News of the death on June 19 of one of the strangest men in Auckland brought on a wave of grief and sorrow for the loss of someone who had become a kind of touchstone of Auckland life, like One Tree Hill and the Devonport ferry, even the Sky Tower
Steve Braunias: The life and death of One Dread
Ian Morgan on his 65th birthday in Westmere. All images supplied by Dave Morgan
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Online tributes to him were from Aucklanders who remembered him as far back as the 1980s, and included sightings these past five decades on Karangahape Road, on Queen St, in Mt Eden, in Parnell, in Ponsonby, in Westmere… He was like an urban legend, someone once seen never forgotten, a troll, a hobbit – but these are dehumanising terms, and they disguise or make light of the load he surely had to carry as someone who appeared to lead some kind of itinerant life, wandering the streets for more than 40 years, walking the earth in all seasons, always alone.
He was an icon of Auckland isthmus, just as a legendary vagrant had been to Wellington until his death in 2003: Robert Jones, also known as Bucket Man, a pitiful character who wandered the streets of the capital holding a little tin bucket. Jones was found dead in a gutter. One Dread died in Auckland Hospital. At least he had come to rest, but he was never really regarded by Aucklanders as a tragic figure. Instead, he was a symbol of fortitude. He toughed it out his entire adult life. The tributes to One Dread were acknowledgements of courage.
“There’ll be a crisis in his past,” said Margaret Lewis, who works with Auckland’s homeless. We met at Merge Café on K Road. It’s administered by the Methodist Church and provides good, cheap meals and acts as somewhere friendly and warm for rough sleepers or anyone in need.
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I mooched around downtown Auckland for three days on a circuit of homelessness - the City Mission on Hobson St, then down the hill to the central library on Lorne St, further downtown to the rough sleeper vortex beneath the overpass by the Tepid Baths on Customs St, then up the hill to the Auckland Methodist Central Parish on Pitt St and around the corner to Merge Café – and asked about 30 people whether they knew of One Dread.
Everyone knew of One Dread. But hard information about him was sparse. It was rumoured he slept by the Tepid Baths. A homeless woman reckoned he constantly hitch-hiked around New Zealand.
A homeless man outside St Matthews in the City, chugging on methamphetamine through a bong made out of a Pepsi can, claimed that One Dread was a narc, a police informant: “I was pinching some food at a superette for my missus cos she was pregnant. And he was watching us the whole time and ran off to the cops”. I asked, “Did they bust you?” He said, “Nah cos I took off. But yeah. Arsehole.” He tossed the can onto the pavement. One side of it was perforated with tiny holes.
“I knew him back in the 80s,” said a man who went by the name of Spyda. Spyda works in peer support at the City Mission. He had a clipboard and a pen, and welcomed about 100 guests who arrived at City Mission for a free breakfast from 8am. “All good my bro,” he said to each of them. Spyda was one of Auckland’s original streetkids – homeless teenagers, wasted all day long with their heads buried in bags of glue – and said he was about 14, 15 when he arrived on the streets in the mid 1980s. One Dread was already there. “I was based under a building by the Power Station nightclub near Symonds St, and I used to see lots of him on K Road and Queen St. He stuck to himself, he was a loner. He had the dreads even then. He didn’t ask for money. I think he had somewhere to stay.”
He had never seen One Dread at the City Mission. Staff confirmed he wasn’t among their clients. “He didn’t engage with our services,” said Ellen Lear. “We literally have no record of him.”
It was the same with Merge, on K Road: everyone knew One Dread by sight, but had never seen him in the café. “I knew him. Pākehā fellah, eh,” said Alan Smith, a powerfully built man wearing mismatched shoes (“This one cost $10. This one is from a hopper”) and who pushed aside his plate of fish with garlic served at Merge. “You just don’t cook fish with garlic,” he lectured. “Fish has a subtle taste. Garlic’s all good with your mussels, but not with your fish.”
He considered the character of One Dread. “He was – it’s a Pākehā word. It means shy. Withdrawn? No. Remote? That’s good, but it’s not what I mean. He was a man of few words. I always spoke to him but he didn’t want to have a yarn. Innocuous! That’s the word. He was innocuous.”
