Coromandel Dreamin’ – Fiction
A Novel of the Seventies
Coromandel Dreamin’ is the author’s first real crack at writing a full-length work of fiction.
It’s set in the Coromandel of the late 1970s, and is about a young, wandering teacher-musician-builder who ends up in a small communal settlement near Coromandel Town. It’s a love story with all the usual twists and turns that involves, but it also draws on the tenor of the times as some of the innocence of New Zealand had begun to dissipate and crime and drugs became more pervasive.
The novel takes its seed from a Steeleye Span ballad, Thomas the Rhymer, though it’s a more complex tale than the original.
It’s also, for the author, an attempt to capture some of the charm and simplicity of those times and that decade, along with the tumultuous changes New Zealand went through in the decade, one he also remembers as a time of major transition personally.