Lecturer on hunt for novelist’s papers

Descendants of William Satchell are being asked to check their homes for any correspondence, paperwork or manuscripts belonging to the novelist and poet.

Mr Satchell came to NZ from England in 1886 and is known for his writings about life on the gum fields, and the land wars. He is possibly most well known for The Greenstone Door, a historical novel about the Maori land wars in the Waikato, published in 1914.

Waikato University humanities lecturer Dr Norman Franke is interested in the influence of Classical and Romantic German on Mr Satchell’s writings.

“His Greenstone Door novel is historical but it uses 18th and 19th century German literary discourses of love, self construction and society, by the likes of Goethe, Schiller and Novalis.”

Dr Franke, who works in Waikato University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, is presenting a paper in Frankfurt in July about Mr Satchell’s work. Specifically he’s looking at the extent to which Mr Satchell used this German approach to narrate and comment on the land wars and colonialism in this country.

Mr Satchell lived at various times in Auckland, the Hokianga and travelled to the Waikato and had nine children – and some descendants could still be in the Waikato or Bay of Plenty region, Dr Franke says.

Dr Franke particularly hopes to find correspondence Mr Satchell may have kept relating to his studies Heidelberg University around 1880 before he returned to England and eventually came to NZ.

Dr Franke can be contacted on: franke@waikato.ac.nz