From Hell to Hollywood producer Jon Kroll (left) at the Roxy Cinema Wellington premiere with National Press Club’s Christopher Turver who reported from Vietnam during this era with Nick Ut, Richard Long another National Press Club Vietnam Warco of the era, and Scott Templeton who directed the film
From Hell to Hollywood Producer Jon Kroll and Nick Ut Meet Club Warcos
No single newspaper or even broadcast image ever had the same applied impact as Nick Ut’s AP photograph of the napalmed girl running naked down the road toward him.
If it didn’t actually stop the war in Vietnam it became an indelible identifiable hinge of the accumulated evidence that did lead to the end of it.
In the event the photograph was expedited by another AP journalist New Zealander Peter Arnett and thus it was that the image became seared into newspaper history becoming the recognisable pictorial high water mark of the newsprint era.
This was over half a century ago and this following question now becomes inescapable for anyone in the conventional media.
What exactly does happen when someone at the outset of their career achieves something that they and their fellow practitioners know cannot be reprised ever again by them or indeed by anyone else?
If you are Nick Ut you carry on working and do so for the same company, Associated Press.
At war’s end he was an obvious target for the insurgent communist regime and Ut was offered employment in the United States.
Where would he like to be based?
In Hollywood, was the reply.
He again displayed the curious blend of timing and instinct that now saw him positioned in the hub of the entertainment firmament comfortably before it too entered its own industry plateau.
Softly spoken and slight of build it was now that the energetic Ut deployed another reportorial asset.
This is the one which allows certain journalists to quietly insinuate themselves into the confidence of officialdom and it was this trait that saw Ut strategically positioned for show case trials such as the one for OJ Simpson.
After over 50 years service Nick Ut retired as AP staffer in order to focus on subjects that he believed mattered notably wildlife and nature in general.
Meanwhile Napalm Girl (below) which garnered him a Pulitzer remains a compounding subject for study because of the way in which its component parts literally illustrate the theory and practice of photography.
It displays for example the axiom of that other Leica aficionado Henri Cartier-Bresson that photographs should never be cropped. That they depend for effect on what Cartier-Bresson identified as the decisive moment.
Thus the anguish of the napalmed children becomes accelerated, emphasised, by the black and white preoccupation if not indifference of the soldiers in the background and periphery.
Their insouciant demeanour far from being a distraction fortifies point-counterpoint the horror of the moment.
Napalm Girl remains a continuing touchstone of our times.
It detonated a social media era firestorm when Facebook among other platforms decided that portrayal of child nakedness was abhorrent to contemporary societal standards.
It was reinstated. But not before Napalm Girl triggered a searching philosophic evaluation of Facebook and its ilk’s exact status in terms of technology and media.
In turn this conjures up that other decisive moment all those years before.
This was when Nick Ut’s two superiors at AP the late Horst Faas and National Press Club Lifetime Achievement laureate Peter Arnett that day in 1972 held in their hands Nick Ut’s appointment with destiny.
They ushered the shocking image through layers of editorial caution and into print journalism history.
From Hell to Hollywood ranks as an instructional film for practitioners because it shows how Nick Ut intentionally or instinctively presaged a number of trends in applied journalism that are so visible today.
This began at the inception of his international intervention when instead of an exclusive pre-occupation with getting his negatives on the wire Nick Ut’s priority was to ensure that the Napalm Girl and the other burned children were bound for hospital.
This personal nature of his approach presaged the era today of an emphasis on participatory journalism in contrast to the cool detached so-called professional values so dominant in the last century.
He took his subjects personally from getting to know officers in the Fire Department to the numerous celebrities who crossed his lens.
The film notes how his prey became his wards in the form of a vignette showing a legally beleaguered Paris Hilton being door stepped by Ut adjacent to a cut of a re-ascendant Hilton blowing kisses to the photographer at a fashion gala.
The film can be viewed regionally on Apple TV, Kanopy, Amazon, and Prime.
Documentary film maker Gwen Isaac (right) and Victoria University scholar and specialist in women’s film Dr Missy Molloy (left) led the Women in Film and Television critiquing Q&A session which followed the screening of Sundance hit documentary ‘Black Box Diaries’.
