I was in my late 30s watching an Otago Boys’ High School rugby practice. A parental rite of passage, I suppose. I cared so much about rugby then that I had lost the ability to morally adjudicate over what was happening before my eyes. But in retrospect I know something was very off. I was watching boys in pairs train for the scrum, they locked shoulders and arms with each other like bulls with horns and the coach has an umbrella with a metal pointy end and he keeps poking the brown boys’ buttocks with it to correct their posture. After the practice the boys form a huddle. The coach strokes their backs and arms like they are all a family. But for this school, rugby is really an industry. And underneath the ‘family atmosphere’ things were ruthless and competitive. The team I am watching are only juniors, and apart from the nepo Dunedin mafia babies — or dairy-faced hostel boys — all the best players in the junior teams are brown or have whakapapa. None of this hierarchy really matters because the rugby budget at OBHS is enviable and they are notorious for poaching and scouting in Auckland or flying in teens from Samoa and Tonga to compete in the senior first XV. Future stars and members of ‘the brotherhood’. High school forms the bridge between rippa rugby and the potential for a playing career. It also marks the end of their safety. Clubrooms are safer for young boys because their mothers are still hanging around, cutting up oranges, gossiping over the deep fryer in the local club kitchen, keeping an eye on all the men in shorts. Because if a man wants to be around children and is wearing shorts for a living, someone has to be there keeping an eye on him. A year after this practice, the coach with the umbrella’s teaching colleague David Bond is charged and convicted of sexually abusing former students. In 2025 he pleaded guilty to a 26th offence. Now he is an old man begging for home detention. A feeble sight in the dock. David Bond was into coaching cricket, rugby and taking 14-year-old boys tramping into the dramatic postcard entrance of Mātukituki Valley. The camp base nestles into the southern Black Beech near Mt Aspiring. It is an architecturally designed lodge built by staff and student volunteers in the seventies. The OBHS old boys website describes it as the jewel in the school’s crown, but all of the architecture at OBHS is impressive. The old boys network that included Ted McCoy crafting buildings for their former selves to be in. David Bond was into extracurricular activities, because it gave him unfettered access to his prey. And there were Dunedin whispers about him, which also meant no one really did anything about a paedophile for 40 years. And yet, everyone, sort of, and definitively, _knew_. The lodge was a paradise for him. How revolting. His homophobic but accurate nickname “Bummer Bond” also acted as a crude code in between the bullying that was rife in the 1990s at OBHS. A new rector was appointed just before the millennium so the ‘school on the hill’ could signal a culture change after a small cluster of suicides. It is 1992 and I’m just a teenager waiting for the bus with our gaggle that will take us into town where all the OBHS homies are. We wear kilts that were designed for men because Dunedin gets Scotland wrong in its kitsch Presbyterian homage, pretending that haggis is a delicacy and that the honking sounds of bagpipes are stirring instead of distressing. The bus lets us down just before the Octagon. The brown boys we are after hang around in the space under the graciousness of the old Savoy hotel beside the sushi restaurant that isn’t there yet. They wear a grey suit jacket, grey shorts, a tie printed with the school logo and knee socks with stripes. They are ready for an office job they will never have and where shorts will be discouraged, unless they become schoolteachers themselves. We follow them to the video parlour Wizards on Moray Place. They play Street Fighter 2 and my e hoa plays Gyrus, beside her I play a version of Space Invaders before we go down the alley to smoke hideous menthol cigarettes which we cover up the smell of with fake Poison perfume from The Body Shop. The senior boys wear navy blazers with their sports blues as white stripes around the cuffs. Some of the seniors seem like men already, and some of them really are. I go to the same girls high school by the sea that my mother had attended. She left early for a job at Cadbury’s. Warm and chocolate scented in winter, another rite of passage for our youth and uni students and the proletariat dynasties who worked there forever, taking $1 bags of picnic bars and Roses chocolates home to their whānau before palm oil and late-stage capitalism shut it all down. The hospital that is yet to materialise over the site of the demolished factory because we have the officious pipsqueak Simeon Brown in charge of downgrading a common good. A city needs a heart to have a pulse. Most of the shops I remember on the main drag have disappeared into for lease signs in windows, into forlorn cold places. The death of the shops was exacerbated by the pandemic, but we still have the Octagon, although the fountain with dancing lights, and Big Daddy’s, the hole in the wall takeaway shop are long gone. Mum worked at Big Daddy’s too. A solo teen Mum with a baby. Working a deep fryer. Now she has two degrees and a Masters. Dunedin is a city of education. Moray Place hugs the Octagon and as soon as I started reading Breton Dukes’ new book _Party Boy_ I could see the kitchen the protagonist Marco was working and half-dying in and sense it was in lower Stuart St. This was partly because of how intimate the first section of _Party Boy_ is but also because of a shared psychic geography. We are inside the head of Marco fucking up his shift at the bougie bar he works one or two days a week as his past creeps up his neck and he remains determined to weigh the arancini balls instead of feeling for their size like a Nonna. A novel about a white man alone, working a deep fryer. As his day gets worse, he wonders if he accidentally sent a dick pic to his wife to save his ailing marriage and panics that he might have accidentally included his workmates too. People he went to school with turn up at the bar. This is the constant panic for all of us who are Dunedin raised and live here, the terrible feeling you are going to bump into someone you know, a ghost of schools past, the threat of being reminded of some old terrible humiliation. I’m exaggerating but Marco feels like an autofictive exaggeration. A technique Breton Dukes is pulling off, just, because he is using it with great, quiet purpose. Dukes does more showing than telling, the level of detail is rhythmic and almost pointillistic because being inside Marco’s mind is like static, it is white noise. A man in high definition coming undone. I became frustrated with Marco, a feeble, fragile being. Even the routes he drove through Dunedin as he hid in his full-time dad role annoyed me. I’d think _why is he going that way_ as he negotiated Stuart St, past the haunt of his old school and across the Highgate bridge then through to Maori Hill and down Drivers Rd, and across the town belt and down into his boy’s school in George St. What’s wrong with him? And why can’t he just call the AA when he runs out of petrol? Why is he so determined to be heroic? Why does he decide to spend his wife’s money on $2000 worth of beef for a party? The title of _Party Boy_ is ironic. I thought the cover had a red marbled formica table as a design feature but now I think it is marbled beef. A man alone with his BBQ metaphors. Sweating instead of talking about his problems. Why on earth does Marco want to have a party? Marco wants to confess. He is turning 50, but in his mind he could still be a boy, it is why he is so tender with his own sons. Because of what happened with the dog, between Roseneath and Sawyers Bay. Marco is like the Dunedin fragile version of Gary in Jonathan Franzen’s _The Corrections._ Gary with his solitary, futile mixed grills achieved seething in the rain as he imagines himself as the saviour of his family. Both Gary and Marco objectify their wives, and study their distant bodies, thwarted by their desire to go down on them. Marco is faithful to her but she is so thinly drawn, even as she bends over and he studies her rump. ‘Wild Horses’ is the dreary soundtrack to all of this. Sadly, Dunedin has a lot of nice, damaged men in it. They have a subtle reserve that lets them sneak out quietly. As a young man in the early 1990s Marco finds this resolve with Pearl, a solo mother with an aqua G-string that he studies but instead of making a proper escape he loses her son in the town belt. I imagine Pearl sitting alone in her cold St Kilda flat, waiting for their return. Maybe she, too, deeply regretted fucking him. Maybe she disappeared from the wretched male culture of the clubrooms, where women are not treasured or safe after a big game. Marco is still lost in the gothic confections of his old gauntlets, the building that is not really a castle but a fortress where the war is happening within the walls and the women can’t see in. But we need their laser vision to see through the bluestone on the quad and into the poly corner, and where the South East Asian boys are playing handball, staying out of everything, and the richer Asians are hanging with the misfits in the library, and one boy is trying not to get hung up by his bag in the gym. It is the boys wise enough to join kapa haka and hang out with the girls from their mirror school It is where the teacher with a PhD lets out a disgruntled sigh that the boys are being taken out of class to watch rugby again. In 2015 they spell GO RICHIE using their bodies on the pitch below the grandstand. The student from Kurow who survived the hostels and the ruthless culture of rugby life at OBHS to win the 2011 World Cup playing with a broken toe. Forgiven for the transgression of passing School Certificate Mathematics with 100 percent because he was a mongrel and a terrier with someone else’s ball. It feels like Marco would have been happier with a guitar than a rugby ball or his other pill of choice, tramadol. Dukes has stated that he favours the third person over the I but Marco is all “I”. In a literary culture dominated by femme identities, readers and writers this singularity feels weirdly novel. Men have become an alien race even in their natural habitat: grilling meat. A man alone at a BBQ. An alien to himself. It hurts Marco to talk which is what drives the narrative forward until the fourth set piece of the party. Where Marco gives almost too much of himself away. Marco is a conglomeration of all the boys Dukes swallowed as he listened to their stories about men like David Bond. _Party Boy_ is the true stories he could not bring himself to write. It is the cows grazing beside the river before the boys head across the swing bridge through longer grass into the valley for bunks and showers, wet towels flicking and sweaty sleeping bags, pranks, scatalogical humour and Bournvita because it is the Dunedin milo, and because schoolboys are better by far … They are heading into their revelations and their campsides, heading for their doom, and future torments and despite the hard rods bracing the burden they carry on their backs, I hope those boys are able to love nature as much as each other even after everything the men with small and big hands have done. **_Party Boy_ by Breton Dukes** (**Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) is available in bookstores nationwide. ReadingRoom is devoting all week to the author and his tough, challenging novel. Monday:a revealing interview with the author, conducted by Justin Agluba. Tuesday: a portrait of the author by his literary friend Victor Billot. Tomorrow: a review of _Party Boy_ by Fergus Porteous.** **Newsroom exists because of readers like you. Help us deliver trusted, independent journalism that serves all New Zealanders.Support our work with a donation today.**

This evening, Prof. Sam Lawler gave a lecture at Victoria University on how all the satellites in the sky are causing issues with astronomy. It was an absolute blast. With fun anecdotes, interesting topics and I walked away with a feeling of terror.

Kiwi bike adventures and d... | 10 videos · 6 followers · 39 likes

The man was kayaking on Otago Harbour during the weekend's rough weather. File Photo: Stephen Jaquiery A Dunedin man who made it his day’s mission to "travel to Ōtākou by water" succeeded — albeit stark naked after his clothes washed away when his kayak capsized.

Attached: 1 image »“[A]n American fascist … puts money and power ahead of human beings … With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact.« — Henry A. Wallace, “The Danger of American Fascism,” New York Times, 1944 https://www.henrywallace.org/quotes https://www.nytimes.com/1944/04/09/archives/wallace-defines-american-fascism-the-vice-president-says-it.html