Feature
The people's historian
by Tim Watkin
He was born at the turn of history and developed a sense of us as a people that no other writer has ever had. Michael King was passionate about this country – celebrating Maoridom and standing up for the “basic worthiness and honourableness” of Pakeha culture. Sincere, funny, deeply knowledgeable, he taught us so much about being a New Zealander.
He was the man who knew us best. New Zealand’s closest confidant. Our most relentless analyst. And for that simple reason, as we come again to question where we have come from, who we are and how to live with one another, Michael King is someone we could least afford to lose.
Yet this week he was taken from us. And in a bizarre twist that seems to make it all the more cruel. Relieved at having won the first round of a battle with throat cancer and celebrating the unprecedented success of his latest book, The Penguin History of New Zealand, King, 58, and his wife Maria Jungowska were on their way to a luxury lodge in the Bay of Islands for a break. It was a gift from the publishing company. “A way of saying thanks,” says King’s publisher and friend, Geoff Walker.
The couple were driving north along State Highway Two near Maramarua when, according to eye-witnesses, the car inexplicably drifted across the road and crashed into a tree. It burst into flames. Police were mystified as to why the car crashed and why it caught fire. They could only say that dental records would be needed to identify the victims. But they weren’t. When the couple didn’t arrive at the hotel on Tuesday night the police were contacted and the connections made.
“Of all people …” King’s long-time friend and sometime publisher Christine Cole Catley said the next morning, as news of his death was first shared among family and friends and then released on radio. Not him. Not now. The delight that King, as he jokingly described it, had “risen like Lazarus from the dead” had barely sunk in.
He learnt he had tumours in his throat in October and endured six weeks’ chemotherapy – “the most unpleasant thing that’s ever happened to me”, he said in December, his voice rasping and his throat dry and full of ulcers.
Friends had rallied. Jonathan, his son, had organised a “celebration of life” party in Wellington for his father and Maria, a freelance book editor of Polish extraction who suffered from multiple sclerosis. Many of their closest friends had come together at a café. Family friend and Te Iwi Moriori spokesman Maui Solomon was there. “It was saying goodbye, just in case,” he recalls. “I remember Michael saying to me a few years ago, it’s more important to see someone and tell them they’re loved while they’re living, instead of waiting until his funeral to say it.”
(New Zealanders, it seems, felt the same. When his cancer was made public, he received over 900 letters and emails of
support inside two months).
Then his family were having Christmas together at Opoutere on the Coromandel Peninsula, where the couple lived and Michael loved to wake up to birdsong. “This will be home until whenever I’m carried out in a box. This is the most right place for me I’ve ever lived,” he said last year.
It was treasured time with film-maker Jonathan and his wife Rebecca, his daughter Rachael, a novelist and magazine ad manager, and his adored grand-daughter, two-year-old Pippi.
In December he assured me that he had come to terms with dying, then added with a wry smile, “but naturally my preference is to go on living”.
In February the good news arrived. “For the time being I’m out of danger. No need to tell you what a relief that turns out to be. I appear to have a future …” he wrote to me. I spoke to him the next day and said he must be thrilled that the tumours had shrunk or maybe disappeared. No, he replied, careful as always with his words, relieved. And feeling much better, thanks. Each day would be precious now, he said.
And then this. Jonathan said only that the family were “devastated” and in the process of coming together.
But beyond the personal shock and grief – what Cole Catley was really getting at – is the loss to New Zealand of a man of immense knowledge and compassion who instinctively bridged whatever gap exists between Maori and Pakeha, who talked about our race relations with common sense, wisdom and, above all, optimism. As friend and author Kevin Ireland says, he was a faithful servant of history, insistent that truth be the goal and that “we come out of this better than we might have thought”.
Speak to his friends and the most common refrain is, “God but we’re going to miss him.” And they don’t just mean “we” as a group of mates, but “we” as a country.
I have written about Michael before as at times our country’s memory, our conscience and our teacher. That he has been our de facto race-relations conciliator. His books have been the glue that binds. As Cole Catley says, “He was passionate about telling Pakeha New Zealanders more about Maori and vice versa.” He explained us to each other; first telling Maori truths to Pakeha and then Pakeha truths to us all.
Damn, but we need him now.
Said Prime Minister Helen Clark, “His major contribution to New Zealand was to help us understand ourselves.”
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