A presentation on 2nd April 2017 by by Tauranga Writers president Jenny Argante to the Tauranga Historical Society.
Tauranga Writers was founded on the 21st June 1967.
If I were to write my own memoir, I would begin, “I am a word wizard born into a family of mathemagicians…”
Yet even when writers don’t pen actual autobiography, as this would be, everything they write reveals something about them.
That is why when I came to New Zealand over fifteen years ago, my first strategy for rapid integration into this seemingly familiar, strangely different English-speaking nation was to read your past so I could write my future here.
So well did I do at exploring the reporters, writers and recorders of New Zealand’s history, that within a year I won Takahe’s Cultural Essay competition with exactly this topic, broadened beyond the personal to what we all can learn, especially as writers of the future, from writers of the past – writers of poetry, fiction and prose.
It was in exploring in particular the history and personalities of Tauranga City and the Bay of Plenty that I first stumbled across Tauranga Writers and allowed myself the pleasure and privilege of dipping into writings from No Name, No Trumpets; Freelance 1 and 2; The Eye of the Thorn; The Turning Face; Broken Chant and many other sometimes dire, mostly delightful offerings from the past.
(And the existence of Freelance 1 and 2 is why, when Tauranga Writers started producing our annual showcase of members’ work in 2015, it wasn’t only the fact that those two issues exist, but that I am editor-in chief of another Freelance, sub-titled ‘writers helping writers.’ Byline was a great alternative title, being the credit a writer publishes under, and we’ve published two so far, to glowing reviews. Creating history, we hope.)
I’m not always drawn to what the writers themselves might have thought were works of the highest merit. For instance, William E Morris, who wrote an acrostic poem to celebrate Tauranga Writer’s 25th anniversary, probably thought his four volumes of A Contradiction in Terms would be his literary legacy. I confess I turn more often to Please turn the page: the importance of literature to the growing child. Not only does this still rate as a powerful argument expressed with style and vigour, it is also accompanied by delightful black and white line drawings.
And that’s what happens when you begin to delve into the past of any individual person or place, any group or organisation. You’re constantly surprised by that library angel, Serendipity, whose discoveries and digressions lead you down intriguing and challenging pathways. I am sure this is why some books take so long to write: it is the diversions you allow yourself to be seduced by that take you off your intended route.
So when I did join Tauranga Writers, I became their in-house archivist, as it were, a role well-suited to one who is past librarian and teacher.
Was it me who coined the phrase: ‘A day is wasted that you don’t learn something new?’ I use it so often it ought to be. Or the suggestion that, if knowledge is the power, then
information is the key. I can’t with absolute truth claim them as my own; we are all unconscious plagiarists at some time or another, but they are still beliefs I live by.
I constantly state that Tauranga Writers is New Zealand’s longest-running self-help group for members, and I believe it to be true. For those of you who wonder, the New Zealand Society of Authors did precede us, being founded in 1936; but it has always been, until recently, more of a professional association for published authors than anything else.
As an aside, this began to change under Kyle Mewburn’s two terms as President, acknowledging the amazing leap into self-publishing that has been taking place worldwide over the past decade, and especially in New Zealand. (I could present a convincing argument that this is the most difficult country in the world in which to be a writer.)
NZSA is now moving in the right direction of assisting new and emerging writers and the unpublished as well as those who’ve already found a more traditional home for their writings. I’m also associated, as another aside, with Freelance – Writers Helping Writers, another stalwart of the grassroots literary scene in New Zealand, established 35 years ago. This other golden oldie was originally published as the inhouse journal of the Freelance Writers Association, which never existed in any formal or legal sense, but still achieved tremendous things over the years.
I think I’ve established that I’m interested in history, and with a degree in history and literature from the University of the West Midlands, it has to be literary history that most engages my attention. But that was English, occasionally European, history and literature. Here, when I began exploring the past, I discovered a unique history, astonishing literature.
