Autobiography - A (relatively) brief history of my life
Obscured Fame - The new Millennium (2000's)
After the launch of Bouncing With Billie ... its the new millennium. I'm cooking dinner for Nest, and John our friend is about to start all over in Sydney, and then we can't find Steve and Heather's sister's place where we were going to be ... ecstatic in the best of all ways of savouring the hopefulness of the - next episode. Nest has been working all day, he's tired, and he really pushed himself to come, and me ...
I love the way Bouncing With Billie's publication has swung the door of being able to comment on public issues open, the way I get invited to guest shows downtown. At City Gallery's Past Lives I'm one of ten Primitive's talking to the International Festival of the Arts Viva La Vida, Frida Kahlo. I'm saying Above the brown bakedness of life; infinite cool clarity ...I sold copies of Bouncing with Billie most weeks. Its handsome 300 x 300mm size falls out of all the super large carrying bags I have. Those people, often unexpected, who say I love it - how much it thrills me, remind me of the pleasure I have finding something perfect a friend will like.
There's a bonus moment I've pictured for a very long time. Reading my words with live music. My friend Clyde does three poems one night at The Space, with his daughter Emily playing moody backing sax.
Halfway through the year I met James Gilberd, who was starting Wellington's first photo gallery - he called it Photospace. He liked my photos, said These remind me strongly of work of the New Yorker, Nan Goldin's book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency- I want to give you a show. We talked about making it happen ...
In January 2001 there's my first ever set of photo essays at Wellington's Photospace Gallery entitled Romance on the Menu. Their web page essay entry for me is (I think) stunning ...
Here's John, posing with the gladioli Nik bought us on Christmas Eve. I intended it to be an orgasmic rush for John's mate Georghe in Stockholm. They're going to start life together in Australia - but there's a Dear John e-mail from the family. We regret to inform you Georghe is dead. He died of a blood clot after his varicose veins operation. Those photos Fergus did of you. He asked us to put them in the coffin to be buried with him.
How on earth will I pay for the glass, the frames, the mounts for my show out of a zero budget? Creative New Zealand let me know nicely they were overwhelmed with extra funding requests.
Diana Moir of Write On communications brings her mother and father, Kenneth and Eirlys over to view my Teviot railway goodshed painting. Diana says to her father It's that hellhole you ran away from the minute you left school but it's of Fergus and Hattie before he got sick. You have to buy it ... I want it when you're gone. My funding problems are over!
There is enough money to buy gunmetal silver card and I can do photo essay scripts with crayon ... Summarise. Of course! Massively!!!!!
In Being Unidentified Criminals to Fix McGregor's Nausea there's a cops and robbers thriller of One Night with Scott and Giuletta ... my car is off the road, bust. Scott and Giuletta call a taxi for us. They're tired and off to bed. We are crouched in front of their classy car, out of the freezing wind, when a Police car's two occupants leap out, make us put our hands up. They think we're trying to steal the car or that we may have drugs.
We told them we were waiting for a taxi, and sheltering, outside our friends place. They're not going to wake Scott and Giuletta up, but they're tipping everything in our bags on the road, checking for drugs. The woman police officer looked through the packet of photos McGregor took of me priming up for Douglas Wright's ballet work Buried Venus saying ooh yummy! Look at that bum.
The crucial taxi comes by about an hour later. They stop it on a blind bend, explain they will take us home. They do!
They take McGregor's key from him, and admire the big seascape I did that he loves, beside the doorway to the kitchen, turn around and go.
We're shaking!
McGregor's spotting gear (to accentuate the rush) is on the sink, around the corner.
We could have gone to jail for a couple of years, as happened to a New Plymouth tetraplegic last year.
Dan Ambury said Oh Fergus. The night was saved by your two best assets, your arse and your paintings.
Almost as soon as Romance on the Menu is finishing, Wellington identity Kristelle Plimmer and I are doing a duo at Pataka Gallery. She has asked me to back her, but what are we going to do? Have we got a theme? A name for us? We have! - in fact I've been waiting to do this for the last decade. Its about the savage, often random evil of violence, no longer out there somewhere. Close to you, damaging people you love, you know. I talk about it in my poem Kathryn in Bouncing with Billie.
After school Mum would watch our neighbours, Bevan and Dawn Smith's, daughter Kylie, riding her horse, relax. And one afternoon her horse returned. Without her. After a two day search in the rain, they found her body.
Paul Bailey, the man who had been helping her father dig drains, grabbed Kylie off her horse, held a gun to her head while he drove them to a bush clearing, smacked her around, raped and killed her.
