“NORTH & SOUTH”
Auckland, New Zealand.
November 2001.
Issue 188.
ISSN 0112-9023.
Publication Date: October 15 2001.
Pages: 48-59.
It’s over eight years since Dunedin
writer Lynley hood began a book on the Christchurch Civic Creche sexual abuse case.
During that time she’s been accused of keeping an innocent man in prison for
personal gain, threatened with jail by the Court of Appeal and fallen out with
her original publishers. Meanwhile, doubters said her 230,000-word magnum
opus – published this month by plucky Longacre Press – would never make it
to bookshop shelves. LAUREN QUAINTANCE reports on
The Lonely Journey Of Lynley Hood
0n the first page of A City
Possessed Lynley Hood says writing the book "often felt like the
literary equivalent of a solo crossing of Antarctica". "There were
points," Hood told North & South, "where I thought 'this
is too hard' but there were never points where I felt like stopping or that I
had to give up or I couldn't move. At times I felt like I'd fallen down a crevasse
and the only thing to do was to get out my ice-axe and ropes and drag myself up
and trudge on or die in the attempt."
Yet had the 58-year-old Dunedin
writer achieved such a feat she could expect beneficent media coverage and
approving letters from well-wishers. As it is, she's bracing herself for crank
phone calls, bilious letters to newspaper editors and soured friendships. Such
is the depth of feeling about her topic: the 1993 Christchurch Civic Creche
case that led to the jailing of childcare worker Peter Ellis. But Hood's
conclusion that Ellis is innocent is just one reason why the book will be
controversial.
The former scientist who has written
biographies of two well-known New Zealanders - writer and educator Sylvia
Ashton-Warner and "baby farmer" and convicted murderer Minnie Dean -
has displayed the calibre of her literary mettle in her latest project. To
explain how the authorities got it so wrong in the creche case, Hood guides
readers through 30 years of social history and provides an unflinching critique
of leading figures in the feminist, child protection movements and the
,judiciary.
And even before it was published on
October 1 the book was causing a stir in New Zealand's small literary
community. Some were convinced that like Bait, Keri Hulme's
yet-to-be-published novel after the bone people, Hood's book would be at
least a decade in gestation and, perhaps, never finished at all. Then, last
year, news began to leak out about a rift between Hood and her then-publisher
Canterbury University Press over proposed cuts to the book. Had the dispute
ended in court local literary luminaries, including the reclusive Keri Hulme,
were ready to testify on Hood's behalf and the case would have drawn
international attention as a test case about authorial rights.
A year earlier she'd found
herself with her bag packed, waiting
for a policeman to knock on the door of her home in leafy, suburban Dunedin and
take her to jail at the behest of the Court of Appeal. In an unprecedented
decision the court ordered her to hand over some of her research lest it
contain a "smoking gun" that would free Peter Ellis. In both cases
Hood made an unlikely but passionate advocate for writers, especially those who
work in the often overlooked non-fiction genre.
For someone who has never sought -
indeed has for the most part successfully discouraged - a public profile beyond
her writing it has been a remarkable journey. It has sorely tested tier
convictions, her friendships and her bank balance, but it is also much more than
a story about the rights or wrongs of Peter Ellis' conviction: it is likely to
be one of the greatest contributions to this country's social history.
That Hood gives away little of
herself in A City Possessed is no real surprise. To be seated across from
her at the dining room table at her home on a hill overlooking tight rows of
houses on the valley floor and north to the entrance of Otago Harbour is to be
confounded by her dour, unconversational manner. Dressed comfortably each time
we meet in a bright-coloured fleece jacket and trousers, only a Mickey Mouse
watch hints at another, lighter side to Hood's personality. With bobbed hair
and unfailingly sensible shoes, other writers have noted she wouldn't look out
of place on a judge's bench or behind the principal's desk at an all-girls'
school.
Not that Hood has had much use for
fashionable clothes or new hairstyles during the past eight years. Because her
topic is so divisive and she has jealously - perhaps obsessively - guarded the
results of her research, Hood and her dental professor husband Jim have had no
social life to speak of since she began researching the creche case in earnest
in mid-1993. Because even her most valued friends pressed her to discuss what
her book would reveal she virtually "stopped contact" with them. As a
result, the couple's social outings have been extremely rare and, for Lynley at
least, very superficial. This from a woman who has no tolerance for small talk.
All of which is undoubtedly very
different from the early part of the Hoods' marriage. Born in Hamilton, Lynley
shifted to Dunedin to study for a degree in physiology where she met Jim Hood
in the chemistry lab at the University of Otago. She gave up work to become a
full-time mother and wife to her three children and husband. As her children
grew she dabbled in journalism and had feature articles published in
publications as diverse as the Listener and the PSA Journal
before she wrote to the writer and educator Sylvia Ashton-Warner in 1983
proposing to write her biography.
"By the time [my youngest] went
to school I was thinking about rejoining the work force and I realised I liked
writing more than anything else, so I got a book about how to be a writer and realised
I already was one. I thought `well I better find something to write about that
you put between hard covers rather than wrap up the scraps in.' And I read Sylvia's autobiography and
thought 'god, there's got to be a [bigger] story here."'
The resulting biography - the first
to be written about Ashton-Warner who died eight months into the four-year
project - won the then-unknown Hood the 1989 Goodman Fielder Wattie Award and
the 1989 PEN Best First Book of Prose award.
It was a startlingly successful
transformation from dentist's wife to internationally acclaimed writer. Her
next book delved into the 19th century social history that helped produce urban
myths about the Southland "baby farmer" Minnie Dean.
While she was working on Minnie
Dean: Her Life And Crimes Hood became interested in the parallels between
the "wildly contagious public anxiety about the evils of baby farming that
was sweeping the Western world" and witch-hunts of the 16th/17th
centuries. At a biography conference in Australia in 1990 Hood was regaling her
companions with myths about Minnie Dean and explaining that the same stories
about evil women doing unspeakable things to children were told during the
witch-hunts.
One of them drew her attention to a
Good Housekeeping magazine article about a young American childcare worker,
Kelly Michaels, who had been sentenced to 47 years' jail in 1988 for crimes
including raping children with lego blocks, knives and wooden spoons; all
without a shred of evidence. This piqued Hood's interest in possible, but
improbable, acts of child abuse involving arcane rituals, Satanism and
cannibalism.
"When you have cases of people
being accused of being baby-eating Satanists you realise it's exactly the same
urban myths 400 years later and you think `how can this be? Is this history
repeating itself somehow? What's the connection?'... That sent me back to read
up about witch-hunts to see if there were parallels and to see how stories
about baby-eating Satanists could appear in the late 20th century."
This was percolating away in Hood's
mind as she finished Minnie Dean and turned it into a stage play ready
to be performed to commemorate the centenary of Dean's hanging in 1895. That
Hood might be perfectly positioned to make sense of the Civic Creche case
didn't escape the attention of supporters of the creche workers.
In December 1992 the mother of
Debbie Gillespie, one of the women who was charged with abusing children at the
Civic (but was later discharged with the other female creche workers), wrote to
Hood after she heard her speak on a radio show. Gillespie's mother wrote,
"witch-hunts are alive and well" in Christchurch and invited Hood to
examine the creche case, which she resolved to do so the following year.
If creche supporters thought they had
found a Joe Karam-style advocate in Lynley Hood they would have been sorely
disappointed. She made it clear from the beginning that it didn't matter to her
one way or the other whether the creche workers were guilty or innocent. She
was interested in the phenomenon of "moral panic" associated with
mass child sexual abuse cases, the witch-hunts during the Renaissance and the
late 19th century persecution of "baby farmers" like Minnie Dean.
Hood planned to "steer a course
through the shoals and tempests of the controversy illuminating the context
along the way" as she'd done with her previous books. As is so often the
nature of biography, Hood's earlier subjects were nothing if not complex and
contradictory characters: Sylvia Ashton-Warner was "in many ways a genius
and in many ways an absolutely ghastly person"; Minnie Dean was a
"kind lady who looked after children that nobody wanted but she also
obviously lost it".
Hood had assumed she could write
about a criminal case that seemingly divided New Zealand like no other issue
since the 1981 Springbok Tour without taking sides. She was wrong. "It's
something I've been quite uncomfortable with because in my previous books I've
found that everybody's point of view is valid and it's been quite easy to steer
a course through and explain it. But, with the creche case, the more I got into
it, the more it became clear it was a story of right or wrong. And I'm not one
to take sides on issues. My life has been standing on the sidelines as the
demonstrators go by saying `how can you be so sure you're right?' So for me to
be saying `you're wrong, wrong, wrong' is a very uncomfortable position to find
myself in."
Before Hood made the first of many
4fi-hour trips by car to Christchurch in 1993, she phoned an acquaintance there
who'd previously offered her a bed should she ever be in town. Although she had
applied for an Arts Council grant (and was later awarded $9000), she expected
the project to take three years so was keen to keep costs down. When she
informed her acquaintance she'd be visiting Christchurch to research the Civic
Creche case an unexpected edge entered his voice: "I think you should know
we think Peter Ellis is guilty," he said coolly. Hood booked a motel.
Some of the disapproval Hood
encountered came from unexpected quarters. The late writer and historian Elsie
Locke wrote to her in an attempt to dissuade her from the project. Locke knew
some of the families involved and argued the book would upset many people. But
with the support of other writers such as Margaret Mahy, who loaned Hood her
flat in central Christchurch for weeks at a time, she persevered.
With a scientist's commitment to her
investigation Hood followed leads and untangled rumour and fantasy in her
search for that most elusive commodity: the "truth". Yet unlike her
previous research where she'd been frustrated by false trails and dead-end
leads, she found that the Civic Creche case was very well documented. It was
soon apparent to Hood that Ellis was innocent and it would be "intellectually
dishonest" not to say - emphatically - that nothing criminal ever happened
at the Civic Creche.
