Martin Edmond

He did this amazing wall painting, this muralâe¦It was a city, a Paul Klee or a Max Ernst city, a city of the mind perhaps, or of antiquity. A dream city. It was a wonderful thing. It took a few days and nights to do, beautiful days and nights. All the other men who lived in the donga watched it come clear. They loved it. And then other men in the camp heard about it too and came to look. An unknown man comes ashore at a remote beach on the New South Wales coast. He is taken into detention and sent, ultimately, to Darwin. His captors call him Thursday after the day upon which he was found. Thursday doesn't speak, but instead paints an enigmatic mural on the wall of his donga in the detention centre. It is a city, a dream city, and when he finishes he says a single word: Isinglass. This latest offering from author Martin Edmond is a beautifully written portrayal of the shameful practices of the Australian gulag archipelago, and a compelling story of a man adrift in an unkind world.

Isinglass

So here I am walking again an old path made new by the very fact that I am upon it once more, accompanied by familiar hordes: the fecund majority of the dead, the myriad of the living in all of their many forms, defunct, mutant, revenant or otherwise, traversing memory’s infinite field. In the evocative prose that makes him one of our finest writers, Martin Edmond recalls his experiences of growing up in rural New Zealand in the 1950s and 60s. The son of schoolteachers, Edmond’s early life was shaped by his father’s developing career and the moves it dictated: from Ohakune, to Greytown, to Huntly, to Heretaunga. The Dreaming Land shows us the making of a thinker and a writer. Edmond documents the people, locations, and events that made a lasting impression on him, and maps the development of his mental landscape – a landscape marked by curiosity, empathy and the capacity for acute observation. It is a book that is at once personal and universal, charting formative moments yet filled with details that resonate more broadly. The Dreaming Land pushes at the boundaries of what can be remembered to create a narrative which absorbs, illuminates and enchants.

The Dreaming Land

Kirsty Gunn

Owen Marshall

Maurice Gee

Award-winning New Zealand writers Martin Edmond, Maurice Gee, Kirsty Gunn and Owen Marshall explore life and memory in this bundle of BWB Texts. These four works are combined into one easy-to-read e-book, available direct and DRM-free from our website or from international e-book retailers. Martin Edmond’s Barefoot Years is a memoir in which the author attempts to re-inhabit the lost domain of childhood. Widely regarded as one of New Zealand’s greatest fiction writers, Maurice Gee has written virtually no non-fiction. The exceptions are the two exquisite childhood reminiscences combined in a mini-memoir, Creeks and Kitchens. In this exquisitely written ‘notebook’ – ‘My Katherine Mansfield Project’ – Kirsty Gunn explores the meaning of ‘home’ in Thorndon. Owen Marshall reflects at length on his writing career and the forces that have shaped him as a writer, in Tunes for Bears to Dance To. BWB Texts are short books on big subjects by great New Zealand writers. Commissioned as short digital-first works, BWB Texts unlock diverse stories, insights and analysis from the best of our past, present and future New Zealand writing.

BWB Texts: Writers' Lives

The development of the artistic identity is revealed in this autobiography of an award-winning screenwriter. Anecdotes of travels and relationships with friends, roommates, and lovers are balanced with aesthetic encounters with artists such as Van Gogh, Gaugin, and Rimbaud. Episodes in Amsterdam, London, Sydney, Fiji, and New Zealand demonstrate the impact of place on the author's personal life. The nature of the creative personality and the process of writing an autobiography are explored in this artistic and personal revelation.

Chronicle of the Unsung

Bus Stops on the Moon is a personal and a cultural history. As memoir, it is a sequel to The Dreaming Land (2015). A troubled and restless young Martin Edmond is on his way to becoming the wiser, older man who will sit down and write both narratives. As cultural history, the book gives us a participant's-eye view of the early years of Alan Brunton and Sally Rodwell's avant-garde theatre troupe Red Mole. Formed in 1974, Red Mole performed Dadaesque cabaret, agit-prop, costume drama, street theatre, circus and puppetry, live music, and became a national sensation. They toured the country with Split Enz and travelled internationally. One of Red Mole's five founding principles was 'to escape programmed behaviour by remaining erratic.' They ticked that one off. In Bus Stops on the Moon Martin Edmond offers, with his customary elegance, a rich and entertaining picture of the high times and low lives of Red Mole.

Bus Stops on the Moon

Out on that hallowed ground I felt my own consciousness go, not into exile or oblivion but into what was round about . . . like McCahon when he was lost in here, I had surrendered my identity; I had, like him, become just another entity among entities: as the trees pulled up moisture from the earth and exhaled it through their leaves into the air, so too did I inhale and exhale, so too did the insects, the birds, the animals; clouds and stars were likewise mortal bodies that expanded and contracted rhythmically for a long or short while then passed away. In 1984, in the palm grove in Sydney's Botanic Gardens, the artist Colin McCahon went missing. He was found by police early next morning in Centennial Park, kilometres away, with no memory of who he was or where he had been. They took him to St Vincent's Hospital where he remained, a complete unknown, while a major retrospective exhibition of his paintings opened on the other side of town. In Dark Night, Martin Edmond walks in McCahon's footsteps, past pubs and monuments, art galleries and churches, barracks and parks: to accompany him some way into the darkness of his end. Edmond's record of the journey is a brilliant exploration of a city and its denizens; of the nature of art and the foundations of faith; and of the shadowy crossroads where they intersect.

Walking with McCahon

Dark Night

The connection between a colony and its founder, centre and margin, is always paradoxical. Where once Britain sent colonists out into the world, now the descendents of those colonists return to interrogate the centre. This is a book about four of these returners: Harold Williams, journalist, linguist, Foreign Editor of The Times; Ronald Syme, spy, libertarian, historian of ancient Rome; John Platts-Mills, radical lawyer and political activist; and Joseph Burney Trapp, librarian, scholar and protector of culture. These were men, born in remote New Zealand, who achieved fame in Europe—even as they were lost sight of at home. Men who became, from the point of view of their country of origin, expatriates. A writer of penetrating insight, Martin Edmond explores the intersections of past and present in the lives of these four extraordinary individuals. Their stories combine, in the hands of this award-winning writer, to a moving reflection upon New Zealand’s place in the world, then and now.

Martin Edmond

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