Hastings A boy's own adventure

‘ If I’ d been asked to vote on it I would’ ve said I’ d landed at the centre of the universe. Standing on our corner of Sylvan Road and Victoria Street, with Te Mata Peak, the Tukituki River and the mad wilderness of Windsor Park to the back of me and the distinctly non-wilderness of Cornwall Park and the misty vista of the Ruahines in front of me, I was the master of all I could barely survey.’ So writes the much-loved painter Dick Frizzell in this charming, big-hearted memoir. It’ s an endearing, and at times hilarious, love letter to his home town, Hastings, and the weirdly innocent world of the 1950s and early 1960s.

Dick Frizzell MNZM is one of New Zealand’ s best-known painters. He studied at the Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury from 1960 to 1963 and then had a long career in advertising. Alongside his career as a painter, Frizzell is also the highly sought-after designer of a range of products from toys to wine. He is the author of Dick Frizzell: The painter (Random House, 2009), It’ s All About the Image (Random House, 2011), Me, According to the History of Art (Massey University Press, 2020), The Sun Is a Star (Massey University Press, 2021) and The Dance of the Hooligans (David

Introduction 8 1 Getting into it 13 2 Putting the map on Hastings 21 3 Shooting fish in a barrel 29 4 Rabbits for beer 35 5 The death of Stiffy Merton 41 6 They tried to tell us we’ re too young 49 7 Richard almost gets a brother 61 8 Flying a kite 67 9 Save the last dance for me 75 10 The Peak 81 11 Breaking the mould 89 12 Ban Irigham 97 13 First of six 103 14 I got a guts ache 111 15 Great balls of fire! 121 16 Mowing Molly’ s lawns 129 17 Tunnelling out of Hastings 139 18 Robinson’ s Dairy 151 19 The naked pie cart 163 20 That bastard boxthorn hedge 171 21 Cannery row 183 22 The Austin Ten-Four Sherborne 193 23 Younger than springtime 203 24 Ain’ t gonna work on McInnes’ s farm no more 211 25 The great park of Windsor 221 26 GJG 233 27 Fifth in line 247 28 Frankenstein is not the monster 257 29 Milkshakes with the devil 265 30 Where’ s the brick? 273