https://www.thepress.co.nz/nz-news/350353328/martin-van-beynen-independent-thinker

Martin van Beynen - an ‘independent thinker’

Philip Matthews

July 27, 2024
2:16

Retiring Press journalist 'an independent thinker'

VIDEO CREDIT: Alden Williams
One of the first and hardest lessons you learn in journalism is that you can never truly predict which stories will make an impact and which will sink without trace. Some successes seem obvious but some take you by surprise.

For example: the one about Martin van Beynen’s old car.

"I remember the first story that really got people talking was about a car I dropped off at the wrecker’s yard," he says. "It wasn’t a special car. It was just a Honda Civic. We’d nursed this car up to about 250,000km and it was finally knackered."

Van Beynen published that in 2002, 11 years into his time at The Press, so it probably wasn’t the first story of his that got people talking, but it must be memorable for being counter-intuitive. This wasn’t a major investigation or detailed coverage of a murder trial but a nicely sentimental piece about a "valued car that had given us great service over the years", written as though he was leaving a loved one behind.

Twenty-two years later, van Beynen is recalling another one that everyone seemed to read. This was his piece from April about "how not to walk Te Araroa", written self-deprecatingly as an account of dismal failure in the great outdoors. He looked sodden and miserable in the photos. But there was a serious undertone, as van Beynen revealed he had inoperable stage 4 cancer.

"It’s amazing how many people have read that tramping story," he says. "I’ve had a lot of people wish me well. When I say a lot of people, there might be 20."

As well as the 20 or more well-wishers, his retirement from The Press to focus on his treatment saw him interviewed by Colin Peacock on RNZ. He won an Outstanding Achievement Award at the Voyager Media Awards in May, as recognition of his long career, but he missed the ceremony. He was on holiday in Georgia.

We might be skirting around the edges of self-indulgence here, with a journalist interviewing a journalist about journalism, and van Beynen says he isn’t entirely sure he is worth the attention. But then again, he knows he is.

We’re talking at his quiet home in Diamond Harbour, where the usual view across to Lyttelton is blocked by late morning fog. He and his wife Paula’s three adult children have all left home but a high chair in the corner shows that his only grandchild is a regular visitor.

Our conversation feels like a continuation of the many we have had at The Press over the years, about books and journalism and politics. When he faces the fire in his warm lounge, a well-stocked bookshelf looms up behind him. There are great works of fiction and great works of non-fiction. Among the latter you find two copies of van Beynen’s own book, Black Hands.

"That’s so we can both read it at the same time," he jokes.

Martin van Beynen: "In many ways, I should have done better."
ALDEN WILLIAMS / The Press
I mention that I had planned to bring my own copy along, to have it signed, before I noticed he had already signed it in the office one day. I remind him of the dedication he wrote: "To a valued colleague." Which was nice.

"I’m actually quite a nice guy," he insists.

Success and failure

There is a simple explanation for why so many people loved the tramping story.

"People like to read about failure."

Of course they also responded to the cancer news. Does he have an update on the state of his health, or a time frame for starting chemotherapy?

"Some of the tumours are growing but slowly and others are static so my health is still pretty good," he says. "Chemo is an option but there’s no hurry and I might as well enjoy life without the side effects of treatment while I can."

Martin van Beynen: "Opinion writing is bloody hard."
ALDEN WILLIAMS / The Press
His home office is packed with journalism memorabilia, including his awards, coffee mugs stolen from work and a cheery photo with Helen Clark on the front seat of his old Holden Kingswood. In the lounge there are walls of family photos and quality magazines on the coffee table. He subscribes to the Atlantic and gets the New Yorker from the library. When he was young, he was inspired by the great magazine writers of the 60s and 70s, particularly Norman Mailer.

"I suppose I went into journalism to be a writer," he says.

"But the trouble with journalism is if you’re even slightly competitive, you get obsessed by the scoop. Getting the great story out there and beating other people. You become distracted."

Is speed the enemy of quality? That might be a question for another time, along with the one about whether today’s young journalists still aspire to be literate long-form writers as they did in van Beynen’s day.

Any list of his many career highlights would have to include his coverage of the second David Bain trial that led to the celebrated podcast and book Black Hands, his dogged coverage of the Peter Ellis case over decades, an investigation into the background of CTV building engineer Alan Reay and two corrupt Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority officials, and a four-part series on the downfall of Supreme Court justice Bill Wilson, among others.

His own assessment of his career is more modest. Far too modest, really.

"For all the praise, which is nice to get, I think in many ways I should have done better. I had many years where I just seemed to be floundering. But I always tried to produce good copy that was readable, that was clean. That’s half the thing, isn’t it?"

There is a Wikipedia page, set up by his old school, St Peter’s College in Auckland. It contains some mistakes. For one thing, he didn’t study journalism at Otago University but at Canterbury. He doesn’t have a MA either, but "if they want to give me a masters, that’s fine".

He once heard that some people unsuccessfully applied to Wikipedia to have his page taken down on the grounds that he wasn’t worthy of it. It turned out they were disgruntled David Bain supporters.

He is proud that he was an adaptable frontline journalist until the very end, whether it was phoning Stuff’s Newsable podcast to give quick updates on the Lauren Dickason trial or getting a bit too close to the Port Hills fires. As for enemies, he made a few over the years, but he doesn’t think he ever wrote a hatchet job. However, former All Black Grahame Thorne reckoned van Beynen’s coverage cost him a spot on the Christchurch City Council in 2007.

There were journalistic road trips, such as a "poverty tour" of New Zealand’s less fortunate communities, pre-election mood-of-the-nation tours in his Kingswood, which explains the Helen Clark picture in his office, and even a trip through Australia’s Northern Territory. The latter assignment, which followed the federal government’s emergency response to protect Aboriginal children from sexual abuse, seems a little bemusing in hindsight.

The question seemed to be whether such an intervention could or should happen here.

But if journalism made his name, it was his columns that gave him a profile readers could love or hate. He wrote them weekly, for 17 years. Sometimes his critics seemed to miss his very dry, ironic humour.

For example, it was hard to know if his "right-wing public intellectual" or "thinking man’s redneck" persona was serious or an act, or a bit of both. Although he was, in his own words, "an anti-PC voice" in the media, he rarely seemed strident or belligerent.

There were downsides to column writing, he admits. It was a drain on his time and he feels his journalism improved when he stopped. And if people think they know your politics, it may change how they respond to you.

It looked easy, but it was hard work.

"You’ve got to come up with a view, an opinion, every week. Opinion writing is bloody hard. As soon as you start self-censoring, you blunt your message and start vacillating and trying to have it both ways all the time."

Van Beynen says away from phones and screens, people are much less polarised.
Don Scott / The Press
He describes his politics as conservative, although he admits he "had a big crush on Jacinda", whom he also met on a Kingswood tour. As a conservative, he believes he spoke for a silent majority. But when he quit writing the column in 2021, he acknowledged he was increasingly out of step with mainstream opinion.

He wrote: "Rapid change, particularly the sort of changes New Zealand is experiencing at the moment, implies we should feel guilty, ignorant, outdated and prejudiced if we want to take a more sceptical and contrary line.

"And yet I realise that society moves on and a new generation taking over will always seem naive and dogmatic to old-timers like me."

The most notorious column may have been the one that argued New Zealand women swear too much.

"Okay, it was deliberately provocative," he says. "My argument is we all swear too much but it’s worse when women do it. A lot of women agreed with me. But it didn’t go down well with strong feminists, particularly in the media. I got a real hiding over that."

It didn’t help that he followed it up with a faux apology that was not really an apology.

A visit by celebrity philosopher Jordan Peterson in 2019 showed the influence of culture wars and identity politics in a more light-hearted way. Van Beynen and then Press reporter Cecile Meier saw Peterson speak at the Isaac Theatre Royal and wrote pieces for and against. Van Beynen found Peterson to be "an intelligent, well-read and reflective individual". Meier thought it was a boring self-help sermon delivered by a misogynist.

But there is a lesson in this. Van Beynen thinks Meier is "a good journalist and a lovely person", and they could respect each other despite their differences. In person, away from phones and screens, we are much less polarised.

He agrees and offers another example. He thought New Zealand is an over-tattooed nation, but was reluctant to write a column about it because he knew some tattoo artists.

"It’s amazing how your viewpoint is tempered when you actually know people."

A collection of Martin van Beynen’s awards and memorabilia in his home office.
ALDEN WILLIAMS / The Press

The famous van Beynen

People know him. Or at least he is recognised on the street. That may not be a big deal in Christchurch, but he was also recognised in New York City and in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.

Is it fame or infamy? The editor of The Press tells him that "wherever she goes, people talk about Martin van Beynen," he says. "They either hate me or they like me, or they like my stuff. But if I do have any notoriety, it’s probably because of Black Hands. Even though I've done a s—load of journalism over the years."

