28 LISTENER MARCH 10 2018
been volunteering as an aid worker at a
Syrian refugee camp in Greece where the
refugees had put up a sign: “We’re Not
Zoo Animals”.
There were thousands of refugees at the
station, but no sanitation and nowhere
for women to wash. The place and the
people stank. “We have forgotten we have
a smell.”
They stayed and tried to help, with
small gestures of practical kindness:
buying toothbrushes and toiletries
and baby wipes and black tights for
the women, so they could wash at the
hose pipes with a modicum of modesty.
What really pierced his consciousness
and fuelled that indignation was “theGETTY IMAGES
PROFILE
indifference, a sort of icy indifference,
that the locals had towards these people,
which was shocking”.
He came home and wrote out of anger
in his writing shed. He is very private and
lives, off the grid, in his lovely eco-house,
on 9ha of remote land with a river and
a beech forest, 15 minutes south-east
of Martinborough in the Wairarapa.
Sometimes Tiffany lives there, too, but
sometimes they live in Melbourne,because her grown-up children are there.
He didn’t want me to use her name, but
there are plenty of pictures of the pair in
the public domain.
He has three children from his marriage,
including son Avi Duckor-Jones, who won
Survivor NZ last year, and is happier talking
about them, because they are all lovely
and much, much cleverer than their old
man. I don’t believe that for a moment.
He once said that at university he was
about as “clever as a sack of spuds”. “Well,
I’m not the sharpest.” Oh, what rot. He’s
just doing that Kiwi male self-deprecation
thing. “No, I’m not. Honestly. No, I tried.
I wasn’t lazy, but I just didn’t get it. The
intellectual foundations weren’t in place
... and I was a bit immature.” How did he
get to be clever, then? The usual way, he
says. By reading.
He became a sports journalist. He likes
cricket. He plays in the Wairarapa for a
loose assortment of gents of a certain age- he is 62 – known collectively as The Old
Bastards. He loves boxing. Really? Isn’t it
indefensible? “Yeah!” That may be what
1, 3 and 4. Refugees outside Buda pest’s Keleti
station in 2015. 2. A Syrian mother and child
trying to board a train at Keleti. 5. Lloyd Jones
circa 1985. 6. His daughter, Sophia Duckor-
Jones. 7. His partner, Carrie Tiffany. 8. His son Avi
Duckor-Jones, who won Survivor NZ in 2017.12
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Llewellyn was an orphan, one of six
children discovered in a room with
their dead mother in 1914.