We won’t go down that side path, however tempting, so I’ll just say that any excursion into the past of New Zealand literature, Tauranga Writers Group, and the individual writers who have joined it in the past, always begins with a Google search and a visit to the New Zealand Room. Imagine my pleasure when delving into the history of Tauranga Writers in preparation for our 50th birthday celebrations to find so much I could have used in our Jubilee blog, but given a 400-word limit had to content myself with this about our founding year:
IN 1967 YOU COULD BUY A 4-BEDROOM HOUSE IN OTUMOETAI for $6,950 with wood floors throughout and a double garage – and a new Holden to park in that garage for just under $1,100.
Ho Chi Minh was on trial for war crimes in Vietnam, and the first V-Jet Service was flying tourists to South Africa. Also in the wider world Arab and Israeli forces stood ready for war ‘in the worst Middle East crisis since the 1956 Sinai War.’
1967 was when everyone learned how to convert pounds, shillings and pence into decimal currency, with native birds and plants chosen to decorate the new dollar bills.
Hogan’s Heroes and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. created audiences for AKTV- 4, and the Book Page of The Bay of Plenty Times was reviewing more books
than it does today, some in great depth – like The Changing Face of the Leader in Maori Society by Dr. Maharaia Winiata (Blackwood & Janet Paul.)
International Expo ’67 was on in Montreal, with New Zealand among the participating nations. Camelot was in production in Hollywood at a cost of $US10 million – and rising. Tauranga’s new police station opened on the corner of Willow Street and Maclean, and a Maori Civic Centre was going up at the northern end of The Strand.
Sealing of the Tauranga Airport runway finished. Bananas not kiwifruit were ‘la fruit de la jour’ and there was a strong drive to promote New Zealand as a tourist attraction. A rail strike threatened, and grocers discussed rationing. Over 70 drivers signed up for safer driving courses, and Japan and New Zealand engaged in top-level talks on offshore fishing limits. The Government worried about the mass migration of Maori workers overseas (mainly to Australia) and about a significant drop in the birth rate, due no doubt to the pill.
The Molyneux Report expressed reservations on the viability of the Port of Tauranga as a cargo and container port, even though plans were in progress for a massive new cool store close to the docks. HMNZS Waikato returned to her home port of Tauranga decked with flags for the occasion. In two months at sea she had called to bunker at The Azores, Trinidad, Balboa, San Diego, Hawaii and Pago Pago.
Local residents voiced concerns about ‘beach dwelling sprawl’ in Tauranga, Te Puke and the Mount, and the Civil Defence issued a helpful book on what to do in the event of a disaster, and how to ensure your warnings were audible and acted upon.
The circus came to town.
Situations vacant: mainly for farming and service work, clerk or typist, and salesmen on commission – though they also required a port captain at Mount Maunganui.
Lion was the brew for any good keen man, and Commodore his choice for a smoko. Local building firm Guinness Brothers were twenty years old.
And Tauranga Writers was formed on the 21st of June.
Speaking of good keen men, one of our members is Robin Lee-Robinson, who was married to Barry Crump for twelve years and has recorded the history of that marriage in her own memoir, In Salting the Gravy. ‘Hideously proofed’ was how it was described by Steve Braunias, one of the Bay’s most successful and talented writers, though not a nice person, in my opinion. Hideously proofed because Robin could get no publisher interested in publishing what they saw as an attack upon a much-loved Kiwi icon.
Still a compelling story, and her narrative is endorsed, as it were, by his brother Colin Crump’s story of his own experience of domestic violence, In Endless Fear. We all know now that it takes a few generations to break this cycle of abuse born of habit and retaliation.
We also had, as a former President, Bronwyn Elsmore, now a prize-winning writer of plays and novels. She’ll be revisiting Tauranga for our June 2017 birthday week of masterclasses in
creative writing and for the reading of her latest play, performed in Auckland last year to excellent reviews. Fallout is about the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior thirty years ago, and Bronwyn was living here in Rushton Avenue, one road up from me, when that significant event occurred. One historical fact you won’t know is that she was an active member of a Tauranga anti-nuclear group, who claim that Rushton Avenue was the first street in the world to be declared a nuclear-free zone.
One of Bronwyn’s earliest plays was written in Tauranga and premiered locally: Gumboots, a musical comedy. Perhaps we should re-stage that some time and see how it has held up over the years. She also first emerged as a respected contributor to Maori culture, history and literature while living in the Bay of Pleny.
