‘You mean a panel of teachers or librarians in some Bible-belt area of America?’ A chill ran down my spine when I was informed that, no, it wasn’t an American panel…it was a fully New Zealand panel.

To add insult to injury, I was then asked if I would like them to send me, as a memento, the completed artwork for the aborted new edition. At this juncture I was a tad rude, and I do have regrets here because common sense tells me it had not been the poor young editor’s fault. Her enthusiasm for the whole project had been admirable.

But where in this green, pleasant and relatively liberal land of ours had they managed to come across this coven of bigots? And poor old Possum Perkins now almost a quarter-century old!

I think Rosa Dorothea would have enjoyed the tale of Rosa Dorothy Perkins. Indeed I know she would have. ‘Hmmm,’ murmured my father when I gave him his copy. ‘Not as big as a Wilbur Smith, is it?’

Ivan enjoyed the book. I’m pretty sure he enjoyed everything I wrote; and if he didn’t, he certainly didn’t say so. I do know that he was fully supportive of my soon-to-be-made decision to give up teaching in order to write full-time. Now, as I creep further into old age, I realize increasingly just what an enormous debt I owe my parents, Ivan and Dorothy Taylor.

II

In midsummer of the year 1860, James and Elizabeth Taylor and their seven children—an eighth had died in infancy—boarded the clipper Robert Henderson in Glasgow, Scotland, for the long voyage to Dunedin, New Zealand. Quite clearly this was a search for a better life. Each of their eight offspring had been born in a different town or village around Highland and Lowland Scotland. James is described as being a ‘farm steward’, and satisfactory employment had obviously been hard to find for this father of a growing brood who needed to be clothed, fed and educated. Like thousands of other families at that time in England, Scotland and Ireland, they looked further afield. In James and Elizabeth’s instance they decided upon following the trail to the other side of the world already taken by a fair few other Scots over the previous decade.

The voyage was long; three months at sea, even though the clipper was, according to records, one of the best, one of the speediest. One hundred and fifty years later and many of their descendants make the same trip, if they’re in a hurry, in little more than twenty-four hours!

It was an uneventful voyage, other than for an outbreak of scarlet fever which knocked off four of the passengers. Seven others perished from a variety of conditions. The monotony of the long voyage would have been slightly relieved by what was likely obligatory attendance at the subsequent burials at sea.

The Taylors settled in Dunedin’s North East Valley. James seems to have been a man of some small substance, because he and his older sons managed to rake up enough capital to establish a small carrying business; probably a bullock-drawn dray. Luck was on their side. The Central Otago gold rush began a few months later. Canny Scots, they decided against chasing the elusive metal, but were certainly not averse to carrying others who needed transport to the goldfields along with their equipment and provisions. James and his boys made enough money to buy a modest acreage in Winton, Southland, among the first handful of settlers in that community. In 1864, most of the family moved there. They farmed, and continued carrying and contracting.

By the time they died—James in 1898, and his wife in 1901—they had become patriarch and matriarch of a very large brood indeed. It was to get much larger.

By 1986 when a family gathering was held in Invercargill and Winton, James and Elizabeth had 5,000 living descendants. Not all of them could make it to the big weekend, but some 1,500 did. It was just as well that Invercargill’s Centennial Hall was big enough to take the number. When the 1,500 moved over to Winton, it was the racecourse that had to do the honours. Organization was simple: seven groups, each lot descended from one of the children of James and Elizabeth.

Some had done better than others in the reproduction stakes. The only one really letting the side down was the Jane Taylor branch, of which there were only twelve living descendants.