When Welby Ings was growing up he was told he couldn’t read. He was told he was thick. So of course he came to believe he was thick. His second book, Invisible Intelligence: Why your child might not be failing, has just been published. He’s a professor of design at the Auckland University of Technology who is also a film-maker, graphic artist, researcher and writer of many academic papers, most on design pedagogy. He built his own house, down to the carved door handles, in the bush in Auckland’s Waitākere Ranges. So, yeah, he must be thick as one of his planks, eh?
You might be forgiven for thinking, at first glance, that his book is a self-help book. And it sort of is. The author portrait on the back is of him with his forefinger to his brow, looking at a sheaf of papers.
After talking to him for a while I thought he might, in that picture, be pretending to be a pseud. He likes tricks. But he says the only cheat is that the snap was taken in 2018. He likes it because it shows him in a moment of being stuck, concentrating on what he should be doing as a director of his film Sparrow. He likes the idea, I think, of a picture of him being stuck on the back of a book about kids getting stuck with labels. Such as thick.
Here’s a conundrum: he has written a book that’s critical of the education system and he is an educator so part of that system. “Yeah, and that’s part of the reason the book has been written. Sometimes I’ve sat in my office and looked out the window and despaired. And sometimes I’ve failed people really badly who were trusting me. And yes, I’m part of something and I am not an ideal, I’m flawed, so I can only try to get it right. That’s why I said the book’s not a manifesto. I think anyone who starts writing a manifesto, you should take 40 paces backwards from them. But to think rationally and compassionately about the strengths and limitations of something, then I think that’s useful.”
We have something in common. We were both booted out of our respective secondary schools. When he was 16, it was suggested to him that he might not return the following year to Te Awamutu College, which is exactly the same thing as being booted out. I tell him that I still haven’t forgiven Otahuhu College. He said: “I haven’t forgiven Te Awamutu College, either. But I also acknowledge that I wasn’t the easiest person to work with. I became a bit of a shit, really.”
Running wild
He was terribly unhappy at school. He resorted to a number of ruses to get out of going. He had found out from his mother, who was learning flower arranging, that if you happen to be allergic to the euphorbia plant it causes blisters. He was allergic to it. He rubbed it over his face and appeared for breakfast looking like he’d had “a full-blown makeover for Dawn of the Dead”.
He did this a few more times before being rumbled by a doctor. For his next school-avoiding trick he decided to put his foot in a gin trap. He didn’t actually trigger the thing, which would have taken his foot off. He wasn’t that thick. He gingerly placed the contraption around said foot – even untriggered, putting your foot in a gin trap hurts like hell. He then proceeded to limp past the kitchen window to bring himself to the attention of his long-suffering parents. His family were still laughing about this failed performance years later.
He was a bit of an oddball kid. His childhood was happy, except for having to go to school. He was able to grow up quite wild. He was given “free rein on the farm”. He liked to collect bits of sheep: “skulls and bones to make these huge skeleton puppets we used to hang from trees on levers and move up and down”.
That sounds faintly sinister. “But it was just the intrigue of how can you use pulleys to make things work? And my parents just accepted it.”
On the family farm in Pukeatua, Waikato, he had a goat he and his siblings liked to load onto the back of the old farm ute. She was named Nell Gwyn, after the comic actress and mistress of Charles II. His dad, Arthur, was a sheep shearer who met his mum, Lois, when she was a rousie, the name for the workers who sweep the fleece away during the shearing. Arthur left school at 12; Lois at 15. In her 60s, Lois graduated with a bachelor of arts. Arthur took up writing New Zealand folk stories.
They were poor and resilient and endlessly positive. Lois made the six kids’ clothes out of sheets. They went to church in their sheet-made Sunday best. Ings says, with fine irony, they were “over-dressed to hell”.
When I asked, later, if he was a bit of an oddball he said: “I would have been off centre, yeah. But in the world of farming, eccentric is okay. But you still have to be very practical.” And you have to learn to get on with your neighbours.
“I remember Dad once said to us, ‘You’ve got to learn to get on with people because some day you’re going to need some help to pull out the tractor.’ And I think it was grounding ‒ that you have to look after other people – and that kind of got mixed in with having an unbridled imagination. I guess you were constantly balancing that and being brought back to firm realities. But they could co-exist.”
He certainly was a funny little boy. He and his mate used to collect Miss Douglas’s menthol fag butts and smoke them in the playground. They thought they were cool. Picking up your teacher’s menthol fag butts could in no way be construed as cool. “I know. But we thought we were.”
His book is for “the equivalent, I guess, of my mum and dad – of people who know and love someone and they’re getting worried [when] they’re getting reports back that something is wrong with their child. But they actually know that the child is bright.”
He didn’t want to adopt a “scholarly tone”. He wanted “to use storytelling as the vehicle”. Where does a writer find stories? In that drawer in your mind where you keep those dusty memories from your childhood. Every so often you have a rummage through it and find yourself back in that playground smoking Miss Douglas’s fag ends.
One thing we learn as dumb kids is that being ‘quietly occupied’ is an acceptable substitute for incompetence.
Here he is in a classroom, fixated on the antics of a wasp climbing up the window. “I was astounded. How, I wondered, could such a creature scale a sheer pane of glass without suckers on its feet? Normally such a distraction wouldn’t have been a problem because one of the things we learn as dumb kids is that being ‘quietly occupied’ is an acceptable substitute for incompetence.” On this occasion, the teacher demanded to know why he was transfixed by the wasp. Before the entrance of the wasp he had been defacing a schoolbook with his HB pencil.
“And in a rush of attempted distraction I broke the cardinal rule of dumb survival. To stop him focusing on the vandalised book, I answered the question, ‘I was wondering if the wasp was an acrobat.’” Cue tittering.
“I don’t really remember what he said. It might have been to ‘stop being silly.’”
The point of telling this story is that Ings had exposed himself as a dodgy thinker to the entire classroom as if he was “sitting stark naked at my wooden desk”. “We have lots of names: eccentric, bizarre, creepy, oddball [I’m guilty as charged], strange, left field – or the graphic metaphor ‘too many toys in the attic’. The trouble is that often, dodgy thinking gets aligned with being silly or naughty and ‘odd’ thinkers can find themselves framed as difficult.”
He writes: “In a world that easily mistakes good behaviour for good character and convergent thinking for intelligence, dumb kids can become problem kids and they get themselves pathologies when they warrant something better.”
You get the sense he is somewhat surprised to find he actually now likes and appreciates that kid who was supposed to be thick and a bit odd. You can’t help but like him and his dodgy thinking, too. He was funny and dreamy and creative and, yes, practical. He still is.
In Invisible Intelligence, he asks readers to examine then describe their own intelligence. Can he describe his? “My ability to solve a problem. So that might be by rational means, or it might be by creative means. It might be by embodied knowing. There can be lots of different ways. But what it means is … knowing what questions to ask.”
Price of love
He is a romantic “in a deep, deep way. Anyone I love, I believe everything they say.” He doesn’t have a partner at the moment. When he does have a partner he is “boringly monogamous. I’m really a C-minus gay man in some ways.” In the house he made, inset into the bathroom door is a stained glass depiction of Ian, his first love, who died around 1986 at the beginning of the Aids epidemic. He made a film, Punch, in which there is a scene loosely based on the story of another great love, Kevin, whose father was a boxer and who was determined that his sons would be boxers, too.
In 1997, Kevin was dying of Aids in a hospice when his estranged father tracked him down. He wanted to say goodbye to his boy but Kevin didn’t want to see him. He did eventually agree to a visit. His father couldn’t bring himself to touch him, such was the stigma of Aids at the time. “So there’s his father by the bed and he’s just sitting there stroking the sheet and he was just quietly crying.” It is a terribly sad story. “It’s a shit of a way to die.” He means from Aids, but he also means to have your estranged father sitting, quietly crying while you’re dying, and not daring to touch you.
Lois is 89 and dying, at home, as her children always promised her. When we spoke he was in South Waikato providing the palliative care he splits with his sister. Arthur died a few years ago. “It’s kind of the price you pay for love in the end. There are the easy bits and then there are the hard bits. But you’re there for all of it.”
His imagination. A school report when he was 11 read, “Fortunately, he is gaining greater control over his unbridled imagination.”
He is now 69. Here is a glimpse into his life of still-unbridled imagination. He sent some pictures of his house. Before being booted from Te Awamutu College, he’d managed to get UE and, after teachers college in Hamilton, became a woodwork teacher. He wanted to work with kids not deemed academic. With woodwork, he says, “You get to think with your body, with your hands. You get to apply embodied intelligence. It’s not a lesser way of knowing … just a different way.”
He bought the 1.6ha bush section about 40 years ago. He got it cheap because it is so steep nobody could figure out how to build on it. He could. “Some of it is wrapped around trees, like tree houses, joined by ramps and then some on poles. It’s very beautiful, but you tend to say it’s idiosyncratic.”
Or you could say his house is an expression of his still joyously unbridled imagination.
Invisible Intelligence: Why your child might not be failing (Otago University Press, $45), is out now.