Abstract
This article argues that Janet Frame’s 1960s fiction is characterized by close attention to coastal regions and that her novels from this period depict Aotearoa New Zealand’s coastlines as haunted by the violent histories of imperialism. It reads both A State of Siege (1966) and The Rainbirds (1968) as belonging to a wider, largely unacknowledged female Pakeha tradition of the coastal Gothic, first developed by an earlier generation of writers including Katherine Mansfield and Robin Hyde. These women imagined their country’s beaches as littoral borderlands, places which could allow them to question calcified modes of national belonging. Situating Frame’s writing within this literary context underscores how her novels anticipate and interrogate contemporary debates surrounding marine jurisdiction, coastal housing developments, and the legacies of colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand.
In his 1769 journal Joseph Banks records the first European circumnavigation of Aotearoa New Zealand, reporting from aboard the Endeavour that the shoreline appeared “miserably barren” (1896: 206) and offered only a few safe harbours “for establishing a [future] colony” (1896: 224). As the ship’s crew surveyed the coast, their maps and topographical charts reflected, in Anne Salmond’s (2003) words, an imperial desire to fix “the shape of coastlines with instruments and calculations” (xix). This colonial, cartographic imagination reduced the complex world of the Pacific to a “watery wasteland — a mare nullius, waiting to be discovered and claimed” (Salmond, 2017: 38). Banks’s diary is a reminder that the coastal fringes of Aotearoa New Zealand were crucial points of disembarkation and habitation for the first Pakeha settlers (until the early twentieth century, sea travel remained the sole means of arrival to these islands). Yet the littoral space of the shore was, from the moment of European landfall, a site of violent dispute. Within hours of dropping anchor on the banks of the Turanganui River, the Endeavour’s crew had shot and killed a Maori warrior, Te Maro, in the first of several deadly encounters with local iwi. Domesticating the coast and quelling resistance from its inhabitants was, from the outset, an expression of imperial power. 1 As Greg Dening describes, early European voyages in the Pacific were unconcerned by any knowledge which “might be transferred across the beach to their own societies” (1980: 276), regarding coastal regions as “the frontiers and boundaries of islands” (1980: 32). But Banks’s journals suggest a more uneasy vision of these environments as contested, even unsettling sites. Even as the outlines of Aotearoa New Zealand were first mapped according to European concepts of boundaries and property, the coastal fringes remained inhospitable places in the settler imagination.
It is unsurprising, then, that twentieth-century Pakeha literature often imagines these coastlines as haunted by unsettling histories of arrival, contact, and imperial violence. Katherine Mansfield’s “At the Bay” (1922) opens with a seaside colony “hidden under a white sea-mist”, confusing the boundaries between “the paddocks and bungalows” and leaving “nothing to mark which was beach and where was the sea” (2002: 281). At this blurred frontier Stanley Burnell is disturbed by a fellow swimmer who won’t “stick to his part of the sea”, and who comes “barging over to this exact spot” amongst the waves (283). The joke is, of course, how Stanley expects to fix a territorial claim to “part of the sea” amidst the pulling force of the waves. Yet Mansfield reminds us that there are “little pit[s] of darkness” (290) which lurk below the surface of coastal life, as women’s bodies exposed in bathing suits become “tossed-up driftwood”, discarded at the water’s edge (292). The beach might seem to promise rest and relaxation, but Mansfield envisages a shifting, terrifying hinterland charged with ambiguous threats. The perils of the coast fuel Pearl Button’s frightened screams of “what is it? What is it?” when she first sees the “great big piece of blue water […] creeping over the land” (2002: 22). Following Mansfield’s untimely death in 1923, her compatriot Robin Hyde extended this coastal Gothic in descriptions of haunted, deserted beaches “where the white man disputed occupancy with the thundering surf” (2016: 235). Like her predecessor, Hyde too saw the coast as a location marked by a burgeoning female sexuality, one which made clear the futility of colonial possession. 2 By the late 1930s a cohort of male New Zealand literary nationalists would famously identify “[t]he stain of blood that writes an island story” (Curnow, 1974: 139) on their country’s yellow sand beaches, but Mansfield and Hyde had, over the preceding decades, already begun to view the coast as a site of Gothic horror. They explored this dynamic ecotone in order to challenge imperial imaginaries, questioning the stability of the shoreline as an official marker of the nation’s limits, or as a fixed origin point for colonial history. Instead, the meeting place of land and sea is where the suppressed memories of imperial violence rise to the surface and are washed to shore.
