The trouble with Otago Boys High

2026-02-08 - 16:08

Until last year, Breton Dukes worked part-time as a cook at Dunedin bar Woof! on lower Stuart St. Now he describes himself as, “Full-time author, full-time father, full-time house husband.” His wife, Elizabeth, is a consultant psychiatrist. Their three sons, Hector, Claude and Fred, are aged 11, 8, and 7. In his new novel Party Boy, the main character Marco works at a Dunedin bar and as primary caregiver to the three sons he has with his wife, a doctor. As Marco approaches his 50th birthday, the story builds to a climax that harkens back to “all the ghosts of his life.” The author’s own description of his book: “Terrible things happen, there is darkness and trauma and violence, but ultimately where the book lands, and what I believe, is that humour, emotional vulnerability, deep connections with others and love are all much more powerful than that dark stuff.” Dukes was born in Dunedin in 1974. From his home in Roseneath, he would watch the deep-water ships slide towards Port Chalmers. At eight, his parents had divorced. Another formative experience, and the dark cloud that looms over Party Boy: his years as a student at Otago Boys High School, from 1987-1991. “I’ve spent the last 20 or 30 years making sense of it,” he says, “What I sort of learned in high school was how to keep my head down, how to not stand out. I think what that did was sort of crush my personality...I didn’t really kind of shake free from my high school experience and also my university experience until I was in my 30s.” He is careful to note that OBHS was not uniquely malevolent, that “the general attitudes of society” in those times contributed to what followed. But the school incubated a particular vision of masculinity that would take decades to unlearn. Since leaving school, he has lived in Whangarei, Perth, Tokyo, Te Anau, Christchurch, Wellington, and Auckland. There were years of getting loaded (“weed, pills, booze”). He concedes, “This wasn’t how life was supposed to go. I didn’t have confidence. I was anxious.” In Christchurch, he lived with his grandfather in a kind of “boot camp” in an attempt to save money and stabilise. It was a failed attempt. “When he went to bed I drank his liquor and listened to Oasis.” He forged his grandfather’s cheques and flew to Perth. “I was very young. Early twenties and very depressed and lost. My plan was to try and get to London where my friends were. I thought that would solve my problems. In hindsight I am not sure if I would have survived London... Really, I was still a child. I hadn’t processed my parents’ divorce. I didn’t have good friendships. I didn’t know who I was.” Breton was retrieved from Perth by his father and brother. At Christchurch airport, he called his grandfather from a payphone. “Neither of us had access to our emotions so it was difficult to get to the point. Eventually I managed to say sorry. I can’t remember his response. But what I remember, and what still haunts me, was that even after what I’d done, he said, ‘You’d be welcome to come and stay, Bret.” They saw each other a few more times. “I feel shame and remorse for taking my grandfather’s money. I was desperate. Really, it was a cry for help. He was a lonely old man and I took advantage of him... I can’t remember how much longer after that he died, but we stayed in contact.” In the novel, Marco loses a boy he is looking after. Dukes says there is “some correlation” between that scene and taking money off his grandfather. “In both situations, we have someone being badly treated by someone who is damaged. But in writing this scene, I was not consciously thinking about what I had done to my grandfather. In both cases Marco and myself were very confused and unsure how to ‘be’ in the world. And in both cases, the incident increased the confusion and lack of ease in the world.” His grandfather died before Dukes published his first book. * Dukes describes his twenties and thirties in: “terrible anxiety,” “no confidence,” “binge drinking, some drugs,” “shitty jobs,” “lots of different relationships with women,” “moved around a lot,” “generally unhappy.” I ask him why he is making all these public. He says: “I just wanted to be open and honest about who I am and where I’ve come from and sort of where my writing comes from, which is a place of deep emotional truth.” He says of Party Boy, “It’s not autobiographical. But I have taken some drugs over the course of my life. I don’t anymore.” Hours after the interview, he emails, “I think I said I don’t use drugs anymore. Not really true! I still drink occasionally, like many, and get high very occasionally, like many. It’s not destructive like it used to be. I guess that’s the difference.” His salvation was writing. “It wasn’t really until I’d sort of found writing that I started to become a better version of myself.” I asked him what or who nudged him to apply for the writing programme at the IIML in Wellington. “I’d heard about it and applied and didn’t get in. I was working in a government call centre and writing when I could. I guess I was close to being a lifelong bureaucrat, but a job like that just never felt right. My creative fire was burning and was very distracting. And then in 2007 I got a story published in Landfall and then one in Sport and the next year I got in. “I gave up my job, my girlfriend, my friends and did nothing but read and write. My only release was binge drinking on a Wednesday night with an old friend at shitty sports bars around Wellington.” He was taught by Damien Wilkins. “Meeting Damien, being around smart, creative people... It taught me about books and about the craft of writing. I learnt discipline. I learnt to finish something and then start again and then finish it again... I made friends. It changed my life totally.” He has remained