Dame Fiona Kidman is in the house. An intimate portrait of this ‘dangerous woman’ who flouted convention sneaks you in through the back door.
Forty-nine steps zig-zag up to the clifftop house overlooking Wellington Harbour where Dame Fiona Kidman has lived for more than 50 years.
It’s here in the sun porch that she wrote her first novel, A Breed of Women, provoking letters dripping with outrage, handwritten in red ink, that denounced her as a “dangerous woman” and a corrupting influence on their children.
It’s here that Kidman, at 85, still holds steady at the centre of an extended family that sprawls across four generations.
And it’s here that she locked down alone during Covid, slowly recovering from the trauma of losing her husband, Ian, who slipped on those steep steps one dark night after venturing out in the cold to welcome her home from a book reading in Auckland. They’d been married for 58 years.
Kidman wasn’t sure whether she’d be able to go on living in the house, surrounded by a lifetime of memories. In a way, that period of enforced isolation during the pandemic brought her back to herself.
“It was the first time in my life I’d been totally alone, apart from my daughter delivering groceries to me once a week and waving from a distance,” she says, “although I had such a solitary childhood in so many ways.
“I think I returned to a younger self, really; the person who’d had to survive. I had to rediscover myself and rediscover my strengths, about living alone and being alone. That was when I came to terms with being a widow.”
In 2023, Auckland film-maker Joshua Prendeville made his own pilgrimage up those steps to the house in Hataitai. Like all good visitors, he came bearing a gift: a handmade ceramic bowl engraved with the title of Kidman’s award-winning novel This Mortal Boy.
A recreation of the life and death of a young Irish migrant known as the “jukebox killer”, the book is what had brought Prendeville to her door in the first place.
Albert “Paddy” Black was 20 – not so much younger than Prendeville – when he was convicted of murder in 1955 after a fight in an Auckland milk bar and hanged at Mt Eden Prison, a world away from his family in Belfast.
Moved by Kidman’s portrait of Albert and intrigued by the social canvas of the story, Prendeville saw its potential for a screen adaptation. He flew to Wellington to meet her, and what he’d imagined would be a relatively brief encounter lasted the entire day.
“We somehow clicked,” says Kidman. “I enjoyed Joshua’s company and we had so many views in common that he was a person I trusted, which I hadn’t expected to do in such a way.”
That evening, they met up again for dinner in town before Prendeville caught a cab to the airport.
“Fiona waited for the taxi with me,” he recalls. “Then, without her knowing, I was stuck in traffic gliding along next to her as she walked down the street.
“I lowered myself into my seat and just watched her, and I thought how amazing it was to uncover what is behind the door of someone’s life and how illuminating that can be.”
To Prendeville, Kidman the person and Kidman the writer seemed the same, yet also collided in some way. “There were pockets in each that I couldn’t quite place in the other,” he says.
“On the one hand, there was someone so beautifully hospitable and kind, who could have been my grandmother in terms of how she treated me and the conversations we were having.
“At the same time, her work is this piercing, often tenderly vicious interview about women and their place in the world. Making a film seemed to be a way to get those two things into the same room.”
When Prendeville told Kidman he wanted to put the book adaptation on hold and make a documentary about her instead, she turned him down flat.
He won her over, of course – despite the age difference, their friendship has deepened to the point that they’re in contact almost every day.
Prendeville, who has a 2-year-old and a 6-month-old baby, says the only person he talks to more than Kidman is his partner Victoire. His late grandmother was a huge fan of Kidman’s work and his parents have a signed copy of her 2005 novel The Captive Wife (based on the kidnapping of a settler by a Māori chief in 1835).
“What I appreciate about Fiona is the perseverance and dedication she has to what she believes is right, and her way of weathering the storm of life to keep doing the work she thinks is worthwhile,“ he says.
“It’s very easy, particularly in Wellington, to have your moral compass blowing around and shifting all over the place. Fiona has persistently followed the same path, using the mechanics of fiction to talk about the things that are very close to her.”
Distilled from 13 hours of interview footage, The House Within is an intensely intimate and evocative portrait that unfolds in episodic fragments, framed by Kidman reading passages from her work. It’s also a love letter to Wellington, which features prominently as a cinematic backdrop.
Before he began filming, Prendeville sought advice from a psychologist on how he could structure the project as almost a series of therapy sessions, navigating deeply into Kidman’s life without replicating material she’d already covered in her work.
“I didn’t want to make a soapy piece, but a film where it’s not quite a punch in the guts but more like a cut you cradle and you bleed a little bit afterwards,” he says. “Those little incisions and traumas that seep for a while when the audience gets back home.”
A leading figure in the 70s feminist movement, Kidman and her frank writing about women’s messy inner lives and desires – including the kind of explicit sexual language that Brooke Van Velden c-bombed in Parliament – shocked conservative sensibilities of the time.
Not that anyone should have been surprised. In her early 20s, she’d entered a play-writing competition with a piece set in a rugby club that the judge declared must have been written by “the dirtiest-minded young woman in New Zealand”.
