Artists going south

By Tessa Duder

When I threw my hat in the ring for the 2007 Artists in Antarctica fellowship, I really thought it a long shot, with writers (Bernadette Hall and before her Laurence Fearnley)  filling places in recent years. And I was, possibly, at the upper age limit.  

However, a phone call in March 2007 informed me that the good folk at Antarctica New Zealand had chosen multi-media artist Ronnie van Hout and myself as the Arts Fellows from 40 applicants, along with oil painter John Walsh (author-illustrator of the picture book Nanny Mungo) as the Invited Fellow. Three months of the required secrecy followed – a tough call. We three would go in late October.

Tessa with fellow Artists John Walsh, painter, and Ronnie van Hout, multi-media artist.

My reading material for the next six months became almost exclusively the Heroic Age classics (Scott, Shackleton, Cherry-Garrard, Ponting et al), and the latest biographies challenging the infamous 1980s debunking publications stating that Scott was actually a bumbling idiot who led his men to destruction, and Shackleton the real hero who never lost a man.   

Come September, there was a medical to get through; the toughest, said my doctor, in 30 years of doctoring, even worse than an airline pilot’s. (Two stress tests! The most complete blood tests, Mantoux test for TB, polio and tetanus shots! A questionnaire as long as your arm! Haemarrhoids, ma’am?  It all took a whole week.) Two days before I was due to leave, to my extreme relief, the clearance came through and I got on the flight to Christchurch to spend a happy two nights staying with my good friend, author Joanna Orwin, and by day getting outfitted with proper clothing for The Ice.

The trio of Artists flew south with a bunch of Americans and much freight on a US Air Force Starlifter C-17, one of the world’s largest airplanes, its interior cavernous, windowless and naked. The trip took eight hours, and once over the ice we were invited to the ridiculously small cockpit to view the crazed and vast whiteness below.  Landing (for us, with not a window to see out, blind) took two attempts, though we heard later it may have been for the benefit of the trainee pilot on board; at any rate, a costly exercise.  Then, kitted out in our bulky ECWs, we stepped out into a – 20o C. haze, and driving across the vast expanse of sea ice towards Ross Island, through the bleak, treeless settlement that is the Americans’ McMurdo Station and 3 ks later, to the all-green Scott Base, fifty years old in 2007.

Tessa with the famous Scott Base sign.

Scott Base itself was fun – much like a typical Kiwi mountain hut, able to sleep 85, well run by interesting, multi-skilled people. It has quite a different culture from ‘Mactown’ with its Alaskan mining town appearance and shifting population of 1000, scientists and support staff.  I had the chance to go with Ronnie and John to the Mactown Halloween party, but declined – somehow they didn’t mix for me, Antarctica and the largely-phoney festival that is Halloween.  And I’d seen American international construction camps sufficiently up close and personal during my time as a young wife and mother in northern Pakistan in the late 1960s.

But we did later get to see something of the Crary Lab, the centrepiece of Mactown, indeed its raison d’etre, including the core of sea bed being drilled and retrieved (at the time, down to about 230 metres) about 15 ks away on the Ross Sea Ice. In a small room, the end result of the costly Andrill project was now laid out in long narrow trays, and we watched scientists from four countries jostle for the bits of the core they required for their research, all fascinating to a non-science person like me.  The drill itself is apparently maintained in place by four huge air bags under the sea ice; we gathered, a particularly risky operation, as drilling rigs go. (You can read more about it by googling Andrill.) Sadly, the weather conspired against us visiting the Andrill site itself.

For me, long-time fascinated by the Heroic Age stories of Scott and others, the undoubted highlights were the activities connected with the great nearly 20th century explorers who operated from the Ross Sea and Ross Island area. First, we had to get to the historic huts; physically it was quite fun pretending I was 35 again and getting unaided into the Haaglunds (amphibious, tracked sea ice vehicles) and Toyota SUVs in very bulky and restricting extreme weather gear, especially when over-sized tyres put the Toyota’s cab well over a metre off the ground, with the Haaglund’s tracks even higher.

But the effort was of course every bit worth it – we visited the Scott ‘Discovery’ Hut at Hut Point close to Mactown and his ‘Terra Nova’ Hut at Cape Evans, two hours Haaglund journey north across the sea ice, following the western coast of Ross Island. Also the Shackleton ‘Nimrod’ Hut at the even more northerly Cape Royds. All three, despite bleak weather or possibly because of it, were awe-inspiring, sad, almost overwhelming experiences, and I learned much from chatting with the two Antarctic Heritage Trust conservators, an Australian and a Brit, currently working at Scott Base and at the huts themselves to restore, catalogue, photograph and secure the precincts and their artifacts for future visitors and posterity.

Tessa on the top of Observation Hill, beside the cross erected in memory of Scott and his four companions, who reached the South Pole in March 1912 but died on the return journey.

I also climbed with one of the Scott Base Field Trainers up to the Scott memorial cross atop the steep cone of Observation Hill (between Mactown and Scott Base), from where Scott and his men looked south early in 1902 and realized the magnitude of their quest to walk to the Pole many hundreds of miles beyond. Again, for me an unforgettable experience: the legend from Tennyson painfully inscribed on the vertical ‘body’ of the cross by those men nearly a hundred years ago is magnificent in its poignancy: ‘To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.’  I have very vivid memories of hearing John Gielgud’s sonorous voice declaiming those lines on the 1950s recording of Vaughan Williams’ ‘Sinfonia Antartica,’ a symphony of music taken from the famous film Scott of the Antarctic starring John Mills.

Tessa on field training, settling for sleep in a snow cave at -22 degrees C.

The more personal challenges were unexpected. We knew we had to start with three days of field training, but didn’t expect to find ourselves deciding voluntarily to sleep in our snow cave (made by compacting snow onto a neat pile of gear, then extracting the gear and laboriously lowering the floor with small shovels from inside) rather than the tents we also had to put up with the ambient temperature at – 22o C. No wind, thankfully. John Walsh, painter but sometime deep sea trawlerman, is a real whizz with a shovel.

Tessa standing at the doorway of the New Zealand A-frame hut on the Ross Ice Shelf used for field training. Behind is the sweep of Ross Island with Mt Erebus.

Best of all was the opportunity to spend a night on my own in a little A-frame hut on the Ross Ice Shelf, with Erebus (50 ks away, and higher than Mt Cook) at my back, the steep coastline of Ross Island to the side and in front, all the flat white vastness of the Ross Ice Shelf and beyond, looking west and south, the backdrop of those fabled Antarctic ranges. Not a solitary soul closer than Scott Base 7 ks away. I read and meditated the sunlit night away, happy as a sandboy in a little hut with a cosy, shabby interior that was like every NZ bach or trampers’ hut you’ve ever been in. You may have noticed reference to the A-frame, Scott Base’s own ‘bach’, by the Rev Peter Beck speaking at Sir Edmund Hillary’s funeral about a memorable night spent there with Sir Ed. Certainly the inside of that little hut had a special feel and warmth to it, not just the heating supplied by the diesel-fuel heater.  And outside, just that view alone brought home the magnitude of the task and the courage of those who walked into that great white unknown a hundred years ago.

There were inevitably disappointments in our short stay.  Going relatively early in the summer gave us the amazing experience of the midnight sun, and the reality of being outdoors in temperatures of down to – 30o C. (and with the wind added, wind chill factors of – 55o C.) but not much of icebergs as such and the fabled wildlife of penguins, seals and orcas.  High summer (January and early February) is the time for that; we were confined to seeing about four seals who’d popped up through holes in the sea ice and penguins only once and distantly, at the Adelie rookery at Cape Royd. Increasingly strict environmental concerns meant that we couldn’t climb down to the rookery, but could view only from about 200 metres away.

The same environmental concerns meant that visits to the spectacular Dry Valleys, enjoyed by previous Artists, are now not allowed, nor any helicopter flying during the weather we had; one science team had to wait for a week for their helicopter trip to set up camp and begin their work on Antarctic sea urchins at Cape Bird. And visiting the internationally famous Andrill site remained a tantalizing possibility only to be finally scuppered by the weather.

Tourist activity is not yet too obvious in this area, nor should it ever be, in my book. But having read lots and seen a number of videos, I came to the conclusion that if people want to see classic Antarctic scenery and wildlife, they are better to join the 81,000 others (yes, that’s right) who travelled to the Peninsula area from South America last year.  There will be found icebergs, penguins, ice floes and spectacular mountain scenery in abundance. If it’s the history, then of course the three Historic Huts will remain a good reason for going to the Ross Sea area.

Our return was delayed six days by weather – the forecasters couldn’t guarantee the C-17 a window long enough to leave Christchurch, land safely, unload and reload within two hours for its usual 8-hour return trip – so I had a good rest, a chance to use the emails, read and start thinking about what book(s) might come of this experience.

I have huge respect for the histories recently published in New Zealand by Marcia Stenson (Illustrated History of Antarctica), by Margaret Andrew (Antarctica: the unfolding story), Margaret Mahy (The Riddle of the Frozen Phantom) and Janice Marriott (Thor’s Tale). Non-fiction and fiction, they have set a high benchmark. 

Slowly, by them and others in Britain (notably Geraldine McCaughrean), the US (Madeleine L’Engle) and Australia (Hazel Edwards and Coral Tulloch), a body of Antarctic literature for young people is being established.

It’s quite a challenge, to add something worthy, and it’s my task for 2008.

Ps Google Antarctica New Zealand and the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust for background information: two truly excellent websites

World Famous in New Zealand? – Margaret Mahy at 70

Tessa Duder - Keynote speech for Margaret Mahy Symposium, Christchurch, July 2, 2006.

