Shaping and moving young intellects

I can't really write objectively about this book. Without people like Dorothy Butler, children's literature in New Zealand (and overseas) wouldn't have flourished as it has. Without people like her, I and other writers in the field would struggle to make a living.

Butler is one of the grande dames of children's books. She has been an author, educator, mentor, founder of a great kids' bookshop and a tireless literary campaigner.

She also writes damn well. All This is her second volume of autobiography. It takes her from Auckland Teachers' College to international acclaim; from a tent in Birkenhead to an historic home at Karekare; from marriage to widowhood; from book to author, travel to book, honours to more books. She marries the excellent Roy. They have eight kids. Just before her first is born, Butler reads The Snow Goose to a third form class and realises how stories can move and shape.

"I was wondering how early in its life I could start reading to my unborn child." So books inform and extend her lucky family's lives. She teaches evening classes, starts a small bookshop at Playcentre. In 1965, just after the Beatles pass through Auckland, she establishes another, at home next to her bedroom. It grows into the iconic Ponsonby premises.

Meanwhile, her granddaughter Cushla is born with multiple health problems. Reading aloud to the baby helps her physical and mental co-ordination. Grandmother becomes involved — of course. It's the genesis of the famous Cushla and Her Books, and Babies Need Books.

The pages of All This are studded, naturally and unpretentiously, with titles and names. To Butler, reading is an essential part of a healthy metabolism. Penelope Lively, Leon Garfield and Sir William Collins all appear on one page. Lynley Dodd and "a young woman called Tessa Duder" feature on another. Butler's own lively picture books, especially My Brown Bear Barney, get suitable mention.

It's a life lived at 110 per cent. She flies all over Australia's Northern Territory, speaking in "little places with unlikely names". She marches against the 1981 Springbok tour, has problems with a rogue publisher,helps establish the Children's Literature Association, makes a spectacular emergency landing in Miami, copes with decimal currency and the Department of Education, tells Melvyn Bragg to dry himself down before coming inside.

And always, there's the passionate, practical business of books. This is an engaging social history, a celebration of friendship, youth and commitment, and an affecting acceptance of personal losses.

But most of all, it's a life of "spreading the word" — about words, their potency and pleasures. A life exceedingly well spent. Great stuff, Dorothy.

All This and a Bookshop Too
By Dorothy Butler
(Penguin $40)

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer whose new young adult novel, Fire on High, will be published by Mallinson Rendel next month