Two rough sleepers at the library, Dion and Colin, agreed that One Dread never said much. They were sorry to hear of his passing. Dion had a lot on his plate the morning we spoke; his ex had thrown his pillows and bedding into the mud, and he was trying to figure out what could be saved. Colin had taken the bus in from his camp in the bush on Ohau Bay. “It’s a nice little spot and I don’t want anyone moving in. Thou shalt not trespass but if thou tries, thou shalt get thou fucking head chopped off.”
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As for One Dread, he said, “He always wore black. Kept to himself. He had a little hut built around him at the Tepid Baths”. I said I was on my way there, and wondered if someone had taken his spot. “Oh no,” said Colin. “When someone on the street dies, it’s very sacred.”
There was someone asleep inside a little hut built around him beneath the overpass at the Tepid Baths. The rumours had confused One Dread with this character: he had slept there for years, a small, very hirsute man with his beard secured in a hair tie.
Sharon, begging on K Road, knew who I meant by One Dread. He wouldn’t say hello, she said. Sharon had just returned from Tolaga Bay, where she cleaned her partner’s grave on the anniversary of his death. “He died choking on his false teeth.” Rangi at Merge said of One Dread, “I knew him but I didn’t know him. Sad to say but he was just a shadow in the background. He wasn’t aggressive and he didn’t swear or drink. He just lived his life the way he wanted.”
Everyone on K Road insisted I speak with Six, street identity, dope smoker in residence, and editor and founder of the long-running K’Road Chronicle, a few pages of folded A4, which documents street people.
I found Six on the pavement outside the Lim Chhour food hall. I stared at her long black fingernails, and she said, “Tried to take his photograph for the Chronicle. Told me to f*** off. He didn’t really associate with anyone. He was very insular. He kept himself to himself. No one ever had a problem with him. He’s just one of those mysterious K Rd people whose stories we won’t know.”
In fact, he lived in one of the most expensive suburbs in Auckland at 27 Notley Street in Westmere. I was directed there by a woman who worked at the Tepid Baths; she confirmed that the man with his beard in a hair tie who slept opposite the baths was a long-time occupant of that harrowing location, but knew who I meant by One Dread, that she’d seen his death notice in the paper, and a friend of hers was pretty sure he lived in Westmere... I had only assumed he was homeless.
I arrived in Auckland in 1990 and had seen him ever since then, looking like a tramp, destitute, and, I imagined, lost. It was why I made my circuits of Auckland homelessness. When Spyda had said, “I think he had somewhere to stay”, I took it to mean somewhere in the bush, maybe the Symonds St cemetery, or a dry spot beneath that classic resting place for trolls, a bridge.
But no. A state rental in Westmere. There were Housing Corp letters for him in the mailbox at 27 Notley Street, off Garnett Road in that central suburb on a plateau, with lovely views of the harbour and Meola Reef – Ali Williams and Anna Mowbray have a nearby waterfront home and are agitating to build a helipad. Such are the neighbours of a man who I thought lived as poor old Bucket Man of Wellington had died, in gutters.
“Ian,” said people who live on Notley Street. They didn’t know him in his legendary guise as One Dread; they knew him as an eccentric neighbour these past 20 years. “I used to see him most days, just to say gidday,” said Graham Burling. “He always want to talk you,” said his wife; when she gave me her name, I asked if was spelt “L-i-u”, but she laughed, and said, “L-o-u.”
Graham said, “I was probably one of the few he spoke to him. He’d always look out for me.” Lou said, “He really lonely. Lonely man. Sad. He had problem in the head. My daughter say, ‘Mum, dwarf man has passed away.’ He was hunched over and walk twisted.”
They saw him most days walking to the bus stop or from the bus stop. The Outer Link service was his caravan, his happy place: all the sightings of him over the years, in Mt Eden, in Parnell, in Newmarket, were on the Outer Link circuit.
The last time I saw him was on the Outer Link, in autumn, his feet not touching the ground as he rode from Mt Eden to Westmere.
Chris Matthews, the former frontman and songwriter of 90s cultists Headless Chickens, and more recently an Outer Link bus driver, posted a little memoir of One Dread online: “I always chatted with him and he was always friendly - not the sharpest tool in the shed but I got the impression that nobody else talked to him much because of his physical appearance.”
