Contact me by clicking on DAVID MCGILL if you want to buy books or learn more about them, and my other New Zealand social histories, including No 1 NZ best sellers A Dictionary of Kiwi Slang and The Other New Zealanders, and Ghost Towns of New Zealand, Landmarks Wellington: A Capital Century, and I Almost Tackled Kel Tremain. Or contact Silver Owl Press, 24 Aperahama Street, Paekakariki 5034, phone/fax 04 292 8226. They can be posted to you within minutes of your order, p+p included in price.
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'I’d much rather go by train' was one of Lady Chatterley’s least controversial remarks. Fellow Paekakariki writer Michael O’Leary and myself share this view, and were reminded many others do too on our recent return trip on The Overlander to our hometown Auckland. People waved at us passing by on the train, we waved at them. When is the last time you saw anybody waving at cars or boats or planes? The point being that Michael and I have collaborated on a revisiting of my 1985 rail journey around New Zealand in now obsolete guards’ vans. The G’Day Country Redux is an extensively revised edition, with the additions of our Overlander journey compared to 1985's Silver Fern, over 100 images of trains then and now, and Michael’s original and witty railway poems.
We both argue for bringing back the country’s first main trunk line, The Southerner from Christchurch to Invercargill, and the railcars from Wellington to Gisborne and New Plymouth. The Southerner was our best passenger train and we need it to complete the friendliest and most relaxed way to see the country. There’s no comparison between the scenic splendour from the train and the car canyon into Dunedin. A revived passenger train complex only requires demothballing railcars, a cheap fix for the benefit of showing a generation of kids the best way to see the country they never notice from car or plane. The cost is about that of shaving another corner off the state highway, the benefit for locals and tourists relief from road stress and a relaxed and inexpensive way to see our great country.
We launch this book at Paekakariki’s railway station and museum on June 20 with railways guru Bob Stott guest speaker addressing ‘The Boot Hill of Old Train Engines’.
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The G'Day Country Redux
In February 1985 David McGill set off to travel New Zealand rail in guards’ vans, with guards as companionable dispensers of local knowledge. The Minister of Transport Richard Prebble launched the book at Wellington Railway Station, with traditional servings of block cake, ham sandwiches and thick NZR cups of tea. Soon after his government dispensed with the services of the goods train guards.
A generation later McGill introduces the leisurely journey by comparing the then Silver Fern trip from Wellington to Auckland with the present-day Overlander. On the latter he enjoys the company of former Railways worker Michael O’Leary, poet and fellow inhabitant of the born-again heritage rail settlement of Paekakariki.
This extensively revised edition is lavishly illustrated with over 100 photographs old and new of our rail system, and proposes profitable tourist and local passenger train revival.
An original Michael O’Leary railway poem introduces each chapter, and his appendix revives dozens of forgotten Maori railway station names in waiata for obsolete rail journeys.
‘Splashes of Dickensian magic.’ Otago Daily Times
Available from publisher: NZ$34-95, 256 pages
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The Communion of the Easter Bun-Rabbit
The Food Lives of a Kiwi Here and There
You are what you eat – but first, you are what you cook. The author was baking bread from age five, but did not suspect an inherited disposition until the 2008 meeting with maternal and paternal cousins featured on the front cover. The food memories between have been 65 years in the proving, from Mum’s prodigious baking and student surprise at Graham Kerr’s cuisine to OE Ocker fusions of meat and fruit, snails and quail in Paris and London and the food-challenged Celtic homelands, returning to alternative experiments and pursuit of the perfect meat pie.
This personal and social history of evolving and retro Kiwi cuisine draws on diaries, letters, journalism and clippings from a lifetime of national and global roaming. Stories include a disastrous non-lunch with Peter O’Toole and a restaurant meal with George Cole that was worse, a hair-raising prelude to tea with Sir Ralph Richardson and the Duke of Edinburgh’s friend threatening deportation at a Norwich welcome lunch, the author witnessing the Godfather of Kiwi Café Culture taming his All Black guests. 70 original recipes include an English cookery writer’s roast goose, a Kiwi cookery writer’s ‘Attic Chicken’, an English/Kiwi playwright’s pork and prunes, and dozens of heritage family favourites including brandy snaps, Louise cakes, pitta bread pizza and real Russian borscht, with a wine writer’s formative imbibing and the author’s bakes on bread and marmalade.
'Witty and entertaining.' Graham Beattie, Beattie's Book Blog.
NZ$36-99, 341 pages
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The Mock Funeral
In March 1868 a Catholic priest leads hundreds of Irish miners and three mock coffins through the streets of Hokitika, to celebrate as martyrs three Fenians hanged in Manchester. The arrest of the priest on a charge of sedition leads to Irish riots on the goldfields and conflict with British loyalists so bad the new Governor of New Zealand, who has received death threats from Fenian agitators, sends in the troops. This novel recreates the actual events of the fighting and the country’s only 19th century trial for sedition, and the secret work of agents provocateurs whipping up a ‘War of Races’ that will sweep back through the colonies to liberate Ireland from Britain. Set in the colourful period when Hokitika was the gold-rush capital of the world, this tale follows the reporting fortunes of a young journalist pitched into midst of men craving gold, champagne, dancing girls and the world’s first experiment in political equality for all races and nationalities.
‘A fabulous real story of the West Coast, cleverly woven into a believable novel.’ Paul Madgwick, Greymouth Star
NZ$36-99, 350 pages
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The Treadmill Tapes
Everybody has a continuously updated Top 20 or so favourite songs. Here is a one-man Top 20 band that may answer Cilla’s plaintive enquiry: ‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’
Launched on Ringo’s birthday, this personal history of popular music was 50 years in the making. It starts with the first liberation of hopscotching down a Bay of Plenty footpath humming ‘Jambalaya’, finds teenage release with Elvis and Johnny Devlin, student sixties with Ringo and friends, OE flowerpower journalism with Jools in Jesus Field, Mick and his mates in the studio, Jimi’s tragic last gig. Back home reconciliation relies on Van Morrison and Tina Turner, finds closure with Split Enz and Don McGlashan.
From diaries and cassette tape collections, the author has recreated the sounds and social changes of each decade, the tapes serving to soften the daily treadmill grind, presented here as a meditation on popular music and its impact at the time and retrospectively. This pop odyssey charts the development of rock’n’roll and the infiltrations of Cajun Music, Irish and Pacific sounds, ponders the way songs, often as misheard mondegreens, trigger memories. Each chapter ends with a Top 20, at the end a Final Top 20. The one-man band is balanced by Top 20s from Carmen, Max Cryer, friends and family.
‘Barmy but charming.’ Chris Bourke, Sunday Star-Times
NZ$34-99, 317 pages, illustrated
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From my cold, dead hands
Student drop-out Greg Duffie’s suicide off the Kapiti coast is interrupted by an immediate threat. He is mistaken for his uncle, Professor Ben Duffie, recently sacked from the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences for allegedly pilfering commercially sensitive oil-locating data. Other interested parties go to extreme lengths to recover or bury the data and its putative thief. The stroppy scientist meets fire with fire, his confrontational style extending to global warming zealots, government cliques, oil lobbyists and the naively powerful role of television in their cynical scenario. A 1966 meeting between Greg’s father and visiting actor Charlton Heston reverberates through the unfolding political and personal events, and Greg Duffie has to cope with a steep learning curve in regard to his family’s dark secret – if he gets the chance.
NZ$34.95, 320 pages
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Whakaari
Ultimate terrorist threat to NZ’s volcano tourism in pulsating pursuit eco-thriller that could easily be tomorrow’s news.
Dr Duffie is a 'Really engaging character ... an articulate, bad-tempered geology professor who shouts jeremiads against government policy' in this 'distinctive New Zealand thriller.' Sunday Star-Times. The NZ Listener called it 'a good yarn'.
NZ$29.95, hardback, 264 pages
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The First New Zealand BushRanger
In 1861, five months after gold was discovered in New Zealand at Gabriel’s Gully, Henry Beresford Garrett led a gang who robbed 15 miners of their gold on the trail back to Dunedin. He became notorious as the First New Zealand Bushranger for a robbery which, like the one he led on the Ballarat Bank, was carried out with unarmed revolvers. Garrett spent the rest of his life in New Zealand jails, where he wrote convict recollections of Norfolk Island, Tasmania and the Melbourne hulks.
