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<h1 class="pagetitle">Writing Wellington: Twenty Years of Victoria University Writing Fellows</h1>
<h1 class="pagesubhead">1990 Marilyn Duckworth</h1>
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<div class="section" id="tei-RobWrit-_N71396" lang="en">
<span class="pb" id="n55" lang="en"><a class="pb" href="#n55" title="page break">page 58</a></span>
        
<h2>1990 <a class="name person topic-ref mention" href="name-202068.html" id="name-202068-mention" title="Marilyn Duckworth. Novelist, poet, and short story writer.">Marilyn Duckworth</a>
</h2>
        
<div class="section" id="tei-RobWrit-_N71396-1" lang="en">
          
<p class="byline">
<a class="name person topic-ref mention" href="name-202068.html" title="Marilyn Duckworth. Novelist, poet, and short story writer.">Marilyn Duckworth</a>
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<span class="figure" id="RobWrit-fig-RobWri58"><a href="RobWrit-fig-RobWri58.html"><img alt="1990 Marilyn Duckworth" src="/etexts/RobWrit/RobWri58(h280).jpg"></a></span>
          
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<div class="work" id="tei-RobWrit-_N71425" lang="en">
<span class="pb" id="n56" lang="en"><a class="pb" href="#n56" title="page break">page 59</a></span>
          
<h3>Camping on the Fault-line</h3>
          
<p>Olive-green houses had had their day. Now, in the late sixties, psychedelic 
dwellings had sprung up in Kelburn and on the Thorndon hillside. Chocolate 
brown with dazzling yellow or orange trim, dark rusty red with turquoise 
window frames. I looked at them and shone back, quaintly cheered. I bought 
some dark rust-coloured paint and set to work on the asbestos sidings 
of our house. My stepladder wouldn't reach as far as the eaves and I had to 
get help from a neighbour to complete the top half. Then the paint ran out. 
The wall alongside the church would remain a watery green.</p>
          
<p>Harry (Seresin) was appalled at the way we were living and at once organised 
me a job doing publicity for Downstage Theatre for twice as much money as I 
earned at the <i>Observer</i>; which was fortuitous 
 because 
the <i>Observer</i> was about to become defunct. The 
advertising salesman had failed to sell space. Young Helen and Sarah began 
accompanying me to Downstage opening nights. Pinter's <i>Birthday Party</i>, Christopher Hampton's <i>The Philanthropist</i>. When KB Laffa's exuberant comedy, 
<i>Zoo Zoo, Widdershins Zoo</i>, was showing my father 
 rang 
up and warned me&mdash;'If you're thinking of taking the girls to <i>Zoo Zoo</i> I thought you should know there's a scene of 
simulated intercourse.' The play was about six young people in a Midlands 
flat, one of them an American draft dodger and all of them busily making 
love not war. My girls had already seen it and loved it. I didn't, however, 
think of taking them to the Late Night Show&mdash;<i>Knackers </i>and later <i>Knockers</i>, 
starring Paul Holmes, John Banas and <a class="name person topic-ref mention" href="name-005272.html" id="name-005272-mention">John Clarke</a>.</p>
          
<p>Downstage was then in the draughty Star Boating Club. Harry's tiny office 
gave onto the storeroom of the kitchen. He told me he had to stamp his feet 
before he went through this room at night, to discourage the rats. The food 
was protected in cages. Downstage had begun life in an old caf&eacute; on the 
corner of Courtenay Place, the brain child of actors Tim Elliott and Martyn 
Sanderson, poet and actor Peter Bland, and Harry, who had promoted the idea 
of serving dinner before the show. It caused some headaches not usually 
associated with theatre management but made Downstage certainly 
unique.</p>
          
<p>One of the pleasures of doing publicity for Downstage was being allowed to 
attend rehearsals. For years I had borrowed playscripts from the library 
because I found them as rewarding to read as novels. Now I watched them come 
to life, beginning to hatch like peacocks. <i>You Know I 
Can't Hear You While the Water's Running</i>. <i>The 
Bacchae</i>. Eduardo Manet's <i>The Nuns</i>. <i>Three Months Gone</i>. I tried to make myself invisible. 
Sunny Amey would hover, one hand poised above her script like a baton. Nola 
Millar sat, watchful under her beret, with a bag of humbugs on the seat 
beside her.</p>
          
<p>Bill Austin, head of Radio and Television Drama, bought another TV play I 
had called <i>A Jelly Fish in Summer</i>&mdash;but told 
 me 
they didn't currently have the actresses capable of doing it justice. '. . . 
is the kind of play that would be very hazardous to present just at this 
time. However, it could very 
 
<span class="pb" id="n57" lang="en"><a class="pb" href="#n57" title="page break">page 60</a></span> 
 
easily be a viable proposition at some time in the future.' I wondered if it 
was a little raunchy for the times. They had looked askance at my suggestion 
for a series set in a venereal diseases clinic. I went on to write a number 
of television scripts, for Section Seven, and for a series that never 
eventuated, but which brought me in some substantial money.</p>
          
<p>Harry loved my children and said so, but I wasn't ready to be charmed by 
this approach a second time. Harry and I became lovers and the best of 
friends, always, but it didn't happen in a hurry. Meanwhile he courted me 
with cases of peaches, driving me in his Triumph two-seater, telling 
me the stories of his life while I hung washing on the line. I told him some 
of my stories and he listened with mournful attention, sometimes exploding 
with sympathetic laughter. He took the children to the park so that I could 
do some writing. I learned that he was a special person, thoughtful and 
brimming with ideas.</p>
          
