Brian | Caversham, Otago

“I’m proud of the little stories about the writer’s festival. Both of the writers have been Māori artists, the writers that won awards for Māori writing. That’s good. 

I was born in Roxburgh. My father worked in both railway lines. There’s two old railway lines. One goes up Taieri Gorge. The other went up as far as Roxburgh.

What you call education isn’t education, at all, in a lot of ways. Most history is about who wins contests, not the losers. So, if you don’t value people, then you just trade information and most people, when they ask you what you do for a living, that’s trading, what you do for a living, for example. I’m not really good at it, I don’t really do ‘sorry’ very much, but you have to believe in yourself in the first place. What you see is your world, anyway you see, and the troubles you see aren’t yours to carry. Your legacies you leave behind, that’s your legacy. What you leave behind is your choice. Peter Jackson made a movie called Heavenly Creatures, for example. And we got on the world map, with that movie. Even the last one, Jo Jo Rabbit, the funny movie about Hitler?  

I like lots of arts. The humour’s good, but we don’t really appreciate ourselves very much as artists, in general. Even people who did gigs, people have got a lot more complacent about making a living from it. It’s hard to do in New Zealand. I’m proud of them.

I’m 61 now. I’ll be 62 in July, and I have been a voluntary staff for Kiwi Harvest Food Rescue. They do about the equivalent of a million meals a year for people in need around New Zealand.”