Previous discussions of the New Zealand Gothic which focus on “the small town, city, domestic home, farm, and the wilderness” (Conrich, 2012: 394) have not fully accounted for the importance of the coast to female writers like Mansfield, Hyde, and their successor Janet Frame. Frame’s earliest stories were interested in what “The Lagoon” (1951) calls the “drowned wreckage” (1961: 7) emerging from tidal waters, and her mid-career novels A State of Siege (1966) and The Rainbirds (1968) would develop a more nuanced view of saltwater, Gothic environments. With the former set on an island off the coast of Auckland, and the latter on the South Island’s Otago Peninsula, these texts depict haunted shorelines where uncanny doubles walk the clifftops, unseen prowlers stalk the sand dunes, and violent acts are carried out on the sites of coastal land reclamation. Both anticipate more recent discussions of coastal Gothic literature as making “visible the limits of nation states” (Packham, 2019: 207), expressing anxieties about “the permeability of borders and boundaries, and the strength of national character” (Passey, 2023: 12). Here ports, beaches, and coastlines are vulnerable sites, haunted by the threat of incursion. Soon after returning from Britain in the early 1960s, Frame developed a satirical strain of the coastal Gothic particular to Aotearoa New Zealand, using this distinctive subgenre to probe the absurdities of settler isolationism. In her late 1960s novels littoral spaces are transformed into sites of terror because they offer points of connection to a wider seascape. Rather than marking the boundaries of the nation, these texts insist that the beach, the shoreline, and the coast are unstable frontiers.
The sub-genre of the Pakeha coastal Gothic extended by Frame remains distinct from Maori and Pacific ontologies which view oceans as pathways linking connected spheres (in Epeli Hau’ofa’s famous formulation, creating a “sea of islands” (1994: 152)). During the early 1970s, less than a decade after Frame’s return home, pioneering works of fiction by Maori writers mourned a collective estrangement from this relational world. Patricia Grace’s titular short story in Waiariki (1975) describes a coastal community’s despair that “the shellfish beds are depleted” due to commercial fishing, a privation which confirms “that we could not have the old days back again” (1987: 41). In Witi Ihimaera’s Pounamu, Pounamu (1972), “The Whale” depicts a doomed cetacean who lies “stranded in the breakwater” (1973: 120), abandoned and unrecognized as a “kaumatua” or Maori elder. His death emphasizes how “the links are breaking” (119) between his world and the nearby, semi-abandoned village.
These early publications describe the bonds of whakapapa, which maintain integral connections between terrestrial and oceanic realms, as being strained to breaking point by the latter half of the twentieth century. But in later, celebrated texts of the Maori renaissance, beaches emerge as sites of assembly. Grace’s Potiki (1986) depicts one coastal iwi’s fightback against property developers who view their ancestral lands as a “million dollar view to be capitalized on” (85). As the developers plan to build a sea-facing golf course, the shore becomes a locus for organized resistance. When Frame reworks the coastal Gothic in the mid-1960s, she offers a bridge between earlier Pakeha writers like Mansfield and Hyde, and more recent, Maori depictions of disputed shorelines. Frame tentatively connects these distinct traditions by deliberately challenging settler claims to the beach as distinct or sovereign territory.
This article suggests that while A State of Siege regards the coastline as a porous border which proves impossible to police, The Rainbirds looks to the shore as a troubling, even destabilizing origin point for the settler state. These novels raise a series of prescient concerns for a nation whose marine jurisdiction remains over fifteen times that of its land mass (Aotearoa New Zealand’s Exclusive Economic Zone or EEZ extends two hundred miles from its coastline (Steel, 2019: v)). Ongoing proposals to nationalize and mine these offshore regions have confirmed that they remain sites of conflict, with even progressive legislation replacing the infamous Foreshore and Seabed Act of 2004 continuing to challenge customary Maori titles to coastal environments. 3 Meanwhile, rising sea-levels across the Pacific emphasize the vulnerability of all national boundaries predicated on shorelines.
Frame’s coastal Gothic alerts us to the dangers of treating the shoreline as a fixed and rigid barrier (as depicted in the Endeavour’s early maps). In this sense her writing is sharply attuned to what Elizabeth DeLoughrey, following Kamau Brathwaite, describes as “tidalectics”, where shifting relations between sea and land “offer an alternative to the rigid ethnic genealogies of colonialism and nationalism” (Deloughrey, 2019: 21). If Frame’s 1960s fiction pursues a tidalectic undoing of fixed territory, it does so by lingering in the littoral environments of wetlands, mangrove forests, and reclaimed land. Here any firm distinctions between land and sea, Maori and Pakeha history, citizens and strangers, are quickly undone. Yet as we will see, the result is neither a utopian nor a wholly tidalectic undoing of land-based borders as both novels hurtle towards their impressively violent conclusions. By posing a series of unanswered questions about the worlds which lie beyond the beach, Frame’s late 1960s writing encourages us not only to look more closely at Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial past, but to ask how these histories inform the imperial logic of our shared, extractivist present.
