Writing Fellows
edited by
Copyright © contributors
ISBN 0 86473 367 4
First published
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing
for the purpose of private study, research, criticism
or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act,
no part may be reproduced by any process
without the permission of the publishers
appeared in
Fires and Patterns(
'Holidays' in
The Perfect Symbol(
and 'Kapiti Coast' in
(Last Poems
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This book has three purposes. It is a contribution from the world of
literature and the School of English, Film and Theatre to the
In the first of these purposes Writing Wellington
joins a long tradition of
contributions to the best in New Zealand literature by
The two decades of the Writing Fellowship represent also a continuing
partnership with Creative New Zealand (formerly New Zealand Literary Fund).
In New Zealand Listener ('Planting Poets', 8
The investment (to use the imagery of our age) has returned handsome dividends. Without exception Victoria's Writing Fellows have produced significant work during their year on campus. Seven of these publications have won the New Zealand Book Award, four have won or been shortlisted for the Montana (previously Wattie) Award, and the fruits of the Fellowship also include successful plays, poetry, short fiction and non-fiction, and major anthologies and editions. It is an extraordinary record, one that would be hard for any university fellowship in the world to match.
To recognise Wellington as a source and subject of literary work, the book's third purpose, is a new concept in New Zealand anthologies. In some of the pieces Wellington is central, in others merely incidental. A surprising range of the region's history is represented, from pre-European to aspects of present-day Wellington that include the public service, the harbour, academia and a women's prison.
The generous collaboration of the Fellows is warmly acknowledged, as is
permission to include work by the late Louis Johnson. Acknowledgment is also
gratefully made for contributions to the making of this book by Robert
Cross, Nikki Hessell, Fergus Barrowman, Rachel Lawson and Dilys Grant.
Publication is made possible by support from
Pale bony fingers gripped the top rail on B deck as he surveyed the houses perched on the steep green hills surrounding Wellington's inner harbour.
Chaim Walkowitz was not afraid of falling overboard. He was afraid of missing something that would reveal whether or not New Zealand was a suitable home for a twelve-year-old Polish orphan.
The SS Ormonde steamed through the heads on a clear day in
Goats would find it easier using those houses.
The youngster's height when standing erect meant the top rail was at eye level and obscuring his line of sight. He had to bend his knees to get a better view. Except that pushing his head forward to increase the angle of his vision bumped the peak of the grey cloth cap against the rail and down over his sad brown eyes, forcing him to bend even more and tilt his face upwards to observe the new world passing the ship's port side.
Chaim's discomfort was as irrelevant as the elements.
Baggy brown woollen shorts accentuated thin legs with one grey sock up and
one grey sock down. The oversize grey jacket had been given to him by a
The stocky figure of Mrs Polikoff stood bravely against the railing
alongside young Chaim. A black woollen scarf covered her head and she
clutched a dark blue overcoat about her ample body. Pure habit. January in
the South Pacific bore no resemblance to Januaries in
Her soft face was never far from smiling. No matter what confronted her or her family she always held to the belief that, 'everything will be alright'. Never mind that for the past decade life had been appalling. Her fortitude depended upon hoping for the best, so she said 'everything will be alright' as if it answered for every tribulation.
Husband Victor was searching for their daughters. At seven and nine years old they were otherwise engaged during this historic moment with two Greek girls who had become their playmates during the five-and-a-half week journey. The ship's nooks and crannies made for endless games of hide and seek with squeals and giggles transcending the language barrier.
Mrs Polikoff's bravery was vital, as the 120 European refugees on the ship
knew what they had lost but not what they would gain. They had survived
pogroms, war and the death camps, but as New Zealand loomed closer by the
minute there was the fear of the unknown. The feeling they were landing on
'New Zealand,' was the unenthusiastic reply.
'Why so far?' enquired the official.
'Far?' The refugee shrugged. 'From where?'
Still, one indisputable fact overshadowed their discussions about New
Zealand being better or worse than
Chaim had been chosen along with eleven other orphans to start a new life at
a Wellington establishment set up by a couple who had escaped Tsarist Russia
and now offered shelter to as many Jewish orphans as the New Zealand
government would allow into the country. The Polikoffs were Chaim's
chaperones on the journey from London. On the journey from his home town to
the death camp he had been in the company of his mother and three sisters,
his father having died in
The youngest Walkowitz was the only survivor.
When the family arrived at the camp males and females had been separated. He never saw his mother and sisters again, but even at ten years old he did not have to see them die to know one's ordered fate in a death camp.
Innocence was not an extenuating circumstance when the capital offence was your birth.
One of the many seagulls that had joined the ship in Cook Strait swooped down and up again directly in front of them. It could not divert his scrutiny of New Zealand.
Mrs Polikoff followed the flight of the seagull and it brought her gaze down to the forlorn twelve-year-old beside her. She noticed the button on his jacket was through the wrong buttonhole and bent down to correct it, as if this sartorial fault might have a negative influence on whatever bureaucracy processed their arrival in this country.
Chaim did not notice her fussing with his jacket.
They all wore second-hand clothing that accentuated their refugee
status, with Chaim's the baggiest and saddest. He had said little since they
first met in London seven weeks ago. Most of that had been for an
English-speaking Polish schoolteacher who had organised daily language
classes on the ship. A few of the refugees had dropped out of these
two-hour lessons in frustration, but most of them had been glad of the
opportunity for some sort of head start on whatever it was they would
encounter 'down under'. Chaim had been the keenest, always seeking out the
teacher as the time approached for
His dedication had been rewarded last night when the teacher announced that he had used the five and a half weeks of lessons to the best advantage and had picked up a sizeable vocabulary. Though she warned all of them that this difficult new language contained a host of unique words and phrases. Unfortunately, warning them that the little they had learnt could be easily misinterpreted made them doubt the little they had learnt, resulting in most of them retreating to 'please' and 'thank you', in the hope that at the very least the citizens of this country would recognise if not appreciate good manners.
They had survived a master plan wherein the lucky ones were designated infinitely superior and the unlucky ones manifestly inferior, so being polite could be the difference between life and death.
Someone pointed out a car driving along the sea-level road separating the urbanised hills from the white-capped waters. They studied the dark vehicle's progress in silence until it disappeared round a bend in one of the harbour's many small bays, leaving only the seagulls to show there was life in these islands.
By the time the ship docked they had a better idea of the local fauna.
Everyone—including Victor Polikoff and his daughters—crowded the railings to watch the harbour workers bring the ship alongside the wharf. They could have joined the bustling crowd downstairs waiting to disembark as soon as the ship tied up, but after five and a half weeks the ship had become familiar, whereas New Zealand was as mysterious as life after death.
One of the harbour workers waved to the refugees.
None waved back.
Chaim studied the strength, the competence of the big man tying a thick yellow rope to a rusty bollard and imagined himself having leapt ahead in time.
Me down there doing what that man's doing. Talking New
Zealandese as if it's
my only language. Living like I was born in New Zealand. Like my life was
someone else's and that man was on B deck watching me with my New Zealand
muscles tie my New Zealand ship to my New Zealand wharf.
* * *
Queuing before Customs officers and their wide wooden tables in a cavernous waterfront shed was a ludicrous formality, as the refugees had nothing but bundles of second-hand clothing.
The two senior Polikoffs spent most of their time waving and calling out in Yiddish to Victor's cousin and family waiting in the crowd roped off from the new arrivals. The two Polikoff daughters clung dumbfounded to their mother's rough woollen skirt while dark-uniformed New Zealanders went about the task of checking, stamping and signing pieces of paper as if a misplaced comma heralded Armageddon.
Occasionally an official would proffer a friendly greeting in English to a
shabby newcomer. Usually this was met with a blank stare, but some responded
Chaim clung to no one.
In the midst of this regimented bustle he was left where he wanted to be left. Alone. He might look like a child, they might treat him like a child, but the death camp had culled the bewildered from the shrewd, the weak from the strong, the boys from the men and the unlucky from the lucky.
'This way!' An official unhooked the rope and beckoned the Polikoffs away from the wooden tables and into the tearful embrace of their relatives. Chaim avoided this fuss and stayed in the background until Mr and Mrs Davis, who owned the orphanage,stepped out of the crowd and made him the centre of attention.
'Chaim Walkowitz?' Mrs Davis beamed fierce blue eyes and a gold tooth down at the hapless child from atop her black, ankle-length astrakhan coat.
He nodded and stared blankly into the faces of those responsible for his presence in New Zealand.
The Polikoff family having fulfilled their obligation to chaperone him to the other side of the world, hugged the pale little boy goodbye and departed from his life forever.
Mr Davis was a short, round man prone to breathlessness at the slightest exertion. He always deferred to his wife who squatted to bring her face level with Chaim's and gripped his shoulders as if he must not escape, though the compassion in her voice belied any such intent. Holding him in this position she spoke quietly in Yiddish, to which he listened but did not react.
I spoke Yiddish on the other side of the world where it marked you out as an
alien enemy, but here I'll speak New Zealandese or I'll speak
nothing.
She explained about 'the Sterns'. A New Zealand Jewish couple who wanted to be his foster parents. They had a thirteen-year-old son and a twelve-year-old daughter. How did he feel about staying a week at their 'lovely home' with the promise that if he did not like it he was free to come and live at the orphanage, where he would be taken care of as if it was his own home? Where Mr and Mrs Davis would treat him as if he were their own son?
Joseph Musaphia, born in 1935 in London, was one of the
most successful and prolific New Zealand playwrights of the 1970s—80s,
his best-known stage plays being Victims (and Hunting (. He had previously written more than 120 rsdio scripts,
screenplays, lyrics and work for television. Since 1980 he has worked mainly
as a journalist. 'Charlie Wellman', from which this extract is taken, is his
second novel; his first, Let Us Be Naked, was
published by Quoin Press in 1997.
Louis Johnson ( 1924—88) was a central figure in
New Zealand poetry for over thirty years, despite spending the 1970s in
Australia. In the 1950s he was the key figure in the innovative 'Wellington
Group' and in the 1980s provided support for younger writers through his
Antipodes Press. He founded and edited New Zealand Poetry Yearbook
themout back? Dr Williams
say it simpler, it's not
The Shagged Phoenix, students asking
Entropy, Right On!
Moles-
ville. The suave chatty professor
Croix du Sud
croissant, reeked of rankest mole.
Vincent O'Sullivan (b. 1937) is Director of the Stout
Research Centre and Professor of English at Victoria University. A leading
New Zealand figure in poetry, fiction and drama, as well as anthologist and
critic, his best known works are The Butcher Papers ( 1982), Palms and Minarets: Selected Stories ( 1992), Shuriken ( 1983), Let
the
River Stand ( 1993) (winner of the Montana Book Award)
and
the Collected Letters of (ed.,
with Margaret Scott, 1984—). His novel Believers to the Bright
Coast was published in 1998.
Through Selected Texts
(An abstract for a paper to be presented at the LALALAND Conference.)
My paper will explore the various texts of identity, representation and
construction as presented in eighteen selected New Zealand novels, films and
poetic works. In so doing it will try to engage with the semiotics of
contact and the various diasporic, immigrant, exilic and expatriate notions
of this country, alternatively known as the Land of the Wrong White Crowd.
