Dan Davin (1913–1990)

The chronicle of a young Englishman, Richard Kane, who sets out with high hopes of an architectural career ahead of him, but after a series of silly blunders finds himself an emigrant to New Zealand in the first decade of the Twentieth Century. Here further disappointment ensues and he finds himself marrying an Irish Catholic woman and a life as a farmer on a small holding in Southland.
His life has panned out so differently from his original imaginings.
The tale is told smoothly enough in the show more local vernacular and does not lag in any way. However, his life is a disappointment for him as luck and history has its way on him, his family and the country itself. The newly settled emigrant Kane is confronted by bog Irish contempt for England and the English, the burden of farming booms and busts, the decimation of the male population in the Great War in which he fought, and especially his own battle with depression over his broken dreams.
A great contribution to our national literature and an easily read absorbing novel. show less

I must confess that there does seem to me something sad in life. It is hard to say what it is. I don't mean the sorrow that we all know, like illness and poverty and death. No, it is something different. It is there, deep down, deep down, part of one, like one's breathing. However hard I work and tire myself I have only to stop to know it is there, waiting. I often wonder if everybody feels the same. One can never know. But isn't it extraordinary that under his sweet, joyful little singing

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it was just this—sadness ?—Ah, what is it ?—that I heard.

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The gorse blooms pale are a collection of Dan Davin’s Southland stories. Being the first of his works I’ve come across I’m now looking forward to reading his novels Roads from home and For the Rest of Our Lives.
As the title suggests Dan Davin writes of home. If the works of the writer/s of The Little House on the Prairie hadn’t been turned into a television series and been so popular, then this collection of stories should have been the basis for more realistic programmes.
You’ll show more laugh at Dan Davin’s philosophy (as a child) of God being green; or even perhaps want to have a cry when and how he finds out his cousin is not able to marry the girl who was to have his child; but most profound, the year his father shoplifted a printing set for a Christmas present. Well worth a read. show less