THE LANDFALL REVIEW ONLINE

BENEATH THE POHUTAKAWA BLOSSOMS

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 20:52:00 +0000

MICHAEL MORRISSEY

Soon, by Charlotte Grimshaw, (Vintage, 2012), $37.99.

Charlotte Grimshaw's star has never glowed brighter. Here she is with four novels under her belt, plus two critically acclaimed short story collections. And over the course of her fiction, Simon Lampton, a successful Remuera surgeon, has become her perennial standout character. He appeared in earlier short stories, bloomed as a major character in The Night Book, and is once more in full focus.

Simon Lampton is portrayed as a hollow man: someone outwardly successful, a close friend of our shrewd and calculating Prime Minister, David Hallwright, but actually inwardly tormented by self-doubt and guilt. To a degree, this new book is a novel about politics, but politics is forbidden to be mentioned while the PM, like any proper New Zealander, enjoys his summer holiday. So, while politics may hover and occasionally intrude, Soon is more about families, friendship and the budding romance of Roza and Simon — plus David's ongoing secret affair with Mereana.

Whereas her previous novel, The Night Book, skillfully evoked a moody winter, Soon is set against a lazy pohutukawa-drenched summer, which seems rather too familiar, without actually feeling real. The idea that New Zealand is a part of Polynesia and therefore enjoys a tropical climate is a myth that regularly bewitches the national psyche. Travel brochures fail to mention that the appearance of the famous red blossom is short-lived. There is a hedonistic pagan relish to white-sanded beaches, curling waves, and so on, that has fooled more than one visitor into imagining that Aotearoa is in Tahitian latitudes. Depending on circumstance and personality, the New Zealand summer can be very lazy indeed, or full of a prim athletic vigour – tramping, surfing, spear fishing. Soon opts for the former, though it appears, alas, that the laidback summer mood has affected the author’s prose style, for this new fiction lacks the felicitously written delights of Grimshaw's previous novel and collections of short stories. I find myself longing for some large political crisis that would rouse narrative or dramatic adrenalin, but there is only one relatively minor political incident. However, personal crises abound for the Lamptons, and these successfully sustain interest.

The emotional lynch pin of the novel turns on a clash of wills between Roza, the PM's second and glamorous wife, and Karen, Simon Lampton's wife, over who will have custody of Elke. The open scandal, so to speak, is that Roza gave birth to Elke when just sixteen and adopted her out to Karen. The women are in constant proximity because of the deep friendship between David Hallwright and Simon Lampton: another leitmotif in the novel. Prime Minister Hallwright confides to Simon: ‘What I like about you is that you're not political. You're like Roza, hopelessly apolitical. Your mind's on other things. That's so refreshing for me.’ Ironically, Hallwright believes he has what kings and presidents throughout history have wanted (apart, that is, from the necessary band of flatterers), namely a friend who is honest, someone who is not using the relationship for ulterior motives. But of course Simon's friendship is not as pure as the PM believes.

The seemingly confident Lampton is in reality an Auckland idol with feet of clay: a privileged member of the professional class who lives in fear of public scandal. He is portrayed as being more worried about his friendship with the Prime Minister than about the emotional well being of his foster child.

Another crisis looms when an investigative journalist, one Arthur Weeks, pokes his nose into the doctor’s relationship with Mereana, the Greek-Maori beauty. Their passionate connection was fully recorded in Grimshaw's previous novel The Night Book. Weeks is the kind of snapping-at-ankles journalist — an assiduous contributor to Metro and North and South — dreaded by the respectably rich or famous who have skeletons rattling in their closets. Plot spoiler looming ....When Lampton accidentally kills Weeks, he is technically innocent, but riven with guilt. In a deft twist, Weeks was writing a screenplay about the PM, a fact that Lampton is able to use to avert suspicion falling on him regarding Weeks' investigation of his relationship with Mereana.

Two other strands of the plot await full resolution. There is a simmering attraction between Roza and Simon Lampton. They got as far as touching hands in The Night Book, and now it moves to a single kiss. With admirable Regency novel restraint, Grimshaw has kept this tease going for two novels, and one supposes that another novel will be required to fully explore what surely must eventuate: a full-on affair. Again, using cliffhanger techniques, Grimshaw has Mereana briefly resurface at the end of the novel. Hence, Soon casts some loose ends to be picked up in a future book.

Several other prominent figures in search of eminence populate the novel's pages. There is booze baron Peter Gibson, vulgar, overweight, lecherous: a little too easy to dislike — a caricature, one feels, and unworthy of the book's deeper intentions, or higher purpose. And two other dislikeable gents make notable appearances. There is The Cock, in reality the PM's hatchet man, the go-to guy who fixes things that are politically loaded. Cahane is a formidable and unflappable fellow, with degrees from Harvard and Auckland University, who is described as having ‘extraordinary financial prescience’; he’s someone who sells unpopular policies through ‘hypnotic blandness’, which sounds like a number of our current politicians. His special gift is an ability to create 'a mood for change', that is ‘manipulating the public into the very measures he and David had planned to foist on them all along.’ So, he is cut from the cloth of a demagogue, abusing the democracy which allows him the freedom to operate and hence encouraging sideline analysts to view the business of politics with a cynical eye. However, his modus operandi are disappointingly not fully visible in Soon. We are told about his skills, not shown them in action.

In the background is Ed Miles, the mildly sinister Minister of Police, along with the bitterly left-wing Ford, brother of Simon, who is the only dissident voice offering criticism of the PM's social engineering. His raging diatribes against the ‘lazy little shit’ (Simon) and Hallwright's mean-minded policies have a more than familiar sound. There is a tired shrillness to his attacks that may be a flirtation with the parodic on Grimshaw's part, or alternatively, he is the author's flat-out mouthpiece — take your pick. In fact, Simon is more right wing that he would like to admit. What is presumably an authorial assessment of his character is none-too-flattering: ‘Simon's lack of politics was really politics of a basic kind. I am one of those who want poverty to exist so we can affirm our own sense of well-being.’ When the PM speaks of the success that flow from aspiration, he has in mind people like Simon, who has an over-entitled, almost narcissistic, sense of his own success which Grimshaw is at pains to underpin with his moral lapses, the full consequences of which are yet to be explored.

Grimshaw's skill with dialogue varies. At times, it has a kind of dogged realism that is dangerously close to banality, as when a character is described as ‘amazing’ with the adjective occurring four times in as many lines. Lifelike though this may be, it’s humdrum: it doesn't advance revelation of a character to any degree, which dialogue should do. Like many New Zealand writers, Grimshaw uses short bursts of dialogue much of the time — the neo-Sargesonian assumption being that New Zealanders don't overly extend themselves in speech. There is a selective truth to this; it tends not to be the case for the more educated city-dweller. In contrast to a truncated mode of conversation, here is Simon working on Karen to swing her around to accepting Elke's shifting to the Hallwright household:

‘Elke's eighteen. She'll be wanting novelty, experience, travel, all that. The next thing she'll do is find a flat with five thousand of her closest friends. On the other hand, if she moves in with the Hallwrights, we''ll keep her close. All we have to do is maintain our friendship with them. And you don't really want to give that up, do you? There's a lot to look forward to. That ball you and Roza are working on, the fundraising thing with Trish Ellison. The other thing, for the children's hospital. All that work'll go to waste if you cut Roza off, the effort'll be for nothing…’

This smooth, manipulative patter shows how far Simon has fallen morally. Perhaps he even believes his own emotional rhetoric. What's really at stake for him is maintaining his friendship with the PM. Here Grimshaw shows off her talent for revealing a character's hidden agenda. It would have been a welcome expansion of the novel to see more of this type of extended dialogue in dramatic interaction. One yearns for a bigger, broader canvas, a more ambitiously complex plot that shifts the point of view to more characters, that darts between more characters. Arguably, she is over-confident with her material and lets it drift all too easily. But Simon's confession to his brother Ford lifts the adrenalin near the book's conclusion. Soon is a thriller manqué that doesn't quite become a thriller.

I've left a tasty morsel till last. Improbably and therefore delightfully, Roza turns out to have a vivid imagination which she uses to invent an ongoing fantasy story for her young boy. The extracts which appear at regular intervals involve a number of fantastic and colourfully named characters like Starfish, Green Lady, Red Herring and the Oort Cloud's Wife. Ingenious, lively, provocative and teasingly fragmentary, they sound a new note in Grimshaw's writing. Right now the reader doesn’t know what it portends for future work, but to use her keynote motif, I'm sure we will find out: Soon.

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MICHAEL MORRISSEY is an Auckland novelist, short-story writer, poet and anthologist. His recent books include the memoir Taming the Tiger, the poetry collection Memory Gene Pool (Cold Hub Press), and the novel Tropic of Skorpeo (Steam Press).

CLOTHES IN A DRIER

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 20:50:00 +0000

TASHA HAINES

Traces of Red, by Paddy Richardson (Penguin, 2011), 324 pp., $30.

I discovered the wonderful term extruded book product while flicking around in Google, apropos some background material for this review. It sounds like some sort of literary sausage meat — but I was getting slightly off-track and beguiled by the slurry of pulp fiction tropes that lead me eventually to deciding that Traces of Red by Paddy Richardson is a Roman de Gare – which is the much nicer-sounding French equivalent to that less-than-salubrious moniker, ‘Airport Novel’.

Traces of Red aspires to the likes of such Airport Fictionistas as Dan Brown, Jodi Picoult, John Grisham: lucrative writing machines all, and very clever at what they do, if you like that sort of thing. And Paddy Richardson herself is a well-regarded Dunedin-based writer and teacher of writing who has earned recognition for collections of short stories and various novels. But as to the appeal of Traces of Red… well chacun à son goût, as they who read romans de gare might say.

Paddy Richardson’s latest book is touted in Penguin’s media release as being ‘psychological crime fiction at its best’, but there was absolutely no psychological complexity or useful tension between the protagonist Rebecca Thorne and the antagonist Connor Bligh (an oddly piratey name). It was as if all the good raw material that the author had acquired only got as far as flopping proverbially around in one of those glass-fronted Laundromat dryers; while I (the reader) came and went, read a newspaper, went to get a coffee, needing only to give the story half a mind’s worth of attention while it kept going full of indistinct colour and texture with as much sense and interest as, well, clothes in a drier.

There is obviously a demand for this sort of novel, as testified to by the immense wealth of some of the Airport Authors of the world, pumping out their tales of Las Vegas swimming pools, espionage, and illicit affairs. But for me this book has no traction, nothing to hook into, nothing to care about – which is majorly disappointing in a book dubbed a psychological thriller.

At the end of the story I still don’t care about or know Rebecca the jaded (though still young) journalist, who finds her stride scouting around in the archives and life of Connor Bligh, a convicted triple murderer with looks and mannerisms vaguely reminiscent of David Bain (apart from the bit about Connor being good looking). Rebecca stays flat, remote, and dull throughout, despite undergoing some life-changing events, such as the end of an affair, the termination of her job, family conflict, starting a new job, meeting and struggling with an imprisoned criminal; then hunting for supporters of said criminal and being abused by detractors, etcetera. It would change most people, and if it didn’t then the lack of change in response to obvious catalysts would augur an important narrative strand in itself.

Connor Bligh, convicted murderer and brilliant manipulator, is the most potentially interesting character in the book. I found myself beginning to care about whether he would be freed, and whether he had committed the murders, and whether he and Rebecca would fall in love... I began looking forward to getting to that necessary climax. But complications came and went, and resolutions were glossed over during Rebecca’s walks on the windy beach below her cliff top house and her ubiquitous wine and DVD sessions, and I felt fobbed off and led on by the promise of something juicy which was never delivered.

The characters Rebecca, Connor, Katy, and Angela would each have had great turmoil, torment, and fear in their lives, but the conflict of their circumstances isn’t paid-out by the author. For example: Katy, who sees her mother, father, and brother’s slain bodies strewn around the family home in the first scene, manages to go off to law school and to run her own house and supervise her flatmates (as we find out near the end), which seems rather implausible unless tempered by a drug problem or penchant for torturing small furry animals—but no, there’s nothing like that. And Angela who had virtually no mother, a crappy father, and her weird little brother Connor to look after, is portrayed for the most part as being only mildly maladjusted (seeking refuge in the arms and bed of the town’s most popular boy).

But then suddenly there is that other thing… I’ll have to come out and say it (spoiler alert): Angela and Connor didn’t just cuddle-up with their clothes on if you know what I mean. But this is sprung on us at the end of the book, and has no precedent in the novel, other than that one time where there was a small hint of something recounted in one of Connor’s letters to Rebecca…. I will try to avoid further spoilers.

The first chapter is Katy’s; it is the only chapter not written from Rebecca’s point of view or featuring Connor’s letters to Rebecca. And it sets up an expectation that Katy (and the effect on Katy of seeing the murdered bodies of her family) will drive the story forward. So her situation remains a nagging question in the back of my mind after she disappears from the story, and I hoped in vain that the loose ends involving Katy’s trauma would eventually be nicely tied-up.

Connor’s point of view delivered in his many letters to Rebecca is enervatingly prosaic for someone who is supposed to be an outsider science genius who is also very good at volleyball, guitar, and house renovations! His voice should vary markedly from Rebecca’s, but he doesn’t differ enough to create the necessary poignant distinction between types. Rebecca’s voice is believable enough as the go-getter journo; but when she should be expressing fear or vulnerability she is simply ‘put to bed’ by the author with a bottle of wine and a DVD until her ruthless journo self is ready for more action. And so a great deal of psychological depth is thus avoided.

Joe Fahey, Rebecca’s married lover and also Connor’s lawyer, has the most plausible dimension of any character in the book: it is easy to empathise with his difficult situation (sick wife, high profile lover who is now interfering in his professional world), but we don’t get to know him well because he’s only a ‘prop’ character. And even though coincidences are a mainstay of fiction, for Rebecca to have the Connor Bligh case suggested to her as a potential documentary topic by her brother, only to find out that her boyfriend is Connor’s lawyer, is groaningly convenient. And then, on top of that, Joe’s sick wife turns out to be a colleague of Rebecca’s mother (lawyers a-plenty here). Crikey. And by the time I got to the incest bit, I wanted to donate the book immediately to my two-year-old to work on it with her safety-scissors, crayons, paint, and stickers (she can’t read).

All the way along, Connor is portrayed as the genius: he is crafty and seems far too clever for anyone else to figure out, and I naturally read that as having something important to do with how it would all pan out: there would be an ingenious twist, a previously unseen angle, a shocking revelation hinted at through the many clues that seem to pepper the story—but there was nothing like that, not even the incest bit amounts to anything other than a sad and obvious end. And even Connor’s intelligence turns out to have a dubious quality as he comes to a dreary ‘dead end’, pardon the inevitable pun. How bright was he to try and kill his rescuer the very night he gets out of prison?! How bright was he to fail at that? Is the book suddenly making a point about ‘brilliance’? I doubt it. Perhaps it’s turning the previously established idea that ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover’ on its head? Nah. At the end (partial spoiler coming up), after spending the whole book feeling hopeful for the redemption of Connor the misfit, I was suddenly and abruptly informed that I shouldn’t do that because he’s nothing more or less than a psychotic murderer who got too close to his sister. It is a letdown — boring, and more than a little annoying.

And the ‘clue’ that Katy hadn’t been killed along with her family, and that the murderer walked around the house looking for her (there were bloody footprints) clung on until the end: would he get her too? Katy’s is the first P.O.V in the novel; she is the only ‘survivor’ of the original tragedy, so she would surely be pivotal to the outcome. After all, an ending is most gratifying and natural when it has been encoded at the beginning.
Katy gathered good impetus in her absence from the story as it unfolded — up to a point — and I wondered with actual interest about the timing and manner of her grand return maybe she could murder Connor to get even and then we could find out that he was a saint who had been so awfully wronged … or something. But there was nothing grand or overly revealing about what happened, so that Katy’s inconsequential characterisation felt like yet another missed opportunity.

And finally, Rebecca’s rapidly unfolded though calmly played endgame was just too level-headed and cool considering that she had only very recently discovered how wrong she had been about Connor. It would have been more consistent for her to have taken the problem to bed with more wine and a DVD, rather than tackling Connor Bligh as if she had been suddenly possessed by the spirit of James Bond. In the end, I couldn’t help thinking that this novel might have been more interesting as Katy’s story and not Rebecca’s. Katy had more at stake than anyone else, as hers was the only life and sanity ever truly hanging in the balance.

TASHA HAINES has a Master of Fine Arts in Fine Arts from Elam at the University of Auckland. Formerly a lecturer in fine arts and design in Melbourne, she is now a writer, reviewer and tutor living in Wellington.

DOCTOR, I LIKE YOUR NUCLEAR MEDICINE

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 19:30:00 +0000

MARTIN EDMOND

Mad on Radium: New Zealand in the Atomic Age, by Rebecca Priestley (AUP, 2012), 284 pp., $45.00.

In December 1923 Ernest Rutherford sent, from England, a cable to Wellington Hospital confirming that the price they were intending to pay for a single gram of radium was a fair one. When the hospital authorities, on the basis of this advice, decided to go ahead with the purchase, Rutherford personally selected the gram from Radium Belge of London (it probably came from the Belgian Congo) and it arrived in New Zealand the following year, along with a certificate of authentication signed by no less a person than Marie Skłodowska-Curie. The gram was kept in the basement of the hospital, where radon gas emanating from it was collected, sealed into tiny glass tubes, enclosed in suitable adaptors and sent, with platinum seeds and needles, throughout the country for use in cancer treatments.

If this seems early for an enthusiasm for nuclear medicine, it is; but such a use of radon gas was not the earliest, nor the only, symptom of the craze. There had been, since 1914, radium baths in the resort town of Rotorua; and there Arthur Wohlmann, the balneologist responsible for government owned spas at Te Aroha and Hamner Springs as well as those in Rotorua, was a passionate proponent of the health benefits, not just of bathing in irradiated water, but for drinking it as well. Four to six small glasses a day, he said, were effective in the treatment of gout, diabetes, constipation, for the soothing of jangled nerves and even, or so the press improbably reported, the tightening of loose teeth. Wohlmann wasn’t a quack; he was a medical doctor and scientist, working at the cutting edge of new and exciting medical technology.

Rebecca Priestley, author of Mad on Radium: New Zealand in the Atomic Age, begins her excellent and highly entertaining account of the progress of the radium enthusiasm with the story of Dr. Wohlmann and follows it through the twentieth century until the nation’s adoption of a bipartisan nuclear free policy in the 1980s and 90s; her intent is, on the one hand, simply to tell the tale—which she does with clarity and an impressive amount of detail—and on the other to ask if there is any clue as to why New Zealand, of all places, should have become one of the first and few countries on earth to take such an uncompromising stand against the wilder uses of the energy released by the splitting of the atom?

Of course, as everyone knows, it was Rutherford, the boy from Brightwater, Nelson, who split the atom in the first place and that alone, even without his overseeing of the progress of nuclear science in his own country, makes the subject one which many New Zealanders feel they have a special relationship with (see Alan Brunton’s Moonshine); perhaps in the same way some may have a faintly proprietorial feeling towards the mountain, Everest, that another favoured son (allegedly) was the first to climb. Rutherford did not ever return to his home country to live but he did despatch one of his acolytes in his place and this man, another Ernest, Marsden, is a major character in Ms Priestley’s book.

Marsden, a student of Rutherford’s at the University of Manchester was, on ER’s recommendation, appointed in 1915 professor of physics at Victoria University College in Wellington; in 1926 he became the first permanent secretary at the then brand new Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, the DSIR, a position he held for more than twenty years; during which time he championed the development of nuclear sciences in New Zealand. The initial focus of the DSIR was not upon nuclear science but upon agriculture; but Marsden, a restless, energetic and meddlesome man, with a powerful desire to play a part on the world stage, did not let that restrict his activities.

It’s fascinating to read, in the middle part of the book, about the struggle between Marsden and his successor at the DSIR, Bill Hamilton, over the direction research should take in the 1950s and 60s. Hamilton, a dour man, lacking Marsden’s volatility and charisma, nevertheless held strong to a belief that the country’s best interests lay in the development of its agriculture, and that it did not need nuclear reactors so long as there were enough sources of energy elsewhere; while Marsden continued strenuously to advocate whatever the latest nuclear fashion in the larger world might have been.

It isn’t the case that Marsden acted alone, or that he lacked supporters. At all times, right up to and even beyond the discovery in the late 1960s of the Maui gas fields off Taranaki, the possibility that New Zealand would build nuclear reactors to generate electricity did, as they say in Parliament, lie upon the table. It’s sobering to look at the map reproduced here, showing twenty possible sites, north of Auckland, on both coasts, where such a station might be built; and in the event two actual places, Oyster Point on the interior south western shore of the Kaipara Harbour, and South Head at its tip, were identified as viable locations for such a plant.

This was in the mid to late 1960s, when the intent was to use the power so generated to feed the growing appetite for electricity in the city of Auckland; others, including Hamilton, supported an alternative plan, which was adopted, of laying a cable across Cook Strait and thereby bringing hydro-electric power north from the various schemes in the South Island. There were costs to the environment (I nearly wrote ‘landscape’) incurred in the building of those dams; yet imagine if we now had an aging nuclear reactor leaking, as it likely would be, radioactivity into the Kaipara?

This is a comprehensive and meticulously researched book, developed from the author’s PhD thesis at Rutherford’s alma mater, the University of Canterbury at Christchurch. It includes a particularly good summary of the testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific by the US, the UK and France, with comprehensive logs of all such explosions. New Zealand’s close relationship with the UK nuclear industry, both for military and so-called peaceful purposes, is a focus throughout: it is alarming to read that there were once plans to detonate British bombs on New Zealand’s sub-Antarctic Antipodes Islands; or in the Kermadecs; and of the planned use of the thermal bores at Wairaki in the manufacture of heavy water for use in reactors here, in Australia or in the UK.

New Zealand’s even closer relationship with Australia on nuclear matters is explored in depth, as is the steady brain drain of New Zealand born scientists overseas, to work in Australia, Canada, the UK and, particularly during the earlier stages of the Manhattan Project, in the US too. A New Zealander, Charles Watson-Munro, who had been on nuclear reactor projects (ZEEP and GLEEP respectively) in Canada and the UK, became in 1955 head of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission and oversaw the construction there of the heavy water moderated, uranium enriched research reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney—still the sole facility of its kind in Australasia.

One of the physicists who remained home was Jim McCahon, an important contributor to Priestley’s research. McCahon as a young man took part, in the mid-1940s, in two survey voyages prospecting for uranium up and down the West Coast of the South Island on the evocatively named New Golden Hind; in one of the many fine photographs in the book he’s shown on board ship with a number of others, including Minister of Works Bob Semple wearing an elegant linen suit and a Homburg hat. The New Golden Hind found traces of the element in beach sand but not in large enough quantities to be commercially viable. Later, in the 1950s, deposits were discovered in Westland, setting off a uranium rush which didn’t, however, in the end lead to the uncovering of any exploitable deposits either.

Jim McCahon, though Ms Priestley doesn’t say so, was the younger brother of painter Colin McCahon; both men in their later years became actively anti-nuclear in their sentiments; Colin expressing his feelings in paint and Jim more directly: he was the radiation safety officer on HMNZS Otago when the frigate was sent in 1973 to Mururoa Atoll to monitor the French testing there, and felt he was one of the few on board who, rather than just dutifully following government orders, actively showed his opposition to those sinister experiments. The mushroom cloud was, he wrote, as if describing one of his brother’s Muriwai paintings, a tall spindly stem with a flattened bob on top, a reddish brown colour against the surrounding white clouds.

Perhaps the most salutary thing about this book is the way it shows that twentieth century New Zealand government decisions about nuclear issues, both military and commercial, were nearly always taken, not on principle, but for pragmatic reasons. We are not, it turns out, a people wedded in our souls to benign usage of potentially lethal technologies, nor do we oppose such things out of some kind of innate moral purity; rather the reason we—or should I say our leaders—have not adopted these technologies is simply because we have not needed them. This is not to say that a pragmatic approach is wrong: it is pragmatism, precisely, that underlies our refusal to allow nuclear weapons, and nuclear powered ships, to moor in our harbours and sail our waters.

Equally, if it does become necessary in some decision-maker’s mind to build nuclear power stations in New Zealand, chances are the attempt will be made so to do. When I was at school in the late 1950s and early 1960s we were taught, and believed, that such a step was not just desirable, it was inevitable. Today’s children may be taught the opposite; and it could seem that the nuclear-free ethos is now so deeply embedded in the New Zealand psyche that it is somehow permanently there. This book shows how times can and do change and that, in matters nuclear, as in other fields, the price of liberty is, indeed, eternal vigilance.

