New Zealand Book Month has got me thinking about ‘national character’. There’s our broad collective identity as New Zealanders, our narrower collective identities based on where we live and who we’re descended from – and then there’s each of us as individuals.

In a newspaper review of my second poetry collection, Magnetic South, an Auckland reviewer pegged me as a ‘southern lass’. I’m not sure what that term conjures to an Aucklander – but if it’s images of a Speights-swilling couch-burning rugby fan it couldn’t be more wrong. Or am I supposed to be in a constant state of doe-eyed reverence for the lonely landscape? That’s closer – but by no means definitive.

‘Southern lass’ – it’s a term about as meaningful as JAFA really (not that we would ever use that term down here). There it sat in the middle of a review of my poetry: a glib, throw-away remark, a pigeon-holing comment, purporting to sum me up – as a writer and as a person – in two words. Such a label enables people to stick you in a box: neat, confineable, manageable – and (unless my box is also your box), dismissible.
 
Actually I was made in Africa, born in Wellington, raised in Wanganui and Wellington, and (as an adult) eloped to the beautiful city of Dunedin. I guess I’m southern now – but the more northern strands of me remain, and I certainly ain’t no lass any more. When I was a lass, I was a Wanganui lass growing up in an immigrant family, parented by a mother and father who carried within them – and passed silently to me – childhood experiences of war and displacement. At a glance I always looked like a typical Pakeha kid. But I spoke wrong, and we ate wrong, and I constantly played wrong in the playground. The fact of being a New Zealander, for me, has always been complicated by a sense of not being entirely “typical”.

But one of the ways that we as a new New Zealand family found our feet was by reading. I remember my mother’s battered copies of Witi Ihimaera’s Pounamu Pounamu, and Fiona Kidman’s A Breed of Women. Mum read them, and read Sargeson, Frame, Mansfield – she stripped the library of New Zealand books. As she laid the books down, I picked them up, and so began to absorb and understand the various voices of Aoteoroa/New Zealand. Without a doubt, this is how we also became New Zealanders.

The joy and the importance of New Zealand literature – of any literature – is that it does not pigeon-hole. Good writing delves deeply and imaginatively into individuality – subliminally asking: what makes us different? How are we the same? It cautions us against making assumptions; challenges us to see the individual under the skin, the actual person residing at any given address.

The five stories and one set of poems in The Six Pack Three are testament to this: six New Zealand writers, six very different pieces of work, celebrating diversity, articulating a wide range of possible lives and ways to live them, but also highlighting our common fears and yearnings.   

It’s at best laughable, and at worst enraging, to have one’s identity crunched to a sound-bite. I’m lucky: it (mainly) makes me smile. According to my Auckland review, in my assigned role as Southern Lass Poet I ‘name-check the southern realms’ of Wanaka, Bannockburn and Horoeka. That’s interesting, since I also write in the same book about Auckland, Wellington, St Petersburg, Australia, Yorkshire, Zimbabwe, Latvia and London.

But Horoeka? I’ve never been there, though we do have one in the garden. Horoeka is the Maori word for lancewood.