At two in the afternoon on a Friday in downtown Wellington, he is a very easy figure to recognise: the lanky stride, the pink head, the faithful moustache now turned white – and though he is togged out in corduroy pants and a durable winter shirt, there remains about him the ghost of kaftans past. Passers-by take a second glance. You can see it in their eyes: aren’t you …? A police car slows, the driver and the passenger take their eyes off the road to fix a look at this mythical creature, this strangest of fringe players in New Zealand social history.
Bob Moodie, 64, of Feilding. Born in Dunedin, raised as a ward of the state. Left school barely able to read and write. Headed for the usual trouble, but he joined the police. Became a detective. “Ace”, they called him, because he always had a pack of cards in his back pocket: “One of the things about criminal investigation is that timing is everything. When you made your move. When you brought the suspect in for questioning. And sometimes you just needed to sit down and relax, and have a game of Slippery Sam.”
A quack fixed his lousy eyesight, and that’s when he discovered reading, discovered he had a first-rate brain: and he graduated in law from Victoria University with first-class honours. Left the police, taught law. Left the university, became the first secretary of the Police Association – high-profile, very active, but what made him famous is that he decided to go to work wearing a kaftan.
The kaftan. It wasn’t just once; there were many years of kaftan abuse. The media, rightly fascinated, clutched at his hem. Headline, 1979: “Has Confidence in his Sexuality.” He said outrageous things. Quote, 1981: “My favourite word is ‘adorable’.” New Zealand reeled. As drama, it was significant – of something, hard to say what.
And that might have been the end of it, the end of Moodie as public figure, stirrer, maverick. He stepped down from the Police Association and bred goats. Became a millionaire. Was narrowly elected mayor of Manawatu. Lost his millions. Lost the mayoralty by a landslide. Remained in Feilding with his wife and two kids, tinkering quietly in his garage, making farm vehicles from scratch. If there was to be a second act in the theatre of Bob Moodie, it might only be that his kaftans would fetch up as a curio exhibit at Te Papa.
But he has reappeared, he has once again made front-page news. Moodie has gone back to the law. Much of it is trifling: “I do wills, administration of estates, all sorts of stuff.” Including employment law. Two of those clients have had their grievances played out in public – one pending, one with a spectacular result. Moodie is the lawyer for Lynne Snowdon, who has been trying to return to her job as a news editor at Radio New Zealand for the past 14 months; there have been five sets of mediation so far without a resolution to that long dispute. Moodie also acted for former Wanganui police commander Alec Waugh, wrongfully accused of
fiddling his expenses. In June, Waugh was awarded $1m for lost pay, expenses and humiliation.
It was a matter of law, but also an episode of high melodrama. Waugh the innocent man served justice thanks to the efforts of his old friend Moodie – whom Waugh had turned to for advice, through the urgings of his wife Shirl, who would later give a “tearful interview” blaming herself for Waugh’s troubles: “She recounted how, overcome by stress and jealousy, she altered a telephone account, causing Mr Waugh to unknowingly submit a false expenses claim …”
And so to Moodie, a survivor himself, an intense and awkward man sipping tea in a quiet Chinese restaurant. Was the Waugh case his greatest achievement in a career that might be described as varied? “Alec Waugh’s case, in itself, justified 10 years at university to do a doctorate and a first-class honours degree,” he said. “That’s the way I look at it. What he went through, what the system did to him, and to see the system turn that around, is almost unbelievable when you think that it took six years.
“I think the Americans went too far. They now have ridiculous situations where an Alec Waugh might have got $200m. Crippled the police department, crippled the state.” He then refers to the Employment Court’s specific award of $50,000 to Waugh for humiliation: “Now that’s regarded as substantial, and top of the range. That is absolute crap. I believe Alec Waugh should have got at least half a million in damages.
“But the point I’m making is not related to money at all. It’s related to the question of ensuring that the operation of the law protects the citizen as well as the state and big business. It’s weighted against the individual, certainly in the High Court and the Court of Appeal. I have personally been very disappointed with the performance of the Court of Appeal over the past 10 years.”
