Centrepoint vault cracks open
Centrepoint is back. A superb TV docudrama out today. A stream of TV, radio and print interviews related to the doco. A reprint of the 2013 memoir Surviving Centrepoint in the works.
But actually, Centrepoint (b. 1977; d. 2000) never really went away. It’s only three years since the release of the cinema documentary Angie –a biographical portrait in which Centrepoint wasn’t so much the subject, as the vast elephant squatting in the middle of the room.
Before that? In 2015 Anke Richter wrote for North & South of her thwarted efforts to write the definitive Centrepoint book (because frankly, Len Oakes’ 1985 hagiographic Inside Centrepoint skipped rather too lightly over all the sex crimes). A few years before that, Sunday Star-Times journalist Tim Hume disinterred ugly secrets about why early police investigations of child abuse foundered, and also interviewed the unrepentant ‘‘guru’’ Bert Potter.
In fact, as I skim through the spreadsheet on my laptop that tracks 44 years of Centrepoint coverage, it’s hard to find any year since 1977 when Centrepoint hasn’t insinuated itself into the news. All this for a place that ceased to exist more than two decades ago.
That spreadsheet? Ah… that’s because this TV docudrama isn’t the end of it. This year my colleague Eugene Bingham and I have been working on a new narrative podcast about Centrepoint for Stuff. The remarkable thing is that, even on the heels of 90 densely-packed TV minutes, there’s plenty of story left to tell.
Sure, you can summarise it in a single sentence: a smooth-talking ex-salesman and his therapyobsessed mates found a commune preaching personal growth and sexual freedom, and it degenerates into child sex abuse, drug dealing and internal feuding.
Yet that sentence can’t hold the messy complexity of it all. Centrepoint was big: 300-plus residents at its peak, and a constant churn of short-term visitors – and each has a slightly different story. Nowadays, it’s hard to get anyone on the record making a full-throated, unhedged defence of their social experiment, but defenders do exist. Others reckon it was a paradise lost: perfectly sweet until bad apples soured it for everyone. Others still say the only change was that the scales fell from their own eyes: in hindsight they realise Centrepoint was a disgusting disgrace from day one.
That’s just the former adult members; and perspectives of the children who either arrived with parents or were born at Centrepoint are as diverse as their parents’.
Some were outright victims and have seen their abusers jailed. Other victims haven’t pursued legal remedy. Some say they weren’t abused, but still suffered from the community’s non-sexual toxicities. Others – especially those who arrived after Potter was jailed – reckon Centrepoint had cleaned up its act by then and provided the best childhood anyone could have.
That’s a half-dozen classes of ‘‘the truth’’ about Centrepoint off the top of my head. But there’s also this: Centrepoint was a community of complexly inter-related families. So all these variants of the truth are forced to rub shoulders, even now. Child vs parent; sister vs brother – it’s hard to compare memories when those memories exist in mutually incompatible universes.
Yet the remarkable thing that we’ve found is that many exmembers are very keen, decades on, to have a go at talking honestly. This won’t necessarily be public: we’ve talked with exmembers who are comparing notes with their peers in WhatsApp chats and private Facebook groups, but aren’t sure if they want to repeat them into a microphone.
After all, the truth can be frightening. The truth has already sent people to jail and torn families apart. Yet as a former Centrepoint child says near the end of the TVNZ documentary: ‘‘Truth heals’’. She would know.