(Don’t stop) thinking about Tomorrow…

Assoc. Prof. Mike Grimshaw, Sociology, University of Canterbury

It’s become part of New Zealand cultural mythology that New Zealand literature first ‘came of age’ in the brief four issue burst of Phoenix that rose briefly from a small, mainly Auckland based coterie, in the years 1932-34. Traditionally, this is followed by a gap until the first issue of Landfall in March 1947. From this arose the much heralded (and criticized) “Landfall School” and the resulting internecine debates on regionalism versus internationalism.

But this is only half the story. For it has often been conveniently forgotten that created out of a ‘large yet cramped room’ at 81 Hereford Street, Christchurch was Tomorrow, a leftwing magazine of politics, society and (often overlooked), poetry and literature.

Tomorrow has been in the main relegated to the brief aside, the paragraph, the footnote or the thesis so is still predominantly both unknown and unthought of by most readers of New Zealand literature and culture.

The literary aspect of Tomorrow has been especially ignored - except as the location of Frank Sargeson’s first published stories. Yet in the pages of Tomorrow are to be found poems by Allen Curnow, Denis Glover, Rex Fairburn, Robin Hyde, Basil Dowling, Charles Brasch, Frank Sargeson, Ron Mason, Anton Vogt, John Beaglehole and even Toss Woollaston, making Tomorrow a crucial link between Phoenix and Landfall. In total 425 poems were published in the years 1934-1940 yet Tomorrow, as a literary magazine, garners only the briefest of mentions in most histories of New Zealand Literature.

So Tomorrow remains what could be termed a ‘public secret’; known to scholars and interested parties but unknown by the general public and its importance especially unacknowledged. The most surprising omission is the total silence on Tomorrow in the chapter on Poetry in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English. This means that outside bibliomaniacs and literary historians, the range and concerns of the Tomorrow poets – and an important window into incipient New Zealand literary nationalism – remains predominantly untouched and unknown. This paper seeks to correct that oversight.