Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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Chapter Two
Ward’s Childhood and Education
The previous chapter examined Vincent Ward’s aesthetic in relation to intellectual
history, with particular reference to Romanticism and Expressionism. This chapter will
relate Ward’s aesthetic to its immediate social contexts - to the ways in which his
family, upbringing, training and education may have contributed to the shaping of his
artistic vision. The first part of the chapter will discuss Ward’s experience of growing
up on a farm in the Wairarapa - his family’s and friends’ perceptions of him as a child,
as well as his own recollections of his childhood, his parents’ background and attitudes,
and his education at primary and secondary school. The second part of the chapter will
discuss his training as a filmmaker at Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of
Canterbury in the 1970s. Although Ward has himself described his early years in Edge
of the Earth, his brief memoir leaves a number of gaps. It is an extraordinarily valuable
book for an understanding of Ward’s creative interests, but it does not seek to be a
comprehensive autobiography. Some myths and misconceptions have developed in the
tradition of journalistic writing on Ward. The present chapter, based on interviews with
friends and family as well as circumstantial evidence, is an attempt to assemble the first
detailed account of Ward’s early life that can complement his own personal perspective.
In an interview in the San Francisco Examiner, Ward says of A State of Siege and In
Spring One Plants Alone that both films contain “a very strong sense of the land”. 204 It
is Vigil, however, that most strongly reflects a sense of the New Zealand landscape as
an overpowering force. The way the landscape is represented in Vigil, while it follows
many New Zealand cultural precedents, may have particular links with Ward’s own
experiences of growing up on a farm in the Wairarapa.
Childhood and Schooling
Ward was born in 1956, the youngest of four children by six years, while the family was
living at Morrison’s Bush, about five miles from Greytown, and seven miles from
Martinborough. Ward’s eldest sister, Ingrid Ward, recollects that, although there are
204 Scott, "Writing Poetry for the Screen," E3.