When Louise Easter asked me in October last year to present the keynote address today, I had just emerged from an eighteen-month period of not-quite total immersion in the life, works and achievements of the writer I always tell questioning school children is my absolute favourite, the one I most admire: Margaret Mahy.

A month earlier, another children’s author, Lorraine Orman, and I, acting on behalf of the Storylines Children’s Literature Foundation, had posted off hefty packages to fourteen international address – in Switzerland, France, Italy, Austria, Spain, Finland, Russia, Slovenia, United States, South Africa, Iran, Venezuela, Ireland, and one lone city in the southern Pacific, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Each package contained a bubble-wrapped selection of nine Mahy books in English, along with as many European and Japanese translations as we could lay our hands on, plus a 40-page dossier containing a complete Mahy bibliography – some doing! – lists of foreign editions and awards, international reviews and accolades.

These packages represented Storylines absolute conviction that Margaret Mahy of New Zealand had as strong claim as any to be the 2006 recipient of the world’s most prestigious award for writers for young people, the Hans Christian Andersen Medal. It was a conviction we had gathered enough evidence to believe was shared by many in children’s literature elsewhere.

And a few months before, in May 2005, my literary history of Margaret had been published by HarperCollins, I have to say to gratifyingly good reviews and flattering personal feedback.

Having won Margaret’s permission to write what we agreed we’d call a ‘literary history,’ because a conventional biography in her lifetime was an unpalatable prospect and neither of two publishers I approached saw a market for my original idea, a selection of her unpublished essays and speeches, Margaret Mahy: a Writer’s Life inevitably turned out something of a hybrid. It was neither biography nor the critical study some might have hoped for, but served more as a vehicle for substantial quotes from Margaret’s own commentary on her life and works, within the framework of her career. I quite liked Greg O’Brien’s definition of my role ‘functioning as a kind of ground crew allowing my subject to take off on the lyric flights and imaginative trajectories that have characterised her fictional creations – and non-fictional commentaries – over the past 40 years.’ Later in the same Listener review, I was ‘the necessarily sensible dance-partner to Mahy’s wild colonial girl as she twirls and leaves the ground.’

Naturally I was anxious that whatever I produced be seen as readable, informative, affirmative, and, as an early contribution to better recognition of her place in New Zealand literature, doing her justice.

With both this 336-page volume and the tightly written dossier under my belt, my first reaction to Louise, after the usual thanks, was to ponder on the challenge of finding something new to say about Margaret that others and indeed she herself, once described by David Hill as a notably astute commentator on her own work, hadn’t already very eloquently said.

‘Of course,’ I wrote to Louise, ‘by then she may have won the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, or at the very least been chosen as one of the honour books, fingers crossed.”

Well, at three in the morning on March 28 this year, after a wait of more than six months, I looked up the website of the International Board on Books for Young People, known as IBBY, and saw there what I’d hardly dared believe might one day happen. Not an also-ran, not one of the runner-up honour books, but the gold medallist! The champion of the world!

As I read, I knew a glittering audience of international publishers, booksellers and other children’s book people, in Bologna for the annual children’s book fair, had gathered for the IBBY news conference to announce the 2006 winner.

We now know, from the official letter written to Margaret by Jeffrey Garrett, the American president of the 10-member International Jury, that at the announcement, ‘loud cheering broke out among the crowd of over 200. And those could not all have been New Zealanders!’

So, with Margaret now planning a trip to Macau in September, to receive the Hans Christian Andersen gold medal at IBBY’s biennial World Congress, and with Storylines’ task done, what more needs to be said?

My book had claimed more than once that she was New Zealand’s greatest living writer, completing a trinity with Katherine Mansfield and Janet Frame; also, that on anecdotal evidence from the former well-travelled diplomat Witi Ihimaera and others, she had been for more than two decades New Zealand’s best-known author on the international literary scene, more even than Frame or any of the usual A team of New Zealand’s literary luminaries.

Now, according to an international Jury speaking between them all the major European languages plus Persian, Russian, Afrikaans, Finnish and Swedish, it was official. We have a world champion among us, an author with permanent standing among the pantheon of the world’s finest writers for the young. What more need I say? This could be the shortest keynote speech on record.

Except that it may be also the best opportunity that I’m ever going to get wearing my Storylines hat to place the Andersen award in some sort of perspective and examine our motivation for doggedly nominating Margaret three times over a five-year period. Most authors are put up by their countries as candidates only once; at the most, as Katherine Patersen apparently was, twice. We up in Auckland and the children’s literature fellowship generally know what this award means, but I’m fairly confident not many others do, in the same way as they believe they know what a Nobel Prize for Literature or a Man Booker Prize means.

The media certainly didn’t when the announcement came through on the wires on March 28, even though our ever-hopeful press release, ready to go and sent out at 6.30 to catch the radio breakfast sessions, did its best within the brief format of press releases. It was, we said, no less than world literature’s ‘Little Nobel Prize.’

As the Storylines contact person, I fielded a number of calls that morning from radio, TV and print journalists. Please put this award in perspective, they all asked; just how do you rate this achievement?

‘Is it bigger than the Booker?’ demanded Sean Plunkett on ‘Morning Report.’ I knew he meant, how does this compare with our single biggest literary achievement to date, the bone people triumphing to win the Booker in 1985.

‘Oh, far bigger,’ I replied airily, with further animated words to the effect that the Man Booker was only for a single novel in English, whereas this was for a life-time’s body of work, to honour a lasting contribution to all the world’s children’s literatures published not only in English but in all the major languages – Spanish, French, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Hindi and Urdu, Japanese and the languages of south-east Asia, eastern Europe and the Middle East.

This explains why many of the previous winners’ names are not known to us. Not many children’s books translated from Urdu or even Spanish find their way into our bookshops, schools or libraries.

You’ll probably recognise the inaugural winner in 1956, Britain’s Eleanor Farjeon, and others writing in English: Britain’s Aidan Chambers and Martin Waddell from Ireland, the Australian Patricia Wrightson, the Americans Meindert DeJong, Scott O’Dell, Paula Fox, Virginia Hamilton and most recently Katherine Paterson. You might know others from translations: Sweden’s Astrid Lindgren and Finland’s Tove Jansen, but I doubt any of us have come across books by the two from Brazil or Germany, or those from Spain, Austria, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Japan and Israel.

And yes, you might have picked up a European bias in there, partly because it was the cultured countries of old Europe and Scandinavia which joined IBBY in its early days. Only member countries could nominate candidates for the Andersen awards for writing, begun in 1956, and for illustration, begun ten years later.

Over a glass of wine in Vienna three years ago, the incoming Executive Director (Albanian-born, raised in Australia living in Belgium) confided to me she felt that IBBY, with its head office in Switzerland, still needed to break down a lingering perception that its underlying culture was brazenly, unapologetically Eurocentric. ‘I’m glad you said that,’ I replied, ‘because it’s what our Australian friends believe, why since Patricia Wrightson won in 1986, they have been very little active on the IBBY front.’

Scrutiny of the Andersen list of winners, however, would support that by mid 80s the process of change had already begun, with writers coming from Europe, America, Australia, Brazil, Japan and the Middle East, and illustrators from all those countries as well as Poland, Russia and Iran. And though IBBY’s many other activities are not relevant today, I should add that we’ve heard a good deal in recent years about IBBY’s energetic work to promote literacy and books for children in Africa and China, especially.

It was the energetic deputy president Dr Peter Schneck, from Vienna, and the then president, Japanese academic Tayo Shima, visiting Auckland in 2000 for the World Reading Congress, who nudged Storylines into joining IBBY. Discreetly, it was suggested that previous Andersen juries had noted the absence of Margaret Mahy’s name from the list of candidates. Surely, we could find the money to join, enabling us to put her name forward?

Cautiously, the Storylines management committee began to investigate ways of supporting the $3300 annual fee. Ruling out the remote possibility of help that many other IBBY countries get from their governments or a single well-endowed university or library, and stretched to the limit for fund-raising for other activities like the annual Storylines Festival, we went the only possible way: a consortium.

Margaret’s New Zealand publishers HarperCollins, Penguin and Scholastic came to the party, as did Random House, the New Zealand Book Council and for the initial period, the New Zealand Reading Association. It took work, but we got the fee covered for three years, at $500 each a year, and set about putting our submission together.

We acquired multiple copies of 10 books from New Zealand and Britain, with translations supplied from Margaret’s over-laden bookshelves. There followed countless emails with Margaret’s forceful London agent and former editor, Vanessa Hamilton, who’d stated that ‘there was practically nothing closer to my heart than the thought of Margaret winning the HCA award, and I’ll do everything I can to further the cause.’

Fortuitously, a bibliography had recently been compiled by a library Masters student and generously made available to us. HarperCollins offered design help. A few months on, we had a good-looking dossier meeting the demanding criteria – 88 dense pages of it.

Of course we had no idea what standard of presentation by other countries we needed to match or surpass. We were a small incorporated society of volunteers, amateurs, doing all this in the New Zealand way, on a very thin shoestring. We imagined others going through the same exercise out of well-funded IBBY permanent offices, or university English departments.

With such support as my husband was able to offer, I lugged the books and dossiers to England; Vanessa helped me pack them up; I lugged them to a post office in Portsmouth (the idea was that posting in UK would be cheaper!) and I was very pleased to see them on their way.

'I just can believe MM won’t win,’ wrote an impatient Vanessa early in 2002, unaware that within a short time she would fall seriously ill, ‘but I know I must be prepared for international political machinations …’

And so it proved. Here’s Vanessa’s reaction, somewhat edited. She was apparently not a great fan of Aidan Chambers, who won.

