RUTHFULLY YOURS

Although the move throughout the West to impose a cancel culture as a form of control seems to be nearing its apex, the fight against the truth has been decades in the making. For example, when moving some decades ago to Nelson, I tried to get from the local library some of the Enid Blyton books I and so many others had loved as children.Blyton eventually wrote so many books that some of her themes became repetitive. But she was imaginatively outstanding, and her wonderful stories about the Faraway Tree, the Enchanted Wood, the Magic Wishing Chair, and Galliano’s Circus, followed by the Famous Five and Secret Seven adventure stories, spanned a career of nearly fifty years. Sales of her books were estimated at over 2 billion copies. As a young Froebel-trained teacher, with her father one of Britain’s top naturalists, her weekly courses of seasonal nature study evoked enthusiastic tributes from schools throughout Britain. She had an extraordinary knowledge of the natural world, coupled with a great flair for detail, and brought to thousands of children an increased awareness of the world around them.

Blyton was well aware that many children living in industrial towns in the 1930s with fathers on the dole couldn’t visit the country, but through her pages she tried to give them vicarious pleasure in the joys of rural life, and described how they might make tiny gardens of their own. One suggestion which met with a huge response was that country readers might like to send such things as budding twigs or wildflowers to their counterparts in town.

She became one of the first victims of the cancelling culture, which apparently sprang from the envy of a rival children’s writer in Britain, and by the end of the 1950s librarians were banning her books in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. The librarian I spoke with some decades later dismissed Enid Blyton with apparent contempt, her reasons hard to find. One was the silly suggestion that Noddy and Big Ears, in the stories younger children loved, had “an unnatural relationship”. Doubtless this would be a reason to have these stories highly regarded these days. Then there was the claim that she wrote for middle-class children only, that she had no social concern—utterly untrue. She and the many thousands of children who belonged to the clubs she formed raised astonishingly large quantities of money for the many charitable organisations they took under their wing. She personally answered a staggering number of letters each week for the children who wrote to her and whose views she always asked for. This didn’t stop the accusations piling up, including from New Zealand librarians and writers such as children’s books specialist Dorothy Butler, who claimed that, “regrettably”, Blyton was a snob.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The children in the Faraway Tree stories were poor, as were those in the wonderful Mister Pinkwhistle stories, where a little man with pointed ears set about finding injustices to remedy, helping poor families and children in dire straits. Children loved these stories of wrongs righted. And this may be part of the problem, for no one could deny that Blyton had extraordinary creative and imaginative gifts; that she created worlds of great enchantment and surprise; that she enhanced children’s appreciation of the natural world around them at the same time as she tried to inculcate canons of kindness, honesty, decency, and courtesy—as well as give great pleasure.

It appears that it was her moral code that offended those anxious to take control of the field of children’s writing. The librarians’ claim that there was no demand for her stories was simply untrue. I wrote for the then family-friendly New Zealand Woman’s Weekly some time back pointing out all these things, which led to my own books for children being cancelled.

So what of children’s writing today? J.K. Rowling’s well-publicised stories drawing upon Ursula Le Guin’s stories of wizardry and magic, and in whose own writing Blyton’s influence can be detected, heralded the swing back to imaginative fiction. But largely, as the Economist pointed out some time ago, “the world of children’s writing has become a matchless area for adult propaganda”—as indeed have our schools.

On two fronts, as a children’s writer and as a book reviewer for National Radio, the Christchurch Press and other publications, I regularly got into trouble for standing up to the bullying hierarchy of the Left, who were laying down the criteria which authors were expected to endorse if they had any hope of being placed in the annual children’s book awards. When I was a columnist for the Dominion, our capital’s city’s newspaper, and as a former Latin and French secondary school teacher with a postgraduate degree in English, and four sons attending state schools, concerned by the decline in teaching standards and in the curriculum, I wrote about this. Apparently, this was unforgivable, particularly because I also queried the growing promotion of racial divisiveness, and the portrayal of those of part-Maori descent as, simultaneously, both victims and possessors of superior insight, and therefore to be deferred to in political decision-making.

Coupled with the Labour Party’s folly in turning the clock back to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, with all claims against the Crown now to be renegotiated, the results have been obvious. It began a still lucrative gravy train of billions of dollars taken from taxpayers’ pockets and given to iwi—today’s corporate pseudo-tribes—in some cases because of markedly fraudulent claims inadequately challenged by under-informed Crown lawyers. The politics of grievance, deliberately inculcated by iwi into the minds of young part-Maori, has long demonised the colonists, deliberately ignoring the immense advantages the establishing of a Pax Britannica by the British Crown gave to constantly warring tribes practising cannibalism and slavery. With no title to their land, all lived in constant fear of attack by neighbouring tribes. By then Maori had also exterminated about thirty species of birds and destroyed an estimated 30 per cent of native forest by fire when hunting to flush out prey, including the ostrich-like moa, which then became extinct. The sanitising of pre-European Maori history and the promotion of the policies of resentment have done incalculable damage to this country.

When I wrote in concern to raise awareness of was happening, an article of mine, “A Question of Perspective”, was among the top ten promised publication in the Christchurch Press at the time, from about 200 entries. When I queried why it never appeared, I learned that because of editorial timidity—the wish not to offend the local powerful iwi—it was not going to be published, regardless of its placing.

I’m reminded of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson’s claim that it is not dangerous and disciplined men with whom we should concern ourselves, but, rather, it is weak individuals who are society’s greatest risk. And indeed, they cost us so much.

For example, it was a thrill for me when A Ring Around the Sun, the first of the twenty-one children’s books I have now written, was accepted by the University of Canterbury Press, whose editor, from memory, was a professor in medieval French and German studies. Highly enthusiastic, promising minor editing only, she was on the verge of sending through the proofed manuscript, ready to print, when I became aware of a hydra-headed monster. A publications committee, some with vigorous ideas on how they themselves would have written the story, had reared its head. It was, in this country, officially “Girls can do anything year” and I was asked to change the two boys in my story into girls. Other peremptory requests followed. I was to divorce the parents (the father was away in Greece at a significant time) to embrace a wholly new theme, quite unrelated to the story, about how well stepfamilies could get on together. There were other bits of accumulative silliness, particularly a stern rebuke for having the children collect pinecones for the all-important bonfire in the story, on the night of the solstice. Apparently, this was “a wasteful public conflagration”, and I was directed to deliver the wood that the boys and their friend Mara had collected “to the elderly and needy of the community”. I was to specify that “trailer loads of prunings and old burnable rubbish” were being used, and that since “prunings will be wet wood, old rubbish should be allowed as a readily combustible base”.

Once the thought police get on your trail, you are in trouble. The poor book editor wrote privately saying that she was on my side, but, rather than give into the bully boys and girls, I eventually withdrew the book. However, on the premise that one should never be a pushover, I made a great deal of trouble for the publications committee with the university establishment, as pusillanimous as hierarchies eventually are—as we have seen today with the extraordinary capitulation of so many in power endorsing the sheer nonsense of transgenderism. They must well know it is simply not possible—in spite of all the physical mutilation and drug taking—for an individual to basically change the sex into which one is born. And allowing males to participate in women’s sports is a cowardly capitulation to claims depending on either delusion or opportunism. A Ring Around the Sun, incidentally, was subsequently quickly accepted by Random Century’s commissioning editor.

 

My earliest books for children received very good reviews (which can be seen on the Books page on my website), one reviewer declaring that The Duck Who Went to Heaven was “destined to become a classic—my favourite New Zealand story”. The Mora Stone received two award nominations, including from the American Mythopoeic Society, with Mike King, television personality and mental health advocate, generously describing me as “quite simply, New Zealand’s best children’s author”. 

This is not a view promulgated by the children’s literary establishment, by whom my children’s books have long been ignored or dismissed. One prominent reviewer seems to have me in his sights, rather than the actual books. A typical review of his would be advising prospective readers not to bother as they probably wouldn’t get past the first chapter anyway. He ended up judging the annual Children’s Book Awards.

By this time I was blacklisted, with my then distributor saying she could no longer distribute my books, as I had become “hated”—her word—by those controlling the awards and grants. When I asked how on earth they could hate me, as I didn’t even know any of them personally, she replied that they had realised that the Dominion columnist was the same individual who was writing those children’s books. They had vowed, she said, “to take it out” on my writing for children. And they certainly did.

