The Going West collection: an Aotearoa literary legacy

In this Heritage et AL Blog we feature guest writer James Littlewood. He reflects on his time working with the Going West Writers Festival Archive. 

As a bonus to this piece listen to James in conversation with Sue Berman, as he plays favourites from the Festival in this Awekura podcast track:

Ngā Pātaka Kōrero - Auckland Libraries · Going West: listening to the archive with James Littlewood

Going West was – and is – the original literary festival, at least in Tāmaki Makaurau. Previously, the Wellington arts festival had a literary component and there was a book festival in Dunedin, so on our founding in 1996 Going West could be said to be the only lit fest north of the Rimutaka. It was directed by Murray Gray and produced by his partner Naomi McCleary, in her role as Arts Manager in the now sadly missed Waitākere City Council, under the arts-savvy mayoralty of Bob Harvey. “In those days”, Naomi once told me, “anything was possible”.     

Murray Gray interviewing Penny Carnaby and Graham Beattie at Going West, 2010.
Photograph by Gil Hanly NZMS-2475-2010-P248, Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 

Naomi McCleary offers acknowledgments at the Going West Writers Festival, 2014.
Photograph by Gil Hanly NZMS-2475-2014-P196, Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections

During the pack down at the end of the first year’s festival, audio technician Dave Hodge came up to Naomi and placed a bit of recording media in her hand. Maybe it was a CD, maybe a DAT tape – nobody remembers. It had everything on it, the whole festival: Ngahuia te Awekōtuku, Robert Sullivan, Emily Perkins, Maurice Shadbolt …everything. Naomi finished the pack down, went back to work on Monday morning and stored the recording in a box under her desk. Over the years, the recordings grew, and grew, and grew. Until one day an assiduous archivist called Robyn Mason saw it, grabbed it and stuck it in storage in Waitākere Central Library (aka Henderson Library), where it continued to grow.

David Hodge at the sound desk, 'Tracking the Vernacular', Titirangi War Memorial Hall, 2002.
Photographer Gil Hanley, NZMS-2475-2002-P001, Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections

And not just with audio recordings. Boxes and boxes of photographs also accumulated in the collection. And more boxes full of paper documents: everything from bank statements to meeting minutes to correspondences between writers and festival staff. When Waitākere City Council was amalgamated with the other four cities, more boxes arrived. And years later when we lost our Going West office in Lopdell House Titirangi, still more filing boxes arrived. There was a lot of stuff, and only a fraction of it was arranged and described.

I joined the organisation as both a participant and a board member in 2016. For my first duty of governance, Naomi sent me off to meet Sue Berman – Auckland Libraries’ Oral History and Sound Curator – to have a look at it all. Sure enough, there were hundreds and hundreds of audio recordings, boxes and boxes of paper documents and what looked like a mountain of photographs, most of which were by Gil Hanley. What a goldmine! I’d worked in various media archiving roles before, and the prospect of being able to do something with all of this was hugely tempting to both me and the other trustees.

Going West archivist James Littlewood in the heritage collection stack, 2026.
Photographer: Sue Berman, private collection.

When the lockdowns hit us in 2020 Going West Trust were obliged to terminate our live programme and figure out how to run a lit fest online. The first thing we did was get a hold of as much of the audio material as we could (with help from Auckland Libraries) to build a podcast series out of it. That’s still up on our platform and has been replicated on Auckland Libraries Soundcloud. Robyn Mason – the aforementioned archivist – was instrumental in getting to grips with the content and curating the series. Over a couple of years, we produced about 50 episodes.  We also published a rather magnificent volume of keynote speeches, Voices of Aotearoa. 25 years of Going West Oratory, which simply would not have been possible without the audio recordings. 

