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Kia ora koutou, ko Neil Atkinson tōku mahi ana, no mai haere mai. It's great to see so many people here today. This is the last of our seminars in this lunchtime monthly series. And as this is a partnership between.. Manitou Taonga, Ministry of Culture and Heritage and National Library. It's great that we have, um, we have Paul, Paul Diamond speaking to us today. Um, so Paul, um, of Ngati Haua, Te Rarawa, Ngapuhi, um, has been Curator Māori at the Alexander Turnbull [00:00:30] Library since 2011. Um, he's been a journalist and broadcaster and, uh, is the author of Uh, A Fire in Your Belly, Makariti, and Savage to Suit, and of course, his latest book, Downfall, uh, The Destruction of Charles Mackie, which you see here, with this wonderful cover, published by Massey University Press last month, and launched, um, here in Wellington and also in Whanganui. Um, so this is a, you know, I think as Paul will tell us, I think this has been a long project, um, it's a really remarkable story, many people will know something about [00:01:00] it now, certainly now, you may have already read the book. Um, and, Know, it's a, it's a story that has a much greater resonance just than, than, than, than a story of the, the, the fate of the, the individuals in involved. So it's, um, really looking forward to hearing Paul, uh, talk about downfall. So please, please join me in welcoming him. Um, , uh,[00:01:30] Tū e kuku, tū e te kōrero, tau te māramatanga, tīhei mauri ora. Um, just to start with, it's really important to thank those who've made this event today possible. So thank you, the Ministry and the Library, Neil, Kate, Joan, Mark and others. And I want to acknowledge the supporters who've actually made possible some of the things I'm going to be showing [00:02:00] you, the research here and overseas. So Mana Te Taonga again for the history award that I was lucky enough to receive. Creative New Zealand, I had their Berlin Writers Residency. Um, the library here for giving me spells of time away to do this research. Um, the Goethe Institut, who, um, um, I'm still learning German, but anyway, I've got more than I had when I.. And I walked into the door of that place. They gave me two language scholarships and the Stout Research Centre. I had a little spell researching up the hill [00:02:30] at that wonderful place as well and joined that community of researchers. And there's lots of other supporters here in the room, actually, people who've been involved and supported, even if that meant indulging me while I banged on about Berlin and Whanganui over the last 18 years. And I need to let you know that the books are for sale in the National Library store on the floor above and I'll be up there with them afterwards. So today what I thought I'd do is just give you a bit of an overview of Downfall. You are a slightly [00:03:00] self selected sample of people with predisposed to have an interest and to know who Charles Mackey was. Walter Darcy Crespo, but I thought it would be good to just whiz through the bare bones of the story. Um, I'll show you some images of the research journey, which is something that was going to be more in the book than it is, but um, I've been using it for other things like these talks and things. And I'm going to present you with some of the mysteries and unanswered questions, which I think is part of the reason this story has intrigued people, but also Um, confounded people a [00:03:30] little bit as well. So, here's a photo of Maki. That's the photo I think that Gavin Hurley used as a basis for, um, the cover. So, in his political life, he, he had been on this thing called the Mata'onga'onga Road Board. Um, which was significant because it was where his in laws family owned land. And they had a big interest in bridges and roads and things built, being built in the area where they.. owned land. But he, uh, Maki became a councillor on the [00:04:00] Whanganui Borough Council in 1905, and the mayor in 1906, in his early 30s. He caused a bit of an upset, you know, the men, and they were all men, who ran Whanganui, tended to be a lot older. Um, this photo was used again in this montage, Whanganui, the future river city of the Dominion, that's from 1909. Um, Mackie was really known for leading the introduction of electric trams to Whanganui. Um, so if you look in each of those pictures, you can actually see a tram somewhere in the photo. Um, so that was the first place [00:04:30] outside the four main centres in New Zealand to have electric trams. And in the book, I talk about how there was a bit of a row about steam trains versus electric trams. I mean, I don't know how he knew, but, but the future was electric, not steam, even though people had been to London and Paris, and where they had steam trains at that stage, and said well, if it's good enough for London and Paris, it's good enough for Whanganui, but Mackie went out on a limb and pushed. He was the only one who pushed for the electric trams, which was a real achievement. Um, but going back in [00:05:00] time, the Wellington College Archives actually, just before the book was finished, sent me this photo. So, Mackey was born in 1875 in Nelson, where his father, Joseph Mackey, was a master at Nelson College. The family moved to Wellington when Joseph Mackey got a job as principal at Wellington College, where Charles was dux in 1891. So that's the same year this photo of the first 15 was taken. The archive has a second copy of the photo, um, which is slightly clearer. [00:05:30] And if you haven't worked out who it is yet, that's Mackie, age 16. That year, his father resigned as principal and the family moved to Taranaki. Charles won a junior scholarship and went to Canterbury College in Christchurch. And after Mackey was shot in Berlin in 1929, a columnist in the Daily Telegraph in Sydney shared a memory of what Mackey was like as a student. A tallish young fellow noted for his walking stick, his smile, and his way of carrying his head on one side. He graduated with honours in mathematics. [00:06:00] But his temperament was always the rover's. Mackey's shifted his digs again, was a remark you heard in the college quadrangle every few weeks. Um, So that's interesting, and I only found that a few weeks ago. There's, there's more and more material emerging thanks to Papers Past and Trove and these other digitized databases. Um, I love this photo because Mackie was sort of praised for, you know, looking the man aboard and, you know, it is quite grand for the mayor of Whanganui to be wearing a top hat, um, at the opening [00:06:30] of Something Catholic, I guess, in, um, in Whanganui, and I just think Mrs. Mackie looks really bored under that giant hat. Um, so after a brief stint teaching Auckland, Mackie trained as a lawyer. And, um, Stratford with Malone, actually, later to become famous at Chanuk Bia, and Maki moved to Whanganui in 1901. 