Would Mr Olds Please Report on Hands and Knees

Philip Temple
Minding His Own Poetry Composing Business: A biography of Peter Olds by Roger Hickin (Cold Hub Press, 2025), 306pp, $42.50

In 1985, aged 40, Peter Olds wrote that he was ‘trying to make sense of the three p’s: psychiatry, poverty & poetry.’ He never did manage the first two, although he had almost another 40 years to go. But the poetry made sense, both for him and, ultimately, anyone else interested in the ‘poetry composing business’. It was the creative sinew that enabled him to go on, to understand where he was in a world that mostly didn’t give a damn about him and the people around him. Those ‘marginalised’ for whom David Eggleton anointed Olds their ‘laureate’.

Roger Hickin chronicles Olds’ life in 27 short chapters that help kick along a narrative skilfully traversing a personal history almost unremittingly scarred by mental health problems and drug and alcohol addictions. Olds struggled from early on with undiagnosed dyslexia. A 1951 winter spell at Roxburgh Children’s Health Camp, when he was just seven, saw him given a ‘severe flogging’ in front of all the other children for a minor misdemeanour. This was a ‘humiliation Peter never forgot. He felt abandoned by his mother, and began to sense that God hadn’t made him right.’ Since his father had become ordained as a clergyman, it was a Methodist God at that, with the family being moved willy-nilly to wherever he was assigned a parish.

This meant Dunedin’s Roslyn suburb for Olds’ intermediate and early secondary school years. His school reports were ‘middling’ or ‘fair’, placing him at the bottom of the class in the likes of arithmetic and science, but they did refer to his artistic abilities and favourably mentioned ‘written expression’. Mediocre school experiences were tempered by times of adventure and enjoyment, such as summer camping in Central Otago and, as he later recollected:

We flew like Methodist lunatics down Shetland Street
(Davy Crockett hats flying),
out of the jaws of Wesley
to Hell
on our home-made trolleys:
on wheels stolen from the local milk-treatment station.

The family’s shift to Auckland’s Ponsonby in 1959 proved calamitous. Bullying and toughing it out at Seddon Memorial Technical High School saw him leave at barely 16. He took a variety of jobs, stopped churchgoing and discovered sex and rock’n’roll:

Jukeboxes replaced hymn-books.
The boys from Boys’ Brigade lounged in
coffee bars listening to rock and roll
(made in America).
Knives flew on Murder Mile.
You could dance with girls at the Grotto.

Young Olds bought a clapped-out Ford V8 coupe—his first car and his last; trying to repair it, he permanently damaged his left eye. He met his first girlfriend, Cathy. After he broke up with her, he fell in with car converters and ended up in Mt Eden Prison, followed by six months in a detention centre. He had joined the ‘marginalised’ and never left.

On parole in Dunedin, he boarded in Kensington with Mrs Fisher, who first recognised that what he was writing was poetry. It started there. He read the Beats, bumped into Hilary Baxter, who said he might like to meet her dad, James K. Baxter. Baxter, then the Burns Fellow at the University of Otago, and Olds, his new long-haired sidekick with a folder full of poems, philosophised around the streets of Dunedin. Later, Baxter, now calling himself Hemi, would inveigle Olds, along with other young spiritual seekers, to join him at Jerusalem up the Whanganui River.

In Dunedin, Baxter introduced Olds to director Patric Carey at the Globe Theatre, for whom he wrote a one-acter, repeated at Wellington’s Downstage to disastrous reviews. The scandal rag Truth, as was its wont, published a story titled ‘Dropout Dreamer’s Drift into Drama’, which led to Carey disowning him.

Already into cheap alcohol, Olds was now into drugs such as methedrine (speed) and the opioid pethidine. Bouts of acute anxiety, hypomania and deep depression saw him lodged in Villa 4 at Cherry Farm psychiatric hospital. Girls were attracted to him, one saying that he was a ‘beautiful, open sensitive yet strangely tough young man’. But relationships could not endure his recurring mental health problems and developing addictions: ‘His psyche was a stew of hurtful rejection and idealised love.’

The pattern is thoroughly established in Hickin’s story of addiction, recuperation, Wakari’s Ward 10, Ashburn Hall, shifting addresses, friends and girls dying young, the marginalised becoming obituaries. Olds sometimes had writer’s block, dry periods, but mostly there was the continuous stream of poetry, helping him interpret who he was and make sense of what was happening to him. He was an acute observer with a wry sense of humour, and he had the ability to nail small truths that resonated wider than most of his early critics were capable of registering.

