The White Lake

Two decades ago in my mid-40’s I had what might be called a professional mid-life crisis. It wasn’t that the job was boring.  I was a war correspondent for TIME magazine, then the world’s largest weekly news magazine. It was a life I could only have dreamed of when, at 20, I left my job as a reporter on the Taranaki Daily News and headed overseas seeking adventure and challenges.  

But by 45, I had grown weary of living out of a suitcase in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Eastern Europe while meeting unforgiving New York deadlines. I was nagged too by concerns that my number might soon come up, as it had for friends and colleagues, shot or blown up in wars nobody now cares about.  

I toyed with the idea of returning to New Zealand and a second, more sedate career. But serendipity took me to Poland which had just discarded communism and which I knew well from reporting there and, more importantly, my Polish wife. Together we built an award winning lodge on a pristine lake at the end of a dirt road and then a wine business which, among other things, imported the first ever New Zealand wine to Poland. Later I created a vodka brand with niche markets in Britain and France.

I also took on corrupt and venal officials in the pages of the Polish-language newspaper I launched, at one stage winning a criminal libel case that could have sent me to jail. My memoir, The White Lake, weaves this story together with memories of growing up in New Zealand and life as a war correspondent to produce what one reviewer in New York calls a book that “reads like a novel.”

The White Lake has just been published in London by Quartet Books and will be available in New Zealand in March/April.