Award-winning journalist and author Steve Braunias has documented one of New Zealand's most sensational trials in his new book Polkinghorne. Photo / Michael Craig
In an exclusive extract from his new book Polkinghorne, award-winning journalist and author Steve Braunias wrote about a photo he believes turned New Zealand hearts against Philip Polkinghorne, and revealed him “a bondage warrior, enjoying every bit of his midlife crisis”.
The High Court of Auckland is a white-turreted castle in the most English corner of town. It’s perched on the intersection of Waterloo Quadrant and Parliament Street, opposite the beautiful arboretum gardens surrounding Old Government House, where Elizabeth Windsor stayed the night in 1953 as the newly crowned Queen of England. Ideally located for the application of English law, it’s a fort of justice, an old pile of bricks spooked by the cries of the dead. It constantly gives me the creeps, but I approached it with a spring in my step and a song in my heart on the opening day of the Polkinghorne trial on Monday 29 July 2024. The news media were set to go gaga. I was eager to contribute some ga.
But I felt a bit abashed. I had only recently vowed to stay away from reporting court trials and made a big deal about it in the introduction of my book The Survivors, ‘the final book in my trilogy of true-crime narratives’, explaining:
I come and go from the High Court of Auckland, and sometimes stay away for months; in the winter of 2023, though, I decided to report on three trials, back to back, two of them about the murder of children, lasting about seven weeks. I overdid it. I started to experience a kind of interference. A kind of static scrambled all the usual signals. I would look at the defendants, look at their families, wonder about their low-life experience, and think: I am way out of my league. I don’t get it. I have no idea who you are and what your lives are like.
Polkinghorne, though, was different. I was nowhere near his earnings league, but we belonged to the same white mass of the New Zealand dream. We were both Kiwis made good from the boring Bay of Plenty — I grew up in Mount Maunganui, he went to Tauranga Boys’ College. We had become members of the indoor proletariat. I looked at the defendant and felt no remove. Neither of us claimed any special intelligence. ‘I was dropped on my head when I was born,’ he casually remarked one day in court. I asked what he meant, and he said, ‘Born stupid.’ It was self-effacing and not to be taken entirely seriously, but he had a point and there was really nothing about him that could reasonably qualify — as the Crown put it, throughout its case against him — as a criminal mastermind.
When we spoke that first day, it was by accident: I was walking out of court looking at my phone and nearly tripped over him. The trial had not yet properly begun. He was sitting at the back of the court where the police usually sit and at first I thought he might be one of the detectives. The fact I didn’t recognise him revealed the fact I hadn’t actually taken much notice of his case before it came to trial. I knew some of the bare details, enough to realise his trial was set to become the biggest gift to legacy news media since Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern gave the industry$50 million during Covid, and I had seen the famous photo of him alongside his wife Pauline Hanna at a social event, but I wasn’t looking at his face in that photo. No one really did. Everyone was staggered by his pants.
The photo was taken by Norrie Montgomery, that great modern chronicler of desperate Aucklanders at play. The occasion was the December 2018 launch of a new range of perfume. Inevitably, the venue was in Parnell. Mr and Mrs Polkinghorne stood together with tall glasses of gin with ice. She wore a fuchsia trouser suit, the jacket over her arm. He wore an alarming pair of red trousers with zips in the legs. They were Significant Pants, the Pants That Changed Everything — New Zealand turned its heart against him as soon as they saw him in these pants, which identified him as a libertine, a bondage warrior, enjoying every bit of his midlife crisis. The most devastating line in ‘Daddy’, Sylvia Plath’s classic poem full of devastations, is when she declares, ‘The villagers never liked you.’ The villagers of New Zealand rose up against Polkinghorne and his kinky red pants and have never stopped shaking their pitchforks.
Yet in person, in court, away from the Significant Pants, Polkinghorne still had an extraordinariness about him. He had beautiful blue eyes and a mischievous smile. He looked a bit like — okay all bald men look alike, and all short bald men are replicants — Dave Dobbyn. He was tiny, a furry little mouse, but without any mousiness; he took his place in the world, he moved with confidence. Also, he found a way to look vivid. He wore lurid socks. He had a new pair every day: socks with pineapples, socks with crescent moons, socks with hoops, socks of every colour. A woman who appeared as a witness at the trial said in court, ‘He’s a man who likes to stand out.’ The socks were like a protest. They were two little rebel flags. He had done nothing wrong; he could dress as he pleased, and it pleased him to dress vivaciously. His son, Taine, also wore mad socks in court, perhaps in tribute to his innocent dad. Taine also sported a motif of his father’s life before his arrest: bow ties. Polkinghorne had worn a different bow tie every day of the week. They were a part of him, as essential as breathing. They were so ubiquitous that his amour, Madison Ashton, had to tell him on the eve of Pauline’s service at Holy Trinity Cathedral in Parnell: ‘Do not wear a fucking bow tie to the funeral.’ She added, ‘Keep the hat.’
News coverage of the funeral, held ten days after Pauline’s death, was the last time I had read or seen anything about the case before it went to trial. I remembered that a lot of bubbles were released from the church when her casket was taken out to the hearse. There was no footage showing whether or not Polkinghorne had worn a fucking bow tie.
Extracted from Polkinghorne: Inside the trial of the century by Steve Braunias. Published by Allen & Unwin Aotearoa New Zealand. RRP $37.99. Out Tuesday July 15.