We have also represented the ways in which twentieth-century Pākehā authors misrepresent Māori. Some of this is offensive, especially to modern ears, but it is part of a literary record where efforts, however limited, to understand the other co-exist with a patronising benevolence allied at times to a crude racism. The most egregious example of the latter is found in the ‘humorous’ pieces that appeared in the Auckland Star throughout the 1960s under the pseudonym ‘Hori’. The stereotypes here evoked are as constraining as those in the ‘Hone Tiki’ sketches of A.A. Grace (1910) and, appearing just before the bicultural transformations of the 1970s, represent perhaps the last unself-conscious instances of that long public violence in print done to Māori speech by Pākehā satirists and humourists.
*
This anthology is not intended to congratulate New Zealanders in the twenty-first century on having arrived at last at an authentic identity as a people. We have resisted the narrative in which Kiwis as tolerant and open postcolonial citizens look back in horror at their racist and sexist past. And the tentative expectation expressed by Alexander and Currie—and by Curnow and Glover—that, at some time in the future, New Zealand might produce writers worth considering seems to us to be a limiting way of looking at both the past and the present. Nineteenth-century authors wrote in a manner approved of by nineteenth-century readers. Their works may seem odd or cumbersome or unpleasantly ornate to us now because we are twenty-first-century readers. It is a function of reading in general and especially of reading works of the imagination that you encounter what you do not recognise. But we would argue that there are continuities and conscious or unconscious variations within the material gathered here. Writing back is an important part of what is to be observed in these selections.
Consider two versions of the national anthem separated by over a hundred years. National anthems, of course, whether ‘O Canada’, ‘Advance Australia Fair’ or the Marseillaise, tend to assert national character, destiny and meaning, but some are more definite and resistant to revision than others. New Zealand has two co-equal national anthems, ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘God Defend New Zealand’. The latter exists in different versions and has managed to shift and complicate its meanings, voice and sense of audience to accommodate the nation’s history. Originally entitled ‘The National Hymn’, it was written by Thomas Bracken and first published in the New Zealand Saturday Advertiser in 1876. Bracken was an Irishman who came to New Zealand by way of Australia in the late 1860s. He was a journalist and a politician of a liberal and humanitarian persuasion, values which are echoed in his ‘hymn’—love, freedom, peace. And he anticipates a common local theme where the larger world gazes admiringly in our direction.
A competition for a musical setting was won by a Lawrence schoolteacher, John Joseph Woods, and Bracken’s poem was first performed in Dunedin in December 1876. Governor Grey arranged for it to be translated into Māori and a copy was presented to Queen Victoria at the time of her Diamond Jubilee in 1897. It was still at this time commercial hot property, but in 1940, the Centennial year, the government bought the copyright and it became a kind of alternative anthem, officially designated the ‘National Song of New Zealand’. The official anthem remained ‘God Save the Queen’, which reflects something about the tentative nationhood being celebrated. Bracken’s verse became a second official anthem in 1977, and for the last decade or so has been sung with one verse in Māori.
There is a narrative of nationhood embedded in this evolution that involves adding voices rather than preserving a single, authoritative one, and the colonial confidence it displays about God, nation and people is steadily modified as these voices are accommodated in collective views of the nation. Over a century after Bracken’s composition, David Eggleton’s ‘God Defend New Zealand’ uses the colonial poem—much as Jessie Mackay uses Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ in her 1881 Parihaka poem—as an over-rigid poetic template from which departures can deflatingly be made. Eggleton’s anthem, like Bracken’s, has existed in written and oral form; his ‘God Defend New Zealand’ began life as a performance poem delivered in Auckland pubs in the early 1980s and has gone through several versions. The version we have chosen comes from Eggleton’s 1988 collection, People of the Land. The rhetorical structure of the work is organised as a series of refrains: ‘When this doesn’t happen, when this doesn’t happen, when this doesn’t happen … God defend New Zealand’; it is in effect a list of what is essential, crucial to the idea of New Zealand, but conveyed in terms of disappointment and deferment rather than confidently grasped nationhood. Unlike the external orientation of Bracken—New Zealand as a political nation among nations—Eggleton is more interested in the internal, the social, as it bisects with the landscape, the neon of Newmarket but also golden gorse, cow-nipple green Taranaki and blooming cherry trees. There is a distinctly ironic tone, a mild send-up of the imagery of New Zealand as nature’s wonderland (‘peaches at the beaches’). Each of these poems gives us a landscape to read, as conjured by the poet. Neither Bracken nor Eggleton describes a place; they describe an idea of place—a self-consciously figured landscape, one version in Victorian language, the second in postcolonial language.
If there is a trajectory to be traced here, it is not towards a more explicit national identity or singular nationalist purpose. The later poem gently mocks such pretensions. In its conscious instability as a poem and the variety of tones, styles and voices it contains, Eggleton’s ‘God Defend New Zealand’ corresponds to Manhire’s open-ended and ‘impure’ articulation of an agreeable kind of national poem in his essay ‘Dirty Silence: Impure Sounds in New Zealand Poetry’:
The kind of poem which most interests me … is like ‘Phar Lap’: a monologue which has room for conversations. Poems don’t need to be ‘about’ all the significant things our schoolteachers used to insist on—but they ought at least to be sociable and surprising in their behaviour, in the way they voice and acknowledge the range of languages which the community gives them to use. I’m aware that the year is 1990, the 150th anniversary of a country which calls itself New Zealand. For what it’s worth, my definition of a community or nation would match what I hope to find in a good poem: a monologue made up of conversations, a voice composed of many voices.*
By the 1990s the ongoing differences in perception between the two parties present at the act of colonisation, indeed the whole postcolonial enterprise, could be viewed from a coolly ironic distance, as in Anne French’s ‘Cabin Fever’:
It all depends
on where you’re looking from. The country viewed from an Air New
Zealand F27 on a misty winter morning, might just resemble a J
boat, very broad in the beam, sailing bravely south away from
Europe and towards the ice, or a waka, small as a room, unstable
in a big swell, blown off course and heading nowhere in particular.
The boat images in French’s poem, as in Sullivan’s Star Waka, tug away from that identification of nation and maritime travel Curnow makes in the introduction to his 1945 anthology: ‘The islands are not content within themselves; their coasts are crