Far North authors share their inspiration

Adrienne Puckey (left) and Liz van der Laarse (right), with host Anne Walker, at their book signing in Kaitaia.

Two very successful Far North authors shared the sources of inspiration at a book signing at Marston Moor in Kaitaia recently.

Historian Adrienne Puckey PhD, who lives in Auckland, added to her list of titles earlier this year with By Bible, Hammer & Compass, the story of missionary brothers William Gilbert Puckey (who established the Anglican mission in Kaitaia with Rev Joseph Matthews in 1834) and James Puckey, while former school teacher Liz van der Laarse published her third teen novel, Cuz.

Dr Puckey, a great-great-granddaughter of William Gilbert, was born in Kaitaia and spent the first 17 years of her life there, attending Kaitaia Primary School and Kaitaia College, before beginning training as a pharmacist.

She subsequently married, "got distracted," and began raising three children before qualifying as an accountant, working in Auckland, the Bay of Plenty, the United Kingdom and Australia.

It was time spent in Cornwall, from where the Puckey brothers, with their parents, set sail for the Pacific (and which she said was home to cabbage trees and flax bushes "stolen from New Zealand") that piqued her interest in her forebears.

So she began studying history.

"Writing was a whole new experience for an academic," she said.

"I hadn't written an essay for years. I was more used to producing a single page of bullet points; I think they gave me C for compassion."

She had found her true vocation, however, quickly learning the importance of not making people what they were not.

"When you are writing history you cannot bend the facts," she said.

Dr Puckey is now a research fellow at the Mira Szaszy Research Centre for Maori and Pacific Economic Development at Auckland University's Business School.

Almost local

Mrs van der Laarse, a lifelong teacher mainly of intermediate-age children, took a very different path to becoming a published author (although she too had often wondered about her forebears, who were from Devon).

A Far North resident for "going on for 45 years," and therefore almost a local, she had taught at Kaeo, Kaitaia and Broadwood, and had been driven to put pen to paper by her concern at the dearth of reading material available for her students.

"So I decided to write for them," she said.

Trouble Patch, "pretty much set in Broadwood," with a cannabis plot playing a central role, was published in 2000, followed by Not Even, "a Taipa story," which made the Storylines Notable Book List, in 2002, and now Cuz, set in Fiordland, which went to reprint six months after its release.

She described Cuz as a tale of trust and survival, set in the wild and rugged Fiordland National Park, but it is no ordinary teen novel.

The story of two young people from very different worlds, it includes references to edible native plants, maps, and a glossary of its re reo Maori content.

Mrs van der Laarse's success is underpinned by the fact that teenagers readily identify with her characters, their credible rural settings, action and events.

She also obeys the first rule for authors, in that she writes about what she is familiar with (excepting the cultivation of cannabis). She and her husband Max, now living in retirement at Cable Bay, have shared a life-long passion for the outdoors, themes that are prevalent in all three novels.

* Trouble Patch and Not Even are no longer in print but are available as e-books.