50 Years Ago Today/New Zealand Taught itself to Play

Everyone is cordially invited to take the ferry or the ‘Finest Marine Drive in the World’ to sunny Eastbourne for elevenses, to launch David McGill ’s novel

Shaking 1960

Venue: Rona Gallery/Bookshop, 151 Muritai Road, Eastbourne
Sunday, 17 October, 11am-2pm

A coming-of-age story of sex, booze, rock ‘n’ roll and conscience set in the turmoil of the ‘No Maoris, No Tour’ protests, the Hastings Blossom Festival Riot and Elaine Miscall winning the Eastbourne Mardi Gras beauty contest. Students pushing personal and public boundaries in election year are shadowed by authorities who tilt pranks and free expression into wild parties and violent death.
To mark the year when protest, wine and fun challenged rugby, beer and glum,
the launch features vintage LPs, books and magazines and images of the era, such as the police Holden, Elaine Miscall, Carmen, the fire-hosing of ‘rioters’, Johnny Devlin, Elvis, the Howard Morrison Quartet and the 1960 male ballet. Kapiti Coast collector Gill Ward, inspiration for the film Second Hand Wedding, loans her 1960 memorabilia, including her scrapbook, a milkshake machine, Dr Scholl’s foot powder, a fuzzy felt game, a Whitcombe and Tombs school atlas. Come along and compare nostalgia notes.

‘An entertaining, rollicking, visceral read.’Linda Niccol, co-writer Second Hand Wedding
‘An existential blast from our pop culture past.’ Redmer Yska, author of All Shook Up
‘Nostalgia has rarely been so entertaining.’ Roger Hall

Silver Owl Press http://www.davidmcgill.co.nz/ - $39.85

Footnote:
I asked author/publisher David McGill what prompted him to write this novel. Here is his response:

This book goes back to where I began playing with words 50 years ago, in a diary. The book draws on a professional lifetime writing journalism and non-fiction books in praise of Wellington, but the old diary has now prompted a fictional recreation of Wellington in 1960.



It was a turbulent year in the capital and country, as both protesters and a reinvigorated National Opposition challenge a tired Labour Government. Well-known Wellington figures of the time appear in its pages, including poet James K. Baxter, publisher Hugh Price, leftwing writer Conrad Bollinger, the inconoclastic Dr Erich Geiringer, restauranteur Harry Seresin, entertainment lawyer Bill Sheat, Wellington Teachers College lecturers Jack Shallcrass, Pat Mascaskill and Anton Vogt, politician Dan Riddiford, anarchist Bill Dwyer, playwright Bruce Mason, novelist Barry Crump, balladeer Peter Cape, café owner Mary Seddon, communist Rewi Alley, university lecturer Harry Orsman. There are a host of other figures from National Party Eastbourne to leftwing Kelburn lifestylers, student party animals, anarchist pranksters, prominent figures in the seminal year of student protest, and the cafe and streetwalkers’ world where a young Carmen was just emerging.


Hotels, cafes and churches I have subsequently profiled have prominent roles, and here they are alive again the way they were. Barretts was a favourite drinking hole for underage students when it was on the corner of Plimmers Steps, the Midland before demolition, the George and the old Royal Oak, where students encountered the capital’s underbelly of drug pushers and prostitutes. The novel unfolds in the café coffee culture, which was in its first boom phase, the likes of Harry Seresin’s coffee gallery above Roy Parsons and other student and intelligentsia haunts such as the Mexicalli, the Rendezvous, the Picasso and the Symposium. Churches bookend the novel, with San Antonio at Eastbourne a refuge from police pursuit, St Mary of the Angels a refuge from guilt, where a murderous attack takes place.
Other featured landmarks are the cable car when it was an open ride and the seagull shack and Eastbourne ticket office on the wharf, which play major parts in the unfolding drama.

Further footnote:
David McGill has written other novels. His website has details. The first was 'Whakaari' a futuristic eco-terrorist plot to blow a volcano in the Taupo Volcanic Zone, 1996, and since then there have been among the non-fiction several thrillers, two about a religious artefact stolen from Europe and ending up in Auckland, with murderous consequences, another about shenanigans around oil strikes in NZ waters, most recently an 1860s novel about the Fenian riots on the West Coast goldfields. An eclectic writer I think you could call him!