Sleeping dogs: Tom Phillips and New Zealand’s wilderness myth

Smith heads for the Coromandel Peninsula, almost wilfully oblivious to the fact that society at large, as a malevolent political force tightens its grip on the country, is following the example of his marriage and breaking down. All of that, anyway, is forgotten when his grand vision suddenly becomes his view. “My God,” Smith mutters to himself, stopping his car to look out through tears over the sun-dappled waters of the Hauraki Gulf and its scattering of islands — upon one of which, Gut Island, he is soon to live. “I’m free.” And in that freedom, a life of isolation, self-sufficiency and an agreeable kind of loneliness, with just an adopted dog and a battered edition of Montaigne’s essays for company, initially out of reach of the authorities, Smith is “only acting out a dream that lived in the heart of every Kiwi”.

Perhaps, back in the real world, Phillips feels a similar epiphanic sense of freedom in the Waikato bush surrounding the Marokopa farm where he grew up, shielded from the world and its helicopters by kahikatea and kānuka, coprosma and punga. If so, his dream is another’s nightmare. Because, deep in the bush, this story also takes place in the shadow of an unimaginable maternal pain. “A waking nightmare,” the mother, known as Cat, told Mata Reports. “Every single day, and it just never stops.” For of course, one can’t isolate Phillips from the children — his victims — whose progress we watch him turn to check in that same footage, standing with two hands on his rifle in a somehow proprietary manner as his offspring traipse towards him, the gun’s implied threat enough to keep the cinematographer of this moment from exchanging more than a handful of words with Jayda.

It is thought that much of the reluctance of Police to force a confrontation with Phillips comes from that same implied threat. Phillips, Police caution, is armed and dangerous. Love gone bad can curdle into obsession and obsession into violence, a psychological terrain intricately mapped in Roger Donaldson’s 1981 film Smash Palace. Bruno Lawrence broodingly portrays Al Shaw, a retired race-car driver whose marriage is crumbling in the stultifying dullness of a small-town wrecking yard; when it finally fails, his wife is granted custody of their daughter, Georgie, in a process in which Al refuses to engage. “She’s my kid and I’ll do what I want with her!” he screams at the officer who informs him of the court’s decision; he proves it by kidnapping her at gunpoint, faking their deaths by plunging his truck down a ravine into a river, and hiding out in the bush.

Phillips, Police believe, is also motivated singularly by custody — and, it must be remembered, seemingly also tried to at least imply his death and that of his kids when he first disappeared and his Hilux was found below the tideline, raked by the waves and pointing oceanward, at wild Kiritehere Beach. They walked out of the bush after 12 days and an extensive Police search, Phillips charged with wasting Police resources — the charge that led to a warrant for his arrest when, having disappeared again, he failed to appear in court in early 2022. The years of disappearance since have been punctuated by a series of anarchic appearances of the kind Al Shaw prepares us for: Phillips’ heavily disguised appearance at two Hamilton hardware stores, an alleged bank robbery, resulting in the further charges of aggravated robbery, aggravated wounding and unlawfully possessing a firearm. The violence of those incidents seems only to be heightened by the presence of a child-size accomplice — allegedly one of the Phillips children — in the security footage that marks each incident.

Those alleged robberies and the fact Phillips risked capture to pull them off suggests there is a limit to the help he is receiving from accomplices in a community in which Phillips, whose family has been farming the area for generations, has deep roots. It marks another sense in which Phillips is not quite a man alone: Police believe the help he has received has been an important factor in his ability to remain undiscovered for so long. “We haven’t hid the fact that we believe he’s been getting assistance since he’s been on the run with those children,” Acting Detective Inspector Andrew Saunders, the man spearheading the search, told the NZ Herald. “I can’t tell you who those people are… We know there’s [sic] people [who are] close associates to Tom that haven’t been cooperative with the investigation.”

And there remains stubborn public support for Phillips — particularly from those, to judge from the comments that proliferate under the news stories, who feel that Phillips is merely a father, wronged by the courts that stripped him of the custody of his children, who had no choice but to go bush — to defend his liberty. “They are fighting for freedom,” intones John Campbell in Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Barry Crump’s 1986 novel Wild Pork and Watercress. “And we believe in freedom in New Zealand. It is a marvellous thing.” And there, in the bush, te ngahere, so crucial to our understanding of ourselves as New Zealanders I take it almost as the repository of our shared subconscious, is where Ricky Baker and Uncle Hector are imagined as the protectors of that tradition — in opposition to the agents of the state, the bungling police and the cynical child-protection services, who give chase.

In roughly the time it took for Crump’s novel to become Waititi’s film the clauses of the social contract underpinning that freedom have undergone significant revision. Once, it was on the government side underwritten by a commitment to full employment and an adequate welfare state; weathered by the reforms of the late eighties, and a resulting capitalism that no longer seems to even aspire to look after all of its own, society has more latterly been calamitously battered by what some viewed as the state-overreach of the Covid era. As we have seen, in some conspiracy-oriented corners of society, there exists a belief that the authority of the state is a fiction that Covid exposed.

Tom Phillips perhaps represents in the minds of some the state’s antithesis — a man almost alone, a defender of freedom, a figure familiar from adventures both in the bush and in the New Zealand canon. In the support that exists for Phillips and his crazed mission — how could it possibly end well for him and the children in whose interests he presumably believes he’s acting? How could he not see the psychological damage this must be doing to his progeny, kept away from peers, education, healthcare? — maybe there exists an element of whatever it is that has me yearning, in my five-minute sessions of masculine atavism, for the kinds of skills, beards and musculature to which it never usually occurs to me to aspire.