"I expected, sooner or later,
to find some real-life happenings on which, rightly or wrongly, the allegations
of criminality were based," she later wrote in the first chapter A City
Possessed. "But in my years of dredging through the mire in which this
story has foundered, I found no evidence of illegality by anyone accused in
this case. Instead, I found convincing evidence that more than 100 Christchurch
children had been subject to unpleasant and psychologically hazardous
procedures for no good reason, and that a group of capable and caring adults
with no inclinations towards sexual misconduct with children had had their
lives ruined as a result."
How does someone as unaccustomed as
Hood to taking sides come to be so sure there has been a miscarriage of
justice? Like some others who have examined the case before her - defence
lawyers, sceptical journalists - Hood's belief that Peter Ellis is innocent is
based on her view that there was a "sustained campaign of state-funded
contamination of the evidence". Before there was any disclosure of abuse,
parents were networking, were encouraged to read books about sexual abuse to
their children and to look for "symptoms" of sexual abuse including
bed-wetting, clinginess, nightmares and rashes that may have been explained by
everyday childhood anxieties.
The book includes a meticulous
examination of the dubious "physical evidence" of abuse that can be
explained by normal genital variations between the children, contamination of
evidence by parents, social workers, counsellors and children swapping stories,
and the confused and improbable evidence of children who claimed Peter Ellis'
wees came out of his bottom and he kept live giraffes at his house.
Hood says apart from the
extraordinary evidence on which he was convicted, there were "50
things" that convinced her of Peter Ellis' innocence. They included:
·
The fact that he hated toileting children and would avoid it where
possible; something that irritated his colleagues who thought he wasn't pulling
his weight.
·
The fact that he wanted his job back and repeatedly refused money to go
away quietly.
·
The fact that paedophilia and urophilia (urinating on someone for sexual
pleasure; something Ellis was alleged to have done) are not compatible sexual
perversions.
·
The fact that so many parents were involved in counselling and therapy
and would have told their children to "scream blue murder" if
sexually abused. None did.
All of which led Hood to ask herself
the question: How could this have happened? How could so many people get it so
wrong? She discovered that the seeds of the ideology that underpinned the
creche case - that sexual abuse was extremely widespread in society and no
allegation could be dismissed as improbable - was sown by three major social
movements: feminism, religious conservatism and the child protection movement
which joined forces in the 1980s to combat sexual abuse.
While not saying that sexual abuse
of children doesn't happen, Hood argues that estimates of the extent and
severity of sexual abuse were inflated by the political agendas of researchers.
The claim that "one in four girls will be sexually abused by age 18"
suited the lesbian-feminist agenda of its proponents, but was unsupported by
any objective research. By the 1980s this had grown into a full-scale panic and
resources were diverted to publicity campaigns, detection and treatment of
sexual abuse.
Laid over this was the rise of a counselling
industry staffed by untrained "authoritarian feminists" who were
driven to unearth sexual abuse on a grand scale. This was compounded by law
changes in the politically-correct late '80s that lowered the standard of proof
required in sexual abuse cases and ignored evidence that child witnesses were
less reliable, and an ACC regime that permitted lump-sum payouts regardless of
whether there was any proof that sexual abuse had been committed.
In Christchurch, anxiety about
sexual abuse was fever-pitched in the late '80s and early '90s because of
rumours about a "Great Christchurch Pornography Ring" (of which no
evidence was ever found); the so-called Ward 24 case involving suspect
interviews of children at Christchurch Hospital; the mistaken mass diagnosis of
children at the Glenelg Children's Health Camp, the Spence family affair which
concerned questionable claims that a father abused his children and the
conviction of a Christchurch teacher's aide who was genuinely guilty of at
least one sexual assault.
One of the most chilling revelations
in A City Possessed concerns a clinical psychologist Hood calls
"M" who describes how the "frighteners were put on" him by
an official in the justice Department who warned him not to get involved with
Ellis' defence team because he would find it difficult to get ongoing referrals
and appointments. According to M, all discussion about whether children
fabricate evidence was shut down and there were attempts to suppress research
in professional journals beneficial to Ellis.
When Ellis was convicted, Hood
argues, the justice system was unable to "self-correct" and the
government and judiciary sought to bury the case rather than examine their own
assumptions. The ministerial review of the case by retired Chief Justice Sir
Thomas Eichelbaum released earlier this year was "narrow and flawed"
and implicitly accepted the ideology that underpinned the international sexual
abuse awareness campaign and failed to recognise that the ideology was based on
misleading research.
Whether Hood's sleuthing turned up
the piece of the jigsaw that would have forced Ellis' jailers to unlock the
door to his cell at Rolleston Prison and let him walk free is but cause for
speculation: Ellis was released after serving six and a half years in February
2000. For her part, Hood doubts it: "I don't know whether anything [in the
book] could have helped Peter Ellis given that there was no smoking gun."
