When Toa Fraser was growing up, Auckland was a place of gangs and bloody brawls. On Auckland Anniversary day he traces his path away from that world and, in a piece for NZ On Screen's newly launched Auckland Collection, asks what the city has become.
When I was a kid growing up in England, Auckland was painted in myth. My dad - Eugene, born in Fiji, raised in Auckland - told us stories that made it a scary, romantic place. Octopuses attached themselves to my uncle's legs as he walked through the sea; men would sit around giant whisky bottles for four days straight; the sand at some beaches was so black you'd burn your feet if you didn't run. Only occasionally, when Dad's mate Allen Guilford - the late, great New Zealand cinematographer - would visit, we'd get a sense that Auckland was a real place, a place of mortals. And even rarer, we'd get a glimpse of Auckland on TV, most memorably during the first World Cup, in '87. I wanted Auckland to look like Michael Jones. Children of Fire Mountain and Worzel Gummidge Down Under made it to our screens over there, too (I can still remember the theme tune to the former).
We moved back to Auckland on the cusp of the 90s (the day TV3 launched, actually: "TV3 come home to the feeling, TV3 come home to the beeeessst ...") It was raining hard as we drove back from the airport, to Mt Roskill, past the power station on White Swan Rd. And it sure didn't feel like a land of coconuts and hula skirts, and it wasn't a City of Sunlight as the 1946 NFU promoted it. Our own idea of the Pacific had become almost as warped as that of Robert Flaherty's, in original "documentary" Moana (1926).
At the time, especially for a teenage boy with a Pacific background, Auckland was all about the gangs: TCGs (Tongan Crypt Gang) and SOS (Sons of Samoa). Names like Principle T were seen on walls all around the streets but the writer never seen. Everybody knew the story of the guy who got killed in a machete attack in Otara.
My cousins were right in the middle of this world, not really loyal to any crew but themselves. They were feared. There were even I HATE THE FRASERS t-shirts at one stage. One of my cousins got me over to his place in Sandringham on one of those early days to do weights. I couldn't lift my arms for a week. Within a few months, and after some brutal scraps, the cops were following me home from the train station.