Against the flow
Reading Ambassador Ben Brown is brimming with ideas to help reverse children’s disturbing drift away from books.
Reading Ambassador Ben Brown is brimming with ideas to help reverse children’s disturbing drift away from books.
Colourful by name, nature, appearance and language, poet and writer Ben Brown (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Koroki, Ngāti Paoa) is an inspired choice as New Zealand’s inaugural Reading Ambassador. With his former wife, illustrator Helen Taylor, Brown won the 2006 Best Picture Book in the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards for A Booming in the Night.
He has written non-fiction and short stories for adults and children, as well as editing a book called How The F--Did I Get Here, a result of his work with young offenders.
He loves both writing and reading books, and it’s hard to imagine children failing to be captured by
his enthusiasm and energy, and his sometimes unorthodox approach.
Brown reports to a range of government departments and agencies, and five months into his two-year appointment, he is keen to get some runs on the board. Asked how it’s going, he throws back his head and laughs before declaring, “It has been a learning experience.”
In announcing the appointment, Internal Affairs Minister Jan Tinetti said Brown was “a great person to inspire tamariki and whānau, and to promote the importance of reading”. She cited OECD statistics showing a marked decline in reading for pleasure: nearly half our 15-year-olds never read for enjoyment.
Despite the bureaucracy he is learning to navigate, Brown is relishing his role. He knows from experience, growing up on a tobacco farm in Motueka, that it can take just one determined person to get a child to pick up a book. In his case, it was his father, Gordon, an Australian from the Northern Territory, who emigrated to New Zealand and fell in love with Turia Raihe, known as Julia. She had connections to Māori royalty: her father’s house was second home to some of the mokopuna from the house of the fifth Māori King, Korokī Mahuta. Among the children was Bob (later Sir Robert) Mahuta, Korokī’s adopted son, who became one of Tainui’s most famous leaders. Gordon Brown became friends with Mahuta after marrying Julia.
His father was unusually progressive for the times: before emigrating, he was friendly with Albert Namatjira, one of Australia’s most famous artists.
“Dad used to say ‘that poor bugger’, because he was the first Aborigine to be made an Australian citizen, and his people hated him for it,” Brown says. “They saw him as a black white man, and to the white man, he was just a curiosity.”
At the Motueka home, the few books reflected Gordon’s interest in his wife’s culture. “There were three Māori books – one on Māori art, one on Māori warfare and one on Māori history. I always thought they were Mum’s books, but Dad told me that when he got to know mum, he decided to acquaint himself with the culture. I always rated him for that.”
The Tainui/Kingitanga influence was important in Brown’s upbringing, especially with te reo. The rule in his mother’s day, he says, was no Māori to be spoken at school, but only Māori to be spoken at home.
“Mum used to talk about [Princess] Te Puea’s stick – she ruled the roost in Tainui and we’re Kingitanga – and the absolute golden rule was you speak Pākehā at school and Māori at home. If Te Puea heard you speaking Pākehā on the marae, she’d hit you with the stick.”
Brown didn’t take to te reo as a child, despite his mother’s best efforts and his father’s understanding of the language. He was sent to Te Aute College for secondary schooling, where “I was almost fluent for a while, but the only person I could really talk to after that was Mum”.
Turia Brown suffered a stroke in 1994, aged 49. There were other blows – Brown lost the use of one arm in a motorcycle accident when he was 21, and his younger sister, Ariana, died in a motorcycle accident in Thailand in 2016. His father died in 2001, aged 70, and his mother in 2012, aged 75.
He attributes his life and career in books primarily
In his mother’s day, “the absolute golden rule was you speak Pākehā at school and Māori at home”.
Brown discusses the N word with older students during school visits. He wants them to know the truth and power of words.
to his father’s influence. “When I was a kid, I would spend as much time out of the house as I could. By Sunday afternoons, I was always knackered, bored and belligerent. When I was about 10, Dad stood in my bedroom doorway one day while I moaned and carried on and eventually, bang, threw this big hardcover book at me, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I read it and he was right, it was cool. Tom Sawyer did all the things I did.”
His father upped the ante with the next book. “He said, ‘You’ve got to read Huckleberry Finn, because it’s a totally different kind of novel.’ And I did, and there’s N---Jim jumping off the page.”
The story of his first acquaintance with Huckleberry Finn and the N word is relevant to Brown’s
current role. He has designed a couple of posters, which will be launched next month, to tempt young people into exploring challenging books, words, and poetry. One poster will simply read, “Keep Reading, Son, You’ll Understand.” His father’s advice of 50 years ago is seared into Brown’s memory.
“I saw the name N---- Jim. I was 10 and the only time I’d heard the N word that I could recall was there was a big dog up the road called Nig. So I said to Dad, ‘That’s a funny name for a man’, and he said, ‘Keep reading, son, you’ll understand.’ So this will be the poster for boys who don’t want to read – the idea is you’ll scan the QR code at the bottom of the poster and it’s going to take you to an explanation of where that line comes from.”
He is critical of recent editions of Huckleberry Finn where the N word has been expurgated and the character appears simply as Jim or Jim the Slave. “I know it’s a terrible word. I know it is laden with misery and prejudice and hatred and all that. But here’s the thing – if a middle-class little white girl in the Midwestern states in America in five years’ time reads that book, she’s going to think, ‘They didn’t have it so bad, they
“My father threw this big hardcover book at me, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I read it and he was right, it was cool.”
weren’t calling them N--- or anything. He had some dignity. He’s just Jim.’”
He discusses the N word with older students during school visits. He wants them to know the truth and power of words. “The first time I dropped it was at a lovely school in Auckland. I spoke in the chapel and told the story, and the kids got really into it. I said, ‘What do you think about that? I have a personal opinion, but I’m not going to share it with you. I want to know what you think.’ And it was a really good discussion – the teachers got into it. I fully expected to be rebuked, but it hasn’t happened yet. I’m very careful how I choose to use the word.”
Brown is a featured speaker at various book festivals this year, including this weekend’s Word Christchurch. He regularly visits schools, and at home in Lyttelton is developing an online literacy tool for young people, especially Māori, to relate sounds to symbols and words. He’s keeping the tool simple, clear and relatable and would like to develop it for inclusion in the curriculum to get children reading. l