Eternal Gadd

Eternal Gadd is actually a psuedoname representing works from three generations of Gadds - all of them called David.

DA Gadd

David wrote mainly about growing up in New Zealand in the early years of the 20th Century when the family lived on the rural outskirts of the Auckland province. He was one of 12 children in a madcap family. He lived with a father intent on pursuing money making schemes and dreams into which he dragged the whole family with very mixed results and a long suffering wife. The family, as if not large enough of itself, was always being further enlarged by dogs, horses and the odd characters they encountered. As an adult David served in the Pacific during World War II, where he sustained a lasting injury. He was a talented writer of music, an amateur historian, always enthusiastic to jump in a car and travel around our beautiful country and a loving father and grandfather.

David Bernard Gadd

The main author of these short stories is DB Gadd, known to all as Bernard Gadd. He was a prolific writer of short stories, novels, plays and poetry, an editor of anthologies and literary journals and a publisher. All this, remarkably, was in his spare time. His main focus was as a teacher, the head of English at a college where he engaged in pioneering work in the classroom - this was the genesis of his writing, when he realised there were few authors writing stories relevant to the real lives of his students, who were mainly Maori and Pasifika teenagers living in a low socio-economic area of Auckland. So he began to write stories himself, designed to encourage literacy amongst students left behind by mainstream education. He engaged them by reflecting the experiences of their own lives in contrast to the sanitised versions of family life they were fed by most media. It worked, he captured their imagination and showed them the power of reading. His commitment to multi-culturalism also saw him foster a new generation of talented emerging Maori and Pacific writers and poets. He founded Hallard Press.

You can see more about Bernard Gadd at Amazon.com/author/bernardgadd

DS Gadd

Although he made his living writing, he was only ever a dabbler in writing of any worth. Instead he mainly concentrated on continuing the dubious Gadd tradition of a having a mad family surrounded by even crazier animals - all the while living with a beautiful, talented and (of course) long suffering wife, two gorgeous children and a variety of dogs, cats, rodents and goats.