THE POWER OF WORDS
becoming a small “media sensation” by writing about his adventures in New Zealand newspapers. The engaging Elizabeth Ereaux, in London, held the family together with her gossipy letters in 1848 and 1852, describing the social life of a Cheapside boarding-house owner, her cat, and the parrot she had taught to speak.
Then there is Australian convict, Samuel Northey. He is barely revealed in a stark report of a failed expedition driving cattle across the bleak and untracked wastes of Northern New South Wales.
“I wanted to address the fact that people in the future will find – in particular – Pākehā history, very, very difficult to understand, sympathise or empathise with,” he told me. “In particular I wanted to widen the lens a little bit and find out what went into that culture. There is that sense too, of this is where we come from, this is who we come from…
“There are two places in my life that are obsessively interesting to me,” he observed of himself in this context. “One of which is Point Chevalier and the other is Napier.”
Point Chevalier, in Auckland, was his childhood home. It is evoked in vivid detail in his novel, Boy Overboard, and in his memoir, Long Loop Home.
It was also the site of an early sexual awakening. “My natural development was stymied, like so many gay men of my era, by the illegality and stigmatisation of the time,” he recently wrote. “In my own case I had an extra bonus, you might call it… I was sexually abused as a boy by an ‘uncle’.
“There is the whole thing of ‘that happened to me, and I’m fucked up and that’s the reason, and that’s the rationale for all that’s wrong in my life’,” he told me. “I really don’t believe that at all, so I didn’t want to raise it as that kind of issue.
“But in a way I was really trying to state something that had become increasingly clear to me, as I got older, that this thing did have a major effect on my ease with sex or my lack of ease with sex. And that took me a long time to even understand, really.” Everything was complicated by the fact Peter’s brother was sexually active with other males from an early age. As a schoolboy – furious, embarrassed, fascinated – Peter lived with the rumours.
“Why am I saying all this now? Well, it’s because I really do have this sense of absolute freedom. My mother’s dead and I have a sense of a deadline. There is not much point in mucking around.”
While Point Chevalier forms one lynchpin of his writing, Napier is the subject of his more formal histories. The city was the centre of The Hungry Heart, his book on the strange and complex life of the missionary, William Colenso. A Journey to a Hanging revealed Napier “as an almost theatrical setting for an intense drama about race in New Zealand” involving rebellion and cannibalism.
Dear Oliver is the third of his “Napier Trilogy”. Peter now divides his own time between the two cities. As he wrote in Long Loop Home, the estate of his brother Russell, a lawyer, treaty-negotiator, and art collector, gave him “what amounted to a private income”.
In Auckland’s Greenlane he lives in the architectdesigned modernity of the Simpson House, built in 1939, which belongs to Douglas Lloyd Jenkins, his partner of 26 years. Douglas is the former head of Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art-Gallery, a TV documentary host, and arts and culture writer, most recently of Beach Life: A Celebration of Kiwi Beach Culture, published in 2016.
In Napier, they live together in the “highly decorated” and “folly extravaganza” of Peter’s object-filled Finnis House, built in 1906. Once neglected and divided into flats, it now has been restored to its Edwardian glory.
Given historically resonant colour schemes, it contains a plethora of carefully chosen objects: a tiny bowl rescued from a sunken galleon in the Malay Straits, the pure lines of Constance Spry vases, and a Victorian painting of a steamship beneath a tumultuous sky.
Peter was a co-founder (with Stephanie Johnson) of the Auckland Writers Festival, and he has also initiated Same Same But Different, a festival dedicated to queer writers.
It was here, frail but determined after his first dose of chemotherapy in early February, that he stood at the podium and described the power of words.
He told his audience of being teased unmercifully as a “sissy” schoolboy at Mt Albert Grammar because of his quiet voice until one day he struck back with words “as sharp as spears”.
“In that second,” he said, “I understood the command of language was what would save me and the feeling was so extraordinary, so empowering that it was almost like that was where my life began, my life as a writer…
“I came into existence like a flame burning upwards and that flame has burnt onwards and kept me company right through to now where I stand before you and say that words are helping me even now when I am facing such a difficult time in my life.”
For Peter, a simple social media post has now become something much more.
“What could have been a fake voyage into self-love or narcissism became for me a very vital form of communication which helped me get through the chill of isolation, which is a very real danger during any illness.”
“I started, I guess, through words and writing, to ‘own’ the situation.”