Don’t Kill it – it’s me! is the title of a novel by Nuri Mass. Her introduction to the book says “it’s a funny thing about writing… It’s the most intimate experience in the world. You find yourself putting things down on paper, in black and white, that you wouldn’t dream of telling your closest friends”.
I think what Nuri is saying is, don’t kill our creative spirit, we all need it.
Nuri Mass was in her mid-seventies when she died in Sydney in 1993, she was a writer of fiction for adults and children, and studies of Australian flora. She obtained a Bachelor of Arts with first class honours and later, a Master of Arts, both from the University of Sydney, and was awarded the University Medal in 1942. Nuri also trained and practised as a chiropractor and worked as an editor and typesetter at publishing houses. She married Sydney Bertram Horwitz in 1947 and they had two children. On her husband’s death she took over the family photo-engraving business.
Illustrations for her botanical books and children’s books were done by Nuri, by her mother Celeste Mass and her daughter Tess Horwitz. A book about China was beautifully illustrated by Tess when she was just 13!
I first heard about Nuri Mass from the artist and feminist Suzanne Bellamy, who was writing about Virginia Woolf and discovered Nuri’s MA thesis on Woolf from 1943. Suzanne was introducing a speaker at one of Braidwood’s Two Fires Festivals, and the speaker, Eilean Haley, was to talk about fairies. Suzanne told us that Nuri made botanical illustrations of Australian flora and produced books like Flowers of the Australian Alps.
But Nuri didn’t just give descriptions of physical flowers in her books for children, she talked about a magic world too, about the flowers’ fairy spirits. By giving voice to the flowers, she made clear to child readers that flowers too have life (don’t kill it!).
She wrote a lovely children’s book, The Little Grammar People, about English grammar, and brings that subject very much alive in a magical world of characters like Miss Noun, Madame Adjective, Baby Conjunction, who all explain their purpose in language to two visiting children.
In Many Paths – One Heaven with drawings by Celeste and Nuri Mass, Nuri provides a summary about people’s main religions in a simple comprehensive way, and I was struck by her definition of what makes human beings different from other living creatures: it’s our ability to marvel. (Whether this is right or not, I couldn’t say…)
Her book Australian Wildflower Fairies lists the following credits: botanical illustrations by Nuri Mass, fairy illustrations by Celeste Mass. There is a fabulous photo of Nuri with her mother Celeste in the Nuri Mass photograph collection, 1922-1986 of the National Library. They are striding out together and you can see they are two women with plenty to do.
For all Celeste’s capacity in the material world so evident in the photo, it must have been Celeste who told Nuri about fairies. You can also see a photo of the child Nuri as an elegant Fairy Queen on the NLA site. Perhaps Nuri wondered whether the fairies and elves of the land of eucalypts were similar to those of the lands of her English mother and Spanish father, or whether they were different? She must have met Old Man Banksia!
I am impressed by Nuri’s life and literary output, and her family’s achievements. I would never have heard of her but for Suzanne Bellamy and Eilean Haley. I can’t help thinking: we live, we create, we die. Few of us will leave dozens of publications and boxes of our photos and correspondence (thanks, NSW State Library and NLA!) to soften the long forgetting.
And of course, in most cases, what we write is dated, we are children of our times and think within the ideologies surrounding us. In a re-edition of one of Nuri’s books, Magic Australia, her children Tess and Chris Horwitz say that Nuri’s thinking about the environment changed. Where once she thought it was a good idea “to tap nature’s bounty to enable progress”, she was later a passionate campaigner for reducing human intervention in nature and for protecting the wisdom of natural cycles.
I’ll leave the last words of this blog to Nuri. They’re from the fly leaf at the back of Don’t Kill It – It’s Me!
“Then suddenly, after you’ve written the last words, you come-to with a sense of shock … “Wait! What have I done? I wouldn’t tell my closest friends, yet I’d make a sacrificial offering of it to a whole world of strangers who might, for all I know, tear it to pieces no matter how earnestly I beseech them, Don’t kill it, it’s me!
“Another interesting thing about such writing is that when you go into retreat for it you don’t go alone. You take the world in with you. The world you sometimes love and sometimes deplore, but in any case, the only one you’ve got … and this can be a pretty frightening thing.
“Yet in the end, it’s just because you’re frightened that you find the courage to go ahead and make your sacrificial offering, repeating the plea, while you make it, Don’t kill it – it’s me! Only now, you’re saying it not for one solitary person, but for the whole planet Earth.”