📍56 Eden Street, Oamaru 9400, New Zealand
1931 – 1943“I grew up in this little house at 56 Eden Street, Oamaru, the third of five children of George and Lottie Frame. My father was a railway worker, and we had moved from town to town across Otago and Southland before settling here in 1931, when I was six. My mother had been a housemaid with Katherine Mansfield's family in Wellington; she wrote poems and sold them door to door, and she filled our crowded, poor and loving house with words, hymns and the belief that poetry mattered more than almost anything. Oamaru, with its white stone buildings, its harbour and its gardens, became my Kingdom by the Sea, as I later called it. We roamed the hills and gullies behind the house, the town's public gardens and the shore, and I began writing poems and stories in exercise books, reading everything I could find in the town library. Our childhood was also marked by sorrow: my brother suffered from epilepsy, and in 1937 my older sister Myrtle drowned at the town baths, a loss that shaped me deeply. Later, another sister, Isabel, was lost in the same way. I went to Oamaru North School and Waitaki Girls' High School, where my writing was encouraged, and in 1943 I left for teachers' training college in Dunedin. Years of hardship followed before I found my way as a writer, and I came to be known for novels such as Owls Do Cry, set in a town much like Oamaru, and for my autobiography, beginning with To the Is-land, which tells of my childhood here. The house at Eden Street is now cared for by the Janet Frame Eden Street Trust and open to visitors, who can see the small rooms where I first fell in love with words.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today