Shining With the Shiner

Description

Title: Shining With the Shiner
Author: John A. Lee
Publisher: [Confirm from title page — “New Zealand Books” series], New Zealand, c.1964–1967
Format: Paperback
Condition: Good condition, small tearing at spine, page discolouration ~60-year-old paperback
Price: $21.00

Out of print. Pre-decimal edition, c.1960s. First published 1944.

Description:

Ned Slattery — known to everyone as The Shiner — was a real man. He tramped the roads of Otago and Canterbury from the 1870s until his death in 1927, surviving entirely on his wits, his charm, and his absolute refusal to be tamed by honest labour or Protestant respectability. He diddled publicans, clergymen, and farmers with equal cheerfulness. He was NZ’s most colourful swagman — the back cover says so, and it’s not wrong.

John A. Lee knew him. He’d walked thirty miles side by side with The Shiner as a young man on the roads of South Canterbury, before the First World War, before Parliament, before everything. Shining With the Shiner is Lee’s tribute: a collection of comic yarns that turn a real Otago folk hero into something larger — “a national icon,” in the words of the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, representing “the spirit of beating the Protestant work ethic and surviving by one’s wits.”

The stories are riotous. The Shiner cons a goat onto a priest who wanted a nanny for his stomach complaint. He diddled publicans who swore he never would. He moves through early twentieth-century rural NZ like a one-man argument against the whole apparatus of respectability — which is precisely why Lee, who spent his political career making that same argument in Parliament and pamphlets, loved him so much.

Lee wrote this in 1944 — the year after his expulsion from the Labour Party, the year his political career collapsed, the year he was left with nothing but his pen and his convictions. The choice of subject was pointed. The Shiner survives by his wits; so, in the end, would Lee.

This is a pre-decimal “New Zealand Books” series paperback, published in the mid-1960s — approximately sixty years old. The Oxford Companion names Shining With the Shiner a New Zealand classic. No modern edition exists.

Why We Stock It:

John A. Lee is one of the most important and most overlooked figures in NZ political and literary history — the man who built state housing, who was destroyed for being too socialist for the Labour Party, who kept writing and bookselling and arguing into his nineties. The Shiner is his alter ego: the outsider who refuses the system’s terms. A pre-decimal NZ classic from a writer the Gravy was made to celebrate.