Holly: Do you make your own wine?

KH: No, we tried, oh about 16 years ago, making mead, and we made horse piddle mead…

Holly: I don't know what mead is.

KH: Mead is a drink that's based on honey.

Holly: Oh, okay.

KH: And if you flavor it with any kind of flowers, it's called metheglin, but our horse piddle wine universally was labeled horse piddle wine — it wasn't really all that good…a drink, that was about it — it wasn't the sort of glass that you'd linger over the aroma or anything like that.

Holly: Stuff you brought out late in the evening?

KH: Very late in the evening, blind hands groping for a glass.

Holly: How was your birthday party?

KH: Splendid.

Holly: Was it a big bash?

KH: No, I invited a dozen or 15 local people.

Holly: Well that's almost the whole town.

KH: Almost, there's some we don't talk to… It was supposed to be for an hour, right, I had goat leg that I'd cooked — my brother shoots goats…and you know, nibbly stuff too, steak patties and stuff like that. But people brought in more food, and they brought in more wine and it was about three in the morning before things stopped…

Holly: Well, God, you know, we could just talk about any number of things…we could talk about — believe it or not — the weather.

KH: Oh yea, I'd talk about that, we're talking global warming and the whole thing. Two things about the west coast: we're notorious for having very heavy rainfall, it's measured in literally meters — we get anything up into 120, 130 inches of rain a year…[so] it feels strange and it feels almost as if it's not the right time for us to get this fine weather — we get that during winter, during July, and we're getting it now. Everybody is hiding inside…and people are thinking "Whoops, what are we gonna get in June and July?" There is a sort of a massive pessimistic streak, it's, it's basically experience I suspect, we know that bad things happen quite frequently in New Zealand, [so when] you get unexpected good, you look for the dark side of it, quite literally.

Holly: Yea, well Marilyn was telling us that there [are ozone] reports every morning.

KH: Because of the two main strands of settling peoples here in New Zealand, obviously colonization [of the] Maori people and the next strand is from England and from Scotland…we've got a lot of fair-haired people in the area, which now is problematic for them. I hate doing this but — we're brought up to do it, you know…we have the biggest this, we have the biggest that, right, — we've got the highest rates of melanoma in the world, we share it with Aussies…

Holly: Is that the one thing you share?

KH: Well look, we don't really hate Australians, we love them.

Holly: Some of your best friends are Australian.

KH: The relationship between New Zealand, a small island country, and Australia, is not that different than that between Canadians and the people of North America — you know, you've got this giant neighbor next door — because we've got intertwined histories as far as the European side of settlement is concerned. There used to be a law on the Australian books that people who were convicts and had committed some dreadful crime would be sent to New Zealand to be devoured by the natives. I'm not kidding.

Holly: Well, they're all convicts, aren't they, aren't they the spawn of convicts?

KH: In Australia…it's very different now, they are proudly reclaiming their convict ancestors. But that's fine, I mean a lot of their convict ancestors were political prisoners, basically, they were Irish who were involved in various legitimate protests against the British government. But it's an interesting relationship. Australians are a vibrant, loud, self-confident…rowdy people — very clever, very much go and get them. And New Zealanders are much quieter. We enjoy hating one another. You know, the best thing New Zealanders can do is to beat Australia in some sense, whether it's floating contests or whatever.

Holly: I never knew there was such a [rivalry].

KH: Oh, it's there, but the interesting thing is, if you're overseas and there are no Kiwis around, you'll get really close to any Aussie in sight, because we actually have very similar body language given the more display-proneness of the Aussies, and we also have, we're Antipodeans, and we drink the same, we have the same sorts of language. You can get Kiwis and Aussies together and we can speak a kind of slangy dialect talk that is very, very difficult for other people to get through, to understand.

Holly: George W, you know, you met with him…

KH: … can we be on to another topic?

Holly: Okay, well, part of what we're doing here is talking to different artists and politicians and folks, and …

KH: We don't have many in New Zealand that are both.

Holly: Now why is that?

KH: Oh, well, politicians are incredibly vicious…and it's well known in New Zealand that all artists…we don't do too much, we're not anything…whereas politicians, of course, are the bones of the nation. If you notice that very slight tinge of irony in that…I don't know, there are very, very few politicians I know that are involved in any form of art. A lot of them are generous supporters of art, admire various art forms religiously, but they are not practitioners.

