Joel Maxwell (Te Rarawa) is a senior journalist.
I started my working life at the age of 10, labouring - as unpaid dogsbody - on farms, around school hours and on weekends, beside my dad. He was not a farmer - I would stress - but a farm worker.
In adulthood my whole career has been a mad scramble away from hands-on labour. God, I want to be as distant as possible from my old blue collar.
Nowadays, I’m the quintessential soy boy: as in I literally eat tofu as a staple protein. Some might call me a class traitor but I’ve noticed that only people who never had to kick a sheep carcass into an offal pit, like a bloated woolly slug, say that.
As someone who graduated from carcasses to keyboards I have a permanent uneasiness about falling backwards. A recent Stuff story didn’t help.