There were other areas where I transgressed. When, as one of the regular reviewers for the Christchurch Press, I was asked by the Literary Editor to review the first paperback edition of the acclaimed novel The Bone People, I refused, as the book was basically preposterous, and suggested he review it himself. However, he said he was unwilling to put his head up above the ramparts, and if I didn’t do so he was going to hand it to a left-wing lecturer at the university who later became an MP for the Labour Party. I agreed reluctantly, although on my first attempt I had given up on the book after the first few chapters. I later discovered that many other New Zealanders had also given up trying to finish it.

The Bone People was a story about a woman of great wealth who had built a medieval stone six-storeyed tower with a spiral staircase. Nothing was ordinary about this woman, Kerewin Holme, whose name and physical description bore an extraordinary resemblance to the author, Keri Hulme. Clad in jerkins and silk blouses, learned in the exotica of spiritual and esoteric paths with a library containing books “on just about everything”, Kerewin wore precious rings on every finger and thumb, and owned a chest with a hundred pieces of jade. Everything was special about this Keri Hulme look-alike, from her goblets to her ring of swords and her knife, Seafire, superbly tempered, its sheath made of oiled leather engraved by the heroine with carved runes and white enamel. She collected precious agates, used patchouli-scented oil on her hairbrushes, had a wine cellar with Chinese ginger jars, wooden boxes of dates, barrels around the walls, shadowed chests in corners. With her Cuban cigars in cedar veneer wrappings, and her clove-impregnated cheroots, she was self-contained, played with oracles and consulted the cards. Glowworms lit her stairwell, where strange mushrooms grew. On top of her tower was a star-gazing platform, and her entrance hall was hung with tapestries. Serenely she invited a poisonous katipo, “Little Death”, to crawl over her hand. She had “this curious heavy grace like something out of its element making do in a thinner medium”, and the sea seemed to come to her call.

Whatever else The Bone People is, it has no claims to be taken seriously as a New Zealand novel. Distinguished by its swagger, pretentiousness and crudity relapsing into almost pidgin she tells her doctor, whom she addresses as “little medicine man”, just to write the prescription she wants, it being what “most of you jokers do most of the time”.

There was much worse, but the incredible thing was that the book ever came to be taken seriously by the literati. Until my critical review appeared, it had been widely acclaimed, a concerning tribute to the power of the feminist movement which, through the Spiral Collective, adopted and promoted it in New Zealand and overseas. 

I was already in trouble, having challenged the highly politicised criteria laid down for the government-funded Children’s Book Awards which stated that authors should pay tribute to biculturalism, and prioritise stories with relevance to Maori, and to New Zealand children’s immediate environment only. What was finding increasing favour was not imaginatively extending children’s horizons, and telling real stories, but promoting the school of social realism dealing with teenagers’ supposed social problems. The children’s writer was to become primarily a psychologist pushing complex issues with adult themes into the children’s world.

Apparently, my review of The Bone People—later endorsed by prominent figures in the literary establishment who had until then kept their heads well down—was the last straw for our literary mafia. I was rung up by one of the editors of the Listener, the leftist weekly widely bought as it was the only publication containing information about all the television programs. He was very cross indeed, told me that I was “finished in literary circles” and that they would make sure I never got published in Listener. Indeed they have kept their word, right up until today. In this small country, very much governed by cliques, I remain well and truly blacklisted.

It is the result for children which is of concern when the bias is towards books written for the average or challenged reader, short-changing children, propagandising them and underestimating their intelligence. The consequences, of course, have been that so many children have simply been turned off reading, as I feared would be the case when previously reviewing for the National Children’s Book Week, which showcased the books publishers were prioritising for different age categories.

Equally bad has been the sheer unpleasantness of so many stories, as with those by the much-acclaimed Maurice Gee. I was once more in trouble for describing his The Fat Man as a disturbing and unpleasant read. Gee had already been in trouble for killing off a child protagonist in an earlier book, and he was extremely good at describing the nasty, the depressing, the psychotic and the bizarre. Even when in his stories the bad are defeated, the end is still often bleak, giving a child reader the impression of nastiness still looming around the corner.

I recorded at the time that in The Fat Man, the fat man himself is a repulsive, evil man who robbed and probably killed his old mother who waited by the railway station for years in case he should at last come home. Gee’s deliberately confronting descriptions include, for example: “the black hair on his chest pasted down like slime … he squirted creek water from his mouth like a draught horse peeing … he brought the chocolate close to his mouth and dropped a gob of spit on it okay kid … there you are, eat it all up … The man grinned at him … the scar curled … it was like a worm lying in his cheek … the worm in his cheek curled again”. 