Holly: Well I think Marilyn Waring would agree with you, I mean, she's seem happy as a clam to have ditched it all.

KH: Yep, she had an enormously hard time…she was I think the youngest member of Parliament…she was a woman and she was a declared homosexual woman at that, and she was imprisoned as a National Party member when both the Prime Minister and the leader of the National Party was a hideous little goblin of a man, called Robert Muldoon — Piggy Muldoon — and she clashed personally with him. And she probably knows she most certainly was Muldoon's downfall by electing to cross the floor... Bye, bye Piggy. But, I have two people I'd call friends — not close, close friends, but friends, people I can talk to very easily — and its doesn't surprise me at all that both of them lasted just one term. One is an academic, one is a lawyer and it's a snake pit, we don't have snakes in New Zealand, but we have snake pits [in Parliament].

Holly: What do you think of Helen Clark?

KH: Helen Clark is an extremely astute politician and she's a political animal. She's been an academic, but she crossed over…and on to games of politics, and she's the machine, she knows how to run it, she's doing a pretty good job. I don't know Helen personally at all, but I was absolutely delighted when the Labour government got back in… Aside from anything else, my family leans to that side of the political spectrum — most of my family. The other thing was she had made a big movement to support the arts in general which has to a large extent has been carried out.

Holly: Yea, it sounds like she's been supportive, I think she and Marilyn are on the same arts commission, or whatever.

KH: Helen…doesn't make empty speeches about it, she actually has worked quite hard to see that money has gone into a lot of fields of the arts, I mean … I'm not that fond of the orchestras, but hey, they're still alive and well.

Holly: How about writers?

KH: She floated an idea and it seems to have died an untimely death, [that] artists, including writers, should be paid the basic wage, minimum wage. Which I think is an excellent idea, particularly for people starting out — you know who maybe only got the one book or who've just hit one exhibition. …The way most people in that situation get money is to go on an unemployment benefit of one kind or another, so it would be making it rather more dignified than that and also giving arts in general some standing, which they don't have in New Zealand.

Holly: Right. Do you think there's a particular almost flavor to the art that comes out of New Zealand? In particular, is there something about being an island country?

KH: Yea, it's something I'd hate to say how many conferences, how many discussion groups I've been in that have looked at this particular point. I think that most emphatically, our writing is different from writing that comes from Australia, and …particularly from the 70s onwards, you hear New Zealand songs and you know they're New Zealand songs… I think one of the contributing things to, as it were, a New Zealand art, whether it be theatre or filmmaking or sculpture or painting or whatever, [is that] there's the dual cultural base, between two interacting cultures… The other one contributing factor is just the archipelago itself. We're a strange set of islands, and it doesn't take long for people to be molded into being New Zealanders…

Holly: So what's the new edition going to look like?

KH: The cover; right. I will show you later so you can contrast it, but…I suggested simply sand, sea, surf line, horizon line, sky, with three shadows — no portrayals of people, thank you very much.

Holly: Well how come no people?

KH: Readers catch their own image of characters if you're writing intensely enough… I've a lot of really peculiar and totally unfounded ideas about what goes on in the reader's mind and if you portray somebody on the cover that is your idea or the designer's idea but it's not going to be the reader's idea, it will interfere with … the image the reader will conjure up.

Holly: How do you feel about books being made into movies?

KH: Not very good, I've consistently refused to sell the rights for The Bone People. I don't mind it with short stories, several of my short stories have been written to films, it's slightly different, but when you're dealing with a novel… no you cannot transplant written word into visual and auditory form without generally suffering greatly. We have a novel that is layered, that is fairly rich in various forms of metaphor and image, you can't easily transform that, and again you're getting into that process which I think is the reader's province, some stories will read much better inside a head than outside of it.

I just actually had a nine page fax from a young woman film director in Germany — she comes from a background as an actress and has translated into being a director — and she was asking me for permission basically to use the characters but transplant them into a German setting. …Very politely…I said "no" and this is the reason why: those characters belong here, you can't, translate them…[to Germany]. It's not to say that part of some written works can't be turned into film… Plays are meant to be made into films, eventually, I think, the powerful and good ones. But, I've obviated the opportunity of that happening in the next two novels, because, I've invented, you know, a set of people that would be fairly impossible to film.

Holly: How come?

KH: They're blue.

Holly: They're blue?

KH: Yea, don't we need some blue people?