The alternative realities, asymmetries and linguistic aesthetics of Pakeha
New Zealand and their textual collisions with the Maori race will also be
explored, much as Shashi Tharoor has done for The
Ingrate's Indian Novel. My
paper is offered in homage from one subversive to another. The selected New
Zealand texts are:
This great New Zealand title belongs to an ancestral Pakeha settler society text, elevated to canonical heights by people who have, actually, never read it. The paper will examine the reasons for the deplorable level of English transported to this virgin country from Great Britain, especially the bad spelling.
Another canonical text in New Zealand literature, Sold
New Zealand considers
the truths about the Pakeha settler society from the perspective of a
so-called Pakeha-Maori. Ostensibly a tract defending Maori, Sold
New Zealand turns out to provide not the mediation between two binaries
but
rather the rationale for Pakeha to take over Maori New Zealand. Maori should
never have signed the Treaty of Waitangi or in any way trusted the
buggers.
The paper will offer a critique on this rip-roaring yarn, a prototype
of the romantic heroic settler novel of the mid- to
late-nineteenth century. It is typical of those constructs of White
hegemony, involving such characters as the White hero, friendly Maori
sidekick, Maori princess who saves the White hero from the usual volcanic
eruption or earthquake presumably so he can go back home to marry the
(White) woman who has been waiting for him all along. Freire, Said, Ghandi,
Spivak, Marx, Foucault, the Spice Girls and aspects of the film Titanic will
be invoked in the paper to provide an utterly useless (con)text to text.
Acknowledgment is made of one of New Zealand's greatest short story writers
in the paper and the curious dichotomous ambivalent position she holds in
One of the great verse sequences of New Zealand literature, Land Brawl in
Unknown Trees lends itself to questions of power, resistance,
indigenous
essence, Fatal Contact, antipodean vision and the mapping out of Maori and
Pakeha dialogical space. If you can understand what all this gobbledegook
means please email the author of this paper
w.ihimaera@wellington.ac.nz
The paper will posit Britannia as prostitute and consider the sorry plight of her children, seeking diasporical haven in the new colonial space of New Zealand. The bifurcated problematics of the two books listed above will be compared and contrasted in one of those stupid and futile intellectual exercises beloved of academics and find contrasts and commonalities that don't exist.
A Bakhtinian Perspective will explore the Architectonic Self implicit in the main character, Daphne Withers, of this brilliant New Zealand novel. Random and totally inappropriate parallels with Arundhati Roy, Margaret Forster, classical Tamil poetry, Caribbean hybrid literature and Hindu sacred cow beliefs will reveal that when bowels do dry you can always rely on Janet Frame to provide superb discourse.
These two novels from the White, male and realist tradition reveal that the
Pakeha male writer is still very much alive and kicking—is he what.
The paper will explore how men have been empowered and disempowered and
include discussion on the sexual politics implicit in other such seminal
male gender texts as Man Can Do It Alone, The Odd Boy,
The Good Keen Ram and
so on. When the time comes would the last White (straight) male, realist
writer still standing in New Zealand please close the door before he
leaves?
Just when Pakeha male writers thought they were home and scot-free along came the feminist revolution to stop them in their hobnail boot tracks and Swandris. The paper will explore the feminist imperative in New Zealand literature, the whinges and whines of women and why it is that this imperative has resulted in some really awful first person narratives by the New Zealand sisterhood. This part of the paper could otherwise be titled Save The Males/Whales.
By comparison, really excellent writing of a quality only matched by the
Kalyani tribe of the Hindu Kush Mountains, a tribe only slightly lower than
the Maori are to Heaven, is to be obtained in the texts written by Maori
authors. Descended from the Gods, the poet of No
Ordinary Son and the great
Wordweaver of the Season of the
Stew and The Sinking Pukkah-Papa) and
demonising of the Maori people
by the villainous Pakeha. Discussion will also focus on essentialism vs
synthesis, post-nativism and indigenous essence, and the upturning of
notions of Centre and Rim in other (r)evolutionary Polynesian texts such as
Cuzzies and Leave Us the
Banyan Trees.
The paper will also disclose the great literary secret, actually known to
Maori all along, but only confirmed by the discovery of gold tablets on
sacred Hikurangi Mountain, that
Na reira, kia kaha, kia manawanui, kia toa ki o tatou mahi tuhituhi i te Ao, ka mate ka mate ka ora ka ora etc etc.
(Author's Note: This magical and spiritual ritualistic karakia or prayer must remain untranslated to preserve the very sacred nature of Maori textuality, all praise be to Allah, and to recognise the primacy of the reo.)
These three texts exist in New Zealand film and the filmic intersections
with literary equivalents show that postmodernism, postcolonialism and
neocolonialism are structures which are perpetuated in film as well
as literature. The first film indicates that New Zealanders are able to
laugh at themselves—as long as the film involves a Mini—but the
other two show that Pakeha unease and dis-ease still intersect with
Pakeha New Zealand Lit. Questions of anxiety, uncertainty, evasion,
ambiguity, ambivalence, deceptions, disclosures and the slipperiness evident
in the Pakeha sense of self indicate that the post-settler identity of
the New Zealand Pakeha is still in a whole heap of trouble. This is
evidenced in the sidelining of Maori characters to the margins of discourse
and, in particular, the metaphoric cutting off of the finger in the
award-winning film, Piano. Thus, the paper will
also discuss
dismemberment as a Pakeha response to having no culture, genital mutilation,
pornographic culture, the conflicting discourses of homo-erotic and
hetero-erotic narratives in the film concerned—and the crucial
question of what happened to the finger? It was not, as far as the author of
this paper is aware, thrown out of a plane.
Finally, these last two texts, one historical and the other creative,
confirm the rhyzomic nature of myth-making (and, incidentally, the
continued invisibilising of gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual
people in New Zealand history indicative of the failure in
Primarily, the paper will propose that all history is lies and all lies can be made into suspect novels or histories. The paper considers these two texts as both salvation of and destruction of myth-making and that, in New Zealand, it doesn't matter what the myth, demolish it (especially if it's Maori) and you may end up with a knighthood.
The novel under discussion is the last of all the texts to be considered in
the paper and should not in fact be included. However, rather than face
accusations of being a spoilsport, the author—who is also the
presenter of the paper to the LALALAND Conference—includes it as an
indication that he can take the piss out of himself. To be frank, why
critics have considered The Fake-triach aka
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Part 2 aka Magic Realism's Last Gasp as an
impossible and unbelievable
cybertext is beyond his comprehension. Many beautiful Maori
grandmothers existed who once lived in Italy, sang arias by Verdi while
fighting the Pakeha, and were pursued by vengeful mothers who could swim
through the universe.
The paper, as above, will be presented in the Atrium of the Peking Cluck
Hotel at 5.30pm on Thursday. Those students wishing to get A+'s in the
author's Masters Papers at
The author exerts his moral rights and, to pre-empt
those who wish to
take out a fatwa against his pure and innocent intentions, asserts that any
resemblance to any New Zealand writer or to the proceedings of the 11th
Triennial ACLALS Conference, December 1—6, Kuala Lumpur, 1998, is
entirely coincidental.
Witi Ihimaera was born in Gisborne, graduated BA from
Victoria University of Wellington and now lives in Auckland. His titles
include Pounamu, Pounamu, Tangi, The Matriarch, Bulibasha, Nights in
the Gardens of and The Dream Swimmer. As librettist, he has worked in opera, song cycle and
symphony with narration. As editor, his books include Growing Up Maori,
Mataora: Contemporary Maori Art and the
five-volume Te Ao Marama series. He has just
completed his second play, Woman Far Walking
, and a biography of the soprano Virginia
Zeani.
Terakihi and Trollopes
It was John Beaglehole who spoke, somewhere, of 'the Regent Street curve of Lambton Quay'. He was lamenting the loss of a harmony of architectural styles that had characterised Wellington's best-known thoroughfare up to the era of gouging and rebuilding that began in the late 1950s.
The comment was pure Beaglehole, apt and felicitous. It arose out of a love
for his home city; and it reflected his brand of erudition, and that of his
generation of scholars, which viewed so many features of New Zealand life
from a perspective conditioned by a thorough knowledge of English history.
That same erudition ensured that Beaglehole would have known the identity of
All of this I now know and understand. In my childhood, however, I had a
more elementary view. Then, visiting Lambton Quay was a matter of going to
town; and Lambton Quay, I believed, was the whole of that place called
'town'. I have no recollection of venturing beyond it up to the age of nine.
There was no need. The Quay contained all the places that, for us, 'going to
town' implied. My father's office at the advertising agency Carlton
Carruthers du Chateau and King was in the South British Insurance Company
Building down the Plimmer Steps end. The Bank of New South Wales, where my
father persuaded a senior staff member to put aside Victorian and Edwardian
currency for my collection of old coins, stood next door. The booksellers
and stationers Whitcombe and Tombs, where we bought family copies of New
Zealand classics (Oliver's New Zealand Birds,
Graham's A Treasury of New
Zealand Fishes, and Powell's Native Animals of New
Zealand) was close
by.
Right alongside Plimmer Steps was the fish shop run by the Barnao family where, like all good Catholics, we bought seafood on Fridays. This last was the subject of what would now be judged a politically incorrect song that my father would sing on the way home in the car, to the tune of 'O Solo Mio'.
Bartolo Barnao
Of Lambton Quay,
He sella da oyster,
Da teraki . . .
This, I found out later, was a variant on a song sung about an even earlier fish shop owner, Nick Fernando.
And there was more. Tony Paino and Vince Criscillo's fruit and vegetable
shop, bursting with an unimaginable selection of produce. The man with a
basket of flowers down the Woodward Street end who called out, 'Aaa, lovely
The reason that 'going to town' provided such a sense of occasion, and that all these sights seemed so exotic, was that we lived on the then rural arm of the Pauatahanui inlet, where there was nothing remotely urban or suburban (Cambourne and Whitby were later intrusions). Getting to town, by train or by car, not only involved transporting ourselves to a different landscape; it was very often a different weather system too by the time we emerged from the second train tunnel or from the bottom of the Ngauranga Gorge and saw what Wellington and its colosseum of hills had in store for us. The meteorological transformation often seemed as complete as it would have been were we visiting another country.
My first recollections of the Quay itself are shadowy and generic—just an awareness of being in a canyon of high grey and brown buildings, of trams rattling past down the centre of the road, and of being jostled by the constant movement of pedestrians. There was a touch of fear in that experience, and a need to keep a firm hold on my mother's or my grandmother's hand. But the dominant memory is one of excitement at the sight of so much mobile and noisy humanity. The same set of feelings came back to me when I walked for the first time down Fifth Avenue, which was cavernous and crowded to an extent Lambton Quay never was—but my perspective as an adult in New York in the 1970s matched that of a small child in Wellington in the late 1940s.
My second memory is highly specific. On
I knew nothing of bereavements, nor of the rituals and pageantry surrounding death, let alone the death of a wartime prime minister. And so I was intensely interested. The slow procession was led by an armoured personnel carrier hauling a gun carriage. On that carriage lay the coffin, covered with a kiwi-feather cloak, a symbol of leadership whose warm earth colour and soft texture contrasted with the cold steel of the war machines.
Fraser's former colleagues walked in dark suits on either side of the
carriage, divided by death as they were in life. The Labour members, who
included a family friend, Phil Connolly, were on our side of the Quay. My
mother identified them for me as they passed in single file. Walter Nash out
front, now Leader of the Opposition, his square face set in granite
solemnity. Behind him Arnold Nordmeyer, whose egglike head was so like the
cartoonists'
Behind the mourners came a line of black limousines. Then lorries loaded with what, at funerals, are always called floral tributes, a blaze of colour in an otherwise sombre sequence. Then an army of trade unionists marching in ranks, shoulder to shoulder. They seemed soldierlike: not because they were in uniform—on the contrary, they were variously dressed in open-necked shirts and tattered sports coats—but because of their numbers, their formation and, most of all, their grim determination.