My criticism of this book brought me up against the ubiquitous Tessa Duder, a writer of chick-lit stories who had already targeted me as being apparently right-wing, and who later managed to leave me out of her long list of New Zealand children’s writers. Duder, who at the time was the convener of the children’s awards judging panel, described The Fat Man as “a superb children’s book”, making the farcical claim, “It is clearly written for children and is therefore for them.” I was unable to make sense out of that.

Another best-selling children’s writer is equally crude in her language use, for example describing “puke on his face”, “snot on his cheek” and thinking it great fun to put whoopee cushions on a visitor’s chair or “a plastic poo” on a toilet seat. As a reviewer I found many other children’s authors similarly crude, but the most striking of all was the letter I got from a children’s writer-in-residence at Auckland Teachers’ College when I questioned the over-casual language in the newsletter being sent out to children’s writers. Her fairly detailed but ungrammatical suggestions to me included, “Put your pen where all that’s shits coming from and get down, lady,” with implied threats. Hardly surprisingly, her own children’s stories contain similarly crude, smart-alecky language. In one of her books inevitably nominated for the book awards of its year, its boy protagonist describes someone’s mother as “so posh and pointy, you know, with elbows and boobs like ice-cream cones”.

There are many more examples of books promoted to children which are poorly written, if not basically propagandising our young on issues which contravene long-held values, and which would disturb parents. However, many children never get to see them, as the mediocre writing long inflicted upon children and teenagers by librarians and teachers has turned them off reading.

Yet literature is one of the means by which minds eventually reach maturity, and outstanding children’s books are valuable, because behind the book is a person to whom life has said something worth passing on, whom experience has shaped. Worthwhile books reveal the possibilities which come from great imaginative insights.

The tentacles of the cancel culture have now gripped so many aspects of our lives that we are all the poorer for it. To stand by and do nothing to oppose it is arguably culpable. Jordan Peterson is indeed right in saying that it is weak individuals who are society’s greatest risk.

Although the move throughout the West to impose a cancel culture as a form of control seems to be nearing its apex, the fight against the truth has been decades in the making. For example, when moving some decades ago to Nelson, I tried to get from the local library some of the Enid Blyton books I and so many others had loved as children. 

Blyton eventually wrote so many books that some of her themes became repetitive. But she was imaginatively outstanding, and her wonderful stories about the Faraway Tree, the Enchanted Wood, the Magic Wishing Chair, and Galliano’s Circus, followed by the Famous Five and Secret Seven adventure stories, spanned a career of nearly fifty years. Sales of her books were estimated at over 2 billion copies. As a young Froebel-trained teacher, with her father one of Britain’s top naturalists, her weekly courses of seasonal nature study evoked enthusiastic tributes from schools throughout Britain. She had an extraordinary knowledge of the natural world, coupled with a great flair for detail, and brought to thousands of children an increased awareness of the world around them.

Blyton was well aware that many children living in industrial towns in the 1930s with fathers on the dole couldn’t visit the country, but through her pages she tried to give them vicarious pleasure in the joys of rural life, and described how they might make tiny gardens of their own. One suggestion which met with a huge response was that country readers might like to send such things as budding twigs or wildflowers to their counterparts in town.

She became one of the first victims of the cancelling culture, which apparently sprang from the envy of a rival children’s writer in Britain, and by the end of the 1950s librarians were banning her books in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. The librarian I spoke with some decades later dismissed Enid Blyton with apparent contempt, her reasons hard to find. One was the silly suggestion that Noddy and Big Ears, in the stories younger children loved, had “an unnatural relationship”. Doubtless this would be a reason to have these stories highly regarded these days. Then there was the claim that she wrote for middle-class children only, that she had no social concern—utterly untrue. She and the many thousands of children who belonged to the clubs she formed raised astonishingly large quantities of money for the many charitable organisations they took under their wing. She personally answered a staggering number of letters each week for the children who wrote to her and whose views she always asked for. This didn’t stop the accusations piling up, including from New Zealand librarians and writers such as children’s books specialist Dorothy Butler, who claimed that, “regrettably”, Blyton was a snob.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The children in the Faraway Tree stories were poor, as were those in the wonderful Mister Pinkwhistle stories, where a little man with pointed ears set about finding injustices to remedy, helping poor families and children in dire straits. Children loved these stories of wrongs righted. And this may be part of the problem, for no one could deny that Blyton had extraordinary creative and imaginative gifts; that she created worlds of great enchantment and surprise; that she enhanced children’s appreciation of the natural world around them at the same time as she tried to inculcate canons of kindness, honesty, decency, and courtesy—as well as give great pleasure.

