In many stories blackness was equated with evil: devils, witches’ clothes, unlucky cats, bad wolves. New Zealand history was told from a Eurocentric … - Patricia Grace

in the early days I didn’t know what real creative writing was. I thought it was just imitating what had been read. I don’t know – trying to write a new Conan Doyle-type mystery, cobblestone streets, or something like that. That was until I came across writing by New Zealand writers, which was very late – after I’d left secondary school. I started to hear the New Zealand voice in literature and to understand that real writing is writing that comes from your self – your dreams, imaginings, emotions, dreads, desires, perceptions – what you know. Part of what you know comes from the research that you do. Those early influences were people like Frank Sargeson and Katherine Mansfield. I started to experience the New Zealand settings, hear the New Zealand voice in what I was reading for the first time, and then when I came across the writing of Amelia Batistich, a New Zealander of Dalmatian origins, I thought well, this is a different New Zealand voice. It started to click with me that I might have my own voice too. The penny dropped rather late for me. As well as Batistich there were all the Maurices [Gee, Shadbolt, Duggan], as well as writers like Dan Davin, Robin Hyde, Ruth Park, Ian Cross, Marilyn Duckworth, Janet Frame. All added to my enlightenment and to the realisation that I would have a voice of my own. I knew also that there were people who I could write about, or characters I could invent, based on people I knew, who hadn’t really been written about before. There were stories about them, but not written ones.

This first part of the story is about two sisters, Ngarua and Maraenohonoho, who quarrelled over a canoe.

...the telling was not complete. As the people slept there was one more story to be told, a story not of a beginning or an end, but marking only a position on the spiral. (The Storles, chapter 28 p180)