Author(s): John Mulgan

Literature

John Mulgan’s place in New Zealand literature rests on his acclaimed novel, Man Alone, and the war memoir, Report on Experience; but he wrote another work, part memoir, part reflective essay, which dealt with his departure from New Zealand (“a small country where loveliness goes often unregarded”) and his first impressions of Oxford: “When a man changes his country … he must make some sacrifice. He loses all the background that is mainly emotional, of the places that he grew up among – in New Zealand it is seas, mountains, dark trees and singing rivers – and he becomes tenacious of all the things of the mind that he can have here.” Caught up in his work at the Clarendon Press, and then by a world at war, he left the work unfinished, and it has remained in his papers since, unpublished and scarcely known. Now published for the first time, Journey to Oxford is a powerful piece of writing, touched in places with a sombre nostalgia, which charts something of Mulgan’s efforts to discover who he is as a New Zealander, and what his removal to Oxford means to him.