24 April 2024
French horn player Gregory Hill enjoyed a successful career in orchestras in both Australia and New Zealand, including three decades as a Principal player in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Throughout this time he secretly nurtured a passion for long-distance train travel, which he finally indulged in after his retirement.
His adventures on an epic railway journey from New Zealand to Spain has now been chronicled in his book, The Antipodean Express, which celebrates the enduring romance of traveling by train across 89 days of travel, on 33 trains, through 19 countries. It begins in New Zealand’s North Island, to the red centre of Australia, weaves past the volcanoes of Java, through East Asia and on into Europe.
I asked Greg for a sneaky peek at his reading life.
The first books to capture my imagination were…
I enjoyed a lot of books as a child but a series that really got my imagination going was Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, from the 1930s. Somehow I planted myself into their sailing and camping adventures and could believe I was part of it.
The books that saw me through my childhood were…
Good British children’s classics which were already rather out of date. I’ve still got my tattered copy of Treasure Island, “Especially edited for The Golden Picture Classics by Anne Terry White” in 1956. Rupert Bear was right up there too. Later there was Biggles and then I went daringly foreign with Tintin. The Hobbit had a stranglehold on me at an early age, but perhaps most influential was Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World (with an introduction by Arthur Ransome!) from 1900. That had me convinced that I must sail alone around the world. In the end I settled for a train.
My favourite book of 2024 is…
I don’t think I’ve read a 2024 book yet, apart from my own repeatedly. My most recently published read is Michael Palin’s Great-Uncle Harry (2023). It’s the story of an uninteresting nobody who benefits enormously, posthumously, from having someone as smart as Palin for a great-nephew. There’s a quite interesting NZ connection in there too.
The fictional character I’d most like to be is…
That’s an interesting concept. I usually expect compelling characters to be flawed in some way. I wouldn’t mind being compelling, but I don’t wish to be any more flawed than I already am. I’ve never read a book and thought “I’d like to be that person”.
The author I’m most likely to binge-read is…
I’m doing a bit of a binge right now as it happens. Len Deighton’s two cold-war trilogies, Game, Set & Match, and Hook, Line & Sinker. I saw them sitting in my bookshelf and realised I’d forgotten what’s in them. One was missing, I got a replacement at Arty Bees. So far I’m up to No.4, Spy Hook. Great characters but rather sparse plots.
The book I am most likely to press on a friend is…
That depends on which friend! I try to be flexible. I wish everyone would be as interested as I was when I read Andrew Crowe’s Pathway of the Birds: The Voyaging Achievements of Maori and their Polynesian Ancestors (2018). Those people’s navigational skills were and are astounding and most of us have no idea. And the book is beautifully put together.
My favourite film adaptation of a book is…
It’s hard to go past Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare. Henry V was a brilliant epic, and contrasting Much Ado About Nothing had some virtuoso film-making.
The book I studied at school that has stayed with me most is…
I read a great deal in my school years but somehow I just never bothered with the curricular books. They weren’t my choice so I wasn’t interested. So now, when friends reminisce about The Catcher in the Rye or Animal Farm, I’m at a bit of a loss. But I enjoyed 1984 and Erewhon, just because I chose them myself and they weren’t compulsory. I don’t know how I got away with it.
The last literary event I attended was…
I’ve been to a few book launches and author talks lately, mainly to get an idea of what happens. I’ve found many of them fascinating, not just because of the authors, but also the assorted personalities who come out of the woodwork to attend. The launch of Tony Simpson’s A Gent in Overseasia was a prime example, likewise Denis Welch’s We Need to Talk about Norman which seemed to attract a who’s who of experts on 1970’s Labour politics and public service. Most recent was something completely different: Rachel King’s The Grimmelings.
The character I’d like to meet is…
Captain Haddock. He reminds me of my father…
A line or two of writing I can recite from memory is…
It is an ancient mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1797. I could go on…
The book I keep meaning to read but somehow never do is…
Whoops! The Luminaries.
The book I have reread the most is…
I don’t generally reread novels unless I can prove I’ve forgotten what’s in there. Having lived the life of a classical musician, the book that most often demands another look is the Faber pocket guide Haydn by Richard Wigmore. Fact, analysis and anecdote about an unjustly neglected genius.
Bookmark, scrap of paper or turning down the corner of the page?
Ideally, a bookmark. Usually, a scrap of paper. Never, turning down the corner of the page! Sacrilege!
The first fifty pages or bust? Or always to the bitter end?
Only occasionally do I not make it. I’ve just found an NZ classic from 20 years ago with a bookmark on page 262. There is a vague intention to go there again.
The books on my bedside table right now are…
The previously mentioned Len Deighton, The Antipodean Express, and the gigantic (much bigger than my head) The Times Complete History of the World 7th Edition by Richard Overy. I got it for $3 from a library sale.
