THE library BOOK UNFOLDEd:
AN INTERVIEW WITH BEN BROWN
transcript

Robin (Intro)
Instead of an audio essay, in this episode, I speak with somebody (!) and the person that I speak with is Ben Brown from Lyttlton in Aotearoa New Zealand, especially to share his insights on library books and books produced by, as well as for, communities of people. Ben was the inaugural Te Awhi-Rito New Zealand Reading Ambassador for children and young people, and he is someone who is steeped in book culture, and so is his family. His daughter, Sophie Taylor Brown, is now an emerging writer. Ben himself is a poet and author. An updated edition of his memoir, A Fish in the Swim of the World, was published by Penguin in 2022. Ben’s also written many books for children, including the acclaimed A Booming in the Night, and he's also served as the editor for an anthology of Young People's poetry from a workshop he ran at an Oranga Tamariki Youth Justice Residence, which we talk about later in our conversation 

Radio New Zealand has two recorded talks delivered by Ben, online. One is the Margaret Mahy Memorial Lecture, where he addressed the power of imagination and its deep roots in te ao Māori, and the other is a Pānui on youth justice and the power of words. I will link to these in the show notes, as well as to a diagram of harakeke leaves, where you can see what Ben is describing when he talks about its importance as a symbol. The illustration for this episode is also of harakeke.  

Ben is someone who cares about public access to books and book-making, and about books for young people as well as adults. In his memoir, he explains how, and perhaps why, 19th century Māori literacy rates, which were higher than rates among European descended settlers —called Pākehā—dropped in the 20th century. Something he touches on in our conversation too. His rich knowledge of history, of language, and of a real variety of traditional and emerging modes of storytelling make him a fascinating person to speak with on the subject of books and storytelling, and that is why he is the very first person I reached out to for this series.  

I will now share the conversation I had with Ben over zoom, on a crisp autumn day for me and a warm spring day for him (this is edited down from our longer talk). I am incredibly grateful to Ben for his generosity and insight, and I'll get right to that conversation now.  

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Robin
We're so far away from each other that you're in a different day and a different s[eason], but I think we're within walking distance to the same ocean, right? I'm just near the — 

Ben Brown
Pacific? 

Robin
Pacific.

Ben
Oh nice—

Robin
And are you in Lyttlton right now? 

Ben
Yeah, I am. I’m in the Lyttleton Library. They’ve got a meeting room here that I quite like. I quite like working down here.  

Robin
That's really nice. I'm glad you're in a library. That seems like a good place to be for our conversation. 

Ben
Ohh yeah yeah. Totally. I mean, yeah, I mean, I like being around books, you know? 

Robin
Are you near the tobacco farm where you were raised? 

Ben
I'm about....I'm about 500K South. 

Robin
Oh, so that's pretty far ! 

Ben
I grew up at the top of the South Island in the Nelson Region and it's a very pretty part of the world.... 

I made a speech in Auckland and I said, “You know, from where I'm standing, I'm a good musket shot away from the guy that declared war on my people, just down the road. We were at the bottom of the hill where the National Library in Aukland is. At the top of that Hill was Auckland University. And the area that I could see was Old Government House, which was where Governor Grey signed off on the invasion at Waikato which is just down the road.” I had that realisation, and I thought, “Well, we've come a long way, you know?" I'm a descendant of that tribe and I'm representing the desire to read and be literate.