Had she been inclined to do so, Hood
says she might have told Ellis' lawyers to look more closely at claims that
there was no suggestion of ritual abuse until late in the investigation when
the boy who was the source of bizarre allegations - including claims children
were put in cages, creche workers danced naked in a circle and that a mystery
boy named Andrew was sacrificed - made his "disclosure". Hood reveals
social workers bought books about ritual abuse for creche parents prior
to the boy's allegations.
That Hood wasn't inclined to help Ellis'
defence team has something to do with her belief that a writer should be an
independent observer - not a partisan advocate - and more than a little to do
with her distaste for the ruthless tactics of Ellis' lawyer Dunedin QC Judith
Ablett Kerr who she describes, with hindsight, as someone to be "handled
with very long tongs".
Hood became an unwitting pawn in
Kerr's desperate attempts to get a pardon for Ellis, a Commission of Inquiry
into the case or to get the Court of Appeal to broaden the terms of reference
for its review of the case. To do that, she badly needed to come up with
evidence not previously heard by the court.
Enter Hood who, up until that time,
had had a friendly relationship with Kerr's team who had taken over as Ellis'
lawyers after his first appeal failed in mid-1996. It was a mutually beneficial
relationship - she would occasionally suggest fertile lines of enquiry or steer
the lawyers away from dead-ends - but Hood insisted her research was
confidential. Then, in September 1998, Kerr's junior colleague, Simon Barr,
asked Hood to meet him to discuss some information too sensitive to talk about
on the phone.
What happened in that meeting is not
certain. But in a statement to the Court of Appeal made a month later Barr
claimed Hood told him she had interviewed an Ellis trial juror. The juror
reportedly admitted he'd found one of the child complainants sexually
attractive and said he could imagine how Ellis could have found rubbing his
penis against the child exciting. He had sought counselling. According to Barr,
the juror also said he knew a key prosecution witness: psychiatrist Dr Karen
Zelas.
All Hood will say about that meeting
is that she went there at Barr's request, they agreed that everything would be
confidential and they traded rumours about the jury that, even if true, would
not have constituted grounds for appeal. Mindful of the fact that it is illegal
for the media to approach jurors or report on the deliberations of a jury in a
particular case only the barest details are included in A City Possessed.
Hood confirmed she had, indeed, interviewed a juror but didn't reveal what was
said.
"He rang me about 5 o'clock at
night and said `I'm in Dunedin overnight'," she told North & South
after some persuasion. "And he said `I've been wanting to talk to you for
a long time'. This was 1997 and the trial was in 1993 so it was a fair way down
the track.
He said `could I come up to your
place in a couple of hours?'
"What do you do? Do you tell
him to go away? I knew the media wasn't allowed to approach jurors. I knew one
of the jurors in the Appelgren [murder] case had spoken to the media and, as
far as I was aware, there was no comeback so it was a grey area to me. So I
said `I don't know whether I can use it but I'll be interested in what you have
to say' and, obviously, what anyone tells you informs your view of the whole
case."
The tête-à-tête with Simon
Barr was a damaging - if understandable - blunder. And although Hood knows it
was unwise to have gossiped at all, she's annoyed by the suggestion she's
loose-lipped. "One of the things that really irritated me about Simon
Barr's statement of our conversation, aside from the fact that it was
confidential (and I'm not commenting on whether it's accurate or not) it gives
the impression I just rushed down there unprompted, which is awfully damaging
to my reputation... The conversation with the juror was in 1997. The
conversation with Simon Barr was in 1998, so if I'd been busting to tell him
I'd have done it long before then."
What came next was to sharpen her
mind about her role as a writer - and test her resolve - like nothing she'd
encountered since embarking on her career. Shortly after she met Barr, Ablett
Kerr told Hood she planned to use some of her comments in a petition to the
Governor-General. Hood refused to give her permission. Ablett Kerr made it
clear she wasn't seeking it; she'd be using the material regardless.
After the Court of Appeal learned of
the "serious allegations" it told Ablett Kerr to front up with
evidence to support her claim. The Ministry of Justice wrote to Hood asking for
any tapes of her conversations with the juror in question. She refused. A month
later documents about the tape were leaked to The Dominion which ran
this front page banner headline: "Leaked Letter Raises Questions On Ellis
Trial Juror".
The next day every major paper in
this country from the Waikato Times to The Press had a story
quoting angry Ellis supporters demanding Lynley Hood turn over the tapes. MP
and former policeman Rana Waitai issued a press release conveying his
"disgust" that Hood was "prepared to hold on to critical
evidence to make a profit rather than helping an innocent man gain his
freedom". Ablett Kerr denied she or any of her staff had leaked the documents
but the publicity did her cause no harm.
