With the honourable exception of Margaret Mahy’s work, fantasy has always been the
weakest genre in New Zealand writing for children, but since the 1980s some of the
most able authors have turned to science fiction. They include Barry Faville, Maurice
Gee, Gaylene Gordon, Sheryll Jordan, Jack Lasenby and Caroline Macdonald.
Apart from Gaylene Gordon, who explores aspects of mind control, novels by the other
writers are frequently set in the future, after some holocaust, but where New Zealand
has escaped through its isolation from the rest of the world. The theme offers an
appropriate opportunity to examine systems of government, the use and abuse of power
and indirectly to caution young people to avoid the mistakes of their elders and prepare
for a different world.
Because of the quality of their prose style and their skill as story-tellers, these writers
have managed to avoid overt didacticism, but in lesser writers throughout the 160 years
briefly discussed in this survey, didacticism and condescension have been the major
faults, and the worst books in New Zealand literature are those which attempt to deliver
information.
Joy Cowley, however, is one contemporary author whose stories for young children
certainly contain messages but they are so charmingly recounted that the charge of
didacticism could scarcely be levelled against them. Books such as The Duck in the Gun
(1969) and The Fierce Little Woman and the Wicked Pirate (1984) deflect violence with
humour as they point out the absurdities of armed conflict in the former and the
underlying motives of aggressors in the latter.
Anthony Holcroft is another writer who uses timeless fairy tale and mythical themes,
but places them within a deeply felt and acutely observed South Island landscape. His
overall message in collections of short stories like Tales of the Mist (1987), is that greed
and possessiveness not only destroy human relationships but even threaten the land
itself, which becomes barren.
As we have seen, the land has always taken a central place on the stage of New
Zealand literature and the challenges afforded by these mountainous islands, isolated in
the Pacific and vulnerable to the vagaries of oceanic weather, have shaped the New
Zealand character. Over the past century-and-a-half children’s literature has reflected
the development of the country from a colonial outpost to a multi-cultural nation in its
own right. The best contemporary writers are no longer trying self-consciously to
establish a national identity. They are dealing with universal subjects of interest and in
consequence are increasingly recognised in international literary circles. Nevertheless,
children’s books are peculiarly vulnerable to economic variations, depending as they do
upon government funding to schools and libraries. It would be ironic if, owing to the
current economic climate, the renaissance of children’s literature in the 1990s were to
suffer the fate of writers in the 1920s and 1930s, whose books were lost after
Depression and War. At present, however, New Zealand authors have
achieved international success out of all proportion to the size of the population, a
success which could never have been visualised when the first halting tales in Stories
About Many Things were first penned.
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