Sue McCauley sits in her home office, in the spot where she used to sleep as a child growing up on her family farm, east of Dannevirke.
The award-winning author is doing her first Zoom interview to talk about her new novel, Landed, which has taken two decades, on and off, to get from page to print. At 81, she finds technology a big annoyance – her book’s protagonist, Briar, moans about it a lot – and McCauley wishes she had listened enough to her 50-something daughter to work out how to change the camera angle so I can see more of the room.
For more than six decades, McCauley worked as a journalist, scriptwriter and award-winning novelist. One of her first paid jobs was as a Listener journalist in the early 1960s, when women were a rarity in newsrooms. She segued into fiction writing to get her opinions on the page without censorship and also because society made it difficult to be a working mother at the time.
Describing herself today as “a slack writer on a pension”, she blinks into the Zoom screen and nods that Landed will be her last book. She is not long back from senior aerobics. She’s healthy for her age, although she has poor hearing and eyesight.
It is just as well she is active, as she is increasingly caring for her husband, Pat Hammond, 66, who has motor neurone disease. It was diagnosed about three years ago, and he moves around the house with a stick or leaning on McCauley, who says: “It’s a horrible condition … I need to be healthy because I’m his caregiver now.”
Her novel took a long time because she has been pouring her energy into their life on her Waitahora Valley family farm, which she and her older sister, Elisabeth, inherited in 2004. McCauley speaks openly about the trauma of her childhood, after their stepmother moved in when she was eight. It was so vivid that when the author returned to the valley she had left at 17, she almost couldn’t bear to step inside, and she wanted to move a new house onto the land.
But Elisabeth – who regularly comes to stay in a cottage on the farm – could remember their late mother living in the house, so McCauley planted a garden and they have three alpacas, a miniature horse, chooks and sheep, “which all follow me around”.
During our conversation, the landline rings. They’re 17km from Dannevirke, so cellphone signals don’t reach them. “It’s for you!” Hammond calls out. “Tell them to call me back,” McCauley pipes back.
Their controversial relationship formed the basis of what McCauley is best known for: her semi-autographical bestseller published in 1982, Other Halves. It tells the story of a Pākehā woman, Liz, in her thirties, who enters a relationship with a young Māori street kid, Tug. The novel explored ethnic, gender, age and class differences and won the Wattie Book of the Year Award and the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction.
McCauley met Hammond (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Raukawa) when he was a homeless teenager. She was living in Christchurch with her former husband and two children, and among her freelancing jobs, wrote for a Catholic magazine and connected with a Christchurch drop-in youth centre. Hammond was one of the youths who came to stay with McCauley and her family, because he was too young to be taken into the City Mission, where he had slept on the veranda. “Which in a Christchurch winter is fairly unpleasant,” she says.
They had room in their home. Her first husband became chairman of the youth centre. The rest is history. “[Pat and I] were both in a state of trauma, I suppose, in retrospect. We were probably both needy.”
In 1970s Christchurch, their relationship shocked people: they were spat at, abused and pointed at. “Taxis would not take us. It was very startling to me, because I thought there was no racism in New Zealand.”
The book came out first, and the author got a deluge of letters, mainly from women: some unhappily married and some sharing their affairs. The film followed in 1984, which the couple didn’t like. Says McCauley: “They were trying to make the young man into not the person I had written about, into someone much more scary. Whereas these kids were lost souls rather than dangerous criminals. They also made [her] look frightfully wealthy. She wore a coat that would have cost a fortune. They were going for Hollywood, and that’s not me.”
Too populist
Aged 17, McCauley (née McGibbon) left Nelson College for Girls, where she had been a boarder and was known for her “attitude problem”. She began her journalism career as a copywriter for the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation. A year later, in 1960, she was hired by Listener editor Monte Holcroft, after he read one of her short stories. She loved her 18 months on the magazine, although her presence was unusual as she was one of only two female editorial staff. “I was overawed that I was there at the Listener, and I was very aware of my own ignorance, but also they were so conservative, all these old blokes.”
One day, McCauley attended the all-male editorial weekly meeting to persuade her colleagues – including writer Elizabeth Knox’s father, Ray – that she should interview and write about Howard Morrison and his quartet. It was a battle, as the editors considered the story idea too populist. However, McCauley persuaded them and recalls: “Howard was quite chuffed to be in the Listener. Weeks later, I was walking up the streets in Wellington and Howard looked up from signing autographs and said, ‘Thank you, Sue.’”
Television was just being introduced to the country in 1960, so much of her job involved rewriting promotional material for overseas shows such as I Love Lucy. A list went around the office inviting those who would like to work in TV to add their names. McCauley chose not to put her name forward, startling her older colleagues. “They thought it was the ‘door to the future’, but having sampled and written about wildly popular shows like Lucille Ball’s, I was happy to give it a miss. I do think time has proved my misgivings were justified.”