Holly: Can you give us a little synopsis of what's coming?

KH: It's fairly difficult to… what everybody wants to do is play God and you do that by developing a set of humans of your own to play with…I was fascinated by the idea of something that does run through, in a curious way, New Zealand history about the Maori and Pakeha: that's the people who are innate pacifists, people who won't fight, people who are very full of life, very vital, very sensual… but will not harm other humans, and I wanted to play with that idea, so I invented the [people] who are roaming around the world in my head, and dripped onto paper…

Holly: So you're playing God?

KH: Yes, of course. My idea is just not to rest for one day of the week, but for pretty well all of them.

Holly: Very good, and fishing…

KH: Fishing is — that's life… I have loved it ever since I was a very small child. …When I arrived out here on the West Coast, I discovered whitebaiting and I have become an obsessive galaxaphile, and that's wonderful. It's not so much a game of fish and fishing, it is life during the two and a half months of the whitebait season; and I collect whitebait lore and whitebait stores and eat them a lot when [I'm] working to catch them, which is why the novel that's coming out this year is called Bait.

Holly: Do think there's a sense — I was reading some article, I can't remember about you or something like that — and there was the sense that that you owed the world a book or something, and I thought that was strange.

KH: I don't think I do.

Holly: You don't think you do?

KH: I don't think I owe anybody, but I…

Holly: I don't either, I thought that was such a, such a strange premise.

KH: I obviously owe the publishers what's in my signed contract, but aside from anything else, I've written quite a lot since that particular novel, The Bone People. There's been five other books published. I've got a collection of short stories and poetry, by and large, mainly unpublished, coming out called Stone Fish — do you notice a certain theme running through here? — coming out…

Holly: Well, yeah, and I think it's, I'm just sort of nailing this one particular writer, but I thought it was like this weird smug thing, and you had published at the time, but even if you hadn't, like so what, you know…

KH: …I think Alice Walker said that a book has its own time, it might be months, it might be years, it might be decades…

Holly: … Well you know, you do something worth doing, it takes a while…So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about dreams.

KH: All right.

Holly: And how they may fit into your creative process.

KH: I often have dreams, I mean talking about things that are delicious and delightful, the theatre in the head and you never know what's going to come up. I know some people practice a kind of pre-programming of their dreams and I think that's kind of a waste of time. I prefer to be surprised, even if they're nightmares, there is a kind of intensity and reality about dreams, that appeals to somebody who leads a relatively quiet life …there's an effect in my dreams anyway of outright strangeness, you know, like they're not dreams that should belong to me, they belong to somebody else. But I'm lucky enough to be poking into their dream landscape, and some of them seem to be, oh, completely out of this world.

I should say that I'm an extremely pragmatic person, I haven't got a gristle of mysticism anywhere in my body, and I'm being literal when I say these ones are strange, they seem to be out of other landscapes — landscapes that I never recall having seen in thoughts, or in film, or certainly in realities. What becomes fascinating to me is once you get a character to certain level of normalness to yourself, they start to appear in your dreams, and they can then do or say things, or act in certain ways, not as you expect and not as you plan. I have been writing for a long time, this novel called Bait, and there's this character in there called Frances…who's paraplegic, and I had every intention for a long time that I kill Frances off and she was gonna be a nice death scene, basically — not of any sentimental, wallowing kind, she'd just be a feisty and gutsy character, she'd just be a loss.

The first time I tried to do this, … it's after being up until about 2 or 3 in the morning, which is my normal working [time], …I went to sleep and woke up absolutely precipitally, it was like somebody pulled half the bed from under from me and my feet were fallen down like that, and I realized it was as though I was in a wheelchair that had been tipped up over backwards. And I thought this is very, very peculiar, I've never been in a wheelchair that's tipped up over backwards, but it was unmistakably that. I went back to sleep somewhat quivering as you do when there's one of those terrifying moments in a dream, and the next thing, there's my character standing there — although not very likely for a paraplegic — but she's standing there and she said "How would you like it if you were in my position, and I just killed you off?"

Holly: Did your blue men, blue people come out of a dream?

KH: Not exactly, there are two characters in Bait who I realized quite early on that their shadows didn't belong to them…that every time I drew them, the shadows were distinctly strange, they just didn't fit the obvious characters, and I started checking through the way I do it — dreams and drawings or whatever — and realized that these people were really quite alien. And, from that, I've quite deliberately started developing blue people.