Unsettling seas:
A State of Siege
(1966)
After returning home in 1963, Frame was surprised to witness the development of Takapuna, a coastal suburb of Auckland, during her seven years in the northern hemisphere: A road once secluded with mangroves, swamp, sea, had been extended, the swamp filled in, the land “reclaimed” and the approach road to the Harbour Bridge built upon it. Suddenly thrust into a world where there was much talk of “reclaimed land”, “desirable” property, the price of sections, sections with and without views, I felt I was seeing a new kind of greed for whatever could be touched, measured, seen, and priced. [….] no one was saying what or whom the land belonged to before the famous reclamation (1990: 423).
4
Horrified by a booming demand for housing, Frame viewed the marketization of coastal property (what she calls this “new greed”) through old, settler models of ownership. She challenges these by acknowledging the prior inhabitants (“whom”) and the non-human entities (“what”) that might reasonably claim the shore as their own. Her concerns were charged with foresight: swamps and wetlands are now recognized as natural carbon sinks whose loss directly contributes to climate change. Decades later, this very housing development in Takapuna would become a case study for man-made “environments that have influenced the long-term modification of the climate” in Aotearoa New Zealand (Carter, 2019: 42). Frame arguably anticipated the scale of this ecological damage because she viewed the altered landscape through imperial ideals of territorial sovereignty, where ownership is secured through productivity. If John Locke insisted that property was what “a man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of” (1689/2016: 17), his rationale informed the later “logic of calculation and measurement” which ascribed the value of colonized land (Bhandar, 2018: 39). By imagining coastal housing developments as an act of theft — taken from local swampland — Frame takes aim at imperial metrics of value and ownership. For her, the neat plots of modern coastal suburbs reflected the vision of early colonial mapmakers who attempted to fix “the location of coastlines by use of instruments” and mapped grids (King, 2003: 107). 5
Throughout the remainder of the 1960s Frame worked on scathing satires of white New Zealand life, condemning a coastal view as just “another god to worship” (1966: 91) in A State of Siege and satirizing families who talk of “our view” as if “the whole country belonged to [them]” (1969: 84–85) in The Rainbirds. 6 Challenging her previous affiliations with cultural nationalism — via her connections to writers like Frank Sargeson — these novels form a pair, both excoriating suburban communities where “herbaceous borders are more precious than a display of bright ideas in the head” (1969: 66). 7 Initially decried as “humorously unkind”, even insulting to “ordinary people” (Brown, 1992: 123), there are remarkable continuities between the first novel, which ends with a death by the sea, and the second, which begins with an unlikely resurrection on the coast. Like many of Frame’s fictions from the latter half of her career, both texts are realist narratives forced off course by bizarre plot twists and diversions into the supernatural. Frame’s novels generally descend into what Living in the Maniototo (1979) calls the “sudden plague of unreality” (1991: 38). But A State of Siege and The Rainbirds respond to a Gothic tradition which extends far beyond Frame’s own writing, one which makes “visible the unrepresentable, unacknowledged, and unthinkable” (Packham and Punter, 2017: 18). After her return home, Frame looked to coastal regions as sites and sights of terror. While critics have previously cautioned against reading either novel as “a traditional settler narrative of place” (Cronin, 2005: 81), both confront imperial understandings of the coast as an unclaimed resource for extraction and profit. For Frame the shoreline is neither a “god”, nor an owned possession, but an inhospitable location where settler narratives of place-as-possession are fatally undone.
