Philippa Stevenson: Storytellers doing service for the future

The history of New Zealand may be short but the professional historians and storytellers of the future are not going to be short on detail.

While researching this column I've come across scores of documents, ranging from a few pages in a folder to impressive hard-back books - all records of the country's early days of European settlement set down by locals whose enthusiasm for chronicling events can frequently exceed their literary ability.

But lack of style does not diminish their efforts. No matter how eccentric the account of this community or that school or district hall, such records will be gold mines for future students of our history.

In the meantime, they are treasured mementos for those intimately connected to the events, people or places. A rash of centennial commemorations for schools, community-built halls and land ballots held in recent years - or scheduled for the next few - suggests this important raw material is growing by the month.

In Golden Weather, a recently published collection of poetry and prose by North Shore writers - not a history book but one which gives a strong sense of the past all the same - publisher Christine Cole Catley tells of her schoolgirl encounter with a much admired writer of the day, Nelle Scanlan.

The elegant Nelle "looked at me while serving thin cucumber sandwiches and said, 'In New Zealand, behind every bush, is somebody who wants to write'. I've learned she was near enough right", Cole Catley said.

So have I. And often the desire to write is capitalised on by those movers and shakers - the centennial committee.

One of the grander privately published histories to come my way this year was a 288-page, hard-back tome entitled Further Stories from Waitanguru, compiled by Te Awamutu couple Stan and Chris Frederikson.

It opened my eyes to a hundred-year-old King Country farming district bordered by the Waitomo Caves to the north, Te Kuiti to the east, coastal Marokopa to the west and Piopio to the south.

I'd been completely ignorant of its existence, and the richness of its heritage, until the Frederiksons' two-year enterprise thumped on my desk. But as this book was the third publication on the region since 1974, there's no chance its contribution to the country's past will be missed.

The Frederiksons spent 39 years at Waitanguru before they moved to Te Awamutu and Stan was involved in all three of the district's histories - East of Maungamangero, which marked the district's 1972, 60th jubilee (a 1150 edition sell-out), and Waitanguru, The great transformation, for the 75th commemoration (also 1150 editions sold). "Recording history is in range of anybody who has that desire and determination," the couple wrote in their introduction to the latest book.

"With a modern computer and inexpensive software, a scanner and printer, it is possible to produce an interesting publication. So have a go," they exhort the rest of us.

Former Herald journalist Kingsley Field, who tutored the Frederiksons at a Wintec writing course, encouraged their endeavour and proofread the result, describing it as "a gem".

Given the opportunity to tell stories of a farming region rich in early rural history, of beautiful, rugged limestone bluffs, steep land and dense native bush, the district's former and present residents had produced "a wonderful stream of little gold nuggets covering a tiny section of this nation's history," Field wrote in the book's foreword.

"It's a priceless segment of detail on how this country has been shaped, and how its people have moulded themselves into the resilient, resourceful and extraordinarily friendly nation renowned world-wide for these traits."

An equally engaging privately published work which came to my attention was Dave O'Hare's Make a Life and Live It, which is part family history, part social history and part window into the world of business practise in New Zealand last century.

O'Hare began working life as an apprentice in the Claudelands, Hamilton, workshops of the State Hydro Electric Department in January 1949 - times when trade training started from scratch. His electrical engineering education began with making hand tools for his toolbox.

Eleven years later O'Hare joined whiteware manufacturers Fisher and Paykel as a draughtsman and by 1990, when he retired from the company, he had been instrumental in establishing its successful, export healthcare division.

These books - and many more like them - may not be the ripping yarns of best sellers but they are strangely compulsive reading all the same.

For us - their contemporaries - it's a glimpse into the lives of our neighbours. And they are often more interesting than we thought.

For future generations, the past that has made them what they are will be waiting for discovery in a book.

We should be grateful that behind every bush is a New Zealander with the urge to write.