Maurice Shadbolt

Shadbolt, c. 1970

Maurice Francis Richard Shadbolt CBE (4 June 1932 – 10 October 2004) was a New Zealand writer and occasional playwright.

Early life and Education

Shadbolt was born in Auckland in 1932, and was the eldest of three children. He had a younger brother and sister, Peter and Julia. Shadbolt was educated at Te Kuiti High School, Avondale College and Auckland University College. Although Shadbolt did not complete a degree, Shadbolt began writing for local West Auckland community newspapers.

He spent much of his childhood in the Waikato town of Te Kuiti, at a time when finding a New Zealand child writing in the school library was like discovering forbidden fruit. He later described Te Kuiti as "a town of trainwatchers", where the local entertainment consisted of watching the Wellington express go past, going to the movies, then returning to watch the next train. His parents moved houses multiple times.

As a teenager, Shadbolt started working as a journalist and editor of an Auckland giveaway newspaper. At 20, he moved to New Plymouth followed by Hawera to work as a journalist for the Taranaki Daily News. "the New Zealand version of Siberia", he said in One of Ben's. He teamed up with a journalist from a rival newspaper the Hawera Star, Geoffrey, sometimes for a drink at the White Hart hotel. One memorable story on which the two journalists worked together was the supposed UFOs, which were reportedly hovering above the countryside at that time "frightening dairy herds dry", he wrote in One of Ben's. Shadbolt describes in vivid detail a hair-raising car trip at night, fruitlessly searching for signs of the UFOs and attendant aliens. It was at Hawera where he met his first wife Australian Gillian Hemming, also a journalist. Who was working with Geoffrey at the Hawera Star.

Shadbolt moved back to Auckland and worked for the Waitakere Gazette as a "crusading journalist", courting unpopularity before eventually resigning. Shadbolt was then offered a job at the New Zealand National Film Unit in Wellington, where he lived in Thorndon in a cottage visualised by Katherine Mansfield in her short story The Garden Party.

National Film Unit and Early Writing

During his three years at the Film Unit, Shadbolt worked as a writer, director and editor — sometimes all three — on 18 newsreel items for the Pictorial Parade magazine series, plus six other films. He wrote about his time at the Unit in less than glowing terms in One of Ben's, the first of two volumes of his autobiography. Shadbolt argued that by the time he arrived in 1954, bureacracy had become more important to the organisation than filmmaking. He was left alone for days in a temporary office, so Shadbolt finally began prowling the studio, and found laboratory staff who showed him how film was processed. Deciding that he was competent to direct films, he got on with making them. "No one seemed to object; or even to notice". His films encompassed fiction, journalism and theatre.

Shadbolt chronicled high country cattle musters, top-dressing, and was ordered to avoid shots of slums after "two priceless weeks" filming painter Eric Lee-Johnson, whose speciality was derelict and historic buildings. Another item on the local wine industry was cancelled over worries the film would give the impression New Zealanders were only "drunks and Dalmatians".

Shadbolt began writing "as disillusion with film set in". At the suggestion of his friend Kevin Ireland, he switched from poetry to short stories, and had a story published in The Listener in 1955. His filming and writing skills crossed over that same year.Having accumulated four weeks leave from the film unit, he and his wife Gillian headed for Opononi in the Hokianga in 1956 where he was to work on a novel just as the dolphin Opo was creating headlines. They joined in, " swimming with it before breakfast and at dusk when the crowds diminished". When he returned to Wellington, he was told to "find a cameraman and get back there fast." The resulting Pictorial Parade film was one of a number he worked on that was later re-edited for the New Zealand Mirror series (a decade later Shadbolt would reimagine the Opo story, for his 1969 novel This Summer's Dolphin).

Soon after, Shadbolt was in Sydney and had lunch with Australian Nobel- winning author Patrick White, who let slip that he planned to write a novel loosely based on Opo but set in Australia. The conversation alarmed Shadbolt, who had already started his own novel. He got stuck in and finished 'This Summer's Dolphin' and received a congratulatory letter from White upon publication of the novel.

Fearing so few films were being made in New Zealand, he "had no future as a New Zealand filmmaker", Shadbolt left the country in June 1957, to begin extended journeys in other countries and pursue creative endeavours beyond film. Along the way, he would write acclaimed novels such as "The Lovelock Version", and his long in gestation "Strangers and Journeys", three editions of Brian Brake photo book New Zealand: Gift of the Sea, and a trilogy of novels set during the New Zealand Wars: Season of the Jew, Monday's Warriors and The House of Strife.

