Zone of the Marvellous: In Search of the Antipodes

He’s constantly demonstrating that the natural world is as splendiferous as any fable —Jim Shepard, New York Times

New Zealand and Australia were imagined thousands of years before they became real. From Plato’s Atlantis to Dante’s Mount Purgatory, Sinbad the Sailor to Abel Tasman, travellers, writers, map-makers, charlatans and rogues dreamed of other worlds at the back of the sun. In Zone of the Marvellous Martin Edmond recounts the fantastic history of the antipodes in the Western imagination. Edmond tells the stories of Gilgamesh seeking immortality on the other side of the Waters of Death and Ptolemy inventing a Great South Land to balance the weight of northern-hemisphere continents. He traces the invention underlying truth in the tales of Marco Polo and the equivocal John Mandeville; and the fact underlying fiction in Thomas More’s Utopia. Along the way he wonders if Tasman’s dour puritanical character is somehow mirrored in aspects of the New Zealand psyche—and if the Australian character might resemble that of the old pyrating dog and three-times circumnavigator William Dampier, insouciant larrikin and freedom-monger.

Shining with intellectual breadth and imaginative reach, Zone of the Marvellous is one person’s trawl through the detritus of the past five millennia. Edmond unfolds his inquiry with a weather eye for the always fertile intertwining of fact and fiction that makes up what we call history; for the moments of wonder and wild surmise that invented our Land of Gold, our Great South Land, our Antipodes; and for the sense and the resonant non-sense that keep alive our feeling for the marvellous.


Read sample pages zoneofthemarvsample.pdf (86kB) .


Martin Edmond was born in Ohakune in 1952, son of poet Lauris Edmond and teacher Trevor Edmond, and grew up in small North Island towns. He studied at The University of Auckland before graduating with an MA (1st Class Hons) in English from Victoria University of Wellington. After spending a year as a junior lecturer at Victoria University, Martin joined the avant garde theatre group Red Mole and spent five years touring internationally as a writer, actor, stage manager and lighting designer. He moved to Australia in 1981, via London, New York and Los Angeles, to work in the film industry there.

A poet, prose writer, blogger and occasional taxi driver, Martin Edmond has also worked as a proof reader, ESOL teacher, lighting designer for rock bands and script writer. Several of his screenplays have been produced as awardwinning feature films: Illustrious Energy; The Footstep Man; and Terra Nova; and he wrote the screenplays for the critically well-received short films Philosophy and Earth Angel.

Four of his books have been shortlisted in national book awards. The Autobiography of My Father (AUP, 1992) placed in the 1993 Wattie’s Book Awards and his memoir/travelogue of the mind Chronicle of the Unsung (AUP, 2004) won the 2005 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Biography.

His most recent works include Waimarino County, The Evolution of Mirrors, The Supply Party and Luca Antara, described by J M Coetzee as ‘a booklover’s book, a graceful and mesmerizing blend of history, autobiography, travel and romance.’

Martin Edmond was the Writing Fellow at The University of Auckland in 2004 and in that same year was the joint winner of literary journal Landfall’s prestigious Essay Competition. He won a CLL Writers’ Award in 2007 to support the completion of his forthcoming book Zone of the Marvellous (Auckland University Press, September 2009).

For more about Martin Edmond see his Book Council Writers’ page.