'Tessa, I am truly dismayed and shocked. I’ve felt horribly depressed all day waiting for the news, and I’m very grateful to you for letting me know so quickly. DAMNATION! The only good thing to come out of this is the enthusiasm with which you’ve all backed Margaret, and the sheer professionalism of what you produced. I’m mighty proud to have been even slightly associated with such a team, and I send you all big hugs and grateful thanks. I feel incoherent with disappointment, so will say no more.’

For the 2004 award we were a bit more savvy. While another Storylines member was updating the dossier, I was in Europe and took the chance to visit the IBBY secretariat in Basel. I asked to see the other countries’ dossiers for 2002. Some had produced actual hard-covered books, a few were as glossy as company annual reports, but most were no better than ours and the UK folder that won Aidan Chambers the 2002 award looked hastily prepared and verged on the scruffy.

‘Actually, yours was one of the better ones,’ I was told, though I could see it was also one of the thicker volumes, probably too wordy for judges reading their way through 30 such documents and five to ten books by each author in multiple languages. We amended ours, but it was too late for a complete make-over. The 2004 writers’ award went, inexplicably, to the Irish writer-illustrator Martin Waddell. Vanessa Hamilton, during this time had become terminally ill and her death early in 2003 spared her a second disappointment.

For 2006 we’d learned a few things more. Our IBBY sub-committee chairman Wayne Mills had been sent to the 2004 World Congress in Cape Town. He gathered (despite the one for Aidan Chambers) that the dossier itself was the main selling tool, more than the actual books, so we decided we definitely needed to make it shorter, more judge-friendly.

88 pages dropped to 40, the font size practically doubled. Pictures were bigger, the claims for our candidate’s literary glory were bolder. We also knew that previously separate Juries for writer and illustrator had this time been combined into one grand jury of ten, charged with the responsibility of making both decisions. Thus Margaret’s entire phenomenal range, from picture books and school readers, poetry and plays, right through to her sophisticated teenage novels, would be familiar to all the Jurors. Surely not even the formidable claims of Britain’s candidate Philip Pullman, nor the American E.L. Konigsberg, nor the 23 unknown but no doubt impressive others, could match that.

Storylines had meantime stepped up to the IBBY mark in other ways too, mindful of Congress chat that as new chums we might have been a touch naïve expecting success first time around.

Dr Peter Schneck, now president, was hosted at the 2004 Storylines Festival in Auckland. A New Zealand expert in children’s books, fluent in English and Dutch, was nominated for and sent to Italy to serve on the 2006 Andersen Jury (a move we felt might do no harm). V.M. Jones is also travelling to Macau to see her novel Juggling with Mandarins celebrated as an IBBY Honour Book for 2006; other books have appeared on earlier lists.

New Zealand applied for and was chosen to host International Children’s Book Day, April 2, 2007, meaning a poster and message to the world’s children from Margaret Mahy, also an anthology of New Zealand and Pasifika stories. Reviews and news were submitted to the IBBY magazine, Bookbird.

If we had to find over $3000 a year, plus a further $1500 as administrative costs for each nomination, we were damn well going to maximise all the opportunities presented.
Happily most of the consortium signed on for a second three years, and are currently being asked for a further commitment to continue raising not only Margaret’s but other writers and illustrators’ international profiles.

And so, in March, our faith was amply justified. I sent a message to Vanessa Hamilton, where-ever, that the fairy tale continues, her dearest wish had been granted. Margaret had triumphed in what Jeffrey Garrett told her was ‘an extraordinarily strong field.’
His letter to Margaret concluded: ‘Let me also say personally that you have been one of my three or four favourite writers for children since I was first introduced to your work (by Diana Moorhead) with The Haunting in 1983. It will always be an honour for me to have been associated with the jury that has given you this long-deserved recognition.’

His Jury’s official citation read:

‘In awarding the 2006 Hans Christian Andersen Medal for Writing to Margaret Mahy, the jury has recognised one of the world’s most original re-inventers of language. Mahy’s language is rich in poetic imagery, magic, and supernatural elements. Her oeuvre provides a vast, numinous, but intensely personal metaphorical arena for the expression and experience of childhood and adolescence.

‘ Equally important, however, are her rhymes and poems for children. Mahy’s works are known to children and young adults all over the world.’

No doubt many of you here rejoiced that day as we did in Auckland. Joy Cowley sent Storylines a rapturous message, as did many others writers and publishers.

From London, Margaret’s equally helpful new agent Mandy Little emailed me: ‘My God, this is fantastic. I’m just over the moon, as everybody must be. And quite apart from our wonderful Margaret, so much is down to you who has put so much into the entry material to get the rest of the world to see what we’ve all known for years.’

I can share that compliment because it’s not true. Of course it was a team effort, involving some six or seven skilled, reliable and dedicated key people sharing the work for all three nominations; I was just the link person, the noisy one.

And while those of you who’ve read A Writer’s Life may deduce some of the reasons why I’ve chosen to devote time and energy to this task, there are other personal factors which go back to the mid-eighties.

As my own career took off, with the publication of Alex in 1987, and I was being asked to write reviews, columns and comentary, I found myself perplexed that comparatively few people outside publishing and children’s literature devotees seemed to be as eager as I was for the next Mahy novel.

Remember, in the 1980s and early 90s they were coming at barely two year intervals: The Haunting, The Changeover, The Catalogue of the Universe, The Tricksters, Memory, Dangerous Spaces, The Blood and Thunder Adventure on Hurricane Peak, Underrunners, in 1995 the extraordinary first person novel, The Other Side of Silence.

It seemed so wrong that my Alex quartet was winning awards and selling like hot cakes, but the acclaimed award-winning novels of Margaret’s literary flowering, imported in hard cover from Britain, pricey and under promoted, were ineligible for local awards until a rule change around 1990.

Deprived of the promotion attendant on such awards, or much publisher promotion or serious reviewing at all, expensive Mahy novels were apparently selling far fewer copies than one might imagine. Students and teachers, in school after school I visited, knew little or nothing of her novels, which always made me feel disappointed for her and cross and vaguely guilty.

She’d won two Carnegie Medals, for God’s sake – where were the stickers, the posters, the author tours, the thoughtful and prompt reviews, the pride?

‘ Prophet in her own country,’ more than ‘tall poppy syndrome,’ I think – and the situation not helped by an editor then agent who rightly put her energies into building Margaret’s career in infinitely more rewarding markets than tiny faraway New Zealand. If Margaret Mahy was often assumed in Britain to be one of their own as she picked up awards for Memory and other novels that appeared on British and American ‘notable book’ lists, so be it.

And in her own country, always – and still! - that entrenched media mentality that barely mentioned her Carnegie Medals or Observer Teenage Fiction Award and even nowadays can see the New Zealand Herald devote half the front page to a lesser-known male butterfly swimmer winning Commonwealth gold in Melbourne, but a week or so later put the story about the Hans Christian Medal on page 7. They’d sent a reporter and photographer out to Governors Bay, good picture, nice story, but on page 7. TV had broken it first, they would argue. Sport rules, I’d say.

And what about two recent TV documentaries: FrontSeat’s Year in the Life of Margaret Mahy, which involved Oliver Driver trailing her at occasions over many months and must have cost a fortune; Artsville’s recent doco Made in New Zealand: Margaret Mahy, a serious attempt to better inform Kiwis of her real international reputation, including interviews shot in London with her British editor and a Guardian critic.

Both documentaries, with TVOne’s customary sensitivity towards its thinking audience, were buried at the dead of night, at weekends.

The Artsville one waited around two years to go to air, and clearly it’s beyond TVOne’s ‘programmers’ to imagine that a doco on a successful writer for the young might conceivably be of prime-time interest to children and teenagers and their parents and teachers.

The Listener’s comment promoting this programme informed us: ‘We consider Margaret Mahy to be a national taonga, but she’s also immensely popular overseas, having been translated into more than 15 languages and tucked a slew of international awards under her belt. This doco looks at just how highly regarded she is internationally’.

Any sub worth their salt would have rewritten that weirdly upside-down first sentence, and the Andersen medal, which the writer should have known about, is not just any old international award, in a slew or otherwise. A bit like saying Peter Snell won a raft of international golds, or Ed Hilary had climbed a Himalayan mountain or two.

I’ve been challenged by the more literary critics for making this claim, but I still believe that until the last few years Margaret has been seen in the public mind primarily, even solely, a picture book writer.

I have spoken of my own dispiriting experiences on schools visits. During the two decades from the publishing of The Haunting in 1982, the continual stream of picture books, the school readers, school visits, the green wig and cosy grandmotherly media images with enraptured children, all helped to embed the notion that Margaret Mahy was first and foremost an uncommonly gifted writer of wacky stories and verse for the very young, also a successful screen writer for children’s TV and film, and through her public persona, a generous, effective advocate for child literacy and literature - and primarily for those reasons, was admitted in 1993 to the 20-member Order of New Zealand and awarded the first of her two honorary doctorates.

One reviewer rebutted my contention that meantime Mahy the young adult novelist had been under-recognised, even ‘shamefully neglected,’ by stating that to the contrary ‘she has been read, studied and widely cherished by anyone who cares about writing.’
All true, but I’m less concerned with those ‘who care about writing’ and more with the recreational reading of ordinary schoolkids growing up in ordinary intermediates and high schools who choose to read, if they read at all, Dahl, CS Lewis, Rowling, Pullman, Jacqueline Wilson, Anne Fine, Louis Sacher, Anthony Horowitz, Lemoney Snicket (it helps if there’s a film) - but have never been introduced to Mahy; and the English student whose New Zealand Lit. course takes in Mulgan, Ihimaera, Grace, Shadbolt, Gee, Kidman, Duff, Marshall, Wendt, Tuwhare, Hulme and Knox - but is still unlikely to have professors enlightened enough to include Mahy.