This is the first comprehensive account of the long prison life and hard times of a man who bore firsthand witness to the appalling brutality of these Victorian gulags.
NZ$29.95, 212 pages
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Stacey
The postwar world of slygroggers, bookies, brothel keepers, backstreet abortionists and murder trials recreated from the casebook of a criminal lawyer ‘the closest New Zealand has come to a real-life Rumpole of the Bailey’, The Dominion Post, 5 July 2005.
NZ $39.95, 300 pages
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In Xtremis
Extreme Opposition to Auckland marine adventure park and obsessive pursuit of the priceless monstrance endanger another generation. ‘The attack on the car with the digger was inspired.’ Steve Whitehouse.
NZ$24.95, 216 pages
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The Monstrance
Two Westie lads pursue stolen religious vessel through swinging sixties Europe to a fiery climax in the Hauraki Gulf. ‘I was gobsmacked by your recall of Auckland.’ Steve Whitehouse. ‘Captures laconic Kiwi-speak perfectly.’
NZ$24.95 , 264 pages
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Island of Secrets
The island at the centre of New Zealand’s history: Maori invasion of Chathams; First immigrant quarantine; Death ray sponsorship; Nazi NZ takeover plot; Tuatara breeding programme. Matiu/Somes Island in Wellington harbour retains a secret wartime diary.
NZ$30.00, illustrated, 160 pages
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The Girning of Government House
Political Satire /Future Fable
New NZ PM Ron Doshe (think Key or Goff) has all his Lottos come at once with the good oil strike, but picks the wrong time to lose the combination for his superloo, just when terrorists take Government House oil guests hostage. Junior coalition partner Betty Mahutonga takes charge as wannabe oil partners America, Russia, Australia, Italy, Germany and Britain rush to the rescue. Issues with digital Big Brother security, animal rights and nuclear invasion pour flames on this troubled oil bonanza.
NZ$20.00, 204 pages
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The Dolly Lolly Diaries
Very naughty OE in swinging sixties London.
NZ$19.95, hardback, 206 pages
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Horace-Thomas: The Magic Horse
Kiwi kids on a magical balloon ride freeing animals in Australia, Antarctica, America and England.
NZ$14.95, illustrated, 72 pages
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Guardians at the Gate
Official history 150 years of NZ Customs chasing revenue dodgers by land, sea and air.
NZ $49.95, heavily illustrated, 208 pages
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Gold in The Creek
The fall and rise of the Kiwi village of Kotuku courtesy of the title discovery. The NZ Listener identified 'a veritable Milkwood of characters ... a whisky priest, a ghastly coke-snorting property developer, a very British major, a stoned street kid ... in a shaggy sheep tale that is a bit of a dag'.
David McGill is a New Zealand social historian who has published 43 books, some fictional recreations and memoirs based on diaries, articles and research. Born and bred in Auckland, he trained as a priest in Christchurch before becoming a teacher in Wellington and then a feature writer on the NZListener, in Sydney for The Bulletin and later National Times, in London for TVTimes and New Statesman. He returned to the NZListener and then columnist on Wellington’s Evening Post. There he won awards such as the Dulux Feature Writing, Cowan Historical, Jubilee Investigative and Reed Environmental. He was editor of New Times and W5 magazines before becoming a fulltime writer in the mid-1980s with a travel journey round New Zealand by goods train called The G’Day Country. His other books include twice reprinted Ghost Towns of New Zealand; five bestselling dictionaries of Kiwi slang; POW: The Untold Stories of New Zealanders as Prisoners of War; five books of heritage Wellington and the twice-published national heritage buildings of Landmarks; the futuristic volcano thriller Whakaari and the recent prequel From My Cold, Dead Hands; two Auckland-based thrillers about a valuable religious artefact first featured in The Monstrance; the commissioned history of the Customs Department Guardians at the Gate; the biography of NZ’s Rumpole of the Bailey Stacey; and recently a personal history of pop music, The Treadmill Tapes.