Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde

By Paula Morris and Haru Sameshima

Published by Massey University Press, 2020

Reviewed by Ish Doney for PhotoForum.

Robin Hyde was found dead in her London attic room on August 23rd, 1939. She was thirty-three years old and left behind a son and an extensive and varied collection of written works. (1)

It feels wrong to start here, with her death, but Hyde’s absence is at the heart of Shining Land and getting to grips with this book seems to require it. With words by Paula Morris (Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Manuhiri, Ngāti Whātua) and photographs by Haru Sameshima, the book is part of Massey University Press’s Kōrero series, which invites artists from different disciplines to collaborate, intertwining their distinct approaches into shared projects. In Shining Land , Hyde becomes something of a third collaborator, as Sameshima and Morris follow her faded footprints and search for clues in her texts.

Robin Hyde was born in Capetown to British and Australian parents who named her Iris Wilkinson.(2) The family relocated to Wellington soon after her birth, and the next thirty years of Hyde’s life were spent in New Zealand’s cities, towns and remote landscapes, moving to find work, hide her two pregnancies, and recover her mental and physical health. Hyde crammed a lot of life into these three short decades. As Morris points out “She was a young woman. It’s easy to forget: she did so much.” (3) . A biography part-written by Derek Challis, Hyde’s son, clocks in at close to 800 pages (4); hers was a full and complicated life and I won’t attempt to summarise it here.

Hyde’s movements through Aotearoa New Zealand provide a kind of framework for the story that unfolds in Shining Land, but this is not a biography. Aspects of Hyde’s life are outlined and her voice echoes through well-selected quotes, providing clues to aid Morris and Sameshima in their hunt. The subject of the book is the search for Robin Hyde, rather than Hyde herself. If anything, the book feels like a three-person travel diary, as each artist undertakes the journey through their own medium and in their own time.

Sameshima’s photographs are quiet, even distant; it’s hard to find intimacy when so much time has passed. Each image depicts a place where Hyde has been and, looking at them, I catch myself trying to ignore the signs of contemporaneity. I flick past the pictures dated by cars or signage, lingering over the landscapes and houses that feel like they could have been frozen in time. It strikes me that Sameshima’s task might be the harder of two. While Morris deftly weaves the past with the present and Hyde’s story with her own, Sameshima works with what visible traces remain. This is also a reflection of his decision not to use archival imagery. Nowhere in the pages of Shining Land do we see Robin Hyde. Her presence is always inferred. In each location, each frame, we’re about a century too late. This, coupled with the lack of people in general, imbues the images with a sense of eeriness. Shots from windows and behind bushes and clouds of steam are reminiscent of covert surveillance, but without any sign of the person we’re tailing.

We don’t see or hear from Sameshima, and the stillness of the images can obscure the fact that they’re his eyes we’re looking through. The date (ranging from 1994 to 2020) and location of each photograph can be found near the end of the book. Rather than being attached as an appendix, these notes are nestled amongst further photographs making them feel a part of the whole, highlighting their importance. Sameshima maintains his distance in this written form, opting for the orienting details of place and time and for Hyde’s voice rather than his own, including sections from her texts with some of the captions. For instance, during Hyde’s second pregnancy, she stayed on Rangitoto ki te Tonga D’Urville Island wearing a fake wedding ring and fake name to escape the stigma her lack of husband would invariably have attracted. (5) Sameshima’s black and white spread of the island is linked to a quote from Hyde’s autobiographical collection Your Unselfish Kindness, which begins “I am alone now, more alone than anyone else in the world, and happy in it.”(6), providing a glimpse into the significance of Sameshima’s composition.

Morris’s text creates a very different world from the one presented in the images. It’s here that we are met with hot flashes of Hyde’s life. Morris’s voice and position are apparent; before Hyde is even introduced, the book opens with Morris’s own relationship to the landscape and we continue to flit between the two authors throughout. There’s a closeness here, a sense of openness. Hyde is the focus but we look through, or with, Morris to see her. It’s almost like, in order to write the deceased author’s life, Morris needed to put at stake something of her own.

The Kōrero series advertises itself as “picture books for grown ups,”(7) suggesting they have a more general audience in mind than might typically be the case for an artist book. The difficulty with a project of this nature is how to balance the two forms of communication. The risk is that the images are reduced to illustrations or – conversely – that the text becomes mere captions. Both these pitfalls have been avoided by Shining Land. This is partly a testament to the strength of Morris and Sameshima as artists in their distinct fields. It’s also a matter of ordering and layout decisions, where it becomes unclear how much is the result of the conversation between photographer and author and how much is indebted to Gary Stewart’s book design.

This is an unassuming book, and one that grows on you. It’s about Robin Hyde, but not a biography. It relies on photographs, but is not a photobook. It’s two people telling the story of their search for a third, each through their own medium. It was also my first introduction to Hyde, which forced me to wonder how my experience might have differed if I were an established fan. (For one thing, I’d be more likely to recognise Derek Challis and Gloria Rawlinson’s hefty biography sitting quietly on the bedside table of a hotel room.) (8) There’s no resolution to this search. Hyde's story ends in that attic room in London, after months spent reporting from the midsts of the war in China. Shining Land was always intended to concentrate on Hyde's life in New Zealand and, had it not, the outbreak of Covid-19 – which Morris hints at through mentions of lockdown – would have made it impossible to follow her offshore. Such an extension of the geographical reach might provide more context, but any kind of literal finding would mean going backwards, not forwards. It would mean archives and recollections, a face in a photograph… But again, this is not a biography.

When asked what they hoped readers would take away from Shining Land, Morris and Sameshima both articulated a desire for the book to lead people back to Hyde’s work – for it to introduce her to a new audience.(9) With a small stack of Hyde’s books beside me now, I can safely say that, in this respect, it is an unequivocal success.

Footnotes

(1) 'Robin Hyde', https://nzhistory.govt.nz/people/robin-hyde, (Ministry for Culture and Heritage).

(2) Ibid.

(3) Morris, Paula & Sameshima, Haru. 2020. Shining Land. Massey University Press, Wellington. P.15.

(4) Challis, Derek & Rawlinson, Gloria. 2002. The Book of Iris: A life of Robin Hyde. Auckland University Press, Auckland.

(5) Morris, Paula & Sameshima, Haru. 2020. Shining Land. Massey University Press, Wellington. P.44.

(6) Morris, Paula & Sameshima, Haru. 2020. Shining Land. Massey University Press, Wellington. P.89.

(7) 10 Questions with Paula Morris and Haru Sameshima. Massey University Press https://www.masseypress.ac.nz/news/2020/august/10-questions-with-paula-morris-and-haru-sameshima/.

(8) Morris, Paula & Sameshima, Haru. 2020. Shining Land. Massey University Press, Wellington. P.29.

(9) Questions with Paula Morris and Haru Sameshima. Massey University Press https://www.masseypress.ac.nz/news/2020/august/10-questions-with-paula-morris-and-haru-sameshima/

Ish Doney is an art writer, poet, and theorist living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Ish takes photographs, knits sweaters, and is currently working in digitisation at Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga Archives New Zealand.

also reviewed by:
John Daly-Peoples for NZArtsReview
Sally Blundell for Landfall Review Online
Mary Paul for Kete Books