Cilla McQueen, ‘Living Here’ (1982)
Murray Edmond, ‘Shack’ (1981)
Bill Manhire, ‘Phar Lap’ (1991)
THE MAORI RENAISSANCE, II
Witi Ihimaera, from ‘Maori Life and Literature: A Sensory Perception’ (1981)
Patricia Grace, from Potiki (1986)
Hone Tuwhare, ‘We, Who Live in Darkness’ (1987)
Keri Hulme, ‘One Whale Singing’ (1986)
SUBMERGED HISTORIES
Maurice Shadbolt, from Season of the Jew (1986)
Stevan Eldred-Grigg, from Oracles and Miracles (1987)
Fiona Farrell, ‘Charlotte O’Neil’s Song’ (1987)
C.K. Stead, from All Visitors Ashore (1984)
Albert Wendt, ‘Exam Failure Praying’ (1986)
MEMORY AND DESIRE
Ian Wedde, ‘Beautiful Golden Girl of the Sixties’ (1984)
Leigh Davis, from Willy’s Gazette (1983)
Janet Charman, ‘two deaths in one night’ (1987)
Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, from ‘Soul Traps’ (1985)
Lauris Edmond, ‘The Names’ (1980)
Sam Hunt, ‘Requiem’ (1980)
SUBURBAN GOTHIC
Owen Marshall, ‘Mumsie and Zip’ (1987)
Owen Marshall, ‘The Rule of Jenny Pen’ (1992)
DRIVING INTO THE STORM
Ian Wedde, ‘Driving into the Storm: The Art of Poetry’ (1984)
Fiona Kidman, from True Stars (1990)
David Eggleton, ‘Painting Mount Taranaki’ (1986)
C.K. Stead, ‘Deconstructing the Rainbow Warrior’ (1988)
SEXUAL POLITICS
Dinah Hawken, ‘The Tug of War’ (1991)
Anne French, ‘The evader writes a lyric poem’ (1988)
Anne French, ‘The lady fishermen’ (1990)
Sue McCauley, from Other Halves (1982)
Barbara Anderson, ‘Commitment’ (1989)
Jenny Bornholdt, ‘The Boyfriends’ (1988)
Elizabeth Smither, ‘I’ve Had Any Number of Gay Women Friends’ (1983)
BEING AWAY
Fleur Adcock, ‘Immigrant’ (1979)
Lauris Edmond, ‘Going to Moscow’ (1983)
Kendrick Smithyman, from ‘Reading the Maps: An Academic Exercise’ (1985)
Bill Manhire, ‘Zoetropes’ (1984)
The Front Lawn [Harry Sinclair and Don McGlashan], ‘Tomorrow Night’ (1989)
READING THE LANDSCAPE
Yvonne du Fresne, ‘Astrid of the Limberlost’ (1980)
John Newton, ‘Opening the Book’ (1985)
Cilla McQueen, ‘Vegetable Garden Poem IV’ (1984)
Allen Curnow, ‘The Parakeets at Karekare’ (1982)
Allen Curnow, ‘You Will Know When You Get There’ (1982)
CABIN FEVER: THE NINETIES
FLOATING NATION
Anne French, ‘Cabin Fever’ (1990)
Robert Sullivan, from Star Waka (1999)
Dylan Horrocks, from Hicksville (1998)
Bill Manhire, ‘Milky Way Bar’ (1991)
THE UNPOETIC
James Brown, ‘Cashpoint: A Pantoum’ (1995)
Jenny Bornholdt, ‘Make Sure’ (1989)
Catherine Chidgey, ‘A Short Survival Guide’, from In a Fishbone Church (1998)
Keri Hulme, ‘The Pluperfect Pā-wā’ (1988)
POSTMODERN ECOLOGIES
Dinah Hawken, ‘Hope’ (1995)
Dinah Hawken, ‘Light Is the Word for Light’ (1995)
Geoff Park, from Ngā Uruora—The Groves of Life (1995)
Chris Orsman, ‘Ornamental Gorse’ (1994)
MAGICAL REALISMS
Gregory O’Brien, from Diesel Mystic (1989)
Elizabeth Knox, from The Vintner’s Luck (1998)
Witi Ihimaera, from Bulibasha (1994)
HARDCORE
Sia Figiel, from Where We Once Belonged (1996)
Briar Grace-Smith, from Ngā Pou Wāhine (1995; 1997)
Dean Hapeta aka Te Kupu, ‘Hardcore’ (1994)
Patricia Grace, from Cousins (1992)
WRITING BACK
Glenn Colquhoun, ‘A Problem While Translating the Treaty of Waitangi’ (1999)
Bernadette Hall, ‘Poem in the Matukituki Valley’ (1997)
Michele Leggott, from ‘Blue Irises’ (1994)
MALADIES
Bernadette Hall, ‘Anorexia’ (1994)
Wystan Curnow, from Cancer Daybook (1989)
Peter Wells, ‘When My Brother Got Thin’ (1999)
Barbara Anderson, ‘Fast Post’ (1989)
LOVE
Iain Sharp, ‘Owed to Joy’ (1997)
J.C. Sturm, ‘Maori to Pakeha’ (1996)
