Livin' ina Aucklan'

This is a collection of songs based on O'Leary's poetry designed to capture the good things about Auckland in the 1980s offset against the feeling of loss and emptiness felt at the end of an intense love affair alongside the destruction of so many of the city's older buildings. The idea of ‘Mount Albert being just as important as Montmartre if you live there’ pervades the whole collection. At the time O'Leary's friend John Pule was beginning to explore his artwork, having been known as a poet up to this point. He had done a Pacific Island version of a totem pole in O'Leary's Parimoana Bookshop in Kingsland, so Pule offered to do some drawings for O'Leary's latest collection of poetry. O'Leary had already done a front cover reflecting the work he was doing on the re-paving of Queen Street working 12 hours a night, and a back cover using Polynesian artwork copied from a tapa cloth and other things that Serah Fesolai and O'Leary had hanging on the wall of their Mount Albert flat. The title Livin' ina Aucklan reflects the language of the streets and the whole project was a coming together of the way we lived in those days. O'Leary, Pule and David Eggleton were often out busking and Eggleton and O'Leary were making artworks under the Earl of Seacliff label and selling them on the streets downtown during the weekend and on Friday nights. Included is a long poem not in the original publication, Auckland Revisited, written twenty years later in 2008.