I should explain recent gaps in transmission.
The later months of last year we were travelling; we’ve also been backwards and forwards to Masterton quite a bit. The main cause, though, has been neither of those but rather moving this newsletter to a new home at Ghost.
I’ve taken the opportunity to build some more features, in particular a daily quiz system and a Glossary of Aotearoa, which will be very terrific, I promise, but this has been quite a big job.
The essential idea of the Glossary is a Wikipedia of names and events and ideas and people that keep turning up in these daily newsletters.
It offers a ready reference of background and data and backstory and whatnot so that it’s not necessary to start each time from scratch.
What’s in there? Charts, data, definitions, backstories, references to previous editions, all kinds of good stuff. I’m loving doing it, but there’s also a lot of ground to cover. We’re talking about 1800 previous editions; nearly two centuries of Treaty breaches; the climate crisis; and picking just the right image from the back issues to depict Judith Collins.
So occasionally I’ve been saying let’s just skip it today, I want to get this thing finished. I’ve also had in mind what many readers have told me: the shit the world keeps throwing at us is too much to take every single day. This might be simply making a virtue of a necessity, but it’s also true: there’s only so much Vance, Vance, Trump, Trump, Trump, Netanyahu you can take without some leavening or pacing.
Out running this morning, I passed someone who I remember as a school kid from down our old street. She was out walking the dog, the beset world-weary look of parenthood on her face. The days and years just fly by.
Just to go back to the Ghost move, I should probably also refrain my reasons. Substackhas proven to be perfectly at ease with making the warmest of homes for people writing hateful white supremacist and antisemitic screeds. Now Andrew Tate is in the joint, and I feel just the way I ended up feeling with Twitter: it starts out great but then the world’s godawful worst people, who are always slow on the uptake but eventually catch on to anything good, proceed to insert themselves in the most obtrusive and objectionable way. That’s my cue to leave.
That’s also my cue to press on and get this thing finished. Insert, update, insert, update.
Days and years flying. Dad’s at the stage where my brother and sister have been staying with him overnight. No one can say exactly where we are, but you feel the train has the station in sight. I keep thinking how Mum would be feeling now. She was nine years younger, she imagined she’d be the one left.
Days and years flying. Must get done, want to get done. One of the nice things about this has been reacquainting myself with stuff I’d entirely forgotten. By way of example I’m going to add an old living obituary of Heather du Plessis-Allan to this. The glossary will be full of this stuff. I believe that exploring it might offer a nice way of leavening the daily doom stream.
Days and years flying. The power of the people brings in a deplorable populist; the same power carries him back out. You love to see it even if the replacement may not necessarily be as much of an improvement as you might hope. The power we hold as ordinary citizens still means something, might even still mean a lot.
No need to give up yet. Press on.
Anchorwoman
Metro Living Obituary Jan 2016
Heather du Plessis-Allan
News hound
1985-2079
Heather du Plessis-Allan, New Zealand’s last surviving news reporter, has died in a TV studio on her 94th birthday.
Even as a little girl, Heather wanted to be a news reporter. She liked the way they looked in the movies with their horn-rimmed glasses and trench coats and high heels, asking the hard questions, taking no prisoners, saying answer the question Minister.
In no time at all she was reporting for One News in horn rimmed glasses trenchcoat and high heels saying answer the question Minister.
Soon enough she had her own TV show.
But the golden age of TV current affairs had come and gone. If you wanted people to tune in, you had to make it worth their while, or they would be off to Tinder.
“Tonight on Story we get someone fired” she would say. “That’s right,” her co-host Duncan would say. “This is a real eye-opener. I couldn’t believe it, to be honest with you.”
“Tonight on Story we show you how easy it is for a crim to cut off his ankle bracelet” she would say. “That’s right,” her co-host Duncan would say. “This is a real eye-opener. I couldn’t believe it, to be honest with you.”
It was only a matter of time before she was buying weapons online.
It made for exciting pictures as Heather lifted a rifle out of its packaging, locked, loaded, and intoned “answer the question minister.”
As far as anyone could make out, she was the first person in the country to ever buy a gun online with fake details. She was certainly the first person to be sentenced to ten years in prison for it.
The nation gasped, and the months that followed made engrossing TV. Night after night, footage would find its way to Story: Heather in a striped trench coat; Heather doing pressups in her tiny cell; Heather making a shiv out of a toothbrush; Heather scribbling angry messages to her co-host.
“A real eye-opener,” Duncan would say. “I just can’t believe it, to be honest with you.”
He turned out to be more right than anyone had guessed when the whole thing was revealed as a giant stunt.
“I’d say we’ve taken reality TV to the next level” - Heather said on her first night of ‘freedom’ - “Your turn next Duncan! I reckon it’ll be a real eye-opener.” Duncan looked uncomfortable, but he was never all that much at ease in a suit, to be fair.
And so it went, as fewer and fewer people tuned in for current affairs.
By the time Story was in its twentieth season, no one ever asked a minister a question about anything. By the thirtieth year, its format had been simplified to a replica of the classic Dog Show format, where one clever dog tried to get half a dozen dopey sheep through a gate.
People loved the nostalgia of it, but they especially liked the way Heather would get exasperated after a minute or two and charge past the dog, give it a clip on the ear, grab the stupid animals and haul them into the pen herself. “Honestly Duncan, do I have to do everything myself,” she would say.
But by 94, Heather was exhausted. She expired in an editing booth, making the finishing touches to a story about dog licences that simply had to be told. Her husband, Barry Soper, 124, said she had paid the price for dedication. “I’ve always said you shouldn’t take work that seriously, but honestly it was just that hard to make her listen once she got an idea in her head.”