Roma Potiki, ‘And My Heart Goes Swimming’ (1992)
Hone Tuwhare, ‘Sun o (2)’ (1992)
Jacob Rajan, from Krishnan’s Dairy (1997; 2005)
Jenny Bornholdt, ‘Wedding Song’ (1995)
Kate Camp, ‘Unfinished Love Theorem’ (2001)
YOUNG KNOWLEDGE
Emily Perkins, ‘A Place Where No One Knows Your Face’ (1996)
Damien Wilkins, from The Miserables (1993)
Damien Wilkins, ‘The Prodigals’ (1993)
Fiona Farrell, from The Skinny Louie Book (1992)
HOW TO LIVE ELSEWHERE
LIVING HERE
Paula Green, ‘Waitakere Rain’ (2004)
Anne Kennedy, ‘Whenua (1)’ (2003)
Anne Kennedy, ‘Blackout’ (2003)
John Newton, ‘Trout-fishing and Sport in Maoriland’ (2010)
Elizabeth Smither, ‘Removing the Subsidy on Butter’ (1999)
Bill Manhire, ‘1950s’ (2010)
Hinemoana Baker, ‘Methods of Assessing the Likely Presence of a Terrorist Threat in a Remote Indigenous Community’ (2010)
BEING THE OTHER
Harry Ricketts, from How to Live Elsewhere (2004)
Cliff Fell, from ‘The M at the End of the Earth’ (2007)
Chris Tse, ‘Chinese Colours’ (2005)
Tusiata Avia, ‘Wild Dogs Under My Skirt’ (2004)
Tusiata Avia, ‘Alofa’ (2004)
Paula Morris, ‘Like a Mexican’ (2008)
OVERSEASIA
Lloyd Jones, from The Book of Fame (2003)
Emily Perkins, from Novel About My Wife (2008)
Kate Duignan, ‘Four Reasons to Come to Scotland’ (2008)
Diana Bridge, ‘Diary: September 20–21’ (2000)
Elizabeth Knox, from Daylight (2003)
Lloyd Jones, from Mister Pip (2006)
Stephanie de Montalk, ‘Fourteen Thousand Miles’ (2009)
LITERARY RETURNS
Allen Curnow, ‘The Bells of Saint Babel’s’ (2001)
Chris Price, ‘What I Know About Curnow’ (2002)
Nigel Cox, from The Cowboy Dog (2006)
MĀORILAND
Bernadette Hall, ‘Omakau’ (2001)
Hamish Clayton, from Wulf (2011)
Anna Jackson, ‘Huia’ (2001)
Anna Jackson, ‘Takahe’ (2001)
Anna Jackson, ‘Moa’ (2001)
Gregory O’Brien, ‘For Te Whiti o Rongomai’ (2001)
Alison Wong, from As the Earth Turns Silver (2009)
Tina Makereti, ‘Skin and Bones’ (2010)
DOMESTIC
Jenny Bornholdt, ‘The Jersey’ (2003)
Brian Turner, ‘Semi-Kiwi’ (2001)
Kate De Goldi, from The 10PM Question (2008)
Rachel Bush, ‘The Strong Mothers’ (2002)
Damien Wilkins, ‘Reunion’ (2007)
Chris Orsman, ‘The Polar Captain’s Wife’ (2008)
Ashleigh Young, ‘A Swim with Mum’ (2005)
PERSONAL EFFECTS
Bill Manhire, ‘Kevin’ (2005)
Jenny Bornholdt, ‘Undone’ (2011)
Andrew Johnston, ‘The Present’ (2007)
Ian Wedde, ‘4.2 To death’ from The Commonplace Odes (2001)
Kate Camp, ‘Personal Effects’ (2001)
/> LONGING
Cliff Fell, ‘The Adulterer Becomes a Roadie for the Clash and Thinks About Sleeping with their Girlfriends’ (2003)
Eleanor Catton, from The Rehearsal (2008)
Alice Tawhai, ‘Luminous’ (2007)
Karlo Mila, ‘On Joining Pasifica’ (2005)
Geoff Cochrane, ‘That Winter with Celeste’ (2008)
Geoff Cochrane, ‘Loop’ (2003)
LAST WORDS
James Brown, ‘The Language of the Future’ (1999)
Michele Leggott, ‘Mirabile Dictu’ (2009)
Bill Manhire, ‘Without Form’ (2005)
Andrew Johnston, ‘Sol’ (2007)
Author Biographies
Select Bibliography and Sources
Acknowledgements
Index
Introduction
But one could go on with such a catalogue for ever—on and on—until one lifted the single arum lily leaf and discovered the tiny snails clinging, until one counted … and what then? Aren’t those just the signs, the traces of my feeling? The bright green streaks made by someone who walks over the dewy grass? Not the feeling itself. And as I think that, a mournful glorious voice begins to sing in my bosom. Yes, perhaps that is nearer what I mean. What a voice! What power! What velvety softness! Marvellous!
