Deborah Coddington took the 10-day trial version of retirement and found that aimlessly rearranging the furniture wasn’t for her.
So at 70, with a life that revolved around words, the award-winning journalist, author and former Act MP decided she needed a new challenge for her creative spirit.
Deborah’s recently set up a small niche publishing company called Ugly Hill Press – named for the country road she grew up on in Hawke’s Bay – in a move that’s more about coming full circle than it is starting a new chapter.
After selling The Martinborough Bookshop (the first to open in the historical Wairarapa town), she has returned to publishing after working in the industry in the 1980s and now wants to produce books about New Zealand landscapes, people and places where they work.
With dogs (from left) Whetu, Elsa and Mahi, who are all moving to Karāpiro .
Peering from her laptop on a Zoom call with the Weekly, Deborah is make-up-free, wearing round black spectacles and hands clasped in fingerless woollen gloves. (“No one would recognise me from what you’re looking at now to what you see in the photos!”)
She muses that her restless energy has never left her in peace.
“I sold the bookshop, where I worked seven days a week, and I was going to retire,” she tells. “After about 10 days of wandering around the house, I thought, ‘I just can’t do retirement. I’ve got to have a project.’
“In the background, I did have plans for a coffee-table book on 35 independent bookstores of New Zealand with photos by Jane Ussher.
“I pitched it to another publisher, who wasn’t incredibly keen on it. So I thought, ‘I got a good price for the bookshop – I should probably put my own money into this and realise my own visions of what sort of books I want to publish.’
“But launching a publishing company is much scarier than opening a bookshop. You’re spending all this money and not getting any of it back until the books go on sale.”
Deborah at her 70th birthday with granddaughters (from left) Edie, 10, and five-year-olds Mika and Billie.
First off the Ugly Hill press is Green Rain, a poetry collection by Alistair Clarke, due out this month.
Next year will include a book celebrating the architectural beauty and historical significance of the Wellington Railway Station, photographed by Bruce Foster.
“I’ve picked up a couple of really good non-fiction books to publish in 2024. I did say to the authors, ‘Why me?’ But they wanted attention and pastoral care from a small publisher, and I found that hugely gratifying.”
Deborah is one of the country’s best-known journalists. During her long career, she has worked for North & South magazine, BBC World Service’s New Zealand operation and written columns for national newspapers.
In 1996, she compiled the Paedophile and Sex Offender Index, notching up death threats in the process. It generated criticism from those who alleged it breached the rights of criminals who were named.
She now lives in a rustic setting among the vines on an 11.5-hectare vineyard in Wairarapa, where she and her husband of 18 years, Chief Commissioner Colin Carruthers KC, produce Te Muna Valley wines.
It’s situated a little more than an hour from Wellington city, where Deborah once walked the halls of Parliament as an Act MP from 2002 to 2005.
Deborah in Parliament alongside Helen Clark.
The tenacious mum-of-four was reported to have been allegedly chased across the grounds of Parliament after a breakfast meeting by Roger Kerr, former executive director of the New Zealand Business Roundtable. The following year she announced she would not seek re-election.
“I was going to be pushed, so I jumped,” she says candidly about why she left politics. “As someone said to me the other day, ‘It wasn’t you who chased Roger Kerr across the grounds of Parliament.'”
How did she cope at that time being under such immense scrutiny? “It was absolutely horrible, mainly because your children hate it – they hate your job – and then you move on and nobody remembers.”
Born in Waipukurau, books were central to Deborah’s life growing up in central Hawke’s Bay. “I was really lucky that every single night, no matter what, Mum would read a story to me. She was obsessed with making sure we could read because she had to leave school at 11 years old because of the 1931 Napier earthquake.
“She had five brothers and had to forgo her education to look after the family because her dad, who was the Napier pharmacist, broke his leg when their house collapsed. “Her first job was in the Napier bookshop. She had to climb up ladders and bang the books together to get the dust out from the earthquake.
