Auckland's Wild West

Memories of a misspent youth, trying, sometimes failing to stay out of trouble.

My father used to proudly tell people that if I was going to a long weekend party, where we would be drinking and getting up to mischief, to “Make sure you are home in time for school.”

I’m not sure whether he thought he was being a cool dad. I think he was more of an absentee parent with more important things to do. I feel it was a matter of good luck and me making a few smart decisions, with a healthy dose of luck that led me to a good life, becoming a person who understands that ‘the system’ isn’t everything that is wrong with our way of life, but that we are ‘The System.

Things could have gone very differently. When I arrived back home from living with my grandparents in Holland after 2 years, aged almost 14, I had a chip on my shoulder. I didn’t want to come back. I was fixated on bad memories of my parents splitting up.

While I was away, they adopted out my adopted sister, Miriam, because she was white. Who does that? She, my brother and other sister were all adopted. They kept the other two because they felt being of brown skin, they would have a harder time finding a good family.

All I wanted in life was to be a professional musician, and I asked my parents to at least send me to a school with a good Music class. They sent me to a school that had a good rugby class, and no music. Kelston Boys High was a single-sex school with a single passion, rugby.

The school had put me back a year because they said that I hadn’t been in the New Zealand curriculum for almost 2 years. It didn’t matter that I had excelled at school in Holland. I had been to school AND concurrently completed Year 9 via New Zealand Correspondence School. It turns out that each month when I completed all my studies and sent them home for marking, my parents had failed to send my schoolwork down to Wellington to be marked.

The boys I attended intermediate school with before I went to Holland were now in Year 10, and I didn’t know the kids in my new class of 3Ac1. I spoke passable French, fluent Dutch and English, so starting Latin in year two would have been pretty easy for me.

It was a ‘start of year’ tradition at Kelston that the older kids would gang up on the third formers aka ‘Turds’, pushing their heads into the toilet bowl and pulling the chain. It was probably common in other single-sex schools.

I was smart and had a strategy to avoid that indignity. I started that day by visiting my older schoolmates during the breaks, successfully avoiding the attention of the bullies. After the first day, things settled into a normal rhythm.

We were in the west of Auckland, but I was actually from Titirangi which was very different to much of the west. A lot of the West, that my school fed from, was made up of low-income families, with high levels of violence, and was home to a notorious gang called the Headhunters. My school was their recruiting ground, although many of their members only lasted until they were expelled, mostly for violent acts, like beating up teachers, and anyone they didn’t happen to like on any given day. Only a few months into my first year, my homeroom teacher was thrown down a flight of stairs by one of their members, who was bigger than the teacher, and didn’t like being told to get to class. He ended up in hospital and the student was back at school the following week.

Titirangi was a village of mostly middle-class people, attracted by native bush, great beaches and perhaps a little isolation from the rest of the city. Violence and crime were rare, but it was there.

I made a couple of my best friends with guys who had also come from broken families and as such had to fend for themselves a lot. My parents got back together not long before my return from Holland, but I wouldn’t see them as parents as I had before it all went south.

Being sort of self-sufficient, and finding my way into the world of teenage years, I was drawn to people who were also on the rebellious side. One of them was obsessed with girls and drinking, so I became a quick learner with him, while the other was obsessed with British motorbikes, and taught me how to ride BSA and Matchless bikes. We went through bush tracks and dirt roads, getting to and from them via normal roads, except when we weren’t caught by the local cops, who used to say “Push them home, sonny,” warning us that we would be in trouble if we were caught again.

The AI still isn’t perfect. This is supposed to be BSA B31 which was a single-cylinder 350cc

My mate, let’s call him Stan, (girls and booze) lived down the road from me, about a 15-minute stroll, and much of the time we and sometimes his sister were the only ones at his place. His parents were pretty liberal, but caring, in their own way. We would get a few mates around and on the weekends we would have a few dozen beers and party. There's not much in that if you consider New Zealand had a drinking culture, we were just the next generation picking it up. There was nothing particularly unusual about that.

I think the culture came from the days, ending in 1967 when pubs and bars closed at 6 PM and were closed on Sundays, although if you knew the secret doorknock pattern, you could buy ‘sly grog’ at the back door of the local pub. The early closure of the pubs made it normal for men to go to the pub after work, drink as much as they could before closing time at 6 PM, and then go home to their wives and family.

