Self-portraits.

BooksOctober 9, 2019

Let Me Be Frank: an essay about creativity and comics by Sarah Laing

Guest writer

Self-portraits.

Wellington writer, illustrator and Katherine Mansfield obsessive Sarah Laing has a new book out tomorrow. Here, she tells its origin story.

My first baby was really bad at breastfeeding – or else, as my mother and the Plunket nurse insinuated, I had the wrong shaped nipples. He couldn’t get the suction right and it would take him an hour to slurp the milk out of me. It was not erotic – it was painful. The upshot was I got a lot of books read. This was the last time in my life that I could truly sink into books. It was 2003 and my phone didn’t yet have a death grip on me. Only a few friends texted. So, my son in the rugby hold, a paperback on my knee, I read as I’d done in childhood, the world falling away.

One of those books was Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. The story of a girl growing up in Iran whilst the Islamic revolution was taking place, I was struck by how familiar she seemed despite our cultural differences, and how beautiful her black and white images were. They were arresting in an unassuming way – they lacked the flashy prowess of Marvel and DC comics, the competent boy comics style, as my friend Indira describes it. They were like expressionist woodblock prints. I can do this, I thought.

I levered the buggy replete with my four-month-old baby up the Gordon Harris steps; chose a hard-backed journal and an inky pen and began recording the minutiae of my day. The feedings, the walks along the blustery northern ridges of Wellington, the encounters with punks, the embarrassing outings to cafes with babies. I wrote about my neighbour, Mama Miklos, the Hungarian refugee, and my friends. When I’d almost filled the book up I stopped. I didn’t draw comics again for a number of years.

Jonathan, my husband at the time, gave me a new hard-backed journal shortly after my third child was born. I was drowning, not waving, a mother unfit for motherhood, always making things, always feeling bad about the work I’d already done. I made Brett and Jemaine rag dolls and wool felt vampire bats. I grew artichokes, baked bread and built raised-bed gardens. I did craft with my children. People hated me for my frantic creative output, which I documented on my blog, but I wasn’t drawing, I wasn’t writing. I’d applied for a fellowship to write at the Frank Sargeson Centre, hoping that a room of my own might change that. They’d called me as I was walking tired, ice block-sticky children home from Carols By Candlelight and I could hardly hear the good news over the sound of my five-month-old baby crying, strapped to my chest. I was to share the fellowship with Sonja Yelich – she’d have the first half of the year and I’d have the second.

Buddle Findlay chose Sonja as the poster girl for the fellowship promotion. She was blonde and glamorous and had won a major book prize. Sonja told me that her daughter was going to be famous. She’d been discovered at the Rockquest at Belmont Intermediate and was now working with a record producer – but I didn’t believe her. She was a proud mother, and sure, her daughter might have talent, but famous? When Sonja was the fellow, she tiled the floor in poems printed out on A4 paper. One night a man with a sawn-off shotgun scaled the ivy-clad walls and tried to rob her. I wasn’t going to stay the night there – no way. I dropped my eldest at school, my middle at kindy and my baby at creche and then either biked or took the bus into Albert Park to climb the rickety stairs to unlock the door. The space was intimidating, the bookshelves lined with photographs of illustrious authors such as Janet Frame and Catherine Chidgey. At 4pm I returned to Mt Albert to collect the children, and began to cook dinner. It wasn’t the dreamy unstructured time of your traditional residency – I had a small window and I was frantic to fill it.

My friends and I had speculated about the ones who got residencies – what did they even do while they were there? Did they write, or did they have existential crises, spending their time dozing on the sofa, stalactites of drool forming at the corners of their lips? Where were all the novels they promised us? There were a number of residents who had not delivered the goods, as Graeme Lay and Kevin Ireland were keen to point out to me. I was not going to be like them. I was going to finish all the projects I had promised, and then some.

I wrote the comics before I began working on my computer – I sat at the oak table under the window. From there I could see the homeless people sleeping on the balcony. When Steve Braunias was a fellow, ostensibly writing a novel, he’d made friends with them over cigarettes. He’d since given up smoking. I bought cartridge pads from Gordon Harris, along with the Staedler pigment liners, and I folded the pages into six squares. Mostly my comics were just a page or two, taking me an hour to complete.

I created a WordPress blog, and accosted Dylan Horrocks at a Storylines festival, introducing myself as the newest cartoonist on the block. “Friend me on Facebook” he said. It turned out he had 1200 friends already. It also turned out that he liked my stuff – he shared it amongst his 1200 friends and his thousands of Twitter followers. Suddenly people I didn’t know were paying attention. I drew comics with heightened self-consciousness, and the thrill of getting the attention I craved.

