HUTU AND KAWA

MARY SKAROTT

DESCRIPTION ‘We must be cousins!’ said Hutu, from Hutu and Kawa Find an Island, 1956–57

MAKER / ARTIST Avis Acres (1910–1994)

REFERENCE B-087-021 Avis Acres’ close observation of nature is shown here with the rātā vine in its natural habit, twining around a tree trunk, and all its flowering stages included: tight buds, buds starting to open, full flowers and a finished flower head.

A storybook about fairies was nothing new to children in 1950s New Zealand, but Hutu and Kawa are arguably the best known of the local fairy folk. This watercolour was painted for Avis Acres’ 1957 book Hutu and Kawa Find an Island.

Avis Acres (1910–1994) was an artist and storyteller whose career began with the cartoon series ‘The Adventures of Twink and Wink, the Twinkle Twins’, published in the Auckland Star in 1929. Her pōhutukawa babies, inspired by Australian artist May Gibbs’ books featuring the gumnut babies, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, first appeared in the New Zealand Herald children’s page in a comic strip that ran from 1951 until 1960.

Acres had always imagined Hutu and Kawa as book characters; Hutu and Kawa Find an Island was the third of three picture books in which they featured. The stories follow the twins’ adventures in the bush with the birds and forest folk, and incorporate a wealth of information about ecology and the natural world.

Acres’ art is grounded in the New Zealand environment. Like Gibbs in Australia and Cicely Mary Barker in England, who also personified plants and flowers, Acres combines fantasy and imagination with careful botanical observation. Birds, too, are an important part of Hutu and Kawa’s world. Acres loved to draw in the field, and the birds she sketched were depicted accurately in her stories so that young readers would recognise them. In this story, Acres’ conservation message is particularly evident. The possum that has caused damage to trees and birdlife on the island symbolises the pest’s disastrous introduction to New Zealand.

The Hutu and Kawa books were all published by A. H. & A. W. Reed, known for their keen interest in New Zealand content. The 1950s was a time of growth in local children’s publishing, and Acres’ first book, The Adventures of Hutu and Kawa (1955), sold so well that it was reprinted. However, by the third book public interest was waning and there were to be no more. To a contemporary reader the stories are undeniably sentimental, but their conservation message is enduring. All three books were reprinted, unedited, in 1990, and The Adventures of Hutu and Kawa again in 2015 as a sixtieth anniversary edition.

Every children’s book published in Aotearoa is held by the Turnbull, but the papers and artwork that sit behind this body of New Zealand literature are scarcely represented. Acres is an exception; the library received her artwork as a bequest following her death in 1994.