A State of Siege’s protagonist, Malfred Signal, is a retired art teacher who moves to Karemoana, a sub-tropical island off the coast of Auckland which combines the Maori term for sea (“moana”) with “kare”, a noun which translates as dear friend, but whose verb form denotes either a longing for, or the rippling surface of the sea. 8 Her new home’s relation to the surrounding ocean is, from the outset, profoundly ambiguous. Malfred previously lived in the shadow of her father, Francis Henry Signal, a mountain climber who had “named peaks in the Southern Alps, had been mentioned in the country’s history” (8), and whose firm, terrestrial coordinates represent an ideal of imperial masculinity. As the basis of national myth, Francis evokes a genealogy of European navigators and cartographers who “documented the geography of the nation [to] present it as a coherent and clearly defined unit” (Ballantyne, 2012: 272). His named elevations are part of a repertoire of images (including currency, stamps, and anthems) which were never “simply empty symbols, but articulations of state power” (Ballantyne, 2012: 272). When she moves to Karemoana, Malfred therefore tries to escape a patriarch whose biography represents (or signals) the official history of the settler state. Yet she soon discovers that “an element” stalks her new island home, patrolling the outer edges of her property and emitting noises “like human breathing, a whispering that was not the sea” (85). The cottage’s deceased former owner has left behind their possessions, including photographs that look suspiciously like Malfred’s own family, raising notably Gothic concerns with doubles, confinement, and haunted, insecure territory. 9
These anxieties coalesce around Malfred’s position on the coast: Most of the islanders have built their homes to get a “view” of the sea, and now they are haunted by it. Living on an island, one can escape only by diving into the sea, it is like being a swimmer surrounded by sharks, keeping the sharks at bay, yet knowing that one false move, one lapse, and the sharks — and here the sea — will close in for the kill (55)
The islanders are trapped within a well-established model of the uncanny whereby the homely or heimlich becomes inseparable from its antonym, the unheimlich (Freud, 1955: 219–253). The ocean surrounding Karemoana is a haunting presence because the firm distinction between land and sea similarly collapses, threatening settler life onshore. In the uneasy turn marked by a semi-colon, Malfred acknowledges that the terrestrial and the oceanic are profoundly connected “on an island” and the sea is therefore not only a distant, attractive amenity but a potentially invasive force. As her community are pursued by the seascape they once hoped to possess, “the element” is forged in the contradiction of trying to imagine island life as separate from the sea.
The deadly consequences of this are underscored by the discovery of Malfred’s corpse next to a broken window, “where beyond the sea lay calm at last” (246). In her final days Malfred imagines that the boundaries of her domestic world are permeable, her bedroom window suddenly seems too close to the sea, and she fears “see[ing] something not quite in order” just beyond the frame of her own amateur landscape paintings (112). The twinned panes of glass, both designed to contain a view, become two-way portals that the sea, as an unsettling, fluid presence, might cross. Like her neighbours, Malfred has moved to Karemoana hoping to possess a vista, only to find herself trapped. Locke offers, once more, a historical precedent for her anxiety, as he reduces oceans to a singular “great and still remaining Common” (2016: 17) separate from a terrestrial sphere where “labour […] puts the difference of value on land” (22). This created a model for British colonialism predicated on “both the primacy of geography and an ideology about control of territory” (Said, 1993: 93). So, when Karemoana’s inhabitants try to enclose “their” view of the ocean in windows and framed paintings, they work to incorporate it into the personal land-based territory of their homes. But Frame’s Gothic narrative confirms that the sea will not be contained. Instead the coast is a meeting place for overlapping worlds, as the supernatural “element” drags her realist narrative into murky, unknown depths.
Once Malfred condemns Karemoana as “the skid-row of the South Pacific” (152), the paradise island soon begins to resemble its uncanny double, the penal colony. 10 Her neighbours reimagine the ocean as a territorial boundary, a self-policing border separating them from the surrounding sea of islands. They rejoice that there are “no cost[s] of maintenance here: inexhaustible, self-repairing, lovely wall of water, the paint never washes out of the sea” (101). Malfred might chafe against this perspective, but she too imagines that the sea is a “warder”, albeit one “set there to stop her from escaping” (104). The “lovely wall” is, predictably, not enough as the islanders soon long for “passports, visas, [and] health certificates” (108) to keep unwanted arrivants at bay. While these settler fears of the ocean as a bridge rather than a barrier are patently absurd (how do the islanders imagine that their own ancestors arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand?) they respond to real social changes in the mid-1960s, where overseas workers were encouraged to supply the country’s factories and growing agricultural sector (Salesa, 2019: 37). Against this rise in immigration from newly independent Pacific Island nations, Karemoana’s inhabitants struggle to describe themselves as the true representatives of an isolated settler nation. Their collective fears juxtapose Maori and Pasifika epistemologies where the ocean “is meaningful space rather than a watery gap” (Te Punga Somerville, 2012: 6). In this sense, Frame shares Hau’ofa’s later critique that colonial powers imposed a “nonsense of national and economic boundaries” on islands across the Pacific (1994: 151). Her characters fear an interconnected seascape because this frustrates imperial fantasies of a bordered world. The longed-for health certificates and identity papers are a flimsy cordon sanitaire designed to repel the presence of racialized others. When Malfred’s neighbours insist that to maintain their paradise they must embrace the quarantine of a penal colony, the contradictory logic of their miniature, enclosed settler state quickly begins to collapse.
