Interview: David Elliot and Fiona Farrell talk about Once Upon a Harbour
An extraordinary landmark gift book of funny stories and amazing illustrations from internationally acclaimed illustrator David Elliot and celebrated author Fiona Farrell. David and Fiona talk to NZ Booklovers.
Tell us about Once Upon a Harbour.
David: Once Upon a Harbour is a book about a place. Its inspiration was Otago Harbour but it could be anywhere by the sea, where characters and stories seem to wash up against the shore with the coming and going of the tides. Fiona and I have collected up six of those stories scattered around the Harbour, Fiona has brought them to life with her poems and I have done my best to do them justice with my drawings.
Fiona: Once Upon a Harbour is a book of poems and illustrations set around a magical version of Otago Harbour. It’s intended to amuse readers of all ages.
What inspired the book?
David: Once Upon a Harbour began life as a series of drawings of characters and places which I collected during Covid. Some of these were real, like the fat brown rat I saw scuttle under a boatshed at Back Beach, some were historical, like ‘Piggy Bill’ who let his pigs run wild on the sand dunes at Te Ngaru. Some were imaginary, like the ‘Drizzles’ above Mount Cargill or the sea monster that lurks in the cave at Long Beach. Others were more evocative, like the little Lewis cottage in Deborah Bay or the pine trees that ‘march’ across the hillsides. They were really just things that intrigued me and made me laugh, not stories as such.
It wasn’t until I met Fiona Farrell and read her wonderful poetry that I realised her sense of humour might be just the thing to bring these characters and places to life.
Fiona: David’s love of the harbour he can see from his studio in Port Chalmers. He had been drawing character studies and thinking about making a book about it for years. Two years ago we met at a friend’s house and he asked if I’d like to collaborate. I knew his work from the Hunting of the Snark, and he showed me some of the character studies. I had just finished working for two years on a novel for adults about environmental collapse and needed a change of pace, so of course I said yes!
What was the process of working together to create Once Upon a Harbour?
David: I sent Fiona my original drawings and a video of a presentation I had made at a Wild Dunedin Festival (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkXdDHA9K1o&t=339s)
We then did a tour of the Harbour visiting the various places Fiona might like to write about. Then, over the next three months or so Fiona worked on her wonderful rhymes giving each its own blend of quirky humour and magic. She sent them to me and I worked out corresponding rough drawings to show her. Finally when we were satisfied we sent it to Allen and Unwin who accepted it for publication almost immediately. From then on it was really a matter of me doing the finished art (which took rather a long time as I enjoy playing around too much)
Fiona: It’s hard to describe a collaboration, what makes it work. Probably easiest to take one poem e.g.: the one about a sea monster. David and I had discovered we both liked maps, specially medieval maps, and I’d always loved T H White’s Book of Beasts with all those weird creatures.
David showed me a drawing of a sea monster who has learned he doesn’t exist and is dwindling away in his cave at Wharauwerawera Long Beach. He looked terrified.
I thought, ‘What that monster needs is cheering up!’ So, first off, I gave him a name: Craig. And what cheers me up when I’m down? A friend. So I gave him a friend, Shirley, who enjoys dressing up with him, and most of all, gives him a sense of purpose. And what better purpose could there be than solving the global energy crisis?
I wrote it as a narrative poem like the comic verses I’d enjoyed as a child, or my children had enjoyed: Marriott Edgar, Hilaire Belloc, Shel Silverstein, Roald Dahl. The style is deliberately old fashioned to match David’s drawings who look as if they belong in the 1890s or 1920s or 1950s. I wrote it mostly at night in that 2am drift where I do most of my writing. I set the rhythm as a kind of jig with lots of rhyme and variations, hard beats and soft beats. Each morning when I woke I wrote up another section.
When it was ready, I sent it off to David. We made each other laugh a lot. My part took a few months. David’s illustration took much longer: nearly two years.
Are any of the characters inspired by real events?
David: Piggy Bill was a real character in the distant and almost forgotten past.
I’ve always imagined those sand dune pigs of his going a bit feral, maybe turning into buccaneering sea pigs. Fiona has given them broken bicycles and unbrushed teeth. And the little house in the “swaggery day” is a real cottage on the Harbourside. It’s famous for the fact that 17 kids were brought up in it. It has always looked salty and weatherbeaten and full of stories. Now it has one more.
Fiona: Not for me. I write fiction, so I prefer to float a bit above reality, real places, real people. I believe there was once someone nicknamed Piggy Bill, but my character definitely isn’t him. I like writing fables with animals -a play about four hens in a battery farm, a romantic novel about ferrets. These poems are another kind of fable.
Do you have a favourite character from the book?
David: I think I like the trees best. I’ve always had a great fondness for pine trees and their individual wind-blown personalities. I also love the way the plantations scattered around our landscape always seem to be up to something... and imagining just what that might be!
Fiona: Not really. I fall a bit in love with all my characters when I’m writing them and they begin to take shape and start talking.
What do you love about creating, illustrating and writing?
David: I love the way it makes me look at the world. The way it makes me pay attention, the way it makes me inquisitive about everything, the way it creates my own personal swimming pool of words and pictures and ideas. It enriches my life enormously.
Fiona: I’ve made my living as a writer since 1992, writing every day. I find it totally absorbing and deeply satisfying. I love hearing people laughing at something I’ve written, and I’ve loved seeing David’s different approach, different ideas. I’ve often collaborated with composers, and that has been enjoyable, but it has been really fun working with a gifted visual artist for the first time.
Allen and Unwin
