Auckland artist Julia Christian’s
‘We were to be real town dwellers with electric lights and a pullthe-chain lavatory instead of a dumpy hole, and at first the rush of water frightened us, and the brightly lit rooms with the furniture deprived of its big enveloping shadows seemed harsh and too public.”
The recording of Janet Frame, reading from page 54 of the first book of her autobiography To the Island, floats eerily from the old valve radio in the small living room at 56 Eden St, a railway house on a quarter-acre section in Ōamaru described by Frame as her “kingdom of the sea”.
This was her childhood home from the age of six to when she left Waitaki Girls’ High School for tertiary study in Dunedin. It is where she played with her sisters, hid messages in brass bed knobs, made up stories, explored the “plannies” (the pine reserve behind the house) and, as quoted by her biographer, Michael King, “ran wild”.
When heritage expert Bill Tramposch, then chief executive of the Historic Places Trust, visited the town in 2000, he found the house derelict, windows broken, garden overgrown. “It was like if you came to Massachusetts and you walked past the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson and noticed that it was derelict with windows broken,” he says on the phone from his home in California. While Ōamaru celebrated its whitestone architectural heritage, “there was a kind of amnesia as to who Janet Frame was and where she came from”.