Perhaps I could coerce her into writing a dramatic monologue of another Tauranga woman whose professionalism and writing skills I deeply respect and admire, Evelyn Stokes. We can’t claim her or those other literary Dames, Fiona Kidman and Lynley Dodd, as past members, but they have been written about, interviewed, and their works reviewed many times by Tauranga Writers.
Tauranga Writers also had the privilege of birthing, as it were, one of New Zealand’s first writers on the environment, sustainability and conservation, Field Candy, who was a member for many years. A victim of depression, he committed suicide, and Tauranga Writers mourned him deeply, and worked with his wife Mona, a writer herself, to create an anthology of his finest pieces, Every Living Thing. Field was, I think, a victim of that scourge of writers, artists and performers of all kinds – a deeply thoughtful and reactive personality that can go from the highs of red-hot creativity to the deep, dark depths of despair that words cannot always put to right and that the inner critic Virginia Woolf wrote of can sometimes not be silenced.
We still have a few long-term members left – Bronwyn is one, though not the oldest. I believe that honour rests with Jocelyn Davey, now in her late eighties, an honorary life member, and living in Coromandel. She has recorded her life in The Distance Travelled, and one chapter excluded from it I intend to use, with her permission, in the history of our first fifty years I’m presently working on. ‘Jocelyn on Jocelyn’ is a charming 1-page reminiscence on becoming a New Zealand writer.
Another stalwart is Barbara Murray, a member for decades and still active in the writing trade, and who needs to be interviewed for all she has contributed to the Tauranga literary scene. Many of these writers – and there are dozens more I can speak of – have their work and achievements diligently recorded by Barbara in a wonderful scrapbook I was able to gift, with her permission, to the New Zealand Room. Though it is labelled ‘Success Story 1973’ the last entry is 1988, and many treasures lie within.
The list of successes – statistically recorded near the end of this scrapbook – demonstrates to me the persistence in Tauranga Writers of the passion to be in print. Much of their work, though published and commended, remains unrewarded by fame and fortune, though many gained good reputations and a following in their lifetimes.
The first example is that acrostic poem William E Morris wrote for Tauranga Writer’s 25th anniversary. Yes, that’s going in our history book, too, along with the newspaper report and menu for the 10th birthday lunch, the 25th anniversary dinner, and the 40th anniversary Jubilee Jamboree, graced by the presence of Dame Fiona Kidman.
Let’s share a few more snippets from the scrapbook.
Still writing today, a fluent and well-respected journalist, is Sue Hungerford, whom I am making a date to interview. Susan Dassler, described in her obituary as ‘a former pioneer of netball’ – surely an article by a historian there? – who joined in her late 80s and made it to 100 with an abundant number of writings to her credit.
Joy Hawkins seems to have specialised in articles on historic times, especially in the Bay – her article on the Elms Mission House is still a winner – and on travel. To read her is to know she was a competent commentator in everything she wrote.
Verna May Dowrick was another prolific writer, and one of the founder-members of Tauranga Writers on that auspicious day in June 1967. She not only built up a memorable collection of work herself; of her six children, four went on to become writers of one kind or another – Bernard, Lee, David and Peter – and are still actively contributing to New Zealand’s literati glitterati today.
(For the record, others present at that first meeting along with the originators and ‘onlie true begetters’ Verna and Edna Pithie were Susan Dassler, Des Hall – still scribbling away – Christina Jefferson, Kim Rosenbaum, Anthony Sorich, Isabel Taylor, Joyce West – yes, THE Joyce West! – and Nell and Owen Williams, a husband and wife writing team. One day I will have leisure and time enough to check out every single name I’ve come across who is or was a Tauranga Writer. A grant application, perhaps? Anyone interested in helping me?)
Stan Knowles was still around when I first came here seventeen years ago, but died before I met him. I’ve toyed with the idea of putting together his Kiwi yarns, regularly published in the New Zealand Farmer magazine, and great reading, appealing to that New Zealand she’ll be right approach and have-a-go attitude.
