]]> University of Otago]]> Forms (Documents)]]>
It is a fitting juxtaposition that this volume, After Anzac Day, by the first Robert Burns Fellow, Ian Cross, comes from the Charles Brasch Collection, held in Special Collections. Cross had an established reputation with The God Boy (1958) and The Backward Sex (1960) when he arrived in Dunedin to take up the Fellowship in 1959. At that time, the English Department was housed in a ‘two-storey wooden building’. During his tenure, Cross realised he could not financially sustain his growing family, and could not be a full-time writer. Subsequently, through his working life, he had an eclectic career in editorships and management positions; writing both fiction and journalism; and broadcasting for radio and television.]]>
Ian Cross]]> Books]]>
Landfall about the establishment of the Fellowship.]]> Edited by Charles Brasch]]> Periodicals]]> Nurse to the Imagination: 50 Years of the Robert Burns Fellowship. In his 45 years in the English Department at Otago, Jones was first to introduce and teach several papers on New Zealand literature; he also wrote extensively on the topic. Jones’s volume has proved indispensable in the researching of this exhibition.]]> Edited by Lawrence Jones]]> Books]]> Otago Daily Times]]> Otago Daily Times]]> Newspapers]]> Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) was an instant success. Soon after his death, numerous Burns Clubs were formed in his honour in commemoration of his life and oeuvre; Dunedin’s own was established in 1861. He had become the ‘People’s Poet’, and the emigrating Scottish diaspora took him wherever they went. This biography of Burns was written by John Gibson Lockhart (d. 1854), the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott (d. 1832).]]> J. G. Lockhart]]> Books]]>
John Caselberg came to Dunedin in the 1940s to study medicine at Otago; he did not complete his degree. Around the same time, he became friends with some of the talented, artistic coterie that inhabited Dunedin in the form of James K. Baxter, Charles Brasch, and Colin McCahon. In the early 1950s, Caselberg published his first book of poems, and Brasch published some of his stories in Landfall. He wrote in several genres – plays, poetry, short stories, biography – and took up the Burns Fellowship in 1961. This enabled him to research archives at the Hocken Library that contributed to this anthology, Maori is My Name.]]>
Edited by John Caselberg]]> Books ]]>

After gaining the Robert Burns Fellowship, Maurice Duggan flew into Dunedin on 25th January, 1960; appropriately, the 201st anniversary of Robert Burns’s birthday. He described it as his ‘best writing year’, and during his tenure, he wrote or produced drafts of some of his most famous short stories. They included ‘Blues for Miss Laverty’, ‘Along Rideout Road that Summer’, and ‘The Wits of Willie Graves’ – all of which were published in this volume, Summer in the Gravel Pit, in 1965. While he was not prolific, there were thirty stories in thirty years, his style of writing made a distinct impact on traditional New Zealand literature.]]>
Maurice Duggan]]> Books]]>

In the early 1960s, Ronald Allison Kells Mason (1905-71) was struggling both physically and mentally, with pneumonia and depression. His award as Robert Burns Fellow for 1962 served as a great fillip for him, and he described it as a ‘reprieve from death’. Before his tenure, Mason had not published anything for 21 years. During the year, he intended to write short stories and undertake research for a Rewi Alley biography, but his focus became publishing previously written poems. Collected Poems came out in July of that year. Later that month he was hospitalised with depression. He recovered, with medication, and continued with his Burns year. The love and gratitude Mason had for Dunedin and its ‘Scottishness’ saw him remain in the city for three more years.]]>
R. A. K. Mason]]> Books]]>

After arriving in Dunedin to take up the Burns Fellowship in January 1963, Maurice Shadbolt spent the first three months of his tenure clearing the decks of his freelance commitments. Then it was on to his ‘big book’ (eventually Strangers and Journeys). However, 20,000 words in, he gave it up. In his memoir, From the Edge of the Sky, Shadbolt says he ‘felt the need to be mischievous; to write something irreverent and unworthy’. This mischievousness became Among the Cinders (1965), his first novel, which reached 200,000 in sales. Shadbolt was a rara avis – a ‘rare breed’ – in that he was able to sustain a five-decade long, financially rewarding career solely based on his writing.]]>
Maurice Shadbolt]]> Books]]>

Like Janet Frame, James K. Baxter was Dunedin-born. His parents and extended family still lived in the city and surrounding area. His acceptance as Burns Fellow was a kind of homecoming after 20 years away, and he made the most of his two years. Baxter wrote about 90 poems and numerous plays; he gave lectures and wrote essays; he took part in protests of the Vietnam War, and spoke out against the University’s stance on mixed flatting in A Small Ode on Mixed Flatting. Lectures he gave during his tenure were printed in The Man on the Horse (1967). Here is James Bertram’s review of the work. In his own words, Baxter said ‘on the whole, I think I made an exemplary Burns Fellow.’]]>
James Bertram]]> The New Zealand Listener]]]> Periodicals]]>

