Author Sue McCauley doesn’t stick to convention in her new novel
Sue McCauley thinks she'd get in trouble today if she wrote columns, saying "there was censorship back then but everyone is a lot more sensitive today." Photo / Tessa Charles
Sue McCauley sits in her home office, in the spot where she used to sleep as a child growing up on her family farm, east of Dannevirke.
The award-winning author is doing her first Zoom interview to talk about her new novel, Landed, which has taken two decades, on and off, to get from page to print. At 81, she finds technology a big annoyance – her book’s protagonist, Briar, moans about it a lot – and McCauley wishes she had listened enough to her 50-something daughter to work out how to change the camera angle so I can see more of the room.
For more than six decades, McCauley worked as a journalist, scriptwriter and award-winning novelist. One of her first paid jobs was as a Listener journalist in the early 1960s, when women were a rarity in newsrooms. She segued into fiction writing to get her opinions on the page without censorship and also because society made it difficult to be a working mother at the time.
Describing herself today as “a slack writer on a pension”, she blinks into the Zoom screen and nods that Landed will be her last book. She is not long back from senior aerobics. She’s healthy for her age, although she has poor hearing and eyesight.
It is just as well she is active, as she is increasingly caring for her husband, Pat Hammond, 66, who has motor neurone disease. It was diagnosed about three years ago, and he moves around the house with a stick or leaning on McCauley, who says: “It’s a horrible condition … I need to be healthy because I’m his caregiver now.”
Her novel took a long time because she has been pouring her energy into their life on her Waitahora Valley family farm, which she and her older sister, Elisabeth, inherited in 2004. McCauley speaks openly about the trauma of her childhood, after their stepmother moved in when she was eight. It was so vivid that when the author returned to the valley she had left at 17, she almost couldn’t bear to step inside, and she wanted to move a new house onto the land.
But Elisabeth – who regularly comes to stay in a cottage on the farm – could remember their late mother living in the house, so McCauley planted a garden and they have three alpacas, a miniature horse, chooks and sheep, “which all follow me around”.
During our conversation, the landline rings. They’re 17km from Dannevirke, so cellphone signals don’t reach them. “It’s for you!” Hammond calls out. “Tell them to call me back,” McCauley pipes back.
Their controversial relationship formed the basis of what McCauley is best known for: her semi-autographical bestseller published in 1982, Other Halves. It tells the story of a Pākehā woman, Liz, in her thirties, who enters a relationship with a young Māori street kid, Tug. The novel explored ethnic, gender, age and class differences and won the Wattie Book of the Year Award and the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction.
McCauley met Hammond (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Raukawa) when he was a homeless teenager. She was living in Christchurch with her former husband and two children, and among her freelancing jobs, wrote for a Catholic magazine and connected with a Christchurch drop-in youth centre. Hammond was one of the youths who came to stay with McCauley and her family, because he was too young to be taken into the City Mission, where he had slept on the veranda. “Which in a Christchurch winter is fairly unpleasant,” she says.