Panelist Gwen Isaac described the film as a personal favourite and an “important and brave film” of the New Zealand International Film Festival. The film features the extraordinary true story of journalist Shiori Ito (centre) who also directs the film.
Shiori Ito’s documentary came out of her book ‘Black Box’ that documents the true story of her four year crusade to bring her own experience of sexual violence into the light in Japan.
‘Black Box’ documents both her story of rape and making power accountable for crimes that in Japan have traditionally being marginalised or unreported.
Journalist-activist Shiori risked everything in exposing her perpetrator, a high ranking professional with powerful connections.
During the Q&A Ito reminded the audience that in Japan 97 percent of sexual violence claims go unreported. Ito’s story echoes the concerns of feminist scholar Chizuko Ueno citing that Japan’s gender issues are a ‘’human disaster.’’
Responding to the panel Ito noted that “if there is trauma, make a film.”
Time magazine identified Ito as one of the world’s most powerful people. The Women in Film and TV NZ panel noted that the film is not currently being taken up by a streamer due to complexities around the way streamers negotiate rights for films for different territories. The irony is that this insight into the Japanese patriarchal legal system may never actually be able to be seen by Japanese audiences.
Black Box Diaries as documentary film throws still further light, quite literally, on the extent of a pervasive patriarchal judicial system and how this culture comes at the expense of legal and social justice for women.
First person testimony from Ito blending with footage of parliamentary confrontations with Japan’s President Abe underlines the lengths a woman has to endure to take on the burden of the fight.
Ito’s assailant was protected by impenetrable layers of boxes and this is shown in a myriad of different ways. Yet there are moments of real hope portrayed by the men and women supporting Ito at considerable personal cost that save the film from becoming an ordeal.
The Wellington screening followed on the heels of the film’s launch at the Sundance festival.
Gwen Isaac, a screen production lecturer at the National Academy of Screen Arts, Massey University, Wellington, is the director-producer of short documentary Tokyo Woman, an examination of feminizumu (Japanese feminist movement] through intimate profiles of three diverse women https://vimeo.com/477729817
Her recent feature documentary Ms.Information www.msinformationmovie.com featured at 2023 NZIFF film festival and is a turbulent front row seat revealing the trials and tribulations of microbiologist Dr Siouxsie Wiles, a key scientific figure of the New Zealand Covid-19 containment campaign.
The National Press Club news site MSC Newswire passed one million visitors in a single month by the middle of the month of March 2024. The site is one of the very few news sites anywhere to display a visible and real time recording of its usage.
The site has notched up a total of 45 million visitors during its relatively brief career.
The site focuses in covering the no-go areas which mainstream media by convention avoid. One such featured story is about The Platform a streaming broadcast service start-up established to disclose areas which the mainstream and especially the two network television broadcasters collude in failing to objectively cover.
The site draws attention to the underlying sinisterness of the in vogue Cancel movement with its coordinated sabotage of any dissonant voice such as that of Graham Linehan (pictured)
MSC Newswire began as a venture in Hawkes Bay and which requested the assistance of the National Press Club to broaden its coverage and catchment. The site’s industrial foundation is the explanation for MSC – Manufacturer’s Success Connection.
This background means a focus on the productive community by for example exposing the threat to the productive sector of the all-party campaigns to lock in and at any cost upscale voters with variations on the road to zero theme.
The death at 93 of National Press Club vice president Peter Bush brings to end the career of the nation’s most storied living journalist. He covered test matches from the age of 17 and was a constant feature of international touch lines until quite recent times.
Though most celebrated for his work as a sports photographer, especially as a rugby photographer, he was in fact a fully-fledged photo-journalist and a pioneer of the joint craft in southerly latitudes.
He was also one of the very few such practitioners anywhere to have crashed through the not-so-invisible barrier dividing the craft-cum- trade from the arts.
A curated exhibition of his works known as Hard on The Heels toured Australasian art galleries underlining the breadth of his interests from sport via landscape through to visual social commentary.