1904 he married Isabel Duncan from one of the early Whanganui Pākehā settler families. The Duncan family named a street in their subdivided [00:07:00] land in what became known as Whanganui East, after Maki. And.. This image just popped up a few weeks ago. Um, Mackie is Commodore of the Whanganui Sailing Club, which had just been formed then in 1904. He did seem to have a habit of running things that he got. But to jump ahead, um, to 1919 1920, I think the situation was quite different. Mackey was under a lot of pressure. He'd had an accident in 1919, late in that year. [00:07:30] He was walking from his wife's house in Maunganui East to a council meeting along the riverfront in Maunganui, you know, to go into town, and he was run over by a milk cart, and so his legs were damaged. And there was a controversy because he sued the milk cart owner, and it was the milk cart owner who was going to have to.. Sell his milk cart to, and his whole livelihood, to pay the fine. Mackey was involved with the building of the Sargent Art Gallery, which opened in 1919, but he was criticized for enlisting a few [00:08:00] years earlier, but not serving in the Great War. And there was a big row with the RSA and other people in Monganui over the visit of the Prince of Wales, who was actually in New Zealand still when the shooting happened in Monganui. And the town infrastructure was struggling to cope with the rapid growth. So that tram network relied on an electric plant that was gas fired and it was designed for the tram network, which expanded. But I have read in the histories of the trams in [00:08:30] Monganui that You know, hairdresser in Whanganui and Victoria Avenue wanted to be connected to it all, you know, because people wanted electricity rather than gas and the network just couldn't cope. And in fact, after Mackie went to prison, the whole network collapsed and Whanganui didn't have any power for months while the part was being sent out from London, from England. So, and then, and amongst this, Mackie, I think, had strong supporters, but he also had some quite powerful enemies among the soldiers, the returned servicemen, and some of the [00:09:00] others in the town. So, I just wanted to show you this, that when they decided to, um, because Mackie's portrait after his, after he went to prison disappeared, and they tried to find another portrait, so they used, um, They used this one. They, they found a version of this behind a wall in the Whanganui Museum and they used that. So there's actually two versions. The version on the left is the one that um, is in the council chamber in Whanganui. So, of course, this, oh, and he was, just [00:09:30] to give you an idea of how old he was, he was 44 in 1920. And here's his nemesis, Walter Darcy Cresswell. Um, and that's actually one of the photos taken when he, Cresswell, left New Zealand the year after the shooting. So he was 24 in 1920. Um, I don't know what I think. No, I do know what I think about colorization of archival photos, but I just thought I'd show you that. I spotted that on Twitter the other day. It's kind of interesting, not quite [00:10:00] necessarily accurate, but it's interesting. Um, so May 1920, Walter Darcy Cresswell arrived in Whanganui. Um, he'd been training as an architect in London when the Great War broke out. He served with British and New Zealand armies and was wounded from things like shell shock and having had a nervous breakdown and was still apparently on the sick list. And he was visiting Whanganui as part of his recuperation because he had an uncle and an aunt and cousins who lived in Whanganui. And these relations had lost a son at Passchendaele and another [00:10:30] Cresswell cousin that actually died at Passchendaele as well. Um, Cresswell had aspirations to be a poet, uh, but later would become quite well known for his homosexuality. So Darcy Cresswell arrived in Whanganui on the Monday of the week of the 10th of May. He had dinner with Mackie and his, Mackie's, uh, the Cresswell cousin that night. They had dinner again on Thursday when Mackie invited Cresswell to visit the Sergeant Gallery because Mackie had his own key. And then on Friday about four o'clock [00:11:00] Cresswell met Mackie at his office in this Ridgeway Street building. So above the words limited in that photo is where apparently the office was. But I didn't really realize until I.. Walked out the, you know, what actually happened on those very days during that week, was that they actually met in that office four times. So they met there on the Friday, they went to the um, They went to the Whanganui Club in St. Hill Street for a cup of tea, then they went to the art gallery, then they went back to the office, [00:11:30] and that's where Chris Will discovered a certain disgusting feature in Mr. Mackey's character, according to his statement, and that's where there was this sort of ultimatum, You resign or I'll, I'll tell everyone about you and this. Disgusting feature in your character. Um, and then the next day, about 9. 30, Cresswell called on Matthew at that office, they went to the Whanganui Club for another cup of tea, and um, and then back to the office, and that's where there was this incident. Um, which according to Cresswell involved, Um, Mackey shooting [00:12:00] Cresswell, but then not realising, well obviously not being very good at using a gun because Cresswell didn't die and Mackey panicked and either closed or shut the door in the adjoining room and that's when Dusty Cresswell threw the chair out of that window and, um, fired shots and stood at the window and told everyone he'd discovered a scandal. Um, And if you saw the project on TV3 the other night, it was quite a hard case that when they were interviewing people about that office and how they might be putting it on the rainbow list for Historic Places, the [00:12:30] window shattered into a thousand pieces. Um, it's on the NACI website if you want to have a look at it. Um, so Mackey was sentenced to 15 years hard labor and found guilty of attempted murder. He was released after six years controversially on condition he left New Zealand. And.. This is a photo that's not in the book. This is actually his sister. Margaret Jean Mackey, who, she's in the center of that photo, she worked at the Taranaki Herald in New Plymouth. Um, she sponsored him and took him [00:13:00] to London and set him up in a new business. So, most of his siblings sort of, um, stood by him and supported him. And we now know that that new business was advertising. Um, Mackey moved to Berlin in late 1928. He was working as a journalist and teaching English there. He was covering street fighting between the police and communist protesters when he was shot in May 1929. So, Hershevitz, if you can make that word out on the picture on the left, that's a still from a [00:13:30] collection of film footage of those, the fighting. Um, and the barricades are in the front of that photo. So, Maki kind of drove down that street and stopped outside that store. So now that store, which was a Jewish clothes shop, is now a chemist. But we realize that it's actually largely intact, which apparently happened a lot in the buildings that survived the Second World War bombing. Um, for economic reasons, we're often just.. just left or, you know, and so they are actually the same buildings on that side of the street. So Mackie was standing quite [00:14:00] close to where I'm standing when he was shot. So here I am in Whanganui looking for bullet holes, um, in the office. So that's what the office in the Meteor building looks like. It was used as the smoker room for the printing company. Um, up until the company left that building when I was in Berlin, a, um, woman that I met said to me, there's this word called schpurensuche and it's a search for traces. And it's a word from police forensic [00:14:30] inquiries. You know, when there's a crime in the crime scene and they're looking for traces of what happened, they schpurensuche. But this woman said, it's also got a metaphorical meaning. It's actually