Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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In Edge of the Earth, Ward describes himself as an imaginative child who inhabited a
world that “was partly based in reality, partly the creation of my imagination”. 209 He
“played in the shadows of other people’s imaginations: Scott and his Ivanhoe, Grimms’
fairy stories and the Knights of the Round Table”. This points to the influence of his
father, who loved literature and no doubt read these classic tales to his youngest son. 210
The world of imagination occupied the boy’s mind to the extent that he was so vague
and preoccupied, he did not last long as a Catholic altar boy because he would “ring the
gong at the wrong time during Mass”. 211
Ward recalls himself as being “Not a lonely child, but an alone child. I was the
youngest, and because my sisters and brother were mostly away at boarding school, I
spent a lot of time on my own”. 212 He believes that the boredom he experienced living
in relative isolation encouraged him to become reflective. “I grew up on a farm and I
was bored […]. You also find with people who have had illnesses or something that
stops them from engaging in the world that sometimes they’re forced to be more
reflective […]. That affects their view of the world later on, because they’re capable of
a reflective approach”. 213
Some of the childhood memories Ward describes in Edge of the Earth – such as his
father tossing the bodies of dead sheep over the precipice of their farm into the forest, or
a hawk diving out of the sky and plucking out the eyes of a dead lamb – inform the
narrative and setting of Vigil. He has recalled the experience of helping his father “in
the bloody business of docking and tailing lambs”, a scene which is repeated in Vigil
when Toss helps Ethan dock lambs and ends up with her face covered in blood. 214
Ward’s father, Pat, was a third-generation New Zealand farmer. He had grown up in an
isolated area on a farm near Martinborough and eventually acquired his own land as a
returned serviceman after World War Two. For Ward’s mother, however, Morrison’s
Bush must have seemed like the end of the earth. Judy Ward had been born in
Hamburg to a German Jewish family who escaped from the Nazi regime in 1933 and
went to live in Israel. She met Vincent’s father, who was sixteen and a half years older
209 Ward, Edge of the Earth: Stories and Images from the Antipodes 65.
210 Ward, Edge of the Earth: Stories and Images from the Antipodes 66.
211 Ward, Edge of the Earth: Stories and Images from the Antipodes 66.
212 Ward, Edge of the Earth: Stories and Images from the Antipodes 65.
213 Lynette Read, interview with Vincent Ward, 11 December 1997.
214 Ward, Edge of the Earth: Stories and Images from the Antipodes 66.