local and international awards for picture books, collections of stories such as The First
Margaret Mahy Story Book (1972) and novels for older children like The Haunting (1982),
which won the British Carnegie Medal.
Although Mahy’s books have international and timeless appeal there are,
nevertheless, strong New Zealand components in her work. Her settings are recognisably
New Zealand landscapes and seascapes, and the sea which surrounds the islands is
featured in many stories including The Man Whose Mother Was a Pirate (1972), and
Sailor Jack and the Twenty Orphans (1970). Earthquakes occur in a number of stories
and volcanoes erupt in Aliens in the Family (1986).
One of the most noticeable components in New Zealand children’s literature is the
number of elderly, and often idiosyncratic, characters who appear in stories. One of the
most celebrated was the old sailor Falter Tom in Maurice Duggan’s Falter Tom and the
Water Boy (1958), but Margaret Mahy continues the tradition with the poetic tale of old
Phoebe in The Wind Between the Stars (1976), with Great Uncle Magnus Pringle in Ultra
Violet Catastrophe (1975), who refuses to be cosseted like a pot plant, and, most recently
in the remarkable portrait of Sophie, a sufferer from Alzheimer’s disease in Memory
(1987), who is treated with discerning sympathy and manages, in spite of a chaotic
existence, to retain her dignity.
This respect and tolerance for the elderly may well stem from the Maori veneration of
grandparents, and since the 1970s there has been a considerable revival in Maori
culture. One of the first picture books to be published in full colour in New Zealand was
Jill Bagnall’s Crayfishing with Grandmother (1973), which was also the first picture book
to feature both Maori and English texts. It was another grandmother in The Boy and the
Taniwha (1966), who initiated her grandson into Maori legends and customs. The book
was the first to be published by Auckland author R.L.Bacon, a teacher who felt that his
pupils were lacking in knowledge of the Maori, and who also insisted that his well-told
stories should be equally well illustrated by Maori artists. He later broke new ground
with three books, The House of the People (1977), The Fish of our Fathers (1984) and The
Home of the Winds (1986), which explain how the first Maori meeting house, war canoe
and fortified pa were constructed, and which are outstandingly interpreted by
R.H.Jahnke’s rhythmical stylised pictures. Since then a number of Maori artists,
including Robyn Kahukiwa and Gavin Bishop have both written and illustrated picture
books which have added richness and variety to the canon of New Zealand illustration.
The 1970s saw a number of developments which were favourably to influence children’s
literature. In 1969 a Children’s Literature Association had been formed in Auckland
which drew together parents, teachers and librarians and which received much
encouragement from Dorothy Butler, a specialist children’s bookseller, and one of her
staff, Ronda Armitage, later to become the author of The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch
(1977). The Association exerted pressure on newspapers and journals to review
children’s books—something never previously attempted—and in 1973 the New Zealand
Herald became the first newspaper in the country to give reviewing space to children’s
literature.
The growing interest in the genre also led to critical examination and in 1980
J.B.Ringer’s Young Emigrants, New Zealand Juvenile Fiction 1833–1918 was published
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