Another academic reviewer – and here the words ‘ivory tower’ come uncharitably to mind - put forward Margaret’s six Esther Glen medals as clear proof that all Margaret’s awards destroyed my argument that her achievements as a young adult novelist had not been taken seriously.

Well, of the six, only two – The Changeover and 24 Hours - were for novels for young adults. Others equally good, arguably better novels like Memory and The Tricksters and The Catalogue of the Universe which all won places on honour lists and awards in Britain and America, passed the Esther Glen judges by. And the Esther Glen, while worthy and valued as the country’s oldest literary award, is hardly going to cut much ice among the offerings in intermediate and high school libraries and the local Paper Plus in south Auckland or Te Kuiti or Hokitika.

More than a few adult readers of A Writer’s Life volunteered the information that they previously had no idea she wrote novels, and then, praise be! said they’d rushed out to buy one. Such advice reinforced my informal surveys done at the time of researching the book, when I’d seized every possible social and school opportunity to ask people to tell me some Mahy titles – and found that the novels rarely featured. Many were surprised to hear that she’d written any novels at all. An Australian reviewer confessed a similar ignorance, until half way through my book, when quote ‘already engrossed, and stunned at Mahy’s accomplishments, I knew I couldn’t continue until I’d read at least one of them. The Changeover was a revelation, brilliantly written, highly suspenseful and more than two decades on, not a bit dated.’

As for what some of the more literary reviewers saw as my outdated sense of grievance about the status of children’s writers generally, I found myself smiling, but also made a little grumpy. Those who’ve been around only for five or ten years have hopefully been spared some of the condescension, mostly from older males of the post-modernist persuasion, that I experienced in the 1980s. One reviewer pointed out Margaret’s high regard in the general writing community. Undoubtedly true, but this community remains a minority one and in a small country, notably self-referential
But as my book asks, why is Mahy, whom all of us here know to be so eminently quotable, not (as far as I could see) included as are lesser writers in any books of New Zealand quotations? Why does any first-time adult novelist get a prompt stand-alone review when probably only Mahy and possibly Joy Cowley of the children’s writers will, even now, get that attention? How could an AA ‘Directions’ magazine of last year include a lengthy piece on New Zealand literature, leave out Mahy, and the editor be quite unrepentant when I wrote to complain? As well leave out Kiri Te Kanawa in a piece on New Zealand opera singers on some spurious ground that she’s lived all her adult, professional life elsewhere.

Then there was the Otago academic whose review admitted that perhaps he agreed with Greg O’Brien’s quoted statement placing Mahy as one of a line of New Zealand geniuses that includes Katherine Mansfield, Janet Frame, Frances Hodgkins and Rita Angus – but went on to suggest I should have more firmly placed Mahy in the august company of a generation of talented and versatile senior men and women of letters who were born in the 1930s and achieved writing careers of 40 years or more – Janet Frame, Maurice Gee, CK Stead, Joy Cowley, the late Maurice Shadbolt.

Well – no. On the international literary stage, in terms of around 230 books published over a forty-year span in New Zealand and elsewhere, translated in more than 15 languages and sold in their millions, in terms of the pages and pages devoted to her in academic journals and Oxford and Cambridge Companions and similar American publications, and very probably their counterparts in Italian and French and Japanese, I think it entirely justified to claim that Margaret stands as the most senior, head and shoulders above them all.

However, I must resist further temptation to answer reviews – authors traditionally never respond to reviews, at least in writing, and especially to bad ones and usually unthinkable in public! But the issues they raise are sufficiently relevant to why we’re all gathered here today.

Two years on from completing work on A Writer’s Life, I’d happily agree that things are looking up for the mana of children’s literature in this country, and yes, that this sea-change has largely been due to the torch proudly carried by Margaret for thirty-five years since her fairy-tale debut on the interenational scene, with simultaneous launches of five picture books in New York and London in 1969.

Offshore, and to a lesser degree here, during the 1990s there has grown a body of seriously scholarly Mahy studies and accolades, as readers of the by-no-means exhaustive bibliographies in my book will be aware. For example, British academic Peter Hunt, the first children’s literature specialist to win a full professorship in a major university, rates Margaret as an phenomenon in international publishing and one of his 38 all-time great writers in English in the last two centuries, alongside such names Lewis Carroll, AA Milne, Beatrix Potter, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Graham, Roald Dahl, CS Lewis, Dr Seuss, Philip Pullman, L.M. Montgomery, Dr Seuss, Philip Pullman and J.K. Rowling.

More recently there’s been Elizabeth Hale, the Kiwi expatriate editor of the first scholarly book on Margaret’s work, Marvellous Codes, who finds it ‘pleasingly appropriate’ that a writer ‘working in such traditionally marginalised, or non-canonical, genres as children’s and young adults’ literature, and fantasy literature, to say nothing of her consistent representation of marginalised people such as single parents and the elderly, should be one of the foremost writers of a national marginalised by its size, population and location.

‘ Mahy is not wholly a realist, she does not write canonical forms, she does not write the Great New Zealand novel, and she does not place New Zealand-ness front and centre to her writing, having deliberately set her sights on an international marketplace. But in writing within marginalised, rather than central forms, she has been increasingly successful and I think, has been instrumental in reframing the possibilities of this country: bringing a kind of wild magic into New Zealand writing, blending European, Maori and other literary traditions into her work.’

It was gratifying to read in a Weekend Herald and other publications of last December summing up achievements for 2005, that for Margaret Mahy (clearly not just a national taonga whose work happens to be immensely popular elsewhere) this had been a brilliant year of quote ‘long-overdue returns.’

There’d been a second honorary doctorate and a New Zealand Icon award from the Arts Foundation, the Canadian Children’s Literature Association Phoenix award for The Catalogue of the Universe, and just before Christmas, the New Zealand biggie, the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction, the third recipient after Janet Frame and Maurice Gee.

Two more novels, Maddigan’s Quest and Kaitangata Twitch had been published, the TV series of Maddigan’s Quest was soon to be screened. Into 2006, a seventh grandchild had arrived, work was proceeding on the epic fantasy provisionally called The Magician of Hoad and probably other stories, short and long, and possibly even poetry and TV projects no-one yet knows about.

Down the Back of the Chair, brilliantly illustrated by Polly Dunbar, was published in March, to universal acclaim and laughter. In the same month, Storylines held a 70th birthday Gala Dinner in Auckland attended by 200 people, a glittering event people are still talking about; two weeks later the Hans Christian Andersen jury delivered their verdict.

And around the country other birthday events are being held, like this one for adults, and others in schools and libraries involving children.

In September Dr Libby Limbrick, chair of the Storylines Trust and I anticipate the great honour and pleasure of escorting Margaret to Macau for the Wold Congress where she will receive the Hans Christian Andersen Medal 2006, and then go on for four extra days in Beijing where at a large school and an English language bookshop we shall watch her with Chinese children typical of young readers all over the world: entertained, astonished, bewitched.

The final words spoken at the Gala Dinner were Margaret’s, as they were in A Writer’s Life, and I think it fitting the same words should be here also be my last.

I find it interesting that Margaret wrote this jewel when she was only around 35. It was a little gem then; now it is magnificent. Back in 1973 she introduced it to a conference of teachers thus:

[Extract (text and MM poem When I am old) from last page of Margaret Mahy : a Writer’s Life.]

Margaret, for these and all your millions of wise and wonderful words, for being wonderful you – thank you!

Much Ado About The Fat Man

A speech given to the Tauranga Children's Literature Association in Tauranga, 2001.

Twice in the last seven years, the New Zealand children's book awards have produced a good stoush. The first was in 1995, when the AIM judging panel decided to award the Supreme and Junior fiction awards to Maurice Gee's The Fat Man. The second was in 1999 when another Supreme winner, Paula Boock's Dare, Truth or Promise, raised an even greater storm.

Taking 1999 first, I wasn't involved that year in any capacity other than interested member of the children's literature community who watched, for ten days or so, the unfolding scandal: witness the Rev Graham Capill and his speechless, hapless teenaged daughter on Paul Holmes, an appearance that, for me, came close to child abuse; the Rosemary McLeod, I think the Frank Haden and other robust columns, the newspaper leaders, the profiles of the admittedly young and handsome author Paula, especially the one in a white jumpsuit in Next magazine, which lifted her from author to temporary celeb.

The scandal of course revolved around awarding a major prize to a book for teenage readers on female homosexual love. The Rev Capill, like reputedly Queen Victoria, would rather that the word lesbian did not pass our lips, and a book on the subject, no matter how well written, never to fall into the tender unsullied hands of innocent schoolgirls. The Well of Loneliness, anyone? Though we didn't quite descend to the trial for obscenity and subsequent banning of Radclyffe's Hall's infamous 1928 book on lesbian love, Dare, Truth or Promise was to Caphill certainly NOT suitable for endorsement by a panel of trendy lefty judges or Booksellers New Zealand or schools or libraries or caring parents.

