Photos of New Zealand politicians and their bookcases are creepily revealing
Apolitician anywhere near a book is a rare and incongruous sight. They exist as creatures who act on a range of terrible decisions. It doesn’t do for them to be seen floating around in the nebulous, dreamy world of literature, with its nuances and its conflicting ideas. But all photo opportunities are good photo opportunities when you’re running for office, and I had every confidence that New Zealand’s political leaders would say yes when I approached them this year to pose beside their bookcases.
It was for the series of photographs I run every Friday to illustrate the weekly best-seller chart at Newsroom, where I serve as books editor. For quite a long time I asked authors and various other literary types to send in photographs of their bookcases. Most of the photos appeared without any response. They were kind of interesting at the same time as being kind of really boring. Eventually I realised it might be a better idea to ask the authors to be in the photographs as well, and I extended the idea to invite political leaders in 2020 as an election year carrot.
They were kind of pleasantly revealing at the same time as being kind of creepily revealing. Public figures live in goldfish bowls but it was strange to see the leaders of New Zealand political parties in such a personal and intimate nook of their respective goldfish bowls. We are what we read; a bookcase is an X-ray of its owner, their ambitions and fears, their IQ and their desires, as well as the things they choose to decorate their bookcases.
I was forever asking the National party for photographs of its leaders on account of their year-long habit of staging coups. First up was Simon Bridges, who stripped down to a white T-shirt, black shorts and bare feet to sit on the floor in front of the bookcase at his Tauranga home. He looked happy as a sandboy and plainly had no inkling then that his head was being readied for the platter. His bookcase examined his past (a book about how parliament works) and foretold his future (a copy of Last Days of the Reich.) It also revealed his wild side, which is to say the limits of his wild side, in his copy of a biography of Phil Collins. Hard to know what to make of a thing he choose to decorate his bookcase: a bust of Queen Victoria.
Bridges was rolled by Todd Muller. In his first public appearance, Muller surprised and rather baffled the electorate by quoting from the great New Zealand poet Allen Curnow. It was a line from a Curnow poem about “learning the trick of standing upright”. Muller completely failed to learn that trick and
quit after just 53 days. He posed for the Newsroom photo by holding a copy of Curnow’s poetry and even then, in his first week as leader, there was something awkward and unnatural about the guy. He held the book with two fingers over its front, like it was a cricket ball, and as though he’d never learned the trick of how to hold a book.
Judith Collins took over from Muller. The photograph taken at her gracious Auckland home showed her holding a book which accurately represented her most consuming interest: herself. Her memoir Pull No Punches was published in 2020 and served as a very good job application when Muller quit. Collins stood in front of a nice wooden cabinet with glass doors and a key in the lock to preserve her husband’s collection of first-edition books about the Pacific. They did not look as though they had ever been read.
The bookcase of Green party coleader Marama Davidson showed her as an avid reader of Maori and Pasifika authors such as Hone Tuwhare, Karlo Mila, Patricia Grace and Albert Wendt. There was also something called You Can Heal Your Life, and she decorated her shelves with painted pebbles. Scratch a Green, discover a hippie.
Act party leader David Seymour pressed his thumbs together as he posed beside a shelf stocked with books about “some of my political heroes”, who included the neoliberal vandals who worked so assiduously to bring grief to New Zealand communities, Richard Prebble, Roger Douglas, and Ruth Richardson. He also had a copy of something called Good to Great. “It’s one of the most useful business books around. Christopher Luxon gave it to me,” he added, referring to the National MP who many expect will replace
Judith Collins and one day pose beside his own bookcase.
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters refused to have anything to do with my request but his party’s media-friendly blabbermouth Shane Jones cheerfully consented and posed in his Kerikeri home holding a copy of something called An Idiot’s Guide to Philosophy. He didn’t get many votes in the election and lost his seat.
Neither of the two least Age of Enlightenment candidates – Christian fundamentalist Hannah Tamaki of Vision New Zealand, and conspiracy theory fundamentalist Billy Te Kahika of the New Zealand Public party – got anywhere in the election. Their appeal was a bit marginal. Tamaki’s few books on a mantelpiece above her fireplace included The Lady the Lover and her Lord by TD Jakes, and I Found My Destiny by Ulf Ekman, but all eyes were on the bust of a stag. Its two curling antlers looked a lot like the horns of Satan.
As for Te Kahika, his few books included a full set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His outlook is a blend of fact and fantasy; the top of his bookcase was stacked with board games such as The Life of Christ (features over 1,400 multiple-choice questions), and BibleOpoly (the object of the game is to be the first to build a church).
There was one other leader who I needed to collect the set. It took all year to get a photo of prime minister Jacinda Ardern beside the bookcase in her Auckland home. Fair enough. I suppose saving the lives of the nation during the pandemic was fairly timeconsuming. And so I kept pestering, and kept looking forward to the photo. Ardern also serves as arts minister, a portfolio she emphatically wanted for herself, and I was confident her bookcase would be bursting with good New Zealand books - such as The Scene of the Crime, a book I wrote a few years ago, when Ardern gave the speech at its launch. But what else would it hold, and what insights might it reveal?
The photo eventually arrived. It was taken by her partner Clarke Gayford. He’s a nice guy – we ran into each other when Ardern was on the election trail in Auckland, and it gave him an opportunity to step away from the crowds that shrieked around the prime minister – and a man of many talents. Photography is not among them.
The file size of the picture he took on his phone is so small that it’s really hard to make out anything. All I can say with any confidence is that Jacinda Ardern, one of the most admired and celebrated political leaders in the world, has a book on pruning.