Hans Koghler lives on Notley St behind an electric fence. I saw him in his front yard. He wore shorts, exposing the full bionic length of a prosthetic leg. “I kind of backed away from him in recent years,” he said, “cos he was always talking racist shit towards his neighbours. Māori, Pacific Islanders, a Middle Eastern family.” I said, “What kind of racist shit?” He said, “Oh the usual hate speech.”
Two other neighbours made the same accusation. A darker side of One Dread began to emerge, complicating his image as some kind of holy innocent, and the same neighbours repeated the claim I first heard on K Road, and read online, too: that he was a police informant.
Notley St is old Westmere, working-class, with brick duplexes and scowling guard dogs; one tattooed tough guy wandered from his front porch to his high white front fence with a cup of tea, and said, “Yeah. Narc. I know the gangs. KCs [King Cobras] and that. That’s why they transferred him here. His cat got poisoned. His dog got poisoned. He’s lucky he wasn’t poisoned.”
Two doors down, a woman leaned her head out the window of her house, and said, “Everyone knows he was a narc. Cops moved him here from Herne Bay for his own protection”. As for his racism, she said, “He called us names. No one liked him.”
But a man opposite 27 Notley St liked him a lot. “Completely engaging,” he said. “He’s an eccentric. If we were in the middle of the UK we wouldn’t bat an eyelid.” They would have long talks, he said, although to be accurate they were more like monologues. He ranted on about Housing Corp wanting to install a heat pump in his home. He would not allow it. “Very contrarian character. Became totally obsessed about it.”
Like the woman who I interviewed with her head out the window, he watched the ambulance arrive and take his neighbour away, and they both also observed the clean-up mission at 27 Notley St after he had died. Both described people in fully protective Hazmat suits. Both described the workers filling up bag after bag of junk. But the woman went further, and said, “The filth! I went over to have a look and it was yuk. It stunk. It was rotten. He was a hoarder. You open the door and you saw it up to your bloody waist.”
There was a nasty, vindictive tone to all her rantings against her former neighbour. And none of it actually added much of any substance to an understanding of Ian Morgan aka One Dread.
There was affection for him as well as plain dislike from people on Notley St but hard information, once again, was sparse. I hoped to gain insight from the man who lived in the other half of the brick state house at 27 Notley St. Morgan’s half faced onto a bare and barren lawn; to the right, a vegetable garden and an olive tree were flourishing.
A creeper grew out of an open window onto the front porch. I knocked on the door. It opened approximately three millimetres. I could see an eye, and a striped dressing gown. I explained the reason for my call. “Not interested,” he said, and closed the door.
I took a walk behind the house, along a pretty track that led through Jaeger’s Bush to a freshwater stream opposite Auckland Zoo. Tui were loud in the trees, and sunlight played with shadow on the track. I stopped to check on my emails. I had left a message with the classified department at the Herald to pass on my contact details to the family member of Ian Gordon Morgan who had placed the death notice.
There was a message from Dave Morgan, his brother. I read it in Jaeger’s Bush and for the first time I learned something about the life and torments of that strange little man who moved through the Auckland isthmus as one of the city’s most recognisable inhabitants and yet had remained mysterious, aloof.
Dave’s poignant 150-word memoir read, “Ian lived his life on his terms, which created hardships for himself and to a certain extent did not endear himself to the family. He would phone me 4-5 times weekly over the past 10 years with much of his conversation surrounding Lotto results and those who may have died that week. He had limited IQ, was streetwise and had a remarkable ability to remember names from the his past. His lifestyle was determined by his crippleness and a fiercely independent attitude where he shunned institutional help. Also had a great fear of doctors and/hospitals. Was knocked down by a truck 5-6 years ago and hospitalised until they mentioned surgery for cracked ribs at which he promptly discharged himself.
“Have been told that after being found on his floor, with ambulance in attendance, his final words prior to being sedated were, ‘F*** off.’ Think that was his last thoughts on life.”
Dave lives in Tauranga. I caught the InterCity bus to travel there – it was colder onboard than the winter’s day outside – and we talked for about three hours in a richly informative and sometimes heartbreakingly sad interview.
Dave was an interesting guy with an original line of thinking about life. His brother baffled him. He had clearly not met anyone quite like him and sometimes expressed shocking views about him but towards the end of our time together he faltered, and struggled with the loss of someone he had known and loved his entire life.