Hardly anywhere in the heated debate did I read one word of comment on whether Dare, Truth or Promise was actually in literary terms, a good book worthy of the Supreme award. Eventually, with the book accepted for publication in Australia and by the prestigious Houghton Mifflin company in US, the NZ Post judges were vindicated. Eventually, everyone settled down; the book found its own level. But Dare, Truth or Promise was not, as was widely, incorrectly claimed and believed at the time, the first New Zealand YA book on homosexual love: that was William Taylor's The Blue Lawn.

Which takes me back four years to 1995, the year that The Fat Man won the Supreme and Junior fiction awards, and The Blue Lawn, the Senior Fiction.

Because of the intended media focus almost entirely on the Supreme winner, at the expense of the other category winners, The Blue Lawn escaped public scrutiny and censure, although to be sure Richard Prebble had tried - and failed - to stir up a storm in a Sunday tabloid when it was published a few months earlier. I remember Whitcoulls put a warning sticker on it, prompting a sensible, sober and well-argued interview with Bill Taylor in the Sunday Times. Where was Caphill then? I don’t know. Perhaps uninvolved because the section winners were barely acknowledged by the media and the Fat Man debate was fought largely on an intellectual level in literary journals like the Listener and Quote Unquote, rather than at a populist level in the mainstream media.

Anyway, against The Fat Man being hoisted aloft to Junior and Supreme winner, Dorothy Butler fired the first salvo, in an incredulous and impassioned letter to the Listener claiming that at a stroke the judges had deprived children of their innocence; the book 'neatly equated'evil with physical imperfection; moreover, it would disturb or even damage nine to 12-year-olds.

The correspondence went on for two months before it was declared closed. The AIM judges replied promptly, defending their position. In behind Butler came Dunedin's Raymond Huber and predictably pushing her New Right and anti state funding barrow, Agnes-Mary Brooke. Agreeing with the judges and their right, indeed their obligation to judge a book on literary rather than educational terms were Jack Lasenby and Paula Boock, and in varying degrees of enthusiasm, three young readers.

Apart from the Listener, and a smaller debate in Quote Unquote, the award provoked four - only four - letters from schools to Booksellers New Zealand complaining that their trust in the short list, on which they previously relied for purchasing books, had been betrayed. They got a letter back defending the judges'integrity and autonomy, and subtly suggesting that the responsibility for buying or promoting books they considered suitable or otherwise lay with the school, rather than with the AIM judges or Booksellers NZ.

One thing that was different about the 1995 and 1999 debates was that in 1995 nearly everyone, even Dorothy Butler, acknowledged The Fat Man's power, the beautifully-written, lucid and compelling storytelling that we associate with Maurice Gee. Also, in 1995 the major debate centred not so much on Gee as the winner of the Supreme award, but round the judges'decision to place the book in the Junior Fiction category.

I can tell you now, as one of those judges, that decision was not taken lightly. We well knew the storm that would result. I've often wondered what would have happened had we taken the easier way out and popped the book into Senior fiction? Yes, yes, all the gatekeepers would have said. Keep that book out of the hands of anyone under 13, even as the compelling anecdotal evidence then, and even more now, is that the main readers of senior or YA fiction are not 13 to 16-year-olds high school pupils, but two main groups: able 11-year-olds, or even ten, and, suggests Kate di Goldi, echoing Heather Scutter, an Australian academic in a controversial, rather sour 1999 book called Displaced Fictions, middle-aged, politically correct and, by implication, misguided women - teachers, librarians, academics, booksellers, commentators, publishers, festival organisers and writers - who, says di Goldi, 'are diligently peddling the books to their intended teenage market but are, increasingly, left holding the books.'

Peddling is not a nice word. It suggests a lack of integrity. And whichever side people were on in 1995, no-one publicly questioned each other's fundamental integrity.

Maurice Gee and Penguin Books both agreed with the judges that The Fat Man should remain, for the purpose of the awards, with the age range given from about 8 or 9 to 12 or 13, right where it had been submitted, in Junior Fiction.

Gee was especially emphatic, while Penguin pointed to the book's typeface and overall appearance - both, they felt, chosen for the junior fiction, not teenage, market.

I spent a worried afternoon debating the issue with Dr Kirsty Cochrane, former lecturer in children's literature at Waikato University, whose view was unequivocal. For her, the novel's tone, established on the very first page, was clearly that of a traditional children's book. Dr Diane Hebley, completing our first doctorate in children's literature around that time, agreed.

The only accusation I heard regarding lack of integrity was levelled underground at me personally. I heard many years later that some in Wellington believed I had argued for keeping Gee in junior fiction so that my close friend William Taylor could win the senior fiction award. I don't know where that vicious and scurrilous notion left the other two judges.

Did they think that Wayne Mills, an acknowledged authority on children's books and judge also the year before, or Dr Hine Elder, a forthright, independent thinker, then medical student and mother of two, were so easily swayed?

Was it beyond them to imagine that the decision just might have been based on research, intensive consultation and a great deal of soul-searching? That in the end, it came down to whether the book should be placed at the top end of the junior section, or the bottom end of the senior fiction. It sat there, right on the cusp, and yes, there was a moment when I cursed Maurice for making Colin only 11. Why didn't he make him 13 or a skinny, late maturing 14-year-old, for heaven's sake and save us all this angst. I remember at our final judging session, after we'd read the front-runners at least three or four times, spreading out on the floor all the novels in ascending order of age suitability, and saying - well, for me, it sits right at the top of the junior range. We temporised by asking that a warning be put in the schools'resource kit. I was sorry at the time that the wording was less forceful than we intended. Personally, I would have stated bluntly that the book was not recommended for purchase or use in primary schools, but only for mature intermediate age children and upwards.

The voices ranged against our unanimous decision, apart from Dorothy Butler, were formidable.

Agnes Nieuwenhuizen (the Australian guru on what is known over there as youth literature) wrote a rave review for an Australian journal. She complimented New Zealand on honouring a book which she doubted would ever have made a shortlist for an Australian award, in the same way as various controversial books by Sonia Hartnet and Allan Baillie and others appeared to be too much for the judges to cope with. Privately, she has told me she holds to her view that The Fat Man is a young adult book. Well, no-one has said it's rigidly either/or, that any book can't be enjoyed by both age groups as much as by adults. It's just that for the awards a decision has to be made.

Agreeing with Nieuwenhuizen was Margaret Mahy, who came down some years later, in a quite strongly worded Landfall essay, in Dorothy Butler's camp.

Now it's not often that I dare to debate anything with Margaret, but she was quite critical about what she saw the judges'simplistic notion that a book with an 11-year-old hero was ipso facto a children's book. Put so baldly, as a single sole reason, I would agree that it's not sufficient justification. Yet I do hold to my view, informed by reading an essay by the godfather of the genre, Paul Zindel, many years ago, that one of the main characteristics of teenage, young adult, youth literature, call it what you will, is that it is about a teenager. About teenagers in the big wide world. Not so much about troubles at home, but about troubles with school, peers, hormones, temptations, experiments, boundaries. All my contact with teens from say 13 tends to reinforce my feeling that that they don't want to read about the troubles of 11-year-olds. They want to see themselves reflected, not their kid brothers. The God Boy, you might be thinking, or the novels about childhood of Noel Virtue, or Paddy Doyle Ha ha ha? - well, everything about the tone, language, thematic treatment, production and promotion of those books indicate clearly that they're not books for children, and as such don't form part of this debate.

You might be wondering why I'm revisiting 1995 and The Fat Man outcry? Not to justify myself and the judging panel, because with the greatest of respect to the intellectual heavyweights in this specialist literary community of ours, Dorothy, Margaret and Agnes, I still believe it was the right decision. Not only for the purpose of the awards, but because the decision reflected what in real life children are reading, rather than what the gatekeepers, albeit sincerely and with the best possible intentions, thought they should be reading, or not reading.

At heart, the debate was whether children around 11 and 12 should be starting to read about vicious bullying, murder, revenge and finally complicity in an inevitable though just death. Justice was done, and as Gee himself has said that quote 'none of the central relationships are actually damaged … the children are put under terrible threat, but they are not damaged.'Does any of that sound like what you might find in a book by one J.K. Rowling to you, or Philip Pullman, or those vile Goosebumps or Lemony Snicket or Artemis Fowl or any one of several thousand European fairy tales and Greek myths, or even, only stretching the point slightly, Zena, Hercules, the X Files or Shortland Street or the nightly Six O'Clock News? Do they read those books and watch those programmes? Maybe not the genuine Greek myths, though I wish they did, but the others, you bet!

My reason for revisiting 1995, though, is something that has been worrying me for some time, and that is, the effect of all this anxiety and confusion on writers.

Why are caring and responsible adults so anxious about what our pubescent children read, when they are so quiet on what the same children see on television? I'm not talking about our common revulsion at the idea of a child of ten or 11 head down into Stephen King or the salacious female hot sex equivalent of the day (it used to be Virginia Andrews, and possibly still is), but an insidious form of censorship leading to self-censorship that's rather more subtle and more difficult to dislodge.

Is it something to do with an educational terminology that has teachers talking about 'texts'to be 'used'in classrooms? Not books to be read, and enjoyed, as stories, but 'texts'which fit the prevailing orthodoxies? I don't write texts, myself, and I don't 'use'a 'text'in a classroom. I read to and share books with children. I write novels like Alex and the new Tiggie series which, from all the evidence available to me, are probably mostly read by the 10 to 14 age group, even though they are promoted in fantasyland as young adult, that is officially around age 13 to 17.

So, yes, I get lots of warm fuzzy feedback from children, so I'm apparently a successful writer for this 10-14 age group.

But occasionally, every opportunity I get, I take classes for adults who want to write for the young and in the past couple of years I've noticed a rising anxiety among students about what is acceptable, and what is not.