Getting alcohol wasn’t a problem, sometimes we would say we were getting it for our parents. We did the same if we were questioned about buying cigarettes, which were sometimes for our parents. If we couldn’t get any, we would visit friends whose parents had a liquor cabinet. I remember a couple of guys (who will remain anonymous) we used to visit, who both ended up with highly respected careers in yacht racing. They always had lots of bottles of spirits. We would make a witch’s brew, taking what we thought we could out of each bottle and mixing them into something that would make warts disappear, taste foul, and set us on our backsides. I don’t know if their parents ever found out.

Road Trip

Most of our friends were older than us and some were more disposed to getting into trouble than I was. For example, one week in Summer, Stan got talked into going on a road trip with some mates who were far more ‘adventurous’ than us. He invited me as well, but I had the feeling they were going to get into trouble. And they did!

Off they went on a Friday afternoon. Running out of gas around 11 pm somewhere in the central North Island, they sneaked up someone’s driveway, siphoned gas out of the unsuspecting country person’s car, and carried on their merry way. The next day when the gas ran out again, they had another go at siphoning but were caught in the process by the owner of the car. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but instead of taking off in their car, they stole the car from the person whose gas they had been stealing.

This person of course called the Police, and for the next two days, the guys were hunted and chased over a distance of several hundred km, stole two more cars and were eventually caught. The trio of bandits all ended up spending time in the Waikeria Youth Prison. I was very glad I had not joined this trip. Luckily because of his age, Stan kept his clean criminal record, although it could have very easily been different.

There used to be a popular TV series called Outrageous Fortune, and then followed by Westside. Check the video below. This fictitious family wasn’t dissimilar to what it was like living in the West, which was why it was such a popular TV series.

A Kiwi pub typically (and often still) had a public bar and a lounge bar. They had different dress standards and different behaviour. The pub we sometimes frequented in our teens was in New Lynn, and the public bar was locally known as ‘The Flying Jug’. This title was earned because beer was bought by the jug and on certain nights of the week, it was likely that a few would end up flying around the room.

One Saturday night when I was about 15, we were kicked out of the bar for being underage and had nowhere to go. There was a group of us, maybe six or seven guys in two cars. We were wondering what to do when one of the blokes piped up and said “Let’s go to a party.”

“Do you know where there’s one?”

“Get in behind. Follow my car, he said.”

So we started cruising up Titirangi Rd and spotted a party-sized group of cars parked out on the side of the road. We parked and each grabbed a quart of Lion Red beer out of the boot of the lead car and followed one of the guys into someone’s backyard where there was a fairly large gathering of people.

We walked in as if we belonged there, although we didn’t know a soul. We just started chatting, ate a bit of their food and then came the obvious question. “Who are you? Who do you know here?” It wasn’t a challenge, just a conversation starter.

“Oh, John invited us”, one of the guys said, nodding his head. This is New Zealand, everyone knows somebody called John.

But the party was boring, we were the youngest by far and it only took about 20 minutes before we agreed to move on, noticing that we were beginning to be a topic of conversation with sidelong glances.

Back in the cars, we travelled farther up the road, quietly getting more inebriated and looking for another party. There were always parties on a Saturday night and all we had to do was look for cars.

Sure enough, we found another fete and bowled in like we owned the place. One pair of brothers, were getting very drunk and started becoming obnoxious not long after we got there. Again we didn’t know a soul, but the demographic was younger.

Before too long, voices became raised, and two of our little mob started a fight with one of the guests for no apparent reason. We tried to drag the boys off the property and back to our cars. But they didn’t want to leave and it ended up in a brawl, with us leaving not long before the sirens could be heard. It was a close call.

As I would learn, going out with these guys another time a couple of weeks later, brawls seemed to follow them around. Well, actually, they started them. Two of the guys, who were nice and kind people when they were sober, turned into monsters when they were drunk. To make matters worse, they enjoyed getting drunk. Stan and I moved on from that crowd, we were more chill, just wanting to have a good time without the aggro.

Over time a couple of years apart, two brothers from that group committed suicide. We later found out that they had a harsh upbringing, both being frequently beaten by their father, who also became violent with alcohol. They couldn’t break the cycle, hated what they became on alcohol, but couldn’t stop themselves.

My mates and I tried to avoid people who wanted to fight, but that was often difficult and we became pretty savvy at looking after ourselves. Most of the time…

It was a drinking culture. Who better to reflect on it, than Kiwi legends, The Dudes, with their song Bliss? Written as a statement on the Australian drinking culture. The original lyrics, using Downunder slang for beer were “Drink yourself more piss.” But this was sanitised for the radio.