The lockdowns came and went, thank God. And we did a few other things. And in 2024 we landed some funding from Lotteries Community Matters and the Auckland Libraries Heritage Trust to finally put the collection into some kind of order. I was honoured to get the gig. And intimidated as hell. After all, there are archivists out there with years of experience and post graduate qualifications. After a couple of months, I consoled myself with the thought that more experienced archivists might be doing well to avoid the drudgery. I’ve never thrived in spreadsheets, and now I was immersed in them for hours on end, every day. But inside those spreadsheets lay a rich and accessible vein of gold nuggets that kept me coming back for more.

Some of the material from the filing boxes accumulated over 30 years of an independent lit-fest. Photographer: James Littlewood, 2026, private collection.

We divided the collection into three main categories: audio, photography, and everything else. That last one was exactly as nebulous as it sounds, and consisted of all the papers, flyers and bits and bobs we fished out of the filing boxes. Sometimes it felt tedious, like the “business records” category (think: bank statements); sometimes it felt nostalgic, like “ephemera” (mostly publicity stuff and programmes); and sometimes it felt like we were handling priceless taonga, like the fading, handwritten and highly colloquial faxes from Keri Hulme to Murray and Naomi. 

Facsimile (detail) from Keri Hulme to Murray Gray and Naomi McCleary, 1997.
  Series 8, Business Files, Folder 3, NZMS 2475, Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections. 

For those requiring a translation of Hulme’s laid-back vernacular, that reads

whaddidai say? (re Going West recordings) I deny it all, I hadn’t enough 

• Nat[ural] spark[ling] min[eral] water

• uisquebagh 

• Spittle

(tick three or more)

“Uisquebagh”, also spelled usquaebach, usquaebagh and various other ways, is – apparently – some variety of scotch whiskey. Gray often secured a whiskey sponsor for Going West, as he wrote a regular column about the amber stuff for Metro magazine. Is there even such a thing as a whiskey columnist anymore?

But it’s the audio recordings which are really at the heart of the collection. People came to Going West Writers Festival to hear things: writers talking about their work, writers reading their work, readers discussing writers, storytellers of all kinds telling stories and telling stories about telling stories. It took a lot of time and a lot of graft but that’s now all up, and all searchable.  

Selina Tusitala-Marsh, Curnow Poetry Reader at Going West, Waitākere City Council Chambers, 2017. Photograph by Liz March NZMS-2475-2017-P030. 

It’s important to understand that Kura is not a streaming service. It wasn’t possible to make all the recordings freely available on demand, for a range of logistical and legal reasons.  There’s a contact form on every listing page. When you find something in the collection you want to listen to, use the contact form to send a request to an Auckland Libraries staffer, and they’ll get back to you within a day or two with a restricted listening link. 

The photography was by far the most arduous part of the mahi. In all, there are about 20,000 photographs in the collection, including tons of duplicates and near duplicates. We’ve managed to attach photographs to nearly all the audio records, but the entire photographic collection is still being worked through to a photographic catalogue record. It is however described as far as possible on a spreadsheet for the very keen researcher to access. Again, use the contact form on any page of Kura, such as this one. 

The photography is important, partly because not everything was recorded, and partly because, well, photos! In addition to the weekend lit fest, there were the now-legendary train journeys, there was Storyfest (a massive, highly interactive, day–long lit fest just for kids); Wordsmiths (a more concentrated workshop series with established writers in high schools); the poetry slams; theatre performances and various fringe events in various libraries.  

Going West train at Auckland Train Station, Beach Rd, 2002.
Photographer Gil Hanly NZMS-2475-2002-P013 Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections

So between the audio recordings, the photographs and the screeds of paper records, there is a lot in this collection for anyone with even the vaguest interest in Aotearoa literature. Whether you’re a researcher, a reader, a writer or working in some other kind of festival, there’ll be something here for you. In many cases, you could trace an item from a draft programme note, through correspondences with the writers and promotional material, right through to the audio recording and photographs of the event itself, and probably also a photograph of the writer having an after-match drink with Murray.

It’s thirty years of Aotearoa literary history. And since the festival is still with us, the archive itself is still growing. And all of it (at least, all that’s happened so far) is searchable and discoverable right here. 

By James Littlewood - Archivist for the Going West Trust