All this was watched over by the largest crowd I had ever seen, lining both sides of the Quay, crammed on to shop verandahs, leaning out of windows of buildings such as Kirkcaldie and Stains. Strangely, there was no sound, no audible expression of emotion. The effect was one of solemnity rather than grief—a farewell to a man respected rather than loved. My grandmother, however, who lived then in the railway settlement at Ngaio, dabbed her eyes and announced that he had been a good and a great man and a friend to working people.
The years passed. I grew up. Lambton Quay no longer seemed so cavernous at street level. And I learned about other parts of the city: Willis Street, beyond Stewart Dawson's corner, where the handwritten headlines of that day's Evening Post were displayed in the street-level window; Manners Street, home of the left-wing bookshop Modern Books; Mercer Street, where Dick Reynolds presided over that marvellous second-hand emporium, Smith's Bookshop; Courtenay Place, with the best of the cinemas and Chinese restaurants; and Boulcott Street, with St Mary of the Angels, where we attended midnight mass at Christmas and Easter and revelled in the sound of Maxwell Fernie's choir.
In every sense that mattered, however, Lambton Quay was still 'town'. In the
course of my rare visits to the city from boarding school in the Hutt
Valley, my mother would meet me at the railway station. From there, to allow
me to experience something called 'coffee bar culture', whose major features
seemed to be candles in Chianti bottles and heavily mascara'd women in
bouffant hair-dos and fishnet stockings, she would take me to the
Rendez-Vous coffee shop near the entrance to Cable Car Lane. (It was a
sine qua non that such establishments had to have
French names: there was
also the Chez Paree and the Monde Marie; even the one that did not was still
called The French Maid.) On one such occasion at the Rendez-Vous, told
that the premises had a newly opened upstairs gallery, my mother led me with
our cups of coffee and plates of cream cakes into the adjacent and plush
office of a prominent accountant, who was just as startled to see us as we
were to encounter him.
Later still, when I was a university student in the mid-sixties, I always took the Kelburn cable car to and from town, so that Lambton Quay was invariably my point of access and egress. It was in these years that I began to haunt Roy Parsons' sparsely elegant bookshop, by this time established in the Ernst Plischke-designed Massey House. An additional attraction there was the coffee bar that Harry Seresin and his mother had opened on the mezzanine floor, which, among many other attractions, was the first Wellington eatery to make and sell yoghurt. Further along the Quay were the Parsons' shabby but enticing bookseller neighbours, Ferguson and Osborn. The business was run by the eccentric and bad-tempered siblings Harold and Vera Osborn, who seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of unopened first editions selling at their original, pre-inflation prices, and who, right to the end, parcelled all purchases in brown paper tied with string.
In those years too I evolved a routine of Friday night drinking. In the case of the crowd I had fallen in with, this meant heading for the first-floor lounge bar of the Midland Hotel. From that genteel den of iniquity other rites of passage followed: the courtship of members of the fairer sex who joined us there, or floated provocatively on our periphery (of the latter, I recall in particular a pair of blonde Dutch-Jewish twins, with plunging necklines and Stars of David on silver chains); the purchase and subsequent juggling of bottles to have in hand for whatever entertainment would complete the evening; the post-six o'clock meals at the steak bar over the road whose name I no longer recall; and the subsequent converging on taxi ranks for transport to the scene of that night's party in Kelburn, Wadestown or Tinakori Road.
Memories of later years speed up, the way recollections do as they approach
the present, and are less vivid. In my journalism days, after the abolition
of six o'clock closing, there were regular drinking sessions with
journalists at Barrett's Hotel (primarily Evening
Post staffers—
In the early 1970s there was the welcome appearance on Plimmer Steps of John Quilter's bookshop, eventually to shift down to the Quay proper. It was in the original location that I overheard the kind of conversation one dines out on for years afterwards. A flushed gentleman in tweeds burst into the shop and hurtled to the counter, where he asked in a loud voice, 'I say, do you have any Trollopes?' There was a silence while the proprietor considered the implications of the question. Then a customer intervened. 'Wrong place, mate,' he said. 'You want Vivian Street.'
In am back,
I am frequently surprised at ways in which Lambton Quay has improved:
In one important respect it doesn't change, however. If I ever want to recapture the feeling of belonging to a town, of casting off anonymity, I do it there. In ten minutes at Bowen Street corner, or at the bottom of Woodward Street, I can be sure of sighting and talking to at least half-a-dozen people I know: old school friends, acquaintances from university, current and retired journalists, civil servants, politicians. Lambton Quay is not, was not and never will be my place of residence. But it brings me as near as I shall ever come in my life to feeling part of an urban community; and it connects my past to my present.
Michael King (b. 1945), biographer and historian, was
awarded an Honorary
DLitt by Victoria University in 1997. His Whina, a biography of Whina
Cooper, won the Wattie Book of the Year Award. Other major publications
include Te Puea ( 1977), Maori: A Photographic
and Social History (written
during his Victoria University Fellowship), ( 1995). In 1999, as Burns Fellow at Otago
University, he is writing a life of Janet Frame.
The record shows that in Tendering. An output of such heroic proportions
needs to be treated with
kindly scepticism.
Nineteen-eighty-four was indeed a good year for me: a year whose
garrulous tides went in and out. It allowed me to complete much that was
not, and to commit much that would not otherwise have got past the
warm-up. Symmes Hole, a big 'hysterical' novel,
was published in Survival Arts,
described as a 'comic novel', was published in Symmes
Hole. It's hard for me to find the place of my Victorian year within
these
continuities. I guess, and could check, but do not remember, that the
Survival Arts story that continued where Symmes Hole stopped, began to be
written in
The note at the front of Driving into the Storm:
selected poems says, 'Much
of the work was done while I had the writing fellowship at
A mild sense of the ominous enters at this 'point', shepherded by a book
that gave way to production what it owed to integrity—a 'point' which
is also the point at which the end of one novel became the beginning of
another. This flow-on I cannot find in my memory of the Victorian
year. What I do remember very clearly, is the final stage of the
co-editing of the Penguin Book of New Zealand
Verse, published in
The work of editing a large anthology is profoundly humbling. You encounter
not only the few, piercing moments of great writing, highly individual and
remembered as absolutely specific, but also the immense emotional force of
the collective minor. There is nothing wrong with the
This beginning of disenchantment; this first stirring of a sense of fraudulence; this desire to 'collect' the poems I'd written mostly in order to be able to start again—what was happening, was that my Victorian year with its surging tides of production was also the year in which I began, not yet deliberately, to stop writing.
What I remember most clearly of all about the year, with immense nostalgic
anticipation (and apart from the dreamlike, fabulous, infantile, corrupting
fantasy of earning money without any sense of transaction), is the writing
of most of the poems in Tendering, presumably at
the 'point where I'd begun
to reconsider what I was doing in writing'. The writing of much of this book
came out of the evolutionary crisis of my Victorian year. It happened on the
evolved side of my doubts, over the fence of Driving
into the Storm. The key
poem in it was 'The Relocation of Railway Hut 49', in which the tale of my
writing shed at home was interwoven with the tale of my
great-grandfather, Heinrich Augustus Wedde, and with
The Tempest. I
still enjoy the way the language of this poem, and of the others in the
book, stirs up 'the dutiful oil of narrative' (a grizzling phrase from the
introduction to Driving into the Storm). There's a
reference in 'The
Relocation' to 'contenders' who are 'shooting up katipo venom'—they
would crop up again in Survival Arts as one of
that novel's insane
variations on nationalism, which I do remember writing a lot of in the '49'
shed, after my Victorian year. I particularly remember enjoying sitting in
the scruffily bucolic haven of the shed, reading up about tank warfare in
This is not to say my Victorian year was the one that stopped me writing. On the contrary, it was the one that made it possible for me to start again, which, fifteen years later, I eagerly look forward to doing. This is a paradox that will be recognised by other writers whose shit-detectors have been given the time to assist them grow out of their own needy relationship with writing. And let's be a little more frank—I didn't really 'stop', with all the chaste melodrama that implies. I relocated the effort, much as I'd relocated the Railways shed. My Victorian year helped me to start that process. It was a life-saver. 'The Relocation' is my testimonial.
Cooked Breakfast, Bad Karma and Gaga in Toto
der Fischer
Ian Wedde (b. 1946) is a poet, fiction writer, critic,
art critic and arts administrator. His major publications include Made
Over (the novel Symmes Hole(
the Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (ed., with
Harvey McQueen, 1985), How to be Nowhere (an
d
Fomison:what shall we tell them? (He is a
curator at Te Papa Tongarewa The Museum of New Zealand.
All Over the World
While it was still dark Mereana went up to the front bedroom and waited with her mother by the window, looking down. 'There's a southerly coming up,' her mother said.
If it had been daylight they would have seen the rooftops of the other houses layered down the hillside below them. They'd have seen the road curving down, the terraces and crescents, the zigzag paths and the white handrails.
On the flats at the base of the hill, they'd have seen more housetops, in rows with roads between, where trams followed each other back and forth, small, far away. Beyond the houses and roads she knew there was the aerodrome where, in the daytime, planes dawdled about like bees before facing on to the runway, picking up speed and suddenly lifting to fly. Or they came out of the sky above the sea, dropping, roaring along the dark strip, stopping, turning, and making their slow way towards the sheds or the hangar.
At one end of the aerodrome was
On the far side of the 'drome were more houses on more hillsides, and way back, where there were no more houses, were the faraway hills, dark and sharp. Between them, here and there, were glimpses of the sea.
Some mornings, when there was a moon, they could make out the two silver patches of water and the ghosts of houses, the shapes of buildings and hills. But this morning, there in the dark, it was as though there was nothing about or below them at all, apart from the rattling wind. It was as though she and her mother, her brother who was asleep, and their father on his way to work, were the only people in the world, living in the one and only house. Sometimes Mereana's mother would say, 'One day the lights will come on. There'll be lights in the streets again. People will let their blinds up and take the blackouts down. We'll look out and see everything lit for miles.'
Now, kneeling on the big bed in the dark, there was just one light that they waited to see as they looked down to where they knew the road to be.
'There,' her mother said, and she saw the faint, bobbing light, knowing it was her father with a shade on his torch and his lunch in a tin bag, going to his job at the freezing works.
They watched, and at the place down there where they knew the corner to be, they saw the little light stop a moment, jig from side to side as her father waved goodbye, then it was gone.
She got into bed with her mother who said, 'He'll be at the top of the road already.' After a moment she said, 'He'll be on his way down the hill.'
Running past all the animals asleep in their cages—Nellikutha in her
Sometimes on Saturdays she would go with her father over the hills at the back of the zoo to collect horse dung for the garden. He'd take his spade and sack and she'd take the hearth shovel. They'd make their way through the gorse and broom to the clearings, and the old horses would snort and walk away, whacking their big feet down, their tails and manes lifting and falling. 'They're for the lions,' her father told her. 'They're lion tucker.'
When they'd filled the sack they would walk back to the slope above their house and her father, with her on his back, and pulling the sack and shovel, would run down through the prickles and broom to the fence. When they'd climbed through it they could almost have stepped on to the roof of their house which was set right up close to the bank.