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MARTIN EDMOND is a New Zealand-born writer who lives in Sydney. His books include: Dark Night: Walking with McCahon (Auckland University Press, 2011); Zone of the Marvellous: In Search of the Antipodes (Auckland University Press, 2009); and The Supply Party: Ludwig Becker on the Burke and Wills Expedition (East Street Publications, 2009).

WE’D BETTER SOUND AS IF WE CARE

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 19:29:00 +0000

EMILY BRAUNSTEIN BROOKES

Risk, by CK Stead (MacLehose, 2012) 266 pp. $29.99

The back cover blurb for C.K. Stead’s latest novel, Risk, describes it as a ‘novel of our times’ and Stead, in his eightieth year, hits all of the major points of what has certainly been so far the most defining decade in a generation. The story begins in 2002, New York’s twin towers recently fallen, and proceeds to take in the likes of the invasion of Iraq and all of its messy consequences, the 7/7 bombings in London, and the assassination of Saddam Hussein.

Then of course there is the coming financial crisis. Risk’s protagonist, Sam Nola, is a middle-aged New Zealander who as the novel opens has, fresh from a divorce, recently moved to London, the city where he had a two-year OE in the late 70s. Sam is a commercial lawyer, and as soon as we discover that his return to London has brought with it a lucrative job in a fictional investment bank, the events of late 2008 loom large and ominous over the novel. There is some presaging element of fiddling while Rome burns about Risk, with banking bosses amassing more and more wealth and Sam rising almost accidentally up the ranks while being the only character to feel occasional anticipatory pangs of disquiet.

Stead gets the mechanics right, cutting his main character loose and plunking him in the hubristic, arrogantly optimistic environment that was London’s financial sector in 2002. He also gives Sam’s personal life a twist, presenting him with an adult daughter that he never knew he had, the offspring of an affair with a French woman when he was in London as a young man. As Sam receives huge yearly bonuses (‘Not enough?’ his boss asks when Sam expresses shock at £50,000) while weapons inspectors head into Baghdad, the reader sees the dark clouds gathering and awaits the inevitable storm to throw Sam and his comfortable life into disarray.

But the storm never quite arrives for him, and the book is worse off for it. We expect Sam to be a particular trope, the character who in having their life overturned by real historical events essentially stands in for humanity itself. This trope exists because it is such an effective way of assessing and contextualizing the past.

Sam’s life, however, seems charmed throughout the book. Things come very, very easily to him. He builds a relationship with his surprise daughter with seemingly no bouts of anger, doubt or even awkwardness; his long-term affair with a married woman is conducted entirely without self-reflection, jealousy or unease from either party; and for that matter women, from a distant cousin to a young engaged colleague to a Swedish prostitute to a famous London actress, are irresistibly drawn to a sexual charisma that isn’t quite obvious on the page. Plenty happens to Sam, certainly – Stead sends him all over the place, from London to Zagreb and then the Croatian coastal towns of Rijeka and Zadar, to New York, Oxford, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm and the South of France. He gets to know members of his father’s Croatian family, reconnects with his old French flame, meets a mysterious Hungarian man who may want to give Sam access to millions of dollars. His ex-wife shacks up with a former friend; people close to him die; his first grandchild is born. But while we know because Stead tells so us that Sam has emotional responses to these things, they don’t have any real effect in narrative terms. Instead of getting swept up and steered off course by the events around him, Sam remains calm, orderly and satisfied. He experiences no real angst, no real fear, no real regret. His life is one of easy resolutions and complacencies.

Take, for example, this reaction to not embarking on a potential love affair: ‘He reproached himself. But there was also a feeling of relief that he hadn’t embarrassed himself, or her, and that he was, after all, still more or less in charge of his own ship.’ Such a scene is typical of the novel’s frustrations – given a moment that is ripe with potential torment and drama, that could be used to move the character and story forward, Stead chooses to allow his protagonist to slip away unchallenged and unchanged. It’s the novelistic equivalent of introducing a gun in the first act: if a situation with strong potential for character development is introduced, it should be used to its potential.

Giving Sam a career in banking is another narrational red herring, thwarting our expectations. When the financial institution for which he works experiences its spectacular and inevitable disintegration, Sam is accepting to the point of being blasé. As the novel ends, Sam’s life is arguably better than when it began, which would be satisfying if he had overcome obstacles to get to that point, but in this case it is rather the result of what just happens to happen to him. Sam’s lucky, perhaps, which also means not particularly interesting as a character.

Happily for the reader, Sam has a number of people in his life who are less lucky than him. There are points at which the narrative switches to another’s point of view, though they are sporadic, and we yearn for more of them. The most frequent and intriguing of the non-Sam POVs is that of Tom. Tom is the stuff that strong central characters are made from: a reluctant trader who is nonetheless (and to his personal shame) rather attached to the lifestyle this career has afforded him, Tom writes poetry in the dead of night – gifting us, by the by, with the pleasure of original Stead poetry woven into the prose – and struggles to keep a grip on both his family and his health. He is challenged, conflicted and unpredictable. And just when we dare to hope that things might be going his way, the events of the times catch up with him, so that we are left wondering what the outcome will be.

Tom is no fluke. Risk is peppered with interesting (if lamentably peripheral) characters, the types that sour old friendships by debating the relative merits of the invasion of Iraq, that wrestle with addiction, that contemplate suicide. They question their life choices and struggle to find their place in the world – sometimes failing. One short, haunting passage imagines the final moments in the life of David Kelly, the whistle-blower who alerted the press to the ‘sexed up’ nature of Tony Blair’s Iraq dossier and whose subsequent unmasking and televised appearance before an aggressive select committee led to his suicide: ‘He felt weary, bitter, embarrassed, disillusioned – and beyond all of that, he felt something deep like grief,’ Stead writes. ‘He wished for unconsciousness. He was glad to be dying.’ Shortly after comes a scene conceiving of the moment when Tony Blair heard of Kelly’s death. ‘“Just write me a few words about Kelly,’” Stead imagines he may have said to Alistair Campbell (‘Al’). ‘“Nice and neutral, you know? We’d better sound as if we care.’”

That C.K. Stead is an outstanding technical writer goes almost without saying (‘almost’ because say it I shall in order to reaffirm it), and Risk is an undeniably readable novel. Stead’s economy of phrasing and clear, orderly syntax brings a narrative briskness that is immensely enjoyable and well suited to the novel’s setting. So firm and confident is the author’s grip on language that his repeated idiosyncrasies include a liberal approach to the passive voice that might make the blood of many an English teacher run cold, but here injects real buoyancy to the writing.

Moreover he knows that whereof he writes. Sam’s North London haunts and the towers of Canary Wharf where he spends his days are realistically evoked, and Stead equally captures Stockholm’s mix of freeze and coziness, the lavender scent that rolls off the hills of Provence, and the like, with the accuracy of someone who either knows these places well or whose meticulous research lends them the voice of a local inhabitant, rather than the air of a guidebook. The novel is rich with erudition, as characters exchange snatches of poetry or trill off bursts of opera at regular intervals; and Stead is able to describe the mechanics of what has led to the financial crisis so clearly that he could cause a financial journalist to blush.

But this is fundamentally what is wrong with Risk, too. Stead knows his subject matter and his control over the writing is unwavering. Yet that isn’t enough to give his book a solid emotional core, or to prompt readers to engage with or reflect upon the events within. A novel that captures its time cannot succeed on research and factual accuracy alone – as readers we require some sort of conduit to steer us through the story, to be touched and provoked as we may have been. We need, again, some representative figure to be buffeted about by the storm. These characters exist in Risk, but are too few and underused. Instead, Stead presents us with a leaden lead character who is outside of the storm, or in fact perhaps too squarely in the eye of it, calm and unaffected while chaos rages around him. Risk is an enjoyable enough book, but also curiously emotionally flat, ending up as a disservice to both its author’s innumerable talents and the rich potential of its setting.

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EMILY BRAUNSTEIN BROOKES is a graduate of Victoria University of Wellington and a former editor of Salient. Her reviews have appeared in the Dominion Post, the Listener and the Times Literary Supplement. She currently lives and works in Paris.

CIVILISATION VERSUS CULTURE

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 19:26:00 +0000

MICHAEL O’LEARY

A Savage Country: The Untold Story of New Zealand in the 1820s, by Paul Moon (Penguin Books, Auckland, 2012)

‘[the historian’s] work at best is the provisional creation of a pioneer’ – F.W. Deakin

‘Nothing but experience could evince the frequency of fake information … which is afterwards incorrectly diffused by successive relators’ – Dr Johnson

These two observations above, the first by a British twentieth century historian and soldier, the second by the eighteenth century English poet, critic and dictionary-maker, point to something of the ambivalences I find inherent in the prolific Paul Moon’s latest publication. Moon has previously written the best-selling Fatal Frontiers – a history of New Zealand in the 1830s. A Savage Country is his latest book and covers the decade prior to Fatal Frontiers. In addition to writing such books, Moon is also a frequent contributor to national and international academic journals on a variety of history-related topics.

In this new chronicle, A Savage Country, Professor Moon certainly is attempting to invoke the ‘creation of the pioneer’ by telling the story of the early Pakeha incursions into the new found land of Aotearoa. But in doing so he is following Dr Johnson’s prescription by becoming one of the ‘successive relators’ of this historical period, the decade of the 1820s, a time that Moon himself acknowledges as being scarce in documented evidence. In his introduction he states ‘documentary record relating to New Zealand in the 1820s is so irregular in both quantity and scope that it excludes any comprehensive narrative of the period’. This raises the primary question of how much invention he has managed to spin out of fact, and the secondary question of whether he has made his biases clear enough.

To begin at the beginning, one of the main issues I have with Moon’s book is the title, ‘A Savage Country’. It is taken from a statement by Augustus Earle who wrote in 1827: ‘there was no touch of human sympathy, such as we “of the World” feel at receiving an Englishman under our roof in such a savage country as this!’ With these words Earle expresses all the distance and difference he feels as a ‘civilized’ European coming into contact with the ‘savages’ of Aotearoa. To implicitly endorse this remark by taking his title from it, seemingly without irony, jars with Moon’s own admission that ‘European portrayals of Māori throughout the nineteenth century can sometimes reveal as much about the authors who penned them as the subjects of their observations’.

Elsewhere, he describes the experiences of the French adventurer, Duperrey, who noted that while Māori people can be seen as cruel and blood-thirsty towards their enemies they are also ‘capable of the tenderest feelings’. What the English and the French experience as civilized is therefore a subjective thing, a confirmation of relativism, if both Earle and Duperrey are to be believed, even as they contradict one another, with two different philosophical approaches: ‘civilisation’ versus a different cultural world view. Duperrey, for example also criticizes the ‘tricks which European have so often played on New Zealanders, the shameful manner in which the good faith of these men [note, not savages] has been betrayed by whalers, have made them deeply suspicious in conducting business’.

In choosing the title A Savage Country, Moon is continuing the ‘frequency of fake information’ thesis along a historically loaded line (promulgated by early colonial historians Governor George Grey and S. Percy Smith) in implying that Māori society was somehow lesser and more barbarous than the Europeans who have civilized the rest of the ‘known world’. In Chapter Four there is a further very telling quotation from Captain William Edwardson, skipper of the sloop Snapper, who had been sent to New Zealand on a fact-finding mission by the New South Wales’ Government in 1822. Edwardson’s observations on Māori life in the South Island include the following: ‘these people, in their savage state, are treacherous, cunning and vindictive and push their vices to extremes … they are cannibals to the full extent of the word … Addicted alike to theft and lying they live in a state of perpetual mistrust … War is the ruling passion of these pillage-loving tribes’. Edwardson is implying that this state of affairs is somehow peculiar to the ‘savages’ of New Zealand. Yet, if we take even a cursory look at the European internecine conflicts happening at the time of the 1820s we can note that Māori war culture was far from unique or necessarily more blood-thirsty; after all, it was only five years previous to 1820 that the devastating pillage and barbarism of the Napoleonic wars that had raged across Europe finally ended.

Throughout the decade covered by A Savage Country there was much warfare, some of it genocidal, taking place in European centres or their colonies. Wars in Spain and the Ottoman Empire, the Russo-Persian War, Greece’s War for Independence, the Franco-Trarzan War, plus various wars waged by Native American tribes against the invading palefaces, as well as wars throughout South America and the Far East — such as the Java and the Padri Wars against the Dutch. My point is that the Māori way of life was no more or less war-like than that of most of the so-called civilized nations. Also, try convincing an Irish person of the time how ‘we “of the World” feel at receiving an Englishman under our roof’ would give a great feeling of security and civilized bonhomie.

Moon’s prejudices have been often noted and challenged by other historians. For example, in his 2001 biography of Ngā Puhi chief, Hone Heke, he raised controversy because of his treatment of Bishop Pompallier, whom Moon described as ‘seditious’ and ‘treasonous’. This view fellow-historian Michael King rejected as: ‘Absolute nonsense ... reflecting the anti-Catholic prejudices widespread among Protestant missionaries at the time’. It does appear that Dr Moon prefers to consistently promote an Anglophile point of view; he is, after all, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Of course, it was the introduction of new warfare technology by Europeans in the form of muskets that lead to some of the worst atrocities during the 1820s as inter-tribal wars became more about the ‘haves’ verses the ‘have-nots’: that is the triumph of those who had guns over those who didn’t, thus creating an in-balance of the traditional power structures built up over centuries of Māori history. Moon covers this mainly as an aspect of the burgeoning trade between Māori and Pakeha after contact had been more fully established in the 1820s. The musket conflicts have been dealt with more extensively by Ron Crosby in his 1999 book The Musket Wars - A History of Inter-Iwi Conflict 1806-45, as well as by Angela Ballara in her Taua: Musket Wars, Land Wars or Tikanga? Warfare in Maori Society in the Early Nineteenth Century, published in 2003. However, it must be admitted that, given that A Savage Country is a general overview covering a particular decade, Moon’s coverage of the specific effects of the musket trade as a business practice at that time is illuminating.

But this leads me on to another of Moon's favourite topics in early New Zealand history, namely cannibalism and mokomokai. In 2008 he wrote This Horrid Practice in which he discusses cannibalism amongst historical Māori, a book that sparked substantial criticism. It set off accusations that Moon was demonizing Māori people and their traditional culture, with some arguing that the book was ‘a return to Victorian values’ (although actually he was discussing pre-Victorian ideas and practices). In A Savage Country he returns to this contentious topic. It is interesting to observe that the European reaction of disgust during an alleged cannibalistic incident involving the crew of the Haweis, whose captain assumed that his men had been eaten by Māori attackers, and stated how he found his boat ‘covered with clotted blood and hair, where the unfortunate sufferers’ heads had been dashed to pieces’.

At the same time there is not the same human sympathy or empathy felt for the sufferers of mokomokai, a practice implicitly encouraged by unscrupulous European traders who would buy human heads for resale to rich collectors back in Europe, or to be studied as part of the developing academic discipline of anthropology. Such contextual differences were further continued when New Zealand became an English colony after 1840. For example, as I stated in a 2002 article about the actions of the new colonial administration, Rangitāne, the Crown and the Alienation of the Wairarapa ki Tamaki-nui-ā-Rua Rohe: ‘given the context of the time and the difference in culture, government officials tended to over simplify and vulgarize Māori customs and concepts’. Imagine how much more haphazardly and arrogantly this happened in the preceding decade of 1820.

My overall feeling, though, after reading A Savage Country, is that I am glad Dr Moon has taken the time and energy to write it, despite my misgivings about it occasionally appearing to be the hasty work of an academic who rushes to publish regularly as if to keep his name in print. For, despite too his own contentious statement that ‘documentary record relating to New Zealand in the 1820s is so irregular … that it excludes any comprehensive narrative of the period’, A Savage Country gives an intelligible overview of a period that not many people know much about, outside of academic and historical circles.

Indeed, I am prepared to declare Moon’s book an important general history of the era, outlining the early effects of the musket trade, the effects of disease, and the effects of Christianity and European culture generally, good and bad, on the Māori people and their culture at the time. It seeks to strike a populist note, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, when he wears his biases so visibly. Along with Michael King, James Belich, Ranginui Walker, Rory Sweetman, Bill Daker, Linda Smith and Charles Royal, Moon adds to the understanding of New Zealand’s early history, even if he does so at times provokingly; and, like his fellow-historians, he seeks to bring an awareness of this period to a wider audience.

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MICHAEL O'LEARY is a poet, writer and small press publisher who lives on the Kapiti Coast. He has a Doctorate in Philosophy from Victoria University of Wellington.

HOW TO EXPLAIN PHILOSOPHY

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 19:25:00 +0000

ANDREW PAUL WOOD

Fate & Philosophy: A Journey Through Life’s Great Questions, by Jim Flynn (Awa Press, 2012), 250 pp., $32.99.

If The Torchlight List of good books may be glossed as Emeritus Professor Jim Flynn’s genially Quixotic attempt to out-Bloom Harold Bloom’s magisterial Western Canon, then Flynn’s Fate & Philosophy: A Journey Through Life’s Great Questions could be described as a cross between Boethius’ The Consolations of Philosophy and some Alain de Botton pabulum mash-up for the masses. Flynn was Head of the Politics Department at the University of Otago for what seems like forever, has been profiled by Scientific American, and even campaigned to enter Parliament as an Alliance candidate for North Dunedin in 1993 and 1996. Apparently he has written a book of poetry too, somewhere along the line. Perhaps best known round the world for his research into IQ (The Flynn Effect is the proven continual increase in intelligence test scores internationally from circa 1930 to the present day), and the rather unfortunate misrepresentation put about by some dunderheads in the mainstream media that he was pro-eugenics, Flynn is no fool – though like Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane or Saint Thomas, he has doubted. As he says: ‘Today is my seventy-seventh birthday, so it has taken sixty-five years to replace Catholicism with a personal philosophy I can live with. This book is intended to give you a head start.’

Cheers mate, but I’d kinda worked that out for myself at my Catholic high school when I found myself disagreeing with the Church’s stance on contraception, homosexuality, women and rather a lot else, but thanks for the concern. That said, I didn’t particularly feel need to fill the vacuum left by one dogma with another. I’m a bit ad hoc that way.

Certainly Fate & Philosophy (Faith & Philosophy?) has its uses. It offers a very reasonable introduction to a few of of the problems and paradoxes of moral philosophy, but by no means is it a broad overview. Names whiz past like BMWs overtaking a Skoda on the autobahn, so that one gets the impression that it is assumed the reader will have some prior knowledge of the theories of the best of European thinkers: Plato, John Stuart Mill or Nietzsche – a dangerous assumption for a book intended for the local popular market. Names are dropped and schools of thought are alluded to in broad brushstrokes, but with very little in the way of historical or broader theoretical context until later in the book, if at all – which is actually somewhat frustrating, as one tries to orientate one’s self. Worse, he seems to swap sides in mid-flow, a confusing rhetorical flourish for the newbies this book is supposedly aimed at. Really, one would expect an experienced lecturer to know better.

And then there is the mysterious jabber encapsulated in text boxes, which are borderline incoherent – except I rather gather that Flynn really, really doesn’t like Jacques Derrida for being iffy about science; and he finds weaknesses in Ludwig Wittgenstein, which is pretty remarkable given the many brainiacs who haven’t managed to wrap their cerebella around Wittgenstein’s aphoristically dense writing at all — the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is hardly bedtime reading — though given the little digs Flynn makes about the eccentric Austrian, one can’t help but wonder if it is more the case that he just has no patience with the contrarian historical personage who stalked the halls of the University of Cambridge.

Another big negative is that one is left in no doubt that Flynn believes his interpretation of the live minefield of moral philosophy is the only one right and true one, which is somewhat absolutist. Flynn’s writing brooks no arguments and clearly comes from the perspective that everything is cut and dried in many areas (at least for Flynn), particularly in his rejection of moral objectivism and his tendency to get stuck into the religious whenever the opportunity avails itself (which is ironic given the weird photo of a woman wearing angel wings, climbing some stairs on the cover – what is that supposed to mean?). There is little discussion of alternative views or competing theories: for just one example, Flynn is openly dismissive of Compatibalists — the cool kids call it ‘soft determinism’ — the belief that free will and determinism are compatible ideas, not that Flynn really seems to state that as clearly as he might. Compatibilists believe free will has bugger-all to do with metaphysics. Courts of Law, for example, don’t need to invoke philosophy. So, basically, Flynn is saying the Stoics, Hume, Hobbes, and Schopenhauer were all talking out their arses.

In summary, from the outset we are bludgeoned with the World According to Flynn. The whole tone of the book strongly hints that while some of these questions have baffled the greatest minds for millennia, we are indeed blessed to live in the era of Flynn, who has solved many of the conundrums of the ages to his own satisfaction and now, generously, will explain them to us, or modestly state that he simply doesn’t know. Neither position is particularly helpful.

This air of smug pomposity is difficult to shake, but that being said, there is undoubtedly brilliance at work here. The logical deconstruction of racism in the chapter on the definition of goodness should be taught in schools; however his attempt to highlight the absurdity of nationalism in the same chapter — because, presumably, no one can love an abstraction like a nation — is less convincing, as is his chapter on the existence (or rather, lack thereof) of God. Personally I am agnostic leaning towards atheist, because while I believe the universe doesn’t need the existence of an invisible, white-bearded, thunderbolt-wielding, Bronze Age sky fairy to explain it, it is philosophically and scientifically and logically impossible to prove that the big ‘I AM’ exists, or indeed doesn’t exist, one way or another. To take a more adamantine position than that cannot be justified, and therefore I fail to see the point in including a whole chapter on the subject, except possibly to bait the God Botherers and those who frequent the assorted Jacuzzis of the Blood of The Lamb in all their variety. Confusingly, while Flynn rejects the existence of Jehovah-Yahweh-Allah-Brahma-SpongeBob SquarePants, he believes in the possibility of ‘the mystical experience’. I still don’t quite grasp that one.

I am also not entirely sure why the chapter on Free Will manages to completely gloss over neuro- and behavioural science except to mention they exist, when recent discoveries have shown fairly conclusively that Free Will is in part an illusion of brain chemistry and brain wiring – probably because this would smack of the sort of determinism and objectivism he regards as detrimental to humanity and the concept of the individual.

Anyway, Faith & Philosophy is apparently part of a planned trilogy, the final book being How to Improve Your Mind: 20 Keys to Unlock the Modern World. Again, surely such a tome is redundant: Daniel J. Boorstin crossed with Chicken Soup for the Soul? I can’t help but think that it’s a bit presumptuous to assume that the vast majority of adults living today, or indeed in the good old twentieth century, or the nineteenth (and so on), hadn’t worked out some sort of system for getting through modernity without going insane or becoming immoral, inhuman brutes. But to return to Fate & Philosophy, there were fascinating moments of intrigue and enlightenment, yet these were rather outnumbered by the unfascinating moments of groaning and flinching. I come away from my textual encounter with Fate & Philosophy knowing a damn sight more about Flynn’s specific Weltanschauung, but not measurably all that much more than I already knew I didn’t know about the book’s teaser questions of ‘What is good?’ ‘What is possible?’ ‘What exists?’

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ANDREW PAUL WOOD is a Christchurch-based writer, critic, art historian and translator. His current projects include a biography of the émigré Indo-Dutch artist Theo Schoon.

THE ARCHAEOLOGIST AND THE RUNNER

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 19:24:00 +0000

TIM UPPERTON

Graft, by Helen Heath (Victoria University Press, 2012) 79 pp., $28; A Man Runs Into A Woman, by Sarah Jane Barnett (Hue And Cry Press, 2012), 71 pp., $25.

Graft is a short but freighted word. In horticulture, it’s a shoot joined to the stock of an older plant; in medicine, it’s transplanted tissue. It’s also a deceit, a swindle, and the opposite: honest, hard labour. The etymology of the word goes back to Ancient Greek: graphein, to carve, to dig, to inscribe – to write. These various meanings surface and commingle in Helen Heath’s first collection of poems.

Poetry has always told lies as a means to getting at the truth: representation is always a distortion, an invention, a way of seeing rather than the thing seen. This is explicitly acknowledged in the third, final section of Heath’s collection, ‘Truth & Fiction’. Writing a poem, too, as anyone who has ever written one knows, is difficult work; part of the lie, as Yeats says in ‘Adam’s Curse,’ is in making it look easy:

I said: ‘A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.’

Or, as another speaker has it in the same poem:

‘To be born woman is to know –
Although they do not talk of it at school –
we must labour to be beautiful.’

Heath also conceals her craft, her graft, in poems that often concern work, and women working. The beauty of science is a recurring subject – the work that lies behind the discoveries, and the human cost. The physicist and chemist, Marie Curie, features here; so do the astronomer, Beatrice Tinsley, and the biophysicist Rosalind Franklin, both of whom were under-recognized for their scientific contributions, and died young. Science and poetry have often been pitted against each other, with scientists, on the one hand, dismissing poetry as an entertainment at best, and poets, on the other, perceiving science and reason as inimical to the imagination. William Blake’s Newton crouches at the bottom of the sea, dividing and divining the world: reason, to Blake, is so reductive as to be a kind of madness. Heath’s poems show reason and the imagination as complementary, not antithetical; in the poem that begins this book, Newton the scientist cannot distinguish between ‘the moment of first light / or the last of the night’s magic.’ The poet and the scientist may pursue different kinds of enquiry, but they are united by a sense of wonder at the way things are.

Among these science-oriented poems in the first section are poems cast as fairytales, and poems of a girl growing up — a young woman’s relationships with her father, her mother, and the loss of the latter. These have an insouciant, Plath-like sensibility, both playful and crystalline. The father is both idolized and found wanting (quoting Plath directly, one poem ends: ‘Daddy, you do not do’). The dead, absent mother — the trope of so many fairytales — relates also to the women scientists mentioned above, who struggled in their personal and professional lives in the context of pervasive sexism: Tinsley, for instance, eventually left her husband and children to take up a position at Yale.

The second section of the book, ‘Ithaca,’ recalls in its title the birthplace of Ulysses and also Cavafy’s famous poem, ‘Ithaka.’ Both The Odyssey and Cavafy’s poem concern homecoming, only to find that home is not what one thought it was; the true home remains in the mind, and it is the journeying that matters. Heath’s speaker, too, seeks in vain. Asked what it is she is looking for, she can answer only in glib phrases:

I say – My mother’s family came

from here. I don’t know

I just wanted to see, I don’t know.

Maybe if I know my past

I’ll know my future.

Her interlocutor seizes on the word ‘past’ and responds: ‘Archaeologist! You come to dig?!’ This speaker seeks to understand her past, yet struggles to be understood. But dig she does, discovering an old tunnel (‘I think you find Hades / says Georgio’) leading to a cave opening on to a beach, with the sun coming up – an illumination of sorts, if not the one she was looking for.

In the third section, the poems are more miscellaneous, but the same subjects surface: motherhood, physics, Greece, the concept of home, the mortality of the body. As a whole, this collection gleams with intelligence and insight.

The central, riveting sequence of poems in Sarah Jane Barnett’s first collection also concerns mortality: it recreates the final moments in the lives of murderers about to be executed. The official records of their crimes are juxtaposed with their final words of apology, justification, defiance, acceptance. Barnett deliberately treads an uneasy line between voyeurism and empathy in these remarkable poems, some of which are little short stories, with tiny arcs of narrative. The back cover is a photographic portrait of the author, with what might be a smile, and a level, challenging gaze. It’s a visual analogue of the effect of these unsettling poems: Barnett seems to anticipate your reaction, and is there before you.

The title represents a collision, and these poems explore what happens when different people collide: murderers and their victims; lovers; a transgender father and his/her daughter. These collisions are moments of connection, but also disjunction — ‘the space between people,’ as one poem has it – running into and running away.

Running, literal and metaphorical, is a recurring theme. Collisions can also be transformations, blurrings, mergings, as colours run together. These poems tend to break down polarities, oppositions; even those spaces between people can be meeting spaces. The final, long poem, ‘Marathon Men’, blurs genres, slipping from poetry and the power of the line-break to prose and back again. Barnett’s poems are difficult to categorize, to pin down, and her subjects are likewise elusive, on the move. Some poems capture life in a kind of freeze-frame, and the price paid for close observation is a kind of stasis. Barnett’s poems are different: they run alongside, into and away from their subjects, as if both observer and observed are in motion. I’ve never met her, but I’d bet money she’s a runner. Each of these debut collections demonstrates a singular vision, an assurance, and a technical facility that are deeply impressive.

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TIM UPPERTON teaches creative writing at Massey University, Palmerston North. His debut poetry collection, A House On Fire (Steele Roberts), was published in 2009. His poems have appeared in Best of the Best New Zealand Poems (Victoria University Press, 2011), Villanelles (Everyman, 2012), Landfall, Sport and the New Zealand Listener. He won the 2012 Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize.

THE CLASSIC TRANS-TASMANAUT

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 20:00:00 +0000

DENYS TRUSSELL

Apollo in George Street – The Life of David McKee Wright, by Michael Sharkey (Puncher and Wattman, 2010) 450 pp., $45.99.

The poet David McKee Wright (1869–1928) might now be seen as a literary anti-hero with many wrong ideas. This would be to do him an injustice. When we look carefully at settler cultures in Australasia through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we find riches and limitations – both artistic significance and artistic bathos. This period and its works need to be judged in their own terms, not just through the eyes of our own social and critical theory. That is a major success of this biography. It is a meticulous study that has given back to McKee Wright and the trans-Tasman societies in which he spent his adult life some of the dimensions of actuality.

Sharkey does not sentimentalise. We do not see Wright and his milieu in the golden glow of a romantic past. This biographer pulls no punches about the nastiness of some of the notions with which his subject flirted, nor about his poetic failures. For all that Wright emerges as a libertarian – a loveable, gifted and generous man of natural charm and elegance. Some might also say a dandy and a philanderer; but the evidence in this book shows him living successively with three women, two of whom he continued to support after he had left them.

Since Karl Stead’s The New Poetic (1964) and Anthony Kingsbury’s (1968) thesis, Poetry in New Zealand, 1850–1930, it has been conventional wisdom to see the late-Victorian/Edwardian/Georgian period as at best transitional, at worst a poetic backwater. Imperialist rhetoric, worn-out romantic styles and blind jingoism were common. Early Modernist art and poetics had not yet shifted us, en masse, into the modern. Wright’s life in Australasia (1887–1928) coincides with this transition and has many of its qualities. Capable of penning the most abject doggerel, he nonetheless had talent and a real knowledge, both of classical literatures and the mainstream of English poetry. He was not a dilettante, and through his slow arrival at poetic maturity was always aware of the best his art might do.

An imaginative child, he was one of the sons of Anne and William McKee Wright. His mother died when he was eight; his father, a powerful, articulate and austere Presbyterian churchman in Northern Ireland dominated his youth. In adolescence David received a public school education in England then came to New Zealand where there were already extensive family connections. It was 1887 and he was already writing. Here he became known as a balladeer, most famously through his 1897 collection Station Ballads and Other Verses, influenced by his years as a rouseabout on Otago farms. He moved to Sydney from New Zealand in 1910; there he wrote a vast number of ‘topicals’ (poems on current affairs), satirical and serious, and became a famous editor of the Sydney Bulletin’s literary pages. He was aware of early Modernism, but had reservations. Writing seriously in jest, his 1919 comment on vers libre concedes it has valid ground of its own.

there is a difference between

between free verse and words

merely strung together to

link commonplace to commonplace.

He was well-acquainted with Yeats and the literary phase of the ‘Celtic revival’. For a time he considered himself to be a part of this.

By the 1920s he was considered a ‘formalist’ insofar as he used traditional forms and techniques, but definitely not in the sense meant by Stalin’s cultural enforcers later in the Soviet Union. Wright’s ‘formalism’ was not inflexible, and as he grew older his natural urbanity and eclecticism allowed him to bring to the literary pages of the Bulletin commentary on Chinese ‘concrete imagery’ poetics, on the symbolist poet, Aleksandr Blok, on Arabic poetry.

Sharkey deals even-handedly with the good and the bad of Wright’s poetics. His account of how the poet juggled with his art as the First World War increased in bloodiness and futility is fascinating. He could be ‘right wing’ in Bulletin editorials, yet supplying anti-war and anti-conscription material to the Australian Worker, edited by Henry Brooke. It gets even more layered. The Bulletin itself, though officially in favour of a ‘yes’ vote for conscription, defended the rights of the Worker to express views against it. We may guess from this constantly evolving situation that the poet’s heart beat ‘leftward’ for peace and civil society, while his pen, needing stable income, sometimes wrote ‘rightwards’, following the line of the Bulletin’s owner.

It might have been necessity that, in 1919, caused him to write what Sharkey has called ‘an awesomely bad poem’ – an epic in 35 eight-lined stanzas on Gallipoli that uses all the clichés of a hollow and set-piece patriotism – penned for a competition, which he won. It is part of the paradox of the man that, in the same year he was also writing a virtuoso sequence – a 'Crown of Sonnets' – that still reads impressively, despite occasional infelicities.

Wright also published many short stories and attempted a novel. This thankfully was unpublished – a strangely adolescent Pacific Island fantasy called The Lost Prima Donna. In it are all the worst aspects of Eurocentric mythologising and an ill-founded faith in the white races as the natural and stable governors of humanity. One is at a loss to explain how a man of sensibility and talent would waste a moment on material like this. Wright was well-read, yet shows no sign here of contact with the ethnographic and anthropological writings of his day. The text deals with ugly and witless racial stereotypes. It is a riddle, written in 1921 when his genuine creative powers were reaching their height.

He did finally abandon his more discreditable ideas. In 1924 he published Black Brother Poet in the Bulletin, a damning indictment of white racism, written by a ‘Queensland Aboriginal writer’. By the end of his life he seems to be fully in the libertarian stream of the twentieth century. Sharkey gives a succinct account of Wright, the humanitarian attacking fascism, advocating disarmament, subjecting capitalism to moral scrutiny. He had always rejected violence as an instrument of policy, and one of his last ‘topicals’, a good one called 'Hell on High' condemns the American intervention in Nicaragua in the 1920s and its bombing of left-wing forces.

He left virtually no letters, diaries or other ‘private’ writing. His biographer had to achieve a phenomenal feat of reconstruction, detailing the life from correspondence and interviews by Wright’s acquaintance. There’s also the paper-trail left in the public domain – New Zealand sermons, Australian editorials – with something of the inner as well as the public man in them. Luckily he lived among alert, active, articulate people who provided substantive, opinionated and relevant commentary. Wright is, therefore, strongly present to us in this biography.

Despite its confusions, the life has an inner line of development that Sharkey is particularly successful in following, without drowning in the dramatic shifts and contradictions. Such shifts include leaving his New Zealand wife and child, and his vocation as a temperance-preaching Congregationalist minister, to go to Australia in 1910. There he rejects wowserism, and passes from specified Christianity to generalized Pantheism. His vocation as poet-editor comes to the fore and he becomes a social drinker and bohemian in Sydney’s literary precinct. Attractive to women, he becomes involved with Beatrice Osborne, and, famously, Zora Cross, both writers. With them he has six further children and, for a short period, what appears to be a love triangle. As he passes between them he leaves one extant letter. It is to Zora, who head-hunted him, and it is used in the narrative to great effect.

He develops a complex nationalist loyalty to the Australasian world and its future possibilities, but retains close interest in his Irish and English origins. He was happy to belong here but did not tune into the poetic ‘accent’ of the landscapes and emergent settler cultures. Working on Otago farms was important personally, but did not inflect his poetic tongue, except in the vernacular of the ballad. His lyric poetry never quite broke with the literary experience of his youth, particularly the romantics and Tennyson.

New Zealand and Australia had the infrastructure of modern states when he arrived in them. He missed the period when extensive contact with Maori and Aborigines would have been common. Notwithstanding his Blue Mountains residence and much loved garden at 'Greeanawn', he was a townsman, relatively insulated from the indigenous and primordial aspects of these countries. Nor did he live to see a nationalist/modernist aesthetic concerning landscape. He dies just before the years in which Xavier Herbert published Capricornia (1938), Fairburn published Dominion (1938) and Curnow his Island and Time (1941).

It was his fate to live between two distinctive and active phases of literary development in Australasia – the first documentary, the second Modernist. He remains an accomplished lyricist within the limitations imposed by such timing. Apollo in George Street? Yes. Something of the Greek light was in him. What makes him more interesting than the god though is his humanity: less abstract, less rational than the Apollonian, and blessed by failings, by empathy, by confusions, by enthusiasms – some brilliant, some follies. This biography does a superb job of including him in our collective ancestry and helping us get to know him for what he was.

______________________________________________________________________________

DENYS TRUSSEL is a pianist, poet, biographer and environmentalist. He lives in Auckland.

WAITING FOR THE FIRES ON THE HILLS TO GO OUT

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 19:50:00 +0000

BERNADETTE HALL

The Darling North, by Anne Kennedy (Auckland University Press, 2012), 87 pp., $24.99.

‘Ah! Those good old times, when I first came to New Zealand, we shall never see their like again. Since then the world seems to have gone wrong somehow. A dull sort of world this now.’ With these words, Frederick Maning opens his 1863 publication, ‘Old New Zealand’. His account of scenes and incidents is given, he claims, ‘exactly as they occurred’. His writings ‘owe nothing to fiction.’ Anne Kennedy on the other hand, who acknowledges Maning as a source for her new work, makes no such disclaimer. She seems delighted to plunge once again into the heart of fiction. Yet, even as she does so, she’s re-presenting ‘facts’, the kind of things we thought we knew as islanders living among other islanders all on our own little islands in the big bath tub of the Pacific.

That’s probably the most original thing that strikes me in this book, the stance that’s taken. It arises from dislocation, the divided life that has Kennedy shifting regularly between New Zealand and Hawai'ii, where she teaches fiction and screenwriting at the University of Mãnoa. But it’s neither the voice of an outsider nor an insider. What we have here feels to me much more integrated, it arises from deeper roots. It has the seriousness and the weird hilarity of fairy tales, you know the kind of thing where you get an ousted youngest brother, a couple of lost children, several betrayed princesses and a prince who’s in the body of a frog, all of them in search of home, in search of themselves. And time after time, the same big questions arise, what is the world like beyond the forest? What is the one small object that might save you? Where does love reside?

This is a beautiful book. It looks and feels beautiful with a beauty that is meaningful. The title is apt and affectionate. Maning was born in the north, in the northern hemisphere, in Ireland. He moved to Tasmania and then to the Hokianga in 1833. He married Moengaroa of Te Hikutu, a hapu of Nga Puhi and they had four children. ‘North’ is also the stark title of one of Seamus Heaney’s collections of poetry and Kennedy quotes lines from him as well. North and south are loaded words in Ireland. Kennedy is of Irish descent. When she reuses the lines ‘ No treaty // I foresee will salve completely your tracked / and stretchmarked body …’, you can feel the vibrations, it’s Aotearoa as much as it’s Derry.

That’s part of what I’d call the expansiveness of ‘The Darling North’. There’s movement north from Wellington, where Kennedy grew up. In ‘My Carbon Gaze’, a prose poem made up of fourteen smallish segments, there’s a lovely evocation of the city, its hills ‘brassy yellow with gorse flowers.’ Incorporated into the sequence is a homework poem made up by Kennedy’s mother, Vivienne, copied down by the daughter in her ‘McCahon handwriting.’ It’s about the gorse: ‘A prickly maze, a funeral pyre / a golden haze, a monstrous fire.’ Should the fire be real, where would everyone go? To the sea because there’s nowhere else. ‘I’m still out there’ writes the poet. ‘I am standing in the cold sea at Island Bay and it is 2011 and it is freezing and I am waiting for the fires on the hills to go out.’

The title poem takes us on a youthful road trip to the Hokianga and the end of a love affair. The lover’s name is Maning, that’s a nice little joke. ‘Maning earthed me, a brown / wire. I became an in-law of the land.’ The land is marvellously described.

‘Periodically the land leaps

up at me, whiteness, and the wide semi-tropical leaves

like emissaries, resined with recent rain, helmeted,

and I snort, my heart relentless like the water cycle.
Northness has overcome me.’

Later on there’s the move to Hawai'ii. In fourteen free-range sonnets that make up a sequence called ‘Lostling and Foundling’, so we’ve not left fairy tale territory, Kennedy unwraps the process of change, a change of place, a change of self:

Day and night you are dressed in the heat.
Before this you were naked. All your life, not a stitch
of warmth apart from your clothes.

The lightly handled boundaries of the poems cause the material to leap and spark. Each one is jam-packed with fascinating observations. Risks are taken, everything is up for grabs, music and music theory, cocktails, rock bands, a broken violin, a musical laundromat, a thesis on atonality in the bone people, ‘let me have my Irish marae’, says the poet, and when confronted with the question of what to save in the case of a flood, she stops naming and just grabs – ‘this this this …’ repeated fifty four times over the space six lines. The whole sequence is a bravura performance

Early on in the narrative line of the book, somewhere between Wellington and Hawai‘i, there’s a massive change of direction. It comes as a total surprise. Remember the gingerbread man? Well, in a sequence of three case studies (twenty-five pages worth, almost one third of the whole book) that rework fairy tales, we meet up with him again. This time he’s called the Gingerbread Boy and he’s on the run from his Mama, a BIG lady who ‘looms like sunblock’. She was born shortly after him on the very same day from the very same oven ‘which took some getting / your head around / and made you think of /the notion of devolution.’ Her mantra is ‘You can’t you can’t’ – no wonder he starts running. The short lines of the sixteen pages worth catch the velocity and the rhythm of the original children’s story. But you’d never read this one to children. It’s hilarious and disconcerting.

Ruby goes with her mother through the woods to visit her Grandma who’s ‘sick as a dog.’ Mum is worried about the wolf. Ruby has other worries. ‘Mum, it’s not woods and it’s not wolf, / this is the pacific, it’s bush and paedophiles.’ When a wolf does turn up to huff down the house of the three little pigs, he sneers at them like this: ‘Hey ho kunekune puhaface’ and ‘Hey ho pokopoko piggyfritter.’ And it’s the piggy Dad who falls down the chimney. So, what goes into the mix. Psychology, philosophy, literary theory, art history (a Wyeth horizon), religion probably, transactional analysis possibly, high culture, low culture, no culture, a Ted Hughes tuxedo, Helen as in Clark surely, Ellen from TV, and a Red Fox who just happens to be an American and says ‘yes ma’am’ all the time — now you’ll have some small notion of how daring, how bizarre and how meaty this piece of work is. I admire Kennedy for rocking the boat with it. And well done, AUP, for seeing it through.

But let’s go back to Hawai'ii. The final poem in the collection, 'Hello Kitty, Goodbye Picadilly', re-establishes us there. Early European explorers must have thought it was paradise. The word paradise comes from the Persian for a small walled garden. Sounds nice, but what would it be like to live there.

Imagine you’d come to Hawai'iki early.
I don’t have Hawai'iki.

Imagine you were in Heaven.
I don’t have Heaven.

Imagine you were in Paradise
                            but at first you don’t recognise Paradise,
            or smell it or touch it,
                            because you miss earth too much,

and being earthly.

It might have seemed like this when you first stepped off the boat. There’s a lovely theme of dressing and undressing that marks stages in the journey so far. In the Hokianga there was a nightdress, ‘a south dress / snowy and windy.’ In Wellington there was ‘a coat, olive green, rough, / sea-going you wore / near the sea.’ Now in Hawai'i (or is it Paradise): ‘You wonder in passing / about your body, its whereabouts.’ There are no more disguises. Long leisurely lines, slow held bow strokes in the music, a gathering up of all that you are and all that’s happened to you, a circling like running prayer beads through your fingers – in texture and tone the final poem is like nothing else in the collection. It works through loss towards acceptance.

There is no brother
but a digital camera, no aunt but a pair of shoes,

there are no grandparents but a hair straightener,
but they were always

going.

And in its final lines, slowed down by repetition that sounds like a mantra, there’s acknowledgement of the inevitability of change and the hint of a final re-settlement after all the dramatic rehearsals. What is experienced as real now holds all the weight of metaphor. And metaphor is fiction, isn’t it? But perhaps fiction, especially the multi-layered fact/fiction which is the very nature of poetry, is what gets us to the right place after all.

We’ve waited seven years for a new collection of poems from Anne Kennedy. This one arrives like a breath of fresh air. Warm or chill, from the north or the south, it bounces in off the Pacific and I’d say we should feel very grateful.

BERNADETTE HALL lives at Amberley Beach, North Canterbury. Her 9th collection of poetry The Lustre Jug (VUP) was a finalist in the 2010 NZ Post Book Awards. She edited the on-line anthology Best NZ Poems 2011 and she is the editor of The Judas Tree, poems by the late Christchurch writer, Lorna Stavely Anker, which will be published by CUP in 2013.

BYSTANDER IN HER OWN PAST

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 19:49:00 +0000

SALLY BLUNDELL

The Girl Below, by Bianca Zander (Penguin, 2012), 324 pp. $30.00.

Notting Hill, London. Famous for its race riots, Portobello market and the 1999 film that pitched Julie Roberts and a simpering Hugh Grant into a romantic entanglement. For Suki Piper, newly arrived from a decade in New Zealand, the suburb she called home for the first eight years of her life is now a joke, 'part tourist bauble, part film set', a neighbourhood sighing 'with so much privilege that I felt shut out'.

Jobless, near homeless, apparently friendless and increasingly disenchanted by a city she naively assumed, as part of her birthright, 'would always take you back', Suki is the deeply chaotic protagonist of this, the first novel by Auckland writer Bianca Zander.

Zander herself grew up in London and moved to New Zealand as a teenager. She is a journalist and screenwriter with an MA in creative writing from Victoria University. And she is a skilled writer. The Girl Below belts along at a cracking pace, the plot is well-structured, alternating as it does between scenes from Suki’s childhood in Notting Hill to her more immediate past in New Zealand to the increasingly strange events of the present. The characters are fully formed and consistent (although I doubt a sixteen-year-old would say 'don’t be such a square') and the writing fluid, sliding from moments of overwrought terror to the banality of the everyday – in one case a blaring radio programme on raising pigs – with dexterity. But galloping plot lines require some corralling. As does Suki herself.

Since her mother’s death in London ten years earlier, her life has been a mess. Within days after the funeral she is on a plane to New Zealand to find her estranged father, Ludo, now ensconced in a farm in the Waikato with his second wife and their two children. She finds the New Zealand landscape empty and oppressive, 'a Gothic cathedral without a congregation', yet wanders on into a night-time job at a 'faux-French restaurant' in Auckland, a speed-driven, alcohol-slumped social life, aimless affairs and an increasingly strained relationship with her father’s wife (failing to deliver her half-sister’s Christmas present on time and passing out at the family dinner table don’t help).

There is an element of the picaresque here as our flawed protagonist, a self-confessed stray with her 'deep kiwi and West London posh' accent, stumbles from one disastrous encounter to the next. She drifts through university, works as a journalist on a community newspaper, confronts depression and thinks maybe, just maybe, 'New Zealand was to blame for making me depressed, and leaving would be the cure.'

Back in London her life continues its erratic course. She has no family to turn to (she doesn’t know or seem to care if her grandmother is still alive), little money and seems to live in a fug of apathy and self-pity as she crashes her way in, and usually out of, other people’s lives. She overstays her welcome in a London flat, gets wasted, room-spinningly drunk and helps herself to her flatmates’ food before being finally, inevitably told, 'You have to leave. Today'. Little wonder the Chick-Lit-is-not-Dead website says that the novel 'rocks'.

On revisiting the basement flat in Ladbrooke Garden where she grew up Suki reconnects with Peggy, the aged theatre publicist and would-be film star who still lives in the upstairs apartment, and her daughter, Suki’s old babysitter Pippa. She accepts an invitation by Pippa to live in Peggy’s flat for a week to look after the delightfully addled octagenarian. From here Pippa comes to the rescue again, inviting her to live in the apartment she shares with Ari and their belligerent 16-year-old son Caleb who – Pippa fears — is rapidly going off the rails.

But Suki is an unlikely role model. She rummages through Pippa and Ari’s possessions ('nothing uncommon' under the bed) and hauls out her hosts’ tea chests in the middle of the night on the wild suspicion that they may have belonged to her parents. In watching over Caleb while the rest of the family are in Greece she uses Pippa’s money on 'indulgent groceries, the kind I hadn’t bought for months' and, after a Goldilocks-type rest in their bed, forces her way into Ari’s hideaway roof-top shed: 'This counted as breaking in, I supposed, but there was no question of giving up now'. Transgression after transgression (and, with Caleb at her side, more to come). Next she’s drinking beer with her youthful charge and dancing to Ari’s prized vinyl collection.

