From the Personal to the Political, Religious, and a Vision of Socialism in Maurice Gee’s Orchard Street, a New Zealand Novel for Children

Authors

  • Vivien van Rij Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21153/pecl2017vol25no1art1093

Keywords:

New Zealand history, socialism, unionism, nationalism

Abstract

This article considers Orchard Street, a novel for children by award-winning New Zealand author, Maurice Gee, and his use of history in depicting New Zealand during the 1951 conflict between the Waterside Workers, and the ship-owners and National government. The article focuses first on Gee’s childhood during the 1940s in Henderson, West Auckland, and on Newington Road where he and his family lived as a model for the creation of Orchard Street. It then looks at the integration of the 1951 conflict into this realistic setting, and Gee’s charging of the street with a political significance.

A self-proclaimed socialist, Gee is firmly on the side of the Wharfies, as is his protagonist, the thirteen-year old Ossie Dye who is on the brink of adulthood, and faced with difficult choices. While supporting his parents’ socialist ideals, and delivering illegal propaganda at night, Ossie imagines he is the solitary American cowboy, Zane Grey’s Lone Star Ranger (p. 13), and excludes the lonely Bike Pike from his gang of friends.

The article briefly examines Gee’s use of an older Ossie as the first person narrator who, looking back from 1991 to the 1951 conflict, forms a circular frame that modifies its depiction. Also considered is the influence of neo-liberalism and the social and political reforms of the 1980s-1990s on Gee’s writing. The article finally argues that the multi-layered timeframe and geometrical structure of the novel are evidence not only of the author’s preoccupation with division but, more predominantly, of his socialist ideology and search for wholeness and balance.

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Author Biography

  • Vivien van Rij, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

    Vivien van Rij is a lecturer in English in the Faculty of Education, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand where she teaches literacy and children’s literature on under-graduate and post-graduate courses. Vivien’s doctoral thesis was on Maurice Gee’s novels for children, and she has published widely on these and on New Zealand’s School Journal. Vivien has a particular interest in the pedagogical and literary qualities of texts. She has presented at many international conferences and is currently working on an article on Jack Lasenby’s Traveller’s Quartet.

References

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Anonymous (1951) ‘Sid’s Trip to the Moon.’ Wellington: Turnbull Library collection. (Taken from his personal files, this poem was read by Gee to the author during a telephone conversation.)

Author’s Interviews with Two Elderly Residents of Newington Road, Auckland (2005, unpublished).

Bailey, Rona (2004) ‘Telling the World “the Other Side of the Story.”’ In D. Grant (ed) The Big Blue: Snapshots of the 1951 Waterfront Lockout. Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, pp. 38-44.

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Van Rij, Vivien (2013) ‘Patterns of Exchange: Setting, Hero, Villain and Child’. In E. Hale (ed) Maurice Gee a Literary Companion: The Fiction for Young Readers. Dunedin: Otago University Press, pp. 147-61.

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Published

2017-01-01

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Articles

How to Cite

“From the Personal to the Political, Religious, and a Vision of Socialism in Maurice Gee’s Orchard Street, a New Zealand Novel for Children” (2017) Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, 25(1), pp. 23–50. doi:10.21153/pecl2017vol25no1art1093.

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