Sir Bob Jones
When I was a schoolboy, few of our teachers, or anyone else, had ever been to university. Anyone with a degree was looked upon with awe.
Sixty years later it seems everyone goes to university, largely thanks to the commercialisation of universities, now cluttered with bullshit non-academic subjects. Thus degrees are tossed out like throwing confetti.
I wrote about this over two decades ago with my comic novel Degrees For Everyone.
Since then the corruption of academia has sunk to inconceivable depths with doctorates in dressmaking, ballroom dancing and indeed, every human activity, now available on tap by diverse so-called universities, now essentially commercial enterprises.
But, through all of this decay, the core academic subjects still prevail, notably history and the sciences.
And of these old school academics still deserving respect for their research efforts in New Zealand there’s none better than AUT historian Paul Moon.
Paul’s prolific output of books on aspects of our history is truly remarkable. Such is the size and range of his biographic legacy, he modestly doesn’t include it in each new volume.
His latest book Ans Westra – A Life in Photography is typical.
As someone with a sceptical view, seeing photography as a grossly over-rated art form, I read it with some reluctance. In the event, I couldn’t put it down. One reason for that was personal as it transpired Ans Westra’s early 1960’s life in New Zealand in part over-lapped mine.
It was 1962 that most struck a chord when she mixed with poet James K Baxter, then best-selling writer Barry Crump, and other identities. So too that year did I, we gathering after mid-day in a Wellington coffee shop called The Dutch Tulip.
Baxter, or Jim as I knew him, was a postie and typical of the union engineered corruption, back then, was allocated a round easily completed in three or four hours for which he received a full salary. That rot was ended by the Roger Douglas purge in the mid-1980s, albeit by then Baxter had taken up his ill-fated new role as a messiah on the remote banks of the upper Wanganui River.
Crump was not living in Wellington but the first time he turned up at The Dutch Tulip when I was there he later took me for my first ever Chinese meal.
Soon after he impregnated Westra about which time I dropped out of this group, being so busy now in commercial property across New Zealand and in Sydney.
Another episode to which I related, namely Ans being denied access to photograph colourful lawyer and close friend Greg King’s funeral, following his suicide. As I was one of the pallbearers, I might have made the book.
I suspect any reader of my vintage will similarly relate to elements of this biography, even if like me they have no interest in photography.
The fact is Paul Moon is an enormously talented writer to a degree that he can make every topic interesting, which of course everything is, if presented as well as he does.
I have immense admiration for his zealous productivity and strongly recommend not just this latest book, but all of his unmatched prolific output as an engrossing damn good read.
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