“Although I was now being referred to as an ‘expatriate’ writer, my reasons for leaving New Zealand, apart from the desire to ‘broaden my experience’ had not been literary or artistic. My reason for returning was literary. Europe was so much on the map of the imagination (which is a limitless map, indeed) with room for anyone who cares to find place there, while the layers of the long dead and recently dead are a fertile growing place for new shoots and buds, yet the prospect of exploring a new country with not so many layers of mapmakers, particularly the country where one first saw daylight and the sun and the dark, was too tantilising to resist. Also, the first layer of imagination mapped by the early inhabitants leaves those who follow an access or passageway to the bone. Living in New Zealand, would be for me, like living in an age of mythmakers; with a freedom of imagination among all the artists because it is possible to begin at the beginning and to know the unformed places and to help form them, to be a mapmaker for those who follow nourished by this generation’s layers of the dead.”
Reading Janet Frame’s three volume autobiography, particularly The Envoy From Mirror City has been comforting for me. She may take seven hour train rides from Oamaru to Dunedin, and for her, Ibiza may mean a quiet, religious island known among writers and painters as a good place to get some work done, but her experience of learning to be a practicing artist is still strikingly relevant and helpful.
Trying to write stories about New Zealand in the 50s is depressingly similar to writing music about New Zealand now. She has all the same problems in having her chosen occupation taken seriously, until the day (of course) she lands back in New Zealand carrying an ‘overseas reputation.’ But perhaps it’s encouragingly similar - I’ve always seen Frame as a pioneer, showing how writing stories about our own place can be relevant not only to ourselves but to the rest of the world, and today few people would chide a New Zealand author for writing about boring old New Zealand.
The above passage makes me think of Saddle Hill - the volcano I grew up around. It’s such a prominent landmark where I grew up, yet it’s not celebrated or mythologised in the way it would be if it was a similar hill in a Northern Hemisphere city. People seem a little oblivious to it, and when I have mentioned something along these lines, people have said to me ‘it’s just a hill.’ I often compare it to Mt Eden (which, despite the grander title, is almost two hundred metres lower), which in comparison, carries so much more cultural weight, because more people see it, photograph it, set stories around it. It’s starting to build new myths. But I hope to see a day when more people have described it Saddle Hill, sung about it, lived and died around it, and mapped it culturally for the future generations.
