Myth meets accountability

Questions about the state's handling of the Tom Phillips saga should not be buried with the Man Alone fantasy.

- Danyl McLauchlan

The figure of the outlaw who takes to the bush and lives off his wits while evading the state seems to resonate with something deep in the New Zealand psyche. It's the story of John Mulgan's Man Alone - sometimes celebrated as our nation's first literary novel - whose protagonist shoots his boss and flees the law across the North Island's Central Plateau.

In 1941, West Coast dairy farmer Stanley Graham became an antihero when he killed seven men, evading a gigantic hunt from police and the army until he was shot trying to steal food from a farmhouse. Man alone shows up again in CK Stead’s Smith's Dream, defying a police state, and the book was the basis for the film Sleeping Dogs, Sam Neill’s big break.

The 1980s finds this character defending his family: in Smash Palace, Bruno Lawrence defies a court order, kidnaps his daughter and takes to the bush; in Barry Crump’s Wild Pork and Watercress, Ricky and Uncle Hec hide out in Te Urewera to escape the clutches of Social Welfare. The book's ending is bleaker than the film adaptation, Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Things usually end badly for the man alone.

Now, the Waikato has its own dark incarnation of this myth. Perhaps its persistence helps explain the apparent reluctance of the police to capture Tom Phillips for much of the three years and nine months he spent living in the bush around Marokopa: the man was living out a national fantasy.