'I know you’ve had a hard life,' says the patient Pippa, 'But at some point you’ve just got to let it go and move on'.

Too right. But despite Suki’s own admonitions there is still much she wants to unravel about herself and her past. 'Thinking it all over, I started to feel a little like Narcissus, staring endlessly into the lake at his own reflection. Except that in the end it hadn’t been all about me.' It is all about her, yet within this myopic self-centredness she somehow misses the most important events: her childhood glimpse of a man (her father?) with a young woman (Pippa?) is vague without her glasses; her father simply fades from family life; she later chastises herself for missing the moment of her mother’s death. Even the much-anticipated loss of her virginity is an unmemorable event – although she does remember the make and model of the surfer’s car. 'My whole life, I had been doing that,' she thinks, 'been blind when I most needed to see.'.

In reconnecting with Pippa, and her old school friend Alana, she manages to unravel some of the murkier events of her past: her father’s dalliances, her mother’s anxiety, her own lonely and nervous self, 'Always dressing up,' recalls Pippa, 'and entertaining everyone with your imaginary worlds'.

But these worlds are not so easily dismissed. As a child Suki is terrified of 'Jimmy, the bogeyman' who lives on the floor above. She is deeply disturbed by Peggy’s beloved statue of a kneeling girl, trapped, 'blank-eyed', in a 'noose of perpetual childhood' that still sends the 28-year-old Suki into a state of 'quickening vertigo'. She recalls the hand in the hot-water cupboard which would reach out and untie the bows on the back of her dresses. Then there is something overwhelmingly nasty, not in the woodshed but in the abandoned air raid shelter at the bottom of the garden. It is here, the day after her parents throw a memorably wild party, that she and her mother follow Ludo down the darkened stairwell. Suki slips, landing, she is sure, further from the stairwell than she should have. 'Is that normal?' she asks her Jungian therapist many years later. 'To feel like a bystander in your own past?' She is later haunted by the apparent loss of her mother’s locket in the shelter and the discovery of two small teeth amongst her soiled clothes.

In returning to Notting Hill as an adult Suki finds herself again in the grip of strange fears as the past continues to infringe on the present. The view from Peggy’s window transforms into a replica scene of her childhood garden on the night of the party – wine bottles on the lawn, her Wendy tent in situ, the ominous rectangle of black that is the air raid shelter 'peeled open like the lid of a sardine can'.

At Pippa’s house, trying to keep closed a mysteriously opening wardrobe door, she moves a desk only to have it jam on… a small white tooth. Odd and odder. In her overtired, overwrought state even a misprint in a book appears to be 'part of a larger and more sinister puzzle'. In a C.S. Lewis moment, the back of the wardrobe gives way to a dark and downy substance and contact with another adrenalin-pumping reminder from the past. Finally, at Peggy’s deathbed, in a villa on the Greek island of Skyros, these night-time experiences culminate in an unforgettable and strangely believable encounter at the bottom of the air raid shelter….

The Girl Below is a hybrid creature: a thoughtful, action-packed romp combining magic realism, coming of age narrative and a Sarah Waters’ style plunge into genre fiction. Not all the threads of this story are resolved. We never really know how much of Suki’s experiences are real: telltale signs, such as an imprint on skin, a missing jandal and a returned locket, suggest these are not just the symptoms of an overwrought mind or 'the temporary psychosis of sleep deprivation'. And any self-insight Suki may have achieved is tempered. Her conclusion, that 'I was not the decent person I’d always imagined myself to be. I was flawed, just like everyone else', is an alarming understatement evident to all around her from day one. This absence of tidy ends is not a problem in itself, but it is indicative of the challenge Zander has given herself in trying to weave such bulky threads into a seamless whole. While she tackles them with aplomb they could have been spread over two or three more subtle novels rather than piled on to the shoulders of one young, befuddled, exhausted traveller.

SALLY BLUNDELL is a Christchurch-based freelance journalist and writer and editor of Look This Way: New Zealand Writers on New Zealand Artists. In 2009 she completed a PhD at the University of Canterbury looking at responses to terror and trauma in contemporary fiction.

THE HEAVY TIN HAT BOX

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 19:40:00 +0000

CHRISTINE JOHNSTON

The Day She Cradled Me by Sacha de Bazin (Random House, 2012), 319 pp., $37.99.

Minnie will swing – there’s no doubt about it. If you pick up this book, unaware of Williamina Dean’s claim to notoriety, you have only to turn it over and read: 'A fascinating novel based on the life of the infamous baby farmer Minnie Dean, the only woman in New Zealand history ever to be hanged.' The Day She Cradled Me is a novel based on a true story with a protagonist based on an un-knowable historical figure. Convicted of the murder of a baby in her care, she is condemned on the first page of this narrative and confirmed as well and truly dead 300 pages later. 'To comply with the law the body had to remain hanging for one hour ...'

Minnie Dean was hanged in the yard of the Invercargill Gaol on 12 August 1895. On the advice of her lawyer (the illustrious Alfred Charles Hanlon) she did not testify in her own defence, but while in gaol wrote her version of the events that lead to her arrest. This (unpublished) account informs much of this book, which also quotes 'verbatim', according to de Bazin, from documents such as letters and newspaper reports. 'My intent in writing this book was simple:' she explains in her Author’s Note, 'to bring Minnie Dean’s last statement to a public forum as she intended, and to challenge the many previously held beliefs that surround her, even to this day.'

De Bazin achieves the first part of her brief, giving Minnie a voice – she tells much of her own life story, sharing the point of view with the Reverend George Lindsay, who, although initially reluctant, ministered to her in gaol. (Josiah Hanan, Hanlon’s colleague, narrates the brief final chapter.) These interwoven first person accounts help to create an historical context for the events and bring the reader closer to them. Lindsay provides some balance and relief from Minnie’s staccato reportage and her frantic comings and goings, but he seemed at times to be a ‘stuffed shirt’, mouthing platitudes:

‘I am here, Sergeant Macdonnell, not in the name of forgiveness, for I see you do not hold that in your heart. I come therefore in the pursuit of mercy, which all God-fearing gentlemen such as yourself must surely hold sacred, for did not God himself display mercy on us all?’

Not surprisingly, this speech makes little impression on Sergeant Macdonnell. My question is, did anyone, even clergymen, talk like this?

De Bazin no doubt intended the reader to identify with Minnie as she lays bare the hard path of her life from a poverty-stricken childhood in Greenock, Scotland, to her conviction for murder in southern New Zealand. We are reminded that children in the nineteenth century grew up with death as an ever-present reality. Young Minnie lost so many of those she loved, and the trouble never lets up. Her life story makes for grim reading and in the end this accumulation of calamities does not explain or illuminate what happened on those fateful train journeys when two little girls lost their lives. This reader became a little weary. Yes, life was hard in those days: children were beaten, they fell ill and died, adults behaved badly in the name of religion. This begins to feel drummed in. And while Minnie Dean in so many ways embodies the plucky heroine, battling adversity, who is so beloved of historical novelists, she remains a hard character to warm to.

Things certainly didn’t look good for Minnie in May 1895. Known to local police as a woman who ‘farmed’ babies, she was under surveillance. She was seen with a baby, then without a baby, but carrying an unusually heavy tin hat box. (It was the era of the big-brimmed hat.) When the police started digging in her garden they found the bodies of two infants. Subsequently, worse still for our beleaguered heroine, the body of a four-year-old boy was unearthed. I am reminded of Oscar Wilde’s quip that 'to lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.' Given her ‘misfortunes’, can we forgive Minnie Dean her ‘carelessness’?

The Southland community and ultimately the jury were not prepared to give Minnie the benefit of the doubt when it came to her intention to kill Dorothy Carter. Even though many more children died from illness and misadventure in those days, the evidence was seen to indicate that Minnie was a monster. The assumption was made that if she killed one she would have killed many. Hanlon’s defence of Minnie was persuasive, but the judge directed the jury against a verdict of manslaughter, which he described as ‘a weak-kneed compromise’. Her fate was sealed. Was Minnie the victim of local hysteria and a miscarriage of justice? In her 1994 book Minnie Dean; Her Life & Crimes Lynley Hood suggested as much, but allowed the reader to reach her own conclusion. This novel is, necessarily, less dispassionate.

A modern reader, as squeamish as this reviewer, finds the situation at The Larches appalling. The Deans had fallen on hard times. They had a tiny house, teeming with children, supervised, if at all, by a minor. Minnie was perpetually on the move, acquiring more children against her husband’s wishes, or acting as a ‘middle-woman’. And for money. Money to survive of course. Money for food and for children’s clothes and shoes. But still, for money. ‘Child care’ was Minnie’s profession but she was ‘care-less’ to a fault. As a ‘baby farmer’ her record wasn’t good. A moment’s inattention, a poor decision here, a tad too much laudanum there, a too-thorough spanking, perhaps. Minnie had to bury her mistakes.

However, while ‘baby farming’ was unpalatable work, someone had to do it. Illegitimate children were ‘the disappeared’ of the nineteenth century. Society demanded that they vanish in the interests of family respectability. If Minnie didn’t take them in, who did? She had some sympathy for unmarried mothers, having been in that very predicament herself. (Being an enterprising sort of woman, she had invented a doctor husband, sadly deceased, just as she had invented a clergyman for a father.)

In spite of the reader knowing how badly it will go for Minnie, there is tension in The Day She Cradled Me, achieved through ample use of the present tense and plenty of short, sharp dialogue. However, it is the dialogue that has to carry the story and the characterisation, for there is little in the way of reflection, which the content of this story would seem to demand. The pace is at times too hectic and, though some information is inserted unnaturally into snippets of conversation, much in the way of interpretation is left unsaid. Here is an example:

‘Sold up,’ Dean says one morning.

‘I beg your pardon?’ I have almost finished sewing a blanket for Catherine Cameron’s new baby, and my fingers are full of pricks.

‘Bought some acreage up yonder.’ He waves his arm vaguely in the direction of the window.

‘But you can’t have,’ I say.

‘I did.’

The needle slips and draws blood. ‘But the price of land. Everyone knows it’s going to crash.’

He takes a swill of tea. ‘What do they know?’

De Bazin covers too much ground is in this abrupt fashion, skimming over events and risking dislocating, confusing and alienating the reader.

Although I am a daughter of the south, I wasn’t raised on stories of Minnie Dean and her terrible hatpin. I read Lynley Hood’s book eighteen years ago. It isn’t hard for me to accept that Minnie did not intentionally kill Dorothy Carter, Eva Hornsby or Willie Phelan, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that she was to a greater or lesser extent culpable. I read this book with an increasingly heavy heart. The novel-reading experience would have been more enjoyable if I had cared for Minnie, if I had believed in her and viewed her in a sympathetic light. The fact that she was herself a victim of abuse and had suffered personal tragedies didn’t really help. It was hard to lose sight of the fact that in our own time adults continue to inflict fatal injuries on children and claim their deaths as accidental.

____________________________________________________________________________

CHRISTINE JOHNSTON is a Dunedin short story writer, novelist and reviewer.

SHOP TALK

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 19:35:00 +0000

RICHARD DINGWALL

Singing Historian: A Memoir, by Edmund Bohan (Canterbury University Press, 2012), 236 pp., $30.

As an eight year old Edmund Bohan's wanted to be both a singer and an historical writer. This is the story of how, by talent, hard work and self-belief, that childhood ambition was realised. It is full of detail and incident from the author's life, but it lacks any sense of intellectual direction.

Edmund Bohan's mother's was eager for him to have the academic training that was denied her, and he gained entry to Canterbury University where he studied History. Her encouragement of his love of singing meant that by the time he graduated he was immediately able to embark on a career as a professional singer, a career that took him to Australia in the early 1960s, and then to Europe where he established himself as a reliable and popular concert tenor. He also sang opera, most notably with Benjamin Britten's English Opera Group and Kent Opera, but preferred to think of himself as a 'general practitioner of singing', able to take on a wide range of repertoire rather than specialising.

Bohan's childhood, spent growing up in Christchurch and Invercargill, was a happy one – he had a close family who were supportive of his academic and musical aspirations. His mother was a Scots-born Protestant and his father a New Zealand Irish Roman Catholic. This so-called 'mixed' marriage was censured by both sides of what was seen as a religious divide. The censorious Irish nuns and the grim Irish priests of the New Zealand Roman Catholic Church were particularly unrelenting in their disapproval: when Bohan was not sent to a Catholic school his father had to forgo communion during those years that his son attended high school. This withdrawal of religious grace is a reminder of the chill provincialism of New Zealand in the immediate post-war years. Some writers have made careers out such material but Bohan, in this memoir at least, does not come across as a reflective man and we get no sense of how these tensions shaped him.

Bohan liked the London life – he was a professional musician based in England from 1964 to 1987 – and the central section of the book is full of shop talk: jobs secured, roles sung, who was good to work with who was not. We get names and dates, what he sang and with whom, the usual comic stage business – the sword that wouldn't draw during Don Giovanni, the costume that disintegrates during a performance of Dido and Aeneas – but there are too many roles, too much detail. Sometimes we may suspect the writer of emptying his diary onto the pages: the name of his childhood cat, his favourite Laurel and Hardy movie, the first time he was stung by a bee, too much!

The year (1965) he spent working with Benjamin Britten's English Opera Group provides a welcome interlude for the reader. This was not a particularly happy time for Bohan, he did not enjoy the atmosphere at Aldeburgh and the sycophantic, court-like admiration of the great man – those cast from the inner circle were declared 'dead' – yet here at last the pace of the narrative slows down and we can all catch our breath. While finding Britten himself an unsympathetic figure, Bohan enjoyed singing many of his compositions, the Spring Symphony is his favourite (he found that the more he performed the War Requiem the less he liked it), and there is a generous portrait of Peter Pears whom Bohan describes as 'a great artist', suggesting in this phrase that Pears in performance could on occasion transcend considerations of technique, carrying the music and his audience to new heights. Has he ever experienced this as a performer? Perhaps, but he doesn't tell us.

In parallel with his singing Bohan quickly developed a career as a broadcaster and writer, presenting a series of talks on musical themes for the NZBC, the ABC in Australia and the BBC. (Amongst his closest friends was the Scottish baritone Ian Wallace who became well known for his participation in the long running radio quiz My Music.) In the late 1960s he wrote several adventure stories for children achieving notable success with The Buckler (1972) set in the Scottish borders in the immediate aftermath of the battle of Flodden (1513). An engagement with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra lead to his family making a permanent move to New Zealand in 1987.

It was back in New Zealand that he returned to serious historical research. He published a series of historical biographies of nineteenth century politicians: on Edward Stafford (1994), on James Fitzgerald (1998), and on Sir George Grey (1998). In this he was highly successful and was twice a finalist in the Montana Book Awards – as well as being awarded a Stout Fellowship in 1995. At the same time he published a series of popular historical mystery novels featuring Detective Inspector O'Rorke, beginning with The Opawa Affair (1996).

Edmund Bohan is a man of admirable energy and enterprise (he mentions in passing as he leaves England for New Zealand that he was a partner in a wine business), but does not seem to have much time for reflection as he moves on to the next project. As a student at Canterbury he studied under the 'much-feared' Professor of History, Neville Phillips, whose ideas were shaped under the great British parliamentary historian Sir Lewis Namier, one who believed that political change arose from the individual concerns and interests of politicians rather than through the clash of ideas. Like his mentors, Bohan is a 'facts' man and at one point he describes some friendly rivalry between himself and the noted historian Keith Sinclair: Auckland versus Christchurch, facts versus ideology. Yet as a details man and a musical historian one would have expected Bohan to correctly spell the name of the pianist Michael Houstoun.

Bohan deplores what he sees as ideology in historical research. While showing a grudging admiration for James Belich's work on the New Zealand Wars, he discounts what he sees as the narrow focus of much New Zealand historical research. In his own general history the Climates of War which deals with the years 1859–1869 he is at pains to show a continuity with what was happening elsewhere in the British Empire. Intellectually, this is a respectable argument. However, the weakness in his system is that it cannot always winnow out the important facts from the chaff of day-to-day living, however fascinating. One last example will serve. There are five pages devoted to the sea journey to England in 1963. There is a thumbnail portrait of Aden in Southern Sudan during the last years of British occupation, there is a shipwreck when their sister ship Lakonia catches fire with 128 dead (some survivors join their ship at Madeira), and there are fancy dress parades.

In fact, none of these particular events – be they great, dramatic or trivial – contribute insights into his personal journey as a musician or a historian, or serve to increase to our enjoyment of the design of his memoir.

_____________________________________________________________________

RICHARD DINGWALL is a Dunedin writer and musician. He was formerly a regular arts columnist and reviewer for the Otago Daily Times.

MEMORY IS A FAMILIAR STRANGER

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 19:30:00 +0000

TERENCE RISSETTO

Road Markings: An Anthropologist in the Antipodes, Michael Jackson (Rosa Mira ebooks, 2012), 222 pp., US$ 11.00.

For Albert Camus the only philosophical question is 'To be or not to be?' Once affirmed by the existential reverse of Rene Descartes’s 'Cogito ergo sum' into 'I am, therefore I think,' the existential dilemma becomes, 'What meaning is there to be attached to my life and how should I live it accordingly?' In Road Markings: An Anthropologist in the Antipodes, anthropologist and poet Dr Michael Jackson attempts to deal with these and other questions.

Jackson’s ebook is creative non-fiction in the form of a geographical and metaphorical road trip through the author’s natal New Zealand, during which he considers the impact of ‘firstness’ in relation to belonging and home, identity and the past, and the nature of the bond that he has with the land, despite being an expat for most of his life.

The title alludes to the marks or scars left behind by the people who have gone before, and to the paths they have travelled. It is an allegory for life’s journey, examining along the way the influences of familial, social, historical and physical landscapes on people’s lives and their lives on those landscapes of self, whether real or appropriated.

As always, the truth is where the rubber meets the road. Sometimes there are tyre marks, shredded tyres, crashes, road kill. While some people travel through life largely unscathed, Jackson demonstrates, others become life’s casualties: victims or survivors trying to compensate for some sort of inarticulated loss or separation, without knowing what is to be compensated for.

His book works well as a physical road trip and memoir, visiting Jackson’s place of birth in Taranaki and places of importance to him and taking in historical writers (for example, Samuel Butler, Henry Lawson) as well as friends and family including artists, writers (Vincent O’Sullivan, Martin Edmond), intellectuals and academics (Brian Boyd, David Wright). In so doing, Jackson tests the impact of his theory of firstness and its opposites – estrangment, dispossession, loss – as well as the ‘artful’ recall of the past on his own and others’ lives. An interesting result is that the most practical insights in this post-natal quest seem to come from the women (Brigette, Kate and others) who are more grounded and realised in their history and meaning of life.

Evoking Carlos Castaneda in earnestness, the Blues Brothers on a mission from God in absurdity, the puha western Utu on Maori/settler and land issues in vexatiousness, Goodbye Pork Pie in its comical identity-wrestling and in its and random encounters with interesting people and places, and ultimately the counter-culture classic movie Vanishing Point, where the end merges into the beginning, in the search for truth, justice and the meaning of life, Michael Jackson’s long strange trip is a saga of discovery of the country being travelled through as part of you: something you take it on board as memories, perceptions, responses — especially when it is somewhere already familiar from childhood. This latter point is the core issue of the concept and confusion of ‘be-longing’, of being part of something that is bigger than you but which you carry within you, the existential dilemma. In colloquial terms, Jackson asks these questions: You can take the boy out of NZ but can you take NZ out of the man? What part does the past play in enabling us to live in the present? Why do some people choose their own roads and others fall by the roadside?

Throughout these wanderings and wonderings, Jackson asserts that under surface differences we are part of humanity as a whole: that being human, nothing human is strange to us. In today’s society, ‘we have so magnified the value of individual lives that we have lost any sense of ourselves as part of the stream of life itself’. This latter point is the crux of Jackson’s thesis, and is symbolically embodied in recurring descriptions of the ever-present sea as an integral part of the physical landscape. The sea is where all roads inevitably lead.

In returning to the maternal land of birth, Jackson finds himself – the expatriate – reborn and the land repossessed, ‘bathed in a new light’. The emptiness of the landscape, it seems, reminds you of who you really are, reflecting the sense of being both somewhere and nowhere: ‘You feel existentially half-caste, connected by birth to one world yet by disposition to another.’ For Jackson, it is the shared experiences with place and people rather than the places and people themselves that give rise to the firstness of be-longing to that place or with that person – and this allows reconnection on that common ground.

Yes, an essential part of belonging is living with people and sharing their experiences. In this sense New Zealand does not belong to us in terms of ownership but is a part of us because of our shared experience. He aa te tonga? He tāngata he tāngata he tāngata. What is the greatest treasure? It is people it is people, it is people.

Heraclitus said that you cannot step into the same river twice: you cannot go back in time and place and expect it to be the same. To a large extent, the book confirms this. One of the most memorable observations Jackson makes is that rather than being linear, life is more like writing a line on a piece of paper and then crumpling that piece of paper together so that parts of the paper and therefore life touch each other. He comes to see life as a constellation, where stars shine and fade and shine.

What Jackson asserts is that life is patterns, while intelligence is identifying these patterns and academia is writing a book about these patterns, with provenance and bibliography. Academics often take themselves too seriously, and there is an element of that here. Sometimes, Jackson’s writing provides insights in the same way as poetry; elsewhere, the urge to record every detail and then note their source distracts from the unifying sense of phenomenological intent or content. The word missing until late in the book is ‘belonging’ in terms of home, rather than ownership or appropriation (nostalgia, in the sense used by Jackson, is a ‘longing-for’).

These are minor quibbles. Jackson has a genuine interest in how other people’s lives have turned out. The individual stories are worth reading on that level alone, apart from the value in the lessons of their expressed ethos and worldview. Two particularly poignant and ironic stories to look out for are those of Uncle Harold and the self-inflicted death of the academic Dr David Wright, whose research took over his life until in the end his life overtook his research.

Jackson’s own epiphanies, that experience/memory is displaced rather than supplanted, that beginnings are not origins, that we belong to the past as it belongs to us, are worth waiting for. He clearly exhilarates in the New Zealand landscape and his place in it, which gave him the ability to imagine anything was possible and to go against the grain, recognising bullshit when he came across it – but not necessarily recognising wisdom as easily.

Hit-the-road-Jackson’s verbal ‘markings’, warmed by the affectionate yet also slightly-jaded eye of a long-time anthropologist, are, then, insistent evidence that life is not a journey from here to there, or from there to here; it is a journey from here to here. I really enjoyed the ride, but may I offer the same advice as the Zen masters of non-attachment: if you meet the Buddha on the road, run him over and leave him where he is.

TERENCE RISSETTO is a philosophy and anthropology graduate of the University of Auckland.

WHY WE ARE IN AFGHANISTAN

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 19:25:00 +0000

ADAM GIFFORD

Other People’s Wars: New Zealand in Afghanistan, Iraq and the War on Terror, by Nicky Hager (Craig Potton Publishing, 2011), 439 pp., $49.99.

New Zealanders may feel anger and betrayal at reading Nicky Hager’s latest installment of their country’s secret history. But for those described by the former United States ambassador to New Zealand Charles Swindells as ‘first worlders’ – the military and foreign affairs officials, business people and politicians who regard New Zealand as a US ally – the anger will stem from the fact that the lid has been lifted on their activities so comprehensively.

The rest of us, those who applauded then-prime minister Helen Clark’s decision to stay out of George Bush’s invasion of Iraq, will feel betrayed to find we went anyway, as the diplomatic and military establishment took every opportunity to suck up to the US.

‘Sucking up’ is a common term of opprobrium in the New Zealand vernacular, but the top brass who are always shooting off to conferences about ‘security’, along with the diplomats vying for the plum Washington posting and the spies angling for secondment to Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters or the US National Security Agency, don’t appear to listen much to the normal patterns of Kiwi speech. Or if they do, as can be seen from the reams of intercept transcripts from the Operation Eight Urewera terror trial, they mishear.

Hager has been dismissed by one major NZ newspaper as not doing journalism. But if journalism is the first draft of history, better Hager’s Official Information Act requests, his diligent archive trawling, his Wikileaks turn-ups, and his nurturing of confidential interviews from informed sources, than the regurgitated spin and public relations pap that mainstream newspapers and television have served up over the past decade.

Sure, New Zealand troops in Bamiyan may have handed out toys and pencils and rebuilt some school playgrounds in their spare time. But ‘Provincial Reconstruction Team’ (PTR) turns out to have been an artful misnomer. Their real task was to be a cog in the green machine, the US army of occupation, freeing up American combat troops for redeployment to Iraq.