As her neighbours look anxiously towards their borders, Malfred is drawn deeper into the island’s hinterlands: [O]ut in the new world there was one plant that she knew she must paint: the mangrove in its sordid, calm, sinister bed of gray mud, its harsh dusty leaves, the straightness of its stem, the scene, twice a day when the tide came in, of the almost submerged plants, like sinister evidence of a drowned miniature forest. [….] Malfred saw two families of children, Maori and Pakeha, playing near the swamp. She was surprised at their ragged patched clothes, their thin faces and limbs […] it would be at this meeting-place of sea and swamp, this expanse of dust-grey estuary near mangrove forests, that the ragged would always play. (61–62)
The mangrove’s exposed roots, which thrive in changing tidal waters, appear threatening because they offer an alternative to terrestrial forms of belonging. The plant’s preferred habitat, the “sinister bed of grey mud”, marks an indeterminate place between sea and land, the aesthetic antithesis of Karemoana’s supposedly secure water-border. Like the suppressed memories of violence in the “cruel leaves and fleshy stem” (1918/2002: 98) of Katherine Mansfield’s aloe, Frame’s mangrove similarly combines threat and revelation, thriving in an indeterminate landscape which challenges the policed borders of a masculine nation state.
As mangroves thrive in offshore coastal wetlands, “ecosystems [which] reflect a progressive transition from the land to the open continental shelf” (Crooks et al, 2011: 7), this terrain raises a practical difficulty for Malfred: how will she paint the mangrove? While sinking in the bed of grey mud, or by wading offshore with her watercolours? As Amitav Ghosh (2016) notes, mangrove forests do not provide elevated opportunities for an ocean view, “[no] vistas present themselves except when you are on one of the hundreds of creeks and channels […] the forest withdraws behind its muddy ramparts, disclosing nothing” (28). Unlike her father, who proudly conquered the mountains which bear his name, Malfred cannot get close enough to the mangrove to paint it, nor can she climb above the swamp to survey the whole. Her fascination with wetlands contradicts what Mary Louise Pratt — following William Cowper — describes as the “monarch-of-all-I-survey-scene” (Pratt, 2007: 197), where an elevated colonist “masters” an unfamiliar landscape by viewing it “from the centre all round to the sea” (1782/ 2003: 38). Instead Malfred’s mangroves are closer to what Pratt has influentially termed a contact zone, “the space of imperial encounters” where radically different subjects become entangled in a series of unequal relations (2007: 8). The two families that Malfred glimpses — “Maori and Pakeha” — connect in a location which blurs the island’s geographical and social boundaries.
While Malfred’s artistic preoccupations have seen her compared to Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse (McQuail, 2018), A State of Siege avoids the latter’s definitive, closing claim of having “had my vision” (Woolf, 2006: 170). Instead Frame turns to the less determinate mode of the coastal Gothic, where figures like the domineering imperial explorer, or an artist surveying a landscape, are subsumed by rising tides. As a result the foundational myths of a white, settler nation begin to unravel. By raising serious questions over who has the right to be socially and materially at home in Aotearoa New Zealand, Frame’s narrative of island horror probes at the contradictions of national borders. For Janet Wilson (2023), the novel’s “fortress-like enclosures evoking the prison and quarantine islands designated for refugees” (41) connect Frame to other female New Zealanders (including Hyde) who interrogate women’s “position within the national sphere” (Wilson, 2023: 31). But A State of Siege is arguably more concerned with dismantling this sphere altogether, rather than renegotiating women’s contributions to it. Malfred and her neighbours might search the coast for a “safe and sure retreat” (Banks, 1896: 225), but they cannot ultimately realize this settlers’ idyll. As Frame would go on to explore in The Rainbirds, the shoreline is both a deadly, shifting zone and a location which allows her to question calcified modes of national belonging.
