The World Around The Corner by Maurice Gee

This acknowledged his growing literary status. After three years’ casual work in various parts of New Zealand, he spent 1961 teaching and writing in England, partly supported by a grant from the New Zealand Literary Fund. For two years he was a schoolteacher in Paeroa, but found little to enjoy in the profession. He played rugby skilfully, basing the games in The Big Season (1962) on first-hand experience. Gee then attended Avondale College and University of Auckland (MA in English 1954). There can be few accounts of a primary school as vivid as Gee’s Nelson Central School: A History (1978), a major contribution to the history of education based on extensive oral research and Gee’s sensitivity to social issues. Furthermore, he seems able to transfer their atmosphere to other schools. His memories of primary school in Henderson are obviously intense and detailed.

The years of his ministry were years of dispute and rebellion’ (‘Beginnings’, Islands 17, 1977, an important essay for the grounding of Gee’s fiction in his own and his family’s life). He spent his time in the study where there were shelves of books that went up to the ceiling. His description of his grandfather is immediately recognisable to readers of Plumb: ‘He had an ear trumpet that now and then we were allowed to shout into.

His mother’s tales of family history were equally important to Gee’s developing sense of storytelling, providing a sense of social history and its implications for families, couples and individuals. Later, Gee lived a while in Napier and then moved to Nelson with his wife and family, to find a rural town near the sea, both resembling and differing from the Henderson of his childhood. In the fiction, both children and adults have such adventures. Gee’s father was a carpenter, whose sons made the most of their access to tools and materials for making boats for paddling down the creek to Waitemata Harbour. Echoes of Henderson Creek, in various transformations, pervade his fiction. I’d run home from the creek to the safety and security of the kitchen one the place of safety and affection, the other the place of adventure, danger, excitement. Of special significance is Henderson Creek, where, Gee said, ‘I seem to have spent half my boyhood.’ A place of ‘marvellous and terrible things’, it became a source of his ambivalent imagery.

Even in the most recent, where Wellington and Auckland play a major part, it is their subdivisions - Wadestown, Karori or present-day Henderson - which dominate. Again and again his plots are set in Henderson, usually under another name, or other small towns. Gee, Maurice (1931– ), one of New Zealand’s most distinguished novelists, born in Whakatane, passed much of his childhood in the country town of Henderson (now contained by Auckland’s urban sprawl), and this background plays a major role in his fiction. FROM THE OXFORD COMPANION TO NEW ZEALAND LITERATURE

The World Around The Corner by Maurice Gee