Auckland: Sound of a city's voice
By Gordon McLauchlan in The New Zealand Herald
As Auckland merges to create a supercity, the Herald looks back at how Auckland has changed over the years. Click here to view the full series.


Above - John Mulgan, author of novel Man Alone.
 Photo / Alexander Turnbull Library

The faux poet from Christchurch, D'Arcy Cresswell, has been quoted as saying many years ago: "New Zealand wasn't truly discovered until Ursula Bethell 'very earnestly digging' raised her head to look at the mountains. Almost everyone had been blind before."
He is not the only one to make that point. Although Bethell was one of those Cantabrians who were more English than the English, her poetry rang true, without the maudlin overtones of what went before her.


About the same time, although half her age, a greater New Zealand poet, R. A. K. Mason, (pic right) was starting to write in Auckland and he was the true discoverer of a poetry that helped the country emerge from the grey shadow of colonial artistic life, which had previously existed as an appendage of British culture.

During the 1930s, and mostly in Auckland because Auckland had what no other place had as much of - a growing urban population more attached to the outside world - these writers, some of them self-consciously, set about telling New Zealand stories in a New Zealand way.

Argentinian novelist Guillermo Martinez refers to a proverb of his
homeland: "A small town is a vast hell". And in terms of literature
and art that is as true of New Zealand as anywhere else.

Artists such as painter Frances Hodgkins, writers Katherine Mansfield, Jean Devanny and James Courage, and scholar Ronald Syme had fled from the country's intolerable (for the artist) narrowness and puritanism. And stayed away.

New Zealand remained a hard place to breathe for writers who often hyperventilate in the act of creating, but the place at least had the pull of "home" for those such as A. R. D Fairburn and Frank Sargeson.(pic left)They went to England but came back. Some writers did not leave.

Read Gordon McLauchlan's full, interesting piece at NZ Herald.
Footnote:
The Bookman  takes this opportunity to thank the NZ Herald for publishing this series of features on Auckland and it's history. The features have been well written by a diverse group of writers and collectively they make a timely, popular and accessible record as the structure of the city is about to change enormously. Perhaps the features could be turned into a book?