Full steam ahead for Going West festival

Festival organisers Murray Gray and Naomi McCleary feel sometimes they need their heads read.

The catering is excellent, but when poet Glenn Colquhoun says: "It's where I get fed," he isn't talking cuisine. The Going West Books and Writers Festival hits its 10th anniversary this year, and it remains a labour of love for everyone involved.

Consider the train. On Sunday, September 25, at 9am, 200 people will climb aboard a steam train in downtown Auckland, and spend the day wining and dining their way to Helensville and back, with stops along the way for music, readings and other entertainments.

"Sometimes I just think we need our bloody heads read," laughs Naomi McCleary, who has been running the festival since its inception. "By the end of the day we are shattered. Getting people on and off the train through five stops, wining them, dining them, keeping them moving and some of them do get a bit pissed ..."

"But we've never lost anybody," drawls co-organiser Murray Gray, completely deadpan. "No one has ever fallen off the train."

The train trip is no one-off stunt. Despite an upfront cost of $15,500 for hiring the track and the train itself — "we can't price tickets to cover that cost, but the other events offset it, and we get large amounts of sponsorship" — the train is an annual institution, part of what the festival is about.

"I used to run the Under Silkwood bookshop in Parnell," says Gray. "A customer came in one day who had been reading Maurice Gee's Going West, and she said: 'I'm amazed how well he describes that train trip, because I'm still doing it every day'."

That was in 1993. Gray was already having discussions with his friend Bob Harvey — not yet Waitakere City mayor at that point but gearing up to run, about staging a literary festival out west. He was suddenly struck by the idea that a train trip could be part of it.

"My thought was, wouldn't it be neat to have a whole lot of people on the train and get Maurice to read Going West to us as we went along the lines on a steam engine. And we could get drunk, make loud noises and have fun."

There were any number of hurdles in the way, one of them being the impossibility of hearing someone read over the noise of a steam train. "It turns out," says McCleary dryly, "that trains are really rather noisy."

But she and Gray found solutions. In 1995 the train trip went ahead, as it has every year since, and Gee read from his book when the train stopped at Henderson station — the same station where, as a boy, he had caught the train every day on his way to Avondale College. He rarely appears in public these days, but he has agreed to do it again this year, for the festival's 10th anniversary.

Gee is only one of the internationally acknowledged writers with connections to Waitakere City. Gray was sitting in his bookshop one day in 1993, pondering how to put together a festival that would celebrate all of them, and whether a train trip could in fact be part of the package, when another customer walked in: Naomi McCleary.

"We chatted for a while," says McCleary, "and it came out that we are both Westies."

When Gray told her about his idea for a writers festival, her jaw dropped. "I said: 'Are you serious about this? Because that's my line of work. I've just been employed by the Waitakere Council to produce arts events."'

The two settled down over a drink a few days later and discussed it, and Going West was born.

The train trip is the festival's soul, but its heart is the three-day literary weekend at Titirangi Memorial Hall, which this year runs from Friday to next Sunday. The programme is always an eclectic mix of New Zealand writers and performers — the only limit Gray and McCleary place on themselves is that all events must relate to the word in some way.

Unlike other literary festivals, there is only one venue, and events are scheduled to create a flowing theatrical experience.

"Got to make people laugh, got to make them cry," says Gray. Or as McCleary puts it: "It's literary festival as performance art."

Poet Glenn Colquhoun has been coming to Going West since before he was published, and credits the festival with giving him the final push he needed to put into practice his long-standing desire to write. He says the lack of competing venues within the festival is the programme's greatest strength.

"You might really want to go to someone's talk, and so you turn up a bit early and sit through a couple of things before it, and those are are the ones you really love, because you weren't expecting them. There is always one or two sessions that completely bushwhack me, and I would never have gone to them at any other festival."