The Quality of Light: Peter Hooper & the West Coast

(Paperback)

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Writer, teacher and environmental activist Peter Hooper was born in 1919 and lived his whole life on New Zealand's West Coast. Despite chafing against the isolated and culturally proscribed lifestyle of a place defined by its farming and mining industries, his writing became imbued with the Coast, and emerged as an important voice in defence of its wilderness and beauty. Hooper's essay, Our Forests Ourselves (1981) is recognised as a seminal document that passionately and poetically argues the cause of wilderness preservation, and his critically acclaimed 1980s novel trilogy Time and the Forest mythologises the forests of Westland in a futuristic tale of a young man's odyssey. Hooper's writing was also underpinned by the writings of American philosopher Henry David Thoreau who, like Hooper, lived an isolated life but without the demands of teaching. Peter Hooper's biographer is a former pupil - writer and artist Pat White - who was born and worked on the West Coast. Unlike his subject, White moved away to pursue a creative life, and his research into Peter Hooper becomes partly about trying to understand why he had to leave while Hooper stayed put. Was it something about the quality of the light