‘It was like another posting, really’
Pioneering Kiwi journalist Diana Goodman is little known in the homeland she returned to a decade ago.
Pioneering Kiwi journalist Diana Goodman is little known in the homeland she returned to a decade ago.
One of Diana Goodman’s favourite childhood books includes a story of a woman taking on the world and leaving her mark on history. In her small central Auckland apartment, bookshelves dotted with Russian ceramics, along with hundreds of books, Goodman reads aloud an excerpt.
“Joan went forth upon the field of battle. She was clad from head to foot in a suit of shining white armour, and carried a great banner emblazoned with the French lilies in her hand, which waved over her head triumphantly. She was tall, and she rode her charger like a man, as though she had been reared in the saddle, and she could stay from daylight till nightfall upon her horse without a scrap of food.”
The story of Joan of Arc, from My Book of Best Stories from History, retold by Hazel Phillips Hanshew, both frightened and fascinated Goodman as a child and was, she says, a refreshing change from “soppy fairy stories”.
Goodman, born in Christchurch and raised in Gisborne, went on to buck convention, too, entering a male-dominated profession and earning the distinction of being the first woman appointed a foreign correspondent by the BBC. Despite three decades witnessing and reporting on some of the most momentous events of the late-20th century, Goodman, one of our most distinguished journalists, is little known in the land of her birth. She is guest speaker at a dinner in Wellington this month to mark 50 years since the establishment of the Wellington Polytechnic School of Journalism, founded in 1966, and part of Massey University from 2000.
“One chap at a dinner party recently seemed genuinely offended by my accent and said, “Why don’t you f--- off back to England.’”
What brought you back to New Zealand after many years away?
I came home for personal reasons. I had taken early retirement from the BBC but was still working there on contract. My ex-husband, the father of my son Harry, had moved back to New Zealand and had decided to stay. He’s a New Zealander, too – we had met quite by accident in London. Harry was coming up 11, which is a pivotal year in UK education. We would have had to make decisions on possibly moving in order to find an appropriate school, so it seemed the time was right. We came back in 2005, exactly 30 years since I’d left.
Was it hard adjusting to life in New Zealand?
I’ve been back 11 years now, so it is easier, but it was difficult in the beginning. The country had changed enormously in the time I’d been away. I knew too much about where I’d been and not enough about New Zealand – it was like another foreign posting, really. It wasn’t easy for Harry, either. He always says he was a skinny boy with an English accent and Harry Potter glasses and he got endlessly teased for that. When I first went to England, I was 23 and was teased for having
a Kiwi accent. I came back here and still get teased for sounding English. I was in broadcasting for 30 years there, so what else would I have? One chap at a dinner party recently seemed genuinely offended by my accent and said, “Why don’t you f--- off back to England with your f---ing poncy accent.’” Really. I was completely stunned, but he seemed so cross I thought it would be unproductive to take issue with the whole thing.
What was the context?
We were talking about journalism and about RT, the Russian channel, which I call a propaganda channel. Even people who should know better, including him, will tell you in all seriousness it is the only place to get reliable news and that all the news organisations including the BBC are under the thumb of dark forces. I took issue with that in the politest possible way and that was the response.
Are people curious about your experiences?
People have a tendency to not want to know about it. I have learnt, except with close friends, not to say much about my life in those 30 years unless I am specifically asked. Another example was when we were visiting family and we got talking about films we had seen and someone said they had just seen The Lives of Others, the marvellous one about the Stasi, set in East Berlin. They said how much they liked it and I said, “I loved it too and it was especially interesting because I lived in East Berlin for four years, once the wall came down.” It was like dropping a stone into a pond and it just went straight to the bottom. There was no response, not a single question. It is not something that happens only in New Zealand. It must happen everywhere that if you have been somewhere different and done things people haven’t done, it can be interpreted as somehow being boastful when all one
is doing is just talking about life.
What have you enjoyed about your return to New Zealand?
I have a lot more time to read and one of the great pleasures of living in Auckland is the library. I don’t have to buy so many books because the library service here is so wonderful. In terms of work, I decided not to return to news even though it had been my life for 30 years, so I did some freelance journalism, which was great. About three years ago, I decided to start investigating the lives of my six great uncles who were killed in World War I, and my grandfather who survived, and that has been an amazing project. This extraordinary trove of letters was mouldering away under various flights of stairs in boxes. I transcribed them all and sent them to the Auckland
War Memorial Museum.
What was your favourite posting?
Berlin – and I want to go back and spend more time there. The BBC opened a bureau in East Berlin immediately the wall came down. I was working and living in East Berlin, overlooking Checkpoint Charlie; to be there at that time was fantastic. It is odd the way the world turns. I was finishing my posting in Bonn and I had been told my next posting was in the Middle East and I prepared to move to Jerusalem. Then the whole eastern European collapse of communism happened and the Middle East was dead in news terms. It was all on in eastern Europe; German reunification happened faster than anybody could have predicted. I interviewed Angela Merkel a number of times when she had just got into politics. She was shy and quiet, a quantum chemist but with steel inside. Who could have known she would end up the most powerful woman in Europe?
You cite Germaine Greer as an important influence. In what way?