about historical searches for traces. And I love that idea. And so really that's, Where I've got to with the story, it's about trying to get beyond or underneath the story of the shootings. Because the shootings grab your attention. My goodness, a mayor shooting someone. Oh, he was, you know, he was gay. He was being blackmailed. But, you know, beyond that, what was actually going on? And I was really delighted. [00:15:00] This is my partner, Richard King, up at the Sargent. Um, And there was a show, uh, for Pride Week last year. Um, it was Simplegma. I think I'm saying that right. It was a collaborative project between the Auckland based artist Shannon Novak and a curator, Millie Michelanian. And it was about searching for queerness in collections despite historical erasure and exclusion, they said. It's like sifting through coded traces. And I love that, um, these young artists and curators have picked up that idea. [00:15:30] And used it to put together that collection of things from the Sargent's collection as well as work from Shannon Novak on the right. So, taken together, what I'm arguing is the traces that I've found as part of this project are evidence of homosexuality as these two men understood at their own time. The British historian Justin Bengry has argued that terms such as lesbian and gay cannot sustain the task of describing experiences in the past that may differ radically from our own lives today and in the recent past. They [00:16:00] start from an assumption of similarity or even sameness, which serves to reconstitute the past in our own image. Can these terms ever accommodate people in the past who understood their desires and sexualities differently from us, if they even understood themselves to have sexualities? So instead of applying these terms, like gay and lesbian, um, to people in the past, Bengree says we can queer the past. To queer the past, he says, is to let people in history define themselves in often complex and unfamiliar ways, or to accept that even if they did [00:16:30] define themselves, we may never know how. It is a conversation between us and them, these people in history, about the resonances we may feel with their lives without demanding from them a direct line of kinship and exclusive ownership. Queering the past. It's an act that happens in the present. So even if it is uncertain what homosexuality meant to Mackie and Cresswell, I think we can be reasonably confident that that part of their lives impacted on how others treated them. So I [00:17:00] always acknowledge this person, Prue Langbine. So this all began in 2004 when we were working together at Radio New Zealand and Prue said, why don't we do a radio documentary about this story, which she'd found in Michael King's History of New Zealand. I'd found it in Peter Wells essay in The Best Mates Anthology. And so we tro it off to Nui in 2004, and that's Peru and I at the launch a week was a couple of weeks ago. Um, the program didn't get made, but I had the good luck to work with Raman Daley at, um, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, [00:17:30] who said, why don't you, oh, don't try and solve this, but why don't you, um, why don't you work on a new spare time and see where it leads and look at the effect it had on other gay men, which was a great, great tip. So, Looking a bit at some of these mysteries, residual mysteries, to do with the blackmail and the shooting, these are the two statements that weren't made public at the time of the shooting, but these are the statements from the doctor and the specialist, and these speak to this question of how did Cresswell know that Mackie [00:18:00] was homosexual? So that first statement on the left is from Mackey's GP, Dr. Earl, um, written the same day that Mackey was tried and remanded for his sentence. And it says, This is to certify that some six years ago, Charles Evan Mackey, a Whanganui solicitor, consulted me with reference to homosexual monomania. I advised him to attain suggested treatment, and I believe that he acted on my advice. And the one on the right, is by the specialist. This is to certify that Mr. C. E. Mackey in August [00:18:30] 1914, acting on the advice of his medical advisor, came to see me about treating him. He was in a very worried and depressed frame of mind and said if I could not help him, life would be impossible. He had treatment intermittently until the end of November 1914. He then stopped the treatments because he said the homosexual ideas were gone and he felt quite all right again. In my opinion, intermittent treatments should have been kept up for 12 to 18 months, then the cure would have been permanent. I have treated other cases of homosexual desire with success. The two [00:19:00] chief causes of relapse are alcoholism and neurasthenia. For the part last two months, we know Mr. C. E. Mackey has had great mental strain and worry, and I'm sure that if this had not been so, this trouble would have never come to pass. Albert Mackey. And that's Albert Mackey there, um, on second from the right. It is, um, plus fours or something, sixes or something, on the golf course in Whanganui. And that's a newspaper advertisement from the time when he treated Mackey. So there were two years that [00:19:30] Mackey wasn't Mayor, between 1913 and 1915. And I find it interesting that this treatment with Albert Mackey, who apparently wasn't a relation, um, happened. We know now that that was probably this thing, autosuggestion, which, um, Mackey used a lot in his advertising, possibly, um, hypnosis as well. Um, but before 1920, so those six years, who else knew about that treatment? Um, Dr. Earl, Albert Mackey, the metaphysician, but who [00:20:00] else? I mean, I know, you know, patient, um, confidentiality and things, but still, Mackey would have been Living with the knowledge that there could be a risk that someone would let that knowledge out and, you know, six years was quite a long time to live with that. Why did Cresswell decide to blackmail Mackie? Um, and who was Cresswell's cousin and what did he have to do with the blackmail? I think the cousin was this man, Roland Marshall Cresswell, so the eldest son of the aunt and uncle, Charles and [00:20:30] Eleanor, who Darcy Cresswell was visiting. And this is from a family, um, reprinting of a scrapbook kept by Eleanor Cresswell that was done by one of the, um, grandsons who was based in Australia. And, As you can see there, Ronald, uh, Roland Cresswell served in the Great War and ended up running the farm that was intended to be run by his brother, Jack Tennyson Cresswell, who was the one that was killed at Passchendaele. And the father, [00:21:00] uh, Charles Cresswell, was actually appealing to the Military Service Board for his son to be excused from military service, but the war ended, um, before the appeal was, was, was heard. Um, and also people have speculated that there was something.. Some sort of incident, you know, sexual encounter happened between Mackie and Chris, well, you know, that line, I discovered a certain disgusting feature in his character. Well, how and what happened? And it's interesting [00:21:30] that, um, some things have resulted from the publication of this book, um, Chris Brickle, who's been a very important person in the realization of Downfall. So people will know about this book, um, Mates and Lovers, A History of Gay New Zealand. Published in 2008. And the cover uses an image from the Turnbull Library here taken in Wanganui in 1888. And the catalogue says it's a full length seated portrait of two men, Mr Colley and Mr Green, or Green, with a golden Labrador dog between them.