Holly: I spent some time with the blue men of the desert…

KH: Oh, yes, yes, yes, they're the ones that failed me and… there's of course the painter people who basically painted blue.

Holly: Can you get any writing done with kids around?

KH: Well you can when they're asleep…but then you're generally clearing up all the stuff.

Holly: Yea, Gaylene said the other day, she was talking about, I can't remember exactly what, but she called it "B.C."

KH: Oh, right, before Chelsea.

Holly: Exactly, about how…

KH: I find it's great, I don't mind it all because it's family, and I've been quite useful, but, hey, this is five, that's full-on all the time. Matt, you set him upstairs and he'll watch videos happily as long as I don't pull him back down, or he'll be using the computer, which is a bit of a pain because it's the only one, but there's all the ordinary detritus of everyday living and it's pretty hard to squeeze in while people are awake and buzzing around the place, so when they go to sleep you catch up on that and you think, I'll have a smoke and read, thank you very much, so that's it.

Holly: What are your priorities?

KH: Smoking or reading, you mean?

Holly: You tell me.

KH: My priorities are always and always have been family first and foremost…oh, it's hard to toss up between fishing, writing, and reading and living etc., it's very hard, so, during whitebait, fishing takes over, it has been know to step into other working periods too. It's difficult to divide things up. Notoriously in an interview for a New Zealand magazine about 3 years ago, I said writing isn't my life…it's a part of my life, it's a lovely part of my life, I enjoy it very much and it's how I am living, but it's not my life. My life is family, friends, fishing, food…things like reading and painting and all the rest of it, and you can't really prioritize when you're involved with family or you're involved in fishing, you can't say, "Oh, I really should be writing."

KH: You've got to be wholly aware of your surroundings and [you] can cast quite deliberately for something and you might catch something else all together…there are also forms of fishing…and you can catch everything and anything… you never know what you will get, and the process of writing can be very big like that.

KH: Yes, potential, and the more you fish, the more directed you can become and the more open you can become for whatever is coming along…and that's how you can explore ideas of writing that didn't have the glamour or the sex appeal that as a young person, you'd go for — there's other things you can mine later on…

Holly: Well, what are those things gonna be?

KH: I think that inevitably, the older you get as a writer, the more you start looking at the really big questions…you start looking at mortality in a lighter sense in that you start looking at the cycles of the world, the mortality of species, the vulnerability of environments, particularly when you live in a place like the west coast you start looking at that as well.

KH: No, the Maoris…have been here in the South Island for a good 450 odd years…and the places that I like, you know there's generations of family dead lurking in them. The English side of my family, the Scot side of my family, are much later arrivals, the Scot side have been out here for about 140 odd years, the English side, ever since the turn of last century. They were travelers in the sense that they migrated, but none of us really are travelers, we like to find our particular spots [and] with the exception of two people living in Australia and their partners, they are New Zealand spots, the South Island spots. We'll travel abroad from there, but boy do we come back here. I'm not a nomad except in the head. …I like comfort, and being a nomad can sometimes be exceedingly uncomfortable, in both the physical and the spiritual sense…I don't think I've got the mental stamina for it, really.

KH: I hate bungy jumping. Do you know that if you jump the wrong way and you have these weak vessels in your eyes, you can blind yourself? The riskiest thing I do is stay alive…quite seriously, it sometimes can take quite a lot dedication and effort to stay alive and as sane as possible…

Holly: So that's what you mean when you say staying alive is because you physically risk your…

KH: I think the riskiest thing that, quite seriously, I do — it's not a physical thing at all — it's being open to and exploring mentally if… there's knowledge whatsoever that entertains, interests me or I come across… I'm willing to test against currently established truths of anything and everything. That's a very long answer for somebody who spends most of their time sitting in a chair, thinking. I'm not the kind of person who will skydive — my brother used to do that until he became a dedicated family man — and I'm not the kind of person who drives recklessly or outrageously fast — I've seen people wiped out. Thanks very much, don't want to do that. I don't push myself in that physical sense, but basically because I'm not an adrenaline freak, I don't need that kind of rush at all.

Holly: You're an intellectual bungy jumper.

KH: Yes, you're right…I'm not devoted to comfort in the head, but I'm certainly devoted to comfort, you know, when I'm sitting down… But I'll leap off cliffs and hope there's a sufficient updraft in the mental world, and so far there's been a sufficient updraft.

