Prolific writer, dissector of our psyche and foibles
journalist, author and broadcaster b January 9, 1931 d January 26, 2020
‘‘Journalist’’ and ‘‘intellectual’’ are words that haven’t always sat comfortably together in New Zealand, but Gordon McLauchlan, who has died aged 89, straddled the boundary between the two.
From humble beginnings, reporting drainage board meetings for the
Manawatu¯ Standard, McLauchlan rose to become a perceptive and sometimes acerbic social commentator whose book
The Passionless People, with its memorable depiction of New Zealanders as ‘‘smiling zombies’’, was a defining work of the 1970s.
Along with his contemporaries Pat Booth and Ian Cross, who died in 2018 and 2019 respectively, he achieved the distinction of public name recognition in an era when journalism was mostly an anonymous business.
But McLauchlan didn’t confine himself to one income stream. In an unusually diverse and energetic career, he was at various times head of public relations for Air New Zealand, a founding director of the talkback station Radio Pacific, host of the popular TV magazine show Weekend and, controversially, the front man in a series of TV commercials promoting the privatisation of Telecom.
For many years he occupied the ethically ambiguous zone between journalism and public relations. Consultancy work for international airlines and the global corporate giant Deloitte put jam on the bread and butter provided by his prolific writing for books (he wrote or contributed to at least 20, including A Short History of New Zealand for Penguin), magazines and newspapers.
He was also editor-in-chief of the New Zealand Encyclopaedia and for a time secured a niche as a compiler of quiz questions for the TV show Sale of the Century and the New Zealand edition of
Trivial Pursuit (‘‘the hardest job I ever had’’, he later wrote).
He was a long-serving New Zealand Herald columnist, commenting insightfully and often trenchantly on everything from sport to culture, books and politics. No-one was ever likely to die wondering what McLauchlan thought about anything.
He was still working at the time of his death and probably wouldn’t have disagreed with an old friend’s assessment of him as ‘‘driven’’. He wrote of himself: ‘‘I suspect that like many workaholics I am a lazy man frightened to stop. As I said to a Herald editor who asked why I didn’t take a break: ‘I’m scared that if get off this horse I’ll never get back on’.’’
Dunedin-born, McLauchlan and his one sibling, a sister, spent a peripatetic childhood moving from town to town as their ‘‘Micawberish’’ newspaperman father sought advancement.
He learnt early to stick up for himself. Arriving at a new school, he would be picked on and soon learnt the only recourse was to fight back. ‘‘I was a tiny boy but I instinctively knew when this happened to pick out one of the biggest kids and go for him as savagely as I could. Afterwards the other kids would warily want to be your friend.’’
He became flyweight boxing champion at Wellington College and retained a prickly, combative quality throughout his life.
McLauchlan studied English, history and political science at Victoria University for a year but quit because he was bored and the money he had earned in a freezing works holiday job had run out.
Entering journalism via a lowly proofreading job at the Labour Partyowned daily the Southern Cross ,he followed an orthodox career trajectory for journalists of that era. It included reporting jobs in the provinces (Palmerston North, Te Aroha, Matamata), a stint compiling radio news bulletins for what was quaintly called the Talks Department of the New Zealand Broadcasting Service, and a two-year stint working for the New Zealand Press Association in the parliamentary press gallery.
He liked to tell the story of fumbling for a light switch while trying to find a toilet during a Press Gallery party and being confronted by the sight of a Cabinet minister ‘‘thrusting into a young female lover who was spread-eagled in a large leather chair’’.
By 1955 McLauchlan was married and working for Napier’s Daily Telegraph, where he spent 11 years during which his three children were born. The editorship might have been his had he stayed, but
McLauchlan balked at the prospect of his career peaking at a humdrum provincial daily. Instead he became a Wellingtonbased writer of feature articles for the popular Wilson and Horton-owned NZ Weekly News and later, editor of the Journal of Agriculture.
Always a voracious and omnivorous reader, he wanted to be a writer rather than just a journalist. But it wasn’t until 1976 that McLauchlan, by now working as a freelance journalist and author, burst on the national consciousness.
That was the year of The Passionless People, which turned a critical eye on the New Zealand psyche.
The launch of the book in sleepy Eketahuna – chosen as the venue because McLauchlan often whimsically referred to the Wairarapa town in his Herald columns as a sort of metaphor for heartland New Zealand – was a media event that helped propel the book to bestseller status.
The Passionless People portrayed New Zealanders as polite, cheerful and hard working, but also insufferably smug and compliant. McLauchlan might have added masochistic, since they bought 25,000 copies within two months of the book’s release. He would return to the subject 36 years later in The Passionless
People Revisited: New Zealanders in the 21st Century, which was cutting in its condemnation of cant, shallowness and celebrity culture.
Reflecting on his original book, he pronounced it ‘‘perceptive here and there, with dollops of irony, plenty of hyperbole and energy to burn’’. But he observed that it was ignored by New Zealand’s ‘‘literary mandarins . . . who could not themselves write lively and witty prose if their lives depended on it’’.
In 1990, by then a familiar public face due to regular TV exposure on Weekend
and the arts show Kaleidoscope,
McLauchlan was shoulder-tapped to front a series of commercials promoting the sale of shares in Telecom, which had been created out of the ruins of the former Post Office monolith.
The assignment set him up financially, earning him the ‘‘ridiculously lavish’’ sum of $250,000, but it also exposed him to the wrath of a public discombobulated by the privatisation of government departments. Previously a vocal critic of state asset sales, he was accused of selling out. A Telecom employee sitting in a van in downtown Auckland shouted at him: ‘‘Ya f ...... traitor!’’
McLauchlan took particular exception to a critical editorial in Wellington’s Evening Post. ‘‘I understood for the first time how it felt to be attacked with anonymous self-righteousness by someone who had been a mediocre wageslave all his life while I had been living on my wits as a freelance.’’
Certain themes surfaced throughout McLauchlan’s writing. He was antagonistic toward corporate capitalism and suspicious of power and authority, had a working-class grudge against inherited wealth, was appalled by neoliberalism, regarded celebrity culture with contempt and thought journalism had lost its way. He had an empathy with the underdog and sometimes seemed to pine for the simpler, more honest and more egalitarian society he had known in his younger days.
He had a wide circle of friends, including a convivial group with whom he enjoyed regular lunches at an Auckland restaurant where they called their table Curmudgeons’ Corner. But like many good journalists and writers he saw himself as a loner, a trait that grew stronger as he aged.
McLauchlan lived in Auckland for the latter half of his life, first in the suburb of O¯ ra¯ kei and later in a city apartment with a capacious library. His first marriage was dissolved in 1980 and he married his second wife, Dawn, two years later.
He and his old friend Gordon Dryden – like McLauchlan, a broadcaster and journalist, and a co-founder of Radio Pacific – were born only months apart and liked to joke about which of them would live longer.
Those who knew him might have been inclined to back McLauchlan. Until a few months ago he swam daily at Mission Bay, a ritual he cherished, and he had the appearance and vitality of a much younger man.
But then an aggressive cancer struck. McLauchlan died in Auckland’s Mercy Hospice only days after a party to celebrate his 89th birthday. He didn’t have a funeral – preferring, as one old friend said, ‘‘to go quietly’’. – By Karl du Fresne
Sources: Jim Thompson, Ian F Grant, A Life’s Sentences by Gordon McLauchlan, Reed’s Who’s Who in New Zealand, The Listener.