Travel

In 1957, Shadbolt & his wife Gill Hemming travelled to Moscow to attend a youth festival via China. As guests of the Soviet Writers' Union, they had guides, interpreters and a limousine on call. Despite the lavish hospitality, concerts and operas, every night the KGB rang their hotel room to check on them, and their attempts to meet dissident writers were thwarted.

In Georgia, Hemming wrote about the primitive infrastructure and lack of modern plumbing while vast sums were being spent on a marble museum dedicated to Stalin. On their travels, they shared one typewriter. While Shadbolt hammered out articles and short stories for the local papers, Hemming wrote long letters home, whereas Shadbolt wrote of the socialist dream, Hemming reported the actual realities.

They settled in England for two years. During this time, Shadbolt continued to work as a journalist while putting together a collection of short stories. 'The New Zealanders' was published to acclaim in 1959 first in the UK then New Zealand..

His early work attracted much critical acclaim in England, but Shadbolt decided that, as a writer, he was ‘engaged, perhaps for life, in an obsessional love-hate affair with a strange fact of life and history called New Zealand’.2 He recognised that New Zealanders were eager for stories and books about themselves after more than a century of dominance by the British literary tradition, and his novels drew almost entirely on his experience of New Zealand and New Zealanders. He was sometimes criticised for writing with consciously nationalistic themes..

For a decade from the mid-1970s, Shadbolt travelled widely in Europe, often on journalism commissions for Reader’s Digest. His research visit to Gallipoli in 1977 prompted a deep interest in the ill-fated First World War campaign that was said to have triggered New Zealanders’ self-awareness as an independent nation. This led to the Gallipoli section of The Lovelock version, the play Once on Chunuk Bair(1982) (filmed in 1991), and the television documentary Gallipoli: the New Zealand story(1984).The latter was based on interviews with veterans which formed the basis for his book Voices of Gallipoli(1988).

Writing Career

Maurice Shadbolt’s fiction career fell into three broad periods. During the first, from the mid-1950s until the early 1970s, his work strongly reflected the world of family and provincial life in which he had grown up. He came to see the short stories he published between 1955 and 1964 as ‘love affairs’ leading to the more permanent relationships demanded by the novel.3 But he worked many of the characters and themes portrayed in the stories into the fabric of his saga Strangers and journeys(1972), which he had begun writing in 1963. Re-reading his stories in 1978, he wrote that he seemed to be ‘revisiting a lost innocent land, a New Zealand which no longer exists’.

In total, Shadbolt wrote 11 novels, four collections of short stories, two autobiographies, a war history, and a volume of journalism, as well as plays. He won the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award for a short story three times: in 1963, 1967 and 1995. His first collection of short stories, The New Zealanders, was published in the United Kingdom and New Zealand. His most famous book is probably Season of the Jew (1987), which recounts the story of Te Kooti.

Film Work

Though his writing would inspire other filmmakers, Shadbolt himself worked on a few screen projects after leaving the National Film Unit. One of the few exceptions was Down by the Cool Sea, an early television play which screened in 1966. Nine years later Roger Donaldson and Arthur Baysting adapted the short story After the Depression into a anthology TV series Winners and Losers. The series, originally from The New Zealanders, shows the story revolves around a family searching for work in the 1930s.

Shadbolt's debut novel Among the Cinders (1965) was made into a movie in 1983. Filming in Golden Bay, German director Rolf Hädrich made a number of changes to the coming of age tale. Shadbolt and his real-life wife at the time Bridget Armstrong appeared on screen, playing parents to the story's troubled teen. A young Rebecca Gibney co-starred.

Shadbolt's interest in Gallipoli would spawn books, films, and his only published play, Once on Chunuk Bair, a tale of a group of soldiers trying to capture a strategically important hilltop in Gallipoli, was brought to the screen in 1991 by Dale Bradley as movie Chunuk Bair. Shadbolt also wrote the script for the Feltex Award-winning documentary Gallipoli: The New Zealand Story, and accompanying book Voices of Gallipoli. The book was based on interviews that Shadbolt and war historian Chris Pugsley did with 26 Gallipoli veterans, as Pugsley writes here.

Awards

In the 1989 New Year Honours, Shadbolt was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to literature. In 1990 he also was awarded a 1990 Commemoration Medal For Services to New Zealand.

Family and Personal Life

Shadbolt and Hemming returned to Auckland, New Zealand in 1960. Four years later they purchased 'Shadbolt House' a Titirangi property above the Manukau Harbour overlooking Little Muddy Creek. It remained Shadbolt's home for 42 years until his death.

Shadbolt married Journalist Gill Hemming in Auckland on 21 November 1953 in Auckland’s St Matthew-in-the-City and had four children (Sean, Brendan and twins Tui and Daniel). However Shadbolt’s personal life was often tumultuous, and he was involved in numerous extra-marital relationships. "I would marry and divorce more than was good for me, and father five children," he wrote in One of Ben's.

After his first marriage to Gill Hemming ended in divorce in 1971, he married television personality Barbara Magner in Auckland on 17 December 1971. They had one child, Brigid. Following divorce from Magner in 1978, he married actress Bridget Armstrong in Titirangi on 9 December 1978. After dissolution of this marriage in 1992, he married author and script writer Elspeth Sandys in Duvauchelle on 20 November 1993.

Shadbolt's cousin was Tim Shadbolt Mayor of Invercargill for nearly 20 years until his retirement in 2022.

Later Years

By 1997 Shadbolt was suffering from the onset of dementia, thought to be Alzheimer's disease. There was a genetic element to this – his mother had also suffered from degenerative dementia. His last work was the erratic memoir From the edge of the sky(1999), a successor to his earlier One of Ben’s(1993).

In 2000, Shadbolt entered Avonlea Hospital and Home in Taumarunui, where he remained until his death on 10 October 2004 at the age of 72 surrounded by his children.An autopsy revealed that he had suffered from dementia with Lewy bodies. His funeral was held in the church where he was first married, Auckland’s St Matthew-in-the-City, and he was buried in Waikumete Cemetery, West Auckland.

Shadbolt never claimed to be anything other than a storyteller, and the scale of his readership and the wide range of his awards confirm he was the best of his time. In 1993 he wrote, ‘There is only one reason to write, and it is not to serve literary fashion or scholarly fads. It is, as it was in the beginning, to get a grip on our existence’.

Political Activism

Shadbolt was a man of strongly held views - mostly left wing in nature. He joined the New Zealand Communist Party as an 18-year-old, but later became disillusioned with the movement when he became aware of the behaviour of mass murderers like Stalin and Mao, to say nothing of the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia by the USSR. His travels through Russia and other communist countries certainly opened his eyes, especially when he witnessed the repression of so- called dissident writers, such as the Nobel Prize-winning Pasternak.

Through his writing, Shadbolt was an early Pākehā proponent of the need to recognise and embrace Māori culture in national life. His position as a pre-eminent author also lent weight to his role campaigning in print against the Vietnam War for a decade from 1965. In 1972, as part of the protests against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific, he sailed in the yacht Tamuretowards the test site of Mururoa and Tahiti. This experience formed the basis of his novel Danger zone(1975). He also took an active part in protests against the Springbok rugby tour in 1981.

Shadbolt did not complete a degree and spent much of his time at University engaged in socialist activism, especially during the 1951 Waterfront dispute.

Shadbolt was passionate about injustice and became convinced Arthur Allan Thomas was not guilty of the 1970 Crewe murders. He visited Mr Thomas in prison, speaking with the prisoner for hours and wrote an article for Reader's Digest, pointing out the Pukekawa farmer could not have committed the murders. Two weeks later, Thomas was pardoned.

Notable Friends and Art Collection

At university he began lifelong friendships with novelist Maurice Gee and poet Kevin Ireland, who was to endure as his closest literary colleague. As a student, Shadbolt earned some income from performing as a conjuror. He credited this with teaching him that ‘nothing is ever quite what it seems’ and that ‘craft and cunning can go a long way’, perspectives that were to govern much of his creative writing.

Shadbolt's notable art collection was put up for auction by Webb's Auckland in 2008. Many of the paintings in the collection were gifted to the writer who formed close friendships with some of New Zealand's best known artists. The collection had works by Michael Smither, Colin McCahon and Don Binney.

Included was 'Rockpools' by Michael Smither which was used by Shadbolt as the cover art for his novel 'A Touch of Clay'. Rockpools (1972) was oil on board 890 x 675mm. It was created after the duo took a walk together at Bethells Beach. Shadbolt & Smither got some broken bits of pottery and threw them into a pool. Smither then went and sketched it.. Previously Shadbolt had commissioned Smither to create the cover art for his novel 'This Summer's Dolphin'.

Shadbolt House

Shadbolt famously lived at Number 35 Arapito Road, Titirangi for 42 years (1964-2000). Located off South Titirangi Road. Titirangi means "edge of the sky" and Arapito "end of the track", as Maurice explained in his autobiography Edge of the Sky: A Memoir in 1999.