Holly: It seems like with a lot of the people we've been talking to, there's not a particular brand of risk, but…

KH: One of the things that I find interesting about New Zealand is that — and I've had opportunities to look at us from the outside as it were, or at least in a comparative fashion with people from outside — it's that because we're a fairly secular society, we will explore things that possibly other peoples won't. There's also the fact that New Zealand, even today, people are brought up with the belief that we can do anything, not just women, that blokes can too, so New Zealand does invent things at a rate that no other people do, and we invent very strange things indeed from bungy jumping to jet boats, to self vending machines, to…

Holly: Blue people.

KH: Blue people, heaven forbid. We are still a young enough set of cultures to not be fixed in any way and to feel that we can explore everywhere.

Holly: I keep running into a brick wall, with the word "diva" here.

KH: Yeah.

Holly: Actually why don't you tell me why I keep running into a brick wall.

KH: No, I'll be interested to hear your perspective on it before I comment myself.

Holly: Ok, well, I think it's really the "tall poppy" syndrome.

KH: We associate divas with somebody like Kiri Te Kanawa you know, that's a diva, but it's also somebody who is larger than life, who flaunts capabilities, and this is the ultimate sin in New Zealand… And New Zealand commentators say this is a flaw in our character — that we don't for instance, respect accomplished businesspeople enough, that we don't try to emulate entrepreneurs or the high flyers. Some people remark that it's a misunderstanding of what this society of egalitarian people should be like, you know, that we bring everybody down to the same level rather than start everybody off, out with same set of rights. I don't know.

I am fundamentally uneasy about anybody who lauds themselves and I'm fundamentally uneasy about talking about me or what I do in any way, except the way that it's self deprecating, I really am. All my jokes have that, it saves other people, you know getting really rude to you, and it is very, very different from people like North Americans or Australians who [blow] their trumpet for all they're worth. It's not the negatives, it's not jealousy, it's not, envy, it's more, if you're lucky and this is the quintessence, I think, of people who live on earthquake fault lines, if you're lucky enough to achieve something, be quiet about it, because if you're noisy about it, you throw a tantrum, you're loud and proud about it, something will take it away.

KH: Oh yeah. One of the first things kids are taught in New Zealand schools is the earthquake drop, if they haven't already learned it at home, but you learn what to do: hide under your desk or under a door frame, then go outside. …It had a pretty large impact on New Zealand psychology — it's one of the reasons we don't believe things to last forever is, for instance, I don't know if Europeans will build a house, I mean, to last centuries.

…I know people who quite cheerfully will set off down the beaches here and walk for three or four days with little gear — it's not something you make a noise about, it's just something you like to do, you don't make adventures of things, and this is possibly where the Adventure Diva bit is running into a slight brick wall, you don't make adventures of things to do, if you're normal, but just nice quiet little things you like to do yourself.

KH: All right.

Holly In yesterday's paper, there was an article that said they discovered trout, female trout, fake orgasms.

KH: Yes.

Holly: Did you know that already?

KH: No, I didn't but I read the same paper.

KH: I thought it was quite fascinating because it seemed to be a nice evolutionary trick, you know, the reason they fake them, is the males drop the milk fine, but the female's sort of still waiting for the next male, she gets a whole set of partners…I thought it was fascinating. That's the sort of thing that a pragmatic New Zealander might know.

Holly: I notice all your…

KH: Cookbooks?

Holly: Yes, are you quite a gourmet?

KH: No I think that glutton is more the term for it, no… I don't understand the people who are slightly austere and slightly pretentious about their eating, but I enjoy food immensely. But you know. Dorothy Dunnett wrote about pre-Elizabethan food exquisitely, wrote about tactics and strategy…

Holly: Ever thought about moving north?

KH: You know I was actually asked that question right about 1985. I was in New York, and there's a university, a city one, or one that's got quite a campus over there, and one of the academics there said, "What would you say if we offered you [a fellowship] that we'll pay everything and you come over and stay here?" I don't know quite where they were coming from, and I started and said, "that sounds to me like a life end, with all due respect"…the longest I've ever been overseas for is just over 2 months…I don't think I could stand it any longer than that, I would not make an exile of any good kind whatsoever.

Holly: Can you see the sunset from your house?

KH: Yes, I've got a sunset window, that's deliberately set in the back side of the house, that side of house, so I can [watch].