Ian was the youngest in a Catholic family of four boys. Ian was born crippled, he said; Dave wasn’t sure about his exact condition, but it presented as a hunchback, and he thought Ian was also intellectually handicapped in some which way.
He had three fingers on each hand. He was always small. He didn’t play sports and he didn’t have friends. His father worked in banking, and the family moved around, living in Palmerston North, Raglan, Timaru, and Pukekohe.
The boys all left school at 14, 15 to find work, including Ian: “I think with IHC for a while at some factory in Avondale where they put plasters in boxes, but he felt that was beneath him.”
At 25, he left home, and spent the rest of his life on a social welfare benefit, living alone as a Housing Corporation tenant in downtown Auckland on Greys Avenue for a long time, and for the last 20 years at 27 Notley Ave. nue.
Dave said, “It’s a bit like going to a 10-year-old kid and saying, ‘I’ll give you a house, I’ll pay for your power, I’ll pay for all your food and clothing, and you don’t have to work for the rest of your life.’ What would you think? And that was Ian. Because he was like a 10-year-old in the body of someone who nearly made it to 70”.
In the years at Greys Ave, he said Ian would sleep all day, and roam Karangahape Rd all night. He was severely beaten up once but that didn’t stop him.
Dave said he had never thought his brother was a narc; maybe it was just a malicious rumour, and definitely he hadn’t had his cat and dog poisoned as some kind of retribution, because he never actually owned a cat or a dog. He added that he never heard his brother talk racist shit.
After moving to Westmere (there was no interim housing at Herne Bay, contrary to the claims of his mean neighbours), he kept to a routine, spending all day on public transport – out to Pukekohe on Monday, Henderson on Tuesday, and Takapuna every second Sunday for a big feed.
He loved revisiting neighbourhoods from his childhood in the family home. He always travelled with thousands of dollars in cash: he paid everything in cash, including his Herald subscription. Dave thinks he only bought it for the death notices and the Lotto results. He wasn’t even sure Ian could read.
He never cooked. There was nothing in the freezer, and the only items in his fridge were packets of margarine. He lived on Coke, hot chips, and ready-roast meals. He never drank or smoked.
On his 65th birthday, he threw the only party he ever gave, and invited family as well as people who he met on his incessant travels around the city. “He got up and he did a 10-minute speech, totally off the cuff, and he spoke clearly to everybody,” Dave said. “It was mainly his history, how he was born in Palmerston North, had an operation when he was probably about 12 – they put a steel rod in his back – and then he just went through people he’d invited and thanked everybody for coming.”
I said, “That sounds really gracious.”
“Well, it was, you’re right,” Dave agreed. “I mean – you never knew his IQ. I’d ask him, ‘Can you read?’ He’d say, ‘I only went to school for the lunch.’ But now and again, he’d floor me with a big word. And other times it was just like talking to an idiot.”
Ian phoned him all the time, almost never for more than two minutes. He’d call to ask if it was raining in Tauranga. He’d call and ask for the Lotto results. He’d call and pass on news of who was in the death notices. “He had a great memory for names. He’d ring me up and say, ‘Alf Patel died. He was your Scout leader 50 years ago.’ And then he’d be, ‘Okay. Bye.’ He might call three times a day, but two minutes max. But now I miss his calls.” His eyes filled with tears.
Dave trained for the Catholic seminary. It didn’t hold. He lost his faith in God a long time ago. I asked him what he thought Ian might look like in God’s eyes, and he said something quite devastating. “I don’t think a God could exist that would allow people like that to be born.”
People “like that” – but we were talking about his brother, and we were also maybe talking about someone who found happiness, and purpose, and maybe even beauty in walking the streets, a brave little observer on the meanest street in Auckland after dark all those years on K Rd, and then as one of Auckland’s great travellers, forever on the road north, south, west and east (he once took a week-long holiday to New Plymouth, where he booked a motel and did God knows what), slurping on his beloved Coke, tucking into readymade roasts, forever busy.
And then coming home to an idyllic location in Westmere, where he had a roof over his head, hot water, a bed.
Dave filmed Ian’s flat after he died. It was in a hell of a state, piled high with newspapers and documents, with loose coins and jam jars, but Dave said the strangest thing about it is that although he expected it would smell to high hell, it was actually clean.
So much for the malice of the neighbour who got as far as the front door, and claimed it stank. “Here’s his bedroom,” said Dave, playing the video on his phone. There was a mattress and no bedclothes. “He didn’t sleep there. He slept here,” he said, as the video moved to the lounge. Ian slept on an old couch. He had a wooden chair in front of it to rest his legs and watch TV. There was something especially pitiful about the chair, about the thought of his little legs laid out on it in his lonely lair.
Dave liked to talk in circles. He kept circling back to the phone calls. He’d often act them out, and mime Ian’s voice as a flat nasal honk. “He’d phone and say he’d just bought another Herald subscription ... It was his major expenditure. I’d say, ‘Why?’ And he’d say, ‘Oh, because I like to see if you’re still alive or in the death notices.’”
Dave also kept returning to the state of 27 Notley St house after Ian died. “Because of his crippledness, maybe he was getting to the point where he couldn’t bend over and pick things up, so he’d let things fall on the floor and just leave them there. He would come in from shopping, and just dump his bags on the floor. And he couldn’t open jars. They were too hard for his fingers to unscrew. But the place didn’t smell. There were no mice, no rats, no insects. It was quite strange.”
He never wore socks: “He couldn’t put them on.” He only wore slip-on shoes. He wore a check shirt, no singlet, no coat, and black dress pants. Dave found a photo of Ian taken at his wedding 47 years ago. “That was the last time he had his hair cut.”
He circled back to the phone calls. He’d tell Dave that he’d get up at 3am and wait for the Herald to be delivered in his letterbox on Sunday mornings so he could check the Lotto results. “He’d be at the gate at 3am. But I doubt he read the paper fully. I could never quite work out where his IQ was. I’d wonder, ‘Is he really an adult? Or is he a child?’
He’d phone and talk to me about Lotto. Or, ‘Is it raining down there?’ and, ‘I only rang to see if you were alive,’ that sort of conversation. The phone meant a lot to him. He went through life pretty much on his own. Years ago, Dave said, and this was even more shocking than his remark about a just God not letting Ian exist, “they would have given him a bell and put him in a circus”.
He fell over in Takapuna and hit his head earlier this year. Dave thinks he might have suffered a brain bleed. It wasn’t long afterwards that a neighbour saw him lying in the doorway at 27 Notley Street. He might have been there for a day or longer. An ambulance took him to Auckland Hospital. He never regained full consciousness although one night he ripped out all his drips. “Whether it was just an automatic reaction, who knows?”
And then Dave acted out a phone call. “He’d call and say, ‘What are you doing? Is it raining? Somebody’s died. Okay, see ya.’ To some family members, he was a nuisance. He rang them too often.
He found I was an easy target. I suppose I had the time to listen. I mowed his lawn for four years, and after I stopped he’d ring me every couple of days and tell me how much better the new mowing guy is.”
I asked Dave twice for the moral of the story of Ian Morgan, about what his brother’s life meant. He was baffled.
I asked whether Ian had dreams as a boy that he wanted to pursue, and he said, “I know this isn’t what you mean but I know he had dreams because he used to grit his teeth and swear a lot at night when we were kids. I could hear him gritting his teeth”.
I said, “These don’t sound like good dreams.”
He said, “No.”
And then he returned to the subject of the state of Ian’s home. “We were expecting to find mice droppings. But it was just dust. That’s almost the most peculiar part of it.”
I asked Dave if he was either proud or ashamed of his brother, and he said, “I thought he had a lot of guts living like he did. So I have some admiration for his lifestyle. Even with all his deformities, he was quite happy to walk the streets at night. I wouldn’t. But Ian didn’t have any fear of anybody. So a little bit of awe there, I suppose.”
He circled back yet again to the phone calls. He acted another one out, and then he sighed, and said, “Now I’m missing his phone calls on Lotto day. Every Sunday at 9am he’d call. I’d say, ‘How did you go?’ He’d say, ‘Bang-bang.’ That was his code for he hadn’t won. Bang-bang. And then it’d be, ‘Bye.’ The two minutes would be up.”
We sat at the kitchen table in silence for a couple of minutes. Every time Dave had repeated a phone conversation with Ian was a chance for him to imagine he was once again hearing his brother’s voice, calling just to say hi, calling just to confirm that with everything he went through - the friendless childhood, the steel rod in his back, the years of loneliness and wanderings, the crazy hair travelling towards his sockless feet - he was still alive.
