A POETIC REVIEW OF PETER OLDS’ BIOGRAPHY BY ROGER HICKIN (2025)
Kafka liked reading biographies. I just reviewed Kafka’s biography (see previous blog entry). Now it’s the turn of Peter Olds’ biography by Roger Hickin. While Olds, a Dunedin poet, is a total unknown in comparison to Kafka, he has quite a lot in common with Kafka, namely this uncanny gift to analyse himself from the outside, self-depreciating like Kafka, and with a healthy dose of humour. Most people who obsessively self-analyse do it from the inside to the degree of pointless mental disintegration. Peter Olds, on the other hand, who struggled with mental illness of one sort or another all his life, looked at himself dispassionately, and wrote poetry of amazing clarity of purpose.
Peter Olds who died aged 79 in 2023, was a consummate street artist, living on and off the streets in Auckland and Dunedin. Roger Hickin who knew and published Olds’ poetry in his later years, charts Peter Olds life intelligently and compassionately – with the telling title of ‘Minding his Own Poetry Composing Business’. Certainly not in the sense of a money making ‘business’, as he was penniless most of his life and didn’t care about any material comforts of life.
I only ever came across Peter Olds once in my life, as a student at Dunedin University in the late 1970s, when Peter was the poetry editor of the student rag Critic and accepted my submission of a few poems – a copy of which will appear in my new poetry and art book to be published by the Michael O’Leary’s Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop next year. Michael was a good friend of Peter Olds and published many of his little poetry books. They also lived for a few years in Seacliff near Dunedin, as is detailed in Roger Hickin’s biography.
Now, while I do not want to make any great comparisons between biographies in general, there is one aspect to point out: a purely chronological narrative of a subject’s life and death story is sometimes crammed with unnecessary detail that detracts from the overall impression created by the biographer. What other biographers (including my own attempt at Noam Chomsky’s life and work up to 2006) do to get away from the purely chronological narrative is to insert thematic chapters on important aspects of the subject’s work, e.g. in Kafka’s case, his Jewish identity, his relationship with his father, or in Chomsky’s case, his linguistics, politics and philosophy – all cutting across the chronological time spans. This makes for more interesting reading.
However, Hickin is excused from his chronological account as his subject is constantly moving, physically and mentally, ending up in an ‘on the road’ story that matches those of Kerouac and (for NZ) Colin Hogg’s (2018) Sam Hunt ‘Off the Road’ account. As such Hickin does present a fascinating biography that in the narrow New Zealand context – Peter Olds only ever left NZ once for a short time to visit his brother in Brisbane – covers the narrow ground between Dunedin (and environs), Auckland, Omokoroa, Wellington, and iconic stop overs like Jerusalem. The latter is of course in connection with the other iconic poet of New Zealand/Aotearoa, James K. Baxter, who was instrumental in encouraging Peter’s poetic output. One other discernible theme is Peter’s relationship with his father – and his parents in general – which has its ups and downs (but nowhere as bad as that of Kafka’s).
So let us start at the beginning of the long road to poetic immortality – one might intone Werfel’s praise of Kafka here and say:
Dear Olds, you are so pure, new, independent, and perfect that one ought to treat you if you were already dead and immortal.
One might leave out the ‘new’ as much of Olds’ poetry has its roots in the often-radical beat-and-street poems of the likes of Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Wantling, Bukowski, Tuwhare, Baxter and Eggleton. Being widely read, Olds is also linked to the English writers like Wordsworth, Coleridge and Thomas. His lyrical and music tastes (he defines himself as both a song and poetry writer) range from classical (Beethoven) to rock’n’roll (Dylan, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Cohen, Yardbirds). One of his poetry collections is entitled ‘Music Therapy’.
Hickin calls Olds a ‘war baby’, born in 1944, four days before the D-day landing. Born into a staunch Methodist family, his father Mac eventually being an ordained minister of the church by the age of 40. Mac’s earlier life included stints in mechanics, beekeeping, small-holding farming and labouring made him a practical jack-of-all-trades. By the time Peter was five they had moved numerous times, perhaps setting the scene for Peter’s eventual life as a gypsy. A formative event was his being sent to a Health Camp due to having contracted glandular fever. There he received a severe flogging due to a minor infringement. According to Hickin ‘Peter never forgot’ thus contributing or even triggering his life-long struggles with anxiety and depression.