This was shaping up as a lecture. “I still want to teach. That’s something that irritates me. About four years ago, I was very keen to get back to academia; I thought I might have been someone they’d be interested in. I’d certainly be controversial.” Yes, probably. “But the world had changed. They didn’t want people like me who could – to use that terrible phrase – call a spade a spade. They wanted people who could keep things smooth. I only got one university who replied seriously. My own university, Victoria, never even replied, and I was one of their top graduates. That amazed me, and disappointed me.”
He had used what was quite likely a very relevant phrase: but the world had changed. Bob Moodie is a name that exists in the past tense; you associate him with figures from another time, like Ross Meurant, head of the infamous police Red Squad during the 1981 Springbok tour (“I never liked him, he didn’t like me”), and Prime Minister Rob Muldoon (“I respected him, but I didn’t like him”). It was Muldoon who called Moodie “a socialist in drag”. Which is just another reminder that Moodie will always be remembered as – “I’m the guy who wore a kaftan,” he said, finishing the sentence, and making it sound like a sad line on his tombstone.
At the risk of flogging a dead kaftan – he hasn’t worn one, in public at least, for years – it was necessary to revisit the flowing robe (actually, Moodie always preferred to call it a dress) to see whether his choice of wardrobe back then was a prank, a jape, a wheeze, that he was playing the media for laughs.
“No,” he said. “I was challenging society. I was sick of the old Victorian male ideal of manhood. I was absolutely enraged by it. What kicked the kaftan off, I eventually got out of the pinstripe suit and bloody tie, and started wearing polo necks, and a blazer. I occasionally wore a pendant. But one day I wore a string of pearls. I was told that one of the staff had said if I wore the pearls again, he’d walk out. The guy had complained it wasn’t appropriate. So the next meeting I wore a dress with the pearls. Because it was more appropriate.”
But surely this was high comedy. “No. It was deadly serious.” Bother. He continued: “Being invited to join a men’s club has absolutely no appeal to me whatsoever. I don’t like male conversation. It bores me. I would rather sit down with a group of women talking about babies and family life. So often, male conversation is just absolutely f---ing crap.
“Women have always been the dominant force in my life. I never worried about wearing a dress; I was never afraid of it, or scared of it, because of the respect I had for women.”
He talked about his Port Chalmers childhood during World War II: “Every boy had a future in a Spitfire or a tank, or behind a gun. Women were not part of that, but they stood for the real values. I used to walk to school at Concorde Primary, I’d be walking up a bit of a rise, and women in those days had their curlers in, and their dressing gowns on, and they’d be putting the ashes out in the ash bucket on the street. And, you know, that was a signal to me. I knew who ran the world. I knew it was run by women.”
Interesting. But this was no ordinary childhood. “I still have a picture of me about seven years of age, looking up at the bench at a judge, and that day I started the rest of my life as a
state ward. Never consulted. No offending or anything; just a poor family … Seven years of age, and you’re making decisions for yourself. Nobody else f---ing cares. And you survive it or you don’t on the basis of your capacity to adjust. I adjusted very well. And I always have.”
He still seems very angry. “It’s not something that occupies my mind. I’m only talking about it here because it’s raised. And it’s part of the reason why I have trouble with the judiciary. I have trouble with any authority figures, because of that. They got it wrong then; I knew it was wrong, and I was only seven. And it’s why I’m such a bloody fighter.”
This was sincere, but it was too tidy, too simple an equation. He is the kind of fellow who always has something else going on in his head; an independent thinker, complex and determined, not like the rest of us. Apropos of nothing, but as far as Moodie was concerned, everything, he said: “I believe the human race is on the verge of space exploration. This gets back to why we’re here. We’re at the very start of our evolution. It won’t be till we’ve got another 100,000 years up our sleeves that we’ll have the capacity to make a positive contribution to whatever it is we’re here for. You can see how things have gone, the technological advances. But it’s not just that we’ve got shiny Boeing aeroplanes. It’s that we’re understanding the science of the universe.
“If I see a picture of a planet in the paper, I can stare at it for a bloody hour. But I’m not just seeing the picture. ‘Is there other life out there?’ is just a silly bloody question.”
He was in a galaxy far, far away from the rest of us, and by the look on his face – avid, excited, the eyes big and pale and unblinking – that was perfectly fine by Bob Moodie.