As for Black Hands, he is adamant there is nothing more to say about it. But a quick summary is that after the retrial that acquitted Bain in Christchurch in 2009, van Beynen wrote an opinion piece arguing that the jury got it wrong. That was an unusual and brave thing to do.

The piece was widely read. Then van Beynen went off on his own time and dug into the case to see if he could solve it. That eventually led to a manuscript called Black Hands, named after a weird phrase uttered by Bain after the murders. The publisher got cold feet, so he turned the manuscript into a massively successful true crime podcast. At last count, it was approaching 8 million downloads.

Then it became a book, and was adapted as a TV drama, which van Beynen advised on.

On the 30th anniversary of the Bain family murders in June, another media outlet ran a story that revealed Bain’s new name, his wife’s new name and his wife’s job. What did van Beynen make of that?

"Well, I’d done the same when I looked at his birth certificate to find out what his new name was. The fact he’d changed his name was quite interesting and of news value. But I tried to leave the family out of it. And I thought that [story] was pretty distasteful. I can understand them maybe waiting to disclose the fact that he had yet another name. But I thought that was uncalled for."

Surely there comes a time to let it go.

Van Beynen is best known for Black Hands, his investigation into the Bain family murders.
The Press
"I certainly let it go. As I said in the book, I’m not after revenge. I’m not after him spending more time in jail. I’ve always said I could be wrong. I don’t think so though. I reckon I solved it."

We start talking about media distrust. Some people in the media business were rattled by a survey in April showing consumers’ trust in news has declined dramatically since 2020. What does van Beynen think they meant?

"I think they feel as though the media have become cultural warriors on the side that doesn’t appreciate them. I don’t think they distrust the facts they put out there."

Some of that distrust was tied up with the media’s part in Covid-19 lockdowns and vaccination campaigns.

"We played a very helpful role," he agrees. "Maybe you could argue we toed the government line although we did quite a bit of fact-checking.

"But facts will never override ideology. This is what you learn when you’re an opinion writer. Instinct is not the same as opinion. Opinion should be arrived at after considering all the facts."

He describes himself as an introvert, whose instincts are "to withdraw and sit at home with a book".
ALDEN WILLIAMS / The Press

The journalist and the lawyer

When he talks about his journalism tours, van Beynen says this: "The hardest thing for me, as a shy person, is going up to people cold and talking to them about their lives. It’s amazing how many people will open up."

He also describes himself as an introvert, whose instincts are "to withdraw and sit at home with a book".

The Press journalists who saw van Beynen as a kind of elder statesman around the office would be surprised by this. He was often the one who made leaving speeches, the one who acted as a mentor to new recruits.

"I wasn’t afraid to open my mouth and I tried to be helpful," he agrees. "If people needed that hand, I’d be happy to do it. It’s not for me to say I was the elder statesman, but I’d been around so long and had done just about everything. And I suppose I was good at office banter. That’s what I was known for. And making cynical comments."

His own farewell after 33 years was on the day before Stuff began producing daily ThreeNews bulletins, if you were hoping for a symbolic image of the end of one era and the start of another. But that doesn’t quite work. As we noted, he was adaptable. His podcasting showed he wasn’t an ink-stained dinosaur.

That said, he isn’t sure he would have been good on TV.

"If you’re a TV reporter, you have to be a bit of an actor. And I’m not an actor."

He heard about some criticism from a former TV news producer of Stuff’s first few broadcasts. But that can be dismissed.

"TV people are like lawyers," he says. "They hate non-lawyers coming along and showing them up. I guess Stuff said it’s not that hard. You don’t have to be a TV professional to do it. And we are doing it."

Speaking of the law, he originally trained as a lawyer. The career didn’t suit him and he drifted around for years, working as a labourer and in factories, living overseas, and generally getting a broader sense of life, as he sees it in hindsight. He went back to university to study journalism when he was 30.

Martin van Beynen eventually put his law degree to use, often standing up in court to argue for the public’s right to know.
JOHN KIRK-ANDERSON/STUFF / The Press
"Me and the law were never happy bedfellows," he says. "I couldn’t cope with having to account for every six minutes and charge people huge amounts for doing legal work, but what I did enjoy, which became a big part of my job actually, is fighting suppression cases and arguing them in court against queen’s counsel or king’s counsel.

"I won quite a few arguments, mainly because I was on the right side. It wasn’t my eloquence or brilliant legal mind."

Again, that modesty. The redemptive story would be that he had thought he wasn’t a good lawyer, but as a journalist acting as a lawyer, he won in court against real lawyers.

There must be a lesson in that.

"Nothing is wasted in life, is it?"


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