New Zealand voice hard to find for authors

Margaret Mahy at home with her cat, Socks. Picture / Simon Baker

"You'd think you'd automatically be able to write about the place you've lived in all your life, but the stories I'd had read to me as a child somehow disinherited me."

Margaret Mahy has such a self-assured presence that it's hard to imagine her as a victim of the cultural cringe. Her black-on-black outfit, topped off by a black hat, ought to make her look like a witch from one of her innumerable books, but her grin and the amused look in her eye are purest Wise Old Grandmother material.

"When I was a child, of course, nearly all the books that were read to me were English". She reels off names: Beatrix Potter, Winnie the Pooh, a long list of others. "About the fifth or sixth form I had an English teacher who suggested that it was a very good thing for anyone who wanted to be a writer to write stories with a New Zealand connection."

This came as a complete surprise to her. The default assumption then, and for a long time afterwards, was that New Zealand experiences were less interesting and valuable than British or European ones. Mahy had soaked this in unquestioningly, as children generally do.

"But I set out to do what my teacher suggested, because I felt he was right, and I found I couldn't easily write a New Zealand story. I didn't imaginatively believe my own New Zealand stories in the ways I believed in the fantasies and such things that I'd been writing."

If you read Mahy's early classics, such as The Lion in the Meadow, or the short stories she used to write for the School Journal, you won't find any hints of New Zealand. The setting is the familiar British Anywhere of a thousand folk and fairy tales, right down to the trees and bushes. That first began to change with the book, appropriately called, The Changeover.

"It's a curious thing, because everyone thinks of country landscapes and things like that as being the essential New Zealand identity, but I started edging back into New Zealand through the city. The city in The Changeover — that's a version of Christchurch really."

Coincidentally or not, that book came out in the watershed year of 1984, the same year David Lange's Labour Government launched its tough-love assault on the old idea of New Zealand as an economic and cultural outpost of Britain.

"Driving through Christchurch at that time, I found myself picking up on little details and feeling a kind of imaginative reconnection."

Two years later she published The Tricksters, set in a version of Lyttelton Harbour. "From that point I moved more and more into being able to write New Zealand stories, and now I feel that I've been restored to the place that I've lived in all my life."

The process of rediscovering your own backyard is front and centre in Mahy's latest book, the young-adult novel Kaitangata Twitch (Allen & Unwin $20.99). Its heroine is a young girl named Meredith, whose family lives on the shores of an idyllic bay not too far from a large city, looking out towards Kaitangata Island. As the story opens, a rich property magnate is angling for permission to open the bay up for development, and Meredith is having strange dreams in which the island comes to life and attacks her.

It slowly emerges that the would-be developer is an old boyfriend of Meredith's mother, and that he and Meredith's father, who both grew up locally, used to have a shared hatred of the bay, and couldn't wait to escape to the city and overseas. But Meredith's father had the classic distance-lends-perspective epiphany, and came back. The political battle over whether or not to rezone the bay for development is a kind of grudge match between two different New Zealand archetypes: the small-town boy who made it big, and the OE-veteran who had to leave his country to fall in love with it.

Meanwhile, Meredith's dreams are becoming alarming. Kaitangata Island seems to be aware of the development plans somehow, and it doesn't like them. Mahy sees the book, with its lively mix of politics, ambiguous magic and coming-of-age story, as distinctly different in tone from most of her work. "A lot of the stories that I've done in the past seem to me to relate indirectly to folk tales, but this one is perhaps less folk tale and more Gothic horror story."

It also draws more openly and obviously on local history than Mahy's previous books. Kaitangata — which has the potentially alarming meaning of "people food" — is the Maori name for the peninsula in Lyttelton Harbour where one of Mahy's daughters lives with her family.

"It has something of the same history I gave the island in the book. I took a lot of the descriptions of walking around the seashore of the island, and the wildflowers and things like that, from things I'm used to seeing on my daughter and son-in-law's peninsula."

Likewise, the land development story closely mirrors events some years ago in Governor's Bay, where Mahy lives. "There was a whole series of meetings, and the council who'd backed the development plan there got voted out ... but of course Governor's Bay has changed in spite of that. Fairly predictably, for a place with good views of the sea and close to the city."

The inevitability of change is the ultimate theme of Kaitangata Twitch, though Mahy cunningly misdirects her readers by making the odious property developer such an obvious villain. Meredith, who just happens to be right on the cusp of puberty, slowly realises that her father needs to let go of his desire to freeze the bay precisely as it was in his childhood.

The question isn't whether change will come to the bay, but how it will be managed, and whether the beauty of the place can survive.

"Change", remarks Mahy, who ought to know, "is going to go ahead no matter what".