[00:22:00] That could be Mr. Colley in the middle. And there have been some stage plays, um, retelling uh, stories from that book. Um, they happened in two different years, in Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin. And they suggested that Darcy Creswell and Charles Mackey had actually had sex. And I think in one of them, that I saw at BADS, I think they had sex and then Mackie gave Criswell the [00:22:30] money for the, I think he came back as a ghost because he died in Berlin and he came back, they had sex and then Mackie gave Criswell the money for the gas meter to gas himself. So quite a lot of dramatic, dramatic license. Um, but I find it interesting that, you know, gay creatives have kind of thought, well, they must've had sex. They must have had some sort of encounter and like that. But evidence found as part of my research suggests that this may not have been what happened. And this is an article [00:23:00] that I didn't find till just before the book was finished. This is from Pātea. So Pātea is the town just above Whanganui. And the little editorial is talking about these two cases that had happened that week. The case with Charles Mackey and also one Dennis Gunn. It was a murder in Ponsonby. Um, there is one aspect of the Whanganui sensation that the public should not overlook, and that is the service rendered by the community, uh, to the community, by [00:23:30] the young man Cresswell, who courageously took it upon himself to remove a deadly cancerous growth that had unhappily taken root in the neighbouring town, Whanganui. There were probably others that knew of the existence of the evil in their midst, in the part played by the chief actor who is now paying the penalty, but not having the proofs that young Cresswell apparently had. Had to be content with a vigorous and unrelenting campaign of hostility towards the culprit and the hope that he'd take a hint and retire from public life. Instead of doing so, he brazen things out until [00:24:00] the crash came and the campaign of righteous hostility was for a long time regarded by many as persecution. They are wiser now. Everything somehow comes to those who wait, and those who fight in a good cause. One word before the curtain is wrung down forever, let us hope on an unpleasing episode, that if there are any further signs of the cancerous growth in Whanganui, it is to be hoped the police will get to work and root it out completely. So that's June and then the next month this article [00:24:30] appears in the New Zealand Times and is syndicated all over New Zealand and various other papers. So it reports as you'll see that Cresswell has recovered was from his um, the bullet that was near his lung and he was about to leave Whanganui. And this article said that additional information was secured by Cresswell consequent on his discoveries in connection with the first case, and though no information under this detail has been published, it is understood that certain people have shaken the dust of Whanganui off their feet. [00:25:00] And there was an inquiry when Mackie and two other middle class prisoners were released in 1926. It's a bit of a complicated story, which I've tried to summarize in the book, but there was a report Delivered in good bureaucratic fashion just a couple of days before Christmas in 1926, and it went through the facts of the three cases. And when it recounted what happened in Whanganui, it said, it appeared at the hearing in May 1920 that Cresswell had discovered that Maki had been guilty of indecent [00:25:30] practices with young men. That he had interviewed Mackey on the subject on several occasions, and that he insisted on Mackey resigning from his position as mayor, or otherwise he would expose him. See, now that's not the same as what I think those playwrights were assuming, that there was some sort of incident, and that was the issue, and that's why the blackmail. This sort of suggests that there was something else going on, that perhaps didn't just involve Mackey, and could. help, I think, explain why the town just wanted to put a lid on this as fast as possible. Because there are things about the way the trial [00:26:00] happened, like not interviewing the cousin, not identifying the cousin, not locating two statements that were mentioned, um, where Mackie had said he'd resigned the mayoralty, they went completely missing, um, that I think show that they were trying to get this dealt with as fast as possible. There was a reference to the court case was going to be going to the hospital and hearing evidence from Criswell in this hospital But, um, I think the statement, which Chris will never sign, but Mackie did, and it says on it, in as much as this relates to my [00:26:30] own acts and deeds, it's substantially true. So what does that mean about the other person's acts and deeds? And I think perhaps there was something, there is a reference in a, um, oral history, you know, it's very hearsay, it's a lawyer who practiced with a lawyer who practiced with Mackie, you know, um, where there'd been a group of men involved in some sort of.. scandal in the town with younger men and Mackie took the rap for him. But so [00:27:00] that's what that's the evidence really for why I don't really think it was as straightforward as some sort of sexual encounter in Mackie's office, but were the men who may have been involved in places other than Whanganui, you know, and why was this woman Helen Shaw Interested in a man called Ronald Cuthbert. So, Helen Shaw As I've written in the book, was someone entrusted by Ormond Wilson with, um, writing the biography and editing letters from Darcy Crestwell, who she had a [00:27:30] lot of, um, respect for. And Ormond Wilson said, well, if you're going into this detail, you're going to have to look at this Whanganui affair. And so, Helen Shaw really is one of the first people who sort of did, you know, trod the same path that I have. And I've benefited from looking at her papers, which are here at the Turnbull. But she had all this material relating to a man called Ronald Cuthbert, who was a close friend of Criswell's, um, at Christ's College. He trained as a lawyer, and he was based in Christchurch. Um, and I did find a letter from Helen [00:28:00] Shaw to Bill Mitchell, who's someone else, who tried to write about the story in 1982. And Bill was trying to ask her about, well, what, what happened between these two men? What do you think? And she wrote, any additional information I might offer could be mere speculation or at best unproven. I think one has to concentrate on what one knows beyond shadow of doubt. And I thought that was really interesting that she was being so sort of cagey. In the reading room upstairs I found this letter, there's a couple of letters from Ronald Cuthbert who was quite unwell [00:28:30] in the 1960s and he was actually at Hamner and he was recovering from an operation and quite strange handwriting but in that What I was able to decipher was, so this is Helen Shaw had written to Ronald saying, what do you know about Whanganui? And he's writing back saying, could you send me a copy of the newspaper account, best of all a newspaper cutting, telling about the Whanganui murder as narrated before I think Robert Stout. Darcy on one occasion did [00:29:00] tell me at some length of that incident, but before