Maurice Gee: Rachel Barrowman's exhaustive biography

PHILIP MATTHEWS - Sunday Star Times - 12 July , 2015

MAURICE GEE: LIFE AND WORK

Rachel Barrowman
Victoria University Press, $60

Maurice Gee: Life and Work by Rachel Barrowman.

The writer Maurice Gee hasn't exactly been given to divulging biographical facts. "There is a lot I don't want to tell," he said when academic Brian Boyd once asked about autobiography. Words like quiet, unassuming and private recur to an almost absurd degree in the newspaper and magazine profiles Gee has agreed to submit to over the years, but biographer Rachel Barrowman has unearthed some telling stories in her fat, exhaustive Maurice Gee: Life and Work.

Gee became well-known in middle age with Plumb in 1978 and Under the Mountain a year later, and the persona of the artist as a quiet suburban dad was quickly established. He was photographed mowing the lawn or hanging out the washing. It probably suited him, but it meant that one journalist after another would ask how this softly spoken man in the grey cardigan dreamed up such darkness and violence.

So, here are three biographical stories or moments that could have appeared in Gee's fiction. Until he met Margaretha Garden in his late 30s, Gee was unhappy in love. An earlier partner, Hera Smith, absconded with their son, Nigel. Gee searched for them in New Zealand and Australia. Another partner, Leigh, was a fellow teacher in Rotorua; she left for him for David Minnitt, a doctor who later killed her in a case still remembered for Minnitt's use of a provocation defence.
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Right - Historian and author Rachel Barrowman.

Jess McKeown / Fairfax