Auckland

"My SPP shares lost their value: first 30 percent, then another 30 percent, then another 30 percent. We went from HK$5.40 down to 60 cents. Secondly, the mortgagors for our various hotels, if they had a chance, called back their debts. It was just like the property boom and bust in Canada later, in the eighties. Everybody was panicking. My main supports were all based in England. My cash flow became very precarious because land sales at Pacific Harbour simply came to a halt, but once you start building a hotel and it’s three-quarters of the way finished you can’t stop. We had big hotel projects at Narita, the new airport in Japan, and in Auckland at the harbour; and a major shopping centre in the middle of our Fiji development. We couldn't stop any of it."

"One of the things Adnan Khashoggi was famous for in those days was his fabulous parties. Peter Munk suggested to his new partner that, in the interests of SPP, Khashoggi might consider holding parties in Australia and New Zealand. Agreement was enthusiastic and immediate. The first party was in Auckland, New Zealand, on the evening of Thursday, November 18, 1976. Adnan arrived in Auckland in his Boeing 727 with his companion, Laura Biancalini, while Essam Khashoggi flew in in his smaller DC9. Travelling with Adnan were Peter and Melanie Munk as well as David Gilmour and his London model friend, Jill Sweeny, all of whom were central to the Khashoggi bash at the Shoreline Cabaret, ‘Takapuna. Two hundred guests drank Australian bubbly, ate splendidly, were entertained by a Maori concert party and danced to one of the best bands on the island."

"Unrelated, and many months later, Heatley took a late call at home from brokers Buddle Wilson. It transpired that somehow Brierley’s had learned that Michael Horton was booked on a flight from Auckland to Los Angeles. As soon as the plane had taken off, Brierley’s had launched a raid on Wilson & Horton shares. Horton could mount no defence because he did not even know the raid was happening. The brokers were acting on his behalf but without his knowledge. ‘Suddenly, Wilson & Horton, through Buddle Wilson, think I might be able to stave off Brierley’s,’ Heatley says. ‘Brokers are furiously trying to buy shares and they are calling and suggesting that I become a white knight but I was not interested without an agreement with Michael, which I could not have because he was on a plane.’ It was not the last time that an unfortunate turn of events for Wilson & Horton would become an opportunity for Heatley."

"Most people need to work to support themselves or their families; Heatley did not. He and Katherine could afford to do whatever they wanted and to go anywhere in the world. They decided to get out of Auckland and travel for two years with a teacher for the children and an open mind about where they might settle. If somewhere appealed to them, they would stay. If not, they would come home. They started in Whistler, Canada, then travelled through the US, at one stage renting a house in Florida next door to Mar-a-Lago, which would later become famous as US President Donald Trump’s private club."

"Back on the island, Heatley has brought his son Josh and some of Josh’s friends up from Auckland. They head off to play pool, though if Josh was with only his father, they would most likely first play chess. No chance for a competition slides by the pair. If they swim in the surf, they compete to see who can bodysurf furthest up the beach. They are keen on poker. In their Auckland house, at Maui and here on Moturua, chessboards are always set. Josh maintains in his head a lifetime tally of thousands of chess games with his father. The wins are, for now, slightly in his father’s favour. Cut-throat competition is the norm between Heatley and his sons. The Takapuna house where the children grew up had a tennis court adjoining the neighbour’s property. Ben, the eldest of the four children, recalls his brothers, his father and him playing tennis. ‘And, hell, those poor people next door! The moment we’re on the tennis court it’s all on, all of us yelling and all of us arguing because each of us wants to win.’ More often than not, the matches would end with two people not talking to each other. ‘But the next day, we’d put it behind us and do it over again.’ His sister is competitive too, he says, but displays it differently."

"*Carters was run by a tough old sawmiller, Alwyn Carter, and his two sons. I remember going to their offices and persuading the old man to convert to the Chase Prime Rate, but the boys stepped in. They’d had a long-running fight with my brother Ian over pulp and paper equipment and were keen to take out their frustrations on me. I remember them laughing at me: ‘You’ve got your balls in a knot, Gibbsie, you’ll lose some money; what a joke, ha ha ha.’ ‘All right, you bastards,’ I thought. I went back and told my staff to look at the loan contract and if there is any infraction, the slightest irregularity, we’ll call in the loan. And sure enough, not long after they were one day late with an interest payment. I called in the loan. They went berserk. No one else would lend them money, since no one could make any profit lending money under the conditions Muldoon had created. The Carters got on to Chase Manhattan in the US: here they were with the top credit rating in New Zealand, and this little bugger in Auckland* *was calling in their loan! I got reverberations from Australia but nobody stopped me. It was one of those satisfying victories, going back to the Carter brothers and saying, ‘Tough titties, boys: pay up.’ And they did.*"

"Gibbs was also fascinated by the question of happiness. As he had grown wealthy through the 1980s and particularly after the Telecom deal, he’d noticed many people assuming that the money must have made him happier. It hadn’t particularly. He’d derived great satisfaction from his achievements in his chosen field — successfully completing big deals — but beyond a certain point more money didn’t equate to greater happiness. For many years he’d been quietly testing some of the fundamental assumptions that underpinned modern social activism: that normal folk wanted the lives of their idols, that the old and infirm wanted to be young again and that the lives of the poor would be transformed if they had more money. When meeting new people, whether at his home in Auckland, in a Moscow taxi, or by the side of the road in Cambodia, Gibbs would ask them three questions."

"[10](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-ref-note-477309-807254973-10). D Coddington, *Perigo: Politically incorrect,* Auckland: Radio Pacific Publications, 1999."

"The result of four years’ work surpassed Serra’s hopes. ‘I could not have imagined that the piece would come in as well as it did,’ he concluded.[9](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477365-869846975-9) New Zealand art critics were intrigued. Hamish Keith wrote, ‘The rural backblocks of Kaukapakapa are not a setting in which the casual traveller would expect to encounter one of this century’s great works of sculpture, but there it is.… On a fine north Auckland day with scudding clouds, sunlight rolls across the face of *Te Tuhirangi Contour,* painting its rolling curves with light. Seldom have I seen anything as fine or as moving.’[10](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477365-869846975-10) It forcibly struck Keith as an artwork that had required considerable courage to commission; so unlike anything that could have been undertaken by a public arts committee.[11](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477365-869846975-11) The work now features prominently in international surveys of Serra’s work.[12](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477365-869846975-12)"