Sir Bob Harvey is a Westie to the core. He’s a successful writer, historian, politician, environmental campaigner, film guy, advertising gun, surf life-saver and co-founder of the Going West Writers Festival. 

In this address from the opening of the 2013 Going West Writers Festival, Sir Bob pays homage to the West coast and the role that this landscape, and the books he loves, have played in his extraordinary life, a life given over in large part to the service of his community.

If the previous episode of this series celebrated the Bogan Westie stereotypes of the TV show Outrageous Fortune, this episode celebrates all the many other facets of West Auckland. 

The former Waitakere City is also home to free thinkers, artists, writers and readers and one of the oldest literary festivals in the country. Sir Bob Harvey, recently described on RNZ by Paula Morris as “the mayor of everything”, has lived all these things as a true Westie renaissance man.

Much of the detail from this talk made it into his 2014 biography Wild Westie: the incredible life of Bob Harvey by Hazel Phillips.