“So consequently, she was absolutely passionate about our education. She worked her butt off to get me scholarships to go to private boarding school Chilton St James in Lower Hutt.
With ex-partner Alister Taylor and daughter Briar in 1978.
“My four brothers tease me to this day because they had to go to a public school. So they call me the princess of the family,” laughs Deborah.
As a young teen going to boarding school, she admits she just wanted to be back at home on the family farm with her animals.
“It was a very good education, however, and even though the Scottish headmistress Joy Clark was so strict and we were all terrified of her, she was so good to me.
“I was a troublesome girl in school, but she never held that against me. And when I got pregnant at 16, she and my mother arranged for me to go to Australia to have an abortion, when abortions were illegal.
“Joy stuck by me because she knew I should be educated. At the time, she was only 32 herself – we thought she was old – and a single mother-of-three.
“I remember I had to go and tell her that I was pregnant,” tells Deborah, shaking her head. “She said sternly, ‘I know. I could tell by looking at you!’
“Funnily enough, I was a skinny little thing, throwing up every morning and thought I was hiding it well from other people.
“When I look back, I feel so lucky she and the matron didn’t throw me out of school. If I had been at home going to the local public school, I would have been sent up north for a while to have the baby. My life would have been totally different.”
Headmistress Joy ended up coming to see her “troublesome” former student give her maiden speech at Parliament decades later.
And when Joy died, Deborah went to her funeral. “She was an amazingly strong, intelligent woman who told me I was to never spend my life feeling guilty about having an abortion. She was a real mentor to me.”
Deborah aged 20 on her wedding day to first husband John McCormack.
Deborah is also grateful for her mum Patricia Coddington, a World War II women’s air leader who once worked on Tiger Moth aeroplanes, mending their engines and instruments so pilots could go back into battle.
She describes her mother as a tough, beautiful woman. But caring for Patricia when she had dementia in her late eighties was a huge challenge – “I got the private school education, so I owed her,” she jokes.
If Deborah has any regrets, it’s that she wished she had known earlier that her beloved mum had dementia.
“It wasn’t until I visited the Alzheimer’s New Zealand website not long before she died at 91 that I realised Mum had been suffering from stage two dementia –forgetting to eat, neglecting personal hygiene, showing poor judgement – when she was still determined to live in her own home.
“She refused to have Meals on Wheels, so I’d cook dinners and take them to her. She said she’d eaten them, but later I found she’d thrown them away or hidden them around the house.
“I could have saved myself so much unhappiness if I’d known earlier that my mother was unwell and not winding me up.”
After an eventful public and private life, Deborah now just wants to focus on family and making “enduring non-fiction” books.
A “for sale” sign has gone up on her Te Muna property, as she and Colin (and their three labradors, Whetū, Elsa and Mahi, plus cats Muna and Scaredy, and their bantams) look to move north to Karāpiro to be closer to her children and grandchildren.
“These days, I can’t think of better company than books or my four grandchildren. When I look at my granddaughters, my heart explodes with love for them.”
Quick fire
Who are your writing heroes?
Off the top of my head… Joan Didion, Patti Smith, Catherine Chidgey is so clever, Witi Ihimaera and John Mulgan. And I’ve just finished Ned Fletcher’s incredible book on the Treaty of Waitangi.
Share a book that’s helped you as a small business owner.
I read a book called The Company of One by Paul Jarvis, which says that staying small provides one with the freedom to pursue more meaningful pleasures in life. Large growth is one of the main causes of failure. You have to learn when enough is enough. I kept turning to this book, like my little Bible, to remind me when to focus on what I wanted to do.
What are you most proud of?
I think the way my four children have turned out. They had such a rough childhood when their father [the late publisher Alister Taylor] and I were living in Russell, and it was really horrible. They often got dragged out of school to work in the café because that was the only way we could make money. Sometimes all they got for Christmas was a beach ball. But my kids have turned out to be so resilient and successful, and I don’t take a lot of credit for that. They’re all very close and would walk over ground glass for each other.
