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1985: A novel by Dominic Hoey (Penguin Random House, 2025), 286pp, $38
The numerically named 1985 is Dominic Hoey’s third novel, a follow-up to Poor People with Money and Iceland. Hoey is also the author of several poetry collections; he has toured as a rap MC; and he is one of the publishers behind the small-press imprint Dead Bird Books. This amounts to a glittering CV, but it also indicates that this novel will incorporate both entertaining storytelling and an eye for detail in terms of language and style.
Reading 1985, I came to see Hoey as the natural successor to one of my all-time favourite New Zealand novelists, Ronald Hugh Morrieson. 1985 shares Morrieson’s premise of the innocent and/or young character who gets caught up in a plot alongside bad people. 1985’s Obi and his dealings with his father’s dodgy friends has parallels with The Scarecrow’s Neddy and Predicament’s Cedric becoming embroiled in crimes beyond their worst imaginings. Morrieson’s coming of age and loss of innocence stories have also been compared to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and part of the premise of 1985 is that Obi and his mum have found a copy of Treasure Island in the Hard to Find Bookshop in Onehunga, and are reading it together.
Treasure Island forms a loose model for the novel: boy finds map, boy gets mixed up with chequered characters, things do not turn out exactly as hoped. Obi’s dad’s friend Gus, with his piercing glare and big red beard, reminds him of Long John Silver. ‘You never quite knew if he was a goodie or a villain,’ Obi says. Like Silver, Gus is a bit of both, but is a less menacing presence than the novel’s arch-villain, Pope—a character who could have been drawn straight out of Morrieson.
Perhaps the real villain in the book is Dad, the archetypal dreamer, schemer, and emotionally and physically neglectful father, who we last see frantically digging for ‘treasure’ by the light of a torch, his son having finally seen him for who he is. Dad’s career aspirations involve being a poet and staying on the dole, and he has ‘made it pretty clear in his poetry how he felt about work’, with poems titled ‘Fuck Work,’ ‘Kill Your Boss’ and ‘Hooray it’s Dole Day’. Obi’s older sister Summer tells him: ‘You’re like Dad with your games and treasure hunts. I mean come on, our father wants to be a poet, a fucking poet … That’s like a professional poor person.’ But Obi, for most of the novel, remains optimistic about his dad, hoping he can buy a computer both for gaming and for Dad to have somewhere to keep the poems he writes on beer labels and scraps of paper.
Morrieson would have loved the plot twist in 1985, and the way Hoey foreshadows it early on, building up to a climax through a series of escapades. The reader knows from the outset the treasure map is not going to lead to the kind of treasure Obi thinks it is. We are being entertained, but we are also being told a familiar emotional tale: the story of a young person moving from the world of childhood fantasies and wild hopes to the adult world of bills, illness and betrayal. It is also an archetypal tale of father and son, where someone who is a hero and idol comes into focus as a deeply flawed human being.
Hoey’s own poetic sensibilities come through in lyrical turns of phrase and attention to sensory responses to things. For me, one of the most vivid scenes depicts Obi and his best friend Al eating Refresh powder that tastes of ants. ‘I thought you said you got all the ants out?’ Al says. Every kid who grew up in New Zealand in the 80s and 90s (and possibly beyond) can no doubt remember eating packets of Refresh or Raro powder. Characters are vibrantly drawn: school friend Rats ‘was always crying and smelt like raw meat’; Dad ‘was all bones, skin and denim, bound together with tobacco stains’. The landscape itself is alive on the pages:
The smell of graffiti and sunburn, empty stomachs and pockets stuffed with other people’s treasure. Sewage when it rained, of fear, of knowing that reality hates its job, and that being a child is like being stupid on acid.
The smell of taro, burnt bread, factory chemicals, stale beer, fresh cut grass, mould, unwashed clothes. It was the way we thought the future would smell.
Hoey has done a great job of making it feel like the 1980s. Cultural references abound: Star Wars, the Jaws movies, video game arcades, Michael Jackson, Prince, Dire Straits. But it’s not the simpler-times, almost-glamorous 80s of Stranger Things, it’s more of a gritty realist type of nostalgia. This is, after all, the 1980s in Auckland, New Zealand—as Dad sarcastically describes it, ‘the Paris of the South Pacific’.
There is the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior and the subsequent arrest of French spies Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart. There are the sights, sounds and smells of local industry and manufacturing, before the effects of Rogernomics really kicked in. There is television’s Goodnight Kiwi. There is Carrington Hospital, where ‘Mad Sam’ has done some stints and will never be the same again. And there is the Centrepoint commune, where Obi and Dad go looking for Gus, complete with its doorless toilets and lack of underwear. Obi’s mum and dad are former junkies; Mum ‘got sick from the needles’. Dad reminisces with his friends about the gang they belonged to in the mid-1970s selling heroin and weed. If Pope, Gus, Simon and Dad are not directly involved with Mr Asia, they are certainly operating in his wheelhouse.
School is a chaotic place where no one learns any maths and teachers throw dusters at their pupils. Obi gets his mouth washed out with soap for saying the word sex. Kids roam the parks and the streets shoplifting and looking for finds in skip bins, loose dogs chase the kids and copulate on the school field. Hoey’s talent for vividly descriptive narrative brings the Central Auckland of late last century to life:
The car whined loudly as we drove through the city; down Queen Street where the lost boys and girls climbed inside glue bags and old men hid from the chaos behind suits, past the drunks getting warmed up on K Road, the sex workers unfurling their wings, the rundown shops in Ponsonby that survived on traffic fumes and dust, through Westmere and Pt Chev where the elderly shuffled past like human tumbleweed.
Also central to this novel are the twin evils of gentrification and neoliberalism. Obi is narrating as an adult looking back on his childhood, and there are premonitions of what is to come. It’s a form of time travel: we read this in 2025 and we know what has happened in Grey Lynn in 1985, when the inner-city Auckland was still the home of the working class, and was culturally diverse. But this place of ‘rotting houses and rusting cars’ is set to become a place of the past.
In the final chapter, Obi turns eighteen and leaves New Zealand for London.
And the neighbourhood was changing. Feleti’s family had sold up and moved south. More and more houses were getting bought and painted the same white as the rich cunts’ house. A meanness had got into the water supply. They cut the benefits. Felt like everyone was out for themselves. And I knew, when I left, none of this would be here to come back to.
Although the houses being painted white is apparently true, it reads like a pointed reference to the trend towards wealthier, whiter populations in inner-city Auckland suburbs. Obi’s ailing mum and poet dad own their dilapidated, mouldy house in Crummer Road. A house in Grey Lynn is now worth an average of $1.6 million.
I lived in Auckland as a young child in the 1980s. My only concrete memory of the year 1985 is my sister being born. But this novel still feels very homely to me, and I feel a sense of attachment to it because of how easily I can place myself and my family within its pages. My parents were involved in the anti-nuclear movement at the time, and the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior was a massive deal. My dad was an intermediate and high-school teacher and I can imagine him having kids like Obi and Al in his classes. They are the kids in the old school photos he has in a suitcase, with cheeky grins and retro haircuts. They would now be in their forties and fifties. Where in the world are they now? We visited our parents’ friends, our aunties and our grandparents in suburbs like Grey Lynn, Ponsonby and Westmere.
1985 was a nostalgic read for me in the literal sense of the word: it conjured up a kind of longing for the past that is actually painful. I think for Hoey there is a similar sense of things having been lost—casualties of a racist and unequal economic system. But ultimately, 1985 is also an entertaining and feelgood read. It’s a book to be devoured in a gulp; a book to lose oneself in, even if only momentarily.
This review was first published in Landfall Tauraka 250.
AIRINI BEAUTRAIS is a poet, writer and educator who grew up in Tāmaki Makaurau and Whanganui. Her collection Bug Week won the Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham Awards in 2021. Her essay collection The Beautiful Afternoon was longlisted for the Ockham General Non-Fiction Prize in 2025.
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