It appears that it was her moral code that offended those anxious to take control of the field of children’s writing. The librarians’ claim that there was no demand for her stories was simply untrue. I wrote for the then family-friendly New Zealand Woman’s Weekly some time back pointing out all these things, which led to my own books for children being cancelled.

So what of children’s writing today? J.K. Rowling’s well-publicised stories drawing upon Ursula Le Guin’s stories of wizardry and magic, and in whose own writing Blyton’s influence can be detected, heralded the swing back to imaginative fiction. But largely, as the Economist pointed out some time ago, “the world of children’s writing has become a matchless area for adult propaganda”—as indeed have our schools.

 

On two fronts, as a children’s writer and as a book reviewer for National Radio, the Christchurch Press and other publications, I regularly got into trouble for standing up to the bullying hierarchy of the Left, who were laying down the criteria which authors were expected to endorse if they had any hope of being placed in the annual children’s book awards. When I was a columnist for the Dominion, our capital’s city’s newspaper, and as a former Latin and French secondary school teacher with a postgraduate degree in English, and four sons attending state schools, concerned by the decline in teaching standards and in the curriculum, I wrote about this. Apparently, this was unforgivable, particularly because I also queried the growing promotion of racial divisiveness, and the portrayal of those of part-Maori descent as, simultaneously, both victims and possessors of superior insight, and therefore to be deferred to in political decision-making.

Coupled with the Labour Party’s folly in turning the clock back to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, with all claims against the Crown now to be renegotiated, the results have been obvious. It began a still lucrative gravy train of billions of dollars taken from taxpayers’ pockets and given to iwi—today’s corporate pseudo-tribes—in some cases because of markedly fraudulent claims inadequately challenged by under-informed Crown lawyers. The politics of grievance, deliberately inculcated by iwi into the minds of young part-Maori, has long demonised the colonists, deliberately ignoring the immense advantages the establishing of a Pax Britannica by the British Crown gave to constantly warring tribes practising cannibalism and slavery. With no title to their land, all lived in constant fear of attack by neighbouring tribes. By then Maori had also exterminated about thirty species of birds and destroyed an estimated 30 per cent of native forest by fire when hunting to flush out prey, including the ostrich-like moa, which then became extinct. The sanitising of pre-European Maori history and the promotion of the policies of resentment have done incalculable damage to this country.

When I wrote in concern to raise awareness of was happening, an article of mine, “A Question of Perspective”, was among the top ten promised publication in the Christchurch Press at the time, from about 200 entries. When I queried why it never appeared, I learned that because of editorial timidity—the wish not to offend the local powerful iwi—it was not going to be published, regardless of its placing.

I’m reminded of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson’s claim that it is not dangerous and disciplined men with whom we should concern ourselves, but, rather, it is weak individuals who are society’s greatest risk. And indeed, they cost us so much.

For example, it was a thrill for me when A Ring Around the Sun, the first of the twenty-one children’s books I have now written, was accepted by the University of Canterbury Press, whose editor, from memory, was a professor in medieval French and German studies. Highly enthusiastic, promising minor editing only, she was on the verge of sending through the proofed manuscript, ready to print, when I became aware of a hydra-headed monster. A publications committee, some with vigorous ideas on how they themselves would have written the story, had reared its head. It was, in this country, officially “Girls can do anything year” and I was asked to change the two boys in my story into girls. Other peremptory requests followed. I was to divorce the parents (the father was away in Greece at a significant time) to embrace a wholly new theme, quite unrelated to the story, about how well stepfamilies could get on together. There were other bits of accumulative silliness, particularly a stern rebuke for having the children collect pinecones for the all-important bonfire in the story, on the night of the solstice. Apparently, this was “a wasteful public conflagration”, and I was directed to deliver the wood that the boys and their friend Mara had collected “to the elderly and needy of the community”. I was to specify that “trailer loads of prunings and old burnable rubbish” were being used, and that since “prunings will be wet wood, old rubbish should be allowed as a readily combustible base”.