Māori were exposed to the Latin alphabet in 1814 by a missionary in the far north, 25 years later they signed a treaty. By 1860, Māori per capita were more literate than Pākehā in New Zealand. And then by 1930, they turned away. They— “Nah We're not gonna engage with that”. Māori got literate so fast, and I believe there's a couple of reasons for that. One is that the language, te reo, — is — it's a taonga — and it carries your mana. It's very, very sacred. It's regarded as sacred and that's why you don't interrupt the speaker. Because their mana is carried on their words. Their words are ephemeral. So you sift it for meaning, you want to experience every bit of it before it disappears. And then along comes a missionary and shows them how they can take that ephemeral thing and they can record it. See Māori is a syllabic language so the missionaries came up with a clever little song, and it was “ha ka ma na pa ra wa ta wha nga" and then the e vowel. Every Māori word is expressed as a syllable it's like “a, e, i, o, u” and 10 consonants. Now, when a missionary sits down to a young Māori and he says now, “ha,” that's how you make this sound, what a Māori hears is he hears a hugely important, potent spiritual word. He hears “the breath”. And he hears an essence. And the word after that is “ka”. “Ka” is an article that determines the verb’s gonna follow. And those two words together “haka”. That's a a form of dance that celebrates life, or death, or a whole bunch of things. So Māori hear fully formed words. Missionary thinks he's teaching a Māori how to make symbols. Māori's going, "Oh my God.” And in the first 10 seconds they've heard some of the most profound spiritual concepts that exist in their culture. And they understand the implication of being able to write it down and record it. I can write the word mana and all of a sudden that mana, that spiritual authority, that I possessed as a kind of an energy and can emit — now I can write it down and I can record it. 1000 years ago, my descendants will know what I thought in that moment, on that day. And it's there. And it's like— so Māori looked at that and they thought, “It's powerful.” If I commit my mana to a document that records it you're not gonna mess with that ‘cause it's your mana, you know. In the Māori world, the worst thing you could do would be to disparage or somehow diminish your mana, because it was never yours. It came to you from your ancestors. Your job is at least to maintain it. If you can you want to add to its luster by the way you conduct yourself and your life, so it's a good ...it's not a bad guide to life and just think to yourself, “I'm responsible for this mana. The very least I gotta do is pass it on in the same state.” You can add to your mana or you can diminish your mana. So you kind of wanna lead a good life. Conduct yourself with a good character and honest conduct and manaaki. Looking after your friends and your whanau, and making right decisions and being loyal. You know, they're kind of good, solid old-school beliefs. If you do that, you'll at least maintain your mana. 

Robin
That reminds me of something that you said in one of your talks about mana. You said, “the potential for absolute mana that is the collective power and authority of humanity.” 

Ben
Yeah, totally. 

Robin
I was speaking to a class, maybe about a week ago, and they were talking about information, feeling [it was] potentially something that would leave them out. To not be ‘in the know’ is somehow to be left behind, to not be in the know — to not know what other people know — and so there is a an insecurity that comes out of that sense of very fast-paced information that's coming along. And maybe you missed something. But what you're talking about is a way in which people are sharing that knowledge, and it just seems to me so connected to your work. Not only with books, but also with the idea of a Public Library. 

Ben
In New Zealand, it is the most democratic institution, I think, that exists. It's free and it is adamantly free. They had one go at making the library user-paid. The 1st library in New Zealand opened in 1846 and it was closed three months later because no one paid the subs. And it wasn't until the Wellington City Council in the late 1880s opened the Public Library with the idea of free access to all the information that you need to know to get by in society, you know? To understand where you're at and what's going on. Libraries here are changing. The space is changing, they’re big, they’re open, they’re airy, they're modern. 

They have other facilities there. There's so many ways to transmit information and stories and knowledge and creativity and imagination now. They'll give you as much access to it as they can. Especially the big central libraries. And librarians are just awesome, cool people, you know? They they've always had … to me they've always had a mystique and I remember Mrs. Beaton in the Motueka Library when I signed up and…So dad’s G.A. Brown and I'm D.B. Brown. So my card went behind his card and Mrs. Beaton would turn around and you know, “Don’t talk too loudly,” Because I used to get excited [makes excited kid sound] “and don’t run around.” Libraries aren't like that anymore. They’re these big, open, airy places. And there’s areas in the library, the mainl one in town, an unspoken kind of agreement that that’s where the homeless people go when it's cold, you know, they they hang out by the stairs. They don't bug people and people don't bug them. It's just, it's just a cool thing to see. And still every now and then you'll get some little wanker going [grumbling sound] [saying], “someone's gotta pay for all these books!” Well, yeah, it's the price of having an informed society. You don’t want a paranoid society, you want an informed one. You do your society a credit when you inform them. 