Bevan found out later that Paul was on bail for the similarly terrifying rape at knifepoint of another young woman in nearby West Otago. Local Baptist church people had willingly helped Paul and his family with a haven.
As Dawn and Bevan talked and cried through their grief, their anger with their friend Debbie Francis, an idea of putting together a petition to stop similar unnecessary tragedies took shape. Maybe they could start the rules being changed - bail could be stopped for violent sexual offenders. Life imprisonment could be that.
Bevan and Dawn and their friends decided to challenge unrepentant killers being automatically let out of jail some two-thirds of the way through their sentences. In SHATTERED DREAMS; Families of New Zealand murder victims speak out, Bill O'Brien presents their voices - here's a summary We decided to put a petition together. We, naïvely thought the Justice Department would appreciate our efforts. Minister of Justice, Douglas Graham, refused to let them help. When we presented our petition in parliament with a third of a million signatures, he told, us to pull ourselves together, as in fatal car crashes, lots of other people have to get on top of the aftermath of grief, and walked away.
Nothing changes; that could have been my friend Madeleine getting off a winter night Auckland bus in Grey Lynn, excited about being selected to go to The Royal Shakespeare school in England, grabbed by killer Taffy Hotene, trying to adjust to seeing in the dark, held, feeling the knife blade edge slice across her throat. Tired of Taffy - TOT, seems a good working title for what I want to say. His best mate in jail is Paul Dally.
Paul Dally is one of the killers making headlines while I was doing the canvases for the library. He grabbed Karla Cardno on her way home from school in the Hutt Valley, and tortured her so brutally that in a society where sex videos are locked away in R18 hire rooms, and violent vicious ones are not, details have never been released.
Overlapping our now named Un(a)bashed show, media is cautiously publicising his release and Carla's step-dad Mark Middleton is in total shock from only being told now how savagely she was smashed up. He made headlines by saying he would make sure Paul Dally died just as slowly, just as horribly. It's a momentous weekend this, the weekend of UN(a)bashed opening, of scores of thousands (95%) of talk-back callers saying we are tired of being at risk from perverts like Paul, from having to lock up our families to protect them.
A piece of fence post with barbed wire sticking out wants me to make it the thing Paul smashed her up with. Captioning is, Mark's wrenching My Little Girl, bloody pulped, buried alive. It seemed to me there's another layer to the debate which I sum up in the words Can men be trusted to have emotions?
Although this is her life eleven days of every week, Mrs Merepeka Raukawa-Tait, Women's Refuge boss, makes time to launch UN(a)bashed. She blesses us with a serene confidence that as ordinary people get involved, risk looking silly picking up the phone, and ringing police we can make a difference. I notice TV news cameras.
Voter disenchantment - I'm enjoying seeing the Justice Department scrambling to start overhauling, those lenient laws.
2002 is a sandy sunny surfy week in Gisborne going swimmingly well with Petrus and his family in Gisborne. Navi (Petrus's dad) enjoys a serious boozing man to down his home made beer with. Patrice (Petrus's mum) welcomes us with a television set sized jar of Malting Moments.
Every day we tear off to the sea. Nobody else swims here by the gang headquarters, along from the tip. I boost my mediocre swimming skills with generous driftwood for flotation. It's warm enough to stay in for hours ... then its firewood to burn by our beach blanket shelter, from the coldish post - cyclone draughts. Dad would have no doubt admired Petrus's quality erection jobs.
All this, and two steam train rides too! I especially like Mainline Steam's serious J1211 named Gloria trip to Napier in the twilight. Earlier with Petus chashing the train and trying to take photographs.
I had wondered if the rusting Mohaka Viaduct (the highest viaduct in New Zealand at 97 Metres or 318 feet) would fold up under us. The line is seldom used now with no regular passenger service to Gisborne and just one lonely freight train. It looks like the line may eventually be closed - a real shame!
My other steam train trip I took with Petrus and his Dad, Navi. It went to a place called Beach Loop - in the middle of nowhere, and back again. In the many hilltop tunnels steam and smoke squirt in through the ventilators, by my personally selected artist's back seat in the very last carriage. Ahhh the REAL steam train experience! Navi regailed us with a story from his youth where he would catch a ride on the railcar, get off at beach loop with his best mate, and climb down the 300ft cliff and fish for crayfish(lobster) for the day. 
It took 30 minutes to get down and 3 hours to get back up again. Payment for the Railcar was paid in fish!! This area is so remote (no roads go near it) the coast line is totaly unspoiled. Beautiful!
