Bernadette Hall kindly shared her acceptance speech given at the Grand Hall in Parliament last week for her Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement. We would also like to congratulate Dame Joan Metge and Roger Hall on their Awards, both Dame Joan and Roger have published with Victoria University Press in the past.
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| Bernadette Hall |
1.
e hara i te mea, no naianei te aroha, no nga tupuna, tuki iho tuku iho
At a moment like this it feels good to start with love. Love
passed down from generation to generation. And language, language is also
passed down.
2.
We are great talkers in my family. My sisters and me. We can be raucous
and outrageous when we get together. There’s a story: when I was about two and
a half and living in Alexandra, there was a wall-paperer come in to do some
work in the house. Finally he said to my dad that if I wasn’t removed from the
room, he wouldn’t be able to keep on working because I just wouldn’t stop
talking. My dad said, ‘Well, I’ll have to get another paperer then.’
3. There’s a story: my
mother, one of the two most beautiful girls in Dunedin, so they say, working in
the OK Café during the Depression. She didn’t have the chance of tertiary
education. She and her friend Flo used to steal little slices of lemon cake, sliding
them under an upturned cup on a saucer, taking the cup out the back, pretending
they were going to do the washing. Mum
and her family, the Nialls, had the tough, bracing, black humour my sisters and
I call the black Irish humour.
I remember some of the sayings of the old aunts and uncles: a)
if I’d done something that impressed them, they’d say ‘ why, you’re the girl
your mother forgot to drown’. b) if they
heard us complaining or whining about things, they’d say, ‘we’re doin’ right
alright in this little land we stole from the Maoris.’ I suspect that only
Irish Catholics would ever talk like that.
c) If by accident you committed a rhyme when you were chatting away, Mum
would cut in with ‘ she’s a poet and she doesn’t know it’. d) Dad died suddenly
when I was fifteen. If my sisters and I were lazing around, not helping out enough, Mum would pull a face
and full of mockery she’d quote Boxer, the draught-horse from Orwell’s Animal
Farm: "I must work harder". We’d feel
guilty even as we roared with laughter, galvanised into giving her a hand.
5. Alongside this kind of muscular language, there were the
gorgeous elaborations of Church Latin and the Classics, Greek and Latin, which
formed such a major part of my education. The plays and the poetry.
6. It took me a long time to entrust myself to
my lady poetry: in 1971 I met Joanna
Margaret Paul, teaching at St Dominic’s College in Dunedin; in 1972 I attended
a poetry class run by John Dickson in Dunedin; in 1985 I had a first poem
published in ‘Untold’ a magazine edited by Simon Garrett from Canterbury
University; in 1989 there was my first book, from Caxton Press, edited by
Michael Harlow. A very slender volume made beautiful by Joanna’s drawings. I thought I could hide behind them.
6. The American poet Wallace Stevens writes of the “rarities that
the poet (and here I’d say the poem) can offer us: 'rarities which might / reconcile us to ourselves in those / True
reconcilings, dark, pacific words, / And the adroiter harmonies of their
fall' ”. There are people in this room who
offer words like this – words that expand us when we read or listen to them.
Essential words.
7. Thank you to Creative New Zealand,
to Fergus, to Kathryn Madill and to my sister-in-law Tina Reid who opened her
heart and her home to me in the years I worked in Wellington. My thanks and
love to John – who would want to live
with a writer!
I experience this award as an embrace and an invitation to go
on …. working harder, as my mother
would put it. I am truly thrilled and grateful.
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