Once the thought police get on your trail, you are in trouble. The poor book editor wrote privately saying that she was on my side, but, rather than give into the bully boys and girls, I eventually withdrew the book. However, on the premise that one should never be a pushover, I made a great deal of trouble for the publications committee with the university establishment, as pusillanimous as hierarchies eventually are—as we have seen today with the extraordinary capitulation of so many in power endorsing the sheer nonsense of transgenderism. They must well know it is simply not possible—in spite of all the physical mutilation and drug taking—for an individual to basically change the sex into which one is born. And allowing males to participate in women’s sports is a cowardly capitulation to claims depending on either delusion or opportunism. A Ring Around the Sun, incidentally, was subsequently quickly accepted by Random Century’s commissioning editor.

My earliest books for children received very good reviews (which can be seen on the Books page on my website), one reviewer declaring that The Duck Who Went to Heaven was “destined to become a classic—my favourite New Zealand story”. The Mora Stone received two award nominations, including from the American Mythopoeic Society, with Mike King, television personality and mental health advocate, generously describing me as “quite simply, New Zealand’s best children’s author”.

This is not a view promulgated by the children’s literary establishment, by whom my children’s books have long been ignored or dismissed. One prominent reviewer seems to have me in his sights, rather than the actual books. A typical review of his would be advising prospective readers not to bother as they probably wouldn’t get past the first chapter anyway. He ended up judging the annual Children’s Book Awards.

By this time I was blacklisted, with my then distributor saying she could no longer distribute my books, as I had become “hated”—her word—by those controlling the awards and grants. When I asked how on earth they could hate me, as I didn’t even know any of them personally, she replied that they had realised that the Dominion columnist was the same individual who was writing those children’s books. They had vowed, she said, “to take it out” on my writing for children. And they certainly did.

There were other areas where I transgressed. When, as one of the regular reviewers for the Christchurch Press, I was asked by the Literary Editor to review the first paperback edition of the acclaimed novel The Bone People, I refused, as the book was basically preposterous, and suggested he review it himself. However, he said he was unwilling to put his head up above the ramparts, and if I didn’t do so he was going to hand it to a left-wing lecturer at the university who later became an MP for the Labour Party. I agreed reluctantly, although on my first attempt I had given up on the book after the first few chapters. I later discovered that many other New Zealanders had also given up trying to finish it.

The Bone People was a story about a woman of great wealth who had built a medieval stone six-storeyed tower with a spiral staircase. Nothing was ordinary about this woman, Kerewin Holme, whose name and physical description bore an extraordinary resemblance to the author, Keri Hulme. Clad in jerkins and silk blouses, learned in the exotica of spiritual and esoteric paths with a library containing books “on just about everything”, Kerewin wore precious rings on every finger and thumb, and owned a chest with a hundred pieces of jade. Everything was special about this Keri Hulme look-alike, from her goblets to her ring of swords and her knife, Seafire, superbly tempered, its sheath made of oiled leather engraved by the heroine with carved runes and white enamel. She collected precious agates, used patchouli-scented oil on her hairbrushes, had a wine cellar with Chinese ginger jars, wooden boxes of dates, barrels around the walls, shadowed chests in corners. With her Cuban cigars in cedar veneer wrappings, and her clove-impregnated cheroots, she was self-contained, played with oracles and consulted the cards. Glowworms lit her stairwell, where strange mushrooms grew. On top of her tower was a star-gazing platform, and her entrance hall was hung with tapestries. Serenely she invited a poisonous katipo, “Little Death”, to crawl over her hand. She had “this curious heavy grace like something out of its element making do in a thinner medium”, and the sea seemed to come to her call.

Whatever else The Bone People is, it has no claims to be taken seriously as a New Zealand novel. Distinguished by its swagger, pretentiousness and crudity relapsing into almost pidgin she tells her doctor, whom she addresses as “little medicine man”, just to write the prescription she wants, it being what “most of you jokers do most of the time”.

There was much worse, but the incredible thing was that the book ever came to be taken seriously by the literati. Until my critical review appeared, it had been widely acclaimed, a concerning tribute to the power of the feminist movement which, through the Spiral Collective, adopted and promoted it in New Zealand and overseas.