Perhaps this would have been the place to stop and engage in some Freudian analysis, especially as later in his life he spent a lot of time in psychiatric wards under the care of various psychiatrists whose main treatment consisted of heavy medication. Sadly, psychiatry at the time was ruled (and is ruled to this day) by American-style Behaviourism, correctly denounced by Chomsky as ‘neo-fascist’ (when I studied psychology in the early 1970s at Munich’s LMU this was the reason I abandoned my studies). Had Peter Olds undergone verbal psychotherapy he may well have been saved from endless medication and becoming addicted to it. Hickin gives us a clue for his trauma: at the health camp Peter’s punishment was for staying back in the dormitory with an older boy – not for being with an older boy. What was going on? Later in life when Baxter’s alleged homosexual tendencies were revealed, Peter Olds commented that when thinking back, Baxter may have come on to him at some stage. Nothing more is mentioned - swept under the carpet. A taboo subject. I am not suggesting that any of this is related to Olds’ trauma, just that psychotherapy might have revealed the true cause of it, and thereby contributed to the healing process that under Behaviourism never happened.
Olds’ fragile physical state as a child and into adulthood – like that of Kafka – may in turn have exacerbated his trauma in that his father’s exemplary maxim of the wholesome nature of physical labour could not be accommodated by his ‘weak’ son. As such Peter always admired his father for his practical skills but less so for his mental skills.
When in 1953 the family moved to Dunedin – Peter Olds’ eventual holy grail – the underbelly of suburban New Zealand was captured in his poem, quoted by Hickin (p.22):
Lying (as a child) in bed
tucked tight in wesleyan
quilts listening to the neighbours
murdering each other with
blunt breadknives and
set each other alight
at the clothesline stake
for their sins and slaughtering
their children with strangulation
after whipping their bare
backsides with leather straps snatched
from hooks behind bathroom door.
Olds calling a spade a spade, straight-out, not taking any prisoners, a bit like Kafka’s In the penal colony. Note the stylistics: a poetic sentence broken up into three stanzas, merging into each other, making a powerful statement. And yet another example of what such a childhood memory might mean in terms of psychotherapy. Hickin does very well in interspersing his text with Olds’ uncompromising poems that are often more convincing than Hickin’s prose. This is of course the conundrum of any biographer whose subject outshines the literary abilities of the biographer to the power of ten. Bad biographers openly show their envy – Hickin being a very good one.
In Chapter 2 we learn of the momentous move in 1959 to Auckland, the big apple of NZ, no less to Ponsonby, the inner-city suburb that in the 1960/70s turned into the coolest hippy location anywhere in NZ (I should know as a dopey resident there in Margret Street the early 1970s). With cheap and rundown housing, Ponsonby also became home to Polynesian immigrants, thus creating an early example of a kind multiculturalism that straight society viewed with great suspicion and disdain. Being ensconced in the relatively well-to-do parsonage in Herne Bay, Peter was bullied at his high school but one day beat up another boy and thus was spared further agony. He even was invited to join the gangster club of the school. At age 16 he convinced his father to let him leave school and get a job. First as a window dresser – mocked as a job for gays – and then two years later as a worker in a mattress factory. Peter stopped going to church and became a rebel without a cause. He joined the petrol heads. He hung out with older boys who had cars. American V8s. For the uninitiated, let me explain: when I first came to NZ in 1971 or so – and having had a car in Germany but being utterly oblivious about its mechanics or even how to fill it with petrol (this always being done by a petrol station attendant in Germany) - every self-respecting Kiwi hippy had a British motorbike of at least 500cc, take the engine apart and reassemble it in five minutes. I was a fast learner and took my 500cc Triumph apart and reassembled it with a few bits and pieces left over – the bike still worked. Now imagine Peter Olds in 1964, still somewhat pre-Hippy era, as a petrol head, buying his first Ford V8 Coupe, naming it ‘Psycho’ and taking his first steady girlfriend out, like in the famous lyrics by Bob Seger:
Out past the cornfields where the woods got heavy
Out in the back seat of my '60 Chevy
Workin' on mysteries without any clues
When they broke up. Peter Olds went to Dunedin after a spell of residential detention for car conversion. His mother sold his V8, and he never owned another car in his life, turning into a true-blue vagabond, eschewing all material comforts, hitchhiking and if necessary travelling by rail and bus. Still the V8 cars stayed in his memory and in 1972 published a collection of his poems entitled V8 Poems.