He ranked also as a war reporter due to his coverage of the New Zealand participation in the Malaya Emergency.
At home he was a noted chronicler of the outdoors an interest which resulted in the book High Summer on the Heaphy Track and also a book on farming centred on high country hill stations.
He was particularly intrigued by life in remote parts and the people who earned their livings there which he commemorated also in his book South Island Wide.
His interest in travel extended beyond New Zealand and quite later in his career he produced a travel book on the United States.
He became a noted recorder of popular culture with his coverage of early visiting celebrities such as the Beatles, Eartha Kitt, Cliff Richard and David Bowie.
Peter Bush became one of the rare practitioners when he himself became the subject of considerable coverage notably in a television documentary series.
Possessed of a resonant deep voice and with his lived-in visage Peter Bush attracted as much if not more attention than many of the people he was assigned to cover.
First and foremost he considered himself a newsman having honed his skills in the dailies and then on the weeklies notably Truth which heralded the Murdoch era before Murdoch himself set up shop here.
His core speciality Rugby saw his intervention in terms of coverage with the social and political disruptions that shook Australasia from the late 1960s onward, notably the 1981 Springbok tour.
He was remarkable in that he had a curious gift of intimacy which allowed him to relate to others of any walk of life as if he had always known them. His mere presence was enough to enliven any gathering on anything at all.
He had known and conversed with such global figures as Nelson Mandela and Pope John Paul 11 among so many feted local and international movers and shakers.
Rarely, and only when asked, would he dwell on his encounters with the great and the good.
He preferred to fall back on vignettes of his days with the army and the merchant navy and especially on tales from the West Coast of his boyhood.
He straddled the technological dividing line starting when film had to be physically transported to the newspaper dark room to the current era of digital end-to-end throughput.
His decision to go freelance gave him the journalistic depth of field that meshed with his widely diverse interests.
A certain deliberate devil-may-care style of bonhomie successfully disguised a meticulous attention to detail so evident for example in the demanding intricacies of cataloguing his increasingly immense archive.
He was appointed vice president of the National Press Club during the presidency of the late Dominion editor Jack Kelleher and he went on to serve in this role for 40 years.
He was made QSM (1991) and CNZM (2011)
He is survived by his partner, Jane, his two daughters, Trinette and Rachel, stepchildren Carl and Karina, and grandchildren.
Adrienne Stewart
Society Hostess
“Never Met a Stranger”
The death at 75 of Adrienne Stewart brings to an end the era of society hostesses when Wellington was a notable cultural focus of the South Pacific. Her determination to foster a keener appreciation of this sphere was made manifest in two organisations. One was the National Press Club and the other was the Newcomers Club.
She was a stalwart of the National Press Cub during the high noon of conventional journalism in the final decades of the last millennium insisting that the club’s guest speakers were confronted by the quantity and quality of audience that she believes that they deserved.
Simultaneously she was a prime mover in the capital’s Newcomers Club. This had its origins in the discovery that movers and shakers in the diplomatic and commercial world seconded to Wellington were existing in a parallel universe and needed to mingle with locals.
This coincided with the heyday of the dinner party era before the advent of electronic media interrupted traditional social transactions.
Adrienne was a patron of the visual arts encouraging practitioners to stage their own showings at the numerous art galleries of the Wellington’s fin de siecle era.
Seeing an opportunity for some applied social interaction she would from time to time venture out with an exhibition of her own works.
As a social mixer she liked to see people that she considered had ability take advantage of Wellington’s role as a merchant capital. In her role as a hostess she sought to bring together those she believed had shared commercial purposes.
Adrienne was a redoubtable collector of all sorts of artistic objects of the three dimensional variety and curiosity shops benefited greatly from her patronage.
Beguiled by journalism she tried her hand at it herself with a selection of columns cataloguing the comings and goings of the cosmopolitan and the colourful in the once-thriving suburban print weeklies.
She was recalled at her memorial service as someone who “never met a stranger.”
She is survived by her husband Ian and their two children.
Browser Tags News Site in New Zealand
Google has tagged a heavy traffic New Zealand news site. The statement placed above the MSC Newswire browser title stated at various times:-
“It looks like the results below are changing quickly. If this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for reliable sources to publish information.”