During the controversy Hood, on the
advice of Wellington media lawyers John Tizard and Sandra Moran, switched her
phone on to its message service and didn't return any calls. Then on May 20 the
Court of Appeal invoked a rarely used section of the Crimes Act and, without so
much as a hearing, ordered Hood to turn over any tapes. Her lawyers appealed.
The Crown supported the appeal. Ablett Kerr did not. The Court of Appeal upheld
the order and gave Hood two days to hand over the tapes.
That's how on a cold day in Dunedin
in June 1999 this dental professor's wife came to find herself with her bags
packed ready to be escorted to jail. She later wrote: "On D-day I made a list
(`warn clothes, toiletries, radio, money'). I bought two pairs of woollen
socks, a set of thermal long johns and an exercise book in which to write a
children's story (`Grandma Goes To Jail'). I drafted a press release that
began: `As has happened so often in the murky history of the Christchurch Civic
Creche case, at the first whiff of anything salacious and titillating the
authorities have reached for the sledgehammer without pausing to ask: `Is this
allegation true, and is it relevant?' "
Only an 11th hour agreement between
Hood's lawyers and the Court of Appeal, which ensured the tapes would not find
their way into the hands of anyone but the judge assigned to review them, kept
Hood from jail. (When the judge reviewed them he found nothing to support the
claims about the juror.) Hood says she was "so angry" she was quite
prepared to go to jail, and she wasn't frightened because after visiting Peter
Ellis in prison she knew what to expect. But she eventually decided she needed
to "keep her eye on the main task" which was to usher her
long-awaited book into existence.
"The odds were I'd be thrown
into jail for three months, hauled out again and asked whether I'd changed my
mind and then thrown back in again. It was the prospect that the police would be
on my doorstep with a search warrant ripping everything apart and everything
else I was keeping under wraps would be exposed. There was, I gather, a sense
that everyone knew the Court of Appeal shouldn't be looking at the tapes and if
I would only give them a face-saving way out it would all work out all right.
"The lawyers felt I'd fought
tooth and nail, I hadn't just rolled over and I would earn points for that.
But, [by] my own standards, I'd let myself down horribly by talking to Simon
Barr. . . It was a learning experience
and I was grateful for the legal advice I got because I know from other legal
disputes people have got into they've pursued principles to the end of the
earth. And I realised getting my book finished as a credible product - and getting
it published in my lifetime - was the desired outcome."
It's a measure of how strongly Hood
feels about this episode that she dedicated her book - eight years' work - not
to her long-suffering husband or any indefatigable supporters, but to the two lawyers
Tizard and Moran who represented her in the Court of Appeal at favourable rates
because of the importance of the issue. She says she felt "incredibly
ill-used" by both Kerr and our highest court which paid scant regard to
her rights and relied on an arcane piece of law to satisfy its own ends. It
went to the heart of what it meant to her to be a writer and galvanised her
views on an important issue she'd given only lip-service to before: freedom of
speech.
And despite the fact that late one
night during the stand-off she'd packed her car with boxes of documents and
tapes and hid them somewhere, she's had many restless nights where her husband
has had to wake her from nightmares. Usually these dreams involved a shadowy,
threatening figure in her house after dark; a scenario not unlike the one
[veteran investigative journalist] Pat Booth experienced when he was
investigating the Arthur Allan Thomas case -and woke to find a man wearing a
stocking mask at the end of his bed.
Hood may have thought the worst was
over, that all she had to do was finally pull together the many threads of her
argument and polish up her manuscript ready for publication. She would have
been mistaken. Another intractable legal dispute was looming, this time with
one of her few allies: her publishers. Hood would again prove to be an able and
committed opponent and a feisty advocate for her profession.
When Hood decided to write about the
creche case she gave little thought to who would publish her work. After Ellis
was convicted in June 1993, she mentioned the project to the Penguin Books
editor, Geoff Walker, who had published Sylvia! and Minnie Dean.
"I got this sort of horrified reaction. He said `He's a child molester. We
don't want to publish a book about him!'... I just thought it was sufficiently
interesting - and I had a pretty good track record - that someone would publish
it eventually."
After she was awarded the grant by
the Arts Council in 1994, the managing editor of Canterbury University Press
(CUP), Mike Bradstock, was alerted to the project and approached her several
times over the next 18 months to persuade her to sign a book deal. The
university press is a wholly owned subsidiary of the University of Canterbury
in Christchurch that publishes 10 to 12 books a year.
In November 1995 Hood finally signed
with CUP and was paid a $1000 advance, which even by the penurious standards of
the New Zealand book trade is considered small. ("Miserly" says
former Society of Authors president Joan Rosier Jones.) Hood's contract stated
the book would be 100,000 words long and delivered 10 days after signing; a
deadline it was never intended should be met but was left in place.
It was understood a new deadline
would be set but this apparently never happened.
