followed two years later by Betty Gilderdale’s A Sea Change, 145 Years of New Zealand
Junior Fiction (1982), a comprehensive survey of the subject from 1833–1978.
While literary critics were discussing the merits of local writers, Professor Marie Clay of
Auckland University’s Education department was discovering that children learn to read
more quickly if they are given “real’ books rather than graded readers. This method of
teaching reading was so successful that educational publishers such as Ashton
Scholastic, Shortland and Heinemann commissioned well-known writers to write short
stories which were then attractively illustrated and offered to schools for the teaching of
reading. At present not only New Zealand schools but English-speaking countries
overseas, including the USA, import these stories and use the Clay method of teaching
reading.
During the same period a number of international publishers had become established
in Auckland, bringing with them greater expertise in colour reproduction. This factor,
added to the use of picture books in the schools, led to an explosion in the production of
local picture books. Two of the best known New Zealand writers of books for the young,
however, are no longer domiciled in New Zealand. Pamela Allen lives in Australia and
Ronda Armitage and her illustrator husband David live in England.
The most internationally successful author/illustrator who remains firmly in New
Zealand is Lynley Dodd, whose cumulative rhyming texts relate the exploits of Hairy
Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy (1983, and sequels), with his canine and feline friends.
Text and lively pictures are totally complementary; Dodd never stoops to
anthropomorphism and her animals are characters in their own right, with names that
are as expressive as their actions; who can forget Schnitzel von Krumm the dachshund
or Scarface Claw, the terrible tom cat?
Lynley Dodd’s animals have international appeal and during the 1980s there appeared
to be less of an obsession with portraying New Zealand in print. Those books which, in
fact, convey a vivid picture of life in New Zealand do so unselfconsciously, for example,
the novels of Aucklander Tessa Duder, which depict strong female characters sailing on
the harbour, playing in an orchestra or, in her popular Alex (1987) series, becoming a
swimming champion.
The New Zealand preoccupation with winning at sport is satirised in William Taylor’s
The Worst Soccer Team Ever (1987) and its sequels, and these amusing school stories
explore a genre which has been generally neglected in New Zealand. In the late 1920s
and 1930s Phillis Garrard had written Hilda at School, a New Zealand Story (1929) and
its three sequels which featured a country day-school, while in the 1940s and 1950s
Clare Mallory depicted an exclusive South Island girls’ boarding school in Merry Begins
(1947) and subsequent novels. In general, however, adventures in New Zealand seem to
take place outside the classroom and even in the William Taylor novels much of the
action is outside school hours.
Taylor has written a number of novels for older readers which offer a less happy
picture than that of the ebullient pupils of Greenhill Intermediate School. In Possum
Perkins (1987) he sensitively explores the subject of incest, and other novels have
characters who tangle with the law, growing marijuana, stealing hub caps or even
holding up a bank. They reflect a society which has growing social problems and an
economic climate which does not favour the poor.
848 THE WORLD OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE