Historical Material in Maurice Gee's The Fire-Raiser

Award-winning New Zealand writer, Maurice Gee, has written five realistic novels for children, each set during a defining period in New Zealand history. This essay examines Gee’s use in The Fire-Raiser of historical material, particularly that related to Nelson Central School and its lively headmaster, F. G. Gibbs. Through his accurate reproduction of precise detail Gee vividly evokes small-town New Zealand during World War I. But Gee also adapts historical material in order to pursue his ideal of balance.Vivien van Rij is a lecturer in Victoria University's Faculty of Education, specialising in children's literature and literacy.Correspondence about this article may be directed to the author at [email protected]

From the Personal to the Political, Religious, and a Vision of Socialism in Maurice Gee’s Orchard Street, a New Zealand Novel for Children

This article considers Orchard Street, a novel for children by award-winning New Zealand author, Maurice Gee, and his use of history in depicting New Zealand during the 1951 conflict between the Waterside Workers, and the ship-owners and National government. The article focuses first on Gee’s childhood during the 1940s in Henderson, West Auckland, and on Newington Road where he and his family lived as a model for the creation of Orchard Street. It then looks at the integration of the 1951 conflict into this realistic setting, and Gee’s charging of the street with a political significance. A self-proclaimed socialist, Gee is firmly on the side of the Wharfies, as is his protagonist, the thirteen-year old Ossie Dye who is on the brink of adulthood, and faced with difficult choices. While supporting his parents’ socialist ideals, and delivering illegal propaganda at night, Ossie imagines he is the solitary American cowboy, Zane Grey’s Lone Star Ranger (p. 13), and excludes the lonely Bike Pike from his gang of friends. The article briefly examines Gee’s use of an older Ossie as the first person narrator who, looking back from 1991 to the 1951 conflict, forms a circular frame that modifies its depiction. Also considered is the influence of neo-liberalism and the social and political reforms of the 1980s-1990s on Gee’s writing. The article finally argues that the multi-layered timeframe and geometrical structure of the novel are evidence not only of the author’s preoccupation with division but, more predominantly, of his socialist ideology and search for wholeness and balance

Historical Material in Maurice Gee's The Fire-Raiser

Award-winning New Zealand writer, Maurice Gee, has written five realistic novels for children, each set during a defining period in New Zealand history. This essay examines Gee’s use in The Fire-Raiser of historical material, particularly that related to Nelson Central School and its lively headmaster, F. G. Gibbs. Through his accurate reproduction of precise detail Gee vividly evokes small-town New Zealand during World War I. But Gee also adapts historical material in order to pursue his ideal of balance.Vivien van Rij is a lecturer in Victoria University's Faculty of Education, specialising in children's literature and literacy.Correspondence about this article may be directed to the author at [email protected]

The Pursuit of Wholeness in Maurice Gee's Fiction for Children

Towards the end of Maurice Gee's Prowlers Noel Papps comments: "A morning on my sundeck passes like the turning of a wheel. Time present and time past, now and then, bring their motions into agreement and I know the joys of congruency " (p. 217).[2] Here Noel describes a fulfilment which is circular and in which antitheses are brought together in harmony. A scientist, he has not always felt such joy. For much of his life he has been concerned with breaking things down and analysing them according to dry chemical formulae. Yet this process has been necessary for understanding, and in effect for creating the whole novel he narrates. Noel Papps seems to reflect Gee who is also concerned with division and forming a whole rounded book. This thesis examines Gee's concept of parts and their possible congruency. The Introduction considers Gee's novels for adults, especially those in which protagonists, speaking for Gee, describe the process involved in creating a whole work, whether literary, non-fictional or artistic. Their descriptions contextualise my exploration of Gee's pursuit of wholeness in his fiction for children. I turn first to the O trilogy in which the Motherstone is an explicit image of balance. Thereafter the focus is on Gee's five historical novels, in which the presence of lived experiences, real history, allusions to creative works, characters' illusions, and the universal are considered at length. Drawing on interviews, photographs, archival material, and non-fictional, historical, and literary texts, I attempt to establish the authenticity of Gee's reproduction of these dimensions and, where there are discrepancies, their effects. The narrative technique involved in bringing diverse dimensions together is also examined. Finally I consider patterning across Gee's five historical novels as a representation of a whole work

Minions, masters, and migration: Challenging power structures in Gavin Bishop's Cook's cook: The cook who cooked for Captain Cook

Arguably New Zealand’s best loved picturebook author/illustrator, Gavin Bishop invariably challenges populist power structures in his fiction and non-fiction. As such, his books are ideal vehicles for teaching children about such broad topics as race relations, colonisation, migration, class conflicts, gender relationships, environmental issues and spiritual beliefs. The fact that Bishop often addresses several of these simultaneously, and draws on found texts to do so, paves the way for the teacher to encourage the child to read not only the lines and images but between and beyond these in order to construct a fuller meaning. This article will discuss Bishop’s (2018a) picturebook, Cook’s Cook: The Cook Who Cooked for Captain Cook, which qualifies as “faction”, a genre that mixes fact and fiction, with Bishop reproducing historical events and characters whilst investing them with an imaginative dimension. Most obviously, the selected book portrays migration, including the colonisation of New Zealand and the Pacific, and its longer-term effects. Hence, it focuses on the subjugation of the indigenous people, culture, flora and fauna to those that are imported, as well as the domination of the working class by the upper class. However, Bishop is too skilful an author/artist to suggest that everything is black and white. Rather, through paralleling and fusing the aforementioned foci, and in the ways in which the print and pictures work separately, together, sometimes against each other, and in interaction with fore texts, he suggests that dichotomies are mixed.  The article will examine those portrayed as minions and masters (whether human or non-human), their conflicts and conflations, and Bishop’s use of verbal and visual techniques and fore texts to challenge dominant power structures. It will also argue that, while emphasising dichotomies, Bishop, the master storyteller and artist, creates structures that ensure his picturebook is balanced and whole and that, rather than treating the reader as a minion, allow him or her to become a master of meaning making

The Pursuit of Wholeness in Maurice Gee's Fiction for Children

Towards the end of Maurice Gee's Prowlers Noel Papps comments: "A morning on my sundeck passes like the turning of a wheel. Time present and time past, now and then, bring their motions into agreement and I know the joys of congruency " (p. 217).[2] Here Noel describes a fulfilment which is circular and in which antitheses are brought together in harmony. A scientist, he has not always felt such joy. For much of his life he has been concerned with breaking things down and analysing them according to dry chemical formulae. Yet this process has been necessary for understanding, and in effect for creating the whole novel he narrates. Noel Papps seems to reflect Gee who is also concerned with division and forming a whole rounded book. This thesis examines Gee's concept of parts and their possible congruency. The Introduction considers Gee's novels for adults, especially those in which protagonists, speaking for Gee, describe the process involved in creating a whole work, whether literary, non-fictional or artistic. Their descriptions contextualise my exploration of Gee's pursuit of wholeness in his fiction for children. I turn first to the O trilogy in which the Motherstone is an explicit image of balance. Thereafter the focus is on Gee's five historical novels, in which the presence of lived experiences, real history, allusions to creative works, characters' illusions, and the universal are considered at length. Drawing on interviews, photographs, archival material, and non-fictional, historical, and literary texts, I attempt to establish the authenticity of Gee's reproduction of these dimensions and, where there are discrepancies, their effects. The narrative technique involved in bringing diverse dimensions together is also examined. Finally I consider patterning across Gee's five historical novels as a representation of a whole work