Finalist in the 2022 New York Festivals Radio Awards.

In 1951 a modernist, black and white house is built at 22 Ascot Terrace in Wellington. Meanwhile, in post-war New Zealand there's a stark division between left and right. It’s hard to fully comprehend the paranoia of the time against Communism and the Soviets. 

In this episode, we hear the story of an innocent social club—a vegetable co-op—that comes to be spied on by the Special Branch of the New Zealand Police, and of two talented young diplomats, including the owner of The Magpie House Richard Collins, whose careers and reputations would be damaged as a result.

Who was the spy? And what was it like to live under a cloud of suspicion in a city as small as Wellington? Seventy years later, the ‘children of the Vegetable Club’ tell their parents’ stories.

Host: Kirsten Johnstone

Guests: Chris Cochran, Nicola Saker & John Saker, Nick Bollinger, Jacqueline Matthews, Aaron Fox, Sarah Lake

For the show website including information about the music in this podcast, please follow this link.

This series is supported with funding from Creative New Zealand.

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Podcast Series: The Magpie House

Off a bustling Wellington city thoroughfare there's a quaint, narrow lane called Ascot Street, where sits a modernist house whose tar black weatherboard and stark white trim inspired the name ‘the Magpie House’. Out back, lies an overgrown jungle of a garden where New Zealand’s ‘father of classical music composition’ Douglas Lilburn, who lived in that house for over forty years, liked to spend time growing vegetables and listening to the calls of the Tūī. 

In this four-part series, host Kirsten Johnstone delves into the colourful legacy of the Magpie House and its inhabitants, weaving their intriguing—and often surprising—stories into a Forrest-Gump-esque saga of war, music, cold-war espionage, persecution, and the search for identity and a place to call home.

© Centre for New Zealand Music Trust

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