It suggested that site visitors “might take time for reliable sources to publish information.”
The qualifier advises browsers to “Check the source. Are they trusted on this topic?” And to “Come back later.”
Also “Other sources might have more information on this topic “in a few hours or days.” It concludes by suggesting browsers “Get more tips.”
In the event the five year old www.mscnewswire.co.nz has recorded over 35 million visits. It is the only such site to display its own level of historic and real time traffic.
The site which neither seeks nor accepts sponsorship or any other revenue has experienced accelerated readership since the government began subsidising print and broadcast media.
In recent times www.mscnewswire.co.nz has taken up the threat to public welfare presented to the neighbouring townships by the extensive solar generating plants through their associated electromagnetic radiation fields. Headlines in the site on this topic are:-
Auckland City Council C02 v Radiation Emissions Choice
Radiation Clouds Helensville Greytown Giant Solar Schemes in NZ
An investigation into transfer pricing was also widely visited. This un-probed area of New Zealand commercial life allows foreign companies, notably United States ones, to profit through internal sales to its Kiwi company, as these subsidiaries are commonly described.
The site notes that its primary purpose is to disclose what was actually going on when other outlets were precluded from doing so.
The site www.mscnewswire.co.nz originated in Hawkes Bay as a communications channel for manufacturing engineers. The letter M in its title originally stood for Manufacturers. Elements of the National Press Club assisted in transforming it into a general news site.
Sir Christopher Harris Foresaw Culture Wars
Sir Christopher Harris who has died was for many years a stalwart of the National Press Club. He will be remembered for his constant cautioning of practitioners in their political coverage on emphasising what sounded good instead of what actually worked.
Christopher John Ashford Harris third baronet of the Harris Baronetcy of Bethnal Green, County of London foresaw the way in which journalists were increasingly being drawn to the ideological in place of the practical.
A member of the club under the newsmaker category Sir Christopher for many years ran the family importing and merchandising business Bing, Harris & Co and was also a main board director of the Todd Corporation.
He was to the fore when New Zealand abruptly sought new markets in Asia and he constantly iterated Singapore as a nation with valuable pointers for New Zealand. He was a man of action and put his various skills at the disposal of the political parties that echoed his point of view especially in the Wellington electorates.
He was worried about the effect on Wellington of the evaporation of its manufacturing and productive sector and a pet project was to restore to Wellington its floating dry dock in order to boost heavy engineering.
His platform skills were applied to the National Press Club notably in the vote-of-thanks summing up of guest speakers.
He was a lay expert on Captain Cook. He delighted in publicly presenting the explorer as the personification of kindly yet determined informed endeavour that became reflected as Sir Christopher saw it in New Zealand’s own pioneering history of method and order.
An orderly approach that he increasingly saw as being eroded by doctrinal rather than disciplined priorities and in many ways he foresaw the onset of today’s culture wars.
Always affable he successfully disguised any irritation he might have felt at any of the more extreme doctrinal points of view put forward by guest speakers or indeed by any of the club members themselves.
In many ways Sir Christopher was redolent of a distant age, and of an elite class. One that paradoxically installed in the Westminster realm the foundations of the extreme political liberalism that he found himself so severely at odds with.
The baronetcy had been established by his grandfather Sir Percy Harris a British House of Commons Liberal MP who did much to introduce the welfare reforms of Britain’s immediate post war era.
His father Sir Jack Harris and his mother Lady Patricia Harris became in New Zealand public intellectuals of an ultra-liberal persuasion.
Sir Jack was at the helm of the Save Manapouri campaign which paved the way for the Green Party. Lady Harris was a constant figure in the early days of New Zealand television. She was the author of Dining In and Dining Out in New Zealand, a book which remains a minor classic.
The family’s globe-girdling influence stemmed from the Bing, Harris & Co business fortuitously begun in Dunedin just in time to catch the Otago gold fields discoveries.
The family returned to Britain and then repatriated itself back to New Zealand to take control of a business which because of its diversification into so many mercantile sectors continued to prosper in 1934, the year of Christopher’s birth.