writing about what Darcy told me, I would like to read at least the Press Association account of what happened. Failing that, perhaps you can mention what you yourself have already learned in its source and give me particulars of the press accounts of the trial. And that's the last piece of correspondence, because he died on the 5th of May, 1967, so, um, the year after that letter was written. When I thought about what he'd written, I thought, well, it's not implausible that He, you know, could have been [00:29:30] involved in it somehow. And of course he was trying to see what she knew. And remember, you know, 1967 is a long time before papers passed. Helen Shaw in the 1960s didn't even know what year the shooting had happened. She had to write to the town Clerk of Monu who said, yes, it was 1920 'cause he remembered it as a boy. But Mackey did actually spend time in Christchurch. Um, Cranley Barton wrote about, you know, meeting him there and going prowling on the new Brighton Dunes and, and. Maki actually got criticized quite a lot for [00:30:00] being out of Whanganui and not spending enough time, you know, attending to the town's business. He was very connected to You know, local government networks around the country. So it's not implausible that there was some sort of relationship between Mackie and this young man. Who's mentioned a lot in Crestwell's writing as, you know, one of my dearest friends. So that's another little, um, mystery that's left hanging. But now, just to talk about this thing about, you know, was it a conspiracy, or was it, as a previous partner of mine said, often [00:30:30] it's a cock up, um, this is a photo of, um, the day that the Sergeant Gallery was opened, and that's William Ferguson Massey sitting in the centre, and this is at the Cosmopolitan Club, where they'd just had an unveiling of the honours of, um, people, club members who'd served in the Great War. So Mackey's to the right of, Massey and the mayor beaches on the left, but the person to the right is, um, Thomas Boswell Williams and Any [00:31:00] students of body language it was sort of you know I've looked at this is a terrible photo and I've looked at it a lot of course But it was you know only recently that I sort of looked at it and looked at The Thomas Boswell Williams doesn't really by his body language look as if he's that comfortable sitting next to the mayor and I just mentioned this because Williams was the person who took over as mayor for the two years that Mackey wasn't mayor in 1913 15. Williams led the campaigns for the people who tried to challenge Mackey. Um, [00:31:30] each time they tried to unseat him, Williams was the chair. And it was Williams who wrote to the editor of the papers and said that when Mackey Enlisted and then didn't serve because he said he couldn't replace anyone and get a replacement in his business But it was a sham and then Mackey couldn't help himself and criticized Williams as mayor, but I can't help. I'm not saying it's a smoking gun or anything But I just can't help thinking that you know Williams who took over In 1920 after Mackey went to prison [00:32:00] and was very much seen as the older Safe pair of hands and, and, you know, back to that normal mode of older men running, running things in Whanganui, not this sort of, um, new arrival upstart. Anyway. And I know that some of his descendants live in Fielding, uh, you know, that's the thing, not everybody connected with the story still lives in Maunganui. Um, when they had the unveiling, uh, the commemoration of a hundred years of the Dublin Street Bridge, um, some of the descendants of Tom Boswell Williams came over from Fielding.[00:32:30] And I, it would be interesting to know if there is anything in their family about these stories. Why did Mackie have two offices? So, his office in the street directories was in this building, which was a billiard hall. So if you know Maunganui, this is Ridgeway Street, and that's the avenue there. The, um, the old post office, the Rutland Hotel. But the actual meteor building is back where you would have been standing, um, from where this photograph was taken. It's not clear why. [00:33:00] He had two offices. Um, he, a man called Diagon, who built, who owned the Meteor building, was very closely involved with the sergeant, so perhaps he let Mackey use, use that office, but that's another sort of mystery, but the reason we're pretty certain it was the Meteor building is this is the diagram that Darcy Cresswell did, which Corresponds pretty closely with the layout of the office. All that's missing at the moment is the door, the window, um, the wall that was between the sort of anteroom [00:33:30] where Crystal said the girl sat, um, uh, and this, the bigger office. And they, those are those two windows looking out onto Ridgway Street. After Mackey was sent to prison, he declared himself bankrupt. It was difficult for the official assignee, which handled Mackey's trust account, to work out how much his business was worth without his help. So rather than transferring the case to Auckland, the officials decided to bring Mackey back to Whanganui, where the records and creditors were. Against this, Mr Silk, the official assignee, wanted the case transferred to Auckland, and was [00:34:00] worried that Whanganui didn't have the expertise to handle the case. And writing to the Justice Department in Wellington, Silk explained he would not, he was not the only one who did not want Mackey back in Whanganui. And he said, Yesterday I had occasion to visit Mrs Mackie, who's assumed her maiden name of Duncan, and she requested me to endeavour to arrange matters so that it would not be necessary to bring the bankrupt to Whanganui. She expressed herself very strongly on the subject and appeared to be very distressed at the prospect of Mr Mackie being brought to Whanganui. Um, it is impossible to wind up their stakes. [00:34:30] Satisfactorily without the assistance of the bankrupt but suggested in view of the position of Mrs. Duncan It might be advisable to have the bankruptcy transferred to Auckland, but that's not what happened They did actually bring Mackey back to Wanganui and he spent about a fortnight there Helping the officials clear up his business affairs and I came across this photo in a book memories of old Wanganui and You know, was excited. Well, it's a 1920 Studebaker, apparently, which is the right year. And, but that man hopping into the car looks nothing like Mackie. But [00:35:00] the transfer from Mount Eden back to Wanganui was in November 1920, five years after he was sentenced. And what's interesting, though, when I looked at this photo is that everybody apart from the chauffeur is not actually looking at the guy getting into the car. They're looking at someone else. And You can actually see that there's a person just behind there, um, about to climb up in the car. And I do wonder if this could be Mackie. There's a reference in one of Blanche Vaughan's books to him, um, it's anonymized, there's a character called [00:35:30] Etiocles, and she wrote that once he was taken on transfer, not in prison garb, I'm glad to say, Through the very district that he'd once faithfully served, many prisoners would have welcomed the journey as a change. But to one of his sensitivities, it was the worst of possible tortures. I often had occasion to fear for Etiocle's brain. So, uh, no one agrees with me about this, but I just still think it could be him, and it's.. He had very distinctive