Red Herring (26 page)

Marching Through Georgia really did win the Irish Greyhound Derby in 1939. Has there ever been a more magnificent name for a dog?

“Walsh, that Freemanite, I knew it!” A reference to Frederick Engels (yes!) Freeman, who trained at the Comintern’s Lenin School in Moscow and became General Secretary of the CPNZ in 1933. He was expelled from the Party in 1937 for coming down on the wrong side of the Popular Front line. He spent the rest of his working life in the Hutt Railway workshops, was active in the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, President of the Wellington branch of the NZUSSR Society, and an enthusiastic ballroom dancer and keen amateur photographer. He died of a heart attack after collapsing on the gangway of a Soviet research vessel in Wellington harbour in 1969. These details are from Maureen Birchfield’s
Looking for Answers: A Life of Elsie Locke,
and from Elsie’s son, Keith Locke.

“The Black Death came to Sydney in January 1900 . . .” This description of the arrival of the bubonic plague in Sydney is based on material in the catalogue which accompanied
Plague! Rats in the Realm,
an exhibition held at the University of Sydney, Faculty of Medicine, in 2009.

In Anna Green’s history
British Capital, Antipodean Labour. Working the New Zealand Waterfront 1915–1951
, “One member of the Auckland executive recalled that fostering social and cultural activities had been a deliberate union policy after the war to ‘combat a long, continuous, vicious media campaign against us’ and to build up the union into an organisation that would gain the respect of the community as a whole.” Wharfies had sports teams, boxing competitions, pipe bands and chess clubs. Their debating team won the Athenaeum Challenge Cup — the senior debating trophy of the Auckland Debating Association — in 1948 and 1950. So the existence of a Watersiders’ Chorale, like a lot of other stuff in this story, is not
out of the question.

I’d like to thank the following: Johnny Fay, all the Molloys, Geoff Walker, Sue Reidy, Finlay Macdonald, the late Gordon Slatter, Dean Parker, Andrew Maben, Graeme Hunt, Monty Souter, Christopher Pugsley, Stuart Hoar, John Newton, Christine Winter, Susan Butterworth, Gwion Thornley, Bill Rosenberg, Jim McAloon, Pat Booth, Barry Gustafson, Redmer Yska, Anna Green, David Tossman, Murray Horton, Keith Locke, Andrew Laben, Jane Elliott. Elliott, Mick Sinclair, Robert Orland, Simon Shaw, Tim Hunkin, Sara Vui-Talitu, Margie Thomson, Jim Welch, Julia Knapman, Dianne Blacklock, Sandra Noakes, Penguin Books for permission to use Michael King’s quote from
The Penguin History of New Zealand,
Victoria University Press for permission to use John Mulgan’s quote from
Report on Experience,
Frances and Pete, Nick and Kate.

Errors, willful and otherwise, are my own.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JONOTHAN CULLINANE
was born in Palmerston North in 1951. Having established his proletarian bona fides as a roughneck on oil rigs in Canada and the North Sea and as a proofreader and bartender in New York City during the 1970s, he began working in the New Zealand film industry in 1981. In 2007 he wrote and directed
We’re Here to Help,
about the Christchurch businessman Dave Henderson’s titanic run-in with the IRD. The unprecedented success of that film led to a job as a postie in Mt Roskill, Auckland, a position he still holds.

Red Herring
is his first novel.

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollins
Publishers

First published in 2016

by HarperCollins
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(New Zealand) Limited

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Copyright © Jonothan Cullinane 2016

Jonothan Cullinane asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. This work is copyright. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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