TALL TALES (SOME TRUE) Memoirs of an unlikely writer
Greg McGee
Penguin, pbk, $37
Review by Ian Williams
In the early 1980s, Oamaru-born Greg McGee, former Otago rep, Junior All Black, All Black triallist, coach and captain of an Italian village rugby team, and contemporary of Chris Laidlaw and Earle Kirton in the Otago University A team, was the talk of New Zealand.
His hit play, Foreskin's Lament, packed theatres up and down the country, while also causing controversy because of the nudity and swearing.
Its portrayal of grassroots New Zealand rugby, complete with homosexual masseurs, in-it-for-the kill props, and odd (for straight guys) changing-room horseplay, also meant McGee was forever on the outer of the footie establishment.
The same tell-all reporterage and generous use of bad language (how times have changed), plus insights into the Kiwi psyche and human nature in general, should ensure his memoir Tall Tales (Some True) rockets to the top of the bestseller list, both in New Zealand and overseas.
What made Foreskin so good is what makes Tall Tales so good: Here is a man prepared to stand up and be counted on such issues as apartheid in sport; a man who turned his back on a safe career as a lawyer; revealed the hypocrisy that governed New Zealand's rugby administration, yet lived to tell the tale.
Tall Tales is also a great advertisement for Otago, Dunedin, and in particular, the University of Otago. So, uni and city council heavies, and student bodies, fete this man if he drops into town.
Not being a New Zealander and not having grown up in a rugby culture, the do-or-die programming, the get-them-before-they-get-us attitudes that persisted in days gone by, were startling revelations to someone as wet behind the ears as this writer.
With his personal experiences to draw on, McGee portrays Otago and New Zealand rugby figures such as Duncan Laing, Eric Watson, Keith Murdoch, and the thuggery that ruled the Canterbury teams of the '70s, with telling insights.
But Tall Tales is not just about rugby.
It's about a young New Zealander growing up in Oamaru, his OEs in Europe and Australia, and a writer's life in New Zealand, where fame and talent might grow, but not the bank balance, and people who were stars of stage and TV one day wake up with hangovers in dog kennels the next.
Predictably, in the final chapters of the book, when the tall tales become more weighty, a more serious tone prevails.
This especially applies to "Dancing on the Coffins of the Dead", a lengthy chapter dealing with McGee's work on Erebus, The Aftermath, a four-part TV series that broke all New Zealand viewing records, and revealed the devious nature of the Muldoon Government's handling of the inquiry that destroyed the reputation of Peter Mahon, the judge appointed to head it.
As excellent as this is, I might have saved this, and the following two chapters, for another book.
With that tiny reservation, I can unreservedly add: never a dull moment; a memoir that deserves the highest accolades and (hopefully) richest rewards.
- Ian Williams is a Dunedin writer.