Working at odd jobs in Dunedin he sees the Rolling Stones in the Town Hall and is driven to write his own songs for his guitar he cannot really play. He gets free lodging (for work in the garden) with an elderly landlady who allows her tenants to bring in girls for the night. Mrs Fisher, the landlady, spent her days reading and smoking. Peter showed her his lyrics, and she pronounced it ‘poems’. Peter Olds comments that ‘that’s where it started’. Turned on to reading he devoured Kerouac’s On the Road as well as books on the blues (Leadbetter) and poetry by Corso, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. Peter was on his way to become a writer, a poet.
A chance meeting with Baxter’s daughter Hilary in a Dunedin café led to an exchange where she asked him if he is a writer seeing him scribbling in his notebook. The exchange that changed his life is recorded as follows (p.37):
Asked if I was a writer – ‘Sort of’, I said. I’m trying to write songs,’ I added hopefully. ‘Oh,’ she smiled, ‘I write poems.’ She was my first poet.
Well, she was his first poet in the flesh. She suggested to show his songs to her father who had been awarded the 1966 Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. They met and became good friends, although in the beginning Peter was in awe of senior Jim (not James) and a bit worried about Jim’s effusive ‘love’ for him, wondering if he might be gay or just mad – deciding on the latter. Nevertheless, it was Jim (James K. Baxter) who encouraged Peter to become a published poet. Jim introduces him to the bohemian artist scene in Dunedin and a young Cilla McQueen wrote years later that she remembered ‘Baxter and Peter playing chess to the bittersweet strains of Dylan’. As a keen chess player myself, I appreciate the brain gymnastics that this game demands – and no doubt is exhibited by Peter Olds in his poems (and of course Baxter’s).
As noted, Hickin here misses the opportunity to write a thematic chapter on Peter’s relationship with Baxter, who as one of the most iconic poets of New Zealand deserves, in my mind at least, a critical evaluation – one that could be explored through Peter Olds’ perceptive eyes. For example, Peter early on is a bit perturbed by Baxter’s efforts to convert him to Catholicism, which sounds like the shortcoming it is, namely Baxter’s rather bizarre road to Jerusalem which many other readers and critics have lauded as some sort of enlightened meeting of the minds, i.e. Baxter and company and Māori and Catholicism. I much prefer the pre-catholic Baxter.
Meanwhile Hickin goes on to tell us about Olds’ further travels and odd jobs, including meeting a couple of potential publishers. Nothing came of it, so his first published poems appeared in a 1967 Otago University student literary review. Entitled The Road is Getting Empty it is a masterpiece with the first ingenious stanza:
I feel the blues it hangs in
A number –
I count the leaves that float
In the gutter -
After some further travails back in Dunedin Peter was encouraged by Baxter to write a play which was staged together with one by Baxter and others. It was reasonably successful, and Baxter praised it beyond reason. A second play written by Peter was not a success. In addition to that a bizarre meeting took place between Peter and a reporter from the right-wing Truth newspaper that produced the headline ‘Dropout Dreamer’s Drift into Drama’ which scandalised not only Peter but the whole Dunedin theatre scene, with the Globe theatre’s director ‘disowning’ Peter Olds.