The southerly was flapping the blinds, banging the windows, rattling the dustbin that had a brick on its lid; rattling the chimney pot which sometimes came apart, clattered down the roof and dropped on to the square of lawn before bouncing down on to the square of garden.
Sometimes at night, when she was supposed to be going to sleep, she'd get out of bed and watch the searchlights, like long, blue arms, reaching, criss-crossing, looking for enemy planes that could be in the sky. She'd wait, hoping to see an enemy plane trapped in the light, but after a while she'd feel tired of waiting and get back into bed wondering what an enemy plane looked like, what an enemy looked like. What was an enemy? In one of her books there was a story of Bertie Germ who lived in a rubbish bin. You had to fight against him with soap and toothbrushes.
Her brother was still asleep, she thought her mother could be asleep too, and her father was in a dark tram, on his way to catch a train with blinds down over its windows, taking him to the meatworks.
But what would it be like when all the lights came on again, lighting everything for miles? Would there be no night at all then? Would she play and play in an everlasting daytime, up and down all the lit-up streets, in and out of houses that would now have their lights on, their blinds up, their blackouts taken down?
'This week, or next,' her mother said, 'his call-up papers'll come. He'll be off to war.'
Patricia Grace (b. 1937) has won awards for her novels,
short fiction and children's writing. Potiki ( 1987),
which she wrote during her Victoria University Fellowship, won the New
Zealand Book Award for Fiction and international awards. Her most recent
publication is the novel Baby No-Eyes ( 1999). She
is
of Ngati Toa, Ngati Raukawa and Te Ati Awa descent. She was awarded an
Honorary DLitt by Victoria University in 1989.
Wellington for me first took shape on paper. Wellington—a word in my
early readings. Two other words—
Wellington—would it have been any different in Wellington?
Wellington, one day, would start to wriggle its meaning sideways inside that cortex. The holes on the course would sprout tufts of gorse. The gorse in turn would shoot out spikes, and bright yellow blossoms. Wellington would prove the first of a long list of placenames found in literature during my younger years and later turned into something different, something I hadn't counted on. Curnow yielded a lot of pliable linguistic parts, of course. Parts willingly grasped. Moveable signs for a young writer wanting to write away towards some sort of homeland. My first decade offered not so many pointers. The first memorable literature about the windy city to come my way was a product of commercial copywriting, a leaflet handed to me during my fifth or sixth year by an uncle who knew I was 'keen about boats and that'.
A leaflet published by the Union Steamship Company.
Wellington, thanks to the copywriter, came to mean a port. A port to be
found at the end of a charted line not to be seen on the surface of our
planet yet ploughed each night by two trim little liners. 'Interisland
Express'—that was the name of the 'class of vessel'—while the
individual names of the liners were Maori and Hinemoa. A map inside the leaflet outlined the two
chief
islands of the national state in the shape of tiny, meticulously inked
silhouettes of the fleet owned by Union.
Marvellous!
My picture of a port at the other end of the Interisland Express was soon
complicated by new readings. Readings that came to hand during my early
teens when a quickening curiosity about the nineteenth century as a possible
homeland led me to look at all sorts of bits and pieces of text about
colonial Wellington. 'At first I thought the shops very handsome,' I was
told by Lady Barker, 'but I found, rather to my disgust, that generally the
fine, imposing frontage was all a sham; the actual building was only a
little hut at the back, looking all the meaner for the contrast to the
cornices and show windows in front.' Mean sham blended with dark bleakness
to mark the place in the work of Henry Lawson. 'The great black hills they
seemed to close and loom
Passport to Hell . 'If you can
once be perfectly alone with the hills and sea of Wellington, you have
something they can't take away from you, no matter where and why they lock
you up.' Not that the narrator seemed too trustworthy to a bookishly
troubled teenager inside a suburban lounge on one of the numberless orderly
streets of
'Blowy old place, isn't it?' says a secondary character in Nor the Years Condemn. 'Windy Wellington . . . But I
like the wind.'
'Smells of ships, doesn't it?' says Starkie. 'Ships coming in the whole time. I can't stand a place that smells dead.'
Working my way through other writings seemed to add little to my stock
literary knowledge of Wellington. A knowledge that the capital was a lot of
rusty shanties dumped onto steep, dripping, windy hillsides. Wooden houses
on posts—a sort of cross between the towns of Appalachia and Ireland.
Damp, drizzling. Poor. The sort of place where kids played barefoot in
gutters while grey warmish clouds streamed ceaselessly across the
sky—a sort of northern
. . . we have mucked
With the rake of time over the tamed Foreshore. Battering trams; Lambton, lamed With concrete, has only a hint of ghost waters On the Quay stranded among elevators.
Swinging, however, from the sixties into the seventies of the twentieth century, we come to a lucid day of late summer. Sun, water, a small ship. A young man stands at a railing and scans a strait.
Myself, standing and scanning. Ready for my first sighting of the literal Wellington.
Myself, dressed in flared blue jeans and a yellow muslin body shirt, braced
on board the Maori. No longer so trim, that small,
honest ship. Tired, one might say. Tiredness inside her steel plates, but
not my mind—my mind at full alert, aware that my sighting of the city,
so far unseen, will be a sighting from out at sea, from the deck of a
vessel—the traditional first sighting by
Maori cuts past Pencarrow Head. The
colour of the water, all wrong. Turquoise? A true turquoise!
Wellington—brilliant! A place of beauty!
Bewilderment is what I feel, needless to say, leaning forward into the wonderful landscape, bewilderment because, of course, the texts—the texts have not told me. And now, now what sort of place will it prove to be, the literal city? What am I about to find, once our bows have rounded Point Halswell and veered towards the wharves? The would-be writer frowns, and wonders. What sort of city?
Stevan Eldred-Grigg (b. 1952) is a fiction writer,
autobiographer and social historian, especially of Canterbury. Historical
works such as A Southern Gentry ( 1980) and
Pleasures of the Flesh: Sex and Drugs in Colonial New Zealand ( 1984) were followed by the award-winning novel
Oracles and Miracles ( 1987), The Shining City ( 1991), Blue Blood ( 1997) and
others,
all drawing on the social, cultural and literary history of Canterbury.
My History, I think ( 1994) is a memoir.
A windy autumn night. We've lost our way in the distant Wellington suburb of Tawa. Here's a lit-up petrol station—we'll go there, they always know.
But will they? This isn't any ordinary address, a house in a street. Will they draw back from us, shaking their heads, not wanting to know, or to be seen to know? How do people regard a prison in their neighbourhood?
Arohata Women's Prison as it turns out is a bit off the main road, up a curving drive that climbs to the top of the hill where there are large dark buildings, and a car park. No real directions, however; we follow a group which itself gets lost in the darkness, turns, tries again . . .
Eventually we find ourselves waiting in a little enclosure, a kind of open porch, for a door to be unlocked. We form a queue, pay someone our money, wait again. In the end we are invited to take our seats in an informal semi-circle round a large open floor. It looks like a decorated gym (and it is).
It is Kia Marama,
the Arohata Women's Prison performance. It is a collage of different kinds
of presentation—song, dance, guitar music, chorus, talking. Towards
the end of the evening a small fair-headed Pakeha woman comes forward
from the chorus line. She takes a chair, turns it round and sits on it,
leaning on the back; a silence, then slowly she begins to tell us about her
'Silent Tears'. She pauses often, and there is a long silence at the end of
her words. Then she stands up and sings, without accompaniment, in a sweet,
throaty voice, 'All You've Got is Your Soul'. Silence again, then she turns
back to join the group, and they move into their final chorus. This is
Pauline Brown.
Weeks later she still haunts me; that pale intense face and curly fair hair, the clasped hands as she leans forward. Her direct appeal—no, it was not an appeal. 'Here I am,' she said, 'a mother of three children sitting in prison . . . because I killed a man . . .' But she did not condone her crime. 'I'm not sorry he's no longer around, but I am sorry I'm the one who took his life. I will never be able to forgive myself . . .' Mostly she'd talked about her children; she tried to protect them, and now the law decreed she should be denied all access to them.
What kind of history could it be, looming up behind that brief revelation? But then, who am I to wonder, to enquire? A stranger, someone from another world . . . yet I live in the same town, share the same windy sky, the same jutting Wellington hills; our local spring storms and occasional mellow afternoons . . . Is the gap between us really uncrossable?
I sense there is something I could do to traverse it, but at first I don't know what it is; I just know the idea won't leave me alone. I consider the oppressive contrast between my life and hers, my daily freedom of choice and the unrelenting restrictions of hers. I go out, come in, pick up the phone, drive to town or into the country, visit friends and family. And Pauline, this young woman? My God, she's young enough to be my daughter . . . what has the world done to her, taught her, given her and taken away?
One day, weeks after the performance, I know what I must do. I write a careful letter, post it, prepare to wait. It's not for long. 'I wanted to write it myself,' she says, 'but I couldn't: growing up—the booze, and beatings—those men I married—I'll tell you—'
Wednesday. My morning with Pauline. I drive the twenty kilometres or so along the urban motorway, turn oV and up past a mowed slope on which TAWA is planted in low bushes, then up a curved drive to the prison. Lawns edged by tidy gardens, a row of parked cars, the entrance to the Guard Room. There's quite a ritual about unlocking and signing in.
We meet in a small interview room. When Pauline arrives she is carrying an electric jug, milk, a mug for each of us, coffee and her own smokes. One day she comes empty-handed. It's a new guard, doesn't believe her story, confiscated her things—'Arsehole,' snorts Pauline, 'having a bad day, and takes it out on me—'
Sometimes we gossip. Like the time we'd both seen the film on TV showing
murder victims dressing up to go and watch an execution. We agree we
wouldn't want to live in
Other occasions come and go. At home I write to the woman I now know, the silent archetype who endures Pauline's sufferings.
I've discovered that the differences between us don't magically disappear just because we're friends. There is something else though that binds us together; perhaps it's common cause. We do agree on almost everything—but then we mostly talk about 'the system', meaning the law; and it's true that it has ignored the real lives of women like Pauline for hundreds of years, and is very hard to change.
Sometimes I go away, and we miss our weekly talks. But I think of her, she's part of me now. Even sitting in a garden in the early morning, she's there.
Lauris Edmond published her first volume of poetry at
fifty-one, and has since sustained a prolific output of poetry, fiction,
autobiography and critical/editorial work, winning the Commonwealth Poetry
Prize in 1986. Her most recent volumes are A Matter of Timing (
A little history: they left Badbea, the Sutherlands, Bartons and Sinclairs, making their way to Broro, a small town on the sea coast in Sutherlandshire, here to connect with the passenger boat trading from the far north of Scotland to the south.
Picture them waiting with relatives one early morning near the mouth of the Broro River. All ready at last, the final goodbyes, the menfolk take their places.
But wait, at that moment as the keening rises, the wife of Alexander
Sutherland, holding her youngest child in her arms, breaks down and refuses
to enter the boat, to go one step further. We see Alexander leave the boat,
walk to where his wife stands, surrounded by her people. See how he seizes
the child from her arms and turns back to the boat.
She follows; she takes her place. Going, going.
Orientalput down at Petone from where you were taken
And I whisper to you. I tell you you must not mind this foreign soil. You must not mind for me. I am the robber's bride as my mother was before me. I have found my own way. I am the ordinary face of strangeness. You would not know me if you saw me. We have bitten the white throats of roses and ridden wild horses bare backed. I live here. There is no turning back. Do not call me now. Stay just where you are. Tonight I want to sit quietly by this window. There is so little silence, so many voices.