Hager helpfully provides the parts of the ‘all of government’ review of New Zealand’s achievements in Afghanistan that were redacted so as not to prejudice ‘the security and defence of New Zealand’. Behind the stream of good news stories being served up back home was the reality of an omnishambles, with the report concluding the New Zealand Defence Force was ‘not an effective aid provider’ in Bamiyan. Each Provincial Reconstruction Team commander on six month deployment would set their own agenda, and there were no mechanisms in place to monitor the impact, effectiveness or sustainability of projects. And anyway, outside its small compound, the force was too small to provide effective security. Its role was to maintain ‘a perception of security’.

Hager works through each of the services in turn, revealing consistent patterns of lying to politicians and the public, the manipulating of budgets, the undermining of any attempt for New Zealand to pursue an independent policy, and the sucking up – with a horrendous sucking noise – to a robotic US war machine that many of our troops on the ground distrusted and disliked, not only for its hubris but for the way its might was ‘disconnected from coherent strategy’.

If you thought the Royal New Zealand Air Force was a smaller burden on the New Zealand taxpayer because of the axing of the Skyhawks, think again. Hager reveals that when relieved of flying duties the brass fought back, capturing senior defence appointments, bamboozling politicians and winning hundreds of millions of dollars for high-tech systems which have little to do with the country’s needs but a lot to do with seamless integration with Anglo-US military adventures. In 2000 the Air Force told the incoming Labour cabinet that the upgrade of the Orions was mainly to detect illegal fishing, and it would cost $200 million to meet civil requirements, and maybe another 10 percent for military needs.

The government select committee which reviewed the bid found that the key specification in the tender documents was that the planes were able to be ‘employed as part of a larger coalition force integrated into an international, probably US-led, coalition maritime order of battle.’ However that’s the last time the military let our parliament sight a tender document: they are now routinely withheld on the ‘prejudice the defence and security of New Zealand’ excuse.

The government choked on the eventual NZ $562.1 million price tag, and requested a rethink. In 2004 the Air Force came back with a NZ $352 million bid, which the hapless Mark Burdon accepted – not realising it was actually the same bid, with the difference achieved through the NZ-US dollar exchange rate moving.

Over the past decade the ratio of officers to other ranks in the RNZAF has gone from one in four to one in three, and the pay for a Group Captain doubled to just under NZ $200,000. The Navy now has 23 percent of its staff wearing gold braid, and like the Air Force mostly in the higher ranks. The New Zealand Army in comparison has 17 percent officers, mostly in lower ranks.

While Clark tried to keep on top of what officials were telling her and did what she could to limit direct participation in the Middle East fighting, her successor John Key seems to have no such qualms. On the election trail National pitched its foreign and defence policies as a continuation of Labour’s. But Hager shows what Key says and does are two different things.

Despite getting advice (which it kept from the public) that the insurgency was heating up, National sent New Zealand SAS troops back to Kabul. Key assured New Zealand journalists the SAS would not be fighting alongside any of the Afghan forces they were training. It turned out, not only were they doing that, but National ‘provided the SAS for one of the bloodiest and most dangerous military roles in Afghanistan: frontline operations against suicide bombers and other attackers in the deepening insurgency.’

Since the Anzacs landed at Gallipoli, New Zealand has struggled to develop an independent sense of itself on the world stage, usually with Labour projecting an indigenous nationalism and National winding back the clock where it could. Taking us through this history, with special emphasis on the years since 2001, massively detailed and documented, Hager’s polemic arrives inexorably at its judgement: ‘New Zealand’s alliances are not about local security and defence; they are almost entirely about fighting in other people’s wars’. Hager suggests this has been aided and abetted by homegrown special interest groups: ‘Misuse of power by ... a colonial non-intellectual business elite ... is one of the main obstacles to progress in New Zealand as a distinctive independent nation.’

As a commentator, Hager is as fearless and outspoken as Robert Fisk, John Pilger or John Ralston Saul, and as much capable of finding the absurdist blackly comic Catch 22-type thinking in local military circles as those journalists have found in the Western military-industrial complex. Hager’s conclusion on the current state of play in New Zealand is that is that ‘the public and Parliament need to take control of the military, foreign affairs and the intelligence agencies’. His is a timely and important book that, as the back cover blurb states, confirms the need for open and transparent government.

_____________________________________________________________________________

ADAM GIFFORD is an Auckland-based journalist, writer and broadcaster.

NINE BARDIC VOICES

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 18:24:00 +0000

DAVID EGGLETON

Poetic Explanations, by Gill Ward (Kupu Press, 2011) 86 pp. $15.00; Guarding the Flame, by Majella Cullinane (Salmon Poetry, 2011), 69 pp., $29.95; On a Day Like This, by Jan Fitzgerald (Steele Roberts, 2010), 63 pp.. $19.99; cactusfear, by Douglas Wright (Steele Roberts, 2011), 86 pp. $24.99; Elemental: Central Otago Poems, by Brian Turner (Godwit/Random House, 2012) 240 pp. $39.99; Sometimes the Sky Isn't Big Enough, by Owen Bullock (Steele Roberts, 2010), 64 pp., $19.99; You Shot My Dog, by Kerry Loughrey 100 pp., $Aus.19.95; Home, Away, Elsewhere, by Vaughan Rapatahana (Proverse, 2011) 208 pp., $30; Knucklebones: Poems 1962 – 2012, by Sam Hunt (Craig Potton, 2012), 360 pp., $39.99.

The voice of the bard, as Seamus Heaney notified us in the title of a series of lectures he gave on poetry, affirms the government of the tongue: that is, the authority of the poetic art to speak on behalf of the tribe, the people – or at least to speak with the utmost eloquence out of a community.

Gill Ward, a Kapiti Coast poet writes for and to her whanau, her community in Poetic Explanations, a collection of nearly 80 poems that she describes as an 'autobiography'. In 'Gathering', a poem read at the unveiling of her sister's headstone, she writes: 'if we could gather every one of those thoughts/...and weave them into a splendid cloak/ we would wrap you in it.' There's a whole sequence for this twin sister, who entered a strict religious order when she was 18 before later returning to the secular life, and who died after a lengthy illness.

Ward's poems seen in the light of this Roman Catholic connection resemble meditations, reflective notes, prayers. They are often, too, presented as valedictions or commemorations, intended for friends and family, as in 'Kate', also written for the unveiling of a headstone:

I bought two ranunculus today.
They reminded me of you
with their dazzling yellow and flaming red
flamboyant
uncompromising

And there are as many celebrations of just the little things in daily life as there are memorial poems: 'They unsettle me/ my clothes/ the way they jostle/ and push/ always wanting to be the one/ but never quite matching up' ('Wardrobe'). Hers is a large output and somewhat uneven, but the power of her memories, of emotion recollected in tranquillity cannot be doubted when she writes of what rises unbidden to the mind in 'Bombay Lemons'" 'The bamboo thicket/ that shaded its dark mystery/ in the dank sand floor/ dust rising/ around our tattered gang' This tattered gang, which contained the writer and historian Michael King, though only as a toddling hanger-on, seems to have consisted of Catholic kids, and it's notable how strong this strain of Christian thinking – the fall from Grace, elements of the Catholic liturgy – is in New Zealand writing.

Majella Cullinane is a young recent migrant from Ireland, but in a way she refreshes this dispensation in her first collection Guarding the Flame, which takes its title from the myth surrounding St Bridgid's flame in Kildare. And these days of ubiquitous political correctness, therapy-speak and psychobabble used as vehicles for an assortment of fashionable agendas, when humility has become equated with low self-esteem – you must 'big yourself up' – it's noteworthy that she returns us to notions of renunciation, gracefulness and above all modesty as virtues to aspire to. And that such aspirations are intended is signalled by such lines as: 'A star winks over Hillary's step' in her poem about mountains 'Nepalese Meditations'. Many of the poems though in Guarding the Flame find Cullinane having a love affair with the New Zealand landscape, so that 'flame' might equally refer to the pohutakawa tree in summer, the poet trudging past this 'cliff-dweller' that offers green thoughts within its green shade, somewhere 'Between amens and the Coromandel'.

Indeed, for Cullinane this new place is a treasure hoard of eye-brightening discoveries: 'Kauri/ stretching its spine to scoop the first sight of stars', 'black fern canopies', 'the rain's tapping song', even 'the scuttle of rats in the puriri joists', all and each summon from her a kind of joy which weaves in with her pleasure in literature: 'the mustiness of pages rises/ just as the salt air drifts across the beach/ to the crush of shells snagged on our feet' ('Paekakariki'). No wonder then that the organic promise implicit in the word 'knead' makes that word talismanic: 'the dew...the word knead...a child pressing and folding within'.

Joy in the simple pleasures of life also characterises the second poetry collection of Jan FitzGerald, On a Day Like This, though her observant eye is also quick to register incongruities and absurdities, as well as implicit lyricism:

Slippered in displeasure
he enters the sepulchre of the Sunday papers,
peers through the glass at things buckled
and broken by last night's unholy storm...
and though the wind has wrung
the neck of his white shirt upon the line,
its steaming like a hung goose
adds a certain denial to it all
      ('Two men in dressing gowns')

FitzGerald writes with an humanitarian impulse about the discomforts of old age, as well as warmly of childhood memories: 'Quarters of the moon...bobbing in a syrup of froth and foam' ('Bottling Peaches'), while she is especially effective in capturing inconsequential details that enrich the quotidian, whether the comedy of 'the unshaven faces of ferns/ pressing through the fence' or the pastoral fancy of 'Cows crossing':

A bony head looms alongside
turning a neck a child would love to swing from
...eyelashes come down

like slow camera shutters...
Her big, sassy hips sway past...
She is carrying a peach balloon to a party
that happened long ago.
       ('Cows crossing')

FitzGerald writes out of an awareness of agriculture and cultivation, out of a sense of plenitude and repletion, of harvest where ripeness is all but there's also melancholy.

            The pastoral (and by extension the anti-pastoral) is one of the major considerations in New Zealand literature, and indeed in all its arts. In his millennial dance-work halo, choreographer Douglas Wright presented a touring show very much rooted in the New Zealand soil but also grandiose and operatic in its ambition, like Wagner with straw in its hair staged in a paddock out the back of Pukekohe. Now, in his second collection of poems cactusfear, he writes in the poem 'herd':

a herd of cows does not need a choreographer
left to themselves
they always fall into tableaux
of the most ineluctable grandeur...
reclining in massive undulations of serenity
or standing velvet Parthenon...
whenever I find myself speeding
inches above the graven earth
past bovined paddocks
I long to stop the car
get out
and go and lie down with the cows forever

Like those of Gill Ward, Wright's poems constitute a kind of diary – or reverie – of daily life, but he's always pressing towards the metaphysical: the meaning of the ordinary. (Significantly, he's also a cradle Catholic.):

every night I take off my shoes and clothes
before climbing into bed
as if I was born knowing
how to unbutton, unlace, unzip
how to slither torso and limbs backwards
out of dark one-way tunnels of cloth
        ('to be gone')

And more than this, for Wright the innocence of the pastoral affords a quantum of solace, but he also knows that it is never truly innocent, rather that it masks, or else leads to, a hellish descent: loss, rejection, the fires of the flesh, a charred gratuitous consumption by predatory forces. Many of Wright's poems tilt towards phantasmagoria:

listening all night to the tiniest and bravest of sounds: the ghost-
mandibles of millions of white worms eating the resurrection into being

In fact Wright is a poet capable of making the mundane numinous; at times he is a mind watching itself experience the uncanny. In this he holds hands with the symbolist poets, the dandies and decadents of old Europe: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Wilde, Dowson. Draining his cup of medication, it becomes an inspirational potion that does more than help sustain his compromised immune system. It's as if, much preoccupied by angelic orders of existence, he rises to hang out with seraphs and flirts with the exterminating angel. Sanctuaries and healing are ever uppermost; a Grail-quester, he is adept in the mind-concentrating – or emptying – practices of Buddhism. Yet with all these gestures towards dramatic leave-taking – as marked in poems with titles such as 'undetectable' – one of the most admirable aspects of Wright's writing is his clear-sighted empathy, manifested for example in 'Alice Thumb', his poem for his cat: 'sometimes she presents me with a half-devoured corpse/ so that we can polish it off together'.

Brian Turner is another poet of eloquent self-awareness who sings of the Arcadian, of a New Zealand pastoral: a poetry tradition which goes back to the Greeks and Romans, to Polybius, Theocritus and Virgil, but which in New Zealand has to mind its p's and q's, especially when addressing the farming community, which Brian Turner, living in Central Otago, lives amongst:

A farmer asked me
if I was working
and added
he didn't mean
writing.
I said
I was sawing
and stacking wood,
tidying the shed,
pruning the hedge,
'Is that work?'

'Yes', he said,
'keep it up.'
('Keep It Up')

So Turner listens and learns from the voice of authority, and writes as one who stalks Olympus and Parnassus, girded about with laconic utterances and sawn-off proverbial sayings that might be waved like farmers' shotguns to ward off trespassers. Yet his antennae for self-deprecation are ever-alert, and wry humour prevails. While he's referred to as a 'bifocal identity', he also offers up character sketches of the locals: the stud bull, the sheep flock, the farm dogs, the farmer ploughing on his tractor, the farmer at Oturehua who has the 'most/photographed paddock in the district'. Holy balm in Central is symbolised by classical music – Beethoven and Bach – but the lyricism is all Turner's own as he depicts a quintessential lunar landscape – 'there's a full moon/ hovering on the ridgeline of the Hawkduns', ' a piece of moon/ like a parapente', 'an orange moon', 'mysterious moon', 'edgy light of the moon' – in opposition to the sun which 'blares'. For Brian Turner, as say for Sam Hunt, the sun is something to be wary of, its heat suspect and overpowering – they appreciate instead, like the Bronte sisters – the drama of rain and thunderstorms.

Turner is a poet of sense and sensibility, writing of apple-picking and inland fishing, of rivers and tramping, of lakes and alpine grasslands, while also alert to grace-notes of the bucolic idyll: the fog that sits 'on the river/ like a marquee'; butterflies that are 'bright cloth/ caught in webs of sunshine'.

Like Douglas Wright, Turner can celebrate with a disembodied lyricism that's nevertheless grounded in the body, as when he writes of throwing himself on the mercy of the morning and floating like thistledown across the landscape on his bicycle, or catches skeins of wind with his ear: 'I saw tussock, heard it/ speaking in tongues/ and chanting with the westerly'. Turner in these pages (contextualised by Gilbert van Reenan's sensitive photographs of the seasons turning) worships the rural muse and traces her lineaments in the dynamics of the landscape: topography is also morality, though such conservatism – ecological wise words to safeguard the estate – is tempered by knowledge that the earth is always in a state of transformation.

Poets are defined by their heightened sensitivity towards language, which sometimes becomes an irritation with its inadequacies. Owen Bullock, in his first collection of longer poems (he is known as a haiku poet), Sometimes the Sky Isn't Big Enough, offers oblique philosophical poems which argue the need for clarity and are wary of 'echoes of previous meanings'. As Bullock explains in 'the magnificent seven chakras':

the mind is a tyrant...
heart rebels...
the base of the spine
trying to stay
with what it knows

Of all this congregation of bards, Tauranga-based Bullock seems the most pre-occupied by the business of preaching to the choir: these are poems turned in on themselves, as if doubting a reading public. Yet at the same time they affirm the simple power of language and hum with invention, with a teasing wit. As a poet concerned with what language is capable of, Bullock affirms a kind of mystical unity through isolated fragments of perception: which are in fact William Blake's doors of perception, portals to playful ways of seeing:

you teach the park to play
show the bridge how to hold cars
I once lassoed a restaurant
and put it on an aeroplane

Thus is established a thin musical note sounding out, but also a pure and true one, requiring you to lean in to hear it.

Kerry Loughrey is a Melbourne poet with Otago connections who was very active in the Dunedin Poetry scene of the early 1990s, organising fringe events alongside the Roger Hall-initiated It's All Write Here writers' festival. Her first full-length collection, You Shot my Dog contains a long poem about Dunedin, entitled 'Between Sunshine and Shade', which is assembled collagist-style as a startling series of scenes or vignettes:

An earth tremor rocks my house
like a boat and I'm on deck
roof-top waves rise caught mid-ascent
the wealth of old Dunedin seas
undertowed up North
gold rush away their fault line full

In Loughrey's work sound values are crucial. She's aware of the libidinous energies invested in language, as her poem 'Be genital with me' indicates, with its lickerish wordplay. She favours the exclamatory mode, manifesting a sense of spontaneity and a forthright mouth music nurtured in the atmosphere of Melbourne pub readings and their strong bohemian tradition that includes such poets as Pi O and Shelton Lea.

Yet with all that her poems are carefully patterned and often delicately precise in their idioms, borrowing from early T.S. Eliot phrasings, such as those found in 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. Many poems are anecdotal, story-telling poems, and resemble perhaps amulets, good-luck stones to ward off ill-omens. In the end, it seems, the 'quietness' of Otago drove her and her family back to Australia:

By the River Taieri I sat down and selected
pendant stones for story carving
Peace isn't made till the bones are showing,
the cliffs are slipping
and the earth roars nasty
      ('And in the yelling of')

There's a certain bleakness to the book, a sense of life as a series of penitential chambers where the only exoneration is a neat poetic image and sharp expostulation betokening the survivor's optimism in the face of the Furies, who dictate one's progress and the remission of sins. For Loughrey's poems, too, lend themselves to a Catholic-raised reading, of sorts.

Her poems, which in recital have won her a number of Australian Fringe Festival Awards, allow for the public revelation of illicit thrills and spills, for the symbolic uncovering of taboos and finger-pointing at poignant truths. The most impressive of her pieces verbally tease; they kiss and tell and then refute and disown, as if moving on from a parable told.

In Vaughan Rapatahana's most recent collection of poems blood's a rover, trans-oceanic, as this Maori poet takes us with him from the coast of China to the coast of Thailand, from Nauru and the Philippines, to New Zealand past and present. Home, Away and Elsewhere establishes Rapatahana as a malcontent, or at least a critic, one for whom the intolerable wrestle with words led to a pyrotechnics of typology, in which whirligigs of poems done up in jazzy and playful typeface fonts shuffle and jive their way down the page like zoot-suited dancers in some old-time Auckland dance hall.

Identity politics leads to a Marxist interpretation of history in Home, Away and Elsewhere, so that the sons and daughters of colonised peoples – in particular Maori, but not exclusively – are characterised by degeneration, mental illness and addiction, of which Rapatahana is the sardonic, wearied or worried observer, nursing anger:

age shall not weary them
but
may be

those battalions of beers will...
while the steady pall
of roll-your-owns

shimmies...

the same saga
every Friday

('Matakaoa RSA')

As Rapatahana defines it: 'god is a weasel/ a possum/maybe/ a stoat'. Words squirm away from revelation and are remorselessly dragged back for further interrogation. His poetry is raw, confessional, blistering. We are told of: 'Mother's bruises/ even/ duskier/ than/ her/ cheap/ woolworths/ sun/ shades'. Poem titles such as 'corrupted' spell out textual intent. These are anecdotes from the front line of domestic trauma stretching back into the 70s and beyond. he offers a further take on a New Zealand gothic of busted marriages, madness, suicide. Stoking the nihilism, we are made aware of such imagery as drooling tongues that 'swish' like the tails of reptiles.

Elsewhere poems register the poet as prostrated with grief at various kinds of loss, or else marking off, rather as Kerry Loughrey does, domestic purgatories to be endured and later perhaps mined for a kind of resolution in the form of language. But this language is always fractured, jangling, distanced. Rapatahana has found an expressionist mode for authenticity by reminding us that print is really just marks on paper which you feel he'd like to score, incise or beat into the paper, as if onto skin, indelible as a bogan tattoo. His permission is gained from the typologically-daring Dadaists and Surrealists, Christian Morgenstern, Kurt Schwitters, Guillame Apollonaire, for like them, you feel, he has felt the shock wave of a war zone, emerging scarred and blitzed, even deafened, so that the he shouts in despair or ventriloquises, while any laughter is bitter.

At times the grotesquerie is a revelation, illuminating subtle undercurrents running through mainstream New Zealand, at other times it seems like mechanical crankiness or a coat-trailing bravado seeking to elicit responses. However, the doggedness of his achievement, for one senses that this is a writer who has been a long way down, may perhaps be registered or measured by a long-gestated poem that throws a verbal dart of witnessing description, pinning poet James K. Baxter by the sleeve of his too-large Salvation Army greatcoat to a dartboard in the back bar of the Kiwi Tavern, decades after Hemi's actual demise. Tensile, springy, the poem snaps shut like a steel trap.

Sam Hunt's Knucklebones: Poems 1962–2012 confirms him as author of an extraordinary number of love poems: the women to whom and of whom he writes are his denim be-jeaned muses, part dancing Graces and part pagan mysteries – wholly other, yet concisely, and perhaps immortally, delineated. Other poems acknowledge male mentors: Alistair Campbell ('Rainbows and A Promise'), Hone Tuwhare ('Hilary'), Frank Sargeson ('A Salt Man'), though other poets previously acknowledged and perhaps more central, namely A.R.D. Fairburn and James K. Baxter go unaddressed this time around. So even this 'collected poems' is a work-in-progress.

On the cover the poet is posed in dark glasses, hands curled halfway into claws, rather like a hooded falcon, a karearea resting from the hunt. For there's a hawkish quality, as of nature red in tooth and claw, to all of Hunt's work. He took up, or was given early, the role, the duty of contrarian: one of society's awkward squad, albeit its most eloquent figurehead, able to say in public what was muttered in private. But this latest book's most recent poems suggest a poet fending off recriminations from all sides, rather like a wounded toreador, or farm hand perhaps, one beset by maddened bovines. Like Baxter, Hunt has proved the most culpable of bards, taking on or acting out the sins of the tribe, a knight errant or larrikin, depending on your point of view.

So, if early on he was the poet of desire and plain-speaking, his new poems suggest a more guarded and cryptic sayer, in fact his last book Chords could just as readily have been titled Knots, so crabbed and gnomic are many of its poems, like enigmas wrapped tightly inside socks. In this they accord with our modern understanding of poetry as a riddling and solipsistic art form offering peeks into private universes. Sam Hunt's poems, more self-dramatising than most, are autobiography by other means, and he is a man who has in his time played many parts. He affirms the Romantic tradition, celebrating the self and the ego in the approved manner established by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth.

In Knucklebones we see him excavating the mountain of the self, contemplating his own mortality, his own body as a form of geology, incipient dust. This book confirms him as a master of the short lyric, a raconteur shaping his anecdotes into poetic artefacts of lapidary concision. Yet these late poems also constitute a kind of departure from earlier poems. They are, for example, almost cabbalistic in their counting of syllables, their use of numbers (tellingly the last sequence in the book is 'Five knucklebones', while Chords goes up to 'Chord 42'). It's also possible to describe recent ones as a danse macabre to a speeded-up funeral drum, as they increasingly mark the death of family friends and acquaintances, or reminisce about them, often in the form of a communion of spirit-selves in the world of dreams, remembered upon waking.

And always there is that sense of Sam Hunt as a kind of magus, working up spells and charms – and curses as well as charms. Forming melodious utterance from the everyday Kiwi vernacular, he remains exemplary – and guardedly mysterious. One poem in the 'Chords' sequence has him goggling in wall-eyed wonder at 'white cliffs'. Are these the white cliffs of Dover, or some eschatological symbol? Is it a vision or an intimation? Hear the voice of the bard:

talking of the white cliffs...

You never thought you'd

see them again:

but you're looking at them,

            you're looking at them hard,
            you're looking at them so hard
            they can only stare back,

and drop if they could
from thought, from sight.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

DAVID EGGLETON is the editor of Landfall Review Online.

GALLOPER WIELDS PROD AND PROBE

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 18:05:00 +0000

NICHOLAS REID

New Zealand in the Twentieth Century – The Nation, The People, by Paul Moon (Harper/Collins 2011) 672 pp. $49.99.

Conscientious historians worry about periodisation — that is, in historical terms, when can we say an ‘age’ or a period in a country’s history begins or ends? Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s Music Makers ode may be a very bad piece of Victorian poetry, but it’s surely correct when it declares that ‘Each age is a dream that is dying/ Or one that is coming to birth’. Historical periods overlap; attempts to divide history into discrete segments are always artificial; and only hundreds of years later do historians simplify with neat labels like ‘The Middle Ages’ or ‘The Age of Enlightenment’. Yet the attempt to periodise is still an essential skill when narrative historians choose to do a ‘broad sweep’ of a century or so. There has to be at least the effort to explain why one set of circumstances and beliefs and customs gradually changes into another. In other words, history isn’t history without a grasp of causation. The alternative is a more chronological approach, where history gives way to chronicle: one unexplained, de-contextualised event after another. Regrettably, it’s this latter approach that informs Paul Moon’s New Zealand in the Twentieth Century. Doggedly, each of its ten chapters confines itself to one decade, out of which Paul Moon cherry-picks what seem to him the most noteworthy features.
So what are the 1900s? They are notes on how Pakeha debased and romanticised Maori taste in fashioning Rotorua as a tourist trap; how Maori slums were worse than Pakeha ones; the eugenics of Truby King; the limited colonial taste shown in the 1907 Christchurch international exhibition; two pages on Richard Pearse; three pages about Alfred Hill and home-grown music and Charles Goldie’s paintings of Maori with their ‘dying race’ assumptions; Apirana Ngata and Te Aute College; and the burning of parliament buildings. The 1930s? An account of Auckland’s 1932 riot, heavily reliant on John Mulgan’s fictionalised version (without once mentioning Mulgan’s ambiguous role at the time of the riot itself); the Napier earthquake; the election of Labour; Jack Lovelock at the Berlin Olympics; Jean Batten’s flight; Rita Angus and Allen Curnow creating new art and poetry respectively; state housing; social security; the sociological description of ‘Littledene’; and the sinking of the Graf Spee. The 1960s? The introduction of television; the retro Good Keen Man image of Barry Crump; A.H. Reed’s prodigious feats of walking; the stir caused by Washday at the Pa; the Hunn Report; Colin McCahon; the sinking of the Wahine; Lloyd Geering being tried for heresy; the visit by the Beatles; sexual liberation and the Pill. There’s a faint sense of causation in one commendable aspect of this book. Decade by decade, Moon takes some time noting the changing status and social conditions of Maori. Otherwise, the overall effect is more faits divers than history: just one damn thing after another. It’s amusing in the way of old bedside books if you want a series of self-contained yarns before lights out. But it cannot be taken seriously as a authoritative or thorough ‘history’ of twentieth-century New Zealand.

All this would be harmless enough in a nostalgically glowing 'All Our Yesterdays' sort of way, but there’s a more negative side to this book. Paul Moon prides himself on defying the academic history ‘establishment’ and giving a no-nonsense version of the past, free of jargon. Theory is shunned. In his introduction he declares: ‘I have avoided making any overarching claims about the nature of New Zealand and New Zealanders in the twentieth century and have similarly exercised reluctance when exploring theses relating to the country’s social and cultural identity during this period.’ He adds that the book is simply ‘an attempt to build up an impression of New Zealand over this period; and if a few shoots of insight spring from its contents, then it will have achieved its purpose.’ (p.9) In effect, he claims to be ‘objective’ and apolitical, leaving readers to draw whatever conclusions they will from whatever ‘impression’ this impressionist presents. There should always be some caution exercised about historians and other social commentators who declare they avoid ‘overarching claims’ and interpretation. Experience tells me to expect a lot of unanalysed and unsubstantiated opinions instead, presented as objective ‘fact’. My suspicion is fully justified in this case, and Moon’s introductory disclaimers come close to being disingenuous. For, by omission, by implication, by an epithet inserted here and a snide innuendo there, Moon can be seen to express strong interpretative opinions about many things. In effect, these are his own ‘overarching claims’ and ‘theses relating to cultural identity’, no less doctrinaire for not being clearly articulated in one place.

Consider his cherry-picking. Moon asserts in his introduction that ‘by choosing to focus on fewer episodes – as I have in this volume – the opportunity exists to prod and probe them in more detail, rather than just graze the surface before quickly moving on to the next field’ (p.6). In reality, the choice of ‘episodes’ means both de-contextualization and the avoidance of things Moon prefers not to examine. Take the matter of the New Zealand home front in both World Wars. It is almost ignored for the Second World War (there’s an account of the ‘Battle’ of Manners Street and the shooting of Japanese prisoners at Featherston camp). It is completely omitted for the First World War. Why should this be so? The wholesale reorganisation of New Zealand’s economy during the Great War was crucial to the way the country ran for the next few decades. Missing it out compromises severely something which claims to be a ‘history’ of twentieth century New Zealand. Aware that I am only speculating, I wonder if Moon wanted to avoid mentioning that, with the Reverend Howard Elliott and the Protestant Political Association (PPA) exerting some influence on the Reform government, the last years of the First World War were also the most fraught period in New Zealand’s history for religious bigotry and sectarianism? The bigotry came mainly from more marginal, less theologically sophisticated Protestant churches projecting their fears onto Catholics.

At any rate, by completely omitting these matters, Moon makes it easier to give his own typically anti-Catholic spin on the few occasions the Catholic Church is mentioned. Inter alia, there is a ludicrous 4-page summary of the sedition trial of Bishop Liston (pp.154-58), who was apparently just an evil man bent on disturbing the peace. There is a complete misrepresentation of the position of the Catholic Church in New Zealand (‘where medieval-like doctrine trickled down from the Pope’) over homosexual law reform (p.537). In his coverage of the 1930s Depression, Moon devotes two pages (pp. 219-220) to the short-lived New Zealand Legion, with its British imperial flag-waving notions for curing the Slump – while failing to note that many of its personnel were recycled PPA people. But then he can’t note this, can he? Because he’s edited the Protestant Political Association out of his narrative. It would appear that Moon’s own theological leanings are conservative Protestant ones. At least that’s my deduction, following from his extraordinary claim that Lloyd Geering ‘smeared’ a conservative spokesman, E.M. Blaiklock, after the heresy trial. (p. 430) Moon dislikes left-wing intellectuals and militant unionists almost as much as he dislikes Catholics, and his obiter dicta comments on them, peppering the text, again betray his ideology. It may well be that complacently left-wing interpretations of our history have for too long dominated our history departments, and are overdue for a good intellectual challenge. The recent reassessments of Bill Massey would seem to indicate as much. But a good intellectual challenge is not what Moon gives. There may be some cheap fun to be had in Moon’s odd swipe at left-wing pieties, such as his smirking at the ‘bluster’ and ‘booming oratory’ of David Lange (p.513) and Lange’s ‘glib piece of banter’ at the Oxford Union debate (p. 530). But it is hard to smile when we have already waded through pages of Moon telling us in tub-thumping style that industrial troubles before the First World War were the fault of sinister unionist ‘activists and agitators who travelled throughout the Pacific Rim’ (p.91); that the Waihi strike was caused mainly by ‘a decade of socialist rabble-rousing and indoctrination.’ (p.94); and that in 1951 ‘underwhelming as [Sid] Holland’s methods may have seemed to a few of the country’s academics, they proved fitting for the task he faced in dealing with militant unionists intent on throwing their weight around in the political arena.’ (p.335)

In fairness I should note that his eight pages on the 1951 waterfront dispute are reasonably balanced, but then apparently in Bill Sutch’s trial, ‘the hubris of the intellectual left was approaching its climax’ (p. 461). Later, during the 1981 Springbok Tour protests, ‘the act of protest and defiance almost became an end in itself’ (p. 495); and, ‘at some point during the tour the protest movement had turned feral’ (p. 498). I could, of course, be accused of my own cherry-picking in quoting Moon samples, except that they are all much of a muchness, a continuous tabloid editorial. I recall that when Moon was criticised for his ridiculous caricature of Bishop Pompallier in his 2001 biography of Hone Heke, he riposted that it ‘amounted to just a few sentences’ in the book. But a sentence here and a sentence here amounts to Moon’s ‘overarching claims’, his unexamined biases and assumptions. Biases are slyly pervasive in New Zealand in the Twentieth Century. A book containing an historical sweep of 591 pages isn’t completely devoid of merit, of course. This is a readable, if highly selective, gallop through the secondary sources, merrily telling some good tales, rapidly delineating some interesting vignettes. But the claim to be free of a thesis is pure imposture.

______________________________________________________________________________

NICHOLAS REID is an Auckland historian, critic, poet and teacher. He has authored many books from non-fiction to poetry and also runs the weekly blog Reid's Reader.

WIDE HORIZON

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 17:30:00 +0000

VAUGHAN RAPATAHANA

Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania, by Alice Te Punga Sommerville, (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 288 pp., $61.99.

Their knowing the use of this sort of Cloth doth in some measure account for the extraordinary fondness they have shew’d for it above every other thing we had to give them.” [Cook, Edwards, Beaglehole 1955/1968]

'For Māori at Uawa in 1769, the usual European trade goods and trinkets that had been prepared for exchange by the Europeans on board the Endeavour were trumped by large sheets of tapa recently acquired in Tahiti … As they interacted with navigator-explorers Tupaia and Cook, Māori communities drew on existing narratives of connection and exchange with the broader Pacific.' [Sommerville, 2012]

Alice Te Punga Sommerville’s important thesis is that not only do all Polynesian peoples share a Pacific Ocean heritage and ethnicity, but that it is well past the time that mo ngā iwi Māori o Aotearoa and Polynesians from elsewhere started to share a lot more than they currently appear to do, whether in the tight urban-suburban boxes they tend to inhabit within New Zealand, or in their increasing intermingling in diasporal sorties.

Both groups remain marginalised, both groups still do not have a reasonable bite of the socio-economic pie, both groups’ numbers are growing at a rapid rate. Any perceived differences – stemming more from ngā iwi Māori toward other Pacific people rather than the other way around – need now to be put aside and, given their original common Pacific genesis, gestation and subsequent groupings, all New Zealand Polynesians should get together to de-marginalise, demand, defend. After all, Māori too are Pacific Islanders: 'Pacific identification does not dilute Māori identification.' It is an age of inclusiveness, an age of the ‘Hawaiiki nation.’

There are significant connotations here, of course, for Māori as regards Indigenousness to their whenua or land and their concomitant first-people rights, which Sommerville addresses. Asking the vital question: 'Does being Pacific – being migrants from across Te Moananui-a Kiwa – default us out of conventional modes of articulating ourselves as Indigenous?' she sees no dismantling of Māori first nation rights whatsoever, but envisions rather a wider-angled lens whereby, quoting Ngahiwi Tomoana (2008): 'Indigenous peoples across Aotearoa, the Pacific and the Hawaiiki nation' can 'agitate for their rights in the context of the United Nations Declaration [on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples]'. And to quote from Will ‘Ilolahia (1973): 'This doesn’t mean that the Māori lose their Māoritanga and replace their Māoriness. No, it means [the] opposite, because by obtaining and using one’s own Māoritanga, Maori way of life, Māoris [sic] become more Polynesian.'

Māori should, Sommerville argues, not feel threatened by their Pacific cousins, but join with them, and in so doing their bonding would make for an even stronger case for all their rights within Aotearoa, which for her is not the ‘mere’ land mass of a Pākehā-prescribed New Zealand, but which manifestly extends well out into the Pacific and incorporates not only Pasifika people, but also the masses of Māori who live beyond this ‘New Zealand’, because: 'Māori also spend time in Pacific spaces.'

Indeed, for her, it is precisely because of their shared lower socio-economic status within Aotearoa that any rivalries commenced in the first place: 'the economic struggle that I argue has underpinned and exacerbated much of the prejudice between the communities', as she says. This diurnal economic rivalry, rather than any threat to Māori Indigeneity needs to be seen for what it is. For this reviewer, such rivalry has been and still remains part and parcel of a deliberate Pākehā plot, whereby Polynesians were transplanted into cities as the equivalent of coolie labourers. All Polynesians have suffered because of Pākehā oppression and suppression (think of New Zealand’s military presence in Samoa in 1929 and the brutal murders of Mau Samoa protestors, and don’t get me started on Pākehā-on-Māori atrocities like that which happened at Handley’s Woolshed in 1868, let alone more recent incursions into Te Urewera.)

This then is Sommerville’s quite novel, timely and necessary thesis: ngā iwi Māori could and should become more enlightened about their continued antithesis to ngā Pākehā and consider far more the value of their mutuality with Pacific Island peoples.

I will leave aside here the vital question: will ngā iwi Māori katoa ever take heed of this brave writer, and note that at the very least ngā kaituhi Māori may now respond to some other questions posed by Sommerville: 'Where are the novels and short fiction and poetry and plays by Māori that are set in the brown suburbs of Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch and that include mixed Māori-Pasifika families and friendships?' Tika tēnei patai. Me, mo ngā iwi Māori hoki; and what about: 'One does not stop being Māori when one is living in the Pacific, does one stop being Pacific when one is living in Aotearoa?'

However, I have some reservations in the actual presentation and symmetrical logic of the thesis presented here, and worse than this – some claims just do not stand up.

To summarize: In the first place, this is not an academic sociological tract in any sense of the word. Statistics are as elusive as sylphs, while case-studies of ‘real’ Māori and Pacific peoples are few and far between, although some space is given to the curious case of the removal of a Māori youth as a ‘Pacific Island representative’ from a Te Papa poster in October 2007, and to the mixed-up messages pertaining to the naming of, and Māori representation in, any pavilion supposedly representing New Zealand/Aotearoa at the various Auckland Pasifika festivals over the past few years. Everyone, it seems, is confused by the ‘actual’ existential basis of current Polynesian groupings, let alone what to attribute as to nomenclature. In both scenarios there was, and is, a reluctance to attribute Pacific-ness to Māori.

So, rather than sociology, this is a delving into literature – primarily fictive and poetic – and a literary critique (despite Sommerville’s early notation that the book is an exercise in interdisciplinarity) in an attempt to ‘prove’ what in many ways seems a pre-ordained thesis, formulated well before the evidence here presented. And the entire book is very resonant of an academic doctoral thesis with snatches and patches of other writings glued in at various stages (see Sommerville’s note that 'it has emerged from an aspect of my doctoral research.') Which is why there are two pages of publication history at the end of the book, and – somewhat frustratingly – no bibliography whatsoever. Which is also why – for me anyway – the Introductions are far too many, and somewhat repetitive. The entire book is something of a patchwork quilt, and I cannot quite see where Albert Wendt gets his back-cover blurb comment 'accessible' from, because in places it is densely, even tortuously, textured.
Sommerville herself admits to finding a scarcity of literary evidence in this litero-anthropological critique of some literature, particularly with regard to ‘disconnections’ between Māori and Pacific. Thus some analysis is rather sparse on the ground – and some – such as, for example, her introduction of Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan’s Opening Doors as a Māori writing about Pacific is stretching things a bit too thinly. (Although Sommerville eventually admits: 'Indeed, very little of the book explicitly engages Pacific connections at all.') I don’t see enough of her avowed desire to discern 'Māori articulations of connections with the Pacific' here, probably because there haven’t been many! A bit more meat on the bones would have been tastier eh. That said, Once Were Pacific will, I hope, persuade more such articulation.

It is, however, great to see that Patuawa-Nathan and Vernice Wineera have been brought into the world of light by Sommerville, while – at long last also, Hinewirangi gets some of the attention her writings so well deserve. I wish Alice Te Punga Sommerville luck in her impending Ghost Writers project concerning ngā kaituhi Māori ngaro.

Several omissions intrigue me though. Other than the very obvious point that the focus is here entirely on English language literature, not indigenous language works, there is no scope given to many Pacific zones whatsoever – perhaps through the author’s lack of connection to them. Thus, for example, Fiji, Vanuatu, Nauru, Guam, Saipan, Tinian, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Solomon Islands, Palau, Marshall and Caroline Islands just don’t rate much or indeed, any mention, while the Philippines may as well not exist. Yet their strong genetic and linguistic connections to ngā iwi Māori should establish that such nations need to be involved in this project as well.

I speak of what I know, as I have spent and continue to spend considerable time in such places across the Pacific, and I also would swear – rather as Sommerville does as regards Taiwan indigenous peoples – that I had seen my Māori uncles in Pampanga on several occasions, while words such as kutu and mata, among many others, rank with the exact same meanings in both te reo Māori and Tagalog.

To be fair to the author however, she does point out that the hoped-for result of her book is not only 'the development of scholarship about Māori writing in English', but also that she 'yearns for the intellectual company of, parallel development of scholarship about Māori writing in the Māori language' – as well as, incidentally, to going well 'beyond the conventional forms treated in literary studies.'

Some statements, unfortunately, are just downright wrong: 'There are only five published book-length treatments of (English-language) Māori literature' rings hollow – especially in 2012, when Paola Della-Valle, Christine Prentice, Janet Wilson, Christine Stachurski, Nadia Majid, Michelle Keown, Melissa Kennedy, Michaela Moura-Kocoglu have had books published very recently, and some are indeed prominent in the new literature.

And what about this? With reference to the first poetry books by Wineera and Patuawa-Nathan, Sommerville writes that they 'are impossible to buy', which is just not true. I sourced my own copies and paid for them easily on the Internet this year – from www.bookfinder.com

Next: 'Very few new Māori poets have come into publication over the past ten years.' Not true at all. Other than Taylor and Sullivan and Baker, putting aside the fact that this sounds like a law firm and these are indeed referenced in this book, there have been many ‘new’ Māori poets ‘surfacing’ over the last few years – for example, Reihana Robinson and Marewa Glover as just two examples. And where is Michael O’Leary? Roma Potiki? And so on. (Sommerville, has, by the way, managed to smuggle in three of her own poems! She has insinuated here a good deal of personal-life self-referencing too.)

Given all of the last few areas of problematic assertions, as above, and given that Sommerville is at her best and does make for rather enthralling reading when she (re)introduces works that have not had much airplay, such as her detailed and intelligent interpretations of Whale Rider, the various incarnations of Romeo and Juliet, and especially the focus on Te Rangihiroa and – later – the student newspaper Rongo, all of which is very interesting, what is my final summation of Once Were Pacific?
Nēi ra, kei te pai tēnei pukapuka, This book is fine, that’s for sure. Engari kāore he taunakitanga nui kei konei hoki. But there’s also not enough evidence here. Ko nui ngā patai o nuinga mo tēnei pukapuka tonu. There are still many question-marks overall about this book. Heoti, he rangi ta matawhāiti, he rangi ta matawhānui. However, a person with a narrow vision sees a narrow horizon, while a person with a wide vision sees a wide horizon. Ko Alice Te Punga Sommerville tēnei tangata tuarua. Alice Te Punga Sommerville is this second person. She has grasped perspicaciously the 'complicated dynamic of connection and derision that shapes the relationships between Māori and Pasifika communities in Aotearoa New Zealand.' Ko te marangai rangimārie kei mua te āwhā tēnei pukapuka. This book is the quiet rain before the storm.

_________________________________________________________

VAUGHAN RAPATAHANA: Ko Te Atiawa te iwi, ko Ngati Te Whiti te hapu. Ko toru nga wahi o te kainga inaianei. He has a PhD in Existentialism from the University of Auckland and currently lives in Hong Kong.

FATAL ASSUMPTIONS

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 17:28:00 +0000

PETER ENTWISLE

The Meeting Place: Maori and Pakeha Encounters, 1642-1840, Vincent O’Malley (Auckland University Press, 2012), 284 pp., $45.

Vincent O’Malley’s meeting place is a common ground where members of different societies can find ways of interacting which bridge their cultural differences. He has borrowed the notion from an American historian Richard White whose term for it is ‘middle ground’. People have adopted it but often misapplied it. They use it to refer to situations where one society overwhelms the other. In a true middle ground, or meeting place, each group adjusts its own social practices in light of the other’s, but doesn’t abandon its own culture.

It is O’Malley’s contention that in New Zealand the Bay of Islands was such a place between 1814, when the missionary settlement was founded, and 1840 when New Zealand became a British colony. He offers this as an alternative to what he considers ‘the conventional wisdom at one time’: that, after a period of initial resistance, Maori culture changed profoundly – it more or less collapsed – and Maori were assimilated into Pakeha society. He sometimes calls this the ‘Fatal Impact’ view and identifies Harrison Wright, an American who wrote on the subject in 1959, as its leading exponent.

Early in his book, at page 71, O’Malley, says there was another middle ground in southern New Zealand, in the very far south, Murihiku. But when concluding, at page 228, he seems less sure. He makes a good case for his main thesis but is much weaker on the south where there was briefly a middle ground at Otago and where there was indeed a fatal impact.

We get a brief account of Tasman’s, Cook’s, De Surville’s and du Fresne’s bloody first encounters with Maori, convincingly illustrating the lack of common ground, focused on the north of the North Island and the north of the South Island. Later eighteenth century explorers are merely listed before we turn to commercial visitors.

The first, Captain Eber Bunker of the William and Ann, is mentioned at page 57 as approaching Doubtless Bay from the north. This is a confusion. He went to Dusky Sound and probably then called at Akaroa in the summer of 1791 to 1792 before getting to Doubtless Bay. O’Malley’s extensive bibliography includes sources which would tell him about this.

His account of the incidents of the Sealers’ War, sparked by a theft and murder at Otago Harbour in 1810, is still without benefit of the Creed manuscript, discovered in 2003 and reproduced in Gaining a Foothold, a book he lists in his bibliography. There are sources he doesn’t list, including my 2005 biography of William Tucker, who settled at Whareakeake in 1815 and fostered a trade with Europeans in hei-tiki before dying in the conflict, as well as my 2010 account of the Dunedin district in the period Behold the Moon which covers the Sealers’ War and other matters. As a consequence we get a number of dubious claims and mistakes.

According to O’Malley, southern New Zealand saw no obvious milestone matching the 1814 settlement in the north. Actually, the Weller brothers’ Otago establishment, founded in 1831, not ‘after 1832’ as O’Malley says at page 91, is clearly comparable though admittedly different in character. At page 90 the Matilda’s lascars were apparently ‘taken in’ by Maori, despite having probably been enslaved. On the same page, despite O’Malley’s statement, James Stuart’s aboriginal wife was not seized by the General Gates at Kangaroo Island but came with her husband voluntarily. O’Malley’s offered conclusion on pages 89 to 90 that Caddell was not so enamoured of New South Wales as to want to stay is undermined by records that show he later settled and died at Parramatta. Similarly, the General Gates did not sail down and sink a canoe in Foveaux Strait. The waka suffered a natural disaster, which Maori saw as supernatural punishment for having attacked the General Gates’ gangs.

O’Malley then discusses commercial, sexual, religious and political relations separately, still heavily focused on the Bay of Islands. And this is where his case is most convincing. He makes the point that, contrary to some writers’ beliefs, in pre-contact Maori society there were economic as well as ceremonial forms of exchange. While the latter could be commercially dysfunctional, indeed ruinous, because they required accepting unwanted things and responding with gifts of greater value, the former were not. They involved exchanging goods plentiful in one group’s area, say the birds and rats of an inland people, for fish and other seafood from a coastal district. It wasn’t difficult to adapt this to trade with Europeans and didn’t entail any great change to Maori or Pakeha culture.

Sex is more problematic. In pre-contact Maori society, with a few exceptions, unmarried people were free to take lovers without stigma. No special value was placed on virginity in contrast to European, and especially missionary, expectations. On the other hand married people, especially women, were expected to be faithful. There was also a tradition of providing sexual services as a part of hospitality. Intercultural sexual relations soon developed to include prostitution, which was a change for Maori, enthusiastically embraced by many. There were also affectionate relationships and arranged marriages but it is the character of prostitution which is hardest to gauge. The missionaries of course deplored it. But was it beneficial or destructive to Maori society?

O’Malley cites mixed reports and delivers a mixed verdict at page 156; and at page 154 says accounts of a more exploitative trade are mostly confined to the Bay of Islands. This is not so.

One of his sources for the Bay of Islands in 1827 was sailing with Dumont D’Urville, and O’Malley lists the account of the latter’s later voyage in his bibliography. That account gives his and his officers’ vividly condemnatory accounts of prostitution at Otago in 1840, which confirm that it had become more widespread and coercive and reflected a great decline in Maori customary life. Whereas it was formerly only slaves who were coerced, now daughters and wives were preyed on; they were paid little and that taken by their men. These were not missionaries but French naval officers whose accounts cannot be similarly dismissed or ignored. It is remarkable that O’Malley has chosen to overlook their testimony.

Similarly, at page 141, O’Malley says alcohol consumption was not reported as a problem among Maori until well after 1840 although D’Urville in that year reported that at Otago the purveyors of ‘brandy’ got all the little money made by Maori and Pakeha alike.