He was a pupil of Wanganui Collegiate and it was here that he notched up national school records in the 22O and 44O yards. In later years he was to establish a sporting reputation as a deep sea yachtsman based at Wellington’s Royal Port Nicholson club.
It was indeed as a collegiate figure and club man that Sir Christopher will be recalled. He tended to discard small talk and pleasantries in favour of discussing hard edge topical issues.
He was as genially at home with the grandees of the Wellington Club as with the more diversified and more sceptical devotees of the National Press Club.
Russian Oligarch Funds New Zealand Legal Firms
Russian Oligarch Funds New Zealand Legal FirmsNational Press Club Inc Submission to Law Commission
The National Press Club Inc takes the opportunity of drawing the attention of the Commissioners to the circumstances in which a known Russian oligarch funds New Zealand legal practices to engage in litigation in New Zealand.
This submission follows a previous one filed on August 8 2021 in which in this same context we raised with the Commissioners the matter of jurisdiction and also of what is now quite widely recognised as Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation.
We wish now to point out the continuing funding by a United States resident the Russian oligarch Sergei Grishin of litigation against John Bowie proprietor of the Lawfuel website which is based in Wellington.
Our affiliates have recommended that we now notify you about such litigation being conducted at a time in which the international community seeks to curtail the activities of oligarchs within countries condemning the invasion of Ukraine.
We have been shown documents to the effect that at least two Auckland legal firms currently conduct litigation in New Zealand on behalf of Sergei Grishin.
We have similarly been shown documents that indicate that substantial moneys are being sought from the plaintiff.
We may assume that such funds are destined for the benefit of Sergei Grishin.
We appreciate your response to our original submissions and trust that this latest development in this affair will similarly engage your attention
Peter Isaac
President
National Press Club Inc
Newspaperman Jon Morgan pictured at the book launch with fellow Fairfax era colleague Richard Woodd
Jon Morgan became a newspaper reporter at the age of 16 in 1966. It was the high noon of print with 42 daily newspapers nationwide. Zig zagging his way mainly through what was to become the Fairfax then Stuff chain he contrived to remain on a payroll until 2018. In maintaining this half century trapeze act Morgan looks back at what can be seen now as a gradually crumbling print news industry.
He appears to have kept employed by keeping constantly flexible and grasping whatever opportunity or story came his way and following it wherever it led him.
Perceiving that times they really were a-changing we follow Morgan as he gradually eases himself away from the assignment book and onto the specialist track as an agricultural reporter a manoeuvre that sustained him through to his final working days. He additionally armoured himself against the increasingly lethal arrows of outrageous fortune by embellishing himself with a high profile in his chosen agrarian field.
A surprise to many print practitioners will be the immense number of awards adorning the field of agricultural journalism in general and Morgan in particular. The by now roving rural reporter enters his name into seemingly every one of these and appears to have emerged as a consistent victor becoming in the process an agricultural sector statesman officiating in show judging among other rural rituals.
Morgan we can see now entered journalism in its last few years as a bona fide blue collar calling prior to admission to the trade being taken over by the universities. His description of the final days of on-the-job journeyman training and those who administered it should alone ensure his book a place in any official archive of industrial apprenticeship history.
The presentation of this book is of short and sharp lavishly illustrated pieces centred on a march past of personalities. These are divided between sketches and vignettes of his own vintage colleagues and of his raw material which was mainly the farmers he wrote about.
Time has not mellowed his memories and quite a few of these brisk appraisals are caustic and deliberately incautious. Neither does Morgan spare himself. He routinely scolds himself for an enduring attitude of frivolity. Still, he seems to have kept his feet on the ground, and in pretty much the same patch the North Island’s Central Districts.
As the outline of his own end game begins to loom spectrally on the horizon Morgan becomes progressively more distressed at the way in which his employers start to abandon farm coverage. His impatience accelerates as his bosses then segue into actually attacking farmers for muddying the cherished fashionable urban cultural ideals now taking over editorial direction..