The problem is most evident with discussion about books they want to write that, like The Fat Man, Alex and Tiggie sit right on the cusp. Which way do they go? Up or down, will they be disadvantaged for getting published, or (among those with one or two books under their belt) disadvantaged for the awards, and thereby lose a thousand sales? Because that is what a short-listing means to a writer, gain or lose a thousand sales and a great deal of valuable promotion). If they write a book like Hot Mail, with some dodgy language and atrocious puns and terrible jokes and generally subversive tone disguising what William Taylor and I believe is quite a profoundly moral book, will they, like us, end up find themselves shut out of both the NZ Post and Children's Literature Foundation Notable Book shortlists but well reviewed and selling like hot cakes both here and in Australia?

Aspiring writer: Better play safe and write a 'text,'the shorter the better. Even quite big themes can be adequately dealt with in under 30,000 words, like the sexual harassment in Frances Cherry's unconvincing but this year NZ Post short-listed novel Leon, or losing a father as in David Hill's Afterwards. Can't they?

Don't dare be like the 32-year-old J.K. Rowling who resisted publishers' attempts to reduce the length of her sentences and of the first Harry Potter manuscript. 75,000 words, don't even think about it.

Surely, writes academic Rose Lovell-Smith reviewing four skinny novels by Taylor, Mahy, Cherry and Hill in the latest NZ Books, teens'reading matter does not have to come in such concentrated form? Local publishers, she complains, currently seem to think of the adolescent reader as somebody with an awfully short attention span.

The new writer asks: what about colloquial, accurate teen speech, or worse, slang, swearing? Take it out of the text, or your book will end up like The Tiggie Tompson Show, reluctantly declined as a girls'private school 'set book'because the English teacher knew that one f-word rendered it unacceptable to a vociferous handful of the parents who paid the bills. She did put one copy in the library, tho, which for an award-winning book I thought quite brave of her.

Sex? - discreetly fudge it, as I did in Tiggie, William Taylor's Jerome and The Blue Lawn, Paula Boock's Dare Truth or Promise, or forget it. I wonder how the girls' schools are getting on with the rape scene in Tiggie Tompson All at Sea. It's written in a measured 19th century prose voice, in Eliza's impeccably English educated diction, so perhaps that makes it all right.

If I'm beginning to sound a mite cynical, it's because I'm getting worried about how writers fit into the widening gap between text judged on educational terms and book judged on literary terms; between the world that children live in and how adults would like it portrayed; between theory and practice.

My learned colleague Wayne Mills has written in an overview of New Zealand children's literature for an American encyclopaedia that few new writers appeared in New Zealand in the 90s.

Why not, given the terrific boost of the 1980s and the literary role models provided by Mahy and Cowley, William Taylor and Sherryl Jordan and Lynley Dodd, or by the commercial role models of those prolific and I believe financially quite well-rewarded educational writers Pauline Cartwright, Diana Noonan and Allan Trussell-Cullen. Have they all gone underground to earn a living and keep out of controversy, writing school readers? Are the publishers turning them away in droves? Where are those who should be coming through with Vince Ford, Penelope Huber, Sarah Ell?

The answers I suspect are complex, and would take a major survey to discover. My suggestions:

• Publishers are not spending time and money carefully and lovingly editing the manuscripts of potential new writers, as once upon a time I received with Night Race to Kawau. I'm told that anything that is marginal, they tend to turn down.

• For the past ten or so years they have inclined towards shorter books, smaller costs. In effect, writers and children are being short-changed. Perhaps the fourth Harry Potter, and all of Pullman, are helping to change the notion that kids won't read long books.

• Children's books get pathetically little review space and promotion in all the media, so emerging and exciting children's writers don't get reviewed or promoted, unless they happen to hit the jackpot like Vince Ford, whereupon the celeb-hungry media descends.

• Writers'festivals, major promotional exercises, are generally indifferent to the children's genre, and to their obligation towards building tomorrow's adult audience.

• Adult gatekeepers have made publishers and therefore writers over-anxious about content, about perceived boundaries, so that an insidious form of self-censorship is operating.

Earlier I asked what might have resulted if the 1995 judges had taken the line of least resistance and placed The Fat Man as a senior book? Recently, someone (whose opinion I don't particularly respect) suggested to me that by provoking contention and dissent we had actually done children's writing in this country a disfavour.

Well, it's not on my conscience, and I doubt it's on Wayne's. What does concern us both is the lack of robust public debate at some recent award decisions.

• Where were the voices raised publicly at The Raging Quiet, a book chosen for a major US list of ten best young adult book, not making the 2000 senior short-list?

• Who complained at The Natural World of New Zealand and this year, Gone Surfing, being non-fiction winners on the totally spurious grounds that by being accessible to children for school assignments, that made them children's books?

• Who protested at the non-short-listing this year of William Taylor's Crash - the story of Poddy, a book that Joy Cowley, the eventual junior fiction winner, believed should have won? At the non-appearance also of Diana Noonan's critically acclaimed Whistle for the Blunder, and, astonishingly, any Pamela Allen book for the third year, whose talent is every bit as energetic now as indicated by her multi-award winning books over two decades on both sides of the Tasman.

• Who made the difficult call of objecting to the surprising and I can only guess, politically correct inclusion on the Senior short list of Leon, which Rose Lovell-Smith rightly found lacking in any sort of space and time given to creating a fictional world?

Finally, where are the commentators on children's literature generally? They're not getting space in Auckland's media. The New Zealand Herald has been patchy at best, certainly not committed to reviewing local children's writers, even Mahy, even Jordan, even me. Neither of my two Tiggie books have been reviewed there. The Listener went through a two or three year bad patch. Where, Talespinner notwithstanding, are the scholarly magazine articles and books that a genre needs to support research and growth? Has there been a single book published since Diane Hebley's 1998 Power of Place. I don't know of one. How long do we have to wait before Scholastic updates Beneath Southern Skies or the Children's Literature Foundation finds the time and resources to expand its 100 Contemporary Writers booklet.

There is only so much one writer can do. I have books to write and in a small literary community one voice banging on can get tedious or motives misinterpreted. Quite possibly I've reached that eminence.

The Children's Literature Foundation has and will continue to write letters of protest against what they and others see as idiotic judging decisions and the currently unsatisfactory process by which such judges are appointed, but that's another story. Awards will always have their dissenters and critics, but for all that they are a valuable indicator and incentive for the whole industry.

On behalf of writers (and I know many of them share my concerns) please get out there and tell aspiring new writers to forget all the politics, all the angst about age groups and language and suitability and teacher's notes, and simply, as Betty Gilderdale quite rightly pleaded ten years ago, just tell the story, as best they can. Put literature back into literacy, and as has been Harry Potter's greatest achievement, entertainment back into reading, and writers back into doing what they do best - not pontificating, not agonising, but creating and developing the indigenous children's literature that goes with a truly responsible and mature society.

Reading Ransome… Writing Adventure... Downunder

Paper given to the Arthur Ransome Society's biennial Literary Weekend, Durham, England, September 2001.

Thanks, Kirsty, for your kind words, and members of TARS for the invitation to come to Durham this weekend and join this splendid gathering of real children's literature enthusiasts.

I must note that it is the first time ever, for me, in fifteen years of speaking at festivals and seminars, to find myself facing an audience where the men outnumber the women, or at least about fifty-fifty? Usually, whether in New Zealand or Australia or USA, it's more like one or two men to every hundred women, or no men at all. I wonder if TARS isn't unique in that respect? Certainly, people in New Zealand were quite intrigued when I told them where I was headed. Radio New Zealand allocated me ten minutes on a daily arts programme, just before I left. Here in England, too - friends in the West Country, Oxfordshire, and Cheshire have shown me their shelves of familiar green books (with and without jackets) and one, a retired engineer in Macclesfield, proudly produced the Hugh Brogan biography given to him by his daughter. As a writer, I can only marvel at Ransome's staying power, the loyalty he inspired in his lifetime and continues to inspire today. Thank you for the opportunity to share your knowledge and enthusiasm.

I'd like to take you on a journey back to a island on the other side of the world; late summer 1978, late afternoon, lazy half-tide on a sheltered crescent-shaped beach, where a young woman can be seen rigging a small, clinker dinghy.

Passing families, holidaying on yachts, if they get close enough to see the rather patched cotton sails and the peeling varnish, would describe the six-foot, gaff-rigged boat as a 'bit of a character. 'But from the fairway, a hundred yards or more distant, the Marigold's golden topsides and white sails glow in the sun. She looks a picture: for all the world, some say nostalgically, as they drain one beer can and reach for another, like something out of Arthur Ransome. Sometimes, especially with autumn mists shrouding the surrounding hills and damping down the strong, sharp Pacific blues, those who know this island's long narrow harbour well agree that it could happily pass for a loch, or the Lake District at a pinch.

The dinghy rigged, main and jib hoisted, centreboard and rudder ready on the thwarts, the young woman throws a backpack wrapped in a capacious plastic bag into the bows. It contains her sleeping bag, spare clothes, swimming gear, thermos of tea and enough food for 24 hours. Her family, sunning themselves on the foreshore above the high water mark, with occasional dashes down the gravelly beach to cool off in the jade green water, watch in bemusement. They know only that she is going across the harbour and will be away for the night. Research, she had mumbled. Research for what? a daughter had asked. The answer was evasive: Oh, some project, a little guidebook, that's all. They know her for a one-time journalist. It seems feasible, if the overnight bit slightly weird, for a guidebook.