Robin
You touched on something just now that I hadn't actually thought about, but the library card for a lot of people is their first ID. Like it's the first…it's the first— I think that was my first ID, I mean other than the birth certificate. It's the first one that you have some agency over, like maybe you sign it, or in some way— [laughs]

Ben
When I got my driver's license, I was 15 — 1977 — and I'd done my test. You could get your driver’s license in a week in 1977, and I couldn't find my birth certificate and mum says, “Take your Plunket book.” Every child in New Zealand has a Plunket book and it's got your date of birth, the time of birth, the weight you were. But I was like, “Mom, I gotta go to the police and I gotta give him my birth certificate. And I'm gonna give him my Plunket book?” She said, “Take the Plunket book.” [laughter] And I did my driving test and the tradition was is if you passed your driving test, the cop would look at you and go, “You passed.” And you’d give him your birth certificate. And so I got here and he said, “Well, you passed.” And I gave him my Plunket book and he looked at it and he went, “That’s your Plunket book.” I went, “Mum told me to bring it.” And he looked at it and he went, “Baby Brown. 3rd of July, 1962. Alright, come on.” [laughter] And he gave me my driver’s licence on my Plunket book. Which is kind of cool and the other one would have been my library card, which was five years old at that point. 

Robin
So, I read that the name of your role as a Reading Ambassador, which I think is Te Awhi-a Rito?

Ben
Te Awhi Rito, yeah

Robin 
Uh — thank-you — comes from the mature leaves of the harakeke plant. And it refers to the tougher leaves that protect the young shoot at the plant’s center— 

Ben
If you imagine a juvenile harakeke as a plant that kind of looks like that [shows hand with branching out] … there’s a hand of leaves and there's a little centre shoot, that's the rito. So a rito is a juvenile shoot of any plant. So the rito, you consider that a child. The two leaves outside the rito are called mātua leaves. Mātua in Māori is “parents”, so they’re parent leaves. The two leaves outside them, they’re called komātua, so they’re grandparents and all the leaves outside the grandparents are called tupuna leaves. So they’re ancestors. That's the metaphor for strength and your whānau. You have your ancestors and everyone’s leaning in to to to nurture. And so to “awhi”, is an embracing hug. So te awhi rito is to hug and embrace and protect and nurture the child. And so that’s Te Awhi Rito and that's the metaphorical title for the Reading Ambassador. The Ambassador represents the National Library— this just wrap-around group of people who, over the last 20 to 25 years have identified issues with reading and literacy that they think needs to be addressed going forwards. Now in traditional Māori society or te ao Māori, the harakeke plant, that's the weavers’ domain. The weaving domain in Māori is called te whare pora. So “whare” is “the house”, “pora is weaving”, it’s the communal activity of weaving. In the old days bigger more settled or established pā — or villages — would have had a whare pora, but it's as much a state of mind as a place. It encompasses all of the knowledge that comes with weaving. In te whare pora the atua — or the god — whose domain that is, is a woman, and her name is Hineteiwaiwa, and she is the goddess of weaving, she's the goddess of midwifery — she’s childbirth — and she's also the goddess of the transfer of knowledge by oral tradition. And that is because there's so much tradition that goes into weaving and the reason for that is that weaving and that— and the harakeke plant made colonisation in Aotearoa for Māori viable. It held their houses together. It held their waka together it clothed them, fed them, caught their fish. You know, it was— if they didn't have harakeke in, you know, there's no fishing lines, there's no nets. There's no viable long term colonial ability for them. And the plant itself, when you observe it the way it grows, its utility, its robustness, and Māori are a very metaphorical people. Their sort of approach to things is to observe and kind of be guided by it. There's a lot of traditions that go with the harakeke and they're mostly to do with weaving. 

Robin
The weaving metaphor is something that came up many times and in different ways, and sometimes literally when you talked about your mother actually weaving with the harakeke leaf fibers. And the more that you're speaking, the more that I'm hearing a desire to create some sort of coherent, shared body of knowledge, something that everybody has access to. 

Ben
Generally a Māori name is short for a bigger thing. There's these little metaphors that will allude to a story. And so, what you find in traditional place names, is another little body of knowledge wrapped up in stories. And those stories, we call them threads, you know, like...it's a bit like text messages. There’re threads or a thread is a weave and again it is the harakeke metaphor. Now, oratory on the marae it’s a high art form, you’ll spend your whole life becoming a good orator and understanding the real intricacies of the language and its metaphorical weight. When you're speaking, your words carry your mana, and your mana is like your spiritual authority. The “tuiā — tui — tuiā” expression, now that little construct what we call a tauparapara and a tauparapara is like an oratorical flourish. “Tuiā” is again, it's a metaphor from the harakeke and it is “to thread”. So tuiā goes this way, it's a linear thing. And there's a raranga. “Raranga” is a weave. It's a flat weave. So when you're making a mat — you know criss-cross? — that’s raranga. Tuiā brings things together, raranga weaves things together. So the name for a chief in Māori is rangatira. Ranga comes from raranga. “Tira” is “together”, so a rangatira is an individual who draws people together. That’s a rangatira. And it’s a weaving metaphor. A “rangatahi” is a Māori word for like an adolescent youth. The allusion is that you're a rangatira in training or a rangatahi. And all of these metaphors are metaphors of unity.

You look at a harakeke bush itself, a harake, they repeat the habit of the te awhi rito, and they grow out and out and out and the idea is that the more of that you have: awhi, awhi, awhi, awhi, lots of embracing hugs and it’s all about unity. So there's a constant reinforcement where then the weaving philosophy that underscores the importance of unity, of together, of whānau, that's the underlying driver. So “tuia te hā”, that's “threading the breath” — “ha” is “breath” or “voice”. “Tuia te kupu”, so “threading the word.” “Tuia te kōrero”. Tuia te hā, tuia te kupu, tui te kōrero: the breath, and you might say, the thought which precedes the breath, and gives you the word; the word which together combined with other words will give you “kōrero” — “the story”. And tāu te māramatanga — with the breath, with the word, with the story— tāu te māramatanga. “Tāu” is “for you”, and “māramatanga” is like, “to be made bright, or to illuminate, or to understand”. Threading the breath, threading the word, threading the story. Yours to understand. “Tihei mauri ora”. It's the whakapapa of a kōrero, of a story. And so that's a brief little tauparapara that can introduce pretty much any speech. 

Robin
A lot of what you're talking about to me sounds like the way that we're sort of managing a lot of cultural shifts at the same time. 

Ben
The very first question I was asked by a reporter when I got the role [of Reading Ambassador]. Her name is Claudette Hauiti at Radio Waatea here — so they're Māori station from the— and they are first and foremost there for Māori issues and a Māori perspective — and it was, “Ben, as a descendant from an oral Indigenous tradition, how do you reconcile being a Reading Ambassador?” And she put weight on that word “reconcile”, and I was like, “Well, Claudette, you just redefine what reading is.” It was the best question I've ever been asked and I thought, “Actually, that's what you're doing. You redefine what reading is.” Because we're constantly doing that anyway. Geez, when I was going to school, machines couldn't read [laughs] and now apparently they can. I mean, I don't know that they can process it and and kind of get emotional over it or anything else, but they can certainly decipher it and pump out something. And with that, it leads on to the idea that an oral tradition has validity. Māori have a very structured and — I don't want to say formal, but it kind it kind of is — there is a way that you tell a story is. Our whole body of knowledge is in an oral form. And so there's a way that you create and deliver that body of knowledge. And to my mind if you're listening to it carefully, if you’re in the forum of the wharae and you're being told stories in a traditional way, your brain's kind of doing the same thing as it does when it looks at a page with some symbols on it and builds a whole world of meaning out of that. Your brain has to do the work, which is the bit that I think everyone seems to be deep down worried about is that all these critical skills that we assume we get from this deep and understanding knowledge of reading and what we get out of a good basis in reading, we can get in other ways. I find that a compelling argument. I know if you go the far north, school trips up there, and they’re predominantly Māoris. They’re poorer schools. They have, according to the curriculum, reasonably kind of lower success rates and a lot of those kids struggle with the written, literate-based workflow. It's just not in their world. But they can tell you on which tide to catch which fish with which bait and and they can give you the stars, they can give you a whole kind of…. They know exactly what's going on in their environment around them. They know why, they know which bird's gonna arive from which— you know, they’re just down with it because they've taken on board this vast body of knowledge and they understand the relationships between all the different aspects of it. In the not too distant future, that kind of knowledge might be completely relevant in the world. It might take some dude, I don't know, a couple of postgraduate degrees and 10 years at university to acquire the same kind of instinctive-based understanding of what's going on around them. 

