Bex Emmerson and her partner, with their twin baby girls, in Wellington. Bex talks about her dad Errol Hincksman and the Mr Asia Syndicate. Photos / Nicola Edmonds
David Herkt talks to Bex Emmerson about her father – the late Errol Hincksman, his role in the 'Mr Asia Syndicate' and her life as the mother of twins.
Bex Emmerson is in every new mother's state of blissful tiredness – times two. After giving birth to twin girls three months ago, her nights are interrupted, her days rotate around feeding, changing and the support crew she has organised to occasionally assist her and her partner, Rosario.
But it is another part of her history, her father, the late Errol Hincksman, who she is recalling.
"I don't think I really understood it until after he'd died," she begins. "I was clearing out all the stuff in his room when I came across the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Drug Trafficking – the Mr Asia case – but it wasn't until a couple of years after that that I opened up the book and had a proper look at it."
Hincksman died of pneumonia at his home in 2011. His funeral, with a natural wickerwork coffin, took place at Auckland's Purewa Crematorium. It was a gathering of family and friends – along with some unwelcome reporters and photographers.
Her father had been one of the last men alive who had accompanied the notorious Terry Clark from Wi Tako (now Rimutaka) Prison, through the creation of the largest criminal empire in Australasian history and, ultimately, to its spectacular British fall. Hincksman was there from the very beginning to the final day.
"I kind of knew that he was part of it," Emmerson says. "I knew that it was a big thing but I didn't really understand it until a lot later. I remember always being really curious."
It is one of the essential stories of contemporary New Zealand legend.
Picton-born Hincksman had met Clark while serving a prison term for burglary in the early 1970s. They soon become friends. With a snort of laughter, Hincksman later recalled Clark reading books like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People during his prison time.
Upon release, Clark became involved in small-time marijuana distribution in Auckland, where he met clothes salesman, Marty Johnstone. Together they developed Johnstone's business of selling Thai cannabis "buddha sticks" before graduating to the importation and distribution of low-bulk, high-profit, white powder heroin.
Hincksman followed Clark when he took the organisation to Australia, where they flourished. Clark referred to the NSW Police Force as "the best money can buy". Later court testimony records three days spent crushing up heroin from false-bottomed suitcases with an industrial blender in a Queenscliff flat and Hincksman's trips to Melbourne with the product.
"I did a lot of eavesdropping around corners as a child," continues Emmerson. "Everyone had this thing of wanting to protect me, so no one ever really told me anything. Everything I know I put together myself."
After an abortive attempt at establishing a foothold in the United States, Clark travelled to the United Kingdom, taking Hincksman with him. Clark had already ventured into the importation of cocaine from South America. New supply lines were being created.
Hincksman was one of the few New Zealanders to have flown the Concorde on its short-lived London-Singapore route with its purpose-designed cutlery and complimentary French Champagne. He dated New Zealand pop-stars in Sydney and had driven a dark-blue Mercedes in London. There were several passports and several names.
"He really had this thing, 'Ask no questions and you'll get no lies,'" Emmerson says of her relationship with her father. "It was, 'You can ask me stuff but you might not get the truth.' So I didn't ask him a lot of things."
Johnstone, however, made one mistake too many and Clark ordered his death, just like he had ordered others. Johnstone's handless body was disposed of in water-filled Delph Quarry in Lancashire but it was found by a pair of recreational divers. A neck-medallion and a missing person's report provided clues to his identity.
Clark and Hincksman were arrested in London in 1980 when the police broke down the doors of a Knightsbridge flat in a 7.30am raid. Clark's then partner, the Auckland solicitor Karen Soich, kicked an address book under the bed and then stood naked in the middle of the room to ask, "What's going on? I'm a lawyer."
"When I was about 13, I googled Dad's name," Emmerson recalls, "and it came up with the murder trial – with the quarry – and I remember being really shocked by that.
"Was my dad a murderer? That was really heavy."
There were never any legal insinuations or evidence presented that Hincksman had participated in or was accessory to any act of murder.
"And I think as I got to know him more, I believed that as well – that he didn't do that."
Hincksman was eventually convicted on drug matters and sentenced to 10 years in a British jail before deportation back to New Zealand. There would be two shorter terms of imprisonment.
Emmerson's childhood was often fragmented.
She lived with an aunt and uncle from the time she was 4 until she was 8, when her aunt was killed in a traffic accident. Then Emmerson lived with her nana until she was 17 and decided to move in with her father."