Fiona Kidman (b. 1940) began to write seriously when she was twenty-two, combining her early writing life with motherhood. Later, she worked in radio and television, but is now primarily a writer of fiction. Her novels include A Breed of Women ( 1979), The Book of Secrets ( 1987), Mandarin Summer ( 1989) (shortly to be a feature film), True Stars ( 1990) (written during tenure of the Writer's Fellowship) and Ricochet Baby ( 1996). Her most recent book is The Best of . She has received numerous awards and in 1998 became Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (DNZM).
After his wife's death John began to fall in love again. It came on him steadily, drawing energy from his grief until that dried up and blew away and she could walk beside him speaking silently and touching his arm. He remembered that she had been the first to say, 'I love this place.' He had not shared that with her until she was gone.
He thought of her less frequently after several years but was glad of her presence when she came. He looked up from his gardening and saw red cattle moving through the gorse on the hill and no longer heard her telling him to see. A morepork calling woke him in the night and he heard alone, and hearing made him part of the nature of the place; as the cattle did, as the pair of horses on the skyline, as the steeplejack on the TV mast with a helicopter lowering parts to him.
He took the yellow unit down the gorge—nine minutes to the central station—and walked along the waterfront in his parka and sneakers and cheese-cutter hat. They had made that walk each Sunday—and now less frequently he heard her say, Listen, see: the hum of yacht rigging in the wind, a shag on a mooring line drying its wings. He saw for himself and he showed her, easy now, smiling with the union he made. He did not believe she would have been jealous.
The wind wrinkled the water on the artificial lake by the museum and sped a plastic bottle on the surface like a canoe. A black-backed gull with a broken wing flapped and scrambled on the sloping lawn by the marina. 'My husband's phoning the animal ambulance,' a woman cried. The wind gusted. A fat sloop hung in slings by the overseas terminal while two men scrubbed her down with wire brooms. After the murders in the Sounds was there anyone in New Zealand who could not tell a sloop from a ketch?
John walked on, not wanting to remember, only to see: fathers jogging with pushchairs in which tiny frowning buddhas slept: a man 'released into the community'—fingerless gloves, broken shoes, a New World shopping bag full of ravelled jerseys and bitten loaves of bread. He jabbed a fence paling at a council dustman wanting to sweep the corner where he slept. Beyond the Hotel Raffaele an Air New Zealand jetliner slid into the opening between Point Jerningham and Point Halswell.
John walked as far as the Raffaele, past labradors and schnauzers and a muzzled pit bull; past cars splashed with birdshit from starlings overnighting in the Norfolk pines; past vandalised bus shelters and million dollar apartments on the hill; and was still able to say, with a happy melancholy, This is mine.
The city of mirrors and chessboards strove for size underneath the hills it would never climb. The Beehive, a pancake stack, remained complacent. He would have liked to see it sooty and scarred. The sound of a piledriver came across the water from the Railyard Stadium and made him think of Jael nailing Sisera to the ground.
Away in its suburb, under the mast, his house would be steaming in the
A shag dived, sped eel-like and vanished; came up with a fish in its
beak. Silver flashed from the mirror glass. Red grew dull as the sun went
out. He might be watching himself, if time were nothing, from that building
on the hill where he had worked. He rode up every two or three weeks in the
cable car, by-passed Von Zedlitz, found the library instead and leafed
through the TLS and the London Review of Books,
keeping in touch although he no longer needed to. Went into the stairwell to
see the painting when he was done. That figure made of earth and air was
what he really came for. He wanted to take it with him when he left, under
his arm—had never seen a student even pause.
He watched it now, on the hills, and joined it. He did not know what it was
doing there, or what he was doing. The harbour waited, level and patient; it
darkened, then lit up from inside itself. A painter might see a shape in the
water between
He hummed with fear at his vision, then let it go. Walked back to the station the way he had come: the chlorine stink at the Freyburg Pool, the ketches and sloops, the floating crane. Listen, he said to his wife: the wind was coming. Ropes on the charter yacht slapped against the mast with the sound she had made beating eggs. Black-backed gulls side-slipped in the sky.
Tonight the tiles would rattle. He frowned at it. He smiled at it.
Maurice Gee (b. 1931) achieved early success as a
fiction
writer with such titles as the novels The Big Season ( 1962) and In My Father's Den ( 1972)
and the short story collection A Glorious Morning, Comrade ( 1975). Plumb ( 1978) brought a
new
level of acclaim, sustained by such later books as Meg ( 1981), The Burning Boy ( 1990),
Going West ( 1992) and his most recent, Live Bodies
( 1998) (winner of the Montana New Zealand Book Award).
He
is also a successful children's writer, with Under the Mountain ( 1979) and others. He was awarded an Honorary DLitt of
Victoria University in 1987.
Olive-green houses had had their day. Now, in the late sixties, psychedelic dwellings had sprung up in Kelburn and on the Thorndon hillside. Chocolate brown with dazzling yellow or orange trim, dark rusty red with turquoise window frames. I looked at them and shone back, quaintly cheered. I bought some dark rust-coloured paint and set to work on the asbestos sidings of our house. My stepladder wouldn't reach as far as the eaves and I had to get help from a neighbour to complete the top half. Then the paint ran out. The wall alongside the church would remain a watery green.
Harry (Seresin) was appalled at the way we were living and at once organised
me a job doing publicity for Downstage Theatre for twice as much money as I
earned at the Observer; which was fortuitous
because
the Observer was about to become defunct. The
advertising salesman had failed to sell space. Young Helen and Sarah began
accompanying me to Downstage opening nights. Pinter's Birthday Party, Christopher Hampton's The Philanthropist. When KB Laffa's exuberant comedy,
Zoo Zoo, Widdershins Zoo, was showing my father
rang
up and warned me—'If you're thinking of taking the girls to Zoo Zoo I thought you should know there's a scene of
simulated intercourse.' The play was about six young people in a Midlands
flat, one of them an American draft dodger and all of them busily making
love not war. My girls had already seen it and loved it. I didn't, however,
think of taking them to the Late Night Show—Knackers and later Knockers,
starring Paul Holmes, John Banas and
Downstage was then in the draughty Star Boating Club. Harry's tiny office gave onto the storeroom of the kitchen. He told me he had to stamp his feet before he went through this room at night, to discourage the rats. The food was protected in cages. Downstage had begun life in an old café on the corner of Courtenay Place, the brain child of actors Tim Elliott and Martyn Sanderson, poet and actor Peter Bland, and Harry, who had promoted the idea of serving dinner before the show. It caused some headaches not usually associated with theatre management but made Downstage certainly unique.
One of the pleasures of doing publicity for Downstage was being allowed to
attend rehearsals. For years I had borrowed playscripts from the library
because I found them as rewarding to read as novels. Now I watched them come
to life, beginning to hatch like peacocks. You Know I
Can't Hear You While the Water's Running. The
Bacchae. Eduardo Manet's The Nuns. Three Months Gone. I tried to make myself invisible.
Sunny Amey would hover, one hand poised above her script like a baton. Nola
Millar sat, watchful under her beret, with a bag of humbugs on the seat
beside her.
Bill Austin, head of Radio and Television Drama, bought another TV play I
had called A Jelly Fish in Summer—but told
me
they didn't currently have the actresses capable of doing it justice. '. . .
is the kind of play that would be very hazardous to present just at this
time. However, it could very
Harry loved my children and said so, but I wasn't ready to be charmed by this approach a second time. Harry and I became lovers and the best of friends, always, but it didn't happen in a hurry. Meanwhile he courted me with cases of peaches, driving me in his Triumph two-seater, telling me the stories of his life while I hung washing on the line. I told him some of my stories and he listened with mournful attention, sometimes exploding with sympathetic laughter. He took the children to the park so that I could do some writing. I learned that he was a special person, thoughtful and brimming with ideas.
He could see what was good about living in New Zealand, his adopted country,
and yet he was sometimes dejected by the same drabness which had depressed
me when I came back to Wellington after living in London. He talked
nostalgically about 'dancing and singing in the streets', which there was
none of in Wellington in the sixties, and he yearned for more
non-conformist behaviour. I remembered an occasion back in Listener editorial: 'Mr Vogt will no doubt be able to
find a place where the people are joyful and where his own ebullience will
cause no surprise. But he may need to be careful. In New Zealand he has been
free to speak his mind on a variety of subjects; indeed we are all richer
because he has had strong opinions and has expressed them vigorously
. . .'
I enjoyed the vigour of Harry's expression. I wrote to Fleur expressing my surprise that I had become involved with him. He was so different from the kind of man I had been attracted to in the past. I was pleased with myself for not repeating old patterns—if this was a mistake, it was a new one.
Harry and I went with Sunny Amey and Bob Lord to a satirical revue at the
university—One In Five. The title was based on
a provocative statement by psychiatrist Fraser MacDonald that 'one in five
New Zealanders are mad'. Dave Smith had written the catchy title song. He
and Listener: '. . . leaning back in laughter at this
country which I had never quite acknowledged, like a de facto relationship,
Wellington had had its eccentric personalities as long as I had lived there. There was the Eccles family, wizen-faced Mum and the two grown-up sons who didn't seem to work but had money to go to the continuous 'pictures'. They shambled in long, shabby, mud-coloured coats and worn shoes, like creatures from the lost lagoon. There was the gentleman who always wore a hat and pin-striped suit and twirled a walking stick. He talked to himself in plummy tones and would stop to salute the DIC. Lizzie and I as schoolgirls would encounter 'the birdman' who would put his hands together and warble like a canary. He was delighted when we stopped to listen and began to sing: 'Two little girls in blue!' We were wearing our Queen Margaret College royal blue uniforms. These were all personalities we indulged with a fondness which was possessive. They were ours.
'Camping on the Faultline' is an extract from an autobiography in progress.
Marilyn Duckworth, OBE, fiction writer and poet, was
born
in Auckland but has lived mainly in Wellington. Her first novel, A Gap
in the Spectrum ( 1959), was published when she was
twenty-three; her fifth, Disorderly Conduct ( 1984), won a New Zealand Book Award. She has been awarded
the Scholarship in Letters three times, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship
in 1980 and a Fulbright Scholarship in 1987. She has held fellowships at
Victoria and Auckland universities. In 1996 Leather Wings was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers Prize. In that
year she edited a book on New Zealand writing sisters—Cherries on
a Plate. Her thirteenth novel, Studmuffin, appeared in 1997.
Daniel Manders was not happy. Rage engulfed him, seared his ego like a naked flame. His ego, he was prepared to admit, was as big as the next man's, if not bigger. But even so, even so.
Not only had the Head turned down his request for
This was the fact that enraged Manders, not the job itself. He had nothing against Trade. Trade was essential and he could do it.
And he could certainly do Culture. Like any self-respecting thruster in Foreign Affairs, Manders collected New Zealand art. Or had. He read New Zealand literature, especially history, which was even more interesting nowadays. He had always been conversant with the customs and culture of its indigenous people. One or two of his friends were Maori.
And he loved his country, loved it dearly. There was nothing wrong with his homeland. Beautiful. Beautiful.
Or with its people.
Or was there?
He stared out the window at two large water tanks on the flat grey roof below, at air-conditioning ducts and a pigeon standing in a large and rippling puddle. Did he, in fact, like his fellow countrymen and women? Did he, in fact, like anyone? And this, this was the point. Did it show?