This is not to say it was an
entirely happy, commitment-free arrangement. As the months passed Bradstock
became impatient with Hood's failure to commit to a delivery date. Hood:
"We did have one argument where he gave me a blast in the middle of 1998
and, after curling up under the duvet for about three weeks, I wrote back and
said `I will make no compromises in the writing of this book and you'll have to
accept that'. To do otherwise would have been pointless and
counter-productive."
Bradstock's patience would be sorely
tested since it was another two years before Hood delivered the book in its
entirety. Although he'd seen draft chapters as they were written, and knew Hood
had well exceeded the 100,000 word limit, an email obtained by North &
South makes it clear he was surprised by the size of the final manuscript.
In the email to Hood dated May 3 last year Bradstock wrote:
Believe it or not I read the whole
thing between yesterday when it arrived and 2pm today. It's excellent. Thank
you for presenting the whole thing so neatly. I have drawn up a brief for the
editor, whom I am off to see in a few minutes.
By the way are you aware that it's
300,000 words - implying a book over 600 pages? We will have to see if we can
make some cuts although nothing to my mind stands out as dispensable. I
certainly promise not to cut it just for the sake of production costs.
In haste
Mike.
So although clearly surprised by the
book's length Bradstock did not seem overly concerned. His assurance it "wouldn't
be cut for the sake of production costs" is telling. Hood's book was
eagerly anticipated and CUP had been promoting it in its catalogue as a
100,000-word book to be sold for $29.95. Industry sources say in New Zealand,
where print runs are small and relative production costs are high, a
300,000-word book would sell for at least $59.95. At $29.95 CUP would lose
money. Bradstock would either have to raise the price significantly or cut the
book dramatically.
After emailing Hood Bradstock rushed
the manuscript across Christchurch to Anna Rogers. The daughter of the late Max
Rogers, a respected publisher, Anna Rogers has worked in several major
publishing houses and as a freelance editor since 1984. A sometime author, she
co-authored Turning The Pages: A History Of Bookselling In New Zealand
with her father and wrote A Lucky Landing about the Irish in New
Zealand.
Rogers' report on Hood's manuscript
was damning. It suggested Hood had become obsessed by her topic and the book's
extreme length would put off the many readers interested in the Ellis case. In
her view, the chapters that backgrounded the case - and critiqued the role of
the feminist movement - needed "extensive surgery". But Rogers was
also scathing about the quality of Hood's research, describing it as "once
over lightly scholarship" "self-serving sensationalism" and
"deeply offensive".
As part of an agreement with
Canterbury University, Hood is not permitted to talk to the media about the
dispute, but correspondence between Hood and CUP was widely distributed and a
number of people in the industry have been closely involved.
Hood supporters say she was
astounded by the report. Hood considered Rogers had exceeded her brief as an
editor and had been offended by Hood's analysis of the gender politics. This
contrasted sharply with her experience with editors at Penguin Books who had
made sensible suggestions about her earlier manuscripts but had never attempted
to alter her conclusions.
So began a nasty imbroglio that
dragged on for nine months. Depending on who you talk to, the protagonists in
this story are inconstant, chameleon-like. There is Hood (prima donna unable to
accept proper advice or brave, trailblazing writer done wrong),
Bradstock (bullying egotist or hapless publisher doing his best) and Rogers
(hot-headed feminist censor or editor forced to make unpopular
judgements).
It's understood Mike Bradstock has
been badly affected by the melt-down of the relationship with Hood and has
attributed his nervous breakdown to the dispute. When contacted by North
& South he said he "most emphatically" did not want to
comment on the record and then made some unflattering comments about Hood that
he said were not for publication. People who have worked with Bradstock say he
is extremely committed and hardworking if somewhat emotional and highly-strung.
Publishers spoken to by North
& South who have employed Anna Rogers describe her as a consummate
professional and one said he'd be "very surprised" if she let her
personal views affect her job as an editor. Others in the publishing industry
make a connection between Rogers' sister, Juliet Rogers, managing director of
Random House Australia, and another publishing controversy in Australia a few
years ago.
In 1993 a master at Melbourne
University's Ormond College was charged with sexually assaulting two female
students after a high-spirited university function. Journalist and author Helen
Garner wrote a book called The First Stone about the case published by
Picador in 1995. In that book she questioned what had become of feminism that a
man was hauled before the courts for a "nerdish pass".
Random House Australia published a
book of essays edited by one of the girls' supporters, Jenna Mead, called Bodyjamming
later that year to reassert the feminist case. Garner told The Australian
in October 1995 that Mead's book, which accused her of fabricating parts of The
First Stone, was a "disgraceful slur" on her reputation. And
although Garner did not take legal action, Random House was sued for defamation
by a mediator named in an essay on the Ormond affair. The case was settled out
of court.
Certainly a close reading of Anna
Rogers' report tends to indicate particular discomfort with Hood's critique of
the feminist movement. In one part Rogers says she is concerned by the
"lesbian/feminist angle. Fine to make the point, but both the extent and
tone are worrying". But mostly the report wasn't directly critical
of the ideas expressed but claimed Hood's research was poor and she "cut
her cloth to fit her argument".
