My Father's Island

by Adam Dudding

  Lois breastfeeding Adam in the garden at Barnes Road, Christchurch, early 1971. Robin liked the photo so much he ordered a print two foot high and put it on the mantelpiece.

  Adam at 4 Sealy Road, Torbay, around 1974. The hair was getting pretty long, but it still had a way to go.

  Robin and Adam at 4 Sealy Road, Torbay, around 1980.

  Robin Dudding farewelling friends about to leave Lyttelton on the Suevic, around 1973. ‘At some stage,’ Bill Manhire said two decades later, ‘someone will have to sit down and try to work out just what [Robin’s] presence consists of, apart from the considerable beard.’

  The Duddings on holiday on Great Barrier Island, January 1983. Back row (from left): Lois, Robin, Rachel’s boyfriend John, Anna, Ruth, Ruth’s boyfriend Ron. Middle: Melissa, Natasha. Front: Rachel, Adam, Melissa’s boyfriend Brett.

  Sealy Road, 1979: Robin plays ping-pong on the rain-warped table-tennis table, Natasha hangs out washing, and Woodspring Cottage, birthplace of Mate (nos 7–14) and Islands (nos 7–26), quietly rots. Photograph by Paul Buckley.

  Robin Dudding, publisher and editor, as photographed by Glenn Jowitt for Metro magazine in 1984, around the time Islands was being resurrected after a three-year disappearance.

  Robin and Lois Dudding at Sealy Road, around 2005.