Author and editor who shaped NZ
Ian Cross broadcasting boss, editor, author b November 6, 1925 d November 2, 2019
The phrase ‘‘ambitious for New Zealand’’ is tossed around almost at random by politicians these days, but once it might have meant something substantial. Ian Cross, who has died at Paraparaumu at the age of 93, was one of a handful of New Zealand editors who had a self-appointed mission to shape national culture and national thought. Others include his Listener predecessor Monte Holcroft and Landfall founder Charles Brasch.
Unlike Holcroft and Brasch, Cross’ time at the top of the masthead was relatively brief. He spent just four years as Listener editor, from 1973 to 1977. But those years coincided with a dramatic shift in New Zealand life that the Listener both contributed to and benefited from. He later described them as the most satisfying years of his working life.
Cross saw what needed to change, both at the magazine and in the country at large. He wrote in his 1988 memoir The
Unlikely Bureaucrat that New Zealand politicians had, by the 1960s, created a safe, dull country for ‘‘a lethargic colonial people’’. He saw New Zealanders as unimaginative, straight-laced, mediocre and uncertain, deferential to British cultural products over our own.
Readership doubled during his time at the Listener, and he created a magazine that many still remember. It was literary, independent-minded and focused on New Zealand, not Auckland. Cross believed a national magazine could not be run from Auckland in the 1970s, and ensured head office stayed in Wellington.
Readers experienced a new generation of journalists, columnists and cartoonists. Cross took a risk on then unknown cartoonist Tom Scott and made him into a press gallery columnist. Scott’s clashes with Robert Muldoon were defining events in the lives of both men.
Scott’s irreverence defined the spirit of the Listener for a cohort of universityeducated baby boomers who helped shake New Zealand out of the lethargy of the 1960s. Cross hired feminist columnist and cartoonist Rosemary McLeod, cartoonist Burton Silver and talented journalists such as Gordon Campbell and Geoff Chapple. With a weekly circulation that approached 400,000 by the mid-1970s, assisted by its state-sanctioned role as the primary source of TV and radio listings, the Listener under Cross and successive editors put those and other voices before a broad, mainstream readership.
As the possessor of a bookish, debonair charm, Cross might have seemed an unlikely herald of a less stuffy age in journalism. But he understood that an important job of an editor is to act as a talent scout. One meeting with Silver spoke volumes. Cross was strongly opposed to Silver’s cartoon woodsman Bogor growing marijuana, but he had an ingenious solution. ‘‘His decision was that the hedgehog could get stoned and grow marijuana because, and these were his words, ‘people would not emulate a hedgehog’,’’ Silver said in 2018. ‘‘It was a wonderful decision because it set up a conflict between a hedgehog and Bogor where there had not been one before.’’
Born in Masterton, Cross was educated at Wanganui Technical College. Writing was an escape. ‘‘In the rural New Zealand of my boyhood,’’ he later wrote, ‘‘books were the only means of gaining free and unfettered access to the adventure, surprise, and the delight of the world of the imagination.’’
His first job in journalism was as a copy boy for The Dominion in 1943. He stayed for four years before he and a friend from the paper, Maurice Keith Berry, left for Brazil, which was apparently in need of English language journalists. They made it as far as Panama, where they toiled on a banana plantation and worked as subeditors on a bilingual newspaper edited by New Zealander Ted Scott, an agent of British intelligence and said to be one of the models for Ian Fleming’s James Bond.
Cross returned to New Zealand, but Berry stayed and was jailed. Cross later wrote up his strange encounter with postwar espionage in his second memoir, Such Absolute Beginners.
Back in Wellington, he worked in the press gallery for the Labour Party’s Southern Cross newspaper and then became chief reporter at The Dominion.
While on a journalism fellowship at Harvard University in 1954, he began a writing project about a boy rebelling against his parents, drawing partly on the trial of a 13-year-old boy who murdered his mother, which he covered in Wellington a decade earlier.
The writing project grew into Cross’ debut novel, The God Boy, a social-realist story about Jimmy Sullivan, a Catholic boy living in ‘‘the New Zealand of the midtwentieth century, a grey, intensely physical, limited world’’, as literary critic Ian Richards put it. It was first published in the US in 1957, and praised as a ‘‘brilliant first novel’’ by the New York
Times. Cross felt that his immediate international success was resented by other New Zealand fiction writers, but
The God Boy survived the narrow squabbles of the literary community to become an enduring classic that was adapted for both stage and screen. Further novels The Backward Sex,
After Anzac Day and The Family Man failed to repeat the success of The God
Boy, for which he was eventually thankful, as he told journalist Peter Kitchin in 2007. He realised he ‘‘lacked the inner resource to survive the lonely literary confinement’’.
But there was another lasting achievement for the literary community. As New Zealand president of writers association PEN from 1968-72, Cross campaigned to have authors compensated for library use of their books. The fund continues as an annual, and very welcome, reimbursement for writers.
Cross went from literature to public relations, working for carpet manufacturer Feltex from 1961-72. But he kept an interest in journalism, presenting
Column Comment, a media criticism programme on TV. In the 1980s, he appeared on its successor, Fourth Estate.
After Feltex and the Listener, he went to the centre of New Zealand media power and became chairman and then chief executive of the NZ Broadcasting Corporation.
As another former Listener editor, Finlay Macdonald, wrote this week, ‘‘It is him we have to thank for the creation of TVNZ, the result of his amalgamation of TV One and South Pacific TV. His reasoning was clear, and in line with his cultural nationalist principles – end the false competition between two stateowned commercial stations, carve off a channel to become the public broadcaster and eventually sell the rest.’’
But his vision was stalled by Labour politicians, and the Cross who retired in 1986 was dismayed to see TVNZ continuing to act like a commercial operator. He clashed with ‘‘commercial radio chatterbox and presenter of dumber television, Paul Holmes’’. While he did not regard the creation of TVNZ as a failure, he told Kitchin he did see it ‘‘fail miserably to meet society’s interests and tastes as Radio New Zealand has done so successfully’’.
Cross was married to his wife Tui for 67 years; she predeceased him by one month. He is survived by four sons. –