Michael O’Leary
Venus Has No Arms, God Has No Clothes: Born to be an artist by Jenny Hunt (Atuanui Press, 2025), 294pp, $45
The Second World War permeated all my early life. Austerity, grimness and a sense of collective unhappiness hung over our town, requiring that noisy expressions of joy or excitement by children in the community be instantly suppressed.
This is an autobiography with a difference. Jenny Hunt captures what it was like growing up in Hāwera, Taranaki, in the 1940s and 1950s, with parents from widely different social milieus. She was born in 1939, and the most fascinating aspect of her story is how it is written. While she speaks as an adult, the narrative unfurls through the various phases of her life as though from a child’s perspective. The first chapter, ‘A Nonviable Baby’, sets the tone for the majority of the book, depicting a culturally barren, monochromatic world in which to be ‘different’ was to place the ‘nonviable’ person in direct conflict with the so-called ‘norm’.
Her mother’s family moved in the upper echelons of Auckland society until they lost their fortune in the Great Depression, while her working-class father was a direct descendant of a Chickasaw Native American sentenced to penal servitude in Australia. These two parental identities establish the central metaphorical aspects of Jenny Hunt’s life struggle. In the tension-filled house in Hāwera, prey to the advances of adult men and oppressed by the conservative Presbyterian church of her upbringing, Jenny fought to make sense of her surroundings and to follow her passion for art. Venus Has No Arms, God Has No Clothes is a moving and detailed portrait of a significant New Zealand artist, evoking the conservatism of the era she grew up in and the obstacles she had to battle to realise her vocation.
Ironically, her mother, Irene, wanting to be a poet or writer, had completed a BA in 1928 and then trained to be a teacher. At university, Irene had written and produced a historical play that had been highly praised, and she seemed destined for a literary career. Mixing with Auckland’s bohemian set, she was courted by several young men, including Sydney, Jenny’s father-to-be, while another suitor was a poet who couldn’t promise fidelity, so she let him go.
When Irene’s family lost all their money in the Great Depression, she decided to marry Sydney because his work skills were practical. But this meant moving from Auckland to rural Taranaki, as his expertise was in farm machinery and maintenance.
In Hāwera, they settled into married life and raising a family. Hunt has a gift for detail and an almost photographic recall of her childhood environment in rural Taranaki in the 1940s. If Ronald Hugh Morrieson trenchantly portrays the noir side of Hāwera after dark, Hunt captures something of its puritan aspirations and daytime concealments with a child’s observant eye: ‘E.J.’s invalid wife died, and he did his best to convince our mother to leave her marriage to be with him. At the same time, my father was being pressured by a recently widowed wife of one of his farmer friends. There had been no children from their marriage and now he was being invited to take on both the farm and the widow.’
By the early 1950s, Jenny has siblings, and now come the ‘nonviable’, oppressive aspects of the author’s life. Her brother won’t play with her because ‘She’s only a girl’, and both her parents favoured the boys. But it wasn’t just being dismissed as a girl that made Jenny feel belittled; she was also compared unfavourably to her younger sister. Although they were only a year or so apart in age and looked and dressed alike, their mother would say: ‘No, Jennifer is the eldest, but Rosemary is better looking and more intelligent.’
One of the perennial struggles Hunt references throughout her story is her effort to reconcile the strictness of Presbyterian doctrine with her own lived experience. This is emphasised in a chapter titled ‘Spare the Rod’. She writes: ‘If Presbyterianism had made my mother, aunt, and grandmother happy and fulfilled, I may have been more inclined to embrace it.’ At one church event, a visiting preacher asks the congregation if they have been washed in the ‘soul-cleansing blood of the lamb of God’.
My sister and I were so confused at these penetrating, unanswerable demands, coming at us in a strange accent, that we got the giggles … to our mother’s annoyance, and it only got worse when washing in blood was reiterated in hymns … the very thought of being washed in the blood of anything made me feel sick.
After detailing some unwanted sexual advances in a chapter titled ‘On the Importance of Keeping Our Knees Together’, to which her mother contemptuously replied when told, ‘It’s your own fault, you should have kept your knees together. I have told you about that before’, the author returns, in a later chapter titled ‘My Sister’, to 1948, when she was ten and her sister was nine. She wasn’t going to incorporate this part of their story into her narrative, but at the time of writing the book, with all her siblings having died, she felt that her account would be incomplete without including this shameful aspect involving her sister and their older brother.
