Writes of passage

Steve Walker surveys a major new anthology of New Zealand writing and finds that despite some surprising inclusions and omissions, it deserves a special place in our literary journey.

THE PUBLICATION of an anthology is always a major step in a country’s cultural identity. It is a yardstick of how far we have come, and from where, and in what direction we are travelling. This is the first single-volume collection of New Zealand literature across the years since European colonisation, combining a diverse range of genres. At 1162 pages, this is not so much a step – more the 39 steps! And, at $75, it is also astounding value.

The key to the anthology’s worth is the stated intentions of its editors, husband and wife team of Jane Stafford and Mark Williams, both from the English Department at Victoria University. Two questions are uppermost: what do they define as ‘‘New Zealand’’ and what is ‘‘literature’’? The answer to the first is blurred and to the second is problematic.

Several of these pieces were written without their authors ever having graced our shores: Edward Wakefield wrote his Letter from Sydney in 1829 from his London prison. Robert Browning doesn’t even mention New Zealand, and Anne Bronte merely slots in one reference to Port Nelson. New Zealand, apparently, means writing by a resident, or by someone who has visited, or which contains a reference or hint about the country. A pretty wide definition. ‘‘Literature’’ is even more loosely used. Yates’ Garden Guide counts, as do the Edmonds’ Sure to Rise cookery book and the Mazengarb Report of 1954 into ‘‘moral delinquency in children’’.

With a mind-boggling 372 separate entries, this is easily the most comprehensive view of New Zealand writing in English.

Their authors would be touched – and gobsmacked! Yet Michael King, James McNeish and Philip Temple, among other notable omissions, all lack an entry, despite their literary prizes.

The editors’ illuminating introduction provides vital clues. They draw on Robert Sullivan’s incisive metaphor from Star Waka, of the collection as a waka, ‘‘ ‘a knife through time’ . . . connecting the pre-contact past with the urban present’’. It ‘‘contains, preserves and transports a multifarious collection’’. Their focus is ‘‘the way in which writers have fashioned their surroundings into imaginative language’’ – which should immediately have excluded both the Edmonds and the Yates, as pedestrian and factual. If a piece is to be preserved, surely it must be worth it first. Likewise, the Treaty of Waitangi, despite its obvious