Unmasking Masskerade: Remembering Massey’s controversial Capping magazine

CONTENT WARNING: Racism, censored slurs  

From facing one of the harshest censorship rulings not seen since WWII, costing the university thousands in fines, being banned in some of the South Island, and even drawing a warning from New Zealand’s Catholic Church... Massey’s capping magazine had no shortage of controversy. 

Masskerade was Massey’s annual graduation magazine for 47 years, closing shop in 1985. It was published during ‘Capping Week’ — a celebratory period of student antics marking graduation. Palmerston North and other university towns cowered as students tore through the streets dressed inappropriately in grass skirts or almost naked. 

Once a hotly debated publication, Masskerade now lies almost forgotten in Massey University’s Tamiro archives. Today, you might be lucky to get a pamphlet of names at graduation. But once upon a time, student culture and controversy were spread across 60-page print magazines for 30 cents each. 

Now discontinued, Otago, Canterbury and Auckland University’s all produced annual capping magazines from the 1930s to the late 1980s. Inspired by the satirically charged student culture of the UK, these magazines published everything but the truth and nothing of taste. Cartoonists played a major part in the magazines shock factor. Renowned New Zealand artists like Dick Frizell, Neville Colvin and Tom Scott, had their early work published in capping magazines. 

Similar to us at Massive, the capping magazine was funded by the student association and was given full creative freedom from the university.  

And boy, did they run with that.  

(1954)

The magazine adopted a satirical, tongue-in-cheek tone. Serving as a comedic outlet to discuss student pressures and the prevailing political climate.  

The very first issue in 1938 set an early standard of progressiveness and pushed back against the country’s straitjacket conservatism. During the Great Depression, Masskerade published an article titled, The New Zealand Survey. The piece critiqued the government's lack of action and treatment of Māori. “We import Yankee films and magazines, Springboks to whitewash the All Blacks, Japanese cheap goods, and overseas financiers to tell us how to mind our own business.”  

During the post-war boom of the 1950s, Massey started to develop its student culture. Pages then filled with cow jokes and beer guzzling. In a segment of the 1952 issue called What Critics Say, Masskerade was described as “sensitive as a kick in the slacks, as sincere as a pair of falsies and as subtle as a foot between the eyes”.  

In the 1960s, the youth counterculture modelled in the US hit New Zealand like a rocket. The Vietnam War, Nuclear Free NZ, the sexual revolution, and gay liberation were topics hotly advocated by university students. In 1966, the editor wrote that Masskerade had “grown from an acned youth to an acne adolescent”, as its popularity grew.  

When it came to selling the magazine, Massey students went to ridiculous lengths to promote sales. In 1966, when the mag was 30 cents a pop (around $6 today), a group of students walked on stilts from Wellington to Palmerston North to promote sales of the magazine. 

That same year, Masskerade stirred trouble with Auckland University (AU) students. 12 Massey students arrived on the streets of Auckland to gain attraction in the big smoke. Student magazine Craccum wrote: “Faced with the refusal of the police and the City Council to clamp down on Massey's selling, Auckland had in effect to take the law into their own hands.” Petty AU students stole and burned Masskerade’s in protest, frustrated Massey’s capping mag had come out first. 

(1967)

According to The Press, Massey students formally complained to the Police about the theft of 300 of their magazines. It’s unclear if there were any legal repercussions. When Masskerade tried to return to the Auckland streets the following year, they were immediately trespassed.  

Masskerade reached its scandalous peak in 1969 (wink wink). Among page-to-page spreads of female nudity, were articles about prostitutes and comics condemning the Vietnam War. The magazine was declared indecent in the hands of persons aged under 17 by the Indecent Publications Tribunal. The Press reported that the tribunal criticised the “frequent resort to the subject of sex as a prop for its humour, the tactless attacks on religious form, involving disease, bestiality and racial prejudice”.  

But surprisingly they didn’t take the opportunity for 69 jokes that year — was it not a thing back then? 

Tom Scott, a renowned New Zealand cartoonist, was the head designer and editor for the issue. In a 2001 Massey article, Capping it, Scott says he was charged with a prosecution for a blasphemous libel — a charge not seen since WWII. The prosecution was said to cost the university $2000. According to Scott, the 1969 issue contained 120 slurs against the Christian faith and the Catholic Church.   

Scott controversially defended the ‘69 issue, saying it was “an easier time”.  

“Students didn't have the economic pressures they do now. We had generous bursaries. Rents were cheap. We were prosperous but dull,” he recalled. “Māori and women knew their place. There were no homosexuals. Capping magazines tapped into all the repression,” he satirically, maybe not so satirically, reflected.  

In Masskerade ‘70, the editor promised in their editorial that the cartoons and content would be “toned down”. Despite these promises and high sales for the past year, councils in Christchurch, Ashburton, Picton, Paeroa, and Hastings had banned the sale of the edition.  

However, the magazine’s apology was a Trojan horse, publishing an article titled Priest Acquitted on Charge of Cannibalism. The satire article found Wellington priest, Father O’Reilly, guilty of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a dead Jewish person.   

Naturally, the Catholic Church was not too chuffed. The Press reported that a Christian publication called the article “grossly offensive” and “mocks the church in the crudest of terms”. The publication scolded students for not adhering to “ordinary standards of decency and respect for others”.  

(1973)

The maximising of a satire label didn’t stop there. Following Labour’s sweeping victory in the 1972 election, Masskerade released a 1973 article grossly titled, Labour are n***** lovers.   

The piece was posed as a phony advertisement: “Ever wondered why the Labour Party is so loudly opposed to apartheid?”  

“Ever wonder why lazy good-for-nothing Māori and Islanders are defended by the Labour Party?” the fake ad continued. “Because they’re soft on n*****.” 

The article concluded by urging the viewer to vote for “National, the white man's party”.    

The content and title of the piece, so overtly controversial, are a prime example of Masskerade’s mission. The magazine’s left-leaning ideology used shock factor to the highest degree to reveal injustices and systemic oppression.  

Capping culture began faded in the 1980s as the public grew critical of the week’s destructiveness and rowdy behaviour. With this, the magazine started to mellow out. In 1983, The Press reported that Masskerade had released its first “non-grubby” publication free of “lavatory humour”.  

(1980)

Masskerade concluded its production in 1985, supposedly due to the student association losing funding due to capping week antics.  

Massey University’s assistant archivist, Michael Biggs tells Massive that magazine sales dropped from 50,000 in the late ‘60s, to 5000 at the end of its run.   

While Biggs says that the annual publication reflects the baby boomer push against conservative narratives, he questions whether it was an accurate depiction of student culture.  

“They were going out of their way to be as offensive as possible,” he says. “So, it doesn’t necessarily reflect what students were actually thinking.”  

He says that with the crazy Palmerston North student culture arguably dying at the end of the 1980s, so did the need for its eclectic capping mag.   

Student media has long acted as a megaphone for challenging conservatism and slipping student voices into the grooves of mainstream debate. Masskerade’s testing of censorship and taste embodied the free thinking of its era. But while trailblazing in its time, Masskerade belongs to the counterculture that created it. Today in student media, no longer do we need cover-to-cover nudity or racial slurs to voice student stories and opinions.  

Outrageous, ostentatious and unapologetically offensive, Masskerade has cemented its legacy in Massey history — perhaps now, a little less forgotten.