Thursday, August 5, 2010

Marking the spot

This plaque honouring Janet Frame can be found just below the front steps of the Dunedin Railway Station.

The quote from Janet Frame's autobiography recalls her arrival by train in Dunedin as a school-leaver, overwhelmed and intimidated, ready to start her studies at University and teacher's training college.

"I was alone in my first city" she says. "My mind loomed with the fictions of the great cities of the world, and of Dunedin as such a city. I thought of the 'dark satanic mills' and of 'people caged like squirrels'; of fire, and plague, and the press gang; and although I was willing to follow the example of the writers, and eventually 'love' the new city, as Charles Dickens, Hazlitt, Lamb, loved their London, I could think first only of desolation, of the poverty I was sure I would find, and of how living in the city might destroy me."

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