Every Sign of Life: On Family Ground

(Hardback)

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Respectable families hold on to their myths, contain the violence, uphold the Establishment. There was always going to be a story. It couldnt be overlooked, and this one will set the skeletons rattling and the gin bottles clinking up and down the country. The story is exposed through the life and times of Christchurch-born Nicholas Lyon Gresson, enlivened by his passion for justice and love of discovery at the human interface. Overall it is a story of survival. Wide in scope, this memoir is a New Zealand social history with first-hand accounts of crime and justice, psychiatry and poetry, community and family. It is a saga of five generations of the well-known Gresson family giving an authentic context to the life of the authors father, Justice Terence A. Gresson, who was appointed to the Supreme Court judiciary in 1956 at forty-two and died by suicide at fifty-three. His forebear Henry Barnes Gresson emigrated from Irish soil in the 1850s and became first resident judge of Canterbury. Justice Sir Kenneth Gresson became president of the Court of Appeal, and another great-uncle, Justice Sir John Edward Denniston, was knighted for services to the judiciary. Unforgettable characters from all walks of life claim an authentic place with their idiosyncrasies and inclinations. Anecdotes, letters and diaries provide insights into Canterburys founding fabric and inherited values. Where was the author in all this He sought a life beyond the gentry accoutrements of Fendalton Christchurch, pursuing challenges abroad, learning first-hand the vagaries of survival on foreign shores. But there is always a price to be paid for desertion. Following his fathers tragic death Nick endured the greatest of trials. The reader is left gasping as events unfold. Not without humour the book is illuminating in its narrative style. The author adroitly carries the power of storytelling from one point of impact to the next, including public work for justice and advocacy for those who suffer injustice. This comprehensive exploration of a life on a road less travelled, peppered with poetic writings, confronts the reader with tender and brutal honesty, sustaining an irresistible momentum to the final pages all this reverberating upon a rich setting of family ground.

Reviews

I believe his account because this is the life as it has seemed to the man, as he knows he has lived it, and because it is told with such panache, such conviction, such poetry. I finished this book full of admiration for this (at heart I think) Cantabrian, scion of a line of notable jurists - From the Foreword by C.K. Stead ONZ CBE, novelist, poet, literary critic; With his head in his hands, a contemplative stance, Nicholas Lyon Gresson reflects on five generations of his remarkable family of which he is a cumulative part. It is a book larded with snippets, anecdotes, letters and historical stories, reflections on psychiatry and justice, and festooned with his own creative work. Philosophically, it is an autoethnography of poetic self-constitution. It is a great achievement. - Dr Michael A. Peters, Distinguished Professor, Beijing Normal University, Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois, Research Fellow, Universities of Auckland & Waikato; The reader is privileged to share Nicks artistic gift. (Cover endorsement for N.L. Gresson, A Life in Poetry), Terence Gresson was the greatest judge that ever lived He gave a trial a living aura. - Sir Peter A. Williams KNZM QC, barrister, penal reform advocate; Nick works with evidence like a legal actor in a courtroom sifting and sorting and finding what is relevant and reliable. - Dr Elizabeth Mary Gresson, barrister, Auckland, Professor Emeritus, RMIT University, Melbourne

Author Bio

Nicholas Lyon Gresson QSM was born in Christchurch in 1939 into one of New Zealands best known legal families. He did not become a university trained lawyer, but has lived a life steeped in law and justice. With training in engineering he found his university of life through travel as a ships engineer on German ships to North and South America in the military junta days of the 1960s; and living on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait. From there his poetry and writing grew. His interests include photography, art, his Parnell garden, and following sports, particularly Olympic athletics and Formula One. For his community work in mental health and crime prevention he was awarded a Queens Service Medal in 1999. His father, Terence Arbuthnot Gresson, was a much-loved judge of the High Court of New Zealand in Auckland.