Reclaimed land:
The Rainbirds
(1968)
In Frame’s seventh novel Godfrey Rainbird, a thirty-year-old British tourist agent, settles in a coastal suburb of Dunedin on the South Island. While his wife, Beatrice, was raised on the stories of ancestors who came “out in the first ships” (Frame, 1969: 121), tales from the “olden days” are a distant past to Godfrey’s neighbours who — like the inhabitants of Karemoana — “regard the sea as they regard the land: it was a personal possession” (106). The Rainbird family’s mundane existence ends abruptly when Godfrey is killed by a car while “walking home along the shore where the land was being reclaimed” (17), only to wake up several days later in the hospital mortuary: [When] he opened his eyes the fact that he made personal and local history was overshadowed by the shrieks and faints that afflicted the attendants in the hospital mortuary, and the disruption of routine, temper, credulity, and reputation in the hospital itself […] Godfrey followed the example of the mortuary assistants and fainted. (39)
Godfrey is viewed not as the victim of a near-fatal medical error, but as a Gothic revenant who threatens both the city and its civic institutions. His wife decides to keep the expensive grave plot she has purchased in a sea-facing cemetery and Godfrey is quickly fired by his employer who claims to be acting “in the interests of the Tourist business, the country as a whole, not to mention our Overseas Exchange” (139). Left housebound and staring out to sea, Godfrey repeatedly mutters “I must keep my footing” (89) and hopes that the ocean “may be kept in control by the building of a wall” (199). When his son attacks another child on the same spot of reclaimed coastal land, the Rainbirds lose their status “as decent citizens” and are condemned as “delinquents in this country” (227). The novel closes with Godfrey and Beatrice’s shared grave, now featured in tourist brochures, which “overlooks the sea and the long sweep of coast from St. Kilda to St. Clair” (247). Once Beatrice ends her own life, and Godfrey dies (this time permanently), their shared grave becomes a national institution, ironically supplying the same travel industry that Godfrey once jeopardized. Through these final scenes of blood-letting, order is restored to the Otago Peninsula.
Patricia Neville summarizes that critics have long viewed The Rainbirds as one of Frame’s most problematic novels, citing a critical “agree[ment] that it lacks creative power” (2019: 160). While it remains indisputably odd, The Rainbirds is, however, the tragicomic culmination of Frame’s coastal Gothic. From the outset the Rainbird family are described in the language of empire, with Beatrice as “a harsh cunning imperialist […] shamelessly exploiting [prior] inhabitants with glass beads” (21) and imagining a future where “race-cleaning” becomes “as casual as house-cleaning” (195). What overturns this colonial order is not Godfrey’s “resurrection”, but rather how the event reorients his family’s relationship with the coast. From their new, perilous position on the country’s literal and ideological margins, the Rainbirds are driven by a shared fear that “the sea was always there, waiting” (110). They recoil in horror from the shore because the sea reveals an unknown Gothic deep at the edge of their domestic world, leaving them “crowding to find and keep their place on a small square of reclaimed land” (243).
All this is underscored by the sea’s role as an agent in Godfrey’s death; on the night in question it silently “crawl[s] up the harbour, slipping gently over the mudflats (18) and overcomes the borders which demarcate land from water. As an intruder the sea frames a local police officer’s announcement that Godfrey died “near where the land was being reclaimed” (17). Beatrice reflects: Reclaimed land. Miss Hendry spoke bitterly as if the land were being reclaimed and she’d not had her fair share. Who owned the land? Who stole it in the first place? Was it a matter between the sea and the Harbor Board but what an unlikely negotiation for the sea to make when the sea could not write its own name on a document, and yet its mark was more powerful than its name. (18–19)
These questions reference the local topographies of Anderson’s Bay, a suburb built on tidal mudflats, coastal lagoons, and sand dunes. Having grown up nearby, Frame was familiar with the real Harbour Board’s schemes to reclaim low-lying flood plains during the 1940s. Yet she underwrites these distinctive topographies with her home country’s foundational colonial dispute, as Beatrice’s descriptions of negotiations and the “mark” of the sea’s “name on a document” reference the spiralling moko of many Maori signatories on the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. 11 These visual representations of an individual’s mana or status, did indeed offer a mark more powerful than a name, to paraphrase Beatrice. As the founding document of the settler state, the Treaty continues to raise profound questions about “who owned the land” and who retains access to Aotearoa New Zealand’s coastline. In Frame’s reimagined colonial encounter the key players are curiously devoid of all identifying features. Miss Hendry rails against the nameless “they” carrying out the reclamation, the faceless sea leaves its mark on a document, and the anonymous collective of the Harbour Board oversee the “unlikely” negotiation. The result is a confused retelling of settler history which combines historical erasure (the faceless participants) with precise detail (the moko). But if the identities of perpetrators, victims, and even bystanders are dispersed, the spiraling marks are a palimpsestual reminder that the outcome of loss and theft remains the same. To put it plainly, Godfrey is neither the sole nor principal revenant in this pivotal moment. His death is conjoined with the British Crown’s historical promise to grant Maori iwi “exclusive undisturbed possession” (2024) of their lands and fisheries, a guarantee that rings hollow as Beatrice’s unanswered questions echo across the dark peninsula.