Robin
It's a deep knowledge. 

Ben
Totally. And it's… I mean the maramataka here now is the big thing. Maramataka is the body of knowledge concerned with the moon and its phases. Māori had a lunar calendar. This year was the 2nd year that we celebrated matariki. The matariki is the Māori New Year and it it floats from about May to early July. And it's the rising of the the Pleiades and it rises just before dawn, late July, July the 14th, and there's a whole bunch of little things that you— you’ve got to take the particular phase of the particular moon month — which is piperi — and it bases itself on the rising and setting of different stars and every day of the lunar month, there's an instruction that goes with what happens that day so you can live according to the maramataka. So there are auspicious days and there's days when you don't go to meetings, unless you wanna be grumpy. And there's all, you know, days when it's good to plant, days when it's good to gather wood, days when it's great for fishing, days when it's better off staying home and hanging out with the whānau and doing all these things. I became really intrigued, I thought, “Bugger it, I'm going to start living by that thing.” So you know, every second month, I would see what the maramataka was and — and just kind of conduct yourself according to it. And you realise that a lot of Indigenous cultures and the way they operate, it’s just things that get couched and wrapped up in rituals and that — it's just kind of — all they're doing is living with the environment and what's going on around them rather than plotting down a kind of a modern industrialized western way of doing something and just saying, “Well, spring starts September 1st, so go plant your crop,” and lock everything into a 40-hour week and boom-boom-boom it’s all very regimented. Yeah, we can, we can broaden the idea of reading— 

Having said that, you can't really get past the object of a book. There's not many things that function that well and still do the job as a book. It's an engaging object. You kind of trust that book to be authoritative, knowledgeable, there’s a basis that comes with it and it's it's a foundation that has we what we would call whakapapa: layers and layers of just pedigree, you know? We tend to trust that old-school volume sitting on a shelf more than we trust this thing, because the internet's only been around since like 1995, worldwide web, this thing's been around for 45 years. No one really trusts it. You know? We could get a story that’ll change its ending 10 times by the end of the day. So the book hasn't quite gone away in terms of relevance and authority. I don't think. It's just that if I went out there now and asked a classroom of thirty 16-year-olds, “How many of you read a book as a generally accepted practice?” I'd be lucky to get half, I'd be lucky to get half. And to me, the general rule is, if kids come out of a reading home, they're probably going to read, and they're probably going to value books and cherish them. And if they don't, it's a hard ask for them to get into it. Though not always impossible. 

Generally speaking, we look at kids with their devices and [say —grumbling noises], “They're just playing games, just doing this—” But when I sit in a classroom with say 15-, 16-, 17-year olds, I get the impression that they have and instinctively— kind of a better understanding of what the technological future is going to look like than we do. I was sitting in a class with some fifth–formers [14–15 year-old high school students] last section of the day. We were talking about poetry and all this and there were these two guys sitting right next to me and they were sending code to each other. They were coders and my son is a coder, so I recognized what was on their screen and it was a little Python program. And I just happened to quip, I said, “Oh, that's Python.” That impressed them mightily because they’re like, “Huh? How do you know Python?” And I said, “I know about code. It's a bit like poetry.” We had an interesting little conversation about it, and I showed them a little piece of code that I've got in a play and — I think I mentioned to you a play? — there was a piece of code in it that my son wrote for me. It's a specific commentary in the play. I produced this app that has no real utility except to give you a random yes or no answer. The idea is that if you’re — if you're ever at a loss to make a major decision in your life and you want a yes or no, you just hit the app and it will give you a randomly generated yes or no — or a maybe! [laughs] And so it appears as a line in this play. But it was like— they have an instinctively better understanding of what I think their needs might be. So I do wonder if some of our fears are— I'm not going to say they're unfounded, but kids just read differently. 

