I bought this hardcover book on sight at the launch. I want it on my bookshelves immediately to start showing to people. The book itself feels like a treasure, a brand new presentation of an old world, with heavy shiny paper, crisp print and a sharp layout, illustrating a family story from the 1850s to the current day. There are old photos and copies of telegrams, letters, tickets, and all sorts of ephemera, full-page background designs in a range of heightened sepia and all overlaid with panel-squares of exquisite drawings and minimal text, just enough to tie a story through all the pictures. And what a story.
This is Di Morris’s family, early settlers to Aotearoa New Zealand who travelled from Lairg in Scotland in 1856. Little Agnes grew up to marry James Balfour and the pair built a life on their own land, eventually turning a canvas tent into a homestead on a well established farm. The story mainly focuses on two of their children, sisters Elsie and Margaret who live very different lives but are good companions and stay closely tied with letters and visits.
Elsie’s story is amazing. She grows up wanting to become a doctor in an age when it was a shock that women’s brains were strong enough for such rigorous work. A while ago I had planned a story on a New Zealand girl following the seven intrepid women who broke through the gender barrier to study medicine at Edinburgh and become doctors. My story didn’t go anywhere, but I am so delighted to discover that it was true, anyway, and part of Di Morris’s history. Fiction has a way of doing that. These women are absolute heroes and we should remember and honour them. This is feminism in action. And I was amazed to find a follow up story on the Edinburgh Seven 150 years after the event.
Margaret’s life is more domestic, left on the farm while Elsie goes to Edinburgh. A crisis takes her away from home and her story is another one of women’s fortitude in a difficult era and it follows right through to the present day.
This is a story of New Zealand immigration told through a woman’s lens. There is little of war or politics, though it is in the background – the impact of settlement on tangata whenua and the men coming home damaged from war.
So much of the story is told through illustration, which magnifies the sensory feeling infinitely. Mustard plasters on a back. A poor woman birthing in a hospital training room. Being thrown across the room on a rolling ship. A family party. Some pictures are simple and some extraordinarily detailed, the research intricate and evocative.
An absolute classic for any age – anyone who wants to know what it meant, and how it felt, to live in a past era.
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