The three-bedroom house and studio incorporates a California Bungalow erected in the 1940s with a separate purpose-built writer’s studio later created by Shadbolt in 1972, and a garden with native vegetation and features built by him and his family. He would spend most mornings in the small studio set in the bush by the harbour's edge. Which is where he produced such works as One of Ben's, Season of the Jew and Monday's Warriors. Shadbolt's novel Touch of Clay, was also set in Titirangi, which was favoured by artists seeking a creative sanctuary away from suburbia.

Other notable artworks created in the Shadbolt house include 'The McCahon Bar' which is now owned and housed at Te Papa. The formica, sky blue bar was installed by the previous owners of the house and stood in the basement of the Titirangi house. Shadbolt used it to make his coffee on every morning and arrange the papers of the novel he was working on at the time. McCahon painted it for him while he was away on a writing assignment in just one afternoon in a vivid blue, red and green with the words: "As there is a constant flow of light we are born into a pure land." McCahon also painted on the bar: "Buttercup Fields Forever."

Maurice’s words: "Much of my life, possibly too much, has been lived in a studio set above a serene New Zealand estuary. This hermit hideout, where I write now, is fringed with spindly mangroves, wreathed with rainforest, and always under siege from loudmouthed birds."

The walls of his studio were covered with poems, photographs, paintings, prints, clippings and other items relating to the country's artistic elite or his diverse travels. He mentions luminaries such as poet James K Baxter, celebrated photographer Brian Brake, writer Ronald Hugh Morrieson, and artists Colin McCahon, Eric Lee-Johnson and Michael Smither. There were also carvings from Borneo, Tonga and Malaysia; lava from Iceland; fragments of bullets and grenades from Gallipoli; greenstone; ancient Roman coins; and marble remnants from Athens. There was even a worn calfskin rug, a gift from prison escapee George Wilder, whom Maurice visited while incarcerated. In an interview he revealed "This hermit hideout where I write now, fringed with spindly mangroves, wreathed with rainforest and is always under siege from loudmouthed birds . . ,"he wrote in his memoir. The birds he names include wood pigeons, tui, kingfishers, fantails and rosellas. "Most of my dozen novels and more than a score of stories besides have taken form under this roof."

The Shadbolt family sold the home and studio to the Auckland Council in 2006 with plans of establishing a writer's residency programme with school education programmes. A trust was to be set up to manage the project and raise funds to repay some of the $550,000 purchase price. The council hoped the project would follow the success of its handing over the McCahon house. A French Bay Bach where artist Colin McCahon and his family lived for seven years from 1953.

The project was supported and spearheaded by Bob Harvey (KNZM & QSO) and Naomi McCleary (MNZM). Harvey and McCleary together founded many significant arts facilities in west Auckland, including McCahon House, Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery, Corban Estate Arts Centre, and Going West, the literary festival. McCleary described the home as "not an architectural masterpiece, but the walls hold a story of the cultural importance of this late 20th century writer. It is also a very beautiful place. It is the perfect place to establish a writers residency in his (Shadbolt's) name".

Auckland Council came into ownership of the the Shadbolt house as a result of the “supercity” in 2010, when the six separate Auckland councils were amalgamated into what is now one body. Stalling and creating a slow drawn out bureaucratic process to get the writers residence open. The house was rented out until 2019 but required upgrades and repairs which left it standing empty. For a while, Auckland University of Technology (AUT) was interested in buying the house for a writing school, but the idea was dropped around 2010.

In April 2022 it was reported that the West Auckland house was in a state of disrepair. Even in it's terrible condition the the modest weatherboard 1518sqm property, with a 160sqm house, was valued at $1.4m. The Waitākere Local Board agreed to recommend to Auckland Council to transfer the property to the Going West Trust, which runs an annual writer’s festival to continue with the writers residency project. Auckland Council voted unanimously on August 25 2022 to transfer the Titirangi house to the Going West Trust.

Due to the amount of time that had passed, the significant repairs included stabilising the foundations, upgrading the bathroom and kitchen. Along with repainting the interior, and exterior of the property. Landscaping and repair of the pathways would also be required to access the detached studio. Going West Trust entered into four-year lease with Auckland Council for the land in Titirangi on which the Shadbolt House is sited. If successful, the Trust may then renew the lease for a further ten years, with further options to renew. It was agreed that once repairs were completed by the Going West Trust ownership would be transferred to them to manage the writers residence.

