Graeme Lay and Thom Conroy have written about two figures in New Zealand’s colonial past: Captain James Cook, the inspiration for Lay’s recently completed fictional trilogy; and Ernst Dieffenbach, the free-spirited German appointed as surgeon and naturalist on the New Zealand Company’s ship “Tory”, who is at the heart of Conroy’s novel The Naturalist.The two writers discuss their leading men and the process of mutating fact into fiction with Catriona Ferguson.

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