The Grass Catcher: A Digression about Home

Abstract

I read Ian Wedde’s memoir over Christmas 2014 on Waiheke Island, where I had been taken on holiday as a child sixty years earlier, delighting in his non-judgemental evocation of the 1950s—that culturally embarrassing decade that was a paradise to grow up in. In his account of a Blenheim childhood I encountered echoes of my mother’s recall of her childhood there in the 1920s. For the baby-boomers this is a defining literary registration of our era from within the lucid recall of a major writer of our generation. Sargeson’s or Frame’s New Zealand childhood worlds are distant now, and it is engaging to recognize a collective narrative not mired in puritanism or poverty. The Grass Catcher is a welcome generational story of place, community, and language.