story-teller. This was Edith Howes, a science teacher who was anxious that children
should know more about the natural world. Her most famous book at the time was The
Cradle Ship (1916), in which she was daring enough to explain “the facts of life’ to
children through showing them how first fish, then reptiles, birds and mammals give
increasing protection to their young from conception to maturity, finally finishing with
drawing parallels with human beings. The book was enormously successful, not only in
New Zealand but in Britain and Australia and it was translated into French, Italian and
Danish. Nevertheless it has not stood the test of time, and it is her adventure story
Silver Island (1928), which is still enjoyable and which became the forerunner of
numerous New Zealand ‘survival’ stories.
Edith Howes worked in the South Island, and another Christchurch writer, journalist
Esther Glen, was one of her contemporaries. Both authors profited from the favourable
climate for children’s literature which was developing at the time. A library conference in
Dunedin in 1910 had advocated the establishment of juvenile libraries and reading
rooms in all municipal libraries, and children’s reading was greatly encouraged. Local
authors were also finding a publisher in the Christchurch firm of Whitcombe and Tombs
and were not always forced to send their manuscripts to London for publication. In the
spirit of the times, Esther Glen established a children’s supplement in the Christchurch
Sun where she published the work of aspiring young writers. She was eager to
encourage a body of work for New Zealand children and felt particularly challenged by
Australian Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians (1894) so in answer she wrote Six
Little New Zealanders (1917).
The novel, with its sequel Uncles Three at Kamahi (1926), is reminiscent of Lady
Barker’s witty accounts of life on a New Zealand sheep station, as six city children from
Auckland spend a summer with three bachelor uncles in Canterbury. The children are
unused to the country and the uncles are unused to children so the resulting mixture of
misunderstandings and mishaps makes for amusing reading.
The distinctive way of life on large sheep-stations was picked up again thirty years
later in a number of novels written by Joyce West in the 1950s, beginning with Drover’s
Road (1953). Although she depicts a North Island farm, there is still much in common
with earlier books which have a rural setting. Food is plentiful, events such as
agricultural shows and point-to-points dominate the social calendar, and human
relationships are predominantly cheerful and uncomplicated, the drama occurring in
battles with nature—flash floods, drowning stock, bush fires or hurricanes.
Books set in the country are less dominated by the vagaries of human behaviour than
those by the Auckland writer Isabel Maud Peacocke, who offers a more unhappy picture
of urban life in the 1920s and 1930s. Her world is one of ex-servicemen returning from
the First World War to a country where unemployment and poverty are commonplace
and where children, often orphaned, are subject to custody disputes. It is a world where
people die because they cannot afford medical treatment and where social snobbery is
rife. Her adults are frequently irresponsible, but her children are always well-intentioned
and are generally tolerant of aberrant adult behaviour. Her many novels are variable in
style, at best incisive and satirical, at worst sentimental and banal, but her acute
portrayal of life in Auckland at the time is unrivalled.
NEW ZEALAND 845