Mary Scott’s novels may look battered from the outside, their covers dated, but the writing itself is as fresh as the day it was first penned and is lively in its depiction of 1950s rural New Zealand. Her specialty is the town girl moving to the back-blocks and if the intrepid heroine isn’t grappling with life on the farm (Breakfast at Six), then she’s learning to adjust to life in a village which, of course, abounds colourful characters (Pippa in Paradise). She’s endearingly impetuous but with enough common-sense to keep her on the right side of kooky.

To read a Mary Scott is to be immersed in a vanished world when every village has a post office which is not just the place to post letters but also where you pop along to when you need to make a phone call.  In Scottland, there are still grocers, greengrocers and milk bars. Libraries still stamp the books and milkmen deliver bottles to the door. The lack of a pub can lead to a bit sly-grogging.  Everyone smokes! The language also seduces. Bad ‘uns are ‘rotten’ or, in extremis,  ‘beastly swine’. Girls are very jolly and houses gay. Heroes apologise if they used strong language like damn and devil.

In many ways, these books are as light as soufflés; plots gossamer thin with the happily ever after guaranteed. Mary’s fans wouldn’t have it any other way. Yet to leave it there would be to do her a disservice. Her settings and characters are vibrantly portrayed and underneath the merry scenes runs a canny yet sympathetic understanding of the human condition with all its failings and foibles.  It must be remembered that Mary was in her mid-sixties when she had her first best-seller and most of her novels were written in the following twenty years. Light they might be, but they are not foolish.

I’m an unabashed Scott fan and am delighted she found fame – and, I hope, fortune – writing humorous books about loveable characters in vivid settings. Her thirty-three novels form a valuable legacy, preserving a slice of New Zealand life forever. As Lydia Weaver rightly notes in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Mary “represents something rare in New Zealand literature: a highly successful, prolific, comic and realistic woman writer.”

While I was visiting a castle in Scotland some years ago, the woman selling the tickets said, “Mae hoose is older than your country.” Of course, New Zealand itself is considerably older and the Maori have been here for centuries but still, I know what she meant. New Zealand is not littered with monuments hundreds of years old. In fact it has relatively few buildings even a hundred and fifty years old. But we do have Arrowtown.

 The only thing they shared was their dream of gold.
They were a handsome bunch – tanned and strong from their outdoor lives, so Lady Barker noted approvingly in her letters home. They lived hard, played hard. So now peel away the excellent coffee shops, the gourmet restaurants and fine clothing shops and fill these old wooden walls with saloons and bars, billiard-rooms and gaming dens. Throw in a small theatre for there were numerous traveling troupes of performers intent on separating these miners from their hard-won gold nuggets.

We mustn’t forget the women - vastly outnumbered and greatly in demand. Prostitutes, barmaids, dancers and cooks improved life considerably for these men who spent long days panning in freezing rivers. Husbands could be found in a couple of weeks. Many women came out to New Zealand in search of new opportunities and greater independence and through their determination and struggle, they became the first women in the world granted the right to vote.

When in Arrowtown, don’t forget to visit the Chinese section, down by the clear waters of the river. Their tiny stone hovels are truly heart-breaking and awe-inspiring. These men were only permitted to mine the tracings discarded by the first wave of diggers but thanks to their exacting diligence, they not only eked out a living of sorts but also sent money back to their families. The Chinese community still thrives today throughout New Zealand.  
Arrowtown has been the inspiration for my novels Close to the Wind and Fool’s Gold in which I tried to capture some of that reckless daring those early adventurers who lived on the edge and risked all for their dreams.