Braunias on Polkinghorne: ‘I was interested in the way New Zealanders hated him so much’
Tuesday, 15 July 2025
Journalist Steve Braunias was on a visit to Christchurch when he discovered the whole country was obsessed with the lurid Philip Polkinghorne case, not just Auckland.
Was that odd? It seemed like such an Auckland story. Part Gloss, part CSI.
A wealthy eye surgeon was suspected of murdering his wife in their palatial Remuera home. He drove a white Mercedes with a personalised number plate. And he was found to have had spent a fortune on a lurid secret life involving sex workers and methamphetamine.
Braunias was filing daily dispatches from court but who knew that his stories were being avidly read this far south?
During an appearance at WORD Christchurch last August, when Braunias wished he was at the High Court in Auckland to see Polkinghorne’s defence in action, only one subject came up. Was he surprised?
“Yes, very surprised! No-one in Christchurch who I talked to wanted to talk about anything else,” he says. “I think some of it was tied up with the good old hatred of Auckland by everyone south of Papakura. Polkinghorne was Auckland incarnate – he earned too much, his car was too big, he took up too much room.”
Braunias is returning almost exactly one year later with the book of the trial, Polkinghorne: Inside the Trial of the Century. He will be interrogated at WORD festival by former Christchurch mayor Lianne Dalziel.
In the interim, Polkinghorne was found not guilty, meaning Pauline Hanna’s death must be considered a suicide, although many have doubts. Braunias is on the record as saying he genuinely does not know if Polkinghorne killed her or not.
Yet it is also clear that Braunias has nice things to say about the man he famously mocked in print as a sex dwarf, a sex elf, even a sex goblin. Does the sex dwarf have a tender side? Braunias dedicated the book to his brother Mark, an artist who died last year, and he reproduced a touching text Polkinghorne sent when he heard the news.
“I was really moved when he did that,” Braunias says. “He does that sort of thing a lot. He has an unpleasantness about him, at the very least, but he can be so incredibly thoughtful and generous. I don’t think there’s anything manipulative about that. He genuinely likes to help people. I really enjoyed his company during the trial.”
They became friendly. They swapped laughs and small talk. One of the themes of Braunias’ coverage is that a strain of classic New Zealand puritanism and disgust was on display, embodied in the Crown’s use of the phrase “sex fiend”. Braunias seemed unwilling to join in that loathing of Polkinghorne and his lifestyle.
“I was interested in the way New Zealanders hated him so much, that he was like a piñata for their fears and repressions. He was not repressed. He was a long way from being repressed. People loathed him for other reasons too – he could come across sometimes as really unpleasant. For instance he said mean, unfeeling things about Pauline and Madison. I loathed him as well when he was like that.”
Madison is of course Madison Ashton, the Australian sex worker who was in a relationship with Polkinghorne but did not turn up in Auckland to give evidence. Braunias’ post-trial lunch with her is one of the most interesting and perhaps depressing scenes in the book.
It is a highly literary account. Braunias’ model for it was an article by British writer Jonathan Raban, “Christmas in Bournemouth”, which reminded him “to write about people like you were spying on them but not to judge them”.
Speaking of writing, is it true Polkinghorne has been working on his own book?
“He was writing it at the trial,” Braunias says. “I read a little bit of one chapter – it was dense and unreadable, a mess, an indignant declaration that he was innocent and that the case against him was a total nonsense. He might be right about that. I liked the anger of it but it needed crafting.”
Finally, there is a question Braunias’ book does not and cannot answer. Will Polkinghorne fade away from our memories or will he achieve a kind of immortality? Braunias opts for the latter.
“Polkinghorne – the name, the legend, the vision of the little sex-mad surgeon who smoked methamphetamine in a pipe labelled SWEET PUFF and who was accused of killing his wife and then staging it to look like a suicide, but was found not guilty – will never die.”
Polkinghorne: Inside the Trial of the Century by Steve Braunias is published today by Allen & Unwin, $37.99. Braunias talks to Lianne Dalziel at WORD Christchurch on August 31.