Sockburn and the southern Gothic

The relocation of Philip Matthews, the former Listener journalist, to the South Island has, I infer, brought about the confrontation that many northern migrants must make with the different way of life here: colder and sparser, a sense of foreboding appears to infuse the sensibility of the new arrivals. Of course, I am reading into this article a sense of personal difference from what is the here and now: the muggy, populous green environs of Auckland’s triple star (south, west and east-Central) superseded by the colder, grimmer and more constrained climate of these southern outposts.

For me, raised here, it’s different. My mother, who grew up in Invercargill, was a pursuer of southern history both Pakeha and Maori as it was mediated through the written record. My father came from a family whose ancestral sons had sneaked out of their gentleman father’s Dunedin home in order to go farming. I never had a stake in the South Island myth, even as my undergraduate education was heavy with it. That Brasch, for example, looked to the mountains and felt a profound emptiness was his problem, not mine. The interior was the colonists’, taken from Ngai Tahu by governmental stealth, which iwi had in turn synthesised ownership from the earlier tribes they absorbed by force of numbers. Before that, the birds and rocks.

Having said all that, I have requested at the Concrete University Library a copy of the book cited in Matthews’ article, Davey Darling, whose author

… chose Sockburn (as the setting) because it’s right on the edge of town,” [Paul] Shannon [the author] says. “The landscape is very bare around there, nearly treeless, like the worst parts of the United States.”

My home neighbourhood: where the spirit comes to die? In truth, I can see it, stripped of overlying narratives of family and belonging, even as I reject the premise with something approaching a smile. One could indeed come here and see “the worst parts of the United States”, where “the worst parts” means few trees rather than racist lynchings, but there’s more, there’s more, there’s always more.  These pages are, I hope, testament to this.

Shannon is not the first chronicler of Sockburn in fiction, however; that curious honour I contend goes to A.P. Gaskell in “All Part of the Game”, a tale of a jockey in despair. Some of the families mentioned in that story remained our neighbours into the 1980s, and a Sockburn schoolfriend with racing connections was able to pinpoint, through her mother, the house in which the story was said to have taken place.

I’ve never cleaved much to the idea of a southern Gothic. Without wishing to beat, dully, a drum, my personal experience of depression has far overridden any menace I might otherwise read into the landscape. The things that oppress others about these locales—the flatness, the suburbanness, the monotony of topography—sustain me, hiding out in the locations of my early life.  This is a home.

Tagged as: Sockburn, southern Gothic, writing