How would I go about that? How do you research and locate copyright holders when your knowledge of the writer is minimal? How locate the texts and illustrations to support and illuminate your text? Now there’s a topic I’d like to invite an expert to present as one of our Sunday Focus Sessions.
Ruby Corbet got the Queen’s Service Medal for her services to children’s reading and to literacy, and apart from that produced much good stuff both poetry and prose. She also won the Bay of Plenty Times Literary Award in 1974 – now where did that go? – for Beloved Immigrant when the judge was Sylvia Ashton-Warner, another local literary luminary.
Sylvia also judged Tauranga Writers first short story competition and her daughter kindly gave us permission to reproduce it in This Side of the World: Tauranga Writers Celebrating 40 Years. It remains one of the best judge’s reports and summaries of the power of creative writing I have ever read, ‘The True Voice.’ Again, this book is in the safekeeping of the New Zealand Room, should you want to read it for yourself.
Oh, dear. I’m running – perhaps have already run – out of time. Let me finish with just a few more stories of the dozen I have come across.
First of all, discovering early work by a present Tauranga Writers for Children member, a stalwart of Tauranga Writers in the past, and a particular heroine of mine, Jean Bennett. Her record of her grandfather’s career as a confectioner was published in The Listener, September 1978, as ‘Sweet Memories’ and was the first thing I read by her. Since then I have read dozens of Jean’s works and always found myself fully engaged by the quality of her writing, both fiction and nonfiction. She is a taonga, a local treasure. I especially liked two books she wrote for young readers: The information book and The writing book: how to write letters, projects, stories, poems, plays and much, much more. Both models of how to create resources teachers will want to use and students enjoy learning from.
I’d also like to testify to my rediscovery of Barbara Murray, not only for her contributions to Byline, and her steady and assiduous application to the hard graft of getting words down on the page, but also for the past successes of two magazines of which she was a primary influence and instigator: KiwiKids, which I believe Jean Bennett had a hand in too – still a joy to browse through, and what are children reading now? – and Options with Janice Priest, which later became Healthy Options before it succumbed to the competition of Google and online journalism.
And I’ll finish with the kind of success story that Tauranga Writers is all about, because our mission statement is and always has been ‘Getting you started and getting you published.’ Kirsten Cliff came to us as an emerging writer with one or two items to her credit. During her years with us she bloomed and blossomed, and we were sorry to lose her when she married and later moved away. Kirsten has used her writing to overcome challenges, including a fierce battle with cancer that she eventually won, thank God. She is now an acknowledged and
respected writer of haiku, a haijin, and publishes a regular column on the topic of Japanese poetry for the Poetry Society’s inhouse journal, a fine line.
Remember how much I like serendipity? Starting work on the history of our first 50 years I visited the New Zealand Room with Barbara Murray and local memoirist Joy Zena Marks. We asked for the scrapbook, and out came two – not only ‘Success Story 1973,’ but a black-bound beauty recording the events of our week-long celebration of our first FORTY years.
I was blown away! You can browse through it yourself if you care to, and it will record one major achievement from that period: holding the inaugural small press and self-published bookfair, which we called Imprints, and which has been the forerunner of an annual and successful book festival of indie authors and publishers.
Thank you, Kirsten Cliff, for that unexpected gift.
And I’m stopping here. We’re stepping out of history and if you want to read what happened between our 40th and 50th anniversary, you’ll have to buy the book.
And, incidentally, can I make a final request? Please also contribute to our attempt at creating a world record for most number of writers contributing to a single book. Go to www.bopbook.comfor further details. If we pull it off, A People’s History of the Bay of Plenty will be another example of writing from the past inspiring and delighting historians of the future.
You may request a free copy of the following by sending an email to jenny.argante@gmail.com.
- Reading the Past, Writing the Future. (Takahe.)
- I as in Identity: Writing Based on Personal & Family History. (Little Red Hen Community
- Jocelyn on Jocelyn. (With the author’s permission.)
You can also visit www.bopbook.comand contribute up until midnight on June 30th to A People’s History of the Bay of Plenty. 200 words. That’s all.
