Point of Order: Dr Bob Brockie - a remarkably rich life which he documented in a Memoir in Words, Cartoons and Sketches.

Point of Order reports with sadness the death of Bob Brockie, scientist, writer and cartoonist, who contributed his ideas to our editorial content and provided us with cartoons. PoO friend Karl du Fresne has given us permission to publish this article, which he wrote for The Listener in 2015.

BOB BROCKIE, scientist and cartoonist, has a 25-year work programme ahead of him. He has books to write, portraits to paint and pieces of music to compose. There’s just one small catch: Brockie is 82.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that octogenarians are supposed to slow down. Not even a wheelchair, to which he has been confined by polio since his late 60s, seems to have diminished his appetite for new experiences.

“I have this illusion that the best is yet to come,” he says. “I’m going to surprise everyone with what I’m going to do in the future.”

Brockie’s current project, a book called The Darwinists, sets out to detail the myriad ways in which scientists and scholars have built on evolutionary theory since the voyage of the Beagle. Not bad for someone who failed his first two attempts to pass School Certificate.

The Darwinists will be about much more than biology, he says; there’ll be sociology, linguistics, psychology and other stuff too. None of which will surprise readers of the science column Brockie has written for the past 14 years in the Dominion Post, where he demonstrates an omnivorous fascination with the wonders of existence.

When are we likely to see this magnum opus? “I keep saying next Christmas, and this time it really might be.”

Oh, and he wants to compose a symphony too. He can’t read a musical score, but by some quirk of the mind which he seems unable to understand, still less explain, he can write one. He claims to have composed “nearly a hundred short pieces, the best of them sounding like Scarlatti or Mozart on a bad day”.

Brockie’s remarkably rich life is documented in the just-published Brockie: A Memoir in Words, Cartoons and Sketches. The book was launched at the National Library by the novelist Lloyd Jones, whose older sister Pat was the second Mrs Brockie (which made Brockie the brother-in-law of Sir Robert Jones, with whom he traded waggish practical jokes).

Like its author the book is funny, self-deprecating and a bit eccentric.

He seems genuinely pleased when I tell him it’s an engaging piece of work. “It’s meant to be engaging and entertaining rather than profound. Reading it, I realise my life has been one huge joke.”

This remark is accompanied by a chuckle that frequently punctuates Brockie’s conversation. It’s true: he really does seem amused by life’s absurdities, which is why he remains one of the country’s pre-eminent cartoonists.

He has contributed a cartoon to the National Business Review every week for 40 years. The paper’s owners hired him hoping his anti-authoritarian satire, honed on Victoria University student publications and the joyously subversive Wellington underground magazine Cock, would rattle readers’ cages. They weren’t disappointed.

The NBR has undergone several changes of ownership and editorial tone since then but Brockie remains a fixture, and even now his cartoons display that same mocking disdain for the establishment.

At times they border on savage. It’s at odds with his amiable personality but he has an explanation. “Cartooning allows me to let off a bit of steam and frustration in the face of all the ridiculous things going on around me.”

It also provides a release from the pernickety demands of science that otherwise rule his life as a zoologist. A scientist has to be correct and exact, Brockie explains. “You have to focus on cause and effect and probability and statistics, and then you have to submit your work to an army of referees who pick holes in it. But with cartooning, the sillier, the more bizarre and unreal or improbable, the better it is.

“I sweat blood and tears over science but the cartoons are frivolous, something to do after work. I suppose they exercise a different part of your brain.”

Anyway, says Brockie, doesn’t everyone in Wellington have an alternative life? “Someone might be an accountant by day, but at night he’s a stand-up comedian or a drag queen. I know lawyers who do highland dancing.”

He seems slightly surprised when I suggest that his cartoons have a defining sense of mischief, but he takes it as a compliment. He thinks there might still be a bit of the schoolboy in him – the one who entertained his classmates at Christchurch Boys’ High by drawing caricatures of the teachers on the blackboard. (Ronald Searle, the Englishman who illustrated the public school parody Down with Skool, was an early influence and remains one of Brockie’s most admired cartoonists.)