As the tide creeps in, Marigold begins to bump and roll against the rocky seabed. Faced with needing help to lift the heavy kauri dinghy back up the beach, or screwing up her courage and putting to sea, the young woman clips up her lifejacket, pushes the dinghy out into the shallows, climbs in, and yells farewell to those watching. Feeling very foolish, she puts to sea. With some difficulty, narrowly missing the wharf at one end of the beach, then the rocks at the other, she gets the centreboard into the casing and down, the rudder into the gudgeon, the sheets pulled in and, as she moves out of the shelter of the bay and into a brisk 15 knot westerly, the sails drawing.

All this is perhaps braver than might appear to the experienced and relaxed crews sailing past searching for places to put down an anchor for the night. She frankly isn't much of a sailor, then, in 1978. Her childhood has not been spent, like her husband or their daughters or the Walker children, or the enviable 'Captain Nancy'and sister Peggy, messing about in boats. Marrying into a sailing family, she's done some keelboat crewing but not much dinghy sailing, single-handed or otherwise, nor a Boatmaster course. These will come later.

Apart from the good chance of committing some nautical and highly public cock-up on the stretch of busy water between beach and destination maybe half a mile away, I knew there was a second and then a third potential for making a fool of myself. (Yes, that 'young'woman playing Swallows and Amazons was me, aged 37 - well, everything's relative!).

If I got safely without collision or capsize across the harbour (and that in the nautical rush-hour with wind by now a brisk and erratic 20 knots) was by no means certain, I was going to walk two miles or so across the island to spend a night on a deserted beach where around 150 years earlier, there'd undoubtedly been cannibal activity. Bones, human ones, were still being unearthed by the island's resident aristocrat and early Governor of New Zealand, Sir George Grey, as late as the 1880s. Maori pirates living on the island, making a nuisance of themselves to passing canoes, had maybe 70 years before Grey been ambushed on that beach by mainlanders, been killed, eaten, and their womenfolk and children taken in slavery back to the mainland. So the story goes.

That night I felt the planet tilt beneath the heavens, watched the crescent moon inch her way across the sky, saw shooting stars, listened to the trees creak and weka (flightless native bird not unlike a kiwi) call to each other. In the dark hours before dawn I discovered there were glow-worms on Kawau, after a very close encounter with a possum. I tried, unsuccessfully, not to think of razor sharp greenstone weapons, fires, stakes and dismemberment.

Why was I there? Why did I crew, in friends'keelboats, on three successive real Night Races to Kawau each February between 1979 and 1982. Well, foolishly, in early middle-age, this one-time journalist and mother of four wanted to write this book, a novel about a family's nocturnal sailing adventure.

I'd never written a book before. I had absolutely no idea how to go about it, except that if I was going to have my family anchor at that cannibal beach, which seemed like a promising and dramatic idea, and the two children walk over the hill to get help for their injured father, then I had to do some active research, however foolish it might be feeling. I had no idea that a writer called Arthur Ransome had come to the same conclusion when he did a trip fifty years earlier in his 7-ton cutter called the Nancy Blackett across the North Sea, as research for a book subsequently published as We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea.

In fact (and I hate to admit it in this company), though 37 and discovering the golden age of children's books through what my four daughters were reading, I had very little idea about the works of Mr Ransome at all.

My then husband, growing up in Britain in the 1940s, and messing about in small boats and keelers in the famous Hauraki Gulf during the 1950s, was a Ransome addict; he still has a shelf of those green volumes with their distinctive, though now very tattered, jackets. Growing up in New Zealand a few years behind, I voraciously read any library book I could find about girls winning red rosettes at gymkhanas and aspiring to be actresses or ballerinas, and more Enid Blyton than I care now to acknowledge. I never got to hear of Ransome; according to Kirsty Niccol Findlay, they were published in Sydney in the late 1940s and available in New Zealand, but I never discovered them. In self defence, I might add that in those days, in early 50s conservative New Zealand, it was expected that only boys sailed dinghies or crewed on yachts. Females, after the war, were being busily encouraged back into kitchens and gentler arts and sports than sailing.

It is instructive now, nearly twenty years after Oxford University Press first published Night Race to Kawau, to see how it differs from Ransome's survival story, We Didn't Mean to go to Sea.

Certainly I read this book, along with K. M. Peyton's Windfall, the only two family sailing adventures I could find, when I was taking my first tentative steps towards becoming a novelist. The original manuscript accepted by OUP was 90,000 words long. I'd enthusiastically taken my cue from Ransome and not stinted on the sailing terminology. Well, I'd had to swiftly learn that arcane, though immensely practical, precise and beautiful language - what else did you use?

But by 1982, apparently, children couldn't cope any more with the traditional language of the sea. Much of it went with the 30,000 words that were edited out. A glossary was deemed necessary. A few incompetent reviewers tut-tutted about the jargon, far too difficult or boring or potentially off-putting for children.

I recently re-read We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, and marvelled at the lack of condescension. Sailor's language came naturally to Ransome, to his child characters, and to millions of grateful child readers like my husband. He always maintained his love and knowledge of sailing was very largely due to Ransome. Were my readers, in the interests of a book theoretically accessible to all, denied a real opportunity to be introduced to one of the richest and most colourful specialised vocabularies in the English language? Now, I would say yes.

And what about the length of a Ransome book! We didn't Mean to go to Sea is 334 pages of text! I'm no mathematician, but at about 300 words a page, even allowing for the illustrations - that must be approaching around 100,000 words.

Again, inexperienced and naive as I was, knowing nothing of changing fashions in children's publishing, I'd again taken a lead from Ransome, and his quite lengthy accounts of sailing procedures, the Walker children's debates, John's internalised struggles and the many dangers and general progress of the Goblin towards the Dutch coast. In my inexperience, I went too far. Dorothy Butler, a New Zealand authority on children's books, winner of the 1980 Eleanor Fargeon Award, after being shown my beginner's manuscript, later said, 'I knew this new writer would eventually get published. She kept me reading her sailing adventure story for 30,000 words, without even getting the family on the boat!'

Yes, the manuscript needed serious editing, I know that. Wendy Harrex, who had worked for six years at OUP in England, was my first and best editor, and I've had some terrific editors with Penguin, Random House, Scholastic and HarperCollins since. My concern about the full 30,000 going is not with Wendy but rather with a publishing imperative of the past twenty or so years that says Short for Kids is Best. Thirty thousand words, they advise authors, twenty is even better. Tell the story, keep it moving, cut out anything remotely lyrical, descriptive, spiritual, meditative: let's just get the book out, make it cheap for school and library budgets and easy for teachers to promote and use as classroom 'texts. 'Ransome, other good reads of the thirties and forties, all those words. Kids didn't have TV and video games then. Well, they have TV and video games now and J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman have forcibly reminded us that kids will read longer books, gobble them up, know and appreciate a banquet when they see one. Rowling stood her ground, I believe, resisting notions of the sentences and text being too long and too complex, until she found a publisher willing to go against the trend. Good for them, and good for her; such confidence and trust in her own judgement, in one so young!The fourth HP book, as we all know, is a whopper, and in the words of the New Yorker rave review, despite all the hype, it's just 'wonderful.'

But in 1982, I was cut back to 60,000; in 1987 Alex, my third and best known novel, and first of what eventually became the Alex quartet, was rigorously cut back from 90,000 words to 75,000. That process, required by a new publisher at OUP New Zealand to make the book fit her costings, I did resent, so much so that at one stage I hinted imperiously I might take myself and my book elsewhere. I used much of the excised text in the second book, Alex in Winter.

I don't know a writer in New Zealand (except possibly Margaret Mahy, and she's published mostly in UK and America) who hasn't been sternly cut back or themselves pre-empted the inevitable and cut it to the bone. Regrettably and even infamously, we have found ourselves lately grappling with many forms of political correctness, and this reluctance to give kids both shorter books and a good, satisfying read, (or, cynically, to pander to the perceived preference for 'action' and spend no more than you absolutely have to on production costs) is one of them. Economic rationalism and the consequent utterly inevitable hardship for most of the populace, turns books into 'products', writers into hacks and journeymen, and generally makes people, even editors, mean-spirited.

So, if my sailing language, dialogue and overall word length were for various reasons cut back, even if I shared with Ransome a journalistic background and clearly a wish to see child characters and especially female characters empowered to solve problems by their own common sense and courage, does Night Race to Kawau owe anything to him at all?

Now I think, as my manuscript was edited and finally published, not much. There were intrinsic major differences, reflecting that shift that Victor Watson mentioned in his paper, from the rural holiday story to urban and sub-urban settings and themes. Thus, my story involves a family, with mother and father very much involved and not briskly manoeuvred out of the way in chapter one. The storylines of both books reflect their differing geographical and maritime settings, which I'll return to later.

The Goblin's young crew of four has to deal with handling, not a small dinghy on a benign lake in summer, but with the high drama of a heavy cutter in the open sea, with swift tidal flows, no engine, potential collisions with huge buoys and lightships, fog, the threat of grounding on shoals, a storm at night, squalls, near collisions with other vessels and always the potential for being run down by ships negotiating the North Sea.

Aratika's heroine, Sam, on a night race in the comparatively sheltered waters of the Hauraki Gulf which lie east and north of Auckland city, has to deal with fewer dramas: an unconscious father, reluctant mother as 'skipper,'a yacht under spinnaker out of control in gathering dark and worsening weather, risk of collision and shipwreck; also no engine, seasickness, the landing on a cannibal beach and, for both mother and daughter, overcoming that well-recognised female insecurity and dependency of the period which the 1970s feminist movement throughout the Western world set about changing.