ears. Um, I've collaborated [00:36:00] with a number of photographers, including Anne Shelton, who's there. That's Bill Milbank, former director of the Sargent, and my friend Des Bovey, who set up the Whanganui Gay Rights Group, toasting Mackie when Anne had Organized for the stone, um, with Mackie's name to be gilded, which I'll tell you about in a minute. Um, but Anne Lee Mitchell Anion, another photographer that I work with from Whanganui, we all went up to New Plymouth Prison. And Anne took this photo of the prison that had just closed in 2013. We were keen to go there because the prison, [00:36:30] That's me standing by that same, um, corridor. It was largely, you can see it's really, not really that different from, um, when it was open. The cells were 7 by 10 foot, and they were the smallest in the country when the prison was closed. Just jumping to London and Berlin, um, This photo is apparently the, um, the earliest photo of men cruising in London, um, before the 70s. Taken by Montague Glover, um, that's in Trafalgar Square, very close to [00:37:00] where Mackie was based, in the Adelphi area, between the Savoy Hotel and, um, Charing Cross. Um, we found Mackie's will in Berlin, um, if you read the book you'll see that it was quite a saga finding this. And Mackie mentions a man, Chris Craggs. with a serial number, 2nd Battalion Coldstream Guardsmen. And in the book I explain that the Coldstream Guardsmen were very famous for selling themselves for sex in St. James's Park. And independently there are all these [00:37:30] references from Hector Belytho's writing, expat writer, gay writer, um, in London, to make he going almost every evening to St. James's Park. And it took a few years for the penny to drop. If you're doing that, you're not going to get a, um, good photo of Buckingham Palace. Um, and there was a second statement, that 1926 inquiry, just to say that that said, uh, it referred to a written statement made by Cresswell some two years after he was wounded. And there are some references in the [00:38:00] prison file correspondence to a friend of Mackie's going to London and on the advice of a lawyer who was at school with Mackie, um, talking to Cresswell. So I think there was, and there's a letter. Had, um, in the letter register that came in to make the imprison. So there was some sort of connect, contact. So what, what was that second statement or what happened to it? Um, oh, sorry, that was just a, that's Crestwell, um, from an album of photos kept by Lady Otoline Murrell in, um, the Bloomsbury set. [00:38:30] And in Berlin, uh, this is Petra Hurek, the first person I ever met. So that's us in 2007 on my first trip to Berlin, when I had next to no German. And, um, so there's Petra with me at the German Historical Museum. But the place that was really helpful was this, um, grandly named Geheimnisstaatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturgesetz, the Secret State Archives Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which is even in Archive Street. [00:39:00] Um, and when I, that's what, where I found the investigation file, which most of the information about what happened in Berlin is from. And it's a huge big file of the, all the investigation that the detectives and police did into the shooting of Mackey. Learning German, I've been told about false friends, words that are not like what they look. Words that are not like what they look similar to in English. One of these is bekommen, meaning not to become, but to have or to get something. So I got told that German kids come here and say, [00:39:30] I'm becoming a hot dog. And so when I asked this archivist where I was meant to pick up my file, she pointed to this. door across the room and she told me, you go to that room and then you become the file. Which, working in an archive is a marvelous metaphor for historical research. And the third photographer that I worked with was Connor Clark, uh, who was living in Berlin when I visited. That's Connor in Wedding, one of the places where the riots were happening in Berlin. That's [00:40:00] Connor in Neukölln, just across from what used to be that clothes shop that is now the chemist shop. And Connor took that photo of me, um, outside the shop. And it was always a highlight, actually, of all the trips, most of the trips I went to Berlin, that Conor was there. And um, and then Conor got the, um, Sergeant Gallery's Artist in Residence at the Ty Lee Cottage in 2017 2018. And I was really excited to find this photo of the police outside that clothes shop, and that pretty much tells, shows us the spot where [00:40:30] Mackie was shot. Another mystery is what happened to the bullet that killed Mackey. Autopsies were ordered by the police for all those killed in the street fighting. The two doctors who completed the autopsy on Mackey confirmed that he died from bleeding caused by a shotgun wound, but also explained how he was shot. And this was the, this is the translation from that report, it says the bullet entered the middle of the abdomen immediately above the pelvis in a left backward and upward direction and came out at the back above the left main trochanter, which is the bones connecting the muscles to the upper part of the [00:41:00] thigh bone. So weird kind of injury that it sort of bounced off the pavement, maybe, and went right through him. But no bullet was found, making it difficult to tell whether he'd been shot with a police weapon. So that's the spot today. And then a friend of mine in Berlin was actually able to overlay the, the, um, the two images. I do wonder if the police had the bullet. Um, there is actually, unbelievably, there's a whole book about the three days of fighting, um, [00:41:30] by a, French historian, Leon Schumann, um, and the fighting was known as Blutmei, Bloody May. So that Blutmei Berlin 1929, Dichtungen und Wahrheit 1991, um, Poetry and Truth. So that's a reference to Goethe's biography, autobiography, and Dechtelman, I've been told, implies invention, something made up, poetry in contrast to truth. And the book exposes the fabrications and falsehoods of the police and [00:42:00] the authorities. There were a number of, um, false, false statements, and Sherman was outraged about this and went through the archives, and this book was how I found Most of the sources in Berlin. Oh, and just to show you that that's a, that's a map from Sherman's book. Um, which this, this is the, that's where Mackey was killed. And just to show you, this is the sort of area that was cordoned off. And these are the barricades. Um, here that [00:42:30] he couldn't get past when he came in a taxi, but you might be thinking about, um, if you're thinking about Berlin in 1929, um, and police falsifying evidence, you might be thinking about Babylon, Berlin. So on my way home, um, on the metro down, this is the Hermannplatz station. So this is where Mackey had driven from down to where he was shot. Um, One night I, so, it normally looked like that, and then when I went back, it looked like that, and it, we had all these magazines and newspapers [00:43:00] from May 1929, and I'd just been with this woman, Barbara Kiefenheim, who'd said to me, you need to find these, um, these magazines, you should look at these as well as the papers, and there they were there, and it took me a minute, and There was a case with, um, Things for Sale and, um, Reichsmark, uh, yeah, Reichsmarks. And it took me a minute to tweak that they were addressing the set. It was nearly