BROCKIE’S father Walter was a Scottish immigrant who had fought at Gallipoli and become a prisoner of the Turks after being left for dead in a skirmish at Gaza, in Palestine. He worked at the Christchurch Botanic Gardens and although Brockie describes him as unschooled, he had a keen interest in native alpine plants and later became curator of the Otari Native Plant Museum in Wellington. As a boy, Brockie would accompany him on collection trips in the Southern Alps.

If that awakened Brockie’s interest in nature, it was a boarder at his grandparents’ house who stimulated his enthusiasm for drawing. He recalls her as a dark, beautiful, young Eastern European woman who posed as a model at the nearby art school. He was 12 when she invited him into her room to look at some of the students’ sketches; it was the first time he had seen images of a naked woman.

“I returned home and secretly did my best to reproduce those lovely drawings,” Brockie writes in his memoir. “So began my sketching career. The enchanting model shaped my taste in women from that day to this.”

Brockie has something of the quality of a scrapbook. He has kept a diary all his life, along with charming sketches, portraits and photographs recording places he has been and people he has known. He appears never to have thrown anything out and takes special pride in the 100-odd field notebooks documenting all his scientific observations in a life dedicated to the study of wild creatures.

A supporting cast of notable people – writers, artists, actors, lawyers, diplomats, academics – wander amiably in and out of his life story. His circle of friends is extraordinarily wide, a fact underlined by the rowdy and very crowded party held to mark his 80th birthday at Prefab café in Wellington (whose owner, Jeff Kennedy, was taught by Brockie at Nelson’s Waimea College).

Brockie moved in liberal-left circles in the 1950 and 60s and largely formed his political views then, although his father, a devout adherent of the Social Credit Political League, was an influence too. “My father was a gardener. I always felt I was on the side of the workers rather than the bosses.”

Protests against apartheid and the Vietnam War further shaped his attitudes, but he insists he’s not an intensely political person. “I skim across the surface like a moth or a butterfly. As a cartoonist I only pick up on things that are very much on the public’s mind.”

The only politician for whom he had a “visceral” dislike was Robert Muldoon, whom he regarded as a bully. “We’ve never had anyone else, before or since, who was quite like that.”

AS A SCIENTIST, Brockie’s specialty was hedgehogs, chosen because no one else had taken any interest in them. They were the subject of his MSc thesis and won him a bursary to the University of Palermo in Sicily.

It was only after he moved there with his wife and young family in the early 1960s that he discovered Sicily was largely hedgehog-free. He stayed there anyway, becoming a fluent Italian speaker, losing his wife (he came back from a trip to Britain and found her pregnant to the next-door neighbour) and getting infected with polio.

The disease struck when he was physically and emotionally at a low ebb. He was trying to make a piecemeal income giving private English lessons, had nowhere to live and often slept under bushes in a park, showering in the Palermo railway station. “My immune system must have been way down.”

One day he was kicking his sons’ football, the next he was a quadriplegic patient in the Ospedale degli Banfratelli, an isolation hospital for paupers. “They looked after me very well. I was shaved daily by a blind barber using a cut-throat razor.”

He spent 18 months in hospital, the latter part back in New Zealand, but slowly recovered to the point where he could lead “a fairly normal life”. It was only in his 60s that his legs began weakening again as the disease reasserted itself.

His health now? “Despite appearances, very good.” It’s true: interviewed on the afternoon his book is launched, Brockie seems full of brio. He looks smart too: fashionable metal-rimmed glasses, bushy eyebrows under a healthy head of silver hair, neatly trimmed beard.

He’s stylishly dressed in black with well-chosen accessories: black fedora, black gloves (a nice touch) and blue scarf. It’s not hard to detect the influence of his ebullient, accordion-playing, Ukrainian-born wife Galya. Brockie describes Galya as his oxygen and says he’s very lucky to have a wife who looks after him as if he were a precious specimen.

They have been married for 10 years and met at a fancy-dress party in Thorndon. “She was a gypsy playing her accordion and I wore a rented gorilla suit. The gorilla met the gypsy and it was all on.” Another chuckle.

