Real women - and knitting - have more appeal than drag queens at Christchurch Central Library.

There's really only so much drag you can take, before it becomes a drag.

March in New Zealand sees organisations all across the country robustly promote events and fly flags for Pride month. One can barely get away from it. But, even so, Christchurch Central Library – Tūranga – didn’t draw as big a crowd as you might expect for the inevitable drag queen event, a panel talk with the usual in-yer-face flamboyant characters. In contrast, the library’s event for International Women’s Day (IWD), which a lot of people might not know even exists, still drew a similar-sized crowd, if not slightly more.

Is the obsession with drag waning? I wouldn’t be surprised, because, aside from the determinedly ‘progressive’ parents who haul their kids off to drag storytime, for most of us it’s pretty much a case of seen one drag queen and/or performance, seen them all - as I discovered for myself in my youth. From the limited amount I’ve seen of drag since then, it hasn’t changed. Women – the real kind – are infinitely more variable, because we’re not an act.

This year, the International Women’s Day event at the central library was based on the theme of ‘Aotearoa [NZ] Island Reads’, which is presented by Friends of the Library. Like the drag queen event, it’s also an event with a panel, but that’s where the similarity ends. Each guest on the IWD panel, who were all real women, picked three books they’d take with them to a desert island, and told the audience why. Their first book for this event had to be by an NZ authoress.

It’s a chance for the audience to discover books they might not ordinarily come across, and the one which unexpectedly tickled my fancy was about knitting. Go figure, because I’m not a knitter, although I do know how to knit. The book is called The Loving Stitch, by Heather Nicholson, and is about the history of knitting in New Zealand up to 1994. Interesting to see the boys on the cover photo knitting, too. A comment on Goodreads about the book says “The photo on the cover is my Nan and her siblings Jean, David and George, the children of Guide Hill Station who went to school at Tasman Downs, Lake Pukaki, New Zealand.”

Far from being a dull tome, it seems that Heather Nicholson not only knows her stuff, but is also an engaging storyteller about a subject never before explored. As a brief snapshot, the book offers an insight into women’s domestic lives, the economic necessity of garment knitting, the social connections knitting brought, the projects undertaken, men’s knitting, competitive knitting, protest knitting, knitting for soldiers during the wars, how magazines used knitting patterns in them to encourage sales, and a scarf that stretched right round Parliament Buildings. Funding for the book came partly from the 1993 Suffrage Centennial Trust, and from Creative NZ. Apparently, there was a bit of pushback on Creative NZ for wasting money on a book of supposed ‘little consequence’. I wonder who was behind that for the most part?

Knitting’s had a resurgence in popularity in recent times, but even the knitting world hasn’t escaped being corrupted by trans ideology. Some knitting groups are blissfully unaware of it, and others have suffered deep divisions and blazing social media fights over it. Believers of trans ideology are extraordinarily hostile towards non-believers, and knitters are no exception. They cast off (pun intended) those who won’t bow to the belief.

Avid knitter Maree Buscke of RCR (Reality Check Radio) is well up on the play with this. In October last year, we spoke about a website I’d discovered called ‘Yarn Therapy’, which was using its platform to give away breast binders and groin gaffs to kids without parental knowledge. Maree knew all about it, and has had her own unpleasant experiences with the owner of that website.¹

So, knitting aside, another book at the IWD event, which was only mentioned in passing, also tickled my fancy. It was called ‘Killers of a Certain Age’, by Deanna Raybourn, who was approached by her publisher to write about older kick-ass women. The story is about four 60-year-old female assassins on the verge of retirement, who must band together when they realise the organisation they work for would rather see them dead than retired. It’s been added to my list.

Another good read, but not from the IWD event, is Yvonne van Dongen’s latest Substack piece called Sisterhood of the Disagreeable Bigots. In lieu of being a ‘killer of a certain age’, I’ll go with being in the sisterhood of disagreeable bigots.

Anne, the organiser and MC of the IWD event at the library, deliberately orchestrated it to be middle-of-the-road. She’s of the opinion that people’s lives these days are already filled to capacity with controversy, calamities, and chaos, so that many just want to go out and have a good time without it being too intense. I think she has a point, although personally I don’t mind having the odd stray from the middle. However, overall I think that middle-of-the-road is becoming an increasingly more attractive choice than a bunch of drag queens overacting.

¹Is it sinister that free breast binders and groin gaffs are offered to kids on the quiet by a knitting yarn website?