Morgan in vain sought to point out that it was the people in the provinces and notably farmer subscribers who still wanted their information in print rather than on a screen, and by the way supplied the wealth that the metropolitan newspapers depended on.
Nobody it seems listened. The newspapers stepped up their critiques of what they saw and portrayed as the brutish ways of farmers. A still greater share of revenue from still profitable print versions poured into a variety of speculative electronic alternatives.
Jon Morgan seems never to have been lured by the siren song of the public relations world. He entered the industry just as television arrived, yet he stuck with print.
He floats the perplexing and largely unvoiced issue of why so many stories in the internet era give the impression of being bottomless mixes of opinion and conjecture the meaning of which readers are left to work out for themselves and solve rather like crossword puzzles.
One is left with an impression that whatever the future holds for the energetic yet now out-to-graze newspaperman it will not be at a Media Studies establishment or at a J School.
National Press Club Warning Taken up by Westminster Reformists
Wealthy clients and oligarchs from autocratic countries are using prestigious London law firms to intimidate and silence journalists according to Westminster legislators seeking to stall powerful entities using the legal system to “intimidate and destroy” reporters.
A cross party slate of British MPs has urged the government to intercede in protecting journalists from a trend first revealed in the middle of last year by the National Press Club which then alerted New Zealand’s Law Commission to the development .
The intent of the British Members of Parliament with their proposed legislation is simple enough. It is to stop high end law firms with well-resourced clients from inflicting on the media and citizens from what the reforming UK parliamentarians describe as abusive legal actions.
These are known as Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, or Slapps as they are now described. The parliamentarians say Slapps is a form of legal harassment that exploits the legal system by using expensive procedures to silence journalist and also critics and watchdogs.
Identified as practitioners of Slapps were what the MPs defined as elite law firms.
The debate in the House of Commons was secured by former Conservative cabinet minister David Davis MP (pictured above.)
The MPs argued that what attracted bona fide people to the English legal system also attracted those with nefarious intentions and those with exceptionally deep pockets and what were described as exceptionally questionable ethics also.
One reform advocated by the MPs was for judges to have the power to “rapidly dismiss” a case if it was designated as falling into the Slapp category.
They also advocated punitive costs to deter the misuse of courts by those bringing Slap cases. They recommended in addition the establishment of a defamation defence fund via a windfall tax on the law firms that the MPs described as deriving immense revenues from the misuse of courts.
The National Press Club’s submissions to the New Zealand Law Commission were made on August 5 2021.
These submissions (below) relate to proceedings in the High Court of New Zealand between the representatives of a prominent Russian businessman resident in California and a Wellington legal publisher.
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The National Press Club seeks the opportunity to draw your attention to elements of the laws of defamation and libel and the interpretation of them in the context of this recent case.
We perceive the danger in which the sources of an international story become revealed and in doing so become inevitably disclosed to the world at large.
We would like these points in the case to be considered:
- An absentee plaintiff through their agents can precipitate a defamation action in the New Zealand High Court.
- This same absentee plaintiff and their agents can successfully order the handing over of correspondence such as emails that have passed between the journalist and their source.
- In spite of New Zealand’s court system said to be already congested with cases of varying degrees of magnitude of severity a civil case such as this one was accorded a ready fixture.
- The defendant who had substantial costs awarded against them was given no indication of a countervailing deposit made by the plaintiff or through their local agents.
The reason that we seek the attention of the Commission in this matter is that the outcome of this case has created alarm within a number of organisations with which we are affiliated or involved internationally
These include the Overseas Press Club of America, the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom.
The common cause in seeking the consideration of the Commission of a review of laws is that the case indicates that international stories covered in New Zealand can be suppressed through an action brought about by an absentee plaintiff and that a Court here can order the handing over of documents revealing sources and their information.
We note the Commission’s willingness to evaluate ideas leading to the review of laws and our particular anxiety aroused by this case is about the determined and continuing move for the defendant to hand over information connected with the case, and thus their stories.
The Court was made aware of the plaintiff’s urgency expressed via their agent to have this story source data made available to them.
We note that the original stories underpinning this case were derived from events and actions in other countries, the United States and Russia.
