Grace, Patricia - Literary papers of Patricia Grace

Grace, Patricia. 1937-

Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Raukawa, Te Ati Awa.

"Once I’ve finished a book or a story, my job is done. Reviews, analyses, critiques, theses are not written for me . . . What follows – the reading, discussion, dissection, opinion – is part of the next life of the book . . ." (Grace, Patricia. 2021. From the Centre: a writer's life. Penguin Books, NZ, 200).

Patricia Gunson was born in Newtown [St. Helens maternity hospital]. As a child her family lived in the Melrose house built by her father. Her maternal grandmother, two aunts’ and their families lived close by.

Hongoeka on the Kapiti Coast is her safe place, but throughout her life and marriage Patricia has fought the ambitions of councils and companies to obtain this highly desired whenua. Indeed in 1846 along the bay at Tāupo Pa, Te Rauparaha was arrested by Governor Grey, coercing Ngāti Toa into land transactions with the Crown to free him.

Patricia’s whakapapa to Hongoeka is through her paternal grandmother’s line. At 554 acres it is one of the larger papakainga in the Wellington district. Her father was welcomed back there on his return from WWII (as part of 28 Māori Bn) and Patricia’s parents lived there when they were newly married.

Patricia attended Wellington Teachers College 1955-1956 and completed the Probationary Assistant year in 1957. Creative expression and social consciousness were part of Wellington Teachers College as trainees were expected to experience, discuss, and respond to contemporary New Zealand arts, music, and literature. The required reading of Frank Sargeson and Katherine Mansefield led her to other New Zealand writers and the awareness that they wrote what they knew, the self. It was here that the desire to become a writer was born.

She had met fellow student Dick – Kerehi Waiariki Grace, and they were married January 1958 at the St Mary’s of the Angels, Boulcott Street. As a teaching couple within the Country Service, they progressed through various rural schools in Northland, with Patricia working part-time, while raising their family of seven children. She began writing at Tutāmoe; became a country member of the Penwomen’s Society and entered writing competitions and found feedback to be invaluable. At Pakōtai Primary, Patricia discovered that the school pupils’ own poems and stories of their life, worded in their idiom, stapled into small books for display on the classroom wall, were read over and over. This was their foundation for developing reading habits. At the time Little Black Sambo books were the norm in infant class libraries she taught at.

When I first began writing, I knew I wanted to write about the ordinary lives of ordinary people who were Māori, who I knew hadn’t been written about before in fiction – or who were only beginning to be written about (2021, 194).

Patricia became the first wahine Māori writer (in English) to have a manuscript published in 1975 with the short story collection, Waiariki, followed by her first novel Mutuwhenua in 1978.

The move to Porirua with relief teaching work at the College followed by a permanent teaching position meant she wrote mainly in the school holidays and wanted more time to dedicate to it. Her writing would incorporate institutional indifference to Māori cultural beliefs, harassment of Polynesian teens, tamau marriage, the mining of indigenous D.N.A., land issues and land claims etc to create a fictional work in her own voice.

Patricia entered Victoria University and completed the Diploma in the Teaching of English as a Second Language but changing education priorities left her unable to apply it in practice. In 1985 she was successful in her application for Writer in Residence at Victoria University Wellington. She completed her second novel Potiki (1986) and made a strong start on Electric City (1987), ‘At Victoria she had an office and an electronic typewriter which she had to learn to use,’ (2021, 192). During that time, she decided to leave teaching. Potiki has won many literary awards and been translated into several language. In 1989 Patricia was awarded an Honorary DLitt, from Victoria University. Wai-te-ata Press hosted a lunchtime party in 2017 to celebrate her 80th birthday and launch the Italian language edition of Potiki. Hongoeka is the landscape depicted within Potiki, the characters, plot and wharenui are fictional, but its history inspired the story. Patricia, Dick and their children were to settle in Hongoeka Bay and build their whanau home of forty plus years by the sea. As mana whenua they participated in the construction of the wharenui and marae complex that would take many years. Patricia was to comment (2021) that efforts to take Hongoeka stopped after the construction of the wharenui.