Abstract:
This thesis has two components: creative and critical.
The creative component is the novel Boden Black. It is a first person narrative, imagined
as a memoir, and traces the life of its protagonist, Boden Black, from his childhood in
the late 1930s to adulthood in the present day. The plot describes various significant
encounters in the narrator’s life: from his introduction to the Mackenzie Basin and the
Mount Cook region in the South Island of New Zealand, through to meetings with
mountaineers and ‘lost’ family members. Throughout his journey from child to butcher
to poet, Boden searches for ways to describe his response to the natural landscape.
The critical study is titled With Axe and Pen in the New Zealand Alps. It examines the
published writing of overseas and New Zealand mountaineers climbing at
Aoraki/Mount Cook between 1882 and 1920. I advance the theory that there are stylistic
differences between the writing of overseas and New Zealand mountaineers and that the
beginning of a distinct New Zealand mountaineering voice can be traced back to the
first accounts written by New Zealand mountaineers attempting to reach the summit of
Aoraki/Mount Cook.
The first mountaineer to attempt to climb Aoraki/Mount Cook was William Spotswood
Green, an Irishman who introduced high alpine climbing to New Zealand in 1882. Early
New Zealand mountaineers initially emulated the conventions of British mountaineering
literature as exemplified by Green and other famous British mountaineers. These
pioneering New Zealand mountaineers attempted to impose the language of the
‘civilised’ European alpine-world on to the ‘uncivilised’ world of the Southern Alps.
However, as New Zealand mountaineering became more established at Aoraki/Mount
Cook from the 1890s through to 1920, a distinct New Zealand voice developed in
mountaineering literature: one that is marked by a sense of connection to place
expressed through site-specific, factual observation and an unadorned, sometimes
laconic, vernacular writing style.
