The Tainui Kid, KFC & The Scarecrow Committee - Morrieson's literary legacy
09 April 2010
A fictional encounter between Ronald Hugh Morrieson and James K. Baxter is the subject of our next show, HORSEPLAY.
Baxter is well known to New Zealanders; Morrieson less so but the more we research Morrieson in the lead up to opening the play, the more fascinated we become with his story.
Morrieson wrote 4 novels including Came a Hot Friday, Predicament and The Scarecrow and is attributed with forging the genre of ‘Taranaki Gothic’.
Although he enjoyed some success with The Scarecrow, he struggled to publish his later novels. He lamented to Maurice Shadbolt in 1972, “I hope I’m not another one of these poor buggers who get discovered when they’re dead”.
Regretfully, he was one of those poor buggers. He died in 1972 in relative obscurity in Hawera, where he had lived all of his life, several years before The Scarecrow (1982), Came a Hot Friday (1984) and Pallet on the Floor (1986) became movies in the 1980s.
In 1992, his home was demolished to make way for a KFC. Artist and writer Tim Chadwick spearheaded an attempt to prevent the demolition and formed ‘The Scarecrow Committee’ with several other supporters. The fight to save the house from demolition was unsuccessful. Morrieson was a polarising figure in Hawera with many residents remembering him as something a boozer, who used to ‘leer at their daughters’. The fact that he populated his novels with thinly disguised Hawera residents also made him unpopular and nowadays you can gaze upon a small plaque erected in Morrieson’s memory while you rip into your quarter pack.
Read the full blog entry here