“I thought to myself, well, obviously I know some things about the world that he doesn’t,” she says. “So I’ll just keep going.”
Published in 1979, her novel A Breed of Women sold 9000 copies in hardback within the first week, becoming a touchstone for women while triggering a “misogynistic blowback” that enveloped her for a long time.
More than four decades and some 35 books later, Kidman is still writing. Her latest collection of poetry, The Midnight Plane, has just been published, featuring a still from Prendeville’s documentary on the cover.
The title of The House Within is taken from a collection of linked short stories she published in 1997 about a woman called Bethany Dixon who spends her whole life in the provinces, and her search for identity beyond being a wife and mother.
Kidman thinks of Bethany as being the woman she might have become, had she not escaped from the domesticity of suburbia. “A sort of alternative life,” she says.
An only child, Kidman spent her early years in Kerikeri, where her parents (an Irish immigrant father and a Scottish mother) worked for a wealthy landowner.
“I was a lonely child who grew up in the country, feeling like an outsider myself,” she says. “My mother was a cook and my father was the gardener. I was known as cook’s little girl. It wasn’t until I was much older that I got past that feeling.”
Later, the family moved to Waipu, the setting for her 1999 historical novel The Book of Secrets, which stirred up a controversy that Prendeville’s documentary handles in some depth.
The local high school only went to the fifth form. Kidman left at 15, finding her feet a few years later working as a librarian. She was standing at the desk stamping books one day when a schoolteacher brought in his standard two class and caught her eye.
“Did you see that joker who just came in?” she told her colleague. “I’m going to put my stamp on him.” Within months, she and Ian Kidman (Ngāti Maniaopoto, Ngāti Raukawa) were married in Ōhinemutu, on the shores of Lake Rotorua.
Pregnant with their first child at 22, she was forced to give up her job as a librarian at the boys’ school where Ian taught because it was deemed unseemly. Sent home to knit for the baby, she thought, “Bother the booties” and wrote that dirty first play.
To help make ends meet, she began doing book reviews for the local paper. Writing short stories and poems at her kitchen table, she seeded a career that involved her working in radio, film and TV before establishing herself as a fulltime writer.
“I always had mentors and people who believed in me,” she says. “I don’t know why, but astonishingly, they did. I don’t think I could have survived some of the difficult times if I hadn’t had that kind of belief and support.”
In 2006, Kidman received the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship to Menton, France – a life-changing experience at the time. An advocate for the arts, she remains an active supporter of the Randell Cottage writers’ residency in Wellington, which she helped establish in 2001 and is now in a fight for survival after cuts in Government funding.
Since This Mortal Boy was published – winning the fiction prize at the 2019 Ockham Book Awards – she’s tracked down some of Albert Black’s surviving family members, including the daughter he never met, although her identity remains a closely guarded secret.
Prendeville’s adaptation of the novel is still on the cards, in collaboration with an Irish screenwriter, but possibly as a limited series rather than a feature film.
He has a new short film screening at this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival, Our Party, adapted from Katherine Mansfield’s short story The Garden Party and starring sisters Thomasin and Davida McKenzie. He’s also developing a project with Christchurch-based novelist Pip Adams.
Before its public release, Prendeville put on a private screening of The House Within for Kidman and her family.
The opening scene, filmed in the darkness before dawn, shows Kidman pulling back the curtains in the front room of her house to reveal the sky’s golden glow. It ends in the darkness of night, as she struggles through an emotional reading of a piece she wrote about Ian’s death.
“It was the last thing we shot on the last night, in the last hour,” Prendeville says. “We had to have a few pauses, a glass of wine and come back to it.
“That’s what I was saying about Fiona’s bravery of just allowing the film to be what it needs to be – the connection between what is lived and what is fictional and how a life like hers is dedicated so fully to both. Together, it makes the whole.”
During the Auckland Writers Festival in May, Kidman was “struck afresh” as she walked down Queen St and passed the site of a fatal stabbing that forms the backbone of her novel, This Mortal Boy.
In memory of Albert Black and his mother, Kathleen, the poem she wrote on her return home to Wellington is published for the first time here.
Lament for Albert Black
Outside the Lone Star restaurant
a woman wearing a close fitting black
hood walks through a drift of leaves
feathering the pavement after a night
of wild wind and raining like a bastard,
followed by a man with mad white hair
and dark glasses carrying a meat hook
and a look
of nonchalance as, one by one,
we come abreast of 366 Queen Street
that used to be Ye Olde Barn cafe c. 1955
where a boy died and another one sealed
his own fate with a knife
the mistake of a lifetime
in a heartbeat, I see a boy’s
soft Irish face that will dangle
above a rope and far across the world
a woman waiting at a window watching
for her lad and I carry on down
the road, take a left and stride the hill
gathering strength, sorrow on my ragged
breath, along Albert Street, as if to say the name
Albert is everywhere you look Kathleen, some boys
will never come home to their Mams.
• The House Within opens in cinemas nationwide on July 17.
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior lifestyle writer with a special interest in social issues and the arts.
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