Brockie says he has been married three and a half times – the “half” being a reference to a woman with whom he lived for 18 years without actually marrying.

He’s candid about his relationships with the women in his life, though he discreetly skirts around the circumstances in which some of them ended. Writing about his personal life didn’t come easily, but it was necessary “to contextualise things”. His story wouldn’t have made sense without it, he says.

“Each one of those breakups was terribly distressing to me and to whoever was my wife or girlfriend at the time. You’d have to read my diaries for the full story, and I think I’ll put a 50-year moratorium on that.”

Startlingly, Brockie also reveals a suicide attempt. It happened years ago when he became “immensely depressed”. He had several big projects on the go and they stretched out ahead of him “like huge mountain ranges”. He felt overwhelmed.

His book relates: “I wrote suicide letters to all my family, ran a tube from the exhaust into my car, turned up the radio and revved up the motor, expecting to depart this life in about half an hour.

“I fell asleep but awoke about three in the morning, not in heaven but still in Eastbourne. I was really annoyed that my plan had come to nothing and returned sheepishly home where I had to phone my family, asking them all to disregard the contents of my letters.”

He continues: “Subsequently I wrote two letters to the Nissan car company. One cursing them for the effectiveness of their catalytic exhaust converters that frustrated my end-of-life career move, the other congratulating them for the effectiveness of their filters as they gave me another suck on the sausage of life.”

With Brockie, the humour is never far away.

IN AN affectionate tribute at the book launching, Lloyd Jones described Brockie’s life as one prolonged flight from boredom.

Jones recalled being 12 when he met his future brother-in-law for the first time. “He was the most unlikely but the most impressive of Pat’s boyfriends. An appealing kind of unorthodoxy clung to him.” Brockie’s limp, Jones said, seemed more an enhancement than a disability.

Later, when Jones was at high school, he boarded with the Brockies. Getting eggs out of the fridge for breakfast was a special horror, he said, because he had to reach past the dead hedgehogs placed there for safekeeping.

Dead animals and fridges are a recurring theme in Brockie’s life. For his doctorate, he spent two years surveying leptospirosis – aka dairy farm fever – in wild animals. “I collected blood and kidneys from hundreds of newly killed possums, hares, magpies, ducks, eels, pukeko, rats and mice,” he writes in his memoir. “Motel owners in Hawera, Ngatea, Coatesville and Tirau would be horrified to learn what I kept in their fridges overnight.”

Nothing on four legs, or even two, escaped Brockie’s curiosity. He once co-authored a paper about a clever sparrow named Nigel, which had learned how to enter and leave the cafeteria at Lower Hutt’s Dowse Museum by fluttering in front of the electronic sensor that opened the glass doors.

He also co-wrote An Australian magpie’s response to fake snakes in New Zealand. He explains that he once had a pet magpie named Napoleon that became highly agitated at the sight of a little girl with a candy snake.

Brockie bought a pair of toy snakes to further test the bird’s response. Same result. His conclusion? “Magpies have been here since 1860. They haven’t seen a snake for about 80 generations but they still hold the memory in their DNA.”

Among his peers, Brockie is especially famous for his interest in road kill. Even now, he can’t travel anywhere by road without making a note of the squashed animals along the way.

In 1984 he and a colleague drove from Wellington to Kaitaia and back, documenting every corpse along the way. The exercise was repeated in 1994 and 2005 and established that while rabbits and possums were being flattened in ever-increasing numbers, hedgehog mortality on the highways had declined.

Brockie doesn’t know the reason for this anomaly, but says he and his colleagues await a call from the Nobel Prize Committee acknowledging the profound significance of their research. Obviously, someone mislaid his phone number.

Brockie: A Memoir in Words, Cartoons and Sketches, by Bob Brockie, published by the New Zealand Cartoon Archive.

Karl du Fresne is a freelance journalist and former editor of The Dominion newspaper, who blogs at karldufresne.blogspot.co.nz 

and Bob Edlin is a veteran journalist and editor for the Point of Order blog HERE - where this article was sourced.