Nell has been out in the world for two months now. Thus far, all feedback has told me that readers find resonance in Nell with their own life, with their mother’s or grandmother’s; with the landscapes Nell inhabits, and with how she thinks and behaves, alone or with her vital others. I like to think that good fiction does this: it gives us readers back to ourselves. We find ourselves mirrored, or jarred or alerted by the story to something in our own make-up, or in the make-up of our world, that brings us a little more wide awake, a little more conscious, if you will.
I’m grateful that this ‘likeness’ is what has most chimed with readers. Any dissonance has been unvoiced, about Nell being conceived on what is now the uncomfortable side of the political blanket. Her grandfather was a colonial land-bagger of the highest order. (Why buy the rights to one high country run if you had the means for three or four?) By 1859, when Joseph Preston turned up, the Crown had bought from Maori, for a pittance per acre, 80% of South Island land. In the mid to late 1800s, men flocked south for the sales.
A Yorkshire wool merchant and miller who did a bit of trading on the way to Aotearoa (of wool, ships, china, clothing and railway fittings, between UK, Australia, Argentina, Canada and South Africa), Nell’s grandfather Joseph travelled down from Nelson soon after his arrival in NZ. Hampered by the need to buy horses, hire a Māori guide and cross the flooded Waitaki River, he was hours late for the Otago sales in Dunedin.
He came across a man who’d bought a ‘depasturing license’ for a run that very afternoon, but was willing sell it on for a hundred pounds’ profit. And so G-g-g’father Joseph came into possession of his first station, Longlands, straddling a good portion of the Pigroot between Palmerston and Ranfurly. Shortly thereafter, he bought 320 freehold acres on the coast, which he named Centrewood. Johnny Jones was said to have been peeved by both purchases, of land he’d coveted for his family, and refused to sell sheep to Joseph to stock his new farms.
Longlands and Centrewwod were only the first of several family acquisitions.
One of my daughters, reading a draft of Nell, asked if some commentary couldn’t be made in the novel about the state of affairs, how the land had been wrested from the Ngāi Tahu people. I pondered this, but decided not to revise history by making my grandmother more ‘woke’ than she was likely to have been. However, exploiting her feyness, I gave her a modicum of discomfort.
Up on the slopes of Mount Buster, she ties the horse and climbs direct to a steep ridge from where she can look down into a shadowy gully. Remnants of bush cling to the sides of a burn that leaps and races from one rocky basin to the next. Nell straddles a tussock and leans into the hill, sensing the hum of its life around her: insects rustle and flicker; a skylark circles, singing, and is joined by a second. Nell lays her head to the hill. Voices. She looks up through feathered grass at the blue sky and keeps very still. They murmur, rise and fall like wind, impossible to decipher male from female, although she is certain she’s hearing a group of adults and children. The exchange grows urgent; all (Nell simply knows) have broken into a run, in pursuit of moa. She sits up straight and crawls back to the vantage point from where any person within audible range will be visible, but of course the hillside, the gully, the slopes to windward, all are empty. Did she fall asleep? Certainly she did not. Nell is stricken. These hills she and Herb have claimed with such ease, and worse, heedlessness; whose feet have known them more intimately than theirs ever will, and where have they gone? That this land has been obtained by the flimsy transfer of numbers and papers is suddenly preposterous. And yet, what can be done about it now that they have a house down, a baby, and all their livelihood invested here?
I feel sure that Nell, ever fair, would be glad to know of the Ngāi Tahu claim and ongoing settlement process.