When my residency came to an end in December 2010, I said goodbye. I wasn’t going to draw any more comics. It was nice for a project to have a beginning and an end, and for it not to drag its zombie corpse into a future in which WordPress was desperately uncool. And yet, it turned out that I had formed a habit. I was no longer present in my life; I was arranging it into panels as it happened. My daughter screaming until she threw up on the floor of the fruit shop? Material. My new boots rubbing the skin off the back of my ankles? Material. Sleepless nights, professional jealousy, oversharing at parties, fights with my husband? Material. I kept on drawing and drawing, posting and posting. I filled up one folder with drawings and then another. I obsessively checked my email to see if I’d got comments or likes. I got invitations from magazines to draw strips, and to talk. It seemed like my comics were making me famous, which was funny, because I’d started drawing them to make people pay attention to my novels. I was now Sarah Laing the cartoonist.

I fell out with a friend over a comic. I’d revealed that she was having trouble in her relationship and she exploded. She’d told me that in confidence – I wasn’t to tell the world. I thought that everybody was having trouble with their relationships, but perhaps that was just me. Although we reconciled at the end, I felt too scared to write about people anymore, and it was people I was most interested in. I got into trouble with another friend, revealing her antipathy towards her job. I’d written a story about school mums puzzling over why their teenage daughters were so anxious when in fact the world was a better safer place. I’d thought otherwise – weren’t we facing an imminent climate disaster? I didn’t challenge them in person like I should’ve. Instead I drew a judgy comic, juxtaposing their conversation with the fleet of Karori Park SUVs and the parched creek. My readers leapt in on Facebook, and somehow (duh, privacy settings) one of the school mothers saw it. One scolded me for overstepping the line; the other told me via email that she was shocked at what a horrible person I was and how she was never going to speak to me again, and how we’d all be saved from climate change through technological innovations because Bill Nye said so. I apologised profusely, took the comic down and resolved to tackle issues head on rather than through writing. I thought that would be enough. I arrived 10 minutes late to school pick up for a term to avoid seeing her. When I finally did see her, I said hello, but she looked straight through me. She was a good person, she’d insisted. She volunteered for Ronald McDonald house. She never talked to me again.

“The book became talismanic – not just a retrospective, but a portrait of a marriage come undone.”

Jonathan and I separated in August 2018, shortly after I’d been awarded a Creative New Zealand grant to make this book. I spent the months post break-up trawling through all my old comics, vignettes of our life together. I selected the best ones, and then decided they weren’t the best ones and selected some other ones. I wrote new comics. I showed Jonathan the selection and made him read the manuscript because he was obliging that way, even after I’d dismantled our life together. The book became talismanic – not just a retrospective, but a portrait of a marriage come undone. I felt ambivalent and sad and also happy about all of the life that I had pinned down, butterflies in a cabinet.

I dedicated the book to my family – after all, they were the subject of so many comics. I dedicated it to Jonathan, who’d encouraged me in the first place, and continued to encourage me even after we separated. This was it. It was over. I wasn’t sure if I’d write these kind of comics anymore. I wasn’t sure what I would write next, if anything. I now had a full time job, days away from the children, a city apartment, a Tinder account. Of course, all that would also be excellent material.

Let Me Be Frank: comics 2010-2019, by Sarah Laing (Victoria University Press, $35) is available at Unity Books.

Keep going!

The Quail Island colony in 1911, showing huts for leprosy patients among the trees. (Auckland Libraries Heritage collections, AWNS-19111026-16-2)

BooksOctober 7, 2019

He is unclean; he shall dwell alone: A sad and startling story of leprosy in NZ

Benjamin Kingsbury

Guest writer

The Quail Island colony in 1911, showing huts for leprosy patients among the trees. (Auckland Libraries Heritage collections, AWNS-19111026-16-2)

An extract from Benjamin Kingsbury’s The Dark Island, about the history of the leprosy patient colony on Quail Island, in Lyttelton Harbour.

Books editor Catherine Woulfe writes: There are certain passages of Benjamin Kingsbury’s new book The Dark Island that make the reader wince and turn away. But then you turn back again, you can’t help it, it’s just such a great yarn.

With compassion, Kingsbury recounts the untold history of Quail Island in Lyttelton Harbour, and the treatment of leprosy patients – he never uses “lepers” – that were rounded up and exiled there in the early 1900s. Pine trees and pain, meals gingerly passed across no man’s land; what a life. What a death.

In this extract, he tells the story of a Pākehā man who showed up at Christchurch Hospital in the summer of 1906. He had terrible sores over his face and arms, and tested positive for bacillus leprae. One month later officials dumped him, alone, in an empty quarantine barracks on the island. He was the first.

His name was Will Vallance. Little is known of his life before Quail Island: he had come to New Zealand from Queensland in the mid 1890s, and had been working as a tailor in Christchurch since the turn of the century. When he was admitted to hospital he was thirty years old. He had probably contracted leprosy in Queensland, where the disease was more common than in New Zealand. It was not unusual that his illness took so long to reveal itself: symptoms of leprosy could take up to twenty years to appear.

