Man who gave up violence now helping others

Ned Cook spent the first 41 years of his life doing all the things that he now helps people to escape from.

The 51-year-old Tongan is founding manager of Pacific Peoples Addiction Services, a Hamilton agency that helps people to overcome alcoholism, drugs, gambling and violence.

"When I came to New Zealand as a 19-year-old, I had already learned to be violent, getting in trouble with the law three times for assaults on females and males," he says.

"I have scars all over my body from my head down. When I met someone from those days recently, he said, 'You were the man then'.

"It's in my nature to be the best in everything I do - when I'm being good, I'm very good and when I'm bad, I'm bad."

His tattooed arms and hands tell the story of his life as a labourer and storeman, progressing through a series of short-term personal relationships that have made him a grandfather but never, for any significant time, a live-in father to his children.

His pattern was to work hard during the week, then get drunk at the weekends. Each partner suffered.

"I'd give her hidings, threats, smashing the place up - it happened just about every weekend when I got drunk. It was over simple things. It could be money. It could be because I had been away all night, two nights or whatever going to a rugby game and never came back."

Over three days last week, Mr Cook sat quietly at the back of a conference hall at Auckland's Waipuna Hotel hearing experts from three countries analysing the problem of domestic violence.

His own story explains a bit about how it happens, and shows that it can be stopped.

His father - descended, he says, from a liaison between Captain James Cook and a Tongan woman 230 years ago - was the last of the Tongan whalers.

"His whaling crew lived with us. They drank and they fought, so I learned violence from a very young age."

Young Ned Cook's violence got him kicked out of high school. He moved to New Zealand, then on to Australia, where he discovered poker and the horses.

He came back to Hamilton, joined the city's top league team and played one game for the Waikato B rugby team. "But alcohol and my behaviour were just too much for me to follow that up.

"My first marriage only lasted three months because of my behaviour," he says.

Other relationships lasted a year or two, and one for five years.

"She ran away to Australia. After five years she looked me up. She would still get the shakes and fears - that really hammered home to me the message that violence is never okay."

The turning point was when he broke someone's jaw and smashed another man's eardrum. "I decided to stop before I kill someone, or someone will kill me because of my behaviour. So I promised one of the guys that I'd give up drinking."

He did that, and gave up smoking, gambling and violence at the same time.

A decade later, he has two degrees, is in a stable relationship and employs a small staff of counsellors helping other Pacific people to follow him into a healthier life.

The good news, he says, is that he learned violence as a child, and what is learned can be unlearned.

"I do get angry most days, but I deal with it in a different way now that I know I need to," he says.

"Anger is just a feeling. Violence is an action that you do to others. It's having some coping skills because you know when you're getting angry, because you know something about calming yourself down."

A young man who comes to see him now, for example, "likes throwing things when he gets angry".

Mr Cook has taught him to open his palms wide every time he gets angry, so he can't pick anything up to throw.

"My role is to educate people with regard to what anger is, what violence is ... Hopefully, 50 years down the track, those generations will benefit from what we are doing now."

* Pacific Peoples Addiction Services, (07) 834-2964.