Dick Frizzell is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s best known and most versatile painters.

But every life begins somewhere and in Hastings: A Boy’s Own Adventure, he vividly captures his early years in his hometown in the 1950s and early 1960s before he headed south to art school.

Guns, old cars, digging tunnels, riding motorbikes and wandering around unsupervised, it was a boy’s own adventure that is a far cry from many town childhoods today.

He joins Steve Braunias to discuss his charming, big-hearted and funny memoir that is a love letter to Hastings; an insight into the man and artist he would become, and a snapshot of small town New Zealand life in a bygone era.