The Rainbirds is indicative of Frame’s broader fascination with reclaimed coastal land, as in both previous novels and in the later autobiographies she was drawn to dredged shorelines. In The Edge of the Alphabet (1963) Toby Withers remembers “the sea, a near thin strip of menace pounding loosening the rocks of the wall which the Town Council keeps reinforcing, knowing that in the end the Pacific Ocean will triumph and surge across the railway lines” (Frame, 2024: 155). For Toby, “the crashing of the sea is […] like an undertone of dream in the daily mesmerics of waking life” (153). The curiously porous boundaries between Frame’s novels might suggest that the story of Godfrey’s “death” is actually Toby’s earlier, homesick dream for Otago. 12 But Frame’s seventh novel develops a much clearer sense as to why the menacing sea must be countered by literal and imaginative fortifications. Practically land reclamation is “an expansion of territory beyond [a nation’s] immediate borders” (Groom, 2017: 22), and projects to “drain marshes, water meadows and flood plains” (22) across the British Empire provided new space for settler populations to inhabit. But Toby’s fear of the ocean surging over railway lines — whose tracks are the archetypal vision of imperial progress — suggests how land reclamation might also, symbolically, keep the terrors of the deep ocean at bay. In this context the return of a spiralling moko in The Rainbirds is a Gothic disturbance to the colonial present, emphasizing the contested nature of coastal territory.
Shortly after Godfrey’s death his family are troubled by a flood of murderous impulses, beginning with the children’s intention to take Miss Hendry, the police officer, “down to the sea and drown her… that’s a good way to get rid of her” (20). Later Godfrey’s son attacks another child while “passing the beach where the workmen had heaped stones to prepare for the widening of the road” (222), turning the materials of reclamation into deadly weapons. Perhaps unsurprisingly Beatrice realizes that her family’s coastal home has become a liability, worrying that “there’s the lawn to mow, and the sea to keep at bay, at bay” (23). Her etymological slip conflates their position on a curved inlet with the baying cries of predators. This connection makes clear that the Rainbirds’ view of the sea — which once served as a sign of their social status — has now become a deadly threat. The children’s impulse to drown and to bludgeon evokes the violent defence of territory, echoing the bloodshed of early colonial encounters on their country’s beaches. In this sense The Rainbirds extends a distinctive strain of the imperial Gothic by “express[ing] anxieties […] about the weakening of Britain’s imperial hegemony” (Brantlinger, 1988: 229) and tracking “the narrowing vistas of the British Empire” (253). In Frame’s post-imperial reworking of this supernatural sub-genre, modern settlers discover that the legacies of empire can still upend their apparently stable suburban lives.
When Godfrey realizes that he can never return to his former, anonymous existence he finds himself unable to keep out the sea that flowed day and night in his mind now leaving its flotsam and jetsam on the beach of his every thought and feeling, the sea, the thought that overflowed all other thought and sank through it, finding its deep levels where it made dark pools that stayed at high tide, low tide, dead low water: the thought of his death. (142)
In one sense, this passage is a network of intertexts, ranging from Frame’s own descriptions of “the secret sea that crept inside your head forever” in her short story “Swans” (1961: 51), to the invocation of Allen Curnow’s poem “Dead Low Water” (1974: 157). 13 Yet for Godfrey, this new oceanic perspective only leads to the terminal event of death. As Frame’s single sentence plots a meandering trajectory towards its deadly destination, the sea’s creeping incursion is expressed through a syntactical structure which ranges over the shoreline, pulling back and forth across “day and night … flotsam and jetsam … thought and feeling” (emphasis added). After being gripped in the tidal movement of waves, Godfrey is eventually forced into the fearful, unknown depths of the “deep levels”.
Importantly, this submersion is the opposite of his adopted homeland’s white national dream: having “a full view from one’s favourably placed ‘section’ of the sheet of sea” (103). Emphasizing, once more, the folly of imagining the ocean as an extension of domestic property, Godfrey is unable to remain onshore, regarding the distant water as a surface (the “sheet of sea”). It is this descent into unknown waters — and not just the remarkable nature of his “resurrection” — which fatally expels the Rainbirds from their suburban lives, leaving them unable to keep worshipping “the view”. Packham and Punter (2017) argue that, in Gothic literature, “the sea is a space of unease not simply because [of] its fluid multi-dimensionality” but because ‘the ocean prompts modes of thought that are also unstable and unfixed” (18). Godfrey’s transformation raises the terrifying possibility that both his home, and the wider settler nation, might be subject to the external power of changing seas. After “the view” breaks across the frames of Malfred Signal’s paintings and cottage windows in A State of Siege, Frame realizes her vision of the coast as a haunted and haunting place in The Rainbirds, plotting the creeping, supernatural incursion of saltwater into Godfrey’s mundane life.
