KEY POINTS:
When I was a small girl my father, Len du Chateau, wrote for the Bulletin. It was just after the war and, said Dad, a big deal. Whenever he wanted to impress people he would tell them: "I've had poems published in the Sydney Bulletin." His father Leo,
an actor by profession, who also fancied himself as a writer, tried to get his poem into the famed organ but was rejected.
This was a milestone for Dad. First beating his father. Second, getting into the Bulletin, which he considered the literary pinnacle of the day.
He used to recite the first poem it published every time we juddered down the Rimutaka ranges from wet and windy Wellington. It was called The Wairarapa Plains, and in the style of the times, published as one of the pieces from "Maoriland" and a well-versed, rollicking read:
When Spring steps down through the Wairarapa Plain,
Gold gleams the gorse in every rutted lane;
Willows burst green and the red hares,
And the spaniels fossick, and the farmer takes a gun.
This was rather late in the Bulletin's history and well after the magazine's literary peak, says Terry Sturm, former professor of English at Auckland University and author of the Oxford History of New Zealand Literature.
The Bulletin started in 1880 and closed nearly 130 years later.
It was a popular magazine with a strong political and literary voice, welcomed by writers in New Zealand and Australia alike.
"From 1880 to 1930 especially," says Sturm, "the Sydney Bulletin was a significant voice for New Zealand writers."
Dunedin-born cartoonist and artist David Low was one of many who used the Bulletin as a stepping stone to greater things.
"After nine attempts [I] succeeded in getting a very small drawing published in the Sydney Bulletin - an achievement of which I felt very proud," he wrote in 1937, "for the Bulletin was a high-class newspaper and one that had done a lot for 'black and white' art in Australia."
At the time Low was 19 and the Bulletin, then known as "the bushman's Bible", was the most widely-read and influential paper in Australia.
It was extremely nationalistic, full of the "yellow peril". The masthead read: "Australia for the white man".
Soon Low was offered a job by the great newspaper and within six months had "a roving commission to go anywhere in Australia to get caricatures of practically every celebrity, local and otherwise, in the country".
In 1919 Low moved to London and an even more brilliant career, while the Bulletin soldiered on, providing a platform for New Zealand writers and the odd cartoonist for decades to come.
As Sturm says, the magazine was a launch pad for writers needing to publish and with nowhere to go in New Zealand.
Which is why the Bulletin has an important place in New Zealand literary history - and why Sturm persuaded his mature student Theresia Liemlienio Marshall to research the place of the Bulletin in New Zealand literature.
Marshall, a Colombo Plan student who came to New Zealand from Indonesia was "very interested in writing and Pacific and New Zealand connections generally".
Sturm had recently persuaded the Auckland University library to obtain microfilm of the Bulletin archives, "and here was all this material that no one had written about before just waiting for a researcher to work on".
Marshall's PhD thesis investigated New Zealand literary contributions to the Bulletin between 1880 and 1960. It was a labour of love stretching over eight years, and it was published in 1995, several years before her death.
"What couldn't be anticipated was the sheer quantity of New Zealand literature and writing about New Zealand," she wrote. "There were almost 6000 items - a huge archive unmatched by any other literary magazine during the period."
And now, there in the university library, with a appendix almost as big, is her work. Every one of the 4200 poems, 700 short stories and 100,000 literary articles and reviews, including my father's three poems, are listed, with rigorous - and often fierce - literary criticism.
Great swathes of ballads are printed in full - as they were in the Bulletin's famous Red Page (which was actually around four pale pink pages).
As Marshall wrote, the Bulletin gave New Zealand writers the chance to speak directly to a large local readership at home and in Australia. There was plenty of controversy, and insults were fired across the Tasman Sea.
"There was also a degree of hostility, most of it from those who had attempted, unsuccessfully, to establish New Zealand competitors to the Bulletin. But all the evidence suggests that, for younger New Zealand writers, (1880s and after) the Bulletin exercised a mesmeric attraction."
In-fighting focused on "who was a real New Zealand writer?" Was Katherine Mansfield, who moved to Britain? Will Lawson, who swung between Auckland and Sydney? Eve Langley, who moved to New Zealand in the 1930s and wrote one of the finest novels of the time, The Pea Pickers?
Was the Bulletin itself a worthy mouthpiece for New Zealand literature?
Listen to Allen Curnow in his introduction to The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, 1960: "The Sydney Bulletin assumed the inexpensive role of patron of New Zealand poesy," he snarled. "It printed verse, labelling its country-of-origin with the pet name 'Maoriland'!"
Three New Zealanders who became editors of the Red Page, especially championed New Zealand writing.
They get chapters of their own in Marshall's thesis. There was Arthur H. Adams, (twice editor in early 1900s), David McKee Wright, (1912-35) and Douglas Stewart, 1940-1960.
Sturm describes how McKee Wright, "this extraordinary figure", used his position as editor to publish 1600 "quite lively" satires alongside sentimental Irish ballads of his own, many under pseudonyms including Pat O'Maori, Curse O'Moses, Mary McCommonwealth and George Street (site of the Bulletin office).
"It is probably the most unabashed example of editorial self-promotion in Australasian literary history."
The last new Zealand literary editor, 27-year-old Douglas Stewart, breathed new life into the Red Page.
As Sturm writes, "The Bulletin carried a significant body of critical writing about New Zealand literature in the 1940s and 50s. [Stewart's] reviews and articles were often highly critical (even of his favourite authors) but his judgments and insights were widely respected in New Zealand and remarkably prescient of later evaluation."
Stewart's assessment of the Bulletin's women writers especially - Eileen Duggan, Robin Hyde, Eve Langley and Gloria Rawlinson - were thoughtful and accurate and, said some critics writing at the time, their work was more original and robust than their "feeble" male counterparts.
By that time, most of the writers' names are recognisable - fiction by Frank Sargeson, Roderick Finlayson and Langley; critical writing by Monty Holcroft, E.H. McCormick, A.R.D. Fairburn, Allen Curnow and others. Poet and novelist, Karl Stead, who was lecturing in Australia in the 1950s, and offered the Bulletin a poem, says: "I used to read the Bulletin chiefly for literary pages. It still had the old banner, 'Australia for the white man"'.
Writer and historian Gordon McLauchlan points out that the Bulletin was the place to be: "If you could make the Bulletin you were Okay."
Which, I guess was why Dad was so keen to get there.
Later, like more esteemed New Zealand writers and poets, Dad submitted some rather better poems to the Listener, which had been founded in 1939 (first editor Oliver Duff, grandfather of Alan).
By then it was the 1960s, the Bulletin had been taken over by Kerry Packer and company, Stewart had been unceremoniously sacked - and the Red Page with him - and the Listener had well and truly taken the literary mantle back to New Zealand.
As Sturm says, by then the Bulletin had served its purpose.
But thanks to him and Theresia Marshall, its place in local literary history is recorded forever.