As the book outlines, the relationship between Jenny and her sister Rosemary, which had always been close, suddenly and mysteriously changed. Jenny understood what had happened to her sister only in retrospect.
Everything she was, everything she could have been, would be destroyed by our older brother, who had set up a predatory sexual abuse ring with his friends. My sister was their target … He took money and bribes from his friends, who, in return, violated my sister.
But Rosemary was warned off by the gang of youths from talking to Jenny about what was happening to her, so somehow Jenny became the enemy.
From this time on, Hunt had to make her way without the closeness of her sister. She went through primary school and into her early teenage years with the usual disapproval of her mother and her aunts, sometimes unspoken but often full-on condemnation. Her first secondary school was Hāwera Technical High School, where she enjoyed a certain amount of self-esteem through her involvement in the school choir and orchestra, despite her academic failures. ‘But the most thrilling musical adventure was being invited to join the Hāwera Municipal Orchestra as a second violin player.’ Her vision of herself as an ‘artist’ was beginning to materialise.
At the end of 1953, two major events took place in the author’s life. First, the family moved back to Auckland. Her mother’s family blamed her father for making their daughter leave Auckland when they married, and now they wanted to reclaim her. The second event was the Tangiwai railway disaster, which occurred at 10.21 p.m. on Christmas Eve 1953, when a railway bridge over the flooded Whangaehu River collapsed beneath the overnight Wellington–Auckland Express passenger train at Tangiwai. The locomotive and the first six carriages derailed into the river, killing 151 people, several of whom were friends or relatives from the Hāwera district. She was also haunted by the fact that she and her family had often caught the overnight train to Auckland whenever they went to visit family there.
With the move to Auckland, Jenny became more independent and her desire to become an artist had a greater chance of being realised. However, the road was still blocked by her obstinate mother, who saw her artistic aspirations as frivolous, stating: ‘Academic subjects are always more important.’ In January 1956, Jenny turned 17 and spent the school holidays in Hāwera helping to look after the four small children she had minded before the family left, while their parents worked. Ten pounds was her payment, which she describes as setting her up very well for her final year at school.
Back in Auckland, she received her School Certificate results:
I passed by twenty-two marks. Better than anyone had expected. In my eyes, my status as a trainee artist had been recognised and I could return to school as a sixth former, to do the preliminary art subjects which were required to become a fine arts student. I was flooded with relief and a little private vindication.
But her mother had other plans for her. Jenny and Irene went to see the school’s headmistress to discuss her future. ‘Jennifer did very well last year,’ began Miss Gardner, the headmistress. ‘Her marks in biology were the highest throughout the fifth form, but Miss Reece and I both feel that her true vocation lies in art.’ To which her mother retorted: ‘I do not consider art to be a true academic subject so my preference is that Jennifer replace art with history and geography and once she has mastered those, perhaps we can look at art again if she is still interested.’
This setback sent Hunt into a serious depression, which was relieved only when her mother eventually agreed to her leaving school and enrolling to train as a teacher at Teachers’ College. Jenny clung to her belief in herself as an artist, despite her mother and grandmother stating: ‘You are greedy for life … burning the candle at both ends, and you never go to church.’ She began going to the movies and listening to the new ‘Rock & Roll music, the Devil’s music’ in, heaven forbid, coffee bars.
Apart from a few minor details, such as having the Mount Albert trams still running in 1956 when in reality they stopped in 1954, a family tale about an aunt by marriage being the daughter of Czar Nicholas II, and the remarkable assertion that ‘Following the bombing of Pearl Harbour by the Americans …’, Venus Has No Arms, God Has No Clothes is a convincing and harrowing memoir, a story of self-preservation. Jenny Hunt mentions an encounter with the artist Lois White and also praises Ruth Park’s novels for their observant writing, and both serve as lodestars in this engrossing account of growing up as a sensitive, self-aware and determined girl in mid-twentieth-century New Zealand.
MICHAEL O’LEARY is a poet, novelist, publisher and bookshop proprietor. He holds a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington. His Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop imprint, which he founded in 1984, has published many New Zealand writers. He lives in Paekākāriki on the Kāpiti Coast.
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