Review of FROM THE MAINLAND: An Anthology of South Island Writing, edited by Lawrence Jones and Heather Murray (The Godwit Press, 1995)

Nicola Cummins
Department of Engish
University of Otago
New Zealand

nicola.cummins@stonebow.otago.ac.nz

Deep South v.1 n.2 (May, 1995)

When making their selection for the anthology From the Mainland Lawrence Jones and Heather Murray imposed upon themselves a series of restrictions: the writing had to be published since the early 1980s and obviously, it had to be about the South Island. Leaving those considerations aside the anthology still manages to encompass historical writing (Graham Billing, Stevan Eldred-Grigg), autobiography (Toss Wollaston, Janet Frame, Dan Davin and Ruth Dallas) and poetry ( everyone you'd expect and the odd surprise, such as Allan Curnow) as well as the common or garden-variety short story. Stylistically, the works run the gamut from the great New Zealand critical realism tradition (Owen Marshall) through to post-modern parody (Forbes Williams), surrealism (Michael Harlow) and magic realism (Christine Johnson).

Although From the Mainland begins at the northern tip of the South Island and then proceeds down towards the south in logical geographical fashion as if the reader was travelling State Highway One, I found my greatest pleasure in this book came from not following the route that been mapped out for me by the editors, but from dipping into the anthology, unbound by constraints of time and location.

To commence your reading of this anthology at its start and then proceed in orderly fashion through the pages would result in an impression of a harsh, unsympathetic race inhabiting the northern reaches, but this would be slowly mitigated as you moved ever more southerly. The northern half of the South Island as presented in the anthology is a harsh, humourless locale where the dominant human impulse is violence. Violence towards a child in The Two -Tooth in the Thicket; the violent desperation latent beneath the tourist-glossy exterior of Saxton, Nelson's alter-ego in the extract from Maurice Gee's The Burning Boy, and a gruesome reworking of an urban legend in Joy Cowley's The Cleaning of Windows where a woman splices razor blades into the buoy ropes on her crayfish pots to dissuade her estranged brother from poaching her catch. Something approaching humanity is more in evidence once you strike Oamaru and Palmerston. Janet Frame's Oamaru contains a mix of memories, some happy, some uncomfortable and humiliating. Palmerston makes a disguised entrance in Fiona Farrell's A Story about Skinny Louie from The Skinny Louie Book and provides sanctuary and respectability for Skinny Louie's illegitimate child. However, there are flashes of human warmth in some of the northern writing, Toss Wollaston's The Twenty-seventh Nun, which tells of his early days as a Rawleighs' salesman, is a charming account of a developing friendship between two otherworldly people. An anthology functions as a sampler and I am eager to read more from Wollaston. Here's hoping the publication of Wollaston's second volume of autobiography is imminent (First volume is Sage Tea, 1982).

This anthology has a second valuable function apart from that of sampler, which is that it provides a repository for some excellent material that has not previously been widely disseminated such as the excerpt from Wollaston's forthcoming second volume of autobiography. Michael Henderson's story, The Two-Tooth in the Thicket is another instance. It won the Dominion Sunday Times short story competition in 1991 but was too late for inclusion in his short story collection The Lie of the Land and has only previously been published in the Dominion Sunday Times edition of 20 October, 1991. It is a powerful story of the bleakness of male adolescence on a farm in Golden Bay. The oppressiveness of the boy's Calvinistic guardian is alleviated only by his fantasy of being the cricketer Bert Sutcliffe. The story's idiom is uncompromising back-block Kiwi grotesquely interspersed with Old Testament hellfire and brimstone. Lay over the top of that mixture the heroic cricket commentaries that run through the protagonist's head in an effort to block out reality and you have the grim gothicism of this piece which impressed John Fowles, the celebrity judge of the 1991 short story competition. But what was the uniquely South Island quality of this story? Surely the puritanical child-rearing practices delineated here were prevalent throughout the country in their day? I have a suspicion that some selections may have been based on the fact of their fitting in with the geographical constraints of the anthology rather than because of their inherent rendering of a South Island sense of place.

In their introduction Lawrence Jones and Heather Murray state that their selection criteria were personal: 'each selection is there because one or both of the editors liked it' (p.9). They were also 'looking for works that evoke a strong sense of South Island places, people and/or history' and for 'writing with a strong feel of South Island life' (p.10). For me that South Island 'sense' or 'feel' is the landscape; I've seen the 'Welcome to Our World' ad for Toyota cars far too often to believe anything else.

Lawrence Durrell wrote of a quality which he termed 'spirit of place' and references throughout the anthology to familiar place names and the use of NZ terms do work to evoke something of this. Janet Frame in particular judiciously uses what can best be described as 'NZ adjectives' to convey 'spirit of place'. Her description of her father's 'long cream-coloured Mosgiel underpants, (p.109), and 'the old dunny with its dunny roses spilling in a mass of white buds over the corrugated tin-hat roof' (p.109), could only refer to a NZ scene. But does any of the writing convey a sense of the unique wildness and grandeur of the South Island landscape compared to the more built up and pastoral North Island? My feeling is no. The Rita Angus painting 'Cass' that features on the dust-jacket embodies the South Island feeling for me far more successfully than any of the works it contains. The human figure in this landscape is insignificant and the efforts of humans to impose on the landscape with their railway lines, pine trees and power poles are similarly paltry. All interest in the painting is focused on the magnificently wrought angles and planes of the mountains of the central South Island high country. It is the wild and grand qualities which make the Mainland different and like anything wild, they have proven hard to capture. Brian Turner's two poems come closest. In 'Lawrence Cemetery' he writes 'One walks with care on such impenitent ground' (p.206). Here the landscape's lack of forgiveness toward human interlopers is perfectly encapsulated; this is the line I want to remember next time I stumble over the rusted relics of early gold-miners in Central Otago.

Turner's other poem in the anthology 'In the Nineties' links the world of highbrow culture to the Otago landscape, both are important:

Say violins remind you
of moonlight on snowfields in spring,
pianos of high country streams,
and a flute of dun hills
swept by tussock
above which hawks turn, stall
and turn.

Again Turner succeeds in conjuring vivid images that are typical South Island snapshots.

I enjoyed much of the anthology; it provides the reader with the means for a chair-bound journey around the South Island, and it does allow for tantalising samples of a wide range of authorial styles, but ultimately, except in the instances I have outlined above, I did not experience 'a strong feel of South Island life' (p.10) as I read my way through and around the Mainland. If that is what you seek then I would recommend a book that blends both text and pictures, such as the late Robin Morrison's The South Island of New Zealand from the Road.