 
I moved from ultra flat 1970's portraits into intricate, sometimes fussy, detail and ...
 
My 1980's started in August of 1978. I call this Making Informed, Compassionate, and Spiritual choices about Life, Love, Work, Leisure ... I would fall in love with Laurie, who loved being in the Army more than adoring eager motherhood. I'd rather paint. Ritually, rabid State Services/Department of Labour/Social Welfare people would get me fired from my job on Friday, rehired on Monday, on varying temporary employment schemes to make our worrying unemployment statistics appear okay. But ... I've saved enough money to take up an offer of a holiday I'll never forget that my Fijian Indian school teacher friends made, whom I'd met off the overnight train from Auckland.
 
Jim Traue and I deep in conversation.Ray Grover, the assistant Chief Librarian has called me into his office to say "We're not going to be able to do this for you again. You've chosen an outrageously inconsiderate time to ask to work four days a week so you can paint. We're not allowed to replace you."
 
Ray Grover is a lovable boss. Like Jim Traue. He'd never have said this as brutally. But it's always the subtext of looking after the Turnbull Library's crumbling fragile unique art treasures. Because Government thought it was a waste of money bothering to employ Conservation people, it would be squashed into shoeboxes. What a heartbreaking way to go for William, Frances Hodgkins dad's, tiny sketches of Central Otago's empty harshness. For fourteen Rembrant etchings ... (one of which is already missing!)At Abhi & Lila's family farm, Nandi Airport, Fiji. Lila, Anhi's wife (extreme left), photographer Abhi Ram is the friend I met on the train journey from Auckland. The rest of the people are the non-Suva part of Abhi & Lila's extended family. I love still keeping in touch with them. Including during the terrifying uncertainty of the initial 1984 coup.
I am saying I picked up my Pacific Rim Airways tickets. I've saved for them for four years. If I cancel, I'm not going to get another chance.
 
I couldn't afford film for my camera but a friend gave me a sketch block! Seeing how simply people who share things can live. Not being lonely. I knew I'd done the right thing picking a part-time lifestyle. Women have been making quality time for their mates for millennium. It's time for Christian blokes to start leading the way, start catching up nurturing, encouraging each other. Instead of letting life, the things they want, rush past until they retire. Unless they meet Harry, He is here to help of this years Film Festival's hilariously bleak French un-intentionally very New Zealand, vision.
 
 

 
/Biography/Harlem_flat.jpgIn 1979 I moved into a classic Harlem railway carriage basement flat (every room opened off another room). On my own in Island Bay. Of course it was atrociously damp.
My landlord is saying Yes , I'll take your $25 a week. I didn't want to bother doing the wallpaper. Thanks mate, as long as it doesn't worry you.
 
Colin and Annette upstairs said We were so worried. We thought you might be a Goth, and keep us awake all night. Come and have dinner with us. We'll wash your socks, and your underpants and your singlets and all your other stuff for you every day.
 
One morning, I saw that if I paint my world honestly, unpretentiously, I'll hit the big universals people wrestle with - of life, of love, of belonging, of being a New Zealander. Unpretentiously! Yes, it's the word Dad would have most loathed, because he was a Sunderland Postmaster's son with an Englishman's inborn ability to socially grade people as rejects or not rejects.
 
... and I find people saying You have to sell me this, or is there something you want me to do for you.
 
 
 
Because
I
love
whatever
it
is
you've
done.