The New Zealand Writers' Conference, Christchurch 1951, is well known to students of literature: coinciding with the Waterfront dispute, the two events helped to delineate for that generation their feelings for their country. Not so well known is an earlier celebration of writers, Authors' Week, 1936. This paper focuses on generations: on the way that the generation who grew up as writers around Phoenix magazine and the Caxton Press in the 1930s and 1940s, and who gained the power in literary matters by 1951, succeeded also in demoting their writing forebears who were the generations celebrated in 1936. The 1951 Conference shows also the Phoenix/Caxton writers being challenged in turn by a new generation of writers. My underlying theme is one of gender, since I show that Authors' Week 1936 celebrated a literature in which women played the major part, but in 1951, the female voice was largely silent. Borrowing terms used by Lawrence Jones, I find that in order for the Provincial writers--those associated with Phoenix and the Caxton Press--to rise to pre-eminence, they had to displace by discrediting the earlier Late Colonial writers. As eloquent chroniclers of their own achievements, the Provincial writers offered us an inflated view of their significance and a correspondingly poor opinion of their predecessors', but more importantly, their chronicling work has skewed the time-scale of New Zealand literature, drawing out to greater length than is justified their own influence, while condensing the earlier decades until they seemed a brief preamble to their own emergence. Part I of this paper deals with the 1936 Writers' Week; Part II deals with the 1951 Writers' Conference, and will be published in a future Journal of New Zealand Literature. My generation (born in the 1940s) believed until well into the 1980s that our literature was largely a male preserve. It was not until I began researching Authors' Week 1936 that I realised what a short time-span this male annexation of the whole order of literary matters has occupied. I find that the present-day high profile of women's writing merely restores the norm to New Zealand's literature--a norm as celebrated in 1936, and that history will see the 1951 Writers' Conference and the male climate out of which it grew as a short aberration when viewed in the time-scale of New Zealand literature. (1)