"I have been passed around a little bit but I have always stayed in the family.
"Then I decided that if I was going to study anything, it was going to be something that I was really passionate about and writing was it. So, I went and did a degree at MIT, a Bachelor in Creative Writing."
The result was a manuscript titled The Wig House. It is a book-length narrative sequence of poems.
"It is definitely autobiographical and I definitely wrote it with a structure in mind … It was how I understood things first as a child, then as an adolescent, then finally as an adult," Emmerson says.
"I started thinking a lot about the child who was neglected and a lot of stuff like that. I really felt that I owed that child a voice."
The poems are disarmingly honest, frequently reaching to understand the complex events of an adult world. The past has potent echoes that sound into the present, but their significance must be discovered. Familiar people mysteriously vanish. Families breakup. Change is sudden.
However, small moments at the blue-painted Newmarket swimming pool could sometimes provide a brief respite for a very young girl.
I love being under the water,
the deeper you get the louder the silence is,
it seems clearer down there.
But it is Emmerson's father who remains central to her writing. Throughout her childhood and early teenage years, Hincksman remained a much-loved but distant figure, surrounded by mystery. It would only be later, when they shared a city apartment, that other incidents occurred, which would soon be reflected in her poems.
"It was when I moved in with Dad that I really started to know him. He'd had Hep[atitis] C, so he was on Interferon and he was often sick and often depressed … I used to finish work quite late. He used to wait up for me and we'd have a little chit-chat at midnight or whatever.
"There was this one night I came home and we had a red and white retro chair and he was sitting in it. The lights were off and it was lit very dimly with this lamp – it was so picturesque. And he had his fedora sitting on the top of his head, bent down and there was a bottle of Krug on the table and he was drinking it out of a plastic cup.
"And I turned on the lights and I said, 'What the f*** are you doing?' And he said, 'I'm waiting to die.' And I went, 'Oh God, that's a bit melodramatic!' because sarcasm was the only thing that worked on Dad.
"That particular night he did tell me a few things," she continues. "He told me about becoming a vegetarian because the meals were really horrible in prison. He told me about how – it's the only story he told me about jail and I can't even remember it properly – how the screws used to bring in money so all of them could gamble and play poker.
"I think one of the screws was carrying a bag of coins and it ripped open and it dropped and there were all these coins rolling everywhere. And that was the only real story that he told me. "
I remove the bottle
of Krug from the
table, flick the
jug; he is dozing
before I can make
him a cup of tea.
His voice
travels up the
hallway,
Twenty-One Bex, I'll make it
till you're twenty-one.
"But really there were very, very few times he spoke about jail. I never visited him in jail once. To me, when I was really, really young, he'd send me two or three cards a week and I think they are my earliest memories of Dad … I'm not even sure I knew he was in jail. I would have been about 4 or 5."
Emmerson still has the box of cards her father sent her from prison.
"Hello darling, how are you? I hope school is going well! What do you want to be when you grow up? Just kidding, you can be whatever you want." Or "Q- what do you call an Eskimo house that doesn't have a toilet? A- an Ig."
"When he was on Interferon, he'd get quite low … I remember saying to him "Twenty-one, Dad, you told me 21" and that became a thing … Every time he got in one of those states, I'd say "Twenty-one, Dad, you told me 21!" And then on my 21st birthday, the day he died, I just remember having a feeling like it had happened already and it was really bizarre.
"I remember him really fondly. It wasn't until later that I realised all the story …"
Emmerson pauses to reflect.
"He protected me, which I felt was quite frustrating at times as well. Quite often people would say things that weren't true and then years later they would tell something different because they had forgotten what they'd told me. Then things would fall together."
Now, nine years after her father's death, with two girls of her own, everything has changed again.
"I was really worried I wouldn't have that maternal thing happening for me but it has. And that is really nice and I feel warm and full of joy … When I was pregnant my anxiety went through the roof and they wanted to put me on meds. So I told them, 'No, thank you,' because I have always been anti but now that the twins are here I feel less anxious than I have been in so long.
"I watch them sleeping all the time, and I could cuddle them forever," she laughs. "They are beautiful and precious. It is so hard to describe that feeling. Just full of love really. It is trying. I am tired — which is normal. There are two of them, which is hard work, but I also have a partner who is incredibly supportive, loving and hands-on. I feel thankful for that, because I do not know how I'd handle it otherwise. I'm feeling a lot of love from a lot of different places."
Times: Why are we getting worse at sleeping, not better?