THE

PEOPLE
BEFORE

Maurice Shadbolt
 BIOGRAPHY
Shadbolt, Maurice (19322004), fiction writer and playwright,
was born in Auckland and educated at Te Kuiti HS, Avondale
College and Auckland University College.

He worked as a journalist for various New Zealand newspapers

and as a scriptwriter and director of documentary films for the
New Zealand National Film Unit until 1957, when he left for
Europe. This period of his life is recorded in One of Bens: A
New Zealand Medley (1993). Before he returned in 1960 he
published his first book, a collection of stories grandly titled
The New Zealanders (1959). Although the book brought
Shadbolt immediate recognition in Britain, where it was highly
praised by such influential reviewers as Alan Sillitoe and Muriel
Spark, in New Zealand the critical response was predominantly,
and probably unfairly, negative. The eleven stories chronicled
New Zealands social history during the first half of the
twentieth century, introducing themes which have remained
important throughout Shadbolts oeuvre.
 BIOGRAPHY
Maurice Shadbolt is a major New Zealand writer, with an
impressive body of work which also includes successful
non-fiction work such as the Shell Guide to New Zealand
(1968). In a writing career which spanned five decades
he won fellowships and almost every major literary
prize, some on more than one occasion: the Landfall
Prose Award in 1957, the Scholarship in Letters in 1959,
1970 and 1982, the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award
in 1963, 1967 and 1995, the Burns Fellowship in 1963,
the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship in 1998,
the James Wattie Award in 1978, 1981 and 1987, and the
New Zealand Book Award in 1981. In 1989 he was made
CBE. Above all, however, Shadbolt should be recognised
for his storytelling talent. That almost all his books
remain in print is testament to his enduring popularity
with a wide reading public.
PLOT
The story is about an unnamed family who struggle to
improve a dairy farm. The father has bought the farm
cheap from the owners (the people before) who have not
made much in the way of a farm at all.
The father has watched his father work for other people
all his life and he makes up his mind that he will buy land
and be his own boss. During the World War I Gallipoli
campaign, the fathers thoughts of owning his own land
kept his hopes up at the darkest moments of the fighting.
There are two sons. Jim is the younger and does not take
to farming too well. He is weakish and his mother keeps
him inside, whereas the older brother (the narrator of the
story) loves the outdoors and is much more his fathers
boy.
PLOT
The father concentrates on improving the flat land for
cattle and ignores the hills which he sees as a nuisance.
Jim is an imaginative sort of child and explores the hill
area. He finds caves and Maori adzes. His fathers
interest is immediately that they might have some worth.
The two brothers explore the area more and find a cave
with a human skull in it. Clearly there has been some
Maori occupation there at some time in the past (another
set of people before). They keep the knowledge secret.
The land is hard to work and often the father thinks of
giving up, but pride and invested achievement keep him
there. It is the time of the Great Depression 1929-1933
and the father has no time for the moanings of the city
folk.
PLOT
A group of Maori visit the farm one day to allow the
dying old father a last chance to see the land of his
youth. All the tribe know every detail of the farm and
the hill which was once a Pa site and saw battles with
the British, ending with the Maori tribe abandoning the
land: not worth any more deaths. Jim befriends the
Maori group and offers the adzes which they refuse. The
old Maori man is dying and the group stay the night and
leave him buried on the hillside. The father is outraged
and gets the police in but no-one can find the body.
The father sees things differently now and senses that
his efforts are insignificant alongside that of these
people before. He sells up and the family moves from
farm to farm.
PLOT
The two boys go off to World War II. On their return
Jim goes to university and the older brother stays
on the farm to take over from his father (the one
before). When they talk about the war one day,
they both have the same tale of thinking about a
fond moment to help them through just as their
father had done in WWI. Jim tells his brother he
thinks of the adzes and the burial cave and the
Maori family who left their father in a grave in a
cave. His older brother seems to feel cheated that
his younger brother has such a fond memory of the
place and seems to understand the real name of the
farm: Te Wahiokoahoki, the place of happy return.
PART 1 QUESTIONS
1 Describe the early farm after the father bought
it for a song. Who were the people before?
2 What do we get to know about the fathers
character and that of the mother and the two
boys?
Find some lines to quote which typify each
character.
3 Towards the end of part 1, Jim goes to the
abandoned hill area. He finds a cave with adzes
and also a human skull. What is the fathers
attitude to the adzes? What does the author hint
at now about the people before?
PART 2 QUESTIONS
4 This part opens with a reference to the end of the
depression. What year is that, roughly?
5 In the first pages of this section explain how the
fathers view of the land and his work has changed.
6 On p 206 the mother says perhaps theyve got
happy memories of this place. After reading
Part 2, how does this statement seem ironic?
7 Describe why the Maori family have come to the
farm.
8 Re-read the last ten lines of part 2. Why does the
son think his father might have said or felt
something else?
PART 3 QUESTIONS
9 What action has completely astounded the
father?
10 In what way have the brothers remained
the same?
11 Re-read the conclusion to the story. Why
does the older brother think that Jim has
beaten him?
GENERAL QUESTIONS
1 To how many people does the title the
people before apply?
2 What differences in values do various owners
of the land have?
3 What do you get to know about New Zealand
farm life in the 1930s?
 SUMMARY: Maurice Shadbolt is one of the towering figures of
New Zealand literature, winning numerous awards and accolades
for his work, much of which examines the history of the country
through narrative. The central characters in this story are carving
out a farming existence on the land, and the importance of land
ownership to the family is made apparent in a number of phrases
in the story. The narrator tells us that my father took on that
farm, he refers to the importance of Land of your own, which
becomes your own little kingdom. The suggestions of the history
of the land come through the discovery of the greenstone adzes
and attitudes to the land are brought to the fore with the visit of
the Maori group. Although Shadbolt characterises Tom Taikaka as
pleasant, courteous and patient, there is the constant underlying
acknowledgement of the Europeans displacing of the Maori from
their land. Jims attempt at restoring the greenstone to Tom is
symbolic of an attempt at restitution, and the reader is left to
interpret Toms reluctant refusal. The return of the Maori elder
to the land in death, and his disappearance, is another indication
of his unity with the landscape and again demonstrates the
different attitudes to land held by the Maoris and the Europeans,
attitudes which remain polarised in the brothers at the end of
EXTENSION
Wider reading
Strangers and Journeys or The Lovelock Version by Maurice Shadbolt
Playing Waterloo by Peter Hawes

Compare with
Journey by Patricia Grace
Her First Ball by Katherine Mansfield
The Enemy by VS Naipaul

Online
Biographical information and a critical review of Shadbolts work is
available at:
http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/shadboltm.html
This newspaper obituary is also interesting:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article4977
10.ece