Robin
I've had that impression when I'm listening to you talk about it, that you, because I listened to your— you did an interview with Radio New Zealand, I think it was with Katherine Ryan — and both of you expressed a feeling which I have too, which is a kind of combination of some concern, but also a sense of well, “This is new te—…like this is new territory, maybe this is—…” You don’t want to get in the way of new literacies developing, but you're also wanting to shore up a literacy that's been important to you and, well, to me also. 

Ben
Totally

Robin
You were invited to deliver the annual Read New Zealand Te Pou Muramura Pānui — which is like a lecture — and it was to be on something that's close to your heart. And you spoke about your time editing the book How Did I Get Here, which is a collection of poetry and writing produced— 

Ben
It’s actually How the F Did I Get Here?

Robin
OK [laughs] How the F Did I Get Here? It's a collection of poetry and writing produced from a writing workshop that you led at a Youth Justice facility in 2020. And what you've said to me now gives me a little bit more context for that in terms of connecting young people to their identity, to themselves. 

Ben
Yeah, totally

Robin
Can you talk a little bit about that? There was a specific thing that I had a question about, which was [that] in your talk, you had said that you knew that you wanted to have a book at the end of the project: “something to add to the great library of the world.” So I just wanted to ask you about that time, and why it was important to make it into a book. 

Ben
Read New Zealand Te Pou Muramura is a non governmental organisation that used to be the Book Council, so they're responsible for out-of industry, and out-of government, promotion of literacy and reading. And they run the Writers in Schools program. And I've been in the Writers in Schools program for like 20 years. And as part of that program, they asked me would I like to go and deliver a writing program on behalf of this other organization called Arts Access Aotearoa, who put creatives into correctional facilities as a means of doing a look at another alternative option when they get out, and also as a means of, kind of, you know, using art as a means of searching their soul, looking at their own predicament, you know, what I mean? So that how. I was asked to come up with a program that would take a writing program into a Youth Correctional Facility. 

The outcome had to be the production of a publishable object. And the examples that were given were like a poster or some cards or whatever. And in my head I'm thinking, “The top of the publishing object tree is a book.” Because the other outcome was that at the end of that course you would produce two each for each— and I'm like, “That's not real,” you know, it gives them a card that they could make in 10 minutes, or a poster that’s like, “ehn [dismissive sound]. They don't care. But you give them two books that are 89 pages, three editions. It's still in print. First publisher I went to said, “Hell yeah, we'll have that.” You know, you just have a hunch, “Surely a publisher would want this?” I would. Bang, I'd be out there. It’s gnarly, it's confronting, but some of it's quite artful and these guys, once they understood that I was serious, they got serious. It was great.

In the youth facilities they call the staff “staff”. In corrections, you're a prisoner and staff are like “screws”, “guards”. It's just a different thing. They still have their humanity left intact, more or less. But every crime you’ll find in that place, you'll find in a prison. There’s murderers, rapists, extortionists, hardcore gangsters, drugs. But they're just young and most of them understand that, through no fault of their own, they're born into context of deprivation, property disadvantage, behavioural issues— the gamut, you know. Most of them are Māori. But the narrative they're getting all their life doesn't come from them. It's this imposed narrative that says you're probably gonna fail. You're probably gonna flunk out. And so part of this writing program is trying to get them to understand that the narrative they've been kicking against isn't their narrative. And that while it's not OK to go around pointing shotguns at people and scaring the crap out of people and all of that, take some knowledge from the idea that part of why you are where you are is because the narrative that you've been put into isn't of yours. So if you can start finding out what your narrative is, it's gonna give you a better chance of navigating your way out of the shoals, you know? It just gives them a different starting point, and it makes them understand that actually their story is worth telling. Or knowing. Some of them don't even know what their story is. It was just a nice way to introduce that whole concept to them and to make them part of this thing: like a book. 

8 minutes of that book was turned into an animated film and put in a Film Festival a year later. And that really blew— it blew me away. Every youth court judge in Wellington, every youth court lawyer has got a copy of that book. I've been to bloody probation offices 300 miles away and the book’s sitting on their bloody table. I mean, it's— I'm proud for them that that happened. For me, it's the idea that this object that has this huge tradition. It carries mana, you know. 

Robin
I really like the way that you're talking about it as a group project that individually gives people a sense of themselves. 

