The Land Ballot

by Fleur Adcock

A land ballot was the means by which Fleur Adcock's grandparents, immigrants from Manchester during World War I, were able to bid for a piece of native bush on the slopes of Mount Pirongia in the North Island of New Zealand. Their task was to turn this unpromising acreage into a dairy farm. When things didn't work out as they had hoped much of the responsibility for running the farm and engineering their eventual escape fell on their teenage son, Adcock's father. This sequence of poems follows the course of their efforts and builds up a portrait of a small, isolated community.

Genres: Poetry

95 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Fleur Adcock was a New Zealand poet and editor. Of English and Northern Irish ancestry, Adcock lived much of her life in England. She is well-represented in New Zealand poetry anthologies, was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature from Victoria University of Wellington, and was awarded an OBE in 1996 for her contribution to New Zealand literature. In 2008 she was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature.

Reviews

[andré crombie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Senecio jacobaea: bad news,
this pretty weed, this constellation
of tiny suns, this doomful harbinger.

Farmers have walked off their land for less.
Cattle deficient in minerals
develop ‘a depraved appetite’ for it.

It springs beaming out of the soil
to seduce yet another silly beast
with its fairy gold. Whoa! Keep off!

But no: there they go, pathetic addicts,
mouthing and sucking at its alkaloids
like Laura at fruit in the goblin market

until they stagger with cirrhosis
while the plants, like all drug pushers,
multiply as fast as you cut them down.

Conceptually interesting, lovely at times, but more than a bit of the banal self-indulgence of family history.

[Halkon]

an interesting approach to reckoning with material colonial legacy and fractured familial history. archival material interweaved with elegiac poems.

[Subhadeep Das · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting outlook on the lives of early settlers. There is a large time gap where author’s own memories and narratives could have been useful.