<&>Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English Version One <&>Copyright 1998 School of Linguistics & Applied Language Studies <&>Victoria University of Wellington <&>0:47 that was before they had that big carrot that <{1><[1>well is was before the carrot and it was before the ski fields before the mountain road because the mountain road was <{2><[2>actually being built while we were there <,> er and so the whole town got <&>1:00 voc to work on sundays we went up and and did some chiselling of the side of the mountain so that was very much a local event <,> but the thing really that <.>s strikes me now as as vastly different is that you you lived we lived in a much simpler way anyway probably so did our friends in town i think after the war in the first oh ten years perhaps less after the war a lot of men who came back including trevor the voc person i was married to er wanted not to stay in their ordinary organised jobs they didn't want to stay in systems they didn't want to stay in town they wanted to do what was a pretty modest kind of breaking out but breaking out it was and quite a lot of them went to live in the country and one of the reasons that the life we led in those years we were in ohakune was so interesting to us and it was it was really fun was that we had a whole community <&>2:00 of people who all eventually left and went back to live in town um <{3><[3>as we did <[1>which is now a drawcard laughs <[2>mm <[3>why did they do that their children grew up and or grew older and they started to think that they wanted some of the things that town life had to offer i think um in in my own case i resisted being there in some ways at the beginning um which is just to say that it took me quite a while to get used to it but as my family grew and we had our horse riding and all the things that you do have in a in a small town became very engrossing and by the time we left we were all rather appalled at the idea of living anywhere else because it it was in its way a very complete life and a closeknit community was there a lot of support for you as a mother of six children yes there was not the kind of support that mothers of any number of children have now er <&>3:00 there was not a play centre or a kindergarten or or child care of any sort um but i had a lot of friends of course who whose children were small and they played together and everybody is very accessible in a town as small as ohakune i mean it's only got about fourteen or fifteen hundred people it's a real little village and so er you you had friends that you saw constantly and your little kids played together and so on so there was a lot of that you moved on from ohakune eventually but it voc it was a time your time there and and then later when you moved on of great social change women's attitudes were were changing there was no longer perhaps that that tendency that women automatically stayed at home and looked after the children how did you cope with the transitions voc that were going on in society and in your own life well of course it changed my life in an absolutely revolutionary way i was ready to change i think but er it was it was really very <&>4:00 fundamental and it rocked my personal boat for for many years and out of it of course i became the er you know a person who does my own work and lives and works as i do now one of the reasons i wanted to write this book though was to tell that partly but also to not to say or at least to to make sure that the the picture itself of my life didn't say um i spent all those years in a little country town with all those children just waiting for something better to happen it wasn't like that not at all when it did happen er it was er it was wonderful and er i i'm terribly glad that i happened to be just in time for the women's movement to sort of pick me up and take me on but um but before that i was actually very happy i i enjoyed those years i thought my kids were great fun and and i thought the the the ordinary things we did with our picnics and our <&>5:00 gymkhanas for the horses and our trips to taupo and so on i thought they were great i wasn't i was not languishing there thinking what a poor thing i am what a life i lead i thought it was an excellent life and that's one of the reasons i wanted to write the book you speak of it very much in the past as it was of course you're almost like a different person now how did the changes in you start to occur well partly because there were rifts that i didn't recognise in my own marriage and they were <,> well to do with the fact that men at that time were were very ambitious um ambition in teaching which was the sector that i knew about but it probably applied to lots of others um was a was a a scourge really a terrible driving force you had to get on and it was often at that time um at the expense of your wife and family um because er we <&>6:00 had we'd been born into a generation that took it for granted that women served their husband's um ambitions and aspirations and their needs and indeed they served their family's too and what happened to me at about the time that the women's movement was coming to new zealand was that i suddenly saw this i suddenly saw that i had disappeared in a way <{><[>um and so <[>was there a turning point for you because in the book you relate the the incident where you were sitting down in the shade and watching your family playing the cricket and and during the summer and you suddenly felt that those were the people you loved the the most but you weren't really somehow a part of it well i was a part of <{><[>it <.