By 1968 Peter had his first serious attack of anxiety and depression. Baxter found him a doctor who referred him to Cherry Farm, the psychiatric hospital some sixty km north of Dunedin. BTW my wife trained there as a psychiatric nurse in 1979 or so, while I studied at Otago University, and as mentioned before, was published by Peter Olds in the poetry page of the Critic. Peter was subjected to ECT and Chlorpromazine, writing later in a poem of amazing insight (p.48):
Each morning we lined up
to watch the Mandrake
get ripped from her head
by a man named Chlorpromazine …
Having started (but never finished) to train as a psychiatric nurse myself at Carrington Hospital in Auckland where I witnessed ECT and then wrote a report for my supervising teacher – having been given access to Carrington’s subterrain archives – that detailed the clearly punitive application of ECT. Of course, my report was dismissed as the work of a misguided student (who BTW had studied psychology in Germany, so what would a Hun know!).
Then we get another Baxter snippet. Olds had become a voluntary patient and was allowed to go and come as he pleased, and Baxter accosted him with an urgent invitation to join him in his newly discovered Jerusalem. Olds in a later poem refers to this as
There always was something odd about Baxter
And this seemed to confirm it.
Although Olds eventually took up the invitation and travelled to Jerusalem, he resisted Baxter’s nonsensical pull to Catholicism while holding on to Baxter, the great pre-catholic poet-writer-activist, of the sort exemplified in a black-and-white photograph (p.44) showing Olds and friends at an anti-Vietnam War rally in Dunedin in 1967, with Baxter a speaker. Fast forward to Baxter’s death which prompts Olds to write one of the most irreverent, hilarious poems about Hemi Baxter. Olds had missed the burial by a day and on arrival went fishing for eels, catching a big one. Hickin comments that the Māori children at the pā thought it was a taniwha, then introducing the poem by saying that ‘someone else had another idea’ (p.73):
I walked slowly up the brown dry
track to your grave & held it
High over your head, & someone in red hair
& weeping jeans ran from the bushes, screaming –
‘He’s caught Hemi’s cock’ You should
have seen the size of it, mate …
We ate well that night, listening
to the ducks fly over the flat green water.
Really, Roger Hickin should have devoted a whole chapter on the theme Baxter and Olds.
In the meantime, more of his poems were appearing in various poetry magazines, hence his emerging confidence that ‘I’ll always be the poet thing’. Having recovered somewhat from his breakdown, Olds moved back to Auckland. We learn of his adventures there mainly through letters he wrote to his parents. Olds, a bit like Kafka again, was a frequent writer of letters that were preserved by his parents. These often very explicit letters are the more so surprising in that his parents, especially his father, seemed to accept their wayward son’s lifestyle with a certain amount of empathy. For example, he confided in his parents that in Auckland he had shacked up with a married woman ‘I love a married woman and sleep with her. I’ don’t care what the bible says.’ The woman in question, a 20-year-old drug addict who had her four children taken away from her, became Peter’s companion for ‘three torturous years’. Mandrax became their drug of choice (I remember Mandrax being sold in Goa by the fistful for next to nothing). Peter was also busted for Marihuana and sentenced to two years of probation which meant that his probation officer was to direct Peter where to live and work and what medical and psychiatric treatment to undergo. Peter was also ordered not to associate with Baxter for this time. Hard to believe the power of mean-spirited judges and even more so the power of probation officers who wielded God-like oppression over their victims. Olds puts it like this in his poem ‘My probation officer wants …:
talks of his experiences in the army-
I don’t want to know
he wants me to cut my hair
he wants me to stop / writing
he wants me to cut my cock off
and breed flowers …
Wow! Couldn’t have said it better myself, if I may so say so (saith Hone). The ‘saith Hone’ to be explained later, if you don’t already know.
Peter Olds’ life from then on followed the pattern of all of the above – minus any further involvement of the police and courts.