Without any surviving diaries or letters, Vallance’s physical and mental condition during that first lonely year on Quail Island can only be guessed at. In July 1906 James Mason, who had recently returned to his post as chief health officer, visited the island and told the papers that the patient was ‘looking much better’; perhaps Vallance also had some quiet hope that he might soon be allowed to rejoin society.

At the time of Mason’s visit Vallance was living alone in one of the island’s old quarantine barracks. The emptiness of the building was testimony to the changes that had taken place in practices of medical segregation over the last thirty years. The rise of steam shipping had reduced the time available for diseases to spread, and also the need for quarantine facilities. By the early 1890s the effectiveness and fairness of the quarantine regulations themselves were being called into question: one doctor described them as ‘antiquated and most cruel to the patients’, observing that while a New Zealander with typhoid would be treated at a local hospital, an identical case arriving on a vessel would be taken to a quarantine station and dealt with by an ‘ignorant caretaker’. By the early twentieth century most cases of infectious disease were being treated at hospitals on the mainland. The complete isolation of Vallance, whose disease was chronic and only mildly contagious, is a measure of just how far reactions to leprosy differed from those to other diseases.

In April 1907, a year after he had been marooned on Quail Island, the Health Department built Vallance a hut of his own. The hut was small but solidly constructed, with a fireplace for the coming winter. It was perched in a pine plantation 200 yards around the inlet from the quarantine station. Vallance had apparently asked for a smaller dwelling after finding it impossible to get comfortable in the cavernous and empty barracks. The department was also starting to realise that Vallance’s isolation on Quail Island might not be a temporary affair after all: the construction of a hut could well have been a tentative step towards setting up a leprosy colony by stealth.

Vallance now had a new place to live, but his range was extremely limited. His conversations were held at a distance: he used a telephone to talk to friends, and spoke to the island’s caretaker and his family from what they thought was a safe distance. A white picket fence in front of his hut marked the point beyond which he was not allowed to pass. At meal times he would set out his plates on a small table at the end of the fence, and watch the caretaker fill them with food his wife had prepared at their house. His isolation was so complete that a reporter who visited him in 1907 was immediately put in mind of the Old Testament’s prescription for the ostracism of leprosy sufferers: ‘he is unclean; he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall his habitation be’. It was an accurate enough reflection of the department’s approach to his case.

The patients on a hut verandah, c.1922-23. The man standing in front of the railing on the left is most likely one of the Lyttelton residents who visited the patients to give them some company; the others, from left, are Ivon Skelton, Will Vallance, Ah Yip, Jim Lord, George Phillips, Ah Pat and one other, unidentified. (Christchurch Anglican Diocesan Archives, Parish of Lyttelton Collection, PAR039)

Vallance’s isolation was compounded by the depredations of leprosy. He had lost the ability to manipulate objects with his fingers, so his meals had to be cut up for him in advance by the caretaker. When he first arrived on the island he was able to split his own firewood, but soon this too was impossible. It became a struggle to get up and go outside: by October 1907 he only had the energy to leave his hut twice a week. ‘The time is approaching’, the reporter saw, ‘when the poor fellow will become helpless and too weak to move out of his house, and the problem will be what to do with him then . . . he cannot be left to die unattended.’

Vallance did get some help in the early days of his isolation. Once a month (or more frequently if needed) he was visited by Charles Upham, the Lyttelton port health officer and general practitioner, who would change his dressings and make him as comfortable as possible. Upham, ‘the little doctor’, was a short and sprightly man, a familiar sight on the steep streets of Lyttelton as he made his way with pipe, walking stick and dog to the home of one of his patients. He had trained at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, and joined the British navy as a medical officer after his marriage fell apart. He arrived in Lyttelton in the late 1890s on the HMS Torch. ‘It was spring and the area reminded me of the French Riviera. I thought, this is where I want to stay.’

Charles Upham, ‘the little doctor’, with his dog Billie. Upham, who also had a general practice in Lyttelton, was the colony’s doctor for most of its nineteen years. (Date and photographer unknown; Lyttelton Museum, Nola Muir Collection, Z1132)

Upham taught the senior Bible class at Lyttelton’s Holy Trinity Anglican church, and would have been familiar with Old Testament attitudes towards the leprosy sufferer. He would also have been familiar with the New Testament’s examples of those, beginning with Jesus, who had set themselves to care for the sick and the outcast. He did not leave his religion at the door when he set out on a medical visit – he was known to pray for his patients, and believed that he himself had been cured of angina by a visiting faith healer at Holy Trinity. His acceptance of the job at Quail Island was a demonstration of his ‘practical Christianity’. When he took the job, though, he was only expecting to be looking after one patient, and that temporarily. As it happened, more were on their way.

The Dark Island: Leprosy in New Zealand and the Quail Island Colony, by Benjamin Kingsbury (Bridget Williams Books, $39.99) is available at Unity Books.