Read Online Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home by David Cohen - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: David Cohen
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close proximity to privately owned and occupied dwellings. This effectively minimised the “ghetto effect” and stigma of being state tenants.’
Another local history, published as relatively recently as 1990, makes no mention at all of the suburb’s past importance to Maori, much less the thousands of mainly Maori youth who lived at its namesake institution, opting instead to recall a bygone era when Epuni served as a bustling centre of colonial commerce. Here gentlemen of great means and prestige strolled the streets, silhouetted against the blaze of the empire’s sun. Here grateful tradesmen delivered their goods by horse-drawn carts, and an occasional Chinese greengrocer, complete with pigtails, was seenwith his baskets balanced on a pole across his shoulders. Here the children knew where all the birds’ nests were, who grew the tastiest tomatoes, walnuts and fruit, and, the writer marvelled, ‘the settlers were good hearted and industrious citizens’.
Elsewhere in the Hutt Valley intimations of something altogether darker flourished in the mid-1950s, even as the population of the region had nearly doubled to around 8000 in the previous seven years. The problems began on June 20, 1954 when, shortly after her mother and stepfather had reported her as missing, a 15- year-old girl turned up at the Petone police station to file a historic report. Unhappy at home with her stepfather, she told the cops, she had hooked up with a ‘milk bar gang’, whose members met ‘mostly’ for sex purposes at Elbe’s Milk Bar in Lower Hutt’s High Street — jukin’, as the Americans first called it, that rather socially ominous word denoting not only the piece of machinery in which records of the era were played very loudly, but the Gullah dialect of the American South in which juke means both ‘wicked’ (in the same sense as jazz ) and ‘sexual intercourse’.
All of this was naturally viewed with great alarm by a parental generation that had freaked out about every Kiwi manifestation of black American culture since the jitterbug. But now this young girl had become tired of the jukin’, too, worried about the lipstick traces it was leaving; she wanted the police to intercede, and how.
THE AUTHORITIES OBLIGED. PARTICULARLY ENERGISED was one Senior Sergeant Frank Le Fort. A report published at the time in Truth had ‘sources close’ to the crusading cop vowing that there ‘would be no end to the investigation’ of the immoral behaviour radiating out of the Hutt Valley. Eventually, some 65 teenagers involved in sexual misconduct were identified and 107 charges laid. Virtually all of the prosecutions involved consenting individuals, with many relating to trivial offences, such as the caseof the young man who was charged after admitting to touching his girlfriend’s breast. The country was scandalised.
As Le Fort told The New Zealand Herald : ‘These incidents revealed a shocking degree of immoral conduct which spread into sexual orgies perpetuated in private homes during the absence of parents, and in several second-rate Hutt Valley theatres where familiarity between the youths and girls was rife and commonplace.’ Among the revelations were stories of teenage girls wearing make-up , drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, even reading comics.
Down in Canterbury, a saga with purportedly similar overtones involving a couple of teenagers, Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker, unfolded only a couple of days after the ‘Petone incident’. Hulme and Parker, who were arrested and charged with the murder of Parker’s mother, had bashed the older woman to death with a half-brick, each of the girls having taken turns at holding her down by the neck while the other swung the makeshift weapon — 45 times in all.
Worse, almost, the assailants were — in the terminology of the time — abnormally homosexual in their relationship, a fact that seemed to gather some kind of relevance given that neither of the teenaged
Another local history, published as relatively recently as 1990, makes no mention at all of the suburb’s past importance to Maori, much less the thousands of mainly Maori youth who lived at its namesake institution, opting instead to recall a bygone era when Epuni served as a bustling centre of colonial commerce. Here gentlemen of great means and prestige strolled the streets, silhouetted against the blaze of the empire’s sun. Here grateful tradesmen delivered their goods by horse-drawn carts, and an occasional Chinese greengrocer, complete with pigtails, was seenwith his baskets balanced on a pole across his shoulders. Here the children knew where all the birds’ nests were, who grew the tastiest tomatoes, walnuts and fruit, and, the writer marvelled, ‘the settlers were good hearted and industrious citizens’.
Elsewhere in the Hutt Valley intimations of something altogether darker flourished in the mid-1950s, even as the population of the region had nearly doubled to around 8000 in the previous seven years. The problems began on June 20, 1954 when, shortly after her mother and stepfather had reported her as missing, a 15- year-old girl turned up at the Petone police station to file a historic report. Unhappy at home with her stepfather, she told the cops, she had hooked up with a ‘milk bar gang’, whose members met ‘mostly’ for sex purposes at Elbe’s Milk Bar in Lower Hutt’s High Street — jukin’, as the Americans first called it, that rather socially ominous word denoting not only the piece of machinery in which records of the era were played very loudly, but the Gullah dialect of the American South in which juke means both ‘wicked’ (in the same sense as jazz ) and ‘sexual intercourse’.
All of this was naturally viewed with great alarm by a parental generation that had freaked out about every Kiwi manifestation of black American culture since the jitterbug. But now this young girl had become tired of the jukin’, too, worried about the lipstick traces it was leaving; she wanted the police to intercede, and how.
THE AUTHORITIES OBLIGED. PARTICULARLY ENERGISED was one Senior Sergeant Frank Le Fort. A report published at the time in Truth had ‘sources close’ to the crusading cop vowing that there ‘would be no end to the investigation’ of the immoral behaviour radiating out of the Hutt Valley. Eventually, some 65 teenagers involved in sexual misconduct were identified and 107 charges laid. Virtually all of the prosecutions involved consenting individuals, with many relating to trivial offences, such as the caseof the young man who was charged after admitting to touching his girlfriend’s breast. The country was scandalised.
As Le Fort told The New Zealand Herald : ‘These incidents revealed a shocking degree of immoral conduct which spread into sexual orgies perpetuated in private homes during the absence of parents, and in several second-rate Hutt Valley theatres where familiarity between the youths and girls was rife and commonplace.’ Among the revelations were stories of teenage girls wearing make-up , drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, even reading comics.
Down in Canterbury, a saga with purportedly similar overtones involving a couple of teenagers, Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker, unfolded only a couple of days after the ‘Petone incident’. Hulme and Parker, who were arrested and charged with the murder of Parker’s mother, had bashed the older woman to death with a half-brick, each of the girls having taken turns at holding her down by the neck while the other swung the makeshift weapon — 45 times in all.
Worse, almost, the assailants were — in the terminology of the time — abnormally homosexual in their relationship, a fact that seemed to gather some kind of relevance given that neither of the teenaged
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