Ronald Hugh Morrieson

Born in 1922, novelist and short story writer Ronald Hugh Morrieson spent his whole life, including his writing years, in Hawera where he died in 1972. Morrieson lived in his mother’s home, taking rare breaks to Auckland for a few days in his 20s, New Plymouth in later years, and to a writer’s conference in Palmerston North towards the end of his life. In order to write in the evenings, from the age of 37 he worked as a private music teacher; prior to that he worked in the Hawera area as a casual dance-band player.

In 1963 his first novel, The Scarecrow, was published in Sydney by Angus & Robertson. Set in a small town much like Hawera, the tragicomedy of a serial killer was well received by reviewers, who saw it as a Gothic melodrama with a strong pop-culture component. In 1964 his second book, Came a Hot Friday, was less well received. Again set in a small Taranaki town, this was a tragicomic moral tale about gambling. The poor reviews, combined with his alcoholism and the death of his mother in 1968, meant his final decade as an unhappy one.

One of the reasons for the poor reviews was the violence and sexuality in his writing, which the conservative critics of the time struggled with. For them, Morrieson did not live up to the high cultural models that dominated literature at that time. As one critic said, Came a Hot Friday was ”certainly not the New Zealand that I know”.

Morrieson is widely believed to have worried that he could end up ‘another of those poor buggers who gets discovered when they’re dead’ and how right he was. From 1965 onward none of Morrieson’s work was published until after his death in 1972.

Two of Morrieson’s short stories were published in 1974 by Landfall. In March of that year they published ‘Cross my heart and cut my throat’, the comic story of a male guitar teacher’s attraction to a young female pupil. The second, The Chimney, is a far more serious tale concerning morality and sexual desire in an adolescent boy. Published in December of the same year, this work was considered a fine example of writing as art. Both pieces allude to an overly intimate relationship with the author’s mother.

Much harder to get published was Predicament, which was turned down by previous publisher Angus & Robertson. This, his third novel, was a powerful and disturbing tale of the psychological fantasy world of adolescence, again in a familiar small-town. After many drafts, some of which were simply discarded, the novel was finally published by Dunmore Press in Palmerston North in 1975.

Short and bleakly dark, Pallet on the Floor (1976), looks at rape, murder and suicide, this time set against a freezing works backdrop. Dunmore again picked up the work, but it has a somewhat unfinished feel, as though really only in draft form.

In 1976 Heinemann published a New Zealand edition of The Scarecrow and in 1981 Came a Hot Friday was put out by Penguin. Both novels have also been made into feature films.