Hastings: A boy's own adventure

'If I'd been asked to vote on it I would've said I'd landed at the centre of the universe. Standing on our corner of Sylvan Road and Victoria Street, with Te Mata Peak, the Tukituki River and the mad wilderness of Windsor Park to the back of me and the distinctly nonwilderness of Cornwall Park and the misty vista of the Ruahines in front of me, I was the master of all I could barely survey.' This charming memoir by one of New Zealand's best-known painters is a love letter to his home town, Hastings, and the weirdly innocent world of the 1950s and early 1960s.