One of the books I got out for this interview was Greer’s The Female Eunuch. I was thinking about books that have had a profound effect on me. When my generation discovered feminism, or women’s lib as we called it, it was 1972 – Greer came to the Auckland Town Hall. We cheered wildly, as she used swear words and was prosecuted. There is a wonderful quote in which she says, “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them”, which was her going overboard and, of course, it should be “some men”, but in the context of Donald Trump, it sums him up. Her visit and her book gave us fire in our bellies. At the age of 20, I realised feminism means equality. All the other stuff that has been loaded onto feminism, mostly by its opponents, means nothing. It is about equality for women in political, economic and social terms. I find it extraordinary it is still being argued about 45 years since I embraced it.
Do you think women approach reporting stories differently from their male counterparts? I’m thinking of your From Our Own Correspondent Russian orphanage report.
Did my decision to cover that subject have anything to do with being a woman? No, it was a good story that needed to be covered. Did I approach it differently because I was a woman? Possibly. Did I write it differently because I was a mother? Certainly. When you go home after something so shocking, heartbreaking, distressing – children with no chance of being helped – I wrote in
“Feminism is about equality for women in political, economic and social terms. I find it extraordinary it is still being argued about.”
that piece that I went home and sat by my son’s bed and wept. It still makes me want to cry thinking about those children. How different my son’s life is from the way their lives will have been. When considering if women write differently from men, perhaps being a parent is what makes the difference. I think about Fergal Keane’s broadcast, which became the book Letter to Daniel, and that proviso also applies to fathers. Keane said the birth of his son had “turned him upside down and inside out”. After a life lived close to the edge as a war correspondent, he now wondered how he could ever have thought that “glory and prizes and praise were sweeter than life”. So, to me, the choice of stories has less to do with gender than individual experiences.
Where do you get your news?
The internet. I read the English papers every day – the Guardian and Telegraph if I can get through the paywall. The Independent a bit less so because it has such a dreadful website. The Economist, too, but main daily sources are the Guardian and New York Times. I read all the usual weeklies or monthlies, such as the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, Vogue, the Columbia Journalism Review and the Spectator, even though it doesn’t reflect my politics. It is compulsive reading. Also, you need to know what everybody is thinking, and as journalists we are more open than the wider audience to getting information from everywhere. The internet is vital for me. It would have been much harder to come back 15 or 20 years ago without it. I listen to a lot of BBC radio and I read the BBC news website. I listen to Desert Island Discs and I watch Channel 4 News.
Any local media?
Well, the Herald is unreadable, but I do read the Listener. I don’t have a TV because it broke and I couldn’t be bothered with a new one because I was watching programmes online. Sometimes I think I should watch the evening news and I do online. I watch other programmes ondemand including on Maori TV. The thing about the internet is we can all read and see so much. Journalists want to hear voices from all over, but one of the distressing things about the new media climate is that all the research shows that people don’t seek out new and interesting sources, but ones with which they agree. So news consumption is more limited than it would have been before the internet. They are only selecting websites that reinforce what they believe.
What books have you been reading recently?
I reread Anna Karenina (by
Leo Tolstoy) because I was travelling and I searched among the classics on my Kindle. I’d forgotten how gripping it is. Reading it on a Kindle was perfect because it was much easier to flick quickly through some of the long passages on 19th-century Russian agriculture. I think Anna Karenina is one of the greatest heroines in literature. It’s a story that is, of course, about love but it is also about fate and about one’s ability – or inability – to resist temptation or to predict the possible consequences. At the same time, I was reading Eligible, Curtis Sittenfeld’s updated version of Pride and Prejudice, which is just as silly as the original, and I thought, why would anyone read Jane Austen when they could choose Anna Karenina?
I feel a bit like Mark Twain, who wrote: “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her [Austen] up and beat her over the skull with her own shin bone.” Other books I have read recently that have stayed with me include Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which he gives advice to his son about how to live with the reality of being born into a black body, and the extraordinary Anatomy of a Soldier, by Harry Parker, which tells the story of a British officer injured in Afghanistan via 45 different objects: his helmet, his rifle, a bag of fertiliser, a tourniquet … Also memorable were A
Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, about four men who meet at university and what happens in the years that follow – it is quite disturbing in its depiction of sexual abuse and the suffering it causes, although the overriding theme is friendship; and All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski, about a wealthy family at the end of World War II whose inability to accept that the Russians are coming leads to tragedy. Other authors I particularly like are Marilynne Robinson, Geraldine Brooks, Christopher Hitchens, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Greg McGee and Patricia Grace.
“I have always been conscious that as well as interviewing important people, you are also giving a voice to people without one.”
You received an honorary PhD in May and spoke at the graduation ceremony at Massey University. What was your message?
In terms of the journalists, it was stand up for your craft. Don’t listen to nonsense such as “journalists don’t tell the truth” and “news organisations are under the influence of malign outside forces”. Realise that you have to work incredibly hard if you are aiming for the top and that means making sacrifices in your personal life. Recognise the essential role of journalism in democracy and use it wisely. I have always been conscious that as well as interviewing important people, you are also giving a voice to people without one. People will tell their stories, they love to, so you are not intruding even in disaster or conflict. Listen carefully to answers, and be aware that “why” can be a pivotal follow-up question. Journalists are criticised for going in and asking people to tell what has happened, but in my experience people want to talk. It gives weight to their own experience. I also say to journalists starting out have compassion. I don’t mean be soft, but have compassion in the way you treat people and the stories that you choose.