>a <.>a as a as a sort of servant in a way laughs um but er but THEIR perception of ME was the thing that wasn't there yes <.>i yes it was exactly like that and the reason i tell that story er so precisely is that <&>7:00 i couldn't ever forget it it just did happen in in that really sudden way undoubtedly it had been there um in the back of my mind but that's when it sort of shot out and i realised what was going on <[>in your own identity so you wanted voc you recognised that you wanted a role for yourself something for yourself that would be independent of your family at that time well i did yes um and it was it was hard to get hold of it oddly enough i had always known what i wanted to do i had always done writing and in fact i talked about that a bit in and i went on doing it but in a very submerged rather secret clandestine way and you didn't have a lot of time i <{><[>mean bringing up six children and so forth it was sort of poetry lines on the run really wasn't it laughs <[>no laughs late at night when everybody was asleep and i was very nearly asleep myself <{><[>yeah <[>laughs was it the move to huntly that that i suppose brought your independence and and your husband's idea of your role to a head somehow <&>8:00 yes it was um that's because he took on a new kind of authority that's where he became the headmaster of a big school and probably more then than now um and and to some extent this is true of country schools more than town ones um there was a tremendous weight on him and it happened unfortunately for him as well as for me just at a time when i was beginning to say well in fact i don't want to be just the headmaster's wife that's not the only thing i'm here for i want to start and to do my own things and to him that seemed a betrayal um to me it seemed just a necessary next step and there were lots of women who felt like that and lots of men and <.>i yes it was very hard the teaching hierarchy and system through the fifties and sixties put a lot of pressure didn't it on teachers you you describe that that <&>9:00 ambition that <{><[>people had that that need to drive to the top <[>mm mm has the has the system really got a lot to answer for for the sort of experiences that you had oh i think so yes um i practise not feeling um bitter about anything i don't but if i have a residual sort of anger i suppose about things that happened to us and to other people it's it's against the system yes um people er that are a part of <.>s a system and you can say that they have um a choice but it's amazing how little choice you have outside the the social pattern and the social expectations that that you've grown up with and it seems to me looking back now that um that trevor was pretty helpless to do anything about this and i was fairly helpless to do anything about the currents that were that were shifting me writing this book has actually <&>10:00 er crystallised this idea in my mind quite a lot i would've said at the beginning that er you make a lot of your own choices and in one sense you do but you you have to do them within the the limits of the of the social patterns and conventions of your time even if you're breaking out of them er <.>yo i don't think you can do it alone i'm quite sure that what i wanted to do and eventually did do um i couldn't have done it ALL by myself if there hadn't been all these other women who were doing much the same sort of thing what was your biggest encouragement then because it WAS difficult because there were pressures on you to conform and not to change what was the thing that that singly helped you through the most do you think lauris well most of all i suppose the the the thing itself my own writing i i'd really VERY much wanted to do it and i always had but suddenly when i began to to do it with with more concentration and give it more time well i used <&>11:00 to say sometimes in those early years of er of writing and reading that it was was like lancing a boil that had grown very large <{><[>laughs so there was i <.>w i was a very urgent sort of writer i suppose and i did publish a great deal in in quite a short time and that's because there was an ENORMous burst of things that i felt i very badly wanted to say and i'm sure that has to do with the delay although i wouldn't have known it before <[>laughs is it only now as you try to write about your experiences in your early years that you really have the time to sit back and think about what happened and what events shaped you and your family yes it is um <,> but i think you have to move some distance past things anyway to see them um as as a well as a pattern of cause and effect really that's what i have found writing autobiography is <&>12:00 is about it's about looking at what has happened in your own life and around you er and what its consequences are and how you move through the next stage and er how you could've known it was coming but of course you never do know you you only know looking back afterwards <&>12:20