An author dealing in radio talk-back

Press, 18 February 1978, Page 8

An author dealing in radio talk-back

For the New Zealand writer Graham. Billing, producing Radio New Zealand’s 3ZB morning talkback is like “creating a little play.” The actors are the studio and telephone guests intereacting with their host. The plot is spontaneous and the all-over aim is information and entertainment. Last year’s show included such topics as death, elections, sex therapy, transcendental medi-

tation and rubbish disposal. It has begun again with a newly-appointed host, Robin Harrison, formerly a North Island broadcaster. In collaboration with the host, Graham Billing decides on the programme’s content, writes the scripts, vets the speakers (“very few refuse an invitation to speak on the show”), and listens to their opinions beforehand. To this extent it is a “structured” programme, but all good plays have their surprises, and the reactions and eventual mood

of the three-sided debates can only be loosely predicted. “The whole thing may sound easy,” says Billing, “but it leaves us in a sweat at the end of an hour.” Graham Billing is best known for his 1965 novel “Forbush and the Penguins,”' which he wrote after a summer season as New Zealand information officer at Scott Base, Antarctica. “South”, a pictorial composition on the continent followed, and was done with the Christ-

church photographer, Guy Mannering. Then there were three further novels — “The Alpha Trip,” “Statues,” and “The Slipway.” The last was written on a New Zealand Government Scholarship Grant. “The Slipway” was also awarded the P.E.N. International Church Award. Billing won the Cowan Memorial Prize in Journalism; and in 1972 was awarded the Robert Burns Fellowship, spending the next year at the University of Otago. Of his book “New Zea-

land — a Sunlit Land,” Billing says, wryly: “It sank without trace.”’ He also wrote “The New Zealanders” with the photographers Robin Smith and Warren Jacobs, in 1975.

Graham Billing has had spells of being a full-time writer during the last six years. Before this he “subjected himself to journalistic discipline” with the Dunedin “Evening Star” and the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, turning to writing after beginning a youthful career at sea.

For eighteen months Graham Billing taught English literature at Mitchell College of Advanced Education in Bathurst, New South Wales. He had not taught before and found it “a traumatic experience.” He returned to free-lance work in Sydney with relief. “If I don’t write I’m unhappy,” he said. Billing is at present under contract to Reeds (Australia) to write a novel, and is delighted to resume his association with the publishers for “Forbush and the Penguins” (A. H. and A. W. Reed).

Two years ago Graham Billing went back to writing poetry. He finds it a literary safety valve Writing a novel is “like building a bridge” — a massive undertaking.

By

NANCY CAWLEY

Poetry is the construction of something smaller but just as artistic as, say, a well-thrown pot. The collection of poems he has just completed is called “Changing Countries.” The title is sym-

bolic of the changing relationships between men and women; and the feeling he has that, having Australian parents, he has “a foot on either side of the Tasman.” Billing is impressed with the standard of the new television writers. He

finds them “dauntingly good’’ in a very competitive field, and feels the whole climate of New Zealand writing to be healthy. In writing, he says,

people pit their talents against each other. *‘ln the early 1960 s there were just a few of us. Now there are hordes.”

Looking to the future, Graham Billing paraphrases Hemingway: “The sprint of youth is over; we must enter the marathon of middle-age.” He wants to say something that will last in his writing, and has a great admiration for the English novelist, Iris Murdoch. “She writes well about men. I would like to write perceptively about women.”