Ben
Yeah

Robin
There was another aspect of the book that I thought was really interesting, which is it’s not typographic, right? It contained their handwriting?

Ben
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of that stuff it so emphasizes what they're talking about, you know. It's in this scrawl. There's one word — I wish I could remember what the word is — and he spelled it differently every time, but it kind of fits. 

Robin
There was a word— he mixed slave and saviour: slaviour. 

Ben
Ah yeah, yeah, yeah a slaviour. A slaviour, yeah. A slaviour. Ah, I read that and I’m like, “That's a killer word.” A slaviour. Some of them— they're really witty. A lot of the street style, like, rappers and those dudes. I mean, the name of the lecture was “If Nobody Listens Then No One Will Know.” And that came out of a rap. He [this youth cannot be identified by his full name legally; his first name is Andre] was 15 when he wrote it.

I guess you reveal to them their potential and the rest is up to them.

Robin 
It sounds like part of what you're doing is suggesting that there might be other perspectives, even other perspectives within them that they might not yet be aware of. The idea of book as a mirror or book as a route to self-knowledge is such a key part of publishing history. 

Ben
Ah, hell, yeah. And the idea, especially for a crew like that that, “Geez, I can be a part of this thing.” That work’s gonna survive you, you know. It'll be archived somewhere and 100 years from now, your bloody great, great grandkids’ll be able to go out and find it if they want, or it will be online. 

Robin
Yeah. Yeah, that's [true], I hadn't thought about that part. 

Ben
So like, “For real?” Yeah, there’a copy of that book in the Library of Congress. 

Robin
Yeah. How do you work within all these pre-existing systems? Like once a system is in place, that system can be really difficult to navigate with humanity. 

Ben
Yeah, I mean, so the format for the programs is this: you go in, you've got four 1-hour sessions every day for four days. You gotta be fast. You gotta be efficient. But you need to stimulate them. So you go in, you sit down, and have a kōrero. Sit around in a group. We're gonna talk for 10 minutes. On the first day we would talk about “how do I want to be remembered when I die.” And the second day was the system: “give me a simple definition of what a system is,” and I've never heard better definitions, in a simple way, than out of those places. “A system is a process. You put something in on one end and something else comes out of the other.” Boom. OK. How many systems do you live in? And they start getting into it. They go, “Here’s a system.” “Yeah, yeah, yeah— Is there any other system?” And they soon discover that there are way more systems than they even imagined. And systems within systems. And some of the best, most thoughtful writing I had was when they sit down and they think about all the various systems that have impacted in their life and it can be intimidating for them but it puts things into perspective for them. 

I used an example once with the English Teachers Conference and I gave a typical example of a Year 11 — which is a first year — NCEA literacy awareness question, and it was: ‘using appropriate literacy skills, decide on a topic of your choosing that you have an interest in. Devise a means of researching data and information on that topic. You come up with a topic, you put a proposition about that topic. You're go and research whether your proposition is gonna be right or not, and using appropriate literacy skills, you draw up an appropriate conclusion.’ These guys in Youth Justice do that every single day. They have a topic which is very close to their heart which is survival. They know exactly how to research it. They do it thoroughly. They know what the conclusion is and the desired outcome. And they set about achieving it every single day. But they can't present it in a way that is gonna get them 10 credits and NCEA Level 5 or whatever it is. But they're applying exactly the same set of skills. They're observing, they're collating, they're collecting, they're thinking, you know, they're comparing, they're testing and it's— and it's and it's just an ongoing natural process for them. And there's no way for those kids who haven't gone through the education. A lot of them have been out of the school system for several years. Well, there's no capacity for them to turn those skills into a meaningful, or at least a recognised — I don't know — facility or something. We could do worse than allowing some kind of recognition for skills where you see it. 

Robin
I really want to thank you for your time. You've given me so many interesting things to think about. I just really enjoyed also listening to your talks on Radio New Zealand and reading your memoir. So thank-you!

Ben
We'll talk again one day, eh?

Robin
Yeah, absolutely!

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Robin (Outro)
I hope you've enjoyed Ben's insights as much as I have. Once again, thank you, Ben, for the wonderful conversation and for your generosity in sharing your work and experience with us.