Intelligent, relevant books for intelligent, inquiring readers

Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde PAULA MORRIS AND HARU SAMESHIMA

A UNIQUE STORY BOOK FOR GROWN-UPS

Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde brings together award-winning novelist Paula Morris and distinguished photographer Haru Sameshima. It is the second in the kōrero series of picture books edited by Lloyd Jones, written and made for grown-ups, and designed to showcase leading writers and artists working together in a collaborative and dynamic way. In Shining Land Morris and Sameshima focus on the New Zealand journalist, poet, fiction writer and war correspondent Robin Hyde, exploring three locations important to her difficult life and ground-breaking work. This beautifully considered small book richly rewards the reader and stretches the notion of what the book can do.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS $45.00 Paula Morris (Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Whātua) is an award-winning novelist, short-story CATEGORY: Non-fiction writer and essayist. A frequent book reviewer, interviewer and festival chair, she ISBN: 978-0-9951318-2-8 holds degrees from universities in New Zealand, the UK and the US, including a ESBN: n/a DPhil from the University of York and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. BISAC: LCO010000, PHO014000 She is convenor of the Master in Creative Writing programme at the University of THEMA: DNL, AJCD, IMBN Auckland. PUBLISHER: Massey University Press Haru Sameshima was born in Shizuoka City, Japan, and immigrated to New IMPRINT: Massey University Press Zealand in 1973. He completed an MFA (1995) at Elam School of Fine Arts, PUBLISHED: November 2020 . He has exhibited and published widely in New Zealand PAGE EXTENT: 96 pages and his images illustrate some of New Zealand’s most significant art and craft publications. He has his own publishing imprint, Rim Books, and runs his Auckland FORMAT: Hardback studio, Studio La Gonda, in partnership with Mark Adams. SIZE: 250mm x 190mm RIGHTS: World SALES POINTS AUTHORS LIVE IN: Auckland, New Zealand • A unique collaboration between a writer and an artist • The kōrero series editor is the acclaimed Lloyd Jones • A special gift book • Handsomely packaged

PRINTABLE PDF PROMO POSTER AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

Massey University Press Email [email protected] www.masseypress.ac.nz Albany Campus, Private Bag 102904, Phone +64 9 213 6886 North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand II

War ferments at the centre of Hyde’s life, shaping her relationships and experiences — sex, birth, death. Without war, her parents would never have met. Her father, George Wilkinson, was born in India to a British army captain. He fought in the Boer War and One evening Iris and her father rode a tram car home with a friend of his, still in was wounded at the Battle of Elands River in 1901. In the military hospital George was soldier’s khaki. She chatted and simpered like ‘one of the many sloppy little idiots nursed by Hyde’s mother Nelly, an Australian nurse on her way to . who gave to that grim uniform the unthinking hero-worship which may have helped all modern men to despise all modern women’. At the family dinner table her father Nelly never sailed on to England. Instead it became a mythical ‘home’ for which she accused her of looking ‘at that man with the eyes of a harlot!’ She was thirteen years old. longed all her life. George and Nelly married in haste and repented at leisure, their first daughter born four months after the wedding. When Iris, their second daughter, Later, when Hyde had her two sons, her mother knew (or found out); nobody ever told was still a baby they moved to New Zealand and a shabby wind-brisk life in , George. I am caught in the hinge of a slowly-opening door, between one age and another. where another two sisters were born and George worked for the Post Office. The Wilkinson sisters grew up understanding the rules: ‘Relations were virginal until somewhere between sixteen and twenty years old. Sometimes then the girls developed In 1916 he enlisted with the 1st New Zealand Expeditionary Force, and disappeared babies, and the boys, after frantic wriggling with parsons and parents, married them overseas for more than two years, though the old knee wound saved him from combat. at five months, both rather red-eyed.’ Their own parents had married ‘at five months’. George was the one who got to live in England, working in the Postal Service of the Hyde would witness a different sort of ‘frantic wriggling’ with the fathers of her own two New Zealand Engineers. children, because neither was in a position to marry her.

After the war, the family could buy a house for the first time — in the Wellington When Hyde looked back on her sexual relationships with men, she declared her suburb of Northland, too prim a neighbourhood for socialist George. He and Nelly past ‘moderately scarlet’ but admitted she took her ‘sins with diabolical seriousness’. argued about money, politics, capitalism, imperialism, Lord Kitchener. ‘I couldn’t stand She was never offered the chance to make a home with a man, and she never earned the voices in the night,’ wrote Hyde. Declared over-sensitive by her family, she took to enough to make a home for her son. She never felt forgiven. running away. George moved into his own bedroom where he smoked his pipe, read Marx and smouldered.

‘I have known, since, so many returned soldiers whose self-control seemed to have been smashed to pieces,’ Hyde wrote in 1934. ‘Pity the dead, because they are very peaceful and we have written hymns about them! But these despoiled, what about them?’ She was talking about her father.

18 19 20 21

20026 Shining Land 10.0.indd 21 3/08/20 2:41 PM 20026 Shining Land 10.0.indd 18 3/08/20 2:41 PM 20026 Shining Land 10.0.indd 19 3/08/20 2:41 PM 20026 Shining Land 10.0.indd 20 3/08/20 2:41 PM

Also staying at her hotel: one Frederick de Mulford Hyde. He was twenty-seven — tall and dark, slim. In 1917, at the age of eighteen, he’d learned to operate a Curtiss flying boat and received his Royal Aero Club Aviator’s Certificate. Two months later he sailed for England to serve with the Royal Flying Corps. In a photograph taken during the war Frederick looks old-fashioned handsome. ‘Picturesque,’ Hyde declared. He had ‘square curious hands, crooked mouth, loved music’. He had money and friends and a car.

In the summer of 1926 Frederick was circled by a ‘fluttering crowd of older women’. He met Iris over afternoon tea. One night, flustered by a bad dream, she investigated a mystery noise outside — a horse loose in the garden, surreal and comic. She returned to the hotel, and Frederick opened his door, looking ‘a bit oriental in his dressing gown’; he invited her in for a drink. There was a scarlet silk kerchief over the light. But this was not, she insisted, the ‘seduction of a dream- dazed girl’. She already thought of herself as a ‘demi-vierge’ after an encounter with — really a molestation by — an older man when she worked at the Dominion.

Frederick moved into one of the ‘old dark whispering houses’ that Hyde longed for all her life. She filled vases with sweet peas from the garden, tidied up, listened to Frederick sing. Rotorua was a place of exotic birds: the flamingo sky, Frederick’s peacock dressing gown. Sex, she discovered, could be an ‘exultant and mysterious physical thing’.

Iris didn’t know that one of the fluttering crowd was already Frederick’s mistress. Alice Algie was almost forty, a war widow. Her late husband — deputy principal of Rotorua Boys’ High School, son of a Boer War veteran — fought in Egypt and Gallipoli, and was killed in 1916 at the Somme. Her father was architect Benjamin Corlett, who helped design the iconic Bath House where Iris was taking her restorative baths. There is a Corlett Street in Rotorua. New Zealand is a small place. Alice owned the house where Frederick was staying. Alice was the reason he had plenty of money.

28 29 36 37

20026 Shining Land 10.0.indd 28 3/08/20 2:41 PM 20026 Shining Land 10.0.indd 29 3/08/20 2:41 PM

20026 Shining Land 10.0.indd 36 3/08/20 2:41 PM 20026 Shining Land 10.0.indd 37 3/08/20 2:41 PM

49 49 58 59

20026 Shining Land 10.0.indd 49 3/08/20 2:41 PM 20026 Shining Land 10.0.indd 49 3/08/20 2:41 PM 20026 Shining Land 10.0.indd 58 3/08/20 2:41 PM 20026 Shining Land 10.0.indd 59 3/08/20 2:41 PM

Massey University Press Email [email protected] www.masseypress.ac.nz Albany Campus, Private Bag 102904, Phone +64 9 213 6886 North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand