Photography: Babiche Martens.
There’s no doubt that Kerre Woodham is a people person. When she arrives at our photoshoot, she immediately wraps each member of our team in hugs, asks about their lives and within minutes has us in peals of laughter with stories since she clocked off work.
It had been half an hour. It’s a gift that has sustained her through almost 30 years behind the microphone at Newstalk ZB, which is celebrating 100 years on the airwaves.
“I’ve been there for almost a third of its life,” Kerre says with pride.
At 61, Kerre is content. Not only is she doing the job she loves, but at home, her life is rich as a grandmother to Bart, nine, and Dora, seven.
“They’re absolutely delightful,” she says.
“They just spark joy. It’s such a privilege to have them in my life to this extent. They’re just amazing.”
The joy of being Kui
Kerre lives in a multi-generational home with her daughter Kate, Kate’s husband Ranko and her grandchildren. Her mokopuna pop in to see their Kui, as they call Kerre, when they want.
“It’s just a freeflow,” she says.
“It’s such a wonderful opportunity to love them with the same passion and intensity as you did with your own children, but without the fear of doing things wrong or mucking them up. “I see how much their parents have on their plates. I remember as a mum wanting my own time, to not be defined as a mum. But I love being defined as a grandparent. It’s that age and stage.”
Kerre, who has taken them to swimming lessons since they returned to New Zealand from England in 2021, relishes every moment she can spend with Bart and Dora.
“Last year, I took them to Fiji for a week, which was just bliss,” she recalls.
It’s a contentment that Kerre doesn’t take for granted. It has been a massive few years for her, including “consciously uncoupling” from her husband, multiple house moves, and she will soon celebrate 1000 days since she drank alcohol – an experience she’s spoken candidly about with Woman’s Weekly readers in the past. But well before that, at the age of 31, she found herself waitressing in Hamilton, feeling “burned out” from her time as a reporter on Fair Go.
She says, “I was irresponsible and hopeless.”
The unexpected road to talkback
Kerre had gone to study journalism after high school, started out as a cub reporter at RNZ and knew she loved the immediacy of radio.
“But in those days, they were rough newsrooms,” Kerre reflects.
“It was pretty savage. I remember sitting at my typewriter, trembling. I made so many mistakes. It was very patriarchal.”
She had multiple stints around the country before moving into television, which she says was a “good training ground” for talkback because she learned how to explain the stories she was reporting on.
When that ended, she found herself at the restaurant in Hamilton when ZB’s general manager Bill Francis came calling.
“He asked me if I would do talkback and I was like, ‘Eww, old people radio’ and I said no twice. And then he called me a third time. “I had just finished a yelling match with the troubled head chef and a water rat from the river had come into the kitchen that the chef stabbed with a knife. I just thought, ‘A nice, quiet studio has got to be better than this.’ So I went to Auckland with no expectations at all.”
Given the 8pm to midnight shift, Kerre hasn’t looked back.
“I thought it would be a kind of Socratic back and forth, but it wasn’t like that. It was about people. “I suppose what really surprised me is that we often only hear our own views, apart from our mum and dad’s, and you discover there are people who don’t believe in gay marriage or who are racist, or see the world through a different lens. That was remarkable to me. “It didn’t necessarily make them bad people. Where I’d normally dismiss them, you began to see how their world had shaped their views.”
The callers Kerre never forgot
Kerre says being exposed to multiple points of view has been good, but when it came to children listening, she became something of a mother figure.
She explains, “Their parents would say, ‘Can you please tell them to turn out the light because they have school in the morning?’ and I’d tell them to go to bed.”
But not all Kerre’s memories of young listeners are as quaint. One in particular still breaks her heart: a 14-year-old who was working in a brothel.
“She used to pretend I was her mum and listen to me between working and think to herself, ‘Mum’s working and she’ll come and get me when she’s finished.’ She wrote to me. I was heartbroken.”
She is one of many callers who will forever hold a piece of Kerre’s heart. Another was during the global financial crisis.
“A man called me in a hushed voice. He said, ‘Kerre, I’m ruined, I’m ruined. I’ve bought houses because I was told to buy houses, and I’m paying mortgages on the credit card and I don’t know what to do.’
“I told him that he and his wife needed to sell them. But he said, ‘She can’t know, she trusts me to do everything.’ Then I heard her calling him – we all heard – and he said he had to go. I told him to ring me back and he just replied, ‘I’m ruined.’ And that was the end of that. I’ve worried about him ever since.”
The lighter side of talkback
And another: “Once a truckie called me. He was working long hours because he needed money for his wife and their three kids. Then she left him because he was working those long hours, so there he was living in a horrible place behind a pet food factory with a mate who was also a truckie.
“He asked me what was he going to do because he couldn’t take his kids there and didn’t want his kids to think their dad was a loser. “I told him that I couldn’t bring that woman back to him, but he had to have hope. ‘What hope?’ he asked me. ‘Where? Every cent goes to my family.’ “These people don’t leave my mind. They call and they may feel better talking, but I carry them. I really do.”
But Kerre will also remember some uplifting calls, too, like Vivienne.
“She rang in about a year after I started at ZB, saying she had a great one-pot Christmas cake. I asked her if it involved ginger beer, but she said, ‘No, a can of condensed milk.’ So I said on air that if anyone would like Vivienne’s Christmas cake recipe, they could send it in a self-addressed envelope, as it was in those days, and we’d send it back to them. Well, there were 10,000 letters! And it wasn’t me who had to reply but my poor team!” [Interested readers can find the recipe on the ZB website.]
Why radio will always matter
As Kerre helps the ZB team celebrate its 100th birthday, she’s sad that issues such as gay marriage, transgender rights and racism are coming to the fore again.
“I thought we’d done that,” she says. “All these people ringing in would’ve been singing A-E-I-O-U back in the day and taking pride in it. And we loved the Topp Twins and the drag queens. I think in times of economic and global uncertainty, people start to ‘other’. [Othering is defining a person or group as different, placing them outside an accepted norm or community]. It’s just so disappointing that after all this time, we don’t seem to have gotten much further.”
But one thing Kerre firmly believes is that in another 100 years, radio will still be around.
“In an inauthentic world, you can’t fake live radio,” she says.
“You can’t AI radio because it’s about human connection. AI can certainly do a facsimile of me, but punters would pick it up because I can change my mind. I’m not the same every year. I can be talked around by a caller and their opinion. At our heart, we’re all human.”
A proud Kui
And as for those adorable grandbabies, will we ever hear them on the airwaves?
“They’re both such good people. They’re just divine, which is what every grandmother everywhere says, I know,” she laughs.
“I just want them to have a passion for what they do. They’ll need to do something with people because they’re incredibly empathetic, fabulous souls.”