Tranz Rail are unusually lenient; let us stand outside on the open verandah of the guard's van.
I hope somebody saves this scenic route, its savageness snapped me back into being about seven, to the vividness of Mum's stories on the twisting Christchurch Express' route above the Murdering Beach Cliffs.
Thank you Geoff for your loving osteopathy in exchange for paintings, for buying a Bouncing with Billie before Christmas. Its exactly the trainfare.
When we get back to Wellington, Nest is starting writing a new play he calls LEGENDARY.
He read a wee story Katharine Hepburn dosen't tell reporters and gay admirers - Ted, her baby brother, hung himself at the age of 16. An older gay man he loved dearly ended their relationship. There are so many dynamics to the tale - it maybe is t
Later in the year we'll stage it at The Space. The first person that Nest thought of for the lead role in this play is our glamorous friend Jenny Charleson. Her family have all said Mum, you have got to do this! I'll do a painting of her, maybe from this photo of us.
Maybe Jeff Henderson and some of our music family at The Space will perform some moody/tough songs from Katharine's films to surround us and set the mood for the stage production.
In the new year my multimedia work appears twice in exhibitions in the foyer of the St. James theatre. Here's Seth Fraser, who coordinated The Black Sheep Exhibition being interviewed by Tom Cardy, Evening Post's arts reporter about it ...
It's new experimental edgy work from 30 Wellington artists. The theme is being the black sheep in the flock, the artist as maverick, and all its outsider and Man Alone connotations in New Zealand society ... abstract colourful works in painting and sculpture by the nomads of the Wellington art world.
Wellington Motorcycles sponsor us. In Alison Jones' photo, Seth, Arlo and I pack down on their blackest one.
Long term, Seth has a big commitment to moving artists out of our usual precarious poverty, through getting a Trust Fund for materials and some of the other basics started. Then revitalising one of our neglected magnificent buildings, as a sequence of people space cores, permeated with harbour radiance rippling, of people living, working and playing ... and of course enjoying and buying artworks.
Art that captures the Zeitgeist can encompass anything from the war in Afghanistan to Wellington's weather. Alison Jones is explaining her RIGHT HERE / RIGHT NOW exhibition to a Capital Times interviewer. She's designed the invitation to celebrate Lord of the Rings global premiere at the Embassy picture theatre which is nearby. All our names are written in Tolkien's elvish Middle Earth script.
I've already had my wee celebration!
Bigger Than Spielberg! read The Evening Post's preview headlines with me underneath, walking away, irritated at being told we have to wait another half hour to get inside. No camera's, media are allowed inside. Dominion's photographer loved Peter and Andrew's Panic button.
For me Zeitgeist is Ghuznee and Vivian Street retailers complaining about the black greasy car fume film they try to scrub off their shelves when work finishes ... I'm at Breaker Bay in the next painting I do, (The right hand painting on the wall behind Alison Jones) taking my sweaty underpants off. It's a still, perfect, night but the sunset is not relaxing - its Saturday spew heap colours - no worse, those are the synthetic ones I glimpse in oil slick spills.
Japoni Rose Trade Embrais is the name of the painting I am working on ... when I stood my single rose, billowing out and up through our japonica bushes thorny clutches (inspiring me a lot) , up on a chair to admire, the 20 mm thick paint in the roses middle slumped, skidded down. Alison has made an About The Artists and Their Work folder. Oh Beauty. Oh good - I love this.
I'll talk to Prime Minister, Helen Clark, about my disillusioned rose. The heart falling out symbolises the disintegration of people's hopefulness that life will be better. So many people I talked to spoke about arriving at work, working straight through ten hour days and then trying to look after themselves, look after people they love and maybe even have some fun!
Helen, the first thing people tell me when I see them in the late afternoon, falling over with fatigue, is that they haven't had any lunch. People would love you if you had listened to Laila Harre (member of Parliament) saying "Lets give our workers four weeks annual leave; same as in most other countries. They are tired of being remorselessly exploited to keep all the people systems running.
That last paragraph is bleak, but I think its a strongly honest one.
Today*s start of Psalm 106 for my waking-up bible reading encourages me.
You are blessed when you maintain justice, when you constantly do what is right
I am looking back to 1978, to being told I will lose my job - if I continue to want an indulgent work/ lifestyle that makes time for people. I'm assessing again my gut level decision to live passionately, compassionately and innovatively!
Normal would have been neater, but it would have been less fun!.