<p>He could see what was good about living in New Zealand, his adopted country, 
and yet he was sometimes dejected by the same drabness which had depressed 
me when I came back to Wellington after living in London. He talked 
nostalgically about 'dancing and singing in the streets', which there was 
none of in Wellington in the sixties, and he yearned for more 
non-conformist behaviour. I remembered an occasion back in 1962 when 
he had made his coffee gallery available for a special meeting organised by 
poet Tony (Anton) Vogt, who shared the same disappointment as Harry in our 
'welfare society'. Tony had invited writers, musicians, artists, to this 
meeting with the intention of starting an exciting new magazine. There must 
have been about thirty of us. Jim Baxter, musician <a class="name person topic-ref mention" href="name-017411.html" id="name-017411-mention" title="Douglas Lilburn. New Zealand composer and academic. Formerly Professor of Music at Victoria University of Wellington.">Douglas Lilburn</a>, myself 
and others, ranging from humble to smug. We had been surprised and 
disappointed when Tony Vogt decided within weeks to leave the country and 
the project died. A lot of people were angry at the critical views Tony 
expressed in a farewell radio interview. Monte Holcroft wrote in a <i>Listener</i> editorial: 'Mr Vogt will no doubt be able to 
find a place where the people are joyful and where his own ebullience will 
cause no surprise. But he may need to be careful. In New Zealand he has been 
free to speak his mind on a variety of subjects; indeed we are all richer 
because he has had strong opinions and has expressed them vigorously
 . . .'</p>
          
<p>I enjoyed the vigour of Harry's expression. I wrote to Fleur expressing my 
surprise that I had become involved with him. He was so different from the 
kind of man I had been attracted to in the past. I was pleased with myself 
for not repeating old patterns&mdash;if this was a mistake, it was a new 
one.</p>
          
<p>Harry and I went with Sunny Amey and Bob Lord to a satirical revue at the 
university&mdash;<i>One In Five</i>. The title was based on 
a provocative statement by psychiatrist Fraser MacDonald that 'one in five 
New Zealanders are mad'. Dave Smith had written the catchy title song. He 
and <a class="name person topic-ref mention" href="name-005667.html" id="name-005667-mention" title="Roger Hall. Dramatist and script-writer.">Roger Hall</a> and <a class="name person topic-ref mention" href="name-005272.html">John Clarke</a> were responsible for most of the skits. 
Watching this revue I suddenly recognised that I had become a genuine New 
Zealander without really noticing. I wrote an article in the <i><a class="name work topic-ref mention" href="name-202084.html" id="name-202084-mention">Listener</a></i>: '. . . leaning back in laughter at this 
country which I had never quite acknowledged, like a de facto relationship, 
 
 
<span class="pb" id="n58" lang="en"><a class="pb" href="#n58" title="page break">page 61</a></span> 
 
I had a new feeling about it . . . Because I have lived [in Wellington] for 
more than 20 years, the place is full of ghosts for me, some of them 
malignant but mostly not. With the coming of the motorway the city seems to 
move under me like a quicksand&mdash;streets removing themselves overnight, 
buildings enlarging and soaring. While the bulldozers busily erase I 
superstitiously mark the spot, until the city becomes a kind of private 
scrapbook. The people&mdash;they are another thing. I cannot relegate them 
to a scrapbook. My shared experiences of their peculiarities joins me in a 
bond with the rest of the Wellington population . . . not until now had I 
recognised in [New Zealand]'s familiar, sometimes drab 
landscapes&mdash;myself. What tremendous cheek led me to set myself apart 
from all this?'</p>
          
<p>Wellington had had its eccentric personalities as long as I had lived there. 
There was the Eccles family, wizen-faced Mum and the two 
grown-up sons who didn't seem to work but had money to go to the 
continuous 'pictures'. They shambled in long, shabby, mud-coloured 
coats and worn shoes, like creatures from the lost lagoon. There was the 
gentleman who always wore a hat and pin-striped suit and twirled a 
walking stick. He talked to himself in plummy tones and would stop to salute 
the DIC. Lizzie and I as schoolgirls would encounter 'the birdman' who would 
put his hands together and warble like a canary. He was delighted when we 
stopped to listen and began to sing: 'Two little girls in blue!' We were 
wearing our Queen Margaret College royal blue uniforms. These were all 
personalities we indulged with a fondness which was possessive. They were 
ours.</p>

          
<div class="note">
            
<p class="italic">'Camping on the Faultline' is an extract from an autobiography in progress.</p>
          
</div>
        
</div>
        
<div class="biography" id="tei-RobWrit-_N71570" lang="en">
          
<p>
<i><a class="name person topic-ref mention" href="name-202068.html" title="Marilyn Duckworth. Novelist, poet, and short story writer.">Marilyn Duckworth</a>, OBE, fiction writer and poet, was 
 born 
in <a class="name place topic-ref mention" href="name-002817.html" id="name-002817-mention" title="Auckland. A city in New Zealand.">Auckland</a> but has lived mainly in Wellington. Her first novel, </i>A Gap 
in the Spectrum <i>(1959), was published when she was 
twenty-three; her fifth,</i> Disorderly Conduct <i>(1984), won a New Zealand Book Award. She has been awarded 
the Scholarship in Letters three times, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship 
in 1980 and a Fulbright Scholarship in 1987. She has held fellowships at 
<a class="name organisation topic-ref mention" href="name-008371.html" id="name-008371-mention" title="Victoria University of Wellington">Victoria</a> and <a class="name place topic-ref mention" href="name-002817.html" title="Auckland. A city in New Zealand.">Auckland</a> universities. In 1996</i> Leather Wings <i>was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers Prize. In that 
year she edited a book on New Zealand writing sisters&mdash;</i>Cherries on 
a Plate. <i>Her thirteenth novel,</i> Studmuffin<i>, appeared in 1997.</i>
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