That's not the impression the lay
reader gets: it's by no means an easy read but Hood has managed to weave
together a complex story, corroborate key facts and spin what journalists would
describe as a "good yarn". Half a dozen experts Hood asked to read
the manuscript - including a journalist, psychologist, feminist scholar and
lawyer - praised the quality of her scholarship and one said she'd changed her
mind as a result.
Barbara Larson, managing editor of
Hood's new publisher, Dunedin's Longacre Press, told North & South
from Canada that she strongly disagreed with Rogers. She says she was
"bowled over" by the story and impressed with how Hood had managed to
cram in so much information while still making it a "pleasure to
read". Even pruned to 230,000 words it's a long book but, Larson says,
"it's a big story". As for claims Hood's research is somehow
second-rate she says she's bemused: "I don't see where she's been slack.
We've edited it, but it's been a very smooth editing process."
Anna Rogers betrayed the fact she
lives in Christchurch - and well knows how divisive the case was in that city -
by suggesting that Hood's thesis was "too highly charged and extreme for this
situation. It will inevitably be seen as deeply offensive and raises the
temperature of the debate beyond a reasonable and credible level".
All of which raises the question:
shouldn't a university press - of all things - be defending freedom of speech?
CUP, after all, is not even an arm's-length trading company but is simply the
University of Canterbury trading under another name. The university's plan
(adopted as the Society of Authors intervened on Hood's behalf in July 2000)
lists "academic freedom and social responsibility" as two of its
values.
Fergus Barrowman, the managing
editor of Victoria University Press (VUP), says he considers VUP's role to be
threefold: a tool for the dissemination of the university's research;
prestige/marketing for the university; to meet the university's charter
obligations to contribute to the cultural and artistic life of the community.
Unlike overseas universities that
can afford to publish the work of their academics no matter how obscure, books
published by New Zealand university presses must usually have general as well
as scholarly appeal. This means that while the research must be of a
"scholarly standard" (and Barrowman agrees there's no clear-cut
criteria for what qualifies) it must also appeal to readers outside the
university community. In straitened times universities, understandably, want
more bang for the bucks invested in their publishers, but also require them to
meet the institution's public service goals.
That's a difficult balancing act.
VUP's strategy has been to concentrate on poetry and novels, many generated by
Bill Manhire's creative writing course. Judging by CUP's website, it has
attempted to meet those conflicting objectives by publishing scholarly texts on
subjects such as marine biology, natural history - even the stabilisation of
coastal sands - as well as books with mass market appeal such as My Life As
A Miracle by The Wizard and Bruno: The Bruno Lawrence Story by Roger
Booth.
That Hood's book - part social
history, part investigative journalism - doesn't easily fit into any of these
categories is not something peculiar to CUP. When Anna Rogers wrote in her
report that Hood was "torn between the desire to tell a damned good story
and the need to remain as objective as possible" and has "the mind
and approach of a journalist not a dispassionate scholar" she
inadvertently highlighted the fact that, apart from biography, New Zealand has
a poor tradition of weighty non-fiction.
That Bradstock had Hood's book
listed in his catalogue for $29.95 suggests he was expecting a Joe Karamesque Bain
And Beyond book that dissected the creche case. When Anna Rogers criticised
Hood's scholarship it's possible she expected either a dry academic
tome, or a pot-boiler that ends up in the $5 discount bins at Whitcoulls. Not a
book that is a good read and a scrupulously researched (if not
"scholarly") history.
All of which throws light on Hood's
philosophy about writing: she believes it's possible for a book to be
"verifiable" and a "rattling good read". She subscribes to
Tom Wolfe's theory about applying fiction writing techniques to journalism and
says, unashamedly, one of the ways she taught herself to write was by reading
features in the New York Times. This fusion of journalism, academia and
literature - Hood says she's a journalist and a dispassionate scholar - is
something we're simply unaccustomed to.
This is underlined by one of Hood's
major bug-bears: the scarcity of funding for non-fiction writers. Although she
is grateful to the Arts Council for her $9000 grant (over 17,000 hours that
works out at 53 cents an hour, thus she describes herself as "permanent
writer-in-residence at Maerewa St, Dunedin") she says funding for
non-fiction seems restricted to literary biography and published journalism
counts for little.
"When I first went to the Arts
Council to see what funding was available after I'd decided I was going to
write a biography of Sylvia Ashton-Warner and I said `I've had about 50
features published in places like the Listener', they said `have you
written any fiction or poetry? And I said `no'. And they said `what about any unpublished
fiction or poetry?' So if I'd had some juvenilia in a folder on top of the
wardrobe that would have counted for more than published journalism."