No, I came along too late to be directly influenced by Ransome, even though at the time I read We Didn't Mean to go to Sea with pleasure and admiration for its uncomplicated attitude towards girls (or as we say these days, its lack of gender stereotyping), its classical structure, clever pacing and economical, lucid journalist's prose. I like to think that something rubbed off, of those attributes.

Fifty, even twenty years earlier, in New Zealand's children's literature, it was a different story. As in England, from the early thirties on, there were writers clearly influenced by Ransome, though in New Zealand's infant publishing industry we're hardly talking even double digits.

A handful of authors produced adventure and survival stories which predated Ransome - I'm thinking of the first and still one of the best, Silver Island by Edith Howes, published in 1928. In it, the three Lester children sail to an uninhabited offshore island, probably Stewart Island at the extreme south of the country, seeking gold. After their boat founders, they must survive on the island by their wits - though unbeknown to them, they are being watched over by their kindly uncle, who surreptitiously visits at night. Tho not specifically set in boats, but matching the classic English adventure story even earlier was Six Little New Zealanders, from 1917, by Esther Glen, whose name is still remembered by the Library Association's Esther Glen Medal for a distinguished children's novel. Or The Cruise of the Crazy Jane, and its sequel Camping with a C, by Isabel Maude Peacock, from 1932 and 1934, both involving Auckland children on camping and boating adventures, sometimes, or without, their parents.

Jumping forward to a more productive period after the war, there was Barry Mitcalfe's The Long Holiday of 1964, (boys on holiday adventures), The Freedom of Ariki by Rollo Arnold, in whose story of cousins having holiday adventures academic Betty Gilderdale, writing in A Sea Change, finds 'a suggestion of Swallows and Amazons. '1 Or The Sea Islanders by Joyce West in 1970, four kids surviving in a deserted family bach, or cottage. Or the three so-called 'Bush'novels by Ruth Dallas from the early 70s - especially The Big Flood in the Bush in which Robbie builds a flattie boat that enables the children to explore the local creek. A writer called Patrick Wilson produced an early book about P-class dinghy racing on Tauranga Harbour.

Later, moving from the late 1970s through the 1980s, Anne de Roo, Jack Lasenby, Joan de Hamel and Margaret Beames, notably, have continued to explore the opportunities provided by groups of children on holiday, meeting up with oddballs, hermits, smugglers and villains, finding Maori artefacts, learning that their shy and pale English cousins are not such wimps after all, together having adventures which confound and amaze the adults, solve mysteries and end heroically.

But recent, specifically sailing novels, novels explicitly exploring our relationship with the sea that surrounds us? Strangely, in a country which twice now has won the America's Cup, small in population but rich in Polynesian and colonial settler maritime traditions, only six of any note have appeared in recent years and I have been responsible for three of them.

In Fired Up, a talented young Auckland writer named Sarah Ell created a strong female character who, despite losing her boat in a fire, succeeds in that still very male dominated sport of crack dinghy racing. Bob Kerr's story for younger children, The Optimist, takes an unwilling boy on a sailing adventure in one of those very tubby, quaint beginner dinghies. Helen Beaglehole's Strange Company turns a family boating holiday in the Marlborough Sounds into a mysterious adventure.

And then there's my Night Race to Kawau, and Tiggie Tompson All at Sea, the second of my new Tiggie series, which has an extensive contemporary section set on a square-rigger and a parallel historical story set on a typical emigrant ship, doing that nightmare, four-month, non-stop voyage from London docks to Lyttelton, New Zealand in 1859. With William Taylor, in an e-mail book called Hot Mail, I also wrote about a girl called Jessica on a family yachting cruise across the Pacific.

And that's seems to be all. In the 1990s we have been, internationally speaking, more into fantasy with the still-flowering genius of Margaret Mahy, social realism with Joy Cowley, Maurice Gee, Paula Boock, Kate di Goldi, David Hill and William Taylor, science fiction with Sherryl Jordan and Ken Catran. Not much, for a supposedly sport-mad, yachting-mad people, with 2200 miles of coastline, abundant lakes and rivers, seriously into pleasures and adventures year-round on the water.

Well, I think there are identifiable reasons for this, something to do with our third millennium attitudes towards children, and even more to do with land and seascape.

The children first. Reading Ransome, or any of those earlier New Zealand adventure stories, is like a breath of fresh air. Nostalgia and common sense rule, for here is a world where the law does not require children to wear lifejackets on small boats and bike helmets at all times on all roads; where parents happily let them walk (often barefoot) to school, or ride bareback; where we did not have tight occupational safety legislation and sue-happy lawyers and privacy acts, and accountability in all things. If there was one over-used and tedious buzz word of 1990s New Zealand, as economic rationalism, market forces ideologies and the 'business model'took root and spread their poisons through society, even into education and the arts, it was this.

Behind all this accountability, of course, is plain old fear, of danger and harm to life and property, litigation, lawyers and large sums of money. Compared with the relatively care-free New Zealand life-style up to the turbulent sixties, our society has become, like yours, increasingly urbanised and multi-cultural (tho some would add increasingly racist). Paradoxically, society allows permissiveness while expecting accountability.

Hard-pressed parents, both working, both stressed, are more fearful for their children - unlike the calm and reasonable Mrs Walker, who goes through the motions you'd expect of a caring, sensible but not overly protective middle-class parent before she lets the children go off with Jim Brading overnight on the Goblin. Then, middle-class book characters lived 'normal', well-ordered lives and had abnormal adventures in their holidays; now, authors deal with the fallout from separations, transience, school bullying, child abuse, stranger danger, sexuality, neglect, too much or too little money, you name it, book characters have quite enough going on in their day-to-day real life, never mind the holidays.

Worse than that, authors who would put their child characters through great physical outdoor adventures run the risk of being challenged by irate adult gatekeepers: why were those kids out tramping alone in the bush without a cellphone or proper equipment? Out on the water without lifejackets and adults? Allowed to walk round that dangerous headland, cross that dangerous river, take a bus alone at night? Why are they not shown wearing proper clothes, or a seatbelt? Why are they using such awful language?

Yet we all know that really big Adventures are very largely caused by Acts of God like the weather or earthquakes or fire - with or without combinations of politically incorrect and inevitable human errors like lack of communication, misunderstandings, forgetfulness, clumsiness, failure of nerve and pure bad luck. In children's adventure stories, also, children are very often thrown by adults or their own innocence, ignorance or inexperience into situations seemingly beyond their control, at least initially. And they do swear!

So you have to be subtle and inventive and subversive to write adventure stories for children in politically correct and accountable times, or just bloody-minded and write it anyway. I have some knowledge of that. Two years ago, William Taylor and I wrote a book literally in e-mails called Hot Mail which we've heard many adults dislike for its raw language and some truly terrible jokes. Some school librarians have taken the line of least resistance and kept it off their shelves; it didn't appear in any awards short-lists that year, though it has been generally praised by the more informed critics and has sold very well in both Australia and New Zealand.

I know from reading extracts in schools that the kids love its irreverent humour, excitement and fun. If they then read it, they may even take the point that William Taylor's wayward and rough-tongued 14-year-old character Dan the Man significantly matures and 'grows up'during the story. He consciously reduces his swearing, and drinking, and possibly even smoking, learns that passing exams is important and puts himself at personal risk to help his e-mail friend's yacht limping in to port after weathering a Pacific hurricane; what more moral a 'message'could you want?

The second reason, I think, for the scarcity of down under children's adventure stories on nautical themes is that we lack the sort of relatively benign waterways like Coniston Water, the Norfolk Broads, streams, brooks and those small lakes you call gravel pits, where groups of kids can reasonably safely, and predominantly in summer, mess around in boats.

In New Zealand, children mess around with home-made rafts on creeks, but they do not mess around much in small craft without adult supervision on lakes, or rivers, or harbours and coastal waters. This has nothing to do with political correctness, or over-protectiveness, and everything to do with common sense. After a thousand years of Maori and two hundred years of European occupation, though admired for its beauty by tourists, New Zealand is still an unsettling, unforgiving and untamed country, lying on the complex junction of two tectonic plates in the earth's crust along the Pacific Rim of Fire.

We have earthquakes, little ones frequently, big ones occasionally, devastating major cities like Wellington and Napier in the past one hundred years. Wellington will go again, one day, as might Auckland, a rapidly growing city of 1. 4 million sitting astride an isthmus of more than 60 little dormant volcanoes.

We have very active volcanoes, like Ruapehu in the central North Island, which blew, spectacularly, as recently as 1995. We have extinct volcanoes whose previously violent eruptions - for example, the explosion of the Lake Taupo area 1800 years ago, recorded by the Chinese - have created major lakes, or thrown up islands out of the sea, like Rangitoto in Auckland's Waitemata Harbour. Our rivers are wide, swift and unpredictable, given to rapid rises and flash floods. Tho lacking snakes and other animal or insect dangers, our rugged and impenetrable bush deals with unprepared or inexperienced or plain stupid human intruders simply by getting them lost, or sends them sliding off down eroded gullies and muddy slips. The mountains deal you avalanches, or rock falls, or two thousand-foot drops.

As for that lengthy coastline, longer than the east and western seaboards of the United States- yes, we do have some of the world's most beautiful white beaches, lined in summer with the crimson blooms of pohutukawa trees, but the harbours are often full of sandbanks and extremely tidal, the coastline is mostly cliff-edged, with jagged or concealed hidden dangers and pounding, dumping surf.

The weather, prevailing from the south-west, or directly from the polar south, or from the vast fetch of the Pacific north-east, is, putting it kindly, unpre