O’Malley makes a convincing case that Maori conversion to Christianity did not involve the abandonment of all, or even much, of prior religious belief. He is right that it is only if one supposes that chiefly power was previously autocratic that the relatively participatory and egalitarian forms of self-government apparent among Maori by 1840 at the Bay of Islands seem a radical change. He is convincing, too, that while the Bay of Islands’ Maori population had diminished by 1840 it perhaps had not gone down by half and that the 1837 influenza epidemic can’t have been the cause.

He is also surely correct in stating, at page 210, that the most compelling evidence for the ‘fatal impact’ argument is the effect of disease and rapid depopulation. It is just this which can cause a society to abandon its gods, lose its social cohesion and come to believe it is doomed. But he is wrong when he says, at page 212, that the evidence of the devastating impact of disease is ‘both anecdotal and unsatisfactory’, at least so far as Otago and Murihiku are concerned.

This seems an echo of Atholl Anderson’s remark in The Welcome of Strangers, which O’Malley sources, that the relatively large figures for Maori population in the far south of New Zealand before the 1840s are hearsay. They don’t come from reported first hand contemporary witnesses. In Behold the Moon I cited contemporary reports of the epidemics and witness reports, some admittedly later, whose numbers represent a devastating decline.

This would indeed produce something like the effect of the Black Death in Europe in the fourteenth century. At page 213, O’Malley quotes a Hokianga missionary’s concern that Maori faced either extinction or becoming so merged with Pakeha ‘as to lose almost all characteristics of being a distinct people’. It seems clear that that hadn’t happened in the Bay of Islands or Hokianga by 1840, but also that something like it was well in train in the far south by then. The Meeting Place is a useful review of the far north’s contact period history, but it continues a long and unfortunate tradition of extrapolating the results to the rest of New Zealand. It also fails to thoroughly consult the now considerably augmented records for the south. There was a meeting place at Otago from 1831. Sadly the impact of the European incursion was devastating for southern Maori, whose distinctive culture eventually disappeared. Significantly, the continuing Maori renaissance is seeing the culture of southern Maori overlaid with northern characteristics, rather as Dr O’Malley is misrepresenting it by overlaying its history with that of the north.

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PETER ENTWISLE is a Dunedin-based writer, historian and art curator. He contributes a regular column about the arts to the Otago Daily Times, and his books include Behold the Moon: the European Occupation of the Dunedin District 1770 – 1848 (Port Daniel Press).

GINGER MAN

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 17:20:00 +0000

CHRIS ELSE

Love and Money by Greg McGee (Penguin, 2012), 352 pp., $29.99.

In early 1980 one of my first attempts at a stage play was selected for the workshop at the National Playwright’s Conference. A short time later I was drinking in Wellington’s Southern Cross Hotel with a group of people that included Mervyn Thompson, one of the workshop organisers. I doubt that Proc, to use Mervyn's nickname, knew who I was at that point and when one of the group asked him about the plays being worked on he began to wax lyrical about one in particular, describing it as ‘the nearest thing to a work of genius to come out of New Zealand theatre’. He didn’t name the playwright and, of course, my spirits immediately soared with the fond hope that he was referring to my piece. Vanity of vanities. By the end of the workshop there was only one play anyone cared about, and its rehearsed reading was an extraordinary piece of theatre: a rapt audience, an emotionally charged cast, and a script that seemed at once poetic, powerful and profoundly challenging because it was so deeply rooted in the New Zealand psyche. Any envy I might have had was swept away in the experience. It seemed that Foreskin’s Lament had quite simply rewritten all the rules.

  Through the early eighties I followed McGee’s career closely, hoping to recapture the magic of that workshop experience. Tooth and Claw and Out in the Cold had many of the right qualities but they felt more like echoes than new work. By 1987, it seemed as if McGee’s time as the wunderkind of New Zealand theatre was over and the next I heard of him he was writing scripts for movies and television and developing what seemed to become a highly successful career in the commercial side of drama.
The acknowledgements to Love and Money indicate that the story had its origins in an aborted 1987 screenplay and that McGee made several subsequent attempts to bring it to fruition. This, plus the banner on the cover, which makes specific reference to Foreskin’s Lament, invites comparison between the novel and the drama. In its way Love and Money is also a lament and one that revisits the theme of those early plays: a conflict of values between a generous-spirited and somewhat idealistic liberalism and narrow-minded egotism. For Foreskin this conflict plays out in the context of a sporting tradition of fair play that is threatened by an attitude of win at all costs. The novel has a broader canvas, taking in society, culture, and the political-economy and it differs, too, in its historical perspective. In 1980, the crisis in our values was real and pressing. The play was charged with a prescient sense of urgency that something needed and had to be done, an urgency that within fifteen months of that workshop had thousands of New Zealanders on the streets protesting against the Springbok Tour. The novel on the other hand looks back from a distance of 25 years and whatever relevance it has for today is muted by the considerations of hindsight. There is no zeal in Love and Money, none of the sharpness and youthful exuberance of Foreskin. Instead, the edges are blurred and the performance feels like that of a thoroughly experienced professional, aiming as much to entertain as to challenge his audience.
Nineteen eighty-seven was a year of big events. In May and June the first Rugby World Cup helped to rehabilitate the sport in the eyes of many of the fans who were disillusioned by 1981 and by the 1986 Cavaliers tour to South Africa. In August a general election ushered in the second Lange government and the now notorious strategy of selling state assets to pay off government debt. In October came Black Monday, and the stock market crash that wiped out the newly-gotten gains of a generation of speculators and created a global financial crisis. The parallels with 2012 are plain enough but, unfortunately, any comment on twenty-first century New Zealand remains muted because the story set against this historical backdrop is suffused with a mood of nostalgia for political battles past rather than with a forward-looking sense of the need for change.
  The plot revolves around Mike, a middle-aged actor and serial monogamist, whose latest partner, Louise, is company secretary to a high-flying, money-grubbing corporation. When Louise throws him over for her bull-necked boss, Mike begins a downward slide in ironic reversal to the dizzying climb of the stock market. The production of Timon of Athens that he is starring in closes, and he gets fired by the director of the theatre. With nothing to his name but a clapped-out VW, he is thrown on the mercy of his extended family: the three women he has previously had children with and their respective partners. These couples, in their various ways, provide a compendium of the main features that defined the times.
  Liz, who is pregnant, is a marriage councillor working for the Family Court. Her partner, Sean, Mike’s best friend, is speech writer for Prime Minister Lange and spends half his life commuting to and from Wellington. Faye, the mother of Mike’s youngest child, is a journalist for a feminist magazine on a clandestine assignment to expose the sexual exploitation in a supposedly liberated community which differs from Centrepoint in little more than name. Her partner, Roland, a Senior Lecturer in English, suffers threats from the same mysterious group who, in real life, accused Mervyn Thompson of rape, tied him to a tree and threatened to castrate him. The third household consists of Mike’s first partner, the earth-mother Sarina, a brood of children headed by Mike’s eldest child, Hendrix, and Jimmy, a drunken, violent Glaswegian artist.
The novel is divided into five parts, the middle three of which each focuses on one of the couples. As one would expect from a thoroughly professional dramatist, the plotting is excellent, and the story moves easily through its overall dramatic arc while at the same time presenting the requisite stages in the development of the individual protagonists. When it comes to characterisation, though, I was less impressed. The characters are all carefully distinguished one from another but they have little emotional depth. They feel like parts in a play that are waiting for actors to bring them to life.
Now and again, the writing hints at a more satisfying complexity. When Liz goes into labour with Sean stuck in Wellington, it is left to Mike to get her to hospital. Her frustration at his presence and his almost uxorious eagerness to be involved create an excruciating moment that begins to fill out the relationships and the individuals in it. Similarly, there are moments of poignancy in fourteen-year-old Hendrix’s petty thievery and financial scheming as he attempts to keep his family together, to pay the rent and to feed and clothe his siblings.
For the most part, though, despite their carefully differentiated personality traits, the characters seem based in stereotype. All the males, with the possible exceptions of Sean and Hendrix, seem to be bumbling clowns. The females, by contrast and with the possible exception of Sarina, are competent and in control. The contrast suggests the modern phenomenon of 'manvertising' and blunts the novel’s satirical intent. Sexual politics dominates the emotional landscape of the novel at the expense of other possible themes, such as corporate greed or right-wing economic agendas, and despite the many references to feminists and feminism the treatment here harks back to the sixties. There is perhaps one reference too many to magnificent breasts, while Mike, his incompetent downward slide notwithstanding, is cast in the role of the sexually passive but irresistible male. His homosexual banker is sufficiently (yet unrequitedly) in love with him to leave him $150,000 in his will and, throughout the book, Mike constantly finds himself having sex without initiating it. On two occasions he’s asleep when the woman in question jumps him. On another he’s is too drunk to remember what happened afterwards. On a fourth, he’s overwhelmed by his ex-partner’s eagerness, despite his earnest promises to himself not to get involved with her. If it were not for an underlying sense of decency – he gives away his inheritance to alleviate the poverty of Sarina and her family – this scapegrace might have wandered into this book straight out of a Donleavy novel.
In the closing scene, we find Mike sitting in his underwear on the steps of a boathouse playing a harmonica and contemplating a future that is a choice between useful employment as a painter and decorator and a long term acting job in the role of rooster in a series of TV commercials. He has reached rock bottom, it seems, but all self-serving desire is burned away and he has also reached a measure of peace and contentment. There could hardly be a greater contrast than with Foreskin’s last excoriating ‘Whaddarya?’

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CHRIS ELSE is a novelist and occasional poet. He lives in Wellington.

IT LOOKS DEAD BUT IT IS ALIVE

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 17:15:00 +0000

ELSPETH SANDYS

All the Voices Cry, by Alice Petersen (Biblioasis, 2012) 158 pp., $27.00.

Short story collections are notoriously difficult to review. There is no requirement on the author's part to create links from one story to another, or to explore themes that, broadly speaking, bind the parts together to make a whole. Sometimes the only connecting link is the elusive authorial voice, elusive because the better the writer, the more likely it is that each story will be a universe 'entire of itself'.

New Zealand-born Alice Petersen's debut collection, All the Voices Cry, announces itself early on as something of a gift to the reviewer. The authorial voice, far from being elusive, is sharply, poetically present. This is not to suggest that the stories are in any way diminished, though some undoubtedly succeed better than others. What makes this collection so easy (in the best sense of the word) to read, is the author's passionate relationship with the woods, lakes and rivers of her adopted Canada: to be precise, the hinterland of Montreal. In story after story what comes off the page is her sense of the overwhelming presence of the natural world, and the ways in which human beings interact with it, for better or worse.

From story to story, images jump off the page, transporting the reader to a land of portage trails, lakeside cabins, woods full of wild flowers and healing herbs, exotic birds, prowling bears, elusive fish, and humans whose marks on the landscape tend to last no longer than the season in which they were made. ‘Up in the woods life, no longer simple, develops myriad complications’, the English Professor, Colin Pritchard, observes in ‘The Tenured Heart’. Retreating from the weekend that might have changed his life, he pronounces himself a coward. Not for him the challenge of the wilderness, and the shape-shifting humans who inhabit it. The same is true, though in more subtle fashion, for Freya, protagonist of the title story. A widow of eight years, she enters the woods seeking renewal. But what she hears is not the promise of new love, but her husband’s voice: ‘We walk in the woods alone my dear, walk in the woods alone.’

Curiously, the five stories set in New Zealand – 'Through the Gates', 'The Land Below', Neptune's Necklace', 'Scottish Annie', and 'Mrs Viebert's Prognostication' – are less satisfying than their Canadian counterparts. The landscapes of these stories, while vivid enough, carry less freight than the stories set in the Quebec wilderness. Though ‘Neptune's Necklace’, set in a tiny Otago coastal township (I read it as Aramoana), does what Peterson achieves so tellingly in the Canadian stories, aligning the human predicament with the changeable and ultimately mysterious movements of the natural world.

Hattie, the protagonist of ‘Neptune’s Necklace’, has a secret (The five New Zealand stories are all predicated on secrets of some kind, as are several of those with Canadian settings.) In Hatties’s case the secret is the death by drowning of her young grand-daughter, and the sense, hinted at rather than stated, of her own culpability. It is only when this is revealed that Hattie’s life as an artist of the beach and the sea makes sense. But if that was all there was to the story it would be little more than a conventional threnody for the inevitable (and unjust) tragedies that befall so many human beings. What lifts it above the conventional is the presence, as catalyst, of two young lovers, entranced, as Hattie is, by what the sea tosses up, but, unlike Hattie, full of faith in the future and in love with life.

Such grace moments are typical of the whole collection. Stories that might otherwise have been mired in melancholy are subjected to subtle shifts, allowing the reader to view the characters and their situations, from a different, less gloomy angle. Bernadette, the mother in ‘Salsa Madre’ who has lost her son, finds him again, but only to observe, not to engage with. In ‘Champlain’s Astrolabe’ Brian, father of Kelvin, who ‘had always been a question mark kid’, thinks a ‘brush with mortality’ might shock his son out of his torpor. But it is not Kelvin who gets beaten to within an inch of his life but Brian himself, an experience which leaves him ‘strangely exhilarated’. Isabella, the actress in ‘Where the Corpse Weed Grows’, seeking a miracle cure for her dying mother, is directed instead to the corpse weed, ‘the living dead of nature’. ‘It looks dead but it is alive,’ the park ranger tells her, cautioning her against miracle cures. ‘Go to your mother, sit with her, and listen to her,’ he counsels. Melancholy – all too often the short story default position – clings to every one of these tales, but it is the other feelings that Petersen brings into play – stoicism, the acceptance of fate, the possibility of renewal, the persistence of meaning – that create their unique tone.

The perverse ways in which meaning is revealed is another of the unifying threads running through these stories. Nowhere is this more true than in the not entirely successful 'Mrs Viebert's Progostication', a story which asks the reader to believe that a prophecy made sixty years in the past could prompt Norman, a successful Montreal eye doctor, to fly back to his native new Zealand in order to avoid the supposed consequences of that prophecy. The problem is we don't know Norman well enough to understand why he goes to such elaborate lengths to disguise his real reasons for flying 'home', nor are we convinced that those reasons are a sufficient explanation for his actions. Because of that the sighting on the plane of the woman most closely connected with the prophecy seems more like the author straining for meaning than something that has arisen naturally from character and circumstance.

More successful, in the quest for meaning, is the author's doubling of both people and locations. Characters who are centre stage in one story re-appear as virtual ghosts in another, creating a palimpsest of meaning, all the more believable for being so lightly etched. The same places recur too: Rook University the ‘natural home’ of Colin Pritchard, gets a passing mention in two other stories; a necking couple (echoing the couple in 'Neptune’s Necklace') at an airport are observed both by Norman on his journey back to New Zealand, and by Penelope Pritchard, mother of Colin, whose story is told in ‘Neither Up nor Down’. The couple play no role in either story, but such is Petersen’s skill they seem to offer a silent commentary on both Norman’s failed marriage, and Penelope’s failing one.

Petersen has described her stories as 'just the right length for one brief voyage before sleep.' Her ideal reader, she’s been reported as saying, is someone who has ten minutes to spare and picks up one of her stories to read while she is waiting. This chosen brevity, which in the case of ‘Mrs Viebert's Prognostication' means that too much is left out, works, in the more successful stories, in the same way as poetry, suggesting rather than stating, alluding to events that a less confident writer might have been tempted to spell out in detail.

There is an old-fashioned feel to some of the stories, consistent with their remote settings: a poet bashes out his poems on a portable typewriter; children play second world war games; a group of Palmerston North friends play canasta. But there is nothing old-fashioned about Petersen’s observations: the timelessness of desire; the inevitability of loss; the unsettling power of memory; the baffling recurrence of co-incidence, and the wash of meaning left in its wake.

‘A frog knows where it wants to go,’ ten-year old Carl tell his mother in ‘The Frog’, the implication being that human beings don’t, choosing wrong paths at every turn. It’s too soon to predict where Alice Petersen’s talent will take her, but it is to be hoped she will choose the brave path, and not confine herself to ‘brief voyages before sleep’.

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ELSPETH SANDYS is Wellington-based writer, novelist and reviewer. Her short story 'The Postman' was shortlisted in the international Bridport Prize 2012 competition.

THE AMERICAN MODEL TECHNIQUE

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 17:00:00 +0000

TASHA HAINES

Little Sister, by Julian Novitz, (Vintage, 2012), 256 pp., $29.99

The press release accompanying expat Julian Novitz’s novel Little Sister tells us that it is about ‘absent fathers, motivation and identity’, but more accurately it is about the damage caused by incest, the strength of teenage bonds, the power of role models on impressionable youth, and the dangers of self-deception.
The story begins in Auckland and travels to Melbourne and back. There’s a tight focus that helps to maximise the psychological intensity of character and theme in this unnerving tale. The narrative is shared between four characters: 18-year-old close friends Shane, Eileen, and Will, and their teacher, a Mr N (Mr Nobody? Mr Novitz?). The book is divided into four sections with one character point of view per section. Each is told in the first person present tense with past tense flashbacks. An ambiance of claustrophobia is generated and feeds the tension that serves to make Little Sister an aloof but undeniably creepy thriller.
The first section is titled ‘Shane’. Shane is in shock because of what he has just done to Eileen’s father, ostensibly (and separate to Shane’s obvious mental instability), because he wants to avenge his girlfriend Eileen and defend her younger sister Carla – the sister Eileen always talks about but whom no one has met. Will lied to Shane, telling him he had met Carla and problems flowed out of that deceit for Shane.
The next section is named ‘Will’, who is sitting waiting to be interviewed in the police station on the morning after the disturbing event. He rehearses what he will tell them, and in so doing he edits and double-checks his story, including minimising the part where he lied to Shane about the existence of Carla. Will decides that that bit isn’t important and the police won’t need to know it. And when the police do finally come, Will has nothing to say.
Then there’s ‘Eileen’. Her section jumps forward ten years to Melbourne where she is a part-time theatre studies lecturer. A girl follows Eileen and tells her she’s her little sister Carla. But Eileen invented Carla, so she’s fairly freaked out but also gradually reminded of repressed past events and deceits. Eileen is also haunted and obsessed about what Shane did ten years ago at her father’s house on the night of 6 September 2001 (it is tonally significant that this is just a few days before the twin towers came down).
Finally there is the section titled ‘N’. Mr N is the favourite teacher of the three 18-year-olds, and a dubiously inspirational figure. As a point of view character, he comes slightly out of the blue bringing an element of surprise with what he reveals. Little Sister is a short novel in relation to the enormous topics it touches on; while the stop-start way the story unfolds across four points of view, each with a distinct section leaves you wanting more information and more interaction between characters. By the way, the dialogue is set in italics, which I tend to read as thought or emphasis. Slanty conversations look dreamt or imagined, plus you get a stiff neck. But admittedly Little Sister is a page-turner. You want to find sense, connection, and meaning for the dramatic inciting incident into which you are plunged with Shane at the start, and also for the conflict between Eileen’s assertion that she has a sister and what seems to be the reality about that. It would have been good if more could have been made about Eileen’s fantasy world; frustratingly it all just seems to dissolve.
When I reached the end of section ‘Will’ and read on into section ‘Eileen’ I had to stop and regroup for a moment: my expectation of paradigm continuity was scuppered as I was unexpectedly thrust forward ten years into a different place with a different pace, and the point-of-view of a 28-year-old Eileen. Adult Eileen is used as a bridge: she has one foot in her teens back with Shane and Will via her memories, while physically placed ten years on from ‘what happened’; perhaps so that the Carla business can be illuminated and Eileen can take on a linking centrality in the story.
The shifting point-of-view device is usually employed to show an event, object, experience, or person from various sometimes-conflicting perspectives. But the angles that the four sections in Little Sister represent are not different enough, nor are the voices different enough to achieve the intimacy that could have been achieved by this point of view technique.
Eileen in particular and by way of an example, does not strike me as a convincing depiction of an 18 year-old girl who has been repeatedly molested by her father (while he held her down and whispered 'baby girl' in her ear). As a teenager she pulls various stunts like going to his house when he’s out and making messy meals and leaving the dishes to punish him… But wow, really? Who, in her situation, would do (only) that? Who would be able to go to his house at all? Her voice is too cool and distant and her diction too clinical – but not pathologically so.
Eileen got through her youth somehow, then went to Melbourne where she has only minor mental lapses that heed the terrible childhood she endured. 'Everything is not ok. It never has been,' says adult Eileen to Godfrey (her much older boyfriend), but we don’t really get a proper sense of her not being ok. She also comes across on occasion as a bit arrogant, which doesn’t help her case; she proclaims for example: 'To cough in a theatre wilfully and maliciously is almost an act of terrorism.' I wasn’t so keen on that, given that the destruction of the twin towers by terrorists is acknowledged in the book. Suicide bombing and coughing aren’t really on the same level—
Will is the only one in all his cautious, reliable, sensible, and boring ways that ‘comes to life’ in his section; the droll voice suits him well. I wanted to empathise with psychotic Shane and his impulse to do what he does with his samurai sword, but I couldn't because I don’t feel that his back-story goes far enough towards enabling a sense of how and why he could do what he did. Yes, his parents are neglectful and too rich to care, but it was only when I found out (late in the book) about the terrible central misunderstanding that pushed Shane over the edge that I felt any empathy with him.

That clanger in section ‘N’ revealed most of what we need to know about the ‘little sister’. It was a relief because it tied loose ends together; it was a great weight lifted to finally have the mystery of the little sister make some sense. But then the story trails off in Mr N’s point of view, with him having the last word. The trouble with that is that while Mr N has been an important character all the way through, he has been in the background during the other three sections and we know very little about him. He certainly contributed a great deal to the mental life of Eileen, Shane, and Will, and his influence dramatically affected how it all turned out, but it felt disappointing to be entrusted to the flat Mr N at the end.
Adult Eileen explains Novitz’s own stylistic intentions when she recounts the literary style of her writer boyfriend Godfrey: 'His novels were based more on the American model (and not the English who-done-it) which placed a heavier emphasis on mood, atmosphere, and the distinct voice of the detective. He told me the mysteries involved in that kind of story could never be solved completely because they always tapped into the dark, central mysteries of life itself: human corruption and moral cowardice.' It’s a neat and discreet authorial intrusion that re-states Little Sister’s genre. The use of key pieces of repetition helps establish tone, character, and suspense as in the use of Shane’s key phrase, 'Something has happened'. These are the first three words in the first section, Shane’s section, and are repeated by him often. Then Mr N’s soliloquy at the end of the book finishes with those same three words and we are, importantly, unsure again about who has influenced whom.

'Something has happened' implies that the character can’t quite catch up to the facts; can’t quite pinpoint what exactly has happened—it is something, but it is yet to be known or remembered. The phrase taps into Eileen’s description of American Noir. It tries to do away with the need to know more about why Shane is the way he is, and more about Eileen’s family life, and Will’s dull please-all nature and why he hangs around with troubled kids. But ‘something has happened’ takes away some of the gritty detail that might otherwise be divulged and keeps us blind while we plunge on, tripping up here and there between sections being reminded along the way that no one knows exactly what has happened. But Little Sister is a page-turner.

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TASHA HAINES has a Masters Degree in Fine Arts from Elam at The University of Auckland. She was a lecturer in fine arts and design in Melbourne and Wellington, the manager of a fine art dealer gallery in Auckland, and is now a writer living in Wellington.

PRECARIOUS LOOKING

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 16:59:00 +0000

KATHRYN MITCHELL

Van der Velden: Otira, by Peter Vangioni and Dieuwertje Dekkers (Christchurch Art Gallery, 2011), 96 pp. $49.99.

