John McLean
Citizen typist patriot
I’ve just read The Unlikely Doctor, a book about a man who now goes by the name of Timoti Te Moke. The book is written in the first person (“I”), but was in fact written for Te Moke (and the publisher, Allen & Unwin) by a fella named Eugene Bingham. Being a full time medical doctor, Te Moke made it plain, “I ain’t got the time [to write a book]”.
Bingham also ghostwrote the book titled This is the F#$%ing News on behalf of joke-journalist Paddy Gower. As a wordsmith, Steve Braunias eats Bingham and Gower for breakfast. Braunias’ unflinching review of “Gower’s” book began…
The central problem I have with Paddy Gower’s autobiography This is the F#$%ing News is that he didn’t f#$%ing write it. There’s a laziness and a complacency to this as-told-to exercise…Gower can probably write a decent sentence. He’s, you know, a journalist. He knows his way around a keyboard. Why did he need Eugene Bingham to act as his ghostwriter? Is Bingham going to write his Stuff stories for him, too? There are just some things you don’t tell someone, even your amanuensis, and the book feels detached, phoney, a bit unreal. The unexamined life is not worth publishing.
Your Unlikely Book Reviewer has reviewed only one other book. This Substack review is one of my most-read Substacks:
THE UNTOLD JACINDAJohn McLean 9 December 2025
The Unlikely Doctor describes Te Moke’s gritty life to date and his indisputably remarkable and admirable achievement – given his bad luck in life – in becoming a medical doctor at age 56. But, as inspiring and moving as it is, The Unlikely Doctor is significantly flawed literature.
The incessant speech marked (“ ”) quotations of invented dialogue don’t add verisimilitude but, rather, make the reader wonder just how much of the rest of the content has been made up. And the book is blighted by deflections, minimizations and downright untruths.
The main thing downplayed in the book is the appalling role that Te Moke’s mother played in his tough start to life and his life in general. Te Moke’s mother gave Timoki up as a toddler to her parents, where he says he was nurtured and loved. Then, when the boy was six years old, his mother demanded him back as her ticket for higher social welfare child-support benefits. She hauled him back into a horrible household with a ghastly violent step-father. Mother lied to the court that her partner was Te Moke’s biological father and formally changed the child’s name to Timothy Morrison.
Another minimization is the fact that his biological father, said to be Tongan, buggered off before Te Moke was born, never to be seen again. That’s a terrible thing to happen to any child.
Unable to honestly confront the dastardly dual causes of this descent into crime and imprisonment (his mother and absent father), Te Moke – in Bingham’s ghostwritten words – blames colonization. Quoting from the book:
That is what we [Māori and Pasifika people] do – we become doctors and nurses and lawyers and teachers and other professionals…even though our people were colonized.
…but its only since the introduction of capitalistic food production that people of Aotearoa New Zealand, and my people in particular, have experienced hypertension, type 2 diabetes and renal failure. Just saying.[How could Dr Te Moke possibly purport to know that? Average Māori life expectancy before colonization was about 27. Perhaps most Māori never got old enough to suffer hypertension, type 2 diabetes, renal failure and suchlike.]
The Māori Party had been formed in the aftermath of the Foreshore and Seabed Act, a law change that robbed iwi of rights won in court. Outrageous. [Incorrect. Helen Clark’s legislation did not rob Māori of rights won in court. No Māori customary fishing rights had been won in court when Harro Helen’s legislation was passed.]
Sometimes I think about an alternative universe…in which Māori and Pasifika don’t have to deal with the worst of the justice system – the presumptions, the racial profiling, the prosecutions, the pressure just to plead guilty – more of than anyone else has to.
I’m a descendant of many generations of New Zealanders without Māori ancestry (i.e., I’m entirely descended from ‘colonizers’). And I defensively bristle at being blamed for all society’s ills and stickered with white privilege. My skin is as thin as it is pink.
Te Moke’s blaming of colonization for his personal challenges in life contrasts starkly with the attitude that my dear deceased friend, Robert Tuhekengarangi Morehu, took to his own tough life. I’ve covered this remarkable man:
ROBERT TUHEKENGARANGI MOREHU MĀTĀTOAJohn McLean 31 July 2023
Robert’s gravestone at his urupa (cemetery) bears the inscription “a self-inflicted tumultuous life”, and there’s some truth in that. (Robert’s son, also a good friend of mine, went along with the inscription!)
Robert T Morehu certainly didn’t run around blaming anything on colonization.
The book about Dr Timoti Te Moke dwells on the Central North Island (CNI) Treaty of Waitangi Settlement, in the following terms:
“The [2008 Central North Island (CNI) Forests Deed of Settlement] provided redress for iwi in the area over historical Te Tiriti o Waitangi breaches connected to land seized by the Crown for state forests – thousands and thousands of hectares. All those trees you see when you drive through the central North Island, those massive forests. Yeah, they were planted on Māori land taken by the Crown.”
That statement is completely incorrect. The CNI Settlement was not for land confiscations, or even primarily for unconscionable land dealings by the Crown. The supposed Treaty breaches behind the settlement remain largely unclear to this day. Robert Morehu confided in me that he couldn’t understand the CNI settlement, given there were no confiscations.
The blurb on the back page of Dr Te Moke’s book states “A true story of resilience, redemption and revolution”. As indicated, Timoti’s story, while certainly of resilience and redemption, is not all true. Te Moke’s recounting of faded and selective memories to ghostwriter Eugene Bingham was akin to Chinese whispers.
And the blurb’s “revolution” claim is murky.
Timoti appears to have fallen into the thrall of a Māori activist lawyer, Roimata Smail. In 2024, Roimata published a book titled, Understanding Te Tiriti: A Handbook of Basic Facts About Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Roimata’s didactic handbook is decidedly short on ‘basic facts’ but, predictably, big on the invented, ahistorical notion that there exists, as I type, an entirely separate nation of undefined “Māori”.
Back in 2019, Roimata, on Timoti’s behalf, filed a claim with the Waitangi Tribunal requesting an urgent hearing into her and Timoti’s allegations of systemic bias against Māori in the prosecution of crimes. Timoti’s claim has subsequently been rolled into a wider, undecided, Waitangi Tribunal claim alleging wholesale justice system bias against Māori.
My overriding hope is that Timoti hasn’t paid Roimata a dime of his own money, from his book proceeds or doctor’s salary or otherwise. Waitangi Tribunal claims are mainly funded by ‘legal aid’, i.e., New Zealand taxpayers.
Apart from wanting a fairer and generally better New Zealand (who doesn’t), it’s not clear what “revolution” Dr Te Moke might have in mind. At one stage, according to the book, the good doctor advocated to disgraced Police Commissioner Andrew Coster for “an independent body that oversaw police decisions to prosecute Māori”. Coster is said to have demurred.
IMPOSTER COSTER SHIFTS INTO SURVIVAL MODEJohn McLean 27 November 2023
If the book is to be believed, Te Moke’s self-esteem is rising along with his prospects in life. The book ends with:
So I will keep going, creating change in such a way that when it’s time for me to leave the earth, the world will know my name; the world will be a better place because I was here.
It comes as a comfort to me that it was born-again Māori Eugene Bingham who wrote those words, and not Dr Te Moke. Because Timoti doesn’t strike me as an egomaniac. Because the big wide world will never know Timoti Te Moke’s name.
It’s just great the good doctor is now fulfilled and contributing to colonized New Zealand, in a medical profession that wouldn’t exist without colonization.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