A notable period of his life, four years, was spent in Seacliff (ch.13 of Hickin’s biography). While not particularly creative in term of writing poems, he lived there in an outhouse he slowly converted into a liveable mini cottage; he salvaged his building martials from the nearby abandoned Seacliff psychiatric hospital aka lunatic asylum. He kept chooks, one named Janet after Janet Frame, who had spent from 1945 onwards some 8 years on and off at the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, culminating in her famous novel Owls do Cry and subsequently enjoying a stellar literary career. Peter Olds on the other hand just lived with the ghosts of the asylum, roaming through the ruins at night, hearing the voices of the tortured ones. He grew his own vegetables, made wine from wild elderberries, and to escape ‘geese, magpies and sheep’ he travelled to Dunedin, some 28 km away, by bus or sometimes walked. Walking back home again to his small artist colony, the conservative locals would not give him a lift, Peter wondering if they ‘might still be afraid of escaped lunatics’. The other main artistic lunatics in residence at Seacliff were Bryan Harold and Michael O’Leary. According to Michael, their friendship deteriorated somewhat during that time due to them teasing Peter for his Methodist roots ‘Methodism in his madness’. Hickin credits Olds during his time in Seacliff with a pastoral idiom, comparing him to the Chinese Taoist poet T’ao Ch’ien whose aim was to ‘nurture simplicity among gardens and fields’. Olds was also into Zen quite a bit, absorbing the spirit of the Zen gardens, if not the Zen koans for his poems. Being a bit of a Zen gardener myself in my old age, I appreciate Peter Olds’ ode to the simple life:
Rain on the roof drowns out the radio announcer.
Geese cackle behind the macrocarpa …
Yesterday I made wholemeal bread small rolled
saint-filled chunks – burnt brown crust, tasty with
tomato and cheese eaten (today) with potato soup.
Rain …
Paradise …
Runner beans on the trellis wall on the side of the hut
A new red sleeping bag in the alcove
next to the small black stove
The smell of onions.
Kafka’s father would have called such a life ‘abnormal’. Kafka’s reply at the time was that if his vegetarian life was abnormal then it was alright because the other ‘normal’ life outside was WW1. For WWI we can substitute, today, Gaza, Ukraine, Venezuela and dozens of wars fought in the shadows of the great powers. Kafka, Frame and Olds were the odd ones out, nut cases, lunatics in worlds as normal as ever.
Life after Seacliff followed the ups (writing poems) and downs (not writing poems). Another notable meeting of minds is the one between Peter and Hone Tuwhare, another iconic poet that somewhat eclipsed even the fame of Hemi Baxter. Peter and the elder Hone were good friends and when Hone was going down and out, in his eighties, in a Dunedin rest home, Peter described him thus (p.169):
When I come into your room you’re lying in bed
flat as a flounder with receding groper eyes
protruding from above the lip of the blanket,
& the top of your head crowned (royal-like) with
a woolly balaclava pulled down over your rissoled
boilermaker ears.
To emphasise his debt to Tuwhare, he often inserted ‘saith Hone’ in his notebooks. The photograph that goes with it (p.166) completes the picture, as it were.
In his last years Olds becomes a bit more settled in a council flat up on a hill, the past catching up with him via various old and new flames, these days conducted online if not face to face. With Covid lockdowns looming, he became frailer, surviving several hospitalisations. Roger Hickin remarks that Olds wrote his best poetry later in life but after a stroke in 2020 he was coming to the end of his writing days. There was a flurry to have him recognised as a true-blue Dunedin poet and a plaque was installed in the Octagon that in part read ‘The Laureate of the Marginalised’. While this may be true enough, it sounds a bit patronising as an inscription in a plaque, like a consolation prize, – evoking a feeling of pity (Mother Theresa-like, one that catholic Baxter would have liked) if not disenfranchisement from the real thing. Peter at that stage was not well enough to critically evaluate the inscriptions, just happy that he got one after all – next to the one for Baxter! Olds’ last poetry collection entitled Sheep Truck was published by Cold Hub Press in 2022. The following year Olds died. The poem that gives the collection the name should have been reproduced in the biography as it is the key to Peter Olds’ razor-sharp perception of what New Zealand is all about: poor old sheep who like any New Zealander don’t know they are going to the slaughterhouse. I reproduce the poem here from the Cold Hub Press website:
Sheep Truck
So this is what it’s like being on an aeroplane
in a window seat, having a whole window
to myself, jammed in with all the others
who only have their woolly bums exposed . . .
Here we are up before dawn, loaded, packed
& on our way.
Is this the last I see of my family?
We have no suitcases––
we only have our winter coats . . .
We rip down the runway like a train:
bells ringing, tires screaming.
Faces fly by at a distance . . .
Very quickly we are above the clouds.
The view is spectacular:
First there are rivers,
then, snow-capped mountains.
How high can a sheep truck fly!
I see my lambhood down there
among the crab-apple trees, the apricots.
The banks of the Clutha we loved to play on.
I don’t want this trip to end.
I never thought I’d get the chance to fly in an aeroplane.
I don’t know where we’re going but I know we won’t be back . . .
I’ve got a window seat which is quite rare for a sheep.
They said everything we need for our journey
will be waiting for us when we reach our destination.
We must be getting close, our wheels just touched the runway.
I see trees, shops, traffic lights flash by––
and a sign on a lamppost that says ‘GREAT KING STREET’.
© Peter Olds 2022
Surely one of the best of his ‘Poetry Composing Business’.
As mentioned before, in reference to Hickin’s title ‘Minding his Own Poetry Composing Business’, Peter Olds’ business was not about making money – far from it. So, what is it really for? The satisfaction to see one’s poems published by some publisher who also is not interested in making money, and therefor asks you to apply for a literary grant to support the printing of a hundred copies? To see your poem in a literary magazine, hopefully a fairly reputable one, so as to gain some fame and glory? To be discovered by a real publisher who will sell your poetry book by the millions, to make millions? But isn’t the publishing industry predicated on the capitalist credo whereby demand must be created before supplying the market? And we know how this demand is created by a few movers and shakers in the mainly academic literature business – securing manuscripts for the lowest common denominator and proclaiming it in aggressive advertising campaigns as the ‘best’ of the ‘best’. To send the ‘best’ (and now famous) author on gruelling reading and signing tours around the world? Reinforce the sales via best-seller lists? Even the liberal Guardian engages in this nonsense: ‘the best recent poetry review roundup’ (some sound OK, others rather pathetic) next to the ten best novels, the ten best kitchen knives, the ten best video games, the ten best TV shows, etc. After consulting the best seller lists do the editors of such pages then let their own biases do the rest? A bit of networking, nudge, nudge? Sure, very occasionally the great publishing houses and sought after literary agents hit the jackpot, discovering the genius of a complete unknown, out of left field, as happened to Arundhati Roy (I have reviewed her two novels and will soon do the same for her latest Mother Mary Comes To Me). Maybe I’m just a jealous guy, having collected too many rejection slips? But then again when Peter Olds was the poetry page editor of the extremely famous (world famous in Dunedin) Critic magazine, he chose my poetry submission for publication. How many others were rejected in my favour? Maybe I was the only one who had bothered to submit at that time? It’s all very confusing, especially when one proclaims to be a socialist, anti-capitalist writer. Peter Olds did not worry one way or the other and did get published one way or the other by small, sort of anti-capitalist publishers like Michael O’Leary’s Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop. Peter even got a few literary grants and awards (and a Burns Fellowship) to help the printing of his poetry books. A true poet of the people who walk the streets because they cannot easily afford the bus fare to the library to read a poem or two. Strangely enough, he also had an academic admirer, an English literature lecturer at Otago University – the best of two worlds. The latter no doubt being a considerable bonus in terms of academic recognition. All in all, one wonders how this all works.
Finally, clues may also be in the black-and-white photographs and illustrations that enrich Roger Hickin’s biography. Apart from the iconic cover photograph, I particularly like the Seacliff pics that evoke a precious time gone by. Still, Peter Olds defeated the saying ‘a picture tells a thousand words’ by writing words that painted a thousand pictures. And hopefully, the Guardian will include Peter Olds’ biography in the list of the best of the best for 2026.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/02/the-best-recent-poetry-review-roundup
https://www.coldhubpress.co.nz/sheep-truck-peter-olds-cold-hub-press-----.html
