All Visitors Ashore

All Visitors Ashore

Summary

As their freinds leave for Europe and the government gets tough with the unions, a bohemian community is enjoying the euphoria of youth.

It was their dreamtime. The wider world beckoned from the white ships sailing past Rangitoto Island, but the dream was also here on the Takapuna shoreline of Auckland, where the artist Melior Farbro grew his vegetables and let Cecilia Skyways follow her own form of Zen Buddhism in his garden hut. Where Curl Skidmore, his brilliant young head full of novels waiting to be unravelled, could dream of God, Fame, Nirvana, Great Love, or maybe just sex. Where not even the harbourfront strike of 1951 could convince them that life wasn't about poetry and painting and potential.

Reviews

  • Poetic, funny and very enjoyable.
    Richard Francis, Times Literary Supplement

About the author

C. K. Stead

C. K. Stead was Professor of English at the University of Auckland until 1986. In 1984, he was awarded the CBE for services to New Zealand literature. He has published twelve volumes of poetry, two volumes of stories, a memoir and several works of criticism, edited the Penguin Modern Classics Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield and published several novels, including The Secret History of Modernism and Mansfield.
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