I was already in trouble, having challenged the highly politicised criteria laid down for the government-funded Children’s Book Awards which stated that authors should pay tribute to biculturalism, and prioritise stories with relevance to Maori, and to New Zealand children’s immediate environment only. What was finding increasing favour was not imaginatively extending children’s horizons, and telling real stories, but promoting the school of social realism dealing with teenagers’ supposed social problems. The children’s writer was to become primarily a psychologist pushing complex issues with adult themes into the children’s world.

Apparently, my review of The Bone People—later endorsed by prominent figures in the literary establishment who had until then kept their heads well down—was the last straw for our literary mafia. I was rung up by one of the editors of the Listener, the leftist weekly widely bought as it was the only publication containing information about all the television programs. He was very cross indeed, told me that I was “finished in literary circles” and that they would make sure I never got published in Listener. Indeed they have kept their word, right up until today. In this small country, very much governed by cliques, I remain well and truly blacklisted.

It is the result for children which is of concern when the bias is towards books written for the average or challenged reader, short-changing children, propagandising them and underestimating their intelligence. The consequences, of course, have been that so many children have simply been turned off reading, as I feared would be the case when previously reviewing for the National Children’s Book Week, which showcased the books publishers were prioritising for different age categories. 

Equally bad has been the sheer unpleasantness of so many stories, as with those by the much-acclaimed Maurice Gee. I was once more in trouble for describing his The Fat Man as a disturbing and unpleasant read. Gee had already been in trouble for killing off a child protagonist in an earlier book, and he was extremely good at describing the nasty, the depressing, the psychotic and the bizarre. Even when in his stories the bad are defeated, the end is still often bleak, giving a child reader the impression of nastiness still looming around the corner.

I recorded at the time that in The Fat Man, the fat man himself is a repulsive, evil man who robbed and probably killed his old mother who waited by the railway station for years in case he should at last come home. Gee’s deliberately confronting descriptions include, for example: “the black hair on his chest pasted down like slime … he squirted creek water from his mouth like a draught horse peeing … he brought the chocolate close to his mouth and dropped a gob of spit on it okay kid … there you are, eat it all up … The man grinned at him … the scar curled … it was like a worm lying in his cheek … the worm in his cheek curled again”.

My criticism of this book brought me up against the ubiquitous Tessa Duder, a writer of chick-lit stories who had already targeted me as being apparently right-wing, and who later managed to leave me out of her long list of New Zealand children’s writers. Duder, who at the time was the convener of the children’s awards judging panel, described The Fat Man as “a superb children’s book”, making the farcical claim, “It is clearly written for children and is therefore for them.” I was unable to make sense out of that.

Another best-selling children’s writer is equally crude in her language use, for example describing “puke on his face”, “snot on his cheek” and thinking it great fun to put whoopee cushions on a visitor’s chair or “a plastic poo” on a toilet seat. As a reviewer I found many other children’s authors similarly crude, but the most striking of all was the letter I got from a children’s writer-in-residence at Auckland Teachers’ College when I questioned the over-casual language in the newsletter being sent out to children’s writers. Her fairly detailed but ungrammatical suggestions to me included, “Put your pen where all that’s shits coming from and get down, lady,” with implied threats. Hardly surprisingly, her own children’s stories contain similarly crude, smart-alecky language. In one of her books inevitably nominated for the book awards of its year, its boy protagonist describes someone’s mother as “so posh and pointy, you know, with elbows and boobs like ice-cream cones”.

There are many more examples of books promoted to children which are poorly written, if not basically propagandising our young on issues which contravene long-held values, and which would disturb parents. However, many children never get to see them, as the mediocre writing long inflicted upon children and teenagers by librarians and teachers has turned them off reading.

Yet literature is one of the means by which minds eventually reach maturity, and outstanding children’s books are valuable, because behind the book is a person to whom life has said something worth passing on, whom experience has shaped. Worthwhile books reveal the possibilities which come from great imaginative insights.

The tentacles of the cancel culture have now gripped so many aspects of our lives that we are all the poorer for it. To stand by and do nothing to oppose it is arguably culpable. Jordan Peterson is indeed right in saying that it is weak individuals who are society’s greatest risk.

Amy Brooke, New Zealand children’s author, poet and socio-political commentator, can be found at www.amybrooke.co.nz.