30 LISTENER SEPTEMBER 14 2019
- Peter Snell and Murray Halberg
were hitting it big time in Rome
and I followed the Arthur Lydi-
ard method, running about five
or six miles a day.
Were you keen on rugby as a
spectator?
Extremely – I loved it. During
the HART years,
one of the common
things thrown at
me was: “You’re just
anti-sport, you’re
anti-rugby”, and it
was ironic because
I followed the game
closely. A number
of my friends went
right off rugby in the
70s and early 80s,
but my interest in it
never diminished.
But I never went to
rugby games after
HART was formed
because I just figured that would be a red
rag to a bull.What did you do before HART?
I went to university in 1966 and HART
was formed in my fourth year, so I didn’t
have another job before HART. I worked
in my parents’ dairy in Paihia, in the Bay
of Islands, over Christmas to support
myself at university. During the HART
years, I would often get shouts of “get a
job”. The only comment I got more than
“get a job” was “get a haircut”. For the
conservative, short-back-and-sides people
who supported rugby, long hair was a
symbol of wild living, sexual promiscuity
and revolutionaries.Did you think of yourself as a revolutionary?
No, I was just a diligent student with long
hair. I wasn’t trying to be revolutionary; I
was just trying to stop sporting tours with
South Africa. Rosemary McLeod came
down to Christchurch in about 1972 to
interview me for the Dominion. She was
going to spend a day in my life. By 11am,
she was totally bored – people had this
idea of the wide-eyed radical doing revolu-
tionary things when, in fact, I was sitting
at a rumpty old desk licking envelopes
and stamps and sending out newsletters.
Tedious stuff, but absolutely essential to
build up the movement.In the Listener (July 3),
South African academic
and former Truth and
Reconciliation Commission member Pumla
Gobodo-Madikizela described post-Mandela
South Africa as “a crime against humanity”.
What do you think?
It’s gut-wrenching. The corruption that
[former president Jacob] Zuma oversaw
is so entrenched that I think it’s very
difficult for [President] Cyril Ramaphosa
to do the things that he would like to
do because large sections of the African
National Congress are part of the Zuma
gravy-train camp. But talk to white South
Africans who were in the anti-apartheid
cause and black South Africans and they
mostly say what’s happening today is
not nearly as bad as life under apart-
heid. We now have a South Africa that
is democratic and where you can have
commissions of inquiry into corruption.
Hopefully, this one will have a positive
outcome in terms of changing the corrupt
nature of South African politics.You went to Paris with Patti for her job. What
did you do in your 12 years there?
I had a very good time. I took care of
French bureaucracy for us both; there is
a rule for everything. We had so many
friends passing through Paris, at times
I felt as if I was running a small hotel
and restaurant. I love cooking; I am not
so keen on washing sheets and chang-
ing beds! And I wrote probably about60 pieces for New Zealand
newspapers and magazines,
everything from the whimsical
to the serious. For the Listener,
I wrote about Gallipoli, Le
Quesnoy, the 2007 Rugby World
Cup, the Charlie Hebdo and
Bataclan terrorist attacks and
Iran. Patti’s job involved a lot of
travel, including many visits to
European countries as well as to
India, Vietnam, Mexico, Korea,
Morocco, Turkey and Ethiopia.
And, as bag carrier, I visited New
York, my favourite city, more
times than anywhere else.How do you follow global affairs
now?
We are plugged into interna-
tional newspapers. We subscribe to the
Times, the Guardian, the Financial Times
and the New York Times.And books: what are you reading?
I’m reading a Scandi-noir thriller, The
Reckoning, by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. I recently
read Home Fire, by Kamila Shamsie, and
I am looking forward to the latest Chris
Pavone novel, The Paris Diversion. A friend
has given me A Bloody Road Home: World
War Two and New Zealand’s Heroic Second
Division, by Chris Pugsley. It covers the
battlegrounds known to my dad. Patti is
keen on podcasts, such as The Red Box,
by Matt Chorley, about UK politics, and
David Axelrod’s Hacks on Tap for US
politics.As an old hand, what do you make of the
climate-change protests organised earlier this
year by secondary-school children?
Patti and I were standing on our balcony
looking down on Queen St, and in the
way that old protesters do, we were shout-
ing, “Slow down, get off the footpath
and get on the road. Bunch up!” But they
couldn’t hear us, obviously. When I was
younger, people would say, “You can’t
trust anyone over 30”, and then I became
30 and thought that was a ridiculous
notion. But if this was the 1960s, the now
72-year-old Trevor Richards would never
have set up HART. Experience teaches you
that this or that isn’t possible, whereas,
when you’re young, away you go. Youth
thinks it is immortal and invincible.
Today, I would lack the courage and confi-KE dence to do the things I did back then. l
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SHELF LIFE
Richards with partner Patti
O’Neill; left, in 1953.