Books
The world of Jack Lasenby
by Margaret Mahy
An appreciation of “perhaps the most innately New Zealand writer of all New Zealand writers for children”.
I am a grumpy old author. I grew up partly at Mercury Bay on the Coromandel Peninsula. All we ever seemed to do was camp, fish, swim, sail, row, dig for gold, collect kauri gum and go on picnics. Around the camp fires and lying in our sacking bunks at night we listened to our mother and aunts and uncles talk about the times when they were children.
This quote comes from the front of Jack Lasenby’s book Aunt Effie. It precedes the title page and somehow carries more authority than the publisher’s official information on the back cover. The account it gives, the very flavour of that intelligence, though it specifically relates to the book Aunt Effie, relates to other books by Lasenby as well.
Lasenby has been a writer for many years. He has written school bulletins and stories for radio and tele-vision, along with 25 books for children and young adults, and he is perhaps the most innately New Zealand writer of all New Zealand writers for children. His work encompasses picture books, along with both realistic and futuristic novels for children and young adults, and tall stories for the middle school, or anyone. He has lectured and talked to school children, won many awards – one could never say that the excellence of his writing had been unacknowledged. And yet, in a curious way, Lasenby seems to be, certainly not an unknown writer, but a concealed one, and, paradoxically, part of his concealment may be tied in with that innate New Zealand identity, and with his loyalty not only to a particular time but to the quality of New Zealand childhood implicit in that time. Not, he insists, that he consciously set out to acknowledge that particular time. His intention has simply been to tell a story – but then telling a story is never quite as simple as it seems to be.
Lasenby was born in Waharoa, and Waharoa, taking on a sort of archetypal quality, haunts his stories – the realistic ones and the tall stories, too. He went on to intermediate and secondary school in Matamata and worked at a variety of jobs: in a dairy factory, as a tally clerk on the waterfront, as a postman and a gardener, and at deer-culling and possum-trapping, mostly in the Ureweras. In due course he went to university and in 1963 qualified as a primary school teacher. All this time, however, he was involved with the idea of writing, and his time in the bush (on occasions reading Edgar Allan Poe to his fellow deer-cullers) reinforced that storytelling impulse he already carried in him, reminding him yet again of the power of the human voice to release the story, and the eagerness of the human ear to receive it.
In 1969 he became an editor of the School Journal, a job he held for six years before going on, in 1975, to lecture in English at Wellington Teachers’ College, after which, in 1987, he resigned to live dangerously – to try to make a living as a fulltime writer. This is something he has successfully achieved, receiving the Sargeson Fellowship in 1991, the Victoria University of Wellington’s Writer Fellowship in 1993 and the Dunedin College of Education Writer’s Fellowship in 1995.
This introductory account, sparse though it is, suggests the huge variety of experience that Lasenby has been able to bring to bear on his stories. Some of it may seem relatively predictable – teaching and editing of stories for children are activities that might well give a writer a specific voice, and no doubt they have played their part. However, it is Lasenby’s own childhood (together with the mood of those rather more unexpected deer-culling and possum-trapping passages) that inescapably dominate his stories.
“I am not very interested in writing about today,” he says, and adds that he is “writing towards a certain sort of response out there” – an imaginative response to that same imaginative energy he feels working within himself. In writing, Lasenby says, he is trying to achieve a moment of revelation, and not mere reportage of some current fashion in language or teen clothing and -behaviour.
I have suggested that of all the writers for children working in New Zealand today, Lasenby has the most essentially New Zealand voice, even though its idiom and accent insistently relate back to the 1930s and 40s – a time when New Zealand was rather more isolated, and when its vocabulary, its accent, its inner life and its responses to the world were being established in an unconscious and inward-looking way. In spite of the huge changes in international connections and in the casual way New Zealanders now come and go between home and the rest of the world, something of this flavour still survives as a recognisable part of our individuality, and Lasenby finds the childhood of that time coming out in his stories again and again. “The 30s,” he says, “were a period of survival and interest in survival”, and survival is the predominant subject of many of his tales. The 30s were certainly a time when children could be left without adult intercession for a whole day, when they could get together as gangs, to wander up creeks and along the edge of the sea, going without food (unless they caught eels) and returning in the late afternoon or evening.
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