She adds: “I think Monte found me appalling. I was ignorant and opinionated. I also couldn’t spell, but he did think I could write.”
A decade later, when she was a mother trying to freelance on the side, the Listener gave her a column, Hers, which covered women’s issues. McCauley remembers it was the only part of the magazine aimed at a primarily female readership.
In between, she had left the Listener job to move to Australia with her future husband, where she waitressed and married, and they returned together to work at the Taranaki Herald. McCauley then had to quit because she was visibly pregnant. Her first son was stillborn – a tragic part of her life that she deals with in fictional form in Landed. “They took my baby away and they wouldn’t show me him, which I thought was appalling.”
Being a working mother was tough in the 1960s. At the Press in Christchurch she became pregnant again and once again had to quit a job when she gave birth to her son and then a daughter four years later. McCauley turned to freelance work, and picked up her pen and wrote fiction. “You know being visibly pregnant is so horrific and can’t be inflicted on the public. So I thought, ‘I’m not going to go through that again.’”
Through fiction, she could finally “tell the truth”, without censorship from management, government or society. She had always wanted to write short stories and novels – in fact, she wrote her first novel when she was 10, about a cowboy, Maude.
Over the years, she has penned short stories, novels, and many scripts for film, television and radio, along with working as a teacher of scriptwriting and fiction and a judge of story competitions.
“The thing I am most proud of is that in the years from mid-1964, when I was pregnant with my son, to 2006, when I became a pensioner, I managed to make a modest but survivable income from writing of various kinds, even though I was female and had no tertiary education and no family connections to literary or intellectual pursuits.”
Too Many Deaths
McCauley processes her trauma through her writing – her “nastiest character” in Landed, the sister-in-law, is based on her stepmother. “When I came to the valley, all those memories came with me. My daughter said, ‘Oh, you need to go and see someone. Go and see a therapist.’ And I said: ‘No, I’ll write about it.’
“My stepmum has appeared in my short stories over the years. Now she’s dead and my dad is dead and I can say what I like. Chucking things into novels is a way of dealing with past trauma.”
Once considered “opinionated” in the Listener newsroom, McCauley now litters her opinions throughout the novel: set in the 1980s, it is anti-Rogernomics, which “I always thought was totally irresponsible and appalling”, while gambling is also a strong theme in the book – her ex-husband was a gambler.
She celebrates rural life, and Briar has been a solo mother as she was. “Oddly enough, I had written articles when women had been left on their own with no DPB and no support. I had written these articles and felt very angry on their behalf. When it happened to me, the state wasn’t interested in making [my ex] pay, because he was a journalist, he was a kind of middle-class bloke.”
People die in her book, and that was one part of the novel that the publisher she initially approached didn’t like. “They said, ‘Good grief, we don’t like this at all.’
“There were too many deaths. It would have been fine if my characters had been strangled or killed or something. But these are just old people dying, and it’s not fun.”
She rewrote it, keeping the death scenes, and her new manuscript was shortlisted for the 2021 Michael Gifkins Prize for an unpublished novel.
Death is a fact of life, says McCauley, who has been attending a lot of funerals as colleagues and friends pass on. She jokes: “My children seem to want to protect me from the idea, as though I’m ignorant of it.”
It was also important that Briar was middle-aged and reflecting on her relationships with her children rather than the other way around. “I thought, I don’t think I’ve ever read a book … where a parent talks at great length about their children and is sort of involved, but also concerned about their relationship.”
Talking about Briar, McCauley hopes readers like her because “there’s a fair bit of me in there”. “She hates technology,” she laughs. “She was at my stage of life when I started it, and now it’s about a woman who is considerably younger than me.”
McCauley has a close relationship with her son and daughter, who are in their fifties, and she has three grandchildren, so nothing about that part of the book is autobiographical.
She shifts nearer to the screen. Our chat is going well and she invites me to her farm if I’m passing through to meet her, Hammond and their animals. She does hope Landed will spark some lightbulb moments for readers “if only in terms of growing older and the speed of social change – and I would very much like to think that it might cause readers to reflect on the morality and aftermath of market reforms”.
Next month, she will appear at the Auckland Writers Festival to talk about Landed. On stage, talking about her book, will this spark another novel? She would rather write non-fiction stories about herself, reflecting on wider issues. “Kind of a memoir, but about peripheral things … I think I’d get in trouble today if I wrote columns. There was always censorship back then, but it’s just changed. Everyone is a lot more sensitive today.”
McCauley is known for being sympathetic towards the underdog. What bothers her today? She replies that she is worried about “the state of the world. I would say technology. I would say social media. That we’ve become a world in which presentation is all, substance is a bit immaterial. It’s how things present. It’s awfully superficial.
“I’ve got a granddaughter who is an influencer. That’s her job,” she laughs.
“We don’t discuss it. She’s too nice for me to have a go at her! I know so little about it. I just constantly see my instincts being confirmed.”
Landed by Sue McCauley is out on April 10.
