Reviewed by Dr Michael O’Leary 1/9/26   Subtitled ‘The Ultimate Memoir’ this autobiography by Paekākāriki author, David McGill, is a summation of a lifetime career as a writer in several manifestations. His writing work began early as a ‘notetaker’ literally taking notes of people and events of his childhood and [...]

Before Michael O'Leary launches The Notetaker, I would like to note he identified the reason for my tendency to put my foot in it. I should have got it when Tom Scott drew these two versions of me notetaking – indeed Tom inspired this title with both versions taking [...]

The President of the NZ Law Society rang to say he was suing me for defalcations. I had to get him to explain what defalcations were. Theft. Okay. My last interaction with a top lawyer was when he asked me to represent him representing my claim against fellow directors of [...]

My last day in Sydney before flying to Vienna in 1968 I was drowning. I had been reading the Sunday shriek sheets with a friend at the empty end of Palm Beach. I needed a dip to clear the head of the Coonawarra claret of the night before. In I [...]

You will know some variation on the joke about the Scotsman and the Irishman in the pub, the Irishman wants a drink, the Scotsman does not want to pay for it. What it took me a long time to realise was that the Irish and Scots sides of me were [...]

Mick Jagger was writhing around on the studio floor like a real-life Gollum. The speakers were blasting out I Can’t Get No Satisfaction and Mick looked in dire need of a good feed. He was smaller and thinner than I expected. He had his significant lips around the microphone and [...]

Wellington Town Hall November 23, 1979, was for me a proud, daunting and uncomfortable moment. I was placed in the centre front of the dress circle, flanked by guests and dignitaries, as Michi Inoue raised his baton at 6pm for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra to begin its Amnesty International [...]

Screenwriters talk about finding the inciting moment when the drama kicks in. With us more leisurely book writers it is not so easy to identify an inciting moment. I have written six memoirs of life segments such as rock ‘n’ roll, food, childhood, OE. This seventh memoir The Notetaker revisits [...]

The evening of 21 August 1968 I was at the Royal Albert Hall in London to see Dimitri Rostropovich and the Soviet State Orchestra perform Dvorak’s Cello Concerto. That morning Russia and other Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia to crush Dubcek’s Prague Spring. The booing reached a crescendo as the [...]

My reverence for cartoonists was learned at my mother’s knee. Each morning except Sundays she sat on her kitchen chair by the window, sipping successive cups of Choysa, chain-smoking unfiltered Capstans, chuckling at the Minhinnick cartoon in the Herald. I wasn’t sure why Walter Nash and Sid Holland were funny, [...]

The alien electronic warble had scarcely begun when there was a collective sigh of contentment from 23,000 of us spread around the grassy bowl of Crystal Palace, London, on a bleak day, June 3, 1972. The spooky vibrations of the metallic electro-theremin instrument introduced the world to Brian Wilson’s inspired [...]

Village to Village (With thanks to Jude for the prompt) Once upon a childhood Matata was my home by the lagoon, Behind us the dense green hills transformed each summer Into a ferocious forest fire of towering fury and spitting live embers Way more threatening than the Australian bush fires [...]

It took a village my writing lifetime to raise. I left my childhood village of Matata for Auckland at age 12 and started confiding in a diary. That year I composed my first handwritten and hand-illustrated book between the hard black covers of an exercise book, a quotidian account of [...]

White Island was an ever-active part of my childhood, its curling smoke visible 50 kilometres out in the Pacific Ocean. Mum’s all-day teacup often rattled and spilled from the frequent earthquakes. Dad usually took a scientific approach, but he agreed with local Maori that earthquakes were linked to volcanic activity [...]

The second Kotuku Creek story Geyser in the Creek was prompted two decades later by a visit to the famous Whakarewarewa thermal wonderland at Rotorua. There was a flash entrance and a decidedly not-so-flash one. What was going on? The flash entrance was state-of-the-craft presentation, high-end international level bling, what [...]

Lucifer exists, evil exists, that good may exist, and triumph. Down the mean streets the good man must go. Baddies and goodies. So, what kind of baddie would drive my stories of village goodies? None of the venal politicians and tunnel-vision bureaucrats were brutal enough to unsettle my village [...]

Kotuku has existed in my mind since I first clapped eyes on Matata 79 years ago. Kotuku is my invented village adjacent to Matata, where I grew up and went to primary school. Kotuku is like the imaginary friend of a lad who never grows up. Matata was a coastal [...]

Maddy Spurling is breaking news on the other main news channel and the perplexed frontperson asks: ‘What on earth is all this argybargy between a government department and local iwi about rights to exploit access to the geyser? Is this some creek bed claim exploding at a time when the [...]

The following reviews are of early Joe Pickett stories, with one later one thrown in, not long after the top villain rodeo rider Dallas Cates makes his first appearance abusing one of Joe’s daughters. There will be a reckoning for Dallas and his dysfunctionally evil family, who equal the pernicious [...]

The Sydney Opera House on Saturday evening, the curtain rising on Giuseppe Verdi’s lesser-known Simon Boccanegra. At the back of the chequer-board stage Amelia gazes out at a painted sea, awaiting her lover. With an impatient swish of much material, she sweeps regally to stage front. Under an extravagant blonde [...]

Below Zero, the 9th in CJ Box’s Joe Pickett crime series, Chapter 15 begins: STENKO WAS SICK, Robert was angry, and she was scared. They were in a parking lot outside Buy-Rite Pharmacy someplace in Wyoming in the car they’d stolen. There was only one other car in the lot, [...]

DEATH OF AN AGENT is the fourth "kiwi spy story" featuring ex-detective / spycatcher Dan Delaney. Historical crime fiction, based on real-life events this is a series that's been getting better and better, with this outing pleasingly comical in some places, as well as a rip-roaring yarn into the bargain. [...]

My two favourite regional teams the Hurricanes and the Chiefs in the semi-final of Super Rugby at Sky Stadium in Wellington mid-June would usually be first choice experience. Not this time. We got off the train among the hundreds if not thousands of mostly yellow and black be-scarved Hurricanes supporters, [...]

Crime reviewer and then Nelson librarian Alyson Baker welcomed the first Dan Delaney thriller The Death Ray Debacle in October 2016. ‘Dan,’ she wrote, ‘is a delightful protagonist.’ She found this rookie detective human and humble, not sure if he is left-leaning or right-leaning, just wanting to not muck up [...]

I started Michael O’Leary’s collection of his non-fiction writing A Different Hat at the end section on Obituaries and Elegies. I wanted to read his obit of David Mitchell, the poet who back in 1960 at Wellington Teachers’ College was my mentor and occasional inside-back partner in social rugby on [...]