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North of the Bombay hills

Kevin Ireland takes a literary look at Auckland and the North Shore.

From its purchase from the Ngati Whatua, in 1840, Auckland steadily and increasingly featured in our writing, but it was not until John Logan Campbell published his reminiscences in Poenamo, in 1881, that a book captured the spirit and feeling of the place in what we might now call a 'classic' sense.

Campbell was present at the beginnings of the Auckland settlement, and his book does not describe a mere setting or backdrop. He incorporates Auckland into his narrative almost as a character in its own right.

Many other writers besides Campbell lived there, or passed through the place - though not all chose to write about it. Among the interesting literary visitors were such exotics and adventurers as Joel Polack, a Jew who lived in Auckland for five years in the 1840s, and who had previously published two book-length accounts of life in the far north; and - briefly in the 1860s Sygmund Wisniowski, who wrote our finest early novel, Tikera, or, Children of the Queen of Oceania.

Although published in Polish in1877, it was not translated into English until 1972.

If the young settlement did not feature as a significant background in much of the work of the early fiction writers who lived in Auckland, it was because they usually favoured the more dramatic and symbolic outback settings of farms, mountains or bush. When our first crop of significant local novelists, such as Edith Grossman and William Satchell, moved to Auckland, they made little reference to the place in their two finest fictions. The titles of Satchell's The Toll of the Bush (1905) and Grossman's The Heart of the Bush (1910) say it all.

The more interesting of the first authors to describe Auckland were writers of non-fiction, such as Edward Shortland. Fiction writers, from Grossman on, began to write about 'city' subjects, viewpoints and characters as society became more urbanised.

Jane Mander marvellously represents the turning point in the development of what we can now recognise to have been a growing literary awareness and sophistication. She came to live in Auckland after publishing The Story of a New Zealand River (1920), but its writing was heavily influenced by living and working in cities overseas. Grossman also had advanced political, social and moral concerns, and she too had travelled extensively, but the spirit of her writing remained sternly judgemental and Victorian. Mander injected into her writing the more complex attitudes and moods of a society in rapid change.

The irony is that this social transformation would ultimately result in the Auckland writer, Barry Crump, describing his characters (from the 1960s to the 1980s) through a haze of rural nostalgia. The 'outback' had now become merely an 'outlandish' place - rough-romantic and anachronistic.

For its first 90 years Auckland could be described fairly accurately as a town where dozens of writers largely worked in isolation. They may have intersected through journalism, libraries and societies of mutual interest, but it was not until the 1930s that a distinct Auckland literary community evolved. Two other factors, besides an increase in urban population, were crucial. The Depression endowed penniless writers with at least an equal social status to other down-and-out workers, and the rise of new literary and current affairs magazines supplied them with a forum.

For instance, the short-lived Auckland University magazine Phoenix (1931-32), edited first by James Bertram, then by the poet R.A.K. Mason, had a far-reaching influence. It transformed a moment of literary upsurge into lasting myth, and it identified new Auckland talents, such as Mason himself and the poet A.R.D. Fairburn.

The Auckland scene was also enriched in the 1930s by the novelist and politician John A. Lee and by the equally prolific novelist and poet Robin Hyde. But there is no one person who influenced fiction writing more than Frank Sargeson, who moved permanently to Takapuna on the North Shore in that same decade.

This is the point where names begin to tumble out - John Mulgan, Roderick Finlayson, Dave Ballantyne and more than a hundred others - and where we can become simply overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of poets, novelists, playwrights and non-fiction writers,
besides editors, publishers, librarians and booksellers, who have contributed to the vitality, depth and variety of literature in Auckland.

But lists can be useful in giving a broad outline to the literary character of a particular area of any city. Recently a friend and I drew up a roll of all the names of writers we could remember who have lived or worked at some time on Auckland's North Shore. It is not definitive by any means - some names will have slipped our memories - but it suggests an absorbing new angle on the area as a thriving literary enclave.

In no particular order, the list includes: Satchell, Mander, Hyde, Sargeson, Mason and Fairburn, of the deceased writers I've mentioned already. Then there are Bruce Mason, Maurice Duggan, Keith Sinclair, Greville Texidor, Anna Kavan, Ian Hamilton, D'Arcy Cresswell, Margaret Escott, Kendrick Smithyman, Mary Stanley, Phoebe Meikle, Antony Alpers, Isabel Peacocke, Susie Mactier (the 'Takapuna Lake Poet' and founder of the Takapuna Public Library) and the celebrated German poet Karl Wolfskehl.

Among the living, are Janet Frame, Allen Curnow, Maurice Gee, Maurice Shadbolt, Shonagh Koea, Hone Tuwhare, Barbara Anderson, Wystan Curnow, Michael King, Sam Hunt, C.K. Stead, Michael Gifkins, Jean Watson, Barry Crump, Barry Mitcalfe, Diana Moorhead, Warwick Roger, Sarah Campion, Anne Salmond, Tina Shaw, Noel Virtue, Tessa Duder, Graeme Lay, Christine Cole Catley, Joan Rosier-Jones, Robin Dudding, Diane Brown, Lee Dowrick, Leigh Davis, Michelle Leggott, Virginia Were and myself.

That's just over 50 names. But it's a formidable start. And it is as good as a gold mine for students of the future.

Poet and writer Kevin Ireland was conferred with an honorary Doctor of Literature last year. At the time he recollected undergoing Frank Sargeson's 'pressure cooker' school of writing in the shed of Sargeson's Takapuna house.

The Albany campus now offers a paper that covers North Shore's literary heritage, including the work of Sargeson, Fairburn and Curnow. Contact Dr Mary Paul.