In July of 2024 Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga confirmed Maurice Shadbolt House and Studio in Titirangi was listed as a Category 1 historic place. The listing identifies it as a place of outstanding heritage significance for its long and close association with one of New Zealand’s best-known late 20th Century writers.

The process of setting up the writers residency is still on going however it has been noted that once opened the residency will be available to both Authors & Journalists.

Bibliography

His works were often published in the UK and United States as well as in New Zealand, sometimes in different years. Dates are for the first appearance.

• New Zealanders: a Sequence of Stories (1959).
• Western Samoa: The Pacific's Newest Nation (1962).
• Summer Fires and Winter Country (short stories, 1963).
• New Zealand: Gift of the Sea (1963, revised 1973).
• Among the Cinders (1965, revised 1984). A film version was released in 1983.
• The Presence of Music: Three Novellas (1967).
• New Zealand's Cook Islands: Paradise in Search of a Future (1967).
• The Shell Guide to New Zealand (1968, revised 1973).
• Isles of the South Pacific (1968).
• This Summer's Dolphin (1969). Short novel inspired by the story of Opo the dolphin.
• An Ear of the Dragon (1971). Fictional novel based on the life of Renato Amato.
• Strangers and Journeys (1972).
• A Touch of Clay (1974). Part one of a projected trilogy.
• Danger Zone (1975). Part two of the unfinished trilogy.
• Love and legend: Some 20th century New Zealanders (1976).
• Figures in Light: Selected Stories (1979).
• The Lovelock Version (1980).
• Season of the Jew (1986). Part one of the New Zealand Wars trilogy.
• Guide to New Zealand (1988).
• Voices of Galipoli (television documentary, 1988).
• Monday's Warriors (1990). Part two of the New Zealand Wars trilogy.
• Once on Chunuk Bair (1982), a play. A film version Chunuk Bair was released in 1991.
• The House of Strife (1993). Part three of the New Zealand Wars trilogy.
• One of Ben's: A New Zealand Medley (autobiography, 1993).
• Ending the Silences: Critical Essays (1994)
• Dove on the Waters (novellas, 1996).
• Selected Stories of Maurice Shadbolt, edited by Ralph Crane (1998).
• From the Edge of the Sky: A Memoir (1999).

Screenography

• Mercury Lane - Series One, Episode 13, 2001, Subject - Television

• Mercury Lane - Series One, Episode Three 2001, Subject - Television

• Chunuk Bair, 1991, Original Author - Film

• The Making of Chunuk Bair, 1991, Subject - Television

• Gallipoli: The New Zealand Story, 1984, Writer - Television

• John A Lee, 1984, Subject - Television

• Among the Cinders - 1983, Original Author, As: Frank Flinders (Nick's father) - Film

• Winners & Losers: After the Depression, 1976, Original Author - Television

• Gallery - Albert Wendt, 1973, Subject - Television

• Survey - The Town that Lost a Miracle, 1972, Subject - Television

• On Camera, 1970, Subject - Television

• Down by the Cool Sea, 1966, Writer - Television

• Pictorial Parade No. 55, 1956, Writer, Editor, Director - Short Film

• Tasman Glacier - Polar Exercise, 1956, Editor - Short Film

• Pictorial Parade No. 56, 1956, Editor, Writer - Short Film

• Pictorial Parade No. 47, 1956, Director, Editor, Writer - Short Film

• Pictorial Parade No. 33 - Ohakea Looks Up! NZ’s Air Force Day Display, 1955, Editor, Writer - Short Film

• Pictorial Parade No. 34 - Alpine Gliding - Holiday on Air, 1955, Editor, Writer - Short Film

• Pictorial Parade No. 38, 1955, Director, Editor, Writer - Short Film

• Pictorial Parade No. 44 - Spring Round-Up, 1955, Director, Editor, Writer - Short Film

• Pictorial Parade No. 41, 1955, Writer, Director, Editor - Short Film

• Safety in the Mountains, 1955 - 1956, Editor, Writer, Director - Short Film

• Pictorial Parade No. 36 - Ardmore Teachers Training College story, Director, Writer, Editor - Short Film

• Pictorial Parade No. 30 - The Dry Season is Dangerous, 1954, Director, Editor, Writer - Short Film

• The Navy and the Royal Tour, 1954, Editor, Writer - Short Film

See also

• New Zealand literature

References

• Robinson, Roger and Nelson Wattie (eds.). The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature. Melbourne, Victoria: Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-19-558348-5.

External links

• Maurice Shadbolt at the New Zealand Book Council
• Shadbolts bibliography in the Auckland University Library
• Maurice Shadbolt at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database