close with Wilkins. “I admire Damien as much as I admire anyone in the world. He’s been a really helpful supporter, he read the second draft of Party Boy and gave me incredible feedback. And to know someone who’s so good at writing, and to be able to call that person a friend, has just meant everything to me.” Fergus Barrowman at THWUP has published all of Dukes’s work. His previous books have all been short story collections, Bird North and Other Stories (2011), Empty Bones and Other Stories (2014), and What Sort of Man (2020). He enjoys the collegiately of a unique literary club: The Bald Writers Collective. Their membership is Dukes, John Summers, Bill Nelson, William Brandt, and Lawrence Patchett. They meet once a month at 8am on Sundays via Zoom, a group of writers united by hairlessness and early-morning grind, sharing work and encouragement. Brandt, in particular, sustained Dukes through Party Boy’s long composition. “To have someone like William who’s a terrific writer himself and a very good teacher of writing... It made the isolation bearable. I felt that I should keep going. It was an immense power to me.” * Much of his own life is fictionalised in Party Boy. “At the time of the writing of the book, I was working in a bar as a cook. I was doing therapy, and I’d been doing this at Otago Boys’ stuff. So, naturally, all three of those things became part of the novel.” By “Otago Boys’ stuff”, he means the interviews he had conducted with former students about their experiences at the school—including their memory of a predator who had prowled and preyed on students, a teacher whom the boys dubbed “Bummer Bond.” In 2014, David Russell Bond was convicted of indecent assault against a former student from the 1970s, when he was still a student teacher at another school. But the conviction emboldened more men to come forward. Bond was convicted again in 2018, 2022, and 2025. By June last year, he had accumulated 26 convictions for indecent assault against schoolboys across his 40-year teaching career. One victim testified that the abuse made school “a living hell.” Dukes himself was not among Bond’s victims. But he was shaped by the culture that enabled Bond to operate, and when he set out in 2022 to write about OBHS, Bond’s shadow fell across the project. “My initial idea here was to write a non-fiction project about Otago Boys and especially David Bond,” he says. “But having conducted those interviews and having thought about how I could write that sort of project, I realised I didn’t want to do it, and I couldn’t do it, and that was when I started writing Party Boy.” He had collected approximately about 30 testimonies from OBHS alumni—men who had witnessed Bond showering with students, men who had been taken on those weekend ski trips, men who bore the scars in their mind and bodies decades later. “Eventually the emotional toll was quite heavy. Some of the men I talked to had had very, very bad experiences at Otago Boys, either with David Bond, who was the predatory teacher there or with other adults at the school or at the hostel there.” In the acknowledgements of Party Boy, Breton writes: “Bullying, homophobia, the culture of conformity, violence at the hostel—in the end it was all too grim. I couldn’t commit to spending the required time in such dark places. And that doesn’t even account for the horror of David Bond.” What he took from those interviews, he explains, was not the specific incidents but “the mood and atmosphere, the vibe of the institution.” * Some of the narrative devices of Party Boy, he says, were inspired by his favourite TV show: “The Sopranos is my favourite work of art.” He has watched every episode at least eight or nine times. “The first episode of the first season starts with Tony Soprano in therapy, talking about something that happened the day before. And then the action switches back to that scene as if it’s in real time... I stole that setup from The Sopranos and applied it to my book. “Humour is the other thing I take from the show. There are always light moments. The dialogue is amazing. And the pacing. It is always tense and is always driving fast. It has heavily influenced the way I tell my stories.” He lists Delirious by Damien Wilkins and the work of Karl Ove Knausgård as other significant influences. “Also, I love therapy. It’s been so helpful to sit with someone who is on your side and who listens and who can reflect things back on me that I can then work on, understand more about why I am the way I am.” He started his therapeutic journey “maybe two or three years ago,” and it has become a kind of guiding star. In the novel, Marco sees a psychiatrist; the character is based on the author’s own therapist. His therapist read the first draft of the novel. “He thought it was great. He enjoyed it.” I ask which scene from The Sopranos hits him hardest. He replies, “When Tony and his son, AJ, are making ice cream sundaes together. It is late and they are in the kitchen. Tony is being kind and playful. It’s a lovely scene where a father is connecting with his son. It’s made even better because the viewer knows Tony is a monster, that he is capable of terrible things. But in this scene we see that he is capable of being gentle and loving.” Of the poignant final scenes in Party Boy, Dukes has this to say: “It means that Marco has done a good job overall... His kids are still happy to see him... Despite some of the difficulties Marco has had, in the end it’s turned out that he’s a good man and he’s a good father. I think that’s where that gets to.” Party Boy by Breton Dukes (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) is available in bookstores nationwide. ReadingRoom is devoting all week to this tough, challenging novel. Tomorrow: a portrait of the artist by his Dunedin friend, the Master of Odes, Victor Billot.