In a bizarre twist, after Bradstock
sided with Anna Rogers and suggested the book could easily be cut by half, and
Hood decided to take her book elsewhere, he wouldn't let her. Instead CUP's
lawyers threatened to sue her for breach of contract and dispatched a statement
of costs totalling in excess of $40,000. This from an institution that claims
to uphold "academic freedom" and is widely considered a haven for
free debate.
Joan Rosier Jones, the president of
the Society of Authors at the time of the dispute, says usually a writer in
Hood's situation would be expected to return the advance (which Hood offered to
do) and the publisher would return the manuscript. The mere suggestion that
Hood should have to buy her way out of the contract with CUP, says
Rosier-Jones, was "utter nonsense" and the $40,000 claim was
"laughable".
"To hold the book to ransom,
which is sort of what they did, is not on. It deprived Lynley Hood of her
livelihood for a start, plus it took all her energy and time to extract herself
from it. We make little enough money as writers in New Zealand as it
is." The principle at stake is the
"basic right of freedom of speech" and Rosier-Jones says it's
particularly wrong that CUP attempted to make changes to a book which was not
commissioned but was well under way by the time the contract was signed.
Hood's colourful, octogenarian agent
Ray Richards describes the dispute as a "stage coach hold-up" and
insists it is a writer's privilege to control the tenor of their work. Knowing
both writer and publisher he says the dispute was a "fearsome clash of
wills" and because Hood is dogged and honest, cutting her book was a
"red rag to a bull".
Certainly, although Hood can't talk
about the particulars, she's passionate about the principle at issue. As well
as being dedicated to freedom of speech A City Possessed is dedicated to
"the author's moral right to the work". The phrase is drawn from the
1971 Berne Convention that protects the writer's right to "object to any
distortion, mutilation or other modification which is prejudicial to its honour
and reputation".
Had the dispute gone to court it
would have not only caused a flutter in literary circles here it would have
been an international test case for the author's moral right. It's likely Keri
Hulme would have been lured away from the West Coast to take the stand since
when she offered the bone people to publishers several suggested severe
editing; at least one wanted to cut it by half. Hume refused to let anyone
"go through [her] work with shears" or be a "silent
partner" in her work. the bone people was eventually published by
the small Spiral Collective and won Hulme the 1985 Booker Prize.
When the CUP dispute was finally
resolved in late 2000 (Hood repaid the $1000 advance and paid for some of CUP's
legal advice over the book's content), she asked respected writers to look over
the manuscript. Satisfied that the book was a publishable work and she wasn't a
"prima donna who couldn't take advice", Hood decided that with her
husband's help she'd self-publish.
Hood: "By the time I came out
of that dispute I was like a wounded lioness in defence of her cubs. I sort of
backed into a corner and I was ready to rip the arms off any publisher who
extended the hand of friendship. I couldn't trust anybody, you know? I realised
there was no screening test for moral courage and it obviously required moral
courage to publish this book and I couldn't trust anybody."
Longacre Press is a small,
independent Dunedin publisher formed by three women made redundant by McIndoe
Publishers including managing editor Barbara Larson. They've published
children's and young adults' fiction as well as Timeless Land, the
successful collaboration between artist Grahame Sydney, writer Owen Marshall
and poet Brian Turner. Hood approached Longacre for advice about what she'd
need to do to self-publish. Hood: "Barbara rang me and said `why don't you
let us have a look at it'. And I said `it's really controversial. People are
going to hate it, it will annoy the hell out of them'. And she put out a saucer
of milk and eventually I came out."
Although at $59.95 Larson says the
book is likely to appeal to "dedicated readers," the initial print
run for A City Possessed will be 7000 and she's hopeful 10,000 copies
will be sold. Longacre has paid for more costly legal advice about the book; a
defamation suit would seriously undermine the viability of this plucky little
publisher. But Larson is unconcerned. She's inspired by Hood's "tenacity
and determination" and says the book may well prove to be the most
important the company ever publishes.
By the time this story is printed
the display shelves of book stores across the country should - finally - be
weighed down by dozens of copies of A City Possessed. Back in Dunedin
Lynley Hood will be writing "something lighter" - probably a stage
play - and her sleep will once again be uninterrupted. Her doubters will,
likely, find plenty about A City Possessed to criticise but, for the
most part, Hood will sit in her cupboard-like office with a rare smile on her
face. "In my darker moments I thought `what does it matter if it doesn't
get published for another 50 years?' But then I thought `no, it would mean all
the people who don't want any questions asked would have won."
They didn't count on the pertinacity
of Lynley Hood.
* Lauren Quaintance is a North
& South Contributing Writer.
Graphics: 48-49 Scene Lynley Hood;
50 Lynley Hood. 52-53 Left: An early 17th century print depicting a
satanic character illustrates the cover of A City Possessed. It has clear links
to the Civic creche case. Above and right: Early 1990s pictures of the Civic
creche. 54 Judith Ablett Kerr: Hood wasn’t inclined to help Ellis defence team
because of her distaste for the ruthless tactics of his lawyer Dunedin QC
Judith Ablett Kerr.
