83
New Zealand
Betty Gilderdale
The first book for children with a New Zealand setting was Stories About Many Things:
Founded on Facts (1833), in which an anonymous author tells stories about New
Zealand to an enquiring small boy. They feature descriptions of flora and fauna as well of
the indigenous people—the Maori. The same ingredients were to appear in a number of
early books especially those written about the North Island and largely giving a
missionary perspective.
Early books from the South Island were dominated by the experiences of mainly
middle-class women settlers and were compiled from diaries and letters sent “Home’ to
England. They graphically recorded how, deprived of the household help they were
accustomed to in Britain, gently nurtured ladies had to learn how to bake their own
bread, wash their own dishes, attend to poultry and the vegetable garden and bear their
children miles away from medical expertise.
The most entertaining of the early writers was Lady Barker, whose accounts of a three-
year sojourn on a sheep station in Canterbury, Station Life in New Zealand (1870), is a
classic for adults, but her lively stories for children, Stories About... (1870), A Christmas
Cake in Four Quarters (1871) and Boys (1874), also contain amusing domestic detail.
In the North Island, however, disputes between Maori and settlers eventually erupted
into the Land Wars, and overseas writers such as Jules Verne, G.A.Henty and Reginald
Horsley were quick to seize upon the opportunity for fast-paced adventure stories set in
this strange volcanic country where hitherto unknown native peoples posed a threat to
the new wave of European immigrants.
These novels were published in London or Paris by writers who were not directly
involved in the conflict. European New Zealanders who subsequently drew upon the
same material were at pains to emphasise the tragedy of what was virtually a civil war,
where individual friendships between Maori and European sometimes triumphed over
tribal and national affiliations. The best known of these novels is William Satchell’s The
Greenstone Door (1914), but the friendship between Maori and European in times of
conflict was re-visited thirteen years later by Mona Tracy in Rifle and Tomahawk (1927),
and more recently by Anne de Roo in Jacky Nobody (1983).
By the end of the century a new generation of children had been born in New Zealand
and there was a sudden flurry of activity to provide stories for them with a local setting.
Unfortunately, instead of honest non-fiction to tell children about the local flora and
fauna, this information was clothed in ‘flower fairy’ tales which were condescending and
sentimental. One writer, however, emerged from the morass as an excellent and prolific