Piano Rock: A 1950s Childhood  Gavin Bishop

 

Piano Rock
A 1950s Childhood
Gavin Bishop 
Random House (2008)
Memoir, 120 pages, Paperback
ISBN 978 1 86979 010 3 

 
 

The entry for Gavin Bishop in the Continuum Encyclopedia of Young Adult Literature begins: A steam train is travelling across a golden tussock plain. Inside its freight van is a family with their furniture. Seated on their own kitchen chairs, the family look out through the van’s open doors at the passing mountain scenery. Piano Rock starts with the same scene, etched in white on black. It portrays one of Bishop’s earliest memories, travelling by train from Invercargill to the tiny lakeside settlement of Kingston.

In Piano Rock Bishop, whose brilliant art work means his skills as a writer are sometimes overlooked, evokes the years he spent there (1949 to 1954) in a world of coal ranges, school concerts, Tilley lamps, wash-house coppers, vegetable gardens, Guy Fawkes bonfires and jam-making.

Those interested in Bishop’s artistic development will learn how he was inspired by a visiting art-teacher at their 12-pupil school, and by a visiting sign-writer who took time off from a pub mural to paint Mickey Mouse figures on Bishop’s gumboots.

The illustrations show how Bishop is continually developing his style, or in this case styles. He uses black-and-white scraper-board for the dramatic train illustrations and the evocative endpapers. A touch of colour enlivens his stunning picture of migrating eels seen at sunset and his self-portrait walking through a frozen landscape in his painted gumboots and home-knitted balaclava. Many of the other illustrations are in colour, including a perfect re-creation of an illustration from the Janet and John readers.

Piano Rock is a superb evocation of growing up in the 1950s.

Trevor Agnew