Ruth Dallas (Ruth Mumford) moved to Dunedin from Invercargill in 1954. She first met Charles Brasch in 1949, and continued to develop her professional and personal relationship with him when she worked on Landfall in the 1960s as his editorial assistant. Dallas was accepted as Burns Fellow in 1968, and had been publishing poetry for twenty years. In her own words, from Curved Horizon (1991), she outlines her writing process: ‘I found my best pattern was to mull over my plans at home in solitude in the first part of the morning, sketch a draft and take that to the Burns Room, the typewriter and the unlimited paper.’ The Children of the Bush, based on her mother’s childhood experiences, was just one of the works that resulted from Dallas’s Burns year.]]>
Ruth Dallas]]> Books]]>

Janet Frame was the first woman to take up the Robert Burns Fellowship; she had been invited to do so. Charles Brasch wrote in two journal entries for July 1965 that his friend Janet wrote to ‘live’ and to ‘escape’. And write she did. During the year, she finished the manuscripts for Adaptable Man (1965), and State of Siege (1966); and wrote 100,000 words for The Rainbirds. She also wrote 60 of the poems included in A Pocket Mirror. Two of the poems from said volume have distinct Burnsian and Dunedin themes respectively. Note Brasch’s comments in pencil.]]>
Janet Frame]]> Books]]>

Maurice Gee grew up in Henderson, then a rural part of West Auckland, and it was this place, his boyhood home, that informed many of his future novels. In Dunedin, in June 1959, Gee intimated to Charles Brasch that he would like to hold the Robert Burns Fellowship, ‘to enable him to work on another novel’. Gee applied for 1961 but was unsuccessful; his first novel, The Big Season, was published in 1962. In his Burns year, Gee began writing his second novel, A Special Flower, which was published in 1965. In his ongoing career, Gee wrote for both children and adults in over 30 novels. He has received the most literary awards of any author in New Zealand.]]>
Maurice Gee]]> Books]]>

According to Charles Brasch’s journal entry for 8th June, 1969, it took Warren Dibble a few months to find his feet as the Robert Burns Fellow. Brasch comments that Dibble only ever felt ‘at ease’ on the stage which is where he spent a lot of time during his tenure. He also collaborated with artist, Ralph Hotere, and joined Hone Tuwhare for poetry readings. Dibble called his Burns Year a ‘kickstart’, in that he began works that he was never brave enough to attempt before. Dibble left New Zealand for Australia in the 1970s. This letter was written by Dibble to Special Collections Librarian, Dr Donald Kerr, regarding the exhibition held for the 50th Anniversary of the Robert Burns Fellowship.
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Warren Dibble]]> Correspondence]]>

Noel Hilliard applied for the Robert Burns Fellowship in 1960, without success. Unusually, given his subsequent success with the Maori Girl series, Brasch wrote an entry in his journal, including Hilliard in a sentence with the words ‘no-hopers’ and ‘also-rans’. When he finally came to Dunedin for his Burns year in 1971, Hilliard worked on the draft of the third book of his tetralogy, Maori Woman. The first novel in the series was Maori Girl (1960). Power of Joy (1965) and The Glory and the Dream (1978) are the second and fourth books that complete the series. All the novels were Hilliard’s response to the injustices of racism he had witnessed in New Zealand in the 1950s.]]>
Noel Hilliard]]> Books]]>

When Ted Middleton moved to Dunedin for his Burns year, he made up his mind to make the city his home – ‘he likes it so much’ (Brasch, June 1970). The title-story from his publication, The Loners, was read publicly during his tenure; and the work was one of the first published by Charles Brasch and Janet Paul’s new imprint, Square and Circle, in 1972. Artist Ralph Hotere provided the artwork. Middleton’s varied career choices – dock worker, seaman, clerk, gardener, adult educator – informed his writing. He was able to feel empathy with the working class because he had lived it. Middleton continued to live in Dunedin for the rest of his life, and when he became blind in middle age, he continued to write with a Braille machine.]]>
O. E. Middleton]]> Books]]>

Hone Tuwhare was born in Northland in a bilingual home where he was able to indulge his love of reading. A boilermaker by trade, Tuwhare began to write in earnest in 1956 and published his first collection, No Ordinary Sun, in 1964 – it sold out in a matter of weeks, and was reprinted several times. Tuwhare’s tenure in 1969 was a ‘mini-Burns’, part of a Centennial commemoration of the Robert Burns Fellowship. It ran from June to October. The publication, Come Rain Hail, was the result of this tenure, his first time as Fellow at Otago. It was printed in the Bibliography Room, attached to the English Department. The cover design is by Tuwhare’s friend, Ralph Hotere.]]>
Hone Tuwhare]]> Book]]>