Serendipitously, shortly after receiving the review copy of the Christchurch Art Gallery’s Van der Velden Otira catalogue (authored by Peter Vangioni and Dieuwertje Dekkers), I made the trip from Christchurch through Otira to Greymouth on the Transalpine train. A frequent visitor to the Dunedin Public Art Gallery as a child, van der Velden’s A Waterfall in the Otira Gorge, oil on canvas, 1891, was one of my favourite memories; it drew me in to its immense expanse demonstrating painting's ability to be experienced rather than just looked at. In front of this work, I was more than a mere visitor to a cultural institution: I was standing somewhat fearfully in the path of an uncontrollable torrent of rushing white water descending from dark, jagged rocks tossed haphazardly into its path with the passage of time. Its thick, wild brush strokes and dense layering of oil paint accentuated its dark, rugged and dangerous nature.
Experiencing Otira the place as a series of fleeting glimpses broken by the sudden blackness of railway tunnels is absolutely typical of the contemporary spectacle – lush, deep earthy green bush, ravines ascending abruptly skyward punctuated by ragged scars carved out by torrential rainfall. Waterfalls transformed into icy shards by freezing unrelenting winds. As my hands begin to lose feeling gripping the railing of the train’s viewing platform, I elect to shuffle my way through the cluster of photographers eager for a better view and head back to the warmth of the carriage. Multiple digital images will be captured at speed – a souvenir functioning as evidence of having 'been to' this place. I open the book at Peter Vangioni’s essay Otira and examine Charles Beken’s 1910 photograph 'West Coast Road, Otira Gorge' and ponder the stark disparity between photography’s evidence of 'being there' now as I sit comfortably, book in hand, listening to the exclamations of wonder and frenzied shutterless shutter-clicks of numerous digital cameras, as opposed to then – Beken’s 1910 image of an particularly narrow and precarious-looking road in a landscape otherwise devoid of human intervention.
By the time van der Velden arrived in Christchurch in 1890, Otira was an established tourist attraction. I try to imagine the journey as I peer at a photograph – photographer unknown, 'The new hotel at Otira Gorge', 1890. A covered carriage laden with luggage is pictured outside the Otira Hotel, its porch populated by a small crowd of well-dressed visitors; a large dog relaxes by the door. Van der Velden’s second expedition to Otira, according to Vangioni’s account, departed Christchurch bound for Otira in early June 1893 in a canvas-covered wagon with several companions. Predictably perhaps for that time of year, the travellers were subjected to extremely adverse weather conditions, including becoming trapped in a two-and-a-half metre deep snow drift. They were apparently not deterred, but due to the severity of the cold one of their party, photographer Alpheus Aldersley, became extremely ill and died from pneumonia shortly after reaching the Otira Hotel – the day before his wife arrived from Rangiora.
Reflecting on the severity of such conditions, the prevailing sense of melancholy often described in reference to the Otira works seems to capture a greater truth than can be evidenced in any photographic representation. Vangioni refers to van der Velden’s teaching notes in the 1890s in Christchurch: 'A picture is the expression of a moment in Nature; it is a moment you love best so try and paint it … a landscape need not be a copy of a place as long as you get the character and impression of the moment as it appears to yourself – not as it appears to other people – so that it is an expression of your own feeling.' Van der Velden’s assertion here maybe that that the commitment to capturing the unique experience of place rather than merely creating a copy presents the opportunity to connect with its essence or 'aura': rendering that intangible elusive quality that brings one back to stand in front of van der Velden’s works again and again.
An exhibition catalogue often functions as a kind of souvenir of the experience of the work, providing a trigger that enables us to be returned into that space of direct engagement, but more than this, at its best a catalogue can be read as a stand-alone publication. However it is not as compelling to be, rather than a spectator, a reader whose engagement must be indirect, mediated by the restrictions inherent in the glossy and removed image. Works sit on the page with little relevance to the scale or surface of the original, and it is difficult for this reason to do much more than glance at them. What is, though, a tasty accompaniment is the access to dialogue which captivates and engrosses the reader in absorbing questioning: writing that takes the reader on a journey, rather than positioning one as a visitor to knowledge that is exclusive or privileged, offering few opportunities for dialogue and thinking to continue beyond its pages. What we desire from the experience of a painting perhaps may be thought of as similar to that which we desire as readers, namely a relationship with the artist/writer – we want to be involved, to participate, not to feel like a visitor, but to feel like a colleague or friend.
In these days of the e-book, we are told the object that is the paper-and-ink publication is endangered. For lovers of the book-as-object in all its honest, crude and cumbersome physicality, though, Van der Velden: Otira exemplifies one of its more alluring liaisons. Here, the loss of the direct encounter with painted surface is mediated, bridged to some extent, by the spectacle of the book. One can imagine the experience of discovering this offering amongst a plethora of glossy, resplendent bookshop stacks – at first glance unassuming, matte, earthy, and papery, but offering upon more intimate examination under the dust cover, a rough textile surface persuasive enough to merit running one's fingers over. Its dust cover is thick and takes on the appearance of an object in its own right when removed – layers of stiff matte black card folded as if designed to wrap the book in multiple protective layers, a departure from the standard, thin, plastic-coated jacket frequently enveloping visual art publications; whoever said you can’t judge a book by its cover?
Furthermore, against the pervasive argument that the new technology is convenient on long haul flights and so on, one must question the merit of this encounter with the 'digital' reader (the name says it all really: an assemblage of pixels radiating 'untouchably' inside a screen). Is the physical interaction with the book as object an essential aspect of the experience of reading? While many may say no, let’s face it: the idea of curling up with a good Kindle title lacks the romance of positioning oneself in a large comfortable chair, wrapped in a cherished blanket with a glass of red and a good book for an afternoon. I am aware however, even as I write it, that this very contribution will grace the screen rather than the tactile page and, as with many words today, is unlikely to ever exist on a page made of paper. My own love for the page continues, though, undiminished by the expansion of weightless 'digits'. On that train bound for Greymouth, Peter Vangioni’s Otira essay particularly exported me to another time, while simultaneously it encouraged reflection on what van der Velden’s work means to us today. I knew that I would revisit the catalogue on the way home.

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KATHRYN MITCHELL is an art writer and a former public gallery curator, who is currently the art programme manager at the Southern Institute of Technology in Invercargill.

TUKU WHENUA

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 20:00:00 +0000

RICHARD REEVE

A Simple Nullity: The Wi Parata Case in New Zealand Law and History, by David V. Williams (Auckland University Press, 2011), 288 pp., $49.99.

Grossly misunderstood in both its legal context and factual matrix, Wi Parata v The Bishop of Wellington (1877) is the single most infamous case in New Zealand legal history.[i] A solitary passage in the joint decision of Chief Justice James Prendergast and Justice William Richmond (most likely written by Richmond) to the effect that the Treaty of Waitangi was ‘a simple nullity’ has rendered it the whipping boy of modern biculturalism, a deformity of the common law recurrently surfacing to spook liberals until our present Chief Justice Sean Elias finally euthanised it in the 2003 Ngati Apa decision.[ii]

Wi Parata revolved around a Whitireia land grant of approximately 500 acres engineered in 1847–8 by Ngati Toa as a gift to the Bishop of New Zealand, George Selwyn. The intermediaries for the gift were were Octavius Hadfield (‘Te Harawira’, from 1870 the Bishop of Wellington) and two young Christian rangatira, Katu Tamihana Te Rauparaha (son of Te Rauparaha) and Henare Matene Te Whiwhi-o-te-rangi. Under the doctrine of Crown pre-emption, the Governor had a monopoly on all land dealings with Māori. Any such gift required the Governor first to accept the land gratuitously from Māori and then grant it to the Bishop on trust. The terms of that trust, known as the Porirua Trust, were that the Bishopric establish a college of higher learning and religious instruction for the education of all races: ‘hei Kareti mo nga tamariki Maori Pakeha’. When the College did not eventuate, later generations of Ngāti Toa unsuccessfully sought return of the land in Court, following the refusal of Parliament and various Commissions of Inquiry to provide a remedy.

As Auckland legal historian Professor David V. Williams brilliantly and sensitively shows, Wi Parata, for all its infamy, was largely rightly decided. As a demurrer, the case purely involved a question of law rather than fact. That question was whether the Court would enquire into such discretionary freedoms of the executive arm of government as the Crown’s prerogative to issue land grants. In public law, the answer is typically no, other than where the discretion is fettered by statute and an error of law, reason or procedure occurs, or, hypothetically, where some moral outrage spurs the judiciary into activism.

Acknowledging that the Māori concept of ‘tuku whenua’ is very different from the European concept of ‘gifting’ land into a charitable trust, Professor Williams shows that the grant was moreover factually no fraud on the donor. In Wi Parata, the judges in obiter remarks dubiously determined that the donor was the Crown, not Ngāti Toa, on account of the doctrine of Crown pre-emption. However, even if Ngāti Toa had been recognised as the donor, there was still no fraud. Authorised by rangatira signatories led by the tribe’s non-Christian paramount chief Te Rauparaha at the behest of his Christian son, the gift was strategically designed to raise the mana of Ngāti Toa in the eyes of the Crown. From 1846–8, Te Rauparaha had been (illegally) detained by Governor Grey, following the tribe’s 1843 conflict with the New Zealand Company in Marlborough. More generally, Ngāti Toa’s genocidal raids on South Island iwi in the 1830s, for which Te Rauparaha gained his latter-day notoriety, had tarnished the tribe’s reputation. The gift was a fusion of Realpolitik and genuine Christian zeal, a conscious act of diplomacy and piety.

Complicating the picture, increasing tension between sectarian and secular views of education in the colony, and popular resentment at the Church’s expansive land-holdings from tribal gifts like the Whitireia grant, resulted in political pressure for Parliament to divest the Church of its assets where the terms of the educational trusts were unfulfilled. This would free up the land for private enterprise. Hadfield, the great moral dissenter during the New Zealand Wars (he was cross-examined by the House of Representatives for four hours), as trustee was also a jealous guardian of the gifted land. This was despite the fact that the block had been leased for grazing, with profits held on trust until such time as a school could begin, or loaned to other Christian collegial enterprises. According to Professor Williams, in fact, ‘Bishop Hadfield probably felt rather less under attack in the 1877 Whitireia Court case than in most of the other inquiries and commissions’ (p. 115).

Not only was Wi Parata consistent with the precedent authority on executive powers expediently set by Governor Grey in R v Symonds (1847),[iii] it also reflected norms at international law. International treaties, whether the Treaty of Waitangi or the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, do not become binding until ratified by Parliament as domestic law. However cringeworthy the ‘simple nullity’ phrase may be to contemporary ears, with the advent of a New Zealand parliament in 1854 the immediate sources of law were the traditional ones: statute, equity and the common law. The text of the Treaty of Waitangi was not directly incorporated as domestic law, and to that extent was indeed a legal nullity.

For a number of constitutional historians, including Professor Williams, colonial New Zealand was a battleground for competing neo-Roman paradigms of the rule of law, jus gentium and jus civilis. Jus gentium, the law of nations, determined the conduct of advanced governments in respect of first nations people, reaching its 1831 apotheosis in US Chief Justice John Marshall’s judgment, Cherokee Nation v State of Georgia.[iv] In obiter remarks, Justice Marshall wrote that ‘the relationship of the tribes to the United States resembles that of a “ward to its guardian”.’ Indian tribes were to be regarded ‘domestic dependent nations’. Dominant at the time the Treaty was signed (when Māori significantly outnumbered Pākehā), jus gentium emphasised the role of the Crown as protector and friend of Māori, and observed tino rangatiratanga.

If jus gentium indirectly resulted in the notorious ‘Trail of Tears’ in the US as much as the Treaty in New Zealand, jus civilis produced colonial policies of assimilation, homogeneity and equal subjection to the rule of law, ‘promoting’ Māori into New Zealand citizens ostensibly with the same rights as Pākehā and to a significant extent eradicating their culture. The major proponent of jus civilis in New Zealand was Sir George Grey. Under Grey’s governance, the English language became the mandatory language of education for all citizens of the colony. Stridently opposed by Hadfield, this policy was supported not only by many Pākehā but also by ‘Queenites’ like Wi Parata Kakakura, an epochal fusion of Ngāti Toa rangatira, Member of the House of Representatives, Christian, political activist and community leader, and faithful disappointed advocate of European-style due process.

Professor Williams does not argue for a moment that the Treaty is not now part of New Zealand domestic law. The existence of the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975, which established the Waitangi tribunal, as well as Treaty sections in a wide range of other legislation, would make any such position nonsense. His jurisprudential contention, rather, is that there is no ‘golden thread’ at New Zealand common law linking putative nineteenth-century judicial identifications of aboriginal title with those of the present. In the nineteenth century, aboriginal title was thought extinguished by Crown pre-emption, a domestic doctrine derived from international law, and the Court, preserving its comity with the Crown, would not look into how the Crown exercised its discretions. Wi Parata was one part of a kaleidoscope of cases to this effect. While this position puts Professor Williams at odds with eminent judges like Sir Robin Cooke and Dame Sian Elias, the weight of historical evidence in A Simple Nullity? suggests he is almost certainly right.

However much Wi Parata may have been correctly decided in law, Professor Williams is by no means blind to the moral injustices flowing from the Crown’s failure to honour its obligations as friend and protector of Māori. The rigours of the law became the cogs of oppression, degenerate racism dressed up as public policy and due process. There is distinct admiration for the resilience of Ngāti Toa and fighters like Wi Parata, but Professor Williams is also respectful of right-wing conservative intellectuals like William Richmond as men of their time and context. An outstanding scholarly contribution to both New Zealand history and legal thought, A Simple Nullity? with all its quirks deserves widespread recognition as a landmark text.

[i] Parata v The Bishop of Wellington (1877) 3 NZ Jur (NS) 72

[ii] Attorney-General v Ngati Apa and others [2003] 3 NZLR 643 (Court of Appeal)

[iii] R v Symonds (1847) NZPCC 387 (Supreme Court)

[iv] Cherokee Nation v State of Georgia (1831) 30 US 1 (US Supreme Court)

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RICHARD REEVE recently moved to Westport to practise law. He holds a PhD in English on New Zealand poetic reality, and has published four books of poetry. Forthcoming volumes are Horse and Sheep and Generation Kitchen. He is also co-editor with Mick Abbott of the essay anthology Wild Heart: The Possibility of Wilderness in Aotearoa New Zealand (Otago, 2011).

MEDICINAL MEMORIES

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 19:40:00 +0000

AZURE RISSETTO

The Open World, by Stephanie Johnson (Vintage, 2012), 295 pp. $37.99.

In recent years there has been such a proliferation of writing set in the Victorian times that an entire 'neo-Victorian' genre has sprung up out of it. The period offers particularly fruitful pickings for literary endeavour, given that the legal possession of New Zealand, which was marked by the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 and tested by the land wars of the 1860s, occurred under the reign of Queen Victoria.

Stephanie Johnson bases her latest novel The Open World upon the largely forgotten colonial figure of Elizabeth Smith, who was also the author’s ancestor. Smith served a circle that included Sir William Martin, New Zealand’s first Chief Justice, and George Augustus Selwyn, the first Anglican Bishop. She journeyed to the embryonic country in the early 1840s as 'companion' to the invalid Mary-Ann Martin, and was essential to the operation of the Native Hospital established by her employer. Increasingly disillusioned with colonial life, she returned to London in the 1860s, and died soon after.

Working within the black and white outline of the known facts about Smith’s life, Johnson manages to add colour; some of it hallucinogenic. Elizabeth Smith was a jane-of-all-trades: variously nurse, lady’s maid, needlewoman, laundress, cook, silver-polisher, midwife. Johnson’s version of Smith is also a hopeless opium addict, who gleefully shares out the ingredients of her 'little black bottle' to those around her.

While she's skirted by shades of Dickens’s comic grotesque Mrs Gamp, Johnson’s Smith is also a woman prone to deep earnestness and yearning, or poreirewa. By the time readers meet Elizabeth she is elderly, and debilitated by physical complaints. Her longing for the two adult sons she has left behind in the colony, Henry and Ish, is countered only by some belated correspondence, and by her displaying their framed 'likenesses' in her sleeping chambers.

The disability of old age has turned this once self-determined peripatetic into a recluse haunting lodging rooms, railway carriages, and friends’ tea-rooms. She is limited to recalling her colonial past through the haze of her body’s pain, a haze exacerbated by the mixtures and compounds of her murky Cup of Grace. She is slow; her teeth have rotted; her looks have dulled. Nonetheless, she delights in the 'disguise' of her old age: 'don’t all old women look alike with their white caps and collapsing faces, all individual colour and beauty erased?'

Surfaces are always an important harbinger for characters, as for the reader. Elizabeth’s friend-cum-caregiver, Mr. Griggs, searches for the young face within the old, while the mysterious Miss Tripp, with her uncanny resemblance to Elizabeth’s son Henry, searches without success for the good looks she was promised in the woman who briefly replaced her mother as her father’s wife.

The narrative is constructed in layers, so that the authority of any single character’s point of view is undermined by the observations of others, including the unsettling switches to first-person in the voice of Elizabeth. What the characters are looking for are stories on which to graft their (mis)perceptions, and the reader is invited to participate in this process from the beginning.

We tend to encounter Elizabeth when she is conjuring up letters that she ought to be writing. She is always intending to write her life story. She wants to offer a corrective account of her marital history for her sons; she wants to write herself into the memoirs of Mary-Ann Martin and Sarah Selwyn; she wants to share her experience of a liminal and mysterious New Zealand, before the wars, before her return to England. Many scenes of the novel occur when Elizabeth is a passenger in transit, her actual travels vying with rapid flashes of her drug-infused memories. Her past is like the landscape slipping past the train windows, or a boat slicing through water.

Elderly in Victorian England, the medicinal quality of the opium she imbibes inflects her perceptions. The Maori she left behind in New Zealand have a mythical or magical aura to them, emphasised by the interwoven moments of superstition and the occasional eruptions into spoken Maori. George Rupai, her son Ish’s cabin-mate on the way to New Zealand, curses the sharks he catches for the ship as taniwha, while having the power to transform the melancholic Ish (but only for as long as he is around), then disappears once the ship reaches the new country.

It seems that all Elizabeth can ever cling to is a recessive sequence of likenesses, approximations, imitations. While the Maori christened her Mata Te Mete, she refers to herself variously as Elizabeth Horelock or Horlock, was once Hoggs, and has purposively adapted the surname Smith. A complex web of association reveals that the first name of Miss Tripp, Kitty, is a revision upon Elizabeth’s dead child, Katie, while 'Miss Tripp' is in itself a pseudonym. Further, Mary-Ann Martin truncates Elizabeth’s lessons in Greek, Hebrew and Maori by assuring her that a familiarity with the name of the new country in each language is sufficient.

As if mixing one of her tinctures, Elizabeth is constantly measuring, selecting, editing and reworking aspects of her life. Her friend William Cotton’s journal epiphany that 'A man either says too little or too much' haunts her own self-fictionalising. Did she ever love her second husband? Could she have saved her daughter’s life? What does Miss Tripp want from her? Where is 'Home'? Just like her beloved New Zealand, Elizabeth’s life is always under construction, always being built up in certain ways, and set back in others.

The subterfuge of the narrative is undermined by the final chapters, which veer toward the tidy resolution of plot that we associate with the Victorian novel. There are a number of emotional reunions between Elizabeth and the important figures of her past colonial life, some stock theatre scenes, and a few too many coincidences. There are some rather overdone references to M.E. Braddon’s 1862 bigamist sensation novel, Lady Audley’s Secret, while Elizabeth’s encounter with George Rupai on the river Thames, with his tale of disappointing his benefactor, recalls Dickens’s 1861 novel Great Expectations. Thankfully, however, Johnson departs from the conventions of Victorian fiction by withholding the all-important death scene from us.

Likewise, Elizabeth’s letters remain unfinished. The big revelation Miss Tripp has planned fails; but then Miss Tripp is a red herring, as another unforeseen revelation usurps the ending Elizabeth has settled upon for her life story. Johnson’s novel thus resists the temptation to fix a 'final version' of the events in Elizabeth’s life. After all, this is a story of likenesses, and what we are reading is a likeness of what could have been written if the real-life Elizabeth Hor(e)lock Smith had indeed published her memoirs.

In sum, The Open World is a moving tale of a bereaved woman attempting to justify to herself the way her life has turned out under the trying circumstances of Victorian England. 'It was the best it can be between a man and woman', Elizabeth recalls at one point, of her first marriage. 'The very best. I draw that old love around me, as worn as an old quilt, still warm enough to comfort'. The same kind of warmth suffuses Johnson’s effortless-seeming, brilliant reworking of her ancestor’s life.

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AZURE RISSETTO is a PhD candidate at the University of Auckland with a special interest in neo-Victorian fiction.

FUN BOOK SEEKS TARGET AUDIENCE

noreply@blogger.com (Landfall) — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 19:39:00 +0000

MIA WATKINS

The Prince of Soul and the Lighthouse, by Fredrik Brouneus (Steam Press, Wellington 2012), 302 pp. $30.

Nobody is spared ridicule in Fredrik Brouneus’ comic science-fiction novel The Prince of Soul and the Lighthouse. The narrative pokes light-hearted fun at mental health, American culture, scientists, alchemists, the Chinese government and what might be called the modern religions of celebrity, mass media and technology; Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code), The Terminator and YouTube are all lined up for a poke alongside Jesus, Mother Theresa and Tibet’s struggle for independence. Brouneus’ humour is irreverent, sardonic and couched in a very Westernised discourse with references to modern popular culture throughout. Even ‘terrorists’ are thrown into the mix; a word rebranded so often of late it has practically become a neutered euphemism.

If you do not particularly care what an 'SUV' or an 'iPod' is or have never heard of 'NCEA' and 'Nintendo Wii' then there will be quite a few empty terms in this novel for you to gloss over. At the same time, this is perhaps part of what makes the novel well suited for the consumer-savvy young. It uses their language and engages in their world, though not universally. It is the world of the naively affluent Western teenager that is reflected here, somewhat stereotypically. Not all adults are technologically disadvantaged of course, giving the novel potential for an appreciative older demographic: one that finds fast car chases, zombie shoot-outs, armed hold-ups and blowing stuff up exciting. They might, however, need the advisory discretion warning that it is best suited for very young teenage boys.

Despite using reincarnation as its foundation, the narrative hinges on a predictable boy-saves-world plot and stock characters: the lovelorn, angst-ridden teenage boy protagonist George Larson, the annoying little sister, the doting but embarrassing parents, the attractive and intelligent girl as object of desire, the wily, young at heart grandfather and a Tibetan monk with bad English. The puppet-like characters give the story a unique Punch and Judy style gross humour. Although funny, it falls short of subversive, which would have added another more humanistic dimension by giving it a moral point. A little subversive humour can deepen understanding and quicken the mind, but The Prince of Soul and the Lighthouse does not go that far. It appears to reflect contemporary Western culture more than commenting on it by having nothing substantial to say: all conjecture, no knowledge. This book then belongs to the genre of Speculative Fiction; free enough to ‘throw it all to the wind’ but lacking the awareness of post-structuralism, of meta-commentary. The risk taken by this genre is that if the reader does know something, it is very difficult to deliberately suppress this and accede to author-driven facile interpretation, consequently setting up this particular style of nudge-nudge humour to be annoying.

Young adults (absolutely the target audience, one decides by the end) may find the novel stimulating to amusing, depending on their life experience and outlook and how they relate to the protagonist. George Larson is like an older version of Sue Townsend’s character Adrian Mole from her popular teenage series The Secret Diaries of Adrian Mole. He would have to be one of the most unworldly eighteen-year-olds on the planet. This could act as a disincentive to the more ‘street-wise’ teenage reader weary of seeing their generation continuously represented as naïve and unsophisticated. Taken in the slapstick spirit of Punch and Judy however, it works.

There is plenty of protagonist/antagonist action throughout, as George’s mission to acquire The Lighthouse (the novel’s plot device) is dogged by those who desire it for more sinister ends. To stay ahead of the game George relies on nature portents, such as spelling insects and symbol-forming sheep. The monk punctuates his dreams with silly antics to get messages through to his conscious mind and the personification of body parts (George’s heart, brain, mouth and other organs converse) combine to form the fun and enlivening aspects of this novel. The Chinese Programme for Divine Relations however, in which the world religions are hijacked by politics, surveilled and censured by harvesting ‘clicks’ on the internet is reminiscent of George Orwell’s ministries in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The ‘Big Brother’ concept is familiar territory ,and perhaps a little shabby and worn these days.

Written in journalistic style, the text is predominantly dialogue (as if Brouneus has recorded a series of overheard conversations), and the landmarks (including The Lighthouse – the portal of rebirth in the story) are concrete rather than abstract, limiting the imaginative appeal of the story. However, it is precisely the relentless turn-taking of conversation that gives the novel its racy, comic strip effect; there is no time to ponder meanings or hang off words. The feel is more that of an amusement park attraction: get on, get off, next? It is quirky, colourful, and speckled with confetti-style humour. Leave your inquiring mind behind because too deep a look misses the point. It is light-hearted and fun. Brouneus himself admits this. 'It’s all fiction. There are no secret divine revelations, subdivisions of CIA or reincarnation gems collecting dust up in someone’s attic,' he says. 'Sorry, folks' and 'At least to my knowledge' (reviewer’s italics) he teases in a footnote, speculatively. He is undoubtedly right.

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MIA WATKINS is a Dunedin-based writer most recently published in Landfall and The International Literary Quarterly. She is currently attending Teachers College and caring for her daughter.