Picnic on Mount Cargill
TO mark the 12 years since
WordWays began, I’m continuing my irregular series on Dunedin as a Unesco City of Literature. This time I’m celebrating it by a wacky visual aid: the painted powerbox which, since 2016, enlivens the streetcorner above the Roslyn roundabout. Though the artist didn’t paint it for the Unesco bid, it celebrates the bid’s success by showing some of the writers who put us on the map.
Picnic time
Victoria Heatherbell is the artist. She made the news in 2017 by painting our comely prime minister, newly appointed, as the enigmatic Mona Lisa. For the writers, Vikki shows them having a (highly implausible) picnic together atop Mt Cargill. The harbour and peninsula make the spectacular backdrop, in ways which remind me of Colin McCahon’s fine mural in the Dunedin City Library (where the escalator once was). But the writers are in monochrome, the blackandwhite of ink or print. This cunning choice also sets the scene back in time, to when the chosen writers flourished. They look young: Charles Brasch, Hone Tuwhare, Janet Frame, Ruth Dallas, Lauris Edmond, John A. Lee, James K. Baxter, and Denis Glover.
The Worthies
The wit continues into details. Only Glover is drinking beer. The only worthy not in the main group on the box’s front is Brasch, round the left corner, standing reading a book. (As you tend not to do, at hilltop picnics.) Might it mean that Brasch convened the picnic? As editor of Landfall, he published and encouraged very many writers.
Unofficial
So the painter is giving a personal, frisky view of our literary city. For would all these writers have come, if invited? How often were some of them in Dunedin, let alone up aloft on Mt Cargill? Writing is a lonely business. Some prefer it that way. Did these worthies know each other, did they like each other? Some did: Brasch and Dallas, for example. The choices are part of the artist’s personal response.
Janet Frame
To which I’m responding in turn. Among the chosen ones, for me, Janet Frame stands out. The first New Zealand novel which enthralled me was Owls
Do Cry. It stood out from the social realism of so many. It impersonated voices, in Dostoyevsky’s bumpy way. Janet, and Margaret Mahy, are my two most compulsively readable New Zealand novelists.
Glover and Baxter
Of poets, I enjoy Glover and Baxter most. Not that they are talking to each other at the picnic. What would they say to each other? Would either be listening? Glover created characters, Harry, or Arawata Bill, who sing their selves from a silence. Baxter runs on like a tap, a voluble southern Burns, who keeps it up in page after page after page of his verse journals. Then became a selfappointed prophet, losing as well as gaining admirers.
Brasch and Glover
Two who seem opposites, and appear separated on that cabinet, had long known each other. Glover published Brasch, from the Caxton Press. They had known each other before and during WW2 in London. Glover was a naval officer, celebrated by Roger Hall in his oneman show Mr Punch.
Brasch did a stint at Bletchley Park. He decoded from Italian, which he knew from reading Dante; and from Romanian, learnt for Bletchley purposes.
Come and see
Such is life! Lots to talk about on the hilltop. Come and view the highpowered group on their cabinet.
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