Ian Wedde was an emerging writer in his mid-twenties when he arrived in Dunedin for his Burns year in 1972. In his own words:
Rose and I stayed in a small stone cottage in Port Chalmers. A son, Carlos, was born, and I wrote most of the “Earthly: Sonnets for Carlos” as a happy consequence. We’d been living in Amman, Jordan, 1969-70, where I began work with Fawwaz Tuqan on translations of the poems of Mahmoud Darwish – completed during the Burns year. Much of the Otago environment shaped “Spells for Coming Out” (1977) and, obviously, the protest broadside poem, “Pathway to the Sea” (with Ralph Hotere), protesting against the aluminium smelter at Aramoana.’
Like most Burns Fellows, he made some firm friends, who he says ‘have outlasted the shelf-lives of those books!’]]>
Ian Wedde]]> Books]]>

Graham Billing was born in Dunedin, educated at Otago Boys High School, and the University of Otago. By the time he took up his tenure as Robert Burns Fellow, he already had several novels, plays, and works of non-fiction under his belt. His early career as a seafarer, and the time he spent in Antarctica at Scott Base, in the 1960s, proved to be enduring inspirations in his writing. Billing spent his Burns year drafting his fifth novel, The Primal Therapy of Tom Purslane. The novel was not published until 1980, as soon after the end of his Fellowship, Billing’s life ‘derailed’. He managed to get back on track at the start of the next decade but sadly never regained his former reputation as a writer]]>
Graham Billing]]> Books]]>

Sam Hunt began writing poetry when he was still at high school; he was first published in Landfall in 1967. His tenure as Burns Fellow was for ten weeks only, and he chose to live in Alan and Pat Roddick’s crib on Akapatiki Beach, near the harbourside settlement of Otakou, on the Dunedin Peninsula. He wrote a lot, and some of his output from that time was printed in, Drunkard’s Garden. Hunt’s poems are written to be read aloud, and he has spent most of his career travelling and performing his works in his own inimitable style. Perhaps the coffee stains on the cover of this volume are an indication of Hunt’s popularity?]]>
Sam Hunt]]> Books]]>

Born in Gisborne, Witi Ihimaera began writing seriously in the 1960s, and published his first book, Pounamu Pounamu, in 1972.
He describes his Burns tenure in his own words: ‘Ah, Dun Eideann! The land of Scotitanga! Was I the only Maori in Maori Hill? I may have been. But, I was adopted by your iwi and found shelter among your people. In particular, Rakamaomao, your southern wind was kind and, blowing from the shore enabled me - following my first three books, when I needed direction - to launch my fourth, “The New Net Goes Fishing”, seaward. And so the lines taking the trailing hooks through the breakwater flowed forward into Te Ao Marama.’]]>
Witi Ihimaera]]> Books]]>

In 1974, Hone Tuwhare held the Burns Fellowship again, this time for a full year. He spent his tenure putting together a collection of previously published poems for Something Nothing: Poems (1974). He also wrote for a new collection, which culminated in this volume, Making a Fist of It. Throughout his career, Tuwhare toured the country, reading his poetry to audiences in his resonant and distinctive voice. He moved to Kaka Point in the Catlins in 1992, and is now remembered as one of New Zealand’s most important poets.]]>
Hone Tuwhare]]> Books]]>

Roger Hall expounds on his tenure as Robert Burns Fellow: ‘I was, I think, only the second playwright to get the Burns. At the time (and for many years) the University of Otago was the only university to offer arts fellowships. A privilege. The time enabled me to complete “Middle Age Spread” (which I’d been struggling with at home part-time); write my first panto “Cinderella” (“A waste of Burns Fellows’ time” one academic muttered). I got the Fellowship for a second year and wrote “State of the Play”. The Burns (and, later, generous support from the English Department) enabled me to become a full-time writer for which I’ve always been grateful. And Dunedin took the Fellows to their hearts: dinner – and other –invitations poured in. In the end, we stayed seventeen years. A great time for Dianne and me and a solid foundation for life for Pip and Simon.’]]>
Roger Hall]]> Books]]>

In a letter dated 31st January, 1989 to then University of Otago Reference Librarian, Jeff Kirkus-Lamont, Keri Hulme recalls her time (one term: three months) as Robert Burns Fellow. During her tenure, Hulme published poems under a pseudonym in the student paper, and rewrote the ‘the bone people’. Hulme says that: ‘It wasn’t the final re-write (that took place in my garage at Okarito a year later) but it certainly cleared the mental decks for action.’
The Bone Peoplewas first published in 1984, and Hulme won the Booker (now Man Booker) Prize for her work in 1985 – a first for New Zealand. She also recalls in the letter that she wrote poetry, which would later be published in The Silences Between [Moeraki Conversations] (1982).]]>
Keri Hulme]]> Books]]>