PORTRAIT OF THE WRITER AS A YOUNG IDIOT: Teachers' College and Harrisongs

After I was denied re-entry to the University of Auckland for “failure to make satisfactory academic progress” – I only passed Zoology and Botany in two years, the latter on a D Restricted which means “we'll give you a pass but never come back to this subject” – I ended up at North Shore Teachers College.

It was only going to be temporary until my papers were transferred to Waikato Uni where I could continue my BSc studies. Ho ho ho!

For reasons best known to the fine folk at Auckland, it took them about four months to negotiate this highly difficult transfer – a letter or phone call might have done it, perhaps? – and so by that time it was too late to start at Waikato.

I was where I was for a while.

NSTC in 1971 was a strange place: first year students weren't allowed to go flatting; people seemed very young and immature (I was only 19 myself when I started but I'd gone to uni at 17 when it was a hotbed of politics, protest and pub crawls) and many of the girls had come down from places like Whangarei and were pretty fearful of The Big City.

On my first day – which was in about week three because I'd waited for the call from Waikato before applying for teaching as a stop-gap – I got off the bus, asked a lecturer where my class was and he pointed to a troupe of students getting on another bus.

They – and now me – were off to a local primary school to watch some lessons in progress.

When we got to the school I was walking down the path when a man -- who I took to be the principal scanning the incoming -- yelled, called me over and dressed me down for my attire: jeans, sneakers and a football jersey.

He put me back on the bus where I had to wait an hour or so until the observation lessons were over.

Welcome to NSTC.

The deputy principal there gave me a lecture on standards (of dress, behaviour and so on) and then I was let loose among the student population.

Aside from English and Art it was all pretty boring but when I heard there was a student magazine I got keen.

But it was pretty awful.

It was called Threshold and had cartoons stolen from American publications, a racing column (?), a review of a Mercury Theatre production (Jean Anouilh's The Lark), the back page was just a collage of no fixed idea (at the top of his page) and there was some very bad poetry by a third year.

In that same issue it also had a really bad – a truly bad – piece by me about George Harrison and his new triple album All Things Must Pass . . . which it seems sold for $12 as you may see below.

Not long after a few friends and I started an alternative magazine to Threshold. I named it: Dogbreath Views.

It is embarrassing for me to pull this Harrison article out for public ridicule, but there it was. My first piece of writing about music/records.

After that there was no stopping me and the following year when I was taken back into Auckland Uni on the advice of my English lecturer TJ McNamara (whom I would later encounter as the Herald's art critic) I pursued a very different course of study: Art History, English Lit, Chinese Philosophy, Italian language and Italian Film and Literature.

And started writing record reviews for Craccum.

More than half a century later I am still scribble scribble scribble.

I think I have improved a bit. At least I hope so.

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These entries are of little consequence to anyone other than me Graham Reid, the author of this site, and maybe my family, researchers and those with too much time on their hands.

Enjoy these random oddities at Personal Elsewhere.

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