It is mentioned elsewhere how certain periodicals, the New Zealand Listener and Landfall pre-eminently, with the assistance of intermittently appearing “little” magazines, provide rallying points for groups of New Zealand writers. While the number of journals which print original verse or prose is limited, there is some ground for thinking that little work of merit remains unpublished. The Literary Fund Advisory Committee, disposing of about £3,000 annually provided by the Government, has subsidised the publication of commercially unviable work of quality and has also made sustaining grants to writers to free them to continue their work. The scale of this assistance is too meagre to inhibit self-reliance. Indeed, the writer in New Zealand faces very great material difficulties because of the small market for his work, unless he is lucky enough to find publication in England or America. Some Government agencies, such as the School Publications Branch of the Department of Education, have a good record in commissioning work by local writers, and the Broadcasting Service is a valuable patron. Direct State patronage is perhaps less valuable as a stimulus than public appreciation. It cannot be claimed that New Zealand writers have yet built up a climate of opinion favourable to local work in the minds of the public at large such as exists, albeit in a rather naive form at times, in Australia. But even uncritical acceptance would benefit writers more than the indifference of many New Zealanders to the merits of a literature whose variety and vigour they have never attempted to explore.

by David Oswald William Hall, M.A., Director, Adult Education, University of Otago (retired).

• New Zealand Literature, McCormick, E. H. (1959)
• A Treasury of New Zealand Verse (jt. ed.) Alexander, W. F., and Currie, A. E. (1926)
• A Book of New Zealand Verse, 1923–50, Curnow, A. (1951)
• An Anthology of New Zealand Verse (jt. ed.), Chapman, R., and Bennett, J. (1956)
• New Zealand Short Stories (ed.), Davin, D. (1953)
• New Zealand Verse (ed.), Curnow, A. (1960)
• A Survey of the Arts in New Zealand, Simpson, E. C. (1961).