A couple of dozen small-press publications produced over 50 years from 1972 onwards, often illustrated with his own drawings, testify to the consistency of his ‘poetry composing business’. They also reveal the changing range of his publishing supporters, beginning with Trevor Reeves and his Caveman Press during the 1970s. After the 1990s, the ‘toughest decade’, when he ‘kicked the grog’ but health problems laid him low, Michael O’Leary and his Earl of Seacliff Arts Workshop picked up the Olds torch, despite frequent disputes.

More consistently, from 2010 onwards, Hickin and his Cold Hub Press published almost all his slim volumes. Hickin’s research for this biography embraced not only archival material but also interviews with those who knew Olds well, and the biography includes a collation of more than 60 photographs along with Olds’ surreal drawings. Hickin’s solo effort in writing, editing and publishing the book has inevitably resulted in the occasional flaw, but none detract from an essential and readable narrative. It underlines his longstanding dedication to ensuring Olds’ work remains visible in a literary world that otherwise might have consigned it to that of a minor poet of the Beat generation.

This was often how he was regarded in the early days. In an Olds poem I included as editor in Landfall 108 in 1973, ‘At Wellington Airport’, he wrote:

… bring on the critics.

3 hours to wait, stupefied by the
telly; numbed by the sharp snap
of the interjecting loudspeaker:
‘would mr olds please report
on hands and knees …’

where have all the critics gone?

to join my contemporaries
is a laugh. the dishes clatter
endlessly & the price of coffee
is far too high—

where have all the critics gone?

… come—I will write a line or 2
to fill in time at Wellington airport
for you & you & you—

bring on the poets!

A few years later, I served as the PEN representative on the Robert Burns Fellowship selection committee and was able to support Olds’ third-time-lucky bid. Even then, it was not for a full year. The Fellowship fund was overflowing for a brief period, which allowed for both a full Burns Fellowship as well as a ‘Mini-Burns’—and that was given to Olds. A well-heeled, middle-class academic world steeped in English literature went for a well-heeled, middle-class, full-year fellow. Odours of booze, drugs and psychiatric uncertainties should be kept outside the main entrance, or at least confined to a single university term. Yet the Burns money was the first significant income Olds had ever had, matched only by a 2005 Janet Frame Award and unexpected late legacies.

After checking the proofs of Taking My Jacket for a Walk in 2016, Olds, then aged 72, wrote:

Well, now I know I’ll not get—
A plaque in the Octagon
An hon. Doctorate (Otago)
Win a National Book Award
Be named Poet Laureate
Have children—a wife—a cat—fly to Europe—own my own
home—meet Bob Dylan. Have a fan club … or receive the PM’s
Award for poetry. [There might be more to add to this list, saith
Hone].

By then, Olds had been lodged for 16 years in a council flat in Prestwick Street, Māori Hill, where he would stay until his end. And apart from Hone Tuwhare, there were other steadfast friends, such as poets John Gibb and Jenny Powell, and supporters Pamela Gordon and Denis Harold.

And the critics finally caught on. Michael Steven, in reviewing Olds’ Sheep Truck, described him as ‘one of our great stroller poets’ in a ‘life where poetry and its composition were lived like a spiritual discipline’. Peter Simpson observed in a review of Olds’ posthumous collection, The Glass Guitar, that he had a ‘wry self-awareness, a lack of grandiosity, but a firm self-belief in the value of the craft and his life-long commitment to it’. He was awarded an afternoon symposium by the University of Otago, as a poet finally worthy of scholarly papers.

Peter Olds’ poems, like the novels of that other writer of the marginalised, Ronald Hugh Morrieson, spoke of an authentic New Zealand far beyond the boundaries of a literary-correct poetry beholden to middle-class preoccupations and angst. He spoke for those who sought shelter under Dundas Street Bridge.

He did get his writer’s plaque in the Octagon, and he lived to see it before he died, aged 79, in 2023. By then he had been dubbed the unofficial poet laureate of Dunedin. Earlier, he should have been awarded at least a QSM—for survival. As he wrote in the poem ‘Visiting a friend at Wakari Hospital and finding him not there’, published in Taking My Jacket for a Walk (Cold Hub Press, 2017):

Outside the hospital entrance
a woman kneels in grass
before a cup of tea
closely engaged in rolling a cigarette

Fog blankets Wakari
clogging Momona airport
cars whizz through mist
nowhere to go

The nurses tell me you’ve gone home
for a couple days’ leave
but you’ve lost your cellphone
so I can’t ring

I wanted to tell you: When we die
we have no stories left to tell
best say them now
while we still have the chance

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PHILIP TEMPLE is an award-winning Dunedin author of many fiction and non-fiction books. He has been made an Officer of the NZ Order of Merit (ONZM) for his services to literature.