Conclusion: Afterlives and adaptations of Frame’s coastal Gothic
Both Vincent Ward’s 1978 film A State of Siege and the 2017 chamber opera Rainbird, by Mallory Catlett and Aaron Siegel, conclude their adaptations of Frame’s novels with eerie images of desolate shorelines. Ward’s final panning shot is of Malfred’s corpse, stretched beneath an open window, set to the persistent rushing sound of the sea beyond. As the screen fades to white, we can assume that whatever Malfred has glimpsed through the broken glass has quite literally frightened her to death. Catlett and Siegel’s opera is caught in a series of similarly fatal currents, with Beatrice’s refrain of “there’s the sea to keep at bay” (2018: 20:45) giving way to her horrified announcement that “we keep looking at the view and the view keeps looking back at us” (1:20:59). The opera ends with a disquieting sonic and visual turn to the coast, closing with slow-moving, projected images of waves on a shore. Despite their formal and stylistic differences, both adaptations are closely attentive to the littoral geographies of their source material, asking us to reflect on the deadly consequences of straying too close to the coast in Frame’s writing.
Meanwhile, contemporary fiction from Aotearoa New Zealand suggests that the afterlives of Frame’s coastal Gothic are no longer limited to direct adaptations of her novels. In her recent thriller Pet (2023), Catherine Chidgey — recipient of the 2017 Janet Frame Fiction Prize — depicts the murder of a Chinese New Zealander on “the stony path above the sea” (207) near Wellington, surrounded by “the old gun emplacements, the abandoned observation posts” (138). This borderland of abandoned ruins is framed by the protagonist’s discovery that her home is covered in fragmentary sentences penned in invisible ink: “written along the skirting boards behind the curtains, though [the letters] dissolved where the daylight could reach” (98). These evoke Frame’s descriptions of “the layers of life which peel from us from time to time like discarded skins”, secured to furniture by “an invisible hinge which held them to the surface of chairs, tables, floors, walls” (1998: 19) in Scented Gardens for the Blind (1964). Chidgey is likewise drawn to the half-legible truths which emerge at the meeting place of land and sea. While Pet remains formally distinct from the experimental prose of writers like Mansfield, Hyde, and Frame, the novel continues their tradition of the Pakeha coastal Gothic by insisting that “things don’t stay put on the beach. They drift away, they’re buried” (2023: 84). Like her predecessors, Chidgey turns to the coast to ask who belongs to the modern nation, and whose histories lie, part-concealed, at its edges.
To borrow Patrick Wolfe’s (2006) well-known formulation, Frame’s coastal Gothic — along with its continuing legacies — reminds us that colonial settlement is “a structure not an event” (338). These structures are realized in her unnerving depictions of both Karemoana, where “the invasion and the terms of the treaty that followed” (1966: 57) echo on the clifftops, and Anderson’s Bay, where a moko returns at the site of reclaimed land. Yet for Frame, the memories of imperial treaties can no longer verify claims of land-based territory. It seems worth reiterating that Frame raised these prescient concerns almost a decade before the Waitangi Tribunal began its still-ongoing efforts in 1975. Whether we directly re-read her coastal Gothic novels, encounter these narratives in adaptation, or trace their influence in contemporary New Zealand literature, Frame’s unsettling shores reframe settler identity in and for the colonial present. And yet, as none of her Pakeha characters survive their respective attempts to live by the sea, Frame’s late 1960s fiction refuses to develop beyond these petrifying visions of the coast. These novels might understand oceans and shorelines, as recent scholarship in the blue humanities puts it, as “renewed space[s] of empire and territorialism” (DeLoughrey, 2019: 139), but they cannot, or will not, convey what lies beyond the-coast-as-frontier. Instead, the deaths of Malfred, Beatrice, and Godfrey issue a warning which contradicts the official maps of a still-boundaried world: that the shore is not, and has never been, a fixed or stable borderline. Frame’s terrifying, saltwater narratives insist that the terrestrial and the oceanic are interconnected, even as they suggest that gazing on these living, fragile bonds might be a fatally perilous endeavour.
