This recording is from the second Going West Festival in 1997, but in some ways it is where it all began. What co-founder Murray Grey envisioned, and pitched to fellow founders Naomi McCleary and Bob Harvey, was simple: Maurice Gee reading from his novel Going West, on a train as it travelled west.

Gee’s novel Going West, which gave the festival its name, was the Goodman Fielder Watties Book Awards winner in 1993 - just one of his astonishing 13 major New Zealand book awards

In this archival recording, Gee reads the now-famous passage from early in the book that describes the train ride between Loomis and Auckland. In Gee’s work, Loomis is the fictional town modeled on Henderson in every possible way other than in name.

His reading for the live crowd, by the very tracks he’s describing, gives the passage the same barrelling momentum of the old trains, rattling past familiar Auckland landmarks with their social myths and legends.

Maurice Gee remains the patron of the Going West Festival.