The Boy and the Taniwha
The Boy and the Taniwha by R. L. Bacon and Para Matchitt
First published by Collins, 1966.
This is the second edition, and has obviously lived quite a life, containing stamps for the ‘New Zealand Consulate General, New York’ and the ‘Embassy of New Zealand, 37 Conservatory Circle, N.W., Washington D.C., 2008’ on the dust jacket and front endpaper. I wonder where else it journeyed to find its way to me, in a local op shop, for a mere single dollar…
I was first attracted to the interesting tertiary colour palette, but a couple of other things have grabbed my attention about this book. The first is the teaching elements, including the captioned drawings on the end papers, and the introductory (and fairly incorrect) Māori pronunciation guide. I love that this moves the book from being a simple story book, into a teaching resource, and I guess that’s why it found its way to America all those years ago.
The second is the illustrator’s use of Māori patterns (or lack thereof). This confuses me a little as the elements mentioned above, and the story itself seem to go to great lengths to provide accurate explanations of elements of Māori culture, where the illustrations seem to delve into flights of fancy at several points. The artist seems to have been mainly a carver, which I thought would have signalled a keen interest in accurate representations of pattern, but perhaps not…
Matchitt employs swirls (or koru), a well-known Māori symbol, as well as the chevron/zigzag pattern (which can have many different meanings depending on context), but beyond this, seems to be working mainly in the decorative style of the 1960s rather than using further traditional Māori patterns. This may have been a deliberate design decision, but I think that it is detrimental to the story as a whole because the images are not really illustrations, more adornments, and they would have fitted better had they been more traditional, following the tone of the story.
I love the decision to have a ‘storyteller’ and a ‘painter’ rather than an ‘author’ and ‘illustrator’ – so much friendlier! Although, of course, it could be argued that both are storytellers, one visual and the verbal. Overall in the book, the strength definitely lies in the written story, with the pictures becoming fairly incidental.
There is a distance put between the reader and the storyteller, too, with the main character (the boy) being referred to only ever as ‘the little maori boy’ (note the total abandonment of macrons…) apart from when being directly addressed in conversation by grandmother. This distance is increased by the illustrations not showing faces until over halfway through the book (image below of the two characters sleeping), and then, only once. I would have loved to see the treatment of that sleeping scene used throughout the whole book.
The graphic style is a little jarring for someone familiar with Māori culture, but it does create some interesting interpretations of quintessential New Zealand icons, such as the cabbage tree below. Fun fact from the book: the cabbage tree is not actually a variety of palm or flax, but the largest lily plant in the world…
So, a good story, a good teaching resource and an interesting interpretation of Māori culture, of its time. I’m not sure how it would fare today…
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Side note: the artist, Matchitt, was fairly prolific, and was the main carver on a sculpture very well-known to me in my hometown of Wellington. Find out more about it here.