Therefore the possibility must be considered of the consequences to individuals connected with the original series of stories should their involvement in them become more widely known.
Should New Zealand be perceived internationally as a door of entry to successful litigation in this sphere then we suggest that rules embodying discovery and disclosure in a case such as this one be reviewed in order to protect third parties.
In regard to disclosure we suggest that full disclosure be mandated in regard to a plaintiff’s deposit, its presence or otherwise, in the matter especially of absentee plaintiffs.
These submissions are made in cognisance of the Commission’s stated belief that it “is critical that the current views of New Zealanders inform our recommendations,” and similarly in the spirit of the Commission’s objective of seeking ideas in this context.
We note in the judgment summary the reference to “fishing expedition”.
Our submission centres on our worry that in the matter of a globalised case such as the one under discussion here that the order of disclosure inherent to this case is likely to pose severe consequences for third parties in countries beyond the New Zealand jurisdiction.
In any deliberations we may take the liberty in the matter of jurisdiction of reminding the Commission of regulations applying in the UK which provides that the Court will not have jurisdiction to hear a defamation claim where the prospective defendant is resident outside of the UK, European Union or the Lugano Convention states (Norway, Switzerland and Denmark), unless it can be satisfied that England and Wales is clearly the most appropriate.
Greatest Living Adventurer Dies
Bernard Diederich who has died in Haiti was New Zealand’s greatest living adventurer. The National Press Club Lifetime Achievement Award holder sailed before the mast on the Pamir during World War 2, graduated to tankers, and then took up ocean sailing as a hobby which is how he arrived in Haiti.
It was here that he started a newspaper, jousted with Papa Doc Duvalier, and then became during its heyday Time magazine’s Central America correspondent, a position which made him the global expert on all the region’s various dictatorships, and in this he was much assisted by his personal friendship with Fidel Castro.
Another friend was Graham Greene and he and Greene toured the region together giving Diederich the material for his last book Seeds of Fiction.
Bernard Diederich’s career coincided with the high point of print journalism before electronic media eroded the status of practitioners and their freedom to follow a story wherever it led them.
He returned quite regularly to New Zealand to visit his family roots in Martinborough and also to speak to the National Press Club, notably about his coverage of the US incursion into Grenada in which he interposed himself on a dinghy.
Krystyna Tomaszyk’s Last Journey
The death of Krystyna Tomaszyk QSM concludes the most storied of all New Zealand’s immigration epics of living memory. The National Press Club stalwart and her mother were part of a near thousand-strong contingent that fled Europe in 1944 via Siberia, Isfahan, and Bombay, eventually settling in a refugee camp home in Pahiatua.
Most of them stayed in New Zealand and Krystyna became a prominent civil servant while authoring several books on this experience known as the Polish Children.
Always superbly turned out and talking in perfect English, Krystyna over many years brought an aura of cosmopolitan class to the club’s proceedings. She was active in many other organisation, notably the National Library Association. She travelled widely, often on charitable work, notably those connected with Mother Theresa.
Women who step outside their contemporary stereotypes still detonate a wide field of conflicted emotions and responses. A new documentary on hard line infectious diseases clinician Dr Siouxsie Wiles provides the evidence.
Dr Wiles carried the bad news about the severity of Covid. She said the virus was the priority and not the economy or even the comfort of the population.
Her various prognostications were justified.
The documentary reveals how attention focused only slightly on Siouxsie Wiles the scientist and instead focussed on the clinician’s persona which is underwritten by her signature purple frizz hair do, and by her general flamboyance characterised by her choice of nom de guerre, Siouxsie.
The camera follows the colourful clinician in a domestic milieu point-counterpoint style in which she alternately giggles at herself and fires off life-and-death pronunciamentos about the virus threat.
Social equity desiderata permeate the politico-media class.
This documentary by National Press Club member Gwen Isaac indicates however that there remains beyond the elites and their world, well, another world.
It is inhabited by those exhibiting a bewilderment amounting to suspicion and hostility about females who having ventured into the sharper edges of real science then proceed to cross over into other preserves such as entertainment and public education
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