New Zealand voice hard to find for authors

Margaret Mahy at home with her cat, Socks. Picture / Simon Baker

"You’d think you’d automatically be able to write about the place you’ve lived in all your life, but the stories I’d had read to me as a child somehow disinherited me.”

Margaret Mahy has such a self-assured presence that it’s hard to imagine her as a victim of the cultural cringe. Her black-on-black outfit, topped off by a black hat, ought to make her look like a witch from one of her innumerable books, but her grin and the amused look in her eye are purest Wise Old Grandmother material.

“When I was a child, of course, nearly all the books that were read to me were English”. She reels off names: Beatrix Potter, Winnie the Pooh, a long list of others. “About the fifth or sixth form I had an English teacher who suggested that it was a very good thing for anyone who wanted to be a writer to write stories with a New Zealand connection.”

This came as a complete surprise to her. The default assumption then, and for a long time afterwards, was that New Zealand experiences were less interesting and valuable than British or European ones. Mahy had soaked this in unquestioningly, as children generally do.

“But I set out to do what my teacher suggested, because I felt he was right, and I found I couldn’t easily write a New Zealand story. I didn’t imaginatively believe my own New Zealand stories in the ways I believed in the fantasies and such things that I’d been writing.”

If you read Mahy’s early classics, such as The Lion in the Meadow, or the short stories she used to write for the School Journal, you won’t find any hints of New Zealand. The setting is the familiar British Anywhere of a thousand folk and fairy tales, right down to the trees and bushes. That first began to change with the book, appropriately called, The Changeover.

“It’s a curious thing, because everyone thinks of country landscapes and things like that as being the essential New Zealand identity, but I started edging back into New Zealand through the city. The city in The Changeover — that’s a version of Christchurch really.”

Coincidentally or not, that book came out in the watershed year of 1984, the same year David Lange’s Labour Government launched its tough-love assault on the old idea of New Zealand as an economic and cultural outpost of Britain.

“Driving through Christchurch at that time, I found myself picking up on little details and feeling a kind of imaginative reconnection.”

Two years later she published The Tricksters, set in a version of Lyttelton Harbour. “From that point I moved more and more into being able to write New Zealand stories, and now I feel that I’ve been restored to the place that I’ve lived in all my life.”