Saga based on family history

Press, 6 October 1987, Page 8

Saga based on family history

When she is not teaching, marketing cosmetics, managing a travel agency, or 1 selling encyclopaedias door to door, Joan RosierJones’s first love is writing. The Christchurch-born author has spent much of the last year living at the turn of the century, exploring the political and feminist issues that were to become the theme of her latest novel, "Voyagers.” “I would never write anything else that requried such research,” she said. “I spent a whole year reading books set in that time. It wasn’t possible to get excited about anything else, because I needed to sort of live in that era.” Spanning the years 1906-1942, “Voyagers” is a family saga loosely based on Ms Rosier-Jones’s own family history. Her grandfather was a Finn shipwrecked off the coast of New Zealand, and one of the central cha©cters,

Will, is based on him. “I never met my grandfather, but my mother remembers him shutting himself in the laundry and swearing in Finnish. It was the only time he ever swore. I had an idealised view of what he was like.” Will and his wife, Jess, raised three children in the rough railway camps improvised for workers pushing the Main Trunk line through from Auckland to Wellington. One of the mainstays of the author’s research were photographs, and a particularly useful one of a family standing outside a tent beside the Main Trunk line was later identified as her own grandparents. The character, Jess, is a combination of Ms Rosier-Jones’s grandmother’s and her own personality. Both writer and character are socialists trying to resolve the dilemma of

principles versus compromise. ‘ Like Ms Rosier-Jones’s own' forebears, Jess and Will are victims of the class system and the ill-feeling towards foreigners during World War I. The central character of the second part of the book, Alf, a young Londoner who later meets Jess’s daughter, was completely fictional and therefore one of the hardest to develop. Ms Rosier-Jones spent about 20 years as a closet writer before publishing her first novel, “Cast Two Shadows,” based on the life of a friend. Her next novel, which is already complete and waiting to be published, is called "Canterbury Tales,” and tells the story of a group of people taking a train from Dunedin to Christchurch for the Christchurch Festival. She hopes it will be published in time for the next festival in Febraury, 1989.