Manders was a reasonably honest man. If he didn't like his compatriots then
it bloody well should show. Esse quam videre. To
be
rather than to seem. A good motto, he had always thought so. One that should
be framed above the beds of leaders and force-fed to frauds.
The clerical-grey pigeon had been replaced by a streetkid sparrow. The reflections of surrounding high buildings, slabs of cream, brown and blue, shuddered about its feet in the chilly-looking puddle.
Manders pulled a yellow legal pad towards him and wrote.
-
Appreciation of Situation.
- I have become a supercilious shit.
- It shows.
- Is this why I have been seconded to a job in Cultural Links and Trade?
- Unlikely. Both CL and T need charm and bonhomie.
- So does an overseas posting.
- An overseas posting at this stage is essential for my career, let alone vis-à-vis Caroline.
He made a new heading.
-
Options/Action
- Do the CLAT job superbly and get sent back to FA for overseas posting as soon as possible.
- How else to achieve desired posting?
- Get charming. You used to charm. Get charming.
- What about EQV?
- Bugger EQV.
- Practise on someone.
- Who?
He snatched the yellow page, screwed it up and threw it in the wastepaper bin. Then reconsidered and tore it into small pieces. No point in advertising angst at this stage.
The sparrow had disappeared. Cold feet perhaps.
The telephone rang. Daniel snatched it to him. 'Manders,' he barked.
'Is that Daniel Manders?'
'Yes.' Who else, chucky, who else.
'Daniel, this is Tania Webster, Mr Carew's personal assistant speaking. Mr Carew wants to see you as soon as possible about arrangements for the ASEAN trip.'
'Trip. When?'
'After you join CLAT.'
Sweet Christ. One of those balls-aching chatting and shopping
Ministerial swing arounds, dreaded by High Commissions, Embassies and
handlers alike. And I'll be one of them, the
Minister's bear leader, there to dance with the enemy and piss on my
colleagues.
He drew a deep breath.
'Thank you, Ms Webster.'
'Mrs.'
'Mrs. Shall I come over forthwith?' (A bit much, forthwith, but let her swing.)
'No, no, the Minister is completely tied up till Thursday.'
The old game. I'll show you my diary if you show me yours and mine will be bigger and fatter and packed full of meaty interest because my boss is the biggest fucker in the forest and you're ground cover.
'Thursday,' he muttered, 'will be fine.' He put down the receiver with care. The future did not beckon.
He would go and see Steve Roper on the Asian desk. Steve might know
something, some hidden and hopeful agenda, some gleam of light,
sense behind this grisly scenario, this
deliberate seconding of brilliance.
He loped along the corridor in search of help he knew he was unlikely to receive.
Friends, even good friends like Steve, never get the consoling thing right. They listen for a few moments, tell you where you went wrong, tell you what intelligent action they would have taken in similar circumstances, which is usually the exact opposite of that taken by you, then slide gently into their problems which are invariably serious and far-reaching in their effects unlike your sweaty little quibbles against fate. Your bad luck, they intimate, lies within yourself. They are the ones whose misfortunes are determined by malevolent stars.
Steve, as expected, was useless, worse than useless. He said that you have to expect bum postings occasionally, and that Daniel's trouble was he'd always been so bloody brilliant he thought the department owed him a living which it didn't, and that Daniel should wait until he landed a really shitty job like Steve's, and a boss like Stormin' Norman. Then he would have something to moan about. Oh, and had he seen the photos of the shindig at the Mendezes the other night?
'No.'
Steve produced an album with the word 'Photographs' embossed in gold letters on the cover and a handwritten inscription inside. 'With the compliments of Ambassador Constantine Mendeze and Mrs Mendeze on the occasion of the visit of General Alsarvo d'Riva.'
From the evidence of the photographs the party had been an outstanding success. Most of the participants appeared to have spent the evening shrieking with joy, except for one unfortunate shot of a saffron-suited Minister clutching his groin beside a vast floral arrangement of red Kniphofias, Birds of Paradise and giant Pampas Grass.
'Why've you got one?' said Daniel.
'Every desk has. Asian, French, the States. The lot.'
'Very generous.'
'They are very generous, the Peruvians. They gave Daphne and me a set of coasters when they came for a meal. Sort of mottled stone, brown and white like a cow.'
'Brindled.'
'As you say. Rather attractive in a weird sort of way.'
'Caroline and I got them too. God knows where they are now.'
'Well, you would, wouldn't you? Same seniority.'
'Seventy-seven, wasn't it?'
'Nnn. Seventy-seven.'
'Twenty-one years.'
'Yeah.'
They stared at each other bleakly.
'Probably,' continued Daniel, 'she took them with her.'
Steve's head moved sadly from side to side.
'God, you're a supercilious bastard. What would Caroline, an independent
front runner like Caroline, want with four joint matrimonial stone coasters
in
Barbara Anderson (b. 1926) gained her international
standing as a novelist and short story writer in her sixties. Having already
published stories, she included Victoria University's Creative Writing paper
in her BA, completed in 1984, and published her first collection, I
Think We Should Go Into the Jungle, in 1989. Successful
subsequent titles include Girls High (( 1992), which won the Wattie Book of the Year
Award, The House Guest ( 1995) and Proud
Garments ( 1996). Her new novel, Long Hot Summer, will be published this year.
Kia ora.
Alistair Te Ariki Campbell (b. 1925) has a long
association with Victoria University throughout his career as a poet,
playwright, novelist and autobiographer. He was a student when Mine
Eyes Dazzle achieved early success in 1950, and his
most
recent volume of new poems, Death and the 'Tagua',
was published in a fine-print edition by the University's
Wai-te-ata Press in 1996. Other significant titles include
Wild Honey ( 1964), The Dark Lord of Savaiki
( 1980) and Pocket Collected Poems ( 1996). He was awarded an Honorary DLitt in Victoria
University's Centennial Year, 1999.
I stuck my feet in the oven of the coal stove and opened my book. I was renting an old house in a strange, cold town. My daughter was asleep in her bedroom off the kitchen. She was five. Her mother had just killed herself.
I like a coal stove. You can dry your clothes on the rack, warm your feet in the oven, and keep the teapot hot. I looked at the red glow in the grate, heard the ashes falling soft into the pan. The kettle began to sing. I shoved it to the back where it fell quiet, a violin string winding down.
My daughter called out in her sleep. I tiptoed into her room. She had one arm outside the blanket. I tucked it in. I'd had a go at making cheerful curtains for her window, but they didn't fit too well. When I drew them tighter, the night outside was dark; the glass was cold on my knuckles.
I put the kettle over the ring, made a cup of tea, read for an hour or two, and woke. The book was in my lap. I had gone to sleep in my comfortable chair in front of the stove, feet in the oven.
My daughter must have called me. She often did that, or she'd pad out and stand silent beside my bed till I woke and found her there, feet cold as linoleum. I'd pop her into bed beside me, put her feet on the hot water bottle and, in the morning, she wouldn't remember how she got there.
But she hadn't called out. Or she'd gone back to sleep. I found where I'd been reading and heard the sound again. The kitchen door into the gloomy front passage was closed. As I looked the doorknob turned. I tiptoed across. The doorknob turned further. I put my foot against the door, kicked it hard.
A neigh of agony. I shouted with fright and rage. A tall man stood in the passage, a black stocking over his head, holding his nose in both hands. He'd sneaked in through the unlocked front door. He'd gone through the two front rooms and was trying the kitchen door, turning the knob slowly, when it flew open and smashed his nose. He ran, whinnying in pain. I ran after, shouting.
He jumped the front gate. I jumped after. He ran down the street, across Tinakori Road, down the asphalt zigzag between the pohutakawas and Thorndon Quay and, shouting for help, I ran after. He dodged between cars going home from the pictures, and I dodged after him. The neighbours must have heard me yelling. Somebody in the cars would see me chasing the man in the mask.
He ran under the flyover being built across Thorndon, part of the new motorway. In the gritty air beneath that concrete sky he turned, stood his ground, and hefted a length of reinforcing steel like a spear.
'Come and get me! Try your luck . . .' Voice nasal and muffled by the stocking, he took aim. Behind him I could see the huts and lights of the single men's camp in the railway yards, the other side of the flyover. He was on his territory. As I was off mine.
The lights of the cars were a solid white band. None of the neighbours had come to help. Nobody stopped their car. I thought of my daughter alone inside the house, its front door wide open in this strange, cold town. I looked down, saw I was in my socks and was scared.
I turned and ran. The man in the mask snorted and flung the reinforcing steel. I heard the whicker as it flexed through the dark air, the whine as it clanked off something and buried itself, grating into a heap of shingle beside me. I whirled, pulled it out, spun myself around a couple of times and let go. Whop! whop! whop! like a chopper coming up a valley. There was a flump and the second shriek I'd heard that night.
I didn't wait to see if he was injured, nor if he was going to throw it back. I didn't want to be killed under a half-built flyover in a strange town. Just wanted to make sure my daughter was safe. I ran between the cars. Several swerved. A couple tooted. None stopped. I ran up the zigzag, across Tinakori Road, up the street to where light poured through the front door, spilled across the road.
My daughter lay asleep, one arm outside her blanket. I tucked it in, put a shovel of coal on the fire, shoved the kettle over the ring, made some tea.
What if the man had speared me? What if a car hit me? What if somebody else sneaked in the open door, my daughter asleep and alone?
I stood at the front door and stared at the other houses in the narrow, elbowed street. Not one neighbour had come to help. I glared at their windows, locked the door, took my daughter out of her bed, and put her into mine. I filled the hot water bottle from the kettle, wrapped it in my pullover, put her feet on it, and went to bed myself.
I lay beside my daughter, looked through the dark, and thought about our life in the strange town. On Thorndon Quay below, a siren screamed.
Next morning, I took my daughter down the asphalt zigzag between the pohutukawas, across the road, and along the footpath beside the flyover where last night I had turned and run from the man in the mask. There was frost on the pavement and, tingeing the white crystals, a swathe of what looked like blood. My daughter held my hand. The wind was from the south, wolfish as we walked through the strange town.
'We'll get to know the place better,' I said. 'I read a story last night about the zigzag we just came down, a story by a girl who lived just up the road from us. Come on, we'll look for a park.'
My daughter held my hand and skipped. 'Will there be a slide and swings?' she said. 'Will there be friends?'
'There's bound to be,' I told her. Already, she was getting used to this town.
Jack Lasenby (b. 1931) is a leading writer of
children's
fiction, which draws on his wide experience of the New Zealand bush. His
successful titles include The Lake ( 1987),
Dead
Man's Head ( 1994), The Waterfall
( 1995) and his several collections of 'Uncle Trev' stories.
He has worked as a deer culler and as a lecturer at Wellington Teachers'
College.
Living in Wellington was a career choice. It was Gallipoli: The New Zealand Story, published in
The family home in Sefton Street is a typical Wadestown house looking to the western hills bathed in afternoon sunlight, the downside being the northerly winds. In my first years I wrote there each morning. Walking David to school with Blue the dog, then writing from nine till one. The Maurice Shadbolt routine, 1000 words then stop even if I had more to say. Just let it come, good days, bad days, the next time through it would get better. My draft was my file, layering in the research as I went, writing early, writing often, just like tennis, practising my craft every day.
The Army gave me three months resettlement leave on full pay and I offered
my services to the National Archives checking and listing the First World
War holdings. It was letting loose a child in a lolly shop. Sheer marvellous
indulgence, being allowed to look into every War Archives box in the bowels
of the Air New Zealand building in Vivian Street. After the three months
finished I kept on with it. No money coming in, living on what we had put
aside to get me started. Dee at university, the kids at school, enjoying
every day. I got involved in the War Art collection. Tony
Murray-Oliver had done wonders in gathering the Second World War
collection from RSAs various. But on his death, little had been done with
the First World War collection. Sorting them out was difficult, the records
messy, and identification uncertain. That's where I came in. I could not
tell how it was painted, but I could identify scenes and individuals. One
thing led to another. The The Honorary Rank of Captain, A Loss of Innocence, and
Crete:
A Tribute from New Zealand and I was now earning money. Archives were
also good company, Ray Grover and his team endured my singing. Georgina
Christensen administering each exhibition with me as curator. Walking daily
from Wadestown to Vivian Street. Lunchtimes in the Cuba Street galleries and
second-hand bookshops. Jazz 78s in Slow Boat Records, sheer delight.
Archives led me to the New Zealand Film Archive identifying and cataloguing
official New Zealand First World War documentaries and newsreels, equally
good company and equally enjoyable.
I was also writing a history of the New Zealand Division on the Western
On the Fringe of Hell: New Zealanders and Military
Discipline
in the First World War was the result.
I also got a contract to write the official history of New Zealanders in
South East Asia working to both Historical Branch and Headquarters New
Zealand Defence Force. It gave me an office in Defence House, access to
files, research trips overseas, and a project that I have only just finished
many years on. Writing a contract history has been a salutary experience.
You have to anticipate where you are going and stick to it. That was the
difficult part. At times, in despair, I sought and enjoyed distraction.
Books, two during my time as Writer in Residence at Evening Post,
being one of the team that started the New Zealand
Defence Quarterly magazine, now five years old and going strong.
Curator and then Creative Director of Scars on the
Heart at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, commuting to Fighting a Jungle War, as I have with
all
my other books. Looking forward to 5.30 or 6.00 am starts, writing the daily
quota, finally doing it justice.
Wellington is an inextricable part of all this. Meeting everybody on Lambton
Quay. Long café discussions with Ray Grover and Oliver Riddell. DQM breakfasts and lunches with Jim Rolfe and Lindsay
Missen. Art gallery afternoons and coffee with Christopher Moore when
punch-drunk from writing.
I am typing this in Armidale in northern New South Wales. Our delight during
the two years here have been the weeks we have stolen in Balmain. Last week
I rang my wife, back visiting family, and asked Dee how Wellington struck
her after
Anzac: The New Zealanders atGallipoli ,
The assault began at 9.30 pm,
By nightfall Malone was dead, killed by New Zealand artillery fire. The Otago Infantry Battalion and the Wellington Mounted Rifles, led by Lieutenant Colonel Meldrum, replaced the Wellingtons. Throughout
If New Zealanders have a day that is uniquely ours, it is
Christopher Pugsley was a career army officer before
becoming a full-time military historian. His books include On the
Fringe of Hell: New Zealanders and Military Discipline ( 1991), Te Hokowhitu a Tu: the ( 1995) and ( 1984, 1990, 1998). From 1996 to 1999 he
was at the University of New England, Armidale.
someone.
( September —December 1990)
Gregory O'Brien (b. 1961) is a poet, fiction writer,
painter, writer on art and anthologist. His collections of poems and
drawings include Location of the Least Person ( 1987), Great Lake ( 1991),
Days
Beside Water ( 1993) and Winter I Was ( 1999). Diesel Mystic ( 1989) is
an
illustrated novel. He has edited a collection of New Zealand love poems, and
co-edited An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English ( OUP, 1997).
Just after I had finished Ettie, my biography of
Ettie Rout, I felt as if I had walked into a room which was my
life—and switched on the light. Suddenly I was back in the middle of
my own life. For almost a decade, almost a third of my life, almost all of
my adult life, someone else had been there. Ettie had been my focus—as
I had been trying to get her into focus.
I came back to Wellington to write the book. Wellington is the place to
write such a book—with the Alexander Turnbull Library; the General
Assembly Library, where I copied out articles from old, unphotocopyable
newspapers; the National Archives where Ettie's banned letters lay in
folders;
I had left eight years before, to go to university in the news award of the day which, ironically, saved me
from having to do news reporting—something I found it hard to get a
grip on; it was so transient and mindless of past or future. So I could go
off into the past and my future, knowing that if I ever had to come back to
the present and a job, I had a piece of paper which made me look attractive
to a newspaper editor.
But having come to my own time and place (I always wanted to be in
Wellington; circumstances had led me out and kept me away), I was never
quite in either. How could I live properly in my own time when I read more
newspapers from her time than I did from my own?
When I was more interested in any account of any social function she had gone to than to go to one myself? When no
visitor was the one I most wanted to see and never could—just for five
minutes, to ask questions no one but Ettie could answer, to which I needed
answers to make sense of the rest. And when almost any living person was
less interesting than the dead people who populated my mind. On the
occasions when I met up with others who had known these people, we fell to
what seemed like gossiping about mutual friends and relatives, while to the
living I was quite capable of saying, 'Oh, but I do not have a social life' meaning, don't bother asking me.
The social mores and social arguments I was thinking my way round were not those of my own day—to which I paid little attention. I actively avoided things that would excite my mind in other directions. I often did not go to a movie because I didn't want it in my mind. I read few novels, watched little television, and had practically no interest in the 'news' I had once made my living by.
HG Wells (who was one of those who populated my mind as he had been a friend
of Ettie's) once said of his wife that she stuck to him so hard that in the
end he stuck to himself. And I felt like that about Ettie. It was only when
I became riveted to her, at the expense of practically everything else, that
the project stuck to me and flowed in my head and onto the paper. When I
went
Writing a book is hard, but not writing it is
worse.
At those times when I was trying to do something else, I felt as if there
was a child I should have been attending to, but had locked in a cupboard in
the meantime. Did I have the key to the cupboard safely in my pocket? What
if I could not get back in? For lack of my active attention, it could die. A
piece of written work can die—just go cold on you, to the point where
you cannot resuscitate it.
So active attention, feeding it every day, was the only way. The analogy I thought of at the time was a bath. You can stand in it with the water around your ankles, but it won't do any good until you have lowered yourself into it and the water is all round you. With a book you have to immerse yourself in it to a certain level before it will flow. You are in it, it is in you.
For me, going to sleep with it and waking up with it was important because that's when I found ideas came, especially the ones that made links. Making the links is what fires the whole thing. You could put all the facts of a person's life in date order and join them together with dots—but you wouldn't have a biography. You start with hundreds of bits of paper all containing clues—often indecipherable and contradictory—which have to be studied, deciphered, understood, and then stuck together, not in order necessarily, but married one bit to another to include explanation and background and give a bigger meaning than the sum of the parts.
To do this I had to have the whole thing in my head, so that I was able to scan backwards and forwards. There's endlesschoice about where to say what. I was constantly swapping bits of information from the beginning to the summing up at the end. With someone about whom the reader will know very little, as in Ettie's case, you need information at the beginning which forms an argument as to why the reader should bother even knowing about the subject. With Ettie an additional problem was that for many years—between her time and ours—the great issue of her life, the spread of venereal disease, was a non-issue. Unfortunately for the world, but fortunately for making Ettie's life a relevant story, AIDS appeared just before I began the book.
Not only had the cause that fuelled her life become a non-issue in the meantime, even in her own day it had been studiously ignored or concealed —there were not, for example, adequate figures on how many New Zealand soldiers had contracted venereal diseases in World War One when she staged her campaign so there was an enormous amount of research to do even to understand what she had been on about. And even if you could discern 'the facts', you had to understand the thinking of the time. You had to know the odds to see how desperate was her bid to beat them. It was the thinking of the time, the strength of views of those who opposed her that cornered her into tragedy. But how much of a mountain of research do you put in? How can you make that tip of the iceberg stand out clearly for the reader without freezing them to death with the huge bit hidden in the research sea?
Grappling with such things was misery-inducing at first. But when I was feeding the child in the cupboard daily, immersed in the bath which had been cold around my ankles but was now warm and up to my neck, the project became a delight. I was in the project; it was in me. I had no choice about what I did, and I didn't want to do anything else anyway.
If you are actively engaged on a creative endeavour, I learnt, you have to do the creative thing first—and everything else comes last. I trained myself out of housework and administrative tasks that did not have to do with the biography. (There's a lot of admin in a biography: writing and answering letters to and from informants and potential informants and libraries holding archives of other players in the story, setting up interviews, paying for photographs, asking an MP for a signature to get a card for the British Library's manuscripts section, filing . . .) You could tidy up first—but that could go on forever. You could do all the research first—and never write the book because there's no end to how much research you could do.
If I sound sentimental or self-sacrificing, don't read me that way.
I was living an adventure. I knew I was sacrificing things—such as what is generally referred to as 'making a living'. But I did not keep count of the cost. (When I did do the roughest add-up later I decided the sum of the relatively small grants I'd had and the award I won and the royalties for the book would have covered only the cost of materials and travel—no wages for time spent.) And next to what Ettie had sacrificed for her project I wasn't losing much. Money was the least of what she spent in her campaign; she lost reputation and the chance of remaking a life in New Zealand afterwards.
Actually my reputation seemed to be on a downward
spiral as the years rolled by. More people asked me in that time, 'How's Ettie?' than asked, 'How are you?' as if I were to be
judged solely on production of the book, as if they were somehow put out by
the fact that it wasn't out last year. I was cheered to find when I picked
up biographies that their authors had often taken between eight and ten
years. (I took nine—and did another book in between: an oral history
of World War One, which allowed me to ask old soldiers for the information I
couldn't have found out any other way).
I loved the time I spent fixated. I learnt an enormous amount about myself,
being riveted to Ettie, and not only how to write
outraged letters—for which I borrowed Ettie's sarcastic style. Any big
project teaches a lot—and so does trying to see the world through
someone else's eyes.
There was never a time when I felt all the decisions had been made. I had no feeling of fait accompli—always of fait en progres. But I did finally call a halt and so came to a point where, having delivered it to the publisher myself (by hand, via car journey, with breakdown so that after a night in the Cambridge Hotel I walked the streets hugging my manuscript to my bosom, waiting for the mechanic to let me go on) I walked back into that room which was my life, and put the light on.
I did my tax for the first time in three years and went out in search of
income, lurching to the opposite end of the work-income spectrum, by
going down to The Terrace and taking a public relations job for a corporate.
When
I had lasted nine months there before I was caught by the need to produce
something myself again. For when you've done a book, you've tasted a
narcotic. But the books I've done since—Convent
Girls and Sixties Chicks Hit the
Nineties—have been short, swift pieces of work compared with Ettie.
So would I enter the fray of another biography? Oh, yes. But I'd be putting up a stiffer battle in fighting for my own life next time round, trying harder to keep the light on in that room which is my life.
Jane Tolerton (b. 1957) is a biographer, journalist and
teacher of journalism, whose life of Ettie Rout, Ettie ( 1992), won the New Zealand Book Award for non-fiction. Her
other books include Convent Girls ( 1994) and
Sixties Chicks Hit the Nineties ( 1997).
While I was Writer in Residence in
We stood watching the protest because it was not just a spectacle but a
novelty. People just didn't do that any
more.
I told the others some stories about protests.
Eighty-three and eighty-four there were sometimes two marches a day—at lunchtime and early evening. Often they were for the same cause, and you could take your choice—'Is there a matinee?' Most were anti-nuclear, but there was also Homosexual Law Reform, and the H-Block and Latin American Committees, and marches for Women Reclaim the Night. My friends stopped meeting in pubs—instead we went out walking together, ambled along in our op-shop overcoats or Swandris, or our thick men's jerseys under XOS black woollen shearers' singlets. I'd lend some burlier person my fingerless gloves so that they could carry one end of a banner, or one pole of a litter bearing a huge Debra Bustin Uncle Sam—indecently exposing his tumescent warhead.
We heard 'Assemble in Bunny Street', or 'Assemble in Pigeon Park'. And there were chants: 'What do we want?' 'No Nukes!' 'When do we want it?' 'Now!' (less grammatical than a Marines marching song). My sister, Sara, would produce her own versions. On one marathon march for Women Reclaim the Night, we wandered around the smaller streets of Mount Victoria, till Sara began chanting, 'Two four six eight; where are we going, it's getting late?' And there were times she'd offer helpful advice, 'Two four six eight; don't sit on a spiked gate!'
Because I was nosy I worked those marches. There
were so many people I knew—my friend from
design school at the polytechnic, a 'mature student' friend with her
daughter in a pushchair; all of Sara's tribal Rugby Street flat; or Women
Against Pornography, with one woman's white husky trotting among them; and
the good-looking English guy from Greenpeace, possibly without his latest
girlfriend; the bow-legged Chilean from the Latin American Committee; and
members of PAN—our writer's club, an offshoot of the English
Club—two male poets and a protean novelist raising a sweat by carrying
some giant papier-mache puppet from the Nuclear Horror Show. My dashing
about was noticed, I was sent back against the current to find
people—people would ask, 'So, who is here, Elizabeth?' Once I was sent
off with money to buy a big bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken (this is back
Sometimes there was violence, almost always offered by passers-by.
Well—it isn't advisable to suggest to a homophobe that he's a
repressed homosexual, especially if he's amongst friends, and they've all
just reeled out of the Abel T. My sister took up a new
sport—eyeballing the police—and once she slugged a distracted
blue giant outside the Michael Fowler Centre (at either Miss New Zealand or
the National Party Conference). I hauled her away, backwards and flailing,
by grabbing her jacket hood, and drawing her through the crowd, out of the
giant's sight and reach. She plunged like a furious but collared dog, then
spun around and nearly landed one before recognising me. Once, during a
protest on Budget Night, I saw my sister on TV being marched off with an arm
twisted up her back. She arrived home hours late, tearful and shaken, and
said she'd been put in a van and photographed—but had 'talked her way out of it . . .'
On Bastille Day we gathered outside the Saint George, where the French Embassy was holding a banquet. It was a silent protest. We stood peacefully, our candles reflected in the wet asphalt. But the police decided to keep us moving, so that we wouldn't be blocking the traffic. We were directed to go single-file (an order that, whenever it was given by the police, usually elicited memories of Molesworth Street in '81). I wasn't one for single-file. I was talking to a friend, trailing her at her ear. A policeman caught me by the arms to slow me and we spun around several times till I chimed at him sweetly, 'Thank you for this dance.' And he gave a winded laugh, and lost his grip.
Unlike Sara, I had no unshared moments of fear. The worst thing that happened to me—other than swollen feet and fingers after the Wellington test day march in '81—was eczema from the face paint, a patch of red blisters in the shape of a skull.
Some acquaintances who didn't go on the marches would say, 'Aren't you
afraid of being hurt?' Or even, 'You can't change anything that way.' (Male homosexuality was illegal;
there was no rape in marriage; nuclear-powered and -armed ships sailed into
our harbours; and Nelson Mandela was in prison.) These acquaintances claimed
to 'express their political opinions differently'. Probably they wrote
submissions to commissions, or letters to MPs, probably they voted every
three years—though I know some didn't do that
either, were so suspicious of political opinions they were also
suspicious of the democratic process. 'But how can you be so sure of
yourselves?' they'd say, disapproving. Well—we were doing ourselves
that favour—giving ourselves a certain look.
'What are you complaining about?' they wanted to know. 'Don't we live in a
comfortable society?' Relatively, yes, but our rights weren't conferred by
nature, didn't drop like the gentle dew. Someone, at some time, fought for
our rights. Perhaps these people thought that being counted-in was the
same as being co-opted? They did express fears for their identity. We
were the conformists, they said. We were 'sheep'
or 'ideologues'. (At this point in the argument my friend jumped up on our
couch and yelled, 'I'm going to sweep myself out with an iron
broom!')
On the other hand, J, from Socialist Unity, thought we hadn't sacrificed enough for our political beliefs. We were at
University,
while there were people working 'forty hours a week in the biscuit
factory'—which didn't quite have the ring of 't'mill' or 'at the
coalface'. I quarrelled with another friend eye-to-eye across
the catalogue in the library. She said that my wanting to be a writer was
'bourgeois dilettantism'. (She is now a homebirth midwife.) Some of us
thought we were revolutionaries; and some of us
joked about our 'black balaclava knitting circle'. I
decided not to buy suede walking boots because of all the occasions on
which protests required me to stand in the rain.
In July of '84 the ranks—our ranks—parted to let through the real revolutionaries, with their rarefied language,
their market forces, their jet-stream high-and-dry clouds of capital, their
promises of wealth.
Elizabeth Knox (b. 1959), fiction writer, is a Victoria
University graduate in English and Creative Writing. She came to early
prominence with After Z-Hour ( 1987) and has
since published Treasure ( 1992), Glamour and
the Sea ( 1996), a trilogy of Wellington novellas, and
the
internationally successful The Vintner's Luck ( 1998). She is the 1999 Katherine Mansfield Fellow at
Menton.
Scene 2: Wellington Wharf—
PORTER
Do you require a horse and cart Ma'am?
ADELAIDE
I do indeed. And could you recommend a decent hotel? Something capacious. Last time I stayed here, I ended up in either an opium den or a brothel! In any case it was inconsolably small!
PORTER
There's the Thistle Inn, Ma'am. Just opposite the public stocks, but that's not especially commodious. I would personally recommend The Empire Hotel, up on Willis Street, Dicky Dwyer's place. Reading room, billiard room, nicer class of clientele.
ADELAIDE
Dicky's sounds divine! And could you also direct me to the portrait gallery of a Mr Richard Swan? We have some business together.
PORTER
Ah! Now that's easy Ma'am. Mr Swan has premises over on Clay Point. Just a stone's throw away from the hotel.
ADELAIDE
Magnificent!
PORTER
Have you any more baggage Ma'am?
ADELAIDE
I have an entire wardrobe, Sir. Not to mention a couple of infuriatingly late performers, who've managed to get themselves lost on a gangplank. Thank God I can see one of them now. The other one's probably fallen in the drink! Do come and see our performance. Royal Olympic Theatre, behind the Ship Hotel. One week only.
PORTER
I don't approve of theatricals Ma'am. Devillism enacted onstage. This settlement has had a constant stream of vagabond vaudevillians passing through it of late, creating all manner of licentious behaviour! What with liquor being passed around the pit and foul-mouthed debauchery, it's become offensive to ladies and gentlemen of the first quality.
ADELAIDE
My good man, let
me inform you that my company could not be described as vaudevillian. We
have enacted our theatricals before the Queen herself! Not to mention the
Princess Royal. We perform
PORTER
Forgive me, Madam. Heaven implore us. I had not recognised you. I most humbly beg your pardon, Mrs Foley.
ADELAIDE
Forgiven.
PORTER
My dear Mrs Foley, I have seen you perform on two marvellous occasions, and each time you added considerable class to our young colony.
ADELAIDE
How kind. Now run along and help that leading man of mine off the gangplank. He looks as if he's about to fall over his wig box!
PORTER
Pleasure, Mrs Foley. Truly a pleasure.
ADELAIDE
I'm so glad.
ADELAIDE
Good God, Cameron, you look as if you're about to expire!
CAMERON
Concerts in the colonies,
ADELAIDE
Come, come, where's your sense of adventure?
CAMERON
Back in England with a weekly repertory and a decent bit of
CAMERON
Don't know what's happened to Kathryn. Last time I saw her, she was surrounded by six randy sailors.
ADELAIDE
That's a fine predicament to leave your fiancée in! You might at least have acted the gentleman and fought them off.
CAMERON
Kathryn's more than capable of shoving them overboard.
ADELAIDE
And don't think I didn't see you eyeing up a young colonial thing yourself.
CAMERON
Adelaide, Adelaide, you don't miss a trick do you? I was admiring her hair.
ADELAIDE
You were admiring her bosom.
CAMERON
And I'm admiring yours now.
ADELAIDE
You never change do you?
CAMERON
Would you want me to?
ADELAIDE
Probably not.
CAMERON
Where'd I put that damn flask?
ADELAIDE
That's your trouble, Cameron. Too much spirit and not enough pluck!
CAMERON
You do go on, Adelaide.
ADELAIDE
Precious little good it does.
CAMERON
Ah, here she is.
ADELAIDE
Kathryn, where have you been? We're forever waiting, it's maddening.
KATHRYN
Oh, what light! What exquisite light! We have arrived in heaven surely!
CAMERON
Kathryn, your brain is sodden from that cheerless little boat ride. What nautical nonsense! Mind you, after that turbulent tossing, any bit of land would be a blessing. Talk about tempests!
KATHRYN
'When the shore is won at last, who can remember the billows past!'
CAMERON
No use quoting Swinburne at me. It was a horrid little hulk and I hope I never have to see it again.
KATHRYN
Oh, Cammy, how can you be so cruelly ungrateful to that virtuous vessel? That gallant little barque that bore us here. She rose against the salt like a lioness protecting her young. You really are a philistine.
CAMERON
Yes, but a very charming one.
ADELAIDE
Perhaps we could attempt to meet Mr Swan before midnight.
CAMERON
Yes, and I do hope he's not another vapid, talent-free, vanity queen who can't act his way out of a paper bag.
ADELAIDE
Cameron darling, every support actor I've ever had can act. Eventually.
CAMERON
I rest my case!
ADELAIDE
Shall we go?
CAMERON
Yes, let us depart this shapeless shore.
KATHRYN
Farewell then, thou dark and deep blue ocean. Ta-ta my tireless little tugboat. Parting is such sorrow, sorrow. God I'm absolutely starving. What are we waiting for?
KATHRYN
Oh look, how exciting! 'Escaped Convict. Whipped Sea Captain. Resighted at Manukau!' How very dramatic!
PORTER
Yes, they've been looking for that felon for a long time, Miss. Very depraved piece of work. Murderer, thief, prostitute. You name it! They say she's been hiding out among the Maoris, and apparently she actually stripped the Captain and whipped his bare . . . his bare . . . He can't quite say the word.
KATHRYN
Bare what?
PORTER
Bottom.
KATHRYN
Oh really?
PORTER
Yes, she stripped him of his clothes and then she used them to outfit herself.
KATHRYN
How very Shakespearian!
PORTER
Oh, Miss! Are there any seats left for tonight's performance?
Lorae Parry (b. 1955) is a playwright, actor and director. Her plays include the sell-out Frontwomen ( 1993), Cracks ( 1994) and Eugenia ( 1996) which has been performed in New Zealand and internationally. She was the founder of the Women's Play Press, and has performed with the women's comedy company 'Hen's Teeth'. She is celebrated for her comic characterisations on both television and stage, including her representations of Labour Leader Helen Clark.