—Katherine Mansfield, from ‘A Married Man’s Story’ (1921)
In his 1999 poetic sequence Star Waka, Robert Sullivan uses the image of the waka as a container for the freight of history—personal, familial, tribal, national. The waka, he says, ‘is a knife through time’, connecting the pre-contact past with the urban present and sailing on towards a possible, if fancifully configured, extraterrestrial future. The waka morphs as it travels, from primeval first fleet to space ship.
To read this anthology of New Zealand literature is to embark on a similar voyage. A knife through time, the collection traverses the centuries, from Te Horeta encountering James Cook in the 1760s to the latest graduate of the creative writing class in the 2000s. Like a waka, the anthology contains, preserves and transports a multifarious collection of crew and passengers, not always at ease with each other, sometimes in overt contention, often in intense conversation, always amazed at the new landscapes and new landmarks on the way. Where have they come from and where they are headed? And what is the purpose of their voyage?
This book records more than two hundred years of contest and accommodation, during which imagined homes meet already inhabited ones. In the mid-twentieth century a commentator described New Zealanders as ‘hungry for the words that shall show us these islands and ourselves; that shall give us a home in thought’.* In fact, as we record in this anthology, New Zealand became the site not of one such home but of many—some generous, some inhibiting, all invented. If there is a persistent focus throughout the two hundred years covered in this volume, it is the way in which writers have fashioned their surroundings into imaginative language.
At times, indeed, they have entirely imagined those surroundings. In the 1780s poets Henry Headley and Anna Seward, without ever having left England, felt able to describe ‘antarctic Zealand’s drear domain’ where the ‘shrill-ton’d petrel … skim their trackless flight’. In the 1800s, by climatic contrast, the anonymous ‘E.H.’ cited by John Savage in Some Account of New Zealand describes New Zealand as ‘bless’d with genial Skies’ and ‘never-fading groves’. Again there is no record of his (or her) ever being in the southern hemisphere. In 1839 Thomas Campbell—minor Romantic poet, friend of Sir Walter Scott, admired by Byron—hymned a ‘smiling land’ from the comfort of his study in central London. Less comfortably, his friend Edward Gibbon Wakefield wrote his plan for Australasian settlement, mendaciously entitled A Letter from Sydney (1829), from Newgate Prison where he was detained on a charge of abducting an heiress. Literary conventions and sheer invention rather than actual experience infiltrate and colour the factual in this writing.
For the settlers, authoring place becomes more difficult once you have unloaded your piano and your copies of Ossian and Wordsworth on the beach and you look around. The process has, from the outset, been couched in terms of difficulty and deferment. New Zealand’s first major anthology, New Zealand Verse (1906), edited by Christchurch journalist W.F. Alexander and lawyer A.E. Currie, saw a need for a national literature but felt its production was ‘a task that would demand delicate walking’.* Allen Curnow in the mid-twentieth century recognised this difficulty, and the inching progress towards the necessary invention of place. In 1945 he wrote:
Strictly speaking, New Zealand doesn’t exist yet, though some possible New Zealands glimmer in some poems and on some canvases. It remains to be created—should I say invented—by writers, musicians, artists, architects, publishers; even a politician might help—and how many generations does that take?†
National invention, then, requires a self-assurance that, like the ‘uncreated conscience’ of Stephen Dedalus’s Irish race in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), has yet to be fully realised. Certainly, the cultural nationalist concentration of what literature might contain—what Curnow called the ‘local and special’—produced a potent body of major work in the mid-twentieth century.‡ But we see signs of this self-determining consciousness occurring earlier: colonial writing is an integral part of the historical conversation that constitutes New Zealand literature in English, as seen from the twenty-first century, and we reject its neglect for much of the twentieth century. As the selections here demonstrate, writing was as ubiquitous an activity in colonial New Zealand as felling the bush. In Edith Searle Grossmann’s 1890 novel, Angela: A Messenger, Angela’s brother John was ‘always readin’ and learnin’ poetry when he wasn’t rampagin’ over the country’.§ His mother recounts:
One day he come in very eager. ‘Mother,’ he says, ‘it’s about the pines and the trees in the bush,’ and he says a lot o’ poetry, stumblin’ a bit. ‘Well,’ says I, to humour him—and he’d that bright way I couldn’t stand scolding him—‘an’ where’s that from?’ ‘I found it in the Tui bush,’ says he, as grave as could be; an’ then I found he’d made it up himself. An’ after that he was always scribblin’ till he went up to the mountains an’ then he lef’ off.
The nationalist story of moving away from a shameful Englishness towards a gratifyingly independent New Zealandness is one that has become firmly fixed in our sense of our own history. Curnow is the most authoritative instance of this effort of literary renovation, and his introductions to the Caxton and Penguin anthologies of 1945 and 1960 are the most trenchant and closely argued expressions of the values and aversions identified with cultural nationalism. He set the tone for more than three decades in which a nationalist frame was the most powerful way of looking at literature and making anthologies. Yet as the selections in this anthology demonstrate, such agendas make sense only in the period from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century—from the pro-empire nationalism of Maoriland writers like William Pember Reeves to the stringent anti-colonialism of Curnow and his fellows. None of the writers in the first two sections of this anthology, ‘Contact’ and ‘Colonial’, see New Zealand as a nation or identify with New Zealand nationality. They inhabit other worlds, with other agendas and framing ideologies—those of eighteenth-century scientific rationalism intent on delineating the expanding world by measurement and objective analysis; of Christianity and its redemptive obligations to those ignorant of its message; of empire and its associated projects of power, civilisation and commerce; and of settlement which sought, however absurdly, to recreate the familiar even as the familiar was rejected and fled from.
The critical eclipse of the colonial period is singular. In Australia the late colonial period remains the centre of the literary canon. In Canada the colonial period has assumed such eminence that Canadian commentators have objected to the dragging of all that has followed into its purview.* In New Zealand, although amply attended to by historians, the colonial period was long avoided by literary
scholars and anthologists, with the result that full knowledge of our literary past remains partial.
Most societies remember their stories and organise their literature into collections of what is valued and to be remembered. Even settler societies—where making books tends to be secondary to making farms, families and money—feed these early stories into a local canon. A Canadian writer like Margaret Atwood can look back to and draw on nineteenth-century Canadian texts such as John Richardson’s Wacousta (1832) or Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1852). In Australia, Marcus Clarke’s 1874 novel, For the Term of His Natural Life, feeds into the work of Peter Carey or Thomas Keneally in just the same way that Owen Wister’s 1902 novel, The Virginian, does for a twenty-first-century American author like Cormac McCarthy, or Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) for English novelists A.S. Byatt and Ian McEwan. These writers will reinterpret, develop, quarrel with and disapprove of their predecessors. They may feel dislike and contempt for the way they write or the values their writing expresses. But they are aware that they are there. They are in print, they have been translated into film and television, their works are widely known, and are thus available for new literary use.
This general lack of knowledge of literary foundations presented difficulties for late twentieth-century New Zealand novelists. When Fiona Kidman wrote her landmark novels of the late 1970s and 1980s she could not rely on her readers knowing, for example, Edith Searle Grossmann’s feminist fiction of the early twentieth century. When in the mid-1980s the novel in New Zealand embraced the colonial period as its subject, Pākehā novelists like Maurice Shadbolt turned to historians like James Belich rather than to New Zealand’s first novel, H. Butler Stoney’s Taranaki: A Tale of the War, for sources of the collective imagination. A concatenation of sources, modes and influences from the plagiaristically factual to the most fancifully fictional, Taranaki is admittedly a novel, as Dr Johnson might have put it, which is ‘not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all’. Yet set in the first Taranaki War and published in the same year, 1861, it deserves at least to be known by contemporary readers and writers of historical fiction.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 2