Sex Shock Scandal Horror Probe!

Although the literal translation of Russian Pravda is truth, NZ's Truth newspaper wasn't the equivalent - in the early decades after its founding in 1906 it was known for investigative journalism; from the late 1960s, however, it was the weekly tabloid sleaze sheet, with memorable billboard headlines outside every newsagent such as:-

"600 Kiwis go nude on holiday - photos"

"Sex bomb who wanted love 20 times a day"

"Randy revels on the rails"

Our interest was therefore aroused when Lower Hutt based Speech Coach Redmer Yska managed to get a massive $45,000 grant from the National Library "to write a social and institutional history of NZ Truth newspaper, a disreputable but always vivid fixture of the local media scene."

The National Library's media release from December 2007 continued... "In announcing the award, National Librarian and CEO of the National Library of New Zealand, Penny Carnaby, said: "We are full of anticipation over the important social and political history that will be revealed through exploring the records of NZ Truth. It is a newspaper that many New Zealanders will have a view about, and often, these views will be controversial ones."

Yska's other books have been All Shook Up: the Flash Bodgie and the rise of the NZ Teenager in the 1950s (Penguin, 1993); An Errand of Mercy: Captain Jacob Eckhoff and the Loss of the Kakanui (Banshee, 2002); and in 2005 the Wellington City Council controversially commissioned him to write a civic history of the city, Wellington: Biography of a City, a book which fell a long way short of our own (unsubsidized) Wellington: A Capital Century.

So we await with interest the contents of his latest public-funded book. Website