Seminar presented at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage on 3 July 2013
Coast is a novel from David Young after some decades as a writer of non-fiction, particularly in the field of history and environment.
Exploring the effects of two world wars on three generations of men from the same family, Coast is also a meditation on the power of landscape. The east coast of Kincardineshire, Scotland and the North Island’s Rangitikei coastline where a Scots community endures even today, anchor this story in psychological, as well as physical, reality. Told from the standpoints of the three related key characters, the narrative unfolds a male social history spanning much of the twentieth century. It embraces issues of identity, belonging and connection to place. Kin and romantic love, matters of class, the Depression, active service abroad – first on the Western Front, then through the air war in the Pacific – and of family life, reach out beyond Pakeha concerns to the circularity of history and the tangata whenua.
The question of how much the writer brings to his fiction from his previous historical endeavours and from his own life is explored in this talk. The author’s history of conservation in New Zealand, Our Islands Our Selves, his Whanganui River book, Woven by Water, and even his first book, Faces of the River, played a part in the genesis of this work. So too did oral and documentary historical research.
The tragedy of the SS Talune and the 1918 influenza pandemic
Polly Plum and the first wave of feminism
‘Researching kindergarten: the endeavours of women for the play of children’
‘The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, redux’
Jazzy Nerves, Aching Feet, and Foxtrots: New Zealand’s Jazz Age
How does a city make a writer?
Māori Women, Politics and Petitions in the 19th Century
The Great War for New Zealand
Counting redcoats: Who were the imperial soldiers serving in New Zealand in the 1860s?
The Broken Decade: 1928 - 39 by Malcom McKinnon
Past Caring? Gender, Work and Emotion - A talk by Professor Barbara Brookes
Hearth and Home: Reconstructing the Rural Kitchen, c1840–1940’
The Māori War Effort at Home and Abroad 1917
New Zealand’s Rivers: can we learn from history?
Reflections on the Big Smoke
KŪPAPA - the bitter legacy of Māori alliances with the Crown
Richard Seddon: King of God’s Own
Dr Steven Loveridge: New Zealand Society at War
Dr Grant Morris: ’Legal Villain’
Andrew Francis: Enemy aliens and the New Zealand experience
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