midnight and they were getting ready for filming of Babylon Berlin. So that's based on that book, Der Nasser Fisch. Because I was in Berlin and people said, [00:43:30] You need to read this book. It's, it's all about these riots. And then it got made into that series. I didn't actually know about the series, but this is 2016. They were filming it. It got released in 2017. Lots of people will probably have seen it. It apparently is still the most expensive series ever made in Germany. And it was a great, um, series because so much of what was around in the 20s has been lost. Uh, this is what the building where Mackie, uh, lived. Uh, this is in 1944, I think, a survey [00:44:00] of bomb damage. So that building is still there. I mean, this is the classic. Style of architecture, the five stories, and I mean that's as close as I can get really to seeing where Mackie lived, because the three places he lived are not there. One time in Berlin, I rented an apartment across the road from there, so it's a children's playground, and that gives you an idea of the sort of buildings that are there now. That building, remarkably, did survive. Um, just quickly, this is a [00:44:30] letter that Mackie wrote in 1920, um, talking about someone, an artist called Alastair Campbell, and he's writing to Government House, recommending this young artist, architect of great promise. In the prison file, you can see that Alastair Campbell was in Wellington, then he went to London, and He was a beneficiary in Mackie's will. And I can't help wondering that when the uh, housemaid in the pension where Mackie was staying was interviewed and she said Mackie's friend who'd already moved to our pension a week before Mackie Oh, [00:45:00] because Mackie had just transferred um, flats actually when he was killed Um, she just talks about this man coming in and inquiring whether Mr Mackie had moved into their pension and at the same time informed us that Mackie had been shot in Noika on Friday. I do wonder if that was Alastair Campbell But yeah, man who never married, died in England in 1944. I have made contact with some of, um, his family and people who knew him, but they don't really know much about him. Um, and then the, [00:45:30] um, apparently Mackey got a job, um, working at the university. Uh, someone wrote, uh, told a newspaper in London that he'd obtained a post as a lecturer in English at the university. And Mackey was wearing a greenstone tiki, apparently, that had been given by people in Monganui. Um, that actually ended up with this man, Pembroke Stevens, who was the executor in Mackie's will. Um, Mackie, again, just before the book came out, I um, found this story, a [00:46:00] report of a ball in Berlin, and it was a fancy dress ball, and Mackie said, I did not get a fancy dress, but contented myself with a half face mask and a small Māori tiki hung over my shirt like a decoration. Every woman stopped to touch it for luck, one even insisting on dipping it into her glass of wine. But, um. Apparently it was inherited by Pembroke Stephens, who got shot in 1938 working as a journalist in Shanghai. And that's where the trail of the tiki stopped because people from New Zealand wrote to Berlin, um, or the High [00:46:30] Commission in London and then in Berlin to find out where that was. So that's another mystery. Um, just wanted to show you this photo that I tried to include. Chris Brickell sent me this photo. It's in a French magazine. Um, I understand this, working in an archive. The, the archive said they weren't able to photograph their copy because it needed repair. The archive in Arizona that controls the rights for this man Gutmann's photos wanted to charge us 250 American. Um, But anyway, I just thought I'd show you, because photos of the interiors of gay bars in [00:47:00] Berlin are next, they're so rare, and you'll see that the same ones, usually with transvestites, get used over and over and over again. This, this is quite an amazing, um, photos. I'm glad Chris pointed it out, but I'm sorry I wasn't able to use it. Just lastly, where is Mackie's grave? Um, that's the cemetery where he was buried in Germany, as I discovered the first time I went. And, um, you only rent a grave in Germany, so after a rental period, which I think.. It was 25 years, now it's 20. Grave rentals [00:47:30] need to be renewed if possible. So that's what that note is saying. That, um, the right of occupation has expired. You need to go and talk to the office. And sometimes you can't even renew it. It's only if you're famous like the Grimm Brothers. Their graves are kept. But, um, you can't even necessarily get your Grave renewed. But the chapel and the building used to store the bodies before burial is still at the cemetery. But the Mackie family have a photo of the grave, so apparently that's what the [00:48:00] headstone and things look like. And then just the last mystery is really all this to do with the stone at the Sargent Gallery. So, The beautiful, um, sergeant, which is being, um, restored and strengthened and extended at the moment, has a star, has two stones at the front, one in memory of Henry Sargent, and this one about the, um, acknowledging the people who helped the, the, uh, gallery be built. So at some stage after May, 1920, it resulted, and that's what it looked like. That's a photo taken [00:48:30] by Mill Bill Mitchell in the eighties, um, of the stone with it altered. But then, In 1985, the council decided to, um, to restore it. This is the memo from Colin Whitlock, who I did a wee interview with. He's just recently passed away, but he did say to me, you know, if they hadn't done this and this, that story had just been acknowledged as part of Mānganui folklore, it wouldn't have been such a big deal. But, but, you know, by doing what they did, it made it a focus of attention. So that's what it looked [00:49:00] like after it got restored. This is in the Laggans collection here at the library. Um, but by the time I arrived in Monganui, um, the paint had disappeared again in, um, Maki and, uh, Maki's name and the title. But as I told you earlier, Anne Shelton found in the archives that the original specification was for the whole stone to be gilded. So she persuaded the sergeant and council to allow Mackey's Lane to be gilded. You can't see that at the moment. It's all covered over for the [00:49:30] restoration. But what we do know is that, um, before this happened, there was a wreath laying protest. And that was organized during the first Whanganui Pride Week by the Whanganui Gay Rights Association. It took another seven years to get Mackie's name back on the stone. But just to finish, I'll just play you a couple of minutes of Des Bovey, who launched the book a few weeks ago, talking about why that protest was actually in the end significant. And thank you to Gareth Watkins for the audio, which we're going to hear now. [00:50:00] Whanganui was a sleepy provincial town with a well defined hierarchy of families. Mackie's scandal was buried, whispered about only by the best people. By referring to the story openly, in the press and on the radio, we had outed, not Mackie, but the story of Mackie, and by association, the story of his expungement.