I’ve spent quite some time running down rabbit holes recently looking for people and their stories, discovering what life was like in the 1920s here in New Zealand, and connecting a few dots. What struck me most while doing this research, is how similar life is today to then, as it was fifty or a hundred and more years before that. Not in the everyday matters of doing chores; today’s modern appliances make that part of our lives much simpler, but in the emotional anguish. Tragedy has been a human affliction for as long as man has lived.
We hear about it all the time: a child with cancer, a woman who loses two husbands twenty years apart in motor-cycle crashes, a beloved family member lost to illness or accident. The loss of life in natural disasters: floods, earthquakes, storms, and pandemics. Despite today’s advances in medicine, doctors can’t save everyone. The grief of a mother who loses a child is the same. So too, the anguish of losing a loved one in one calamity or another. The trauma of war for previous generations, has become a battle against drugs, violence, abuse, and usurpation.
The Scots came to New Zealand in the aftermath of the clearances, the Irish fled their homeland after the famine, thousands of people around the world fled their home, their families, everything they knew, to escape poverty, slavery, intolerance, or religious persecution. Yet today, we still read about racism, sexism, bigotry, and oppression. Nothing seems to change.
In time, the last fifty years will become history, especially this cruel pandemic sweeping the world. Future generations will learn about the same disparities, the same struggles, the same adversities, and nothing will have changed. Humans will experience the same emotional upheavals as they always have, and will still be trying to understand why. Why, in this day and age, do such things happen? A question every generation has asked.
While natural events cannot be prevented or predicted, the way we treat each other as people should have matured to something other, something greater, than what the past had to offer. A mother’s love is inextinguishable and incomparable never mind the colour of their skin or the language they speak. A father’s desire to provide and protect remains as strong as ever, even if the approach is different. A child needs to be loved and sheltered to grow.
Fortunately, human nature also has an outstanding ability to overcome the odds; to find hope in the smallest of things, to see the good in people, to love and laugh, and find it within themselves to be kind to others, even when they have little.
It is that depth of human endeavour, of character, of optimism that I want to encapsulate in my stories. It’s one of the reasons it takes me so long to write and release a new novel. The facts are easily obtained and explained, but to engage the human spirit and convey both the anguish and fulfillment of life is transitory, a little out of reach, but something to keep striving towards.
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Delve into these multi-generational family sagas, inspired by immigrant stories to a foreign land.
The New Zealand Immigrant Collection
suspenseful family saga fiction about overcoming the odds
Journey alongside one of the immigrants as they cross the oceans for a better life, or follow their descendants as they uncover the secrets of bygone days in stories that bring the past alive.
You won’t be disappointed.
Watch out for the updated cover designs
and
A new look series will be launched soon
Book 1 available now
Dual-timeline stories of searching for your roots
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