Laughs and lamentation: Sir Tim Shadbolt’s colourful legacy

Sunday, 18 January 2026

Game for a laugh. The late Sir Tim Shadbolt.

Mike White is a senior writer and columnist.

OPINION: The funeral notice for Tim Shadbolt, Sir Tim, was as peculiar as it was particular.

'As a mark of respect to Sir Tim it is requested that attendees wear formal, dark, mourning attire. Dark lounge suit for men.'

Often in such public notices, attendees are encouraged to wear bright colours, to celebrate the deceased’s joy for life.

But gone was such gaiety for Sir Tim, supplanted by suits of sombreness and sadness.

On Friday afternoon, hundreds of men dressed in the shade of sorrowing filed into Invercargill’s Civic Theatre, to remember one of the city’s, and country’s, most colourful people - a slightly odd scene for someone who marched through life with his face so often creased into a laugh.

Peace and love: Shadbolt in his hippie prime.

But then, Sir Tim’s life had long ago arced from revolution to respectability, from anti-establishment to establishment figure.

In some ways, Sir Tim exemplified the maxim, “If a man is not a socialist by the time he’s 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he’s 40, he has no brain.”

In his youth, in the days when he was infrequently far from a megaphone or march against somethingorother, Shadbolt was the closest thing nice New Zealand got to Che Guevara.

There was everything from peasant agrarianism experiments, to exhortations to direct action.

Never far from a megaphone, Shadbolt regularly rallied Southland troops.

“Dynamite can be readily obtained from your local quarry, or Molotov cocktails can be made with a bit of petrol in a bottle with a rag wick stuck in it,” Shadbolt wrote in his book, Bullshit & Jellybeans, in a section on bombing. “This type of protest tends to create a strong reaction.”

But times and Tim changed, and he mused to me once, “I think I sort of am a conservative.”

I first met Shadbolt in a pig pen. I was writing a story about how he’d saved some rare feral pigs from the Auckland Islands, which were now a miracle of medical research. Always keen for a gag, he arrived in his mayoral robes and chains, and gumboots.

Years later, I spent several days with Shadbolt in Invercargill for a feature on his political longevity, trailing him around endless functions as he glad-handed, and shook hands, and posed for photos, and shared jokes, his eyes slimming to nothing as he squawked and giggled in that inimitable way.

I tagged along as he cooked a burger for charity, as he celebrated with local resident Violet Riley who was marking her 100th birthday, as he met with constituents, as he met with contestants in the Rose of Tralee competition, as he made a cameo in a local college’s zombie apocalypse movie.

One night, he attended a wearable arts show where one of the entrants styled a spectacular creation from the Southland Woodworkers Guild.

Shadbolt leaned over to me and whispered he had his heart in his mouth at the model’s every step, in case she’d fallen.

Shadbolt was once crowned the most kissable bloke in New Zealand.

“There would have been splinters everywhere.”

Everyone wanted a piece of Mayor Tim.

He was a rarity in New Zealand politics - a celebrity.

But it hadn’t always been thus.

When he ran for Parliament in Wellington Central’s 1992 by-election, trumpeting his slogan “Absolutely Positively Full of Shit”, he got 64 votes, though he did beat Victor Bryer of Christ’s Ambassadors Union, who got only one.

The fickle stream that is politics - dried up one season, a bank-bursting torrent the next - was demonstrated when Shadbolt romped to Invercargill’s mayoralty the next year.

But the following year, he got trounced when standing for New Zealand First in the Selwyn by-election, though he again saw off nemesis Victor Bryer, whose support swelled to two, this time.

When he was ditched from Invercargill by voters the first time, in 1995, Shadbolt clanked and smoked his way out of town in a red Lada bequeathed by his partner’s father.

The heap of shit got as far as Queenstown, where the starter motor packed up, and Shadbolt had to park it on a hill every day so he could crash start it and get to work cooking in a restaurant.

Bill Ralston penned an early obituary of Shadbolt that year, pronouncing him a “faded icon… perhaps about to fade away entirely”.

It was legitimate scepticism, but profoundly premature.

Within a few years, Shadbolt was back, King of Invercargill again.

A condolence book at the Invercargill City Council for Southlanders to pay their respects to Sir Tim Shadbolt, who died on January 8 2026.

And he stayed there, largely beloved, until 2022, when he limped to fifth in the mayoral elections, unable to even garner 1000 votes.

Sir Tim was crushed, the unwanted-man’s burden overwhelming him.

But on Friday, those dressed in their grieving best, rightly remembered the wonderful, wild years and decades before that.

Because, as Sir Tim once told me: “I’ve just been so incredibly lucky. If I’m run over by a bus tomorrow, I’ll have a smile on my face, because so much has just worked out so well.”