[00:50:30] The cover up, which as we all know, is always the real story. This was our temerity. This was our offence. I was taken aside more than once And firmly but politely scolded for my vulgarity in airing the city's dirty linen on national radio. The point I'm trying to make is that although the wreath laying was a modest act, even a fiasco, it can be [00:51:00] argued that it marked a moral turnaround. The exact point at which Mackie's reputation At which he began his slow climb from villain to victim and his blackmailer, his slow slide from victim to scumbag. Great events can turn on tiny fulcrums. [00:51:30] I'm not claiming that if the Wong Nui gay rights had done nothing, Mackie's story would have remained buried. Sooner or later, someone would have done something to rehabilitate the man. It only needed a nudge. That that nudge came not from some council official working quietly behind the scenes, but from the hometown gay community. So noisily, so publicly, is a source of [00:52:00] pride to me. I loved it when Des said that, because it kind of pulled everything together and, and sort of connected what happened earlier on with what's, you know, the significance, as Neil was saying, the resonances of the story for us now. And as Roger Smith pointed out, you know, the The story really is a tragedy because there is a lot of evidence that Mackey was sort of on the verge of a sort of a reinvention in Berlin, you know, and as I've written at the end, you know, when he left London in 1928, he was 53, but managed to get a passport showing his age [00:52:30] as 45. The eight year gap was the length of time from the shooting in New Zealand to his arrival in Berlin. Perhaps the move to Berlin was a new start. A bid for reinvention. Charles Mackie's story is one of resistance. Of refusing to settle, of continually challenging norms, of being knocked down and getting up again. Perhaps this is what connects his story with the story of gay liberation. The determined push by queer people throughout history to live their lives. on their own terms. Gilda.[00:53:00] Gilda. Loved your book, couldn't put it down. I have a question a bit more around that question that Bronwyn posed to you around, uh, I guess did you find out much about what the broader impact was for homosexual men in New Zealand around that time? Whether, you know, the reporting of the case or there was a chilling effect or anything like that?[00:53:30] Um, bits and pieces. Yeah, so Matthew's asking, you know, did I find out about, more about that broader impact of the case on gay men, homosexual men in New Zealand, as Bronwyn had suggested. Um, a big bit of evidence is that Hector Bolaifo told his biographer that he left New Zealand because of the shooting. Hector had been mentored as a writer by Mackie. And he just found it terrifying. If a friend who was the mayor, you know, mayors had a lot of respect. Uh, [00:54:00] there was a lot more, the respect for authority, I think, was quite different back then. And I mean, I think it meant that authority could get away with things that they can't get away with now. Um, so that's a real, I thought that was really interesting that, that he was very definite that the reason he'd left was because of that. He went to Sydney and then he went to London. And. There's also, um, Frank Sargesson apparently, um, sent Janet Frame to the, uh, library to get clippings because he'd read about it as a, [00:54:30] as a young man and actually he, he obliquely just vaguely refers to it in a, um, one of his autobiographies. And then just this observation of all of these men leaving New Zealand and spending periods of time in London. Um, I mean, we think New Zealand's small now, it was really small then. And the odds of bumping into someone who knew your mother were a lot higher. Um, so I can see why you'd want to go and just be in a. Metropolitan, bigger, more anonymous sort of space. [00:55:00] Um, Cranley Barton, wonderful Philip Rayner and Gerry Barton both told me about the references in Cranley Barton's diaries here. Cranley Barton from Monganui worked as a lawyer, but was a gay man, and wrote these quite coded diaries. And there's some lovely references to Mackie in London. You know, bumped into, um, he sort of saw Mr. Mackey at the New Zealand High Commission. He pretended not to see me. He looked quite prosperous. And so that's interesting. And I guess one of the difficulties in this has [00:55:30] been to reimagine yourself into the mindset of a time when All intimacy between men was illegal. You know, there was no 16 year old age of consent or anything. And I just think that would have influenced the way people behaved. So, yeah, bits and pieces of evidence. And I think this is kind of building on what Peter Wells has done, what Chris Brickle's done. I know Chris is looking at New Plymouth Prison, which was set 1914 to [00:56:00] 1956, when prisons were all organized by category. Um, apparently to have fantastic Christmas concerts, but then they, they realized it wasn't necessarily such a good idea to put all the homosexuals together. So that policy was changed, but Chris is actually looking in quite a lot of depth at the archival records of that, which is going to be really interesting. So it's an ongoing project. I was wondering if you could tell us a bit more about the ongoing project, because it sounds [00:56:30] as though there's more and more. The ongoing project, it's sort of early days, really, um, we're looking forward to the film. Even at the time people said, Oh, this movie, this is like a movie ending, you know, shot in the dark. Street in Berlin. Um, so that'll be interesting to see. But no, I've, um, people in Maunganui were coming up to me over the weekend. We were there, um, with new bits and pieces of information, which was really great. And I've been really gratified by the reaction in Maunganui because when Puru and I went there in 2004, [00:57:00] people either didn't know about it, or if they did, they didn't want to talk about it. That's if they were from Maunganui. And if they weren't from Maunganui, they couldn't stop talking about it because they just couldn't believe that something like that had happened in their adopted town. But the people who were from Maunganui were quite defensive about it. And Charles Mackie's daughter, Jo Duncan, was still alive then, um, but did an oral history for suffrage, which is here at the Turnbull and in Maunganui at the museum. And that was really valuable. You know, I looked at it initially because Michelle Horwood, who did that, said, Oh, [00:57:30] incredible, speak for three and a half hours and not mention your father once. She actually did mention him a few times, but, um, it's actually, you know, when you listen to someone talk, you can kind of hear, you know, I think you can, their parents, you know, and, and there was this strong character that came through. And the more I learned about her mother, as well as her father, I think you could kind of hear elements of them in there. So that was quite valuable. It's a bit early really, um, there's been some great reviews and things and I'm, but I [00:58:00] am nervously sort of looking at the reaction from Whanganui, but so far it's been really positive and there's been a lot of activity going on with the push to get the meteor building on the rainbow list, which will be really exciting. And the people in Whanganui and the pride group and things have done a beautiful job of connecting it. The meaning of it, with what it means to be queer in Whanganui now. Which I think is really, really exciting. They're explaining it in ways that hadn't really occurred to me. So that's great. So it's a team now. It's not just me.[00:58:30] .
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