Gregory O’Brien
Writer
Biography
There has been only one instance in my life when I have felt as if I have pulled a rabbit from a hat. This was during the time I was working on the history of the New Zealand School Journal, A Nest of Singing Birds – one of the most enjoyable and edifying projects imaginable.
In fact, during the year or so I spent writing the book – between 2005 and 2007 – I found myself pulling a great many rabbits from a great many hats.
Through earlier researches on Rita Angus and John Drawbridge, I knew there was a phenomenal art history waiting to be uncovered in the School Publications vault. I had also heard a good many (usually picaresque) tales of the writerly contingent – Baxter, Campbell, Johnson – from their time working on the School Journal. I went into the project with a specific objective: to unearth what I could of this unwritten literary and art history of New Zealand. The book is an account of this “alternative history of New Zealand culture” (as one commentator described it). Before I knew it, my desk was stacked high with old Journals bearing the names Janet Frame, Ngaio Marsh, Colin McCahon, Robert Ellis, Russell Clark, Margaret Mahy… There was enough imaginative force in the room to blow the roof off. Upon publication, A Nest of Singing Birds took a lot of people by surprise.
A year or so after that book appeared, my second book about New Zealand art “for the young and curious”, Back and Beyond, was published. That volume is alive with connections to the School Journal and its many contributors. (I even managed to include a few School Journal covers from the 1940s and 1950s – ones I couldn’t fit into A Nest!)
The best projects are the ones you never leave behind; they determine the shape and direction of everything that comes after. A Nest of Singing Birds was certainly like that for me. Since then, I have completed a book-length study of one of the key Journal artists of the 1960s, Graham Percy. With a touring exhibition to accompany it, The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy will be published in May 2011. It includes numerous Journal illustrations from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as a series of designs for Pacific Island language publications that I tracked down in an archive in London late last year. I hope in the years to come, other researchers and writers will keep digging deeper into this remarkable history.
I like the hedgehogs and the eels, but I get a real kick from all the rabbits (including some by Graham Percy) that have appeared in the Journal. Some of the best ones were drawn by Jill McDonald (who also designed the best birds – see the cover of A Nest of Singing Birds). Although I do not have strong memories of the School Journal as a child, it seems to have caught up with me in my forties. I like to think of it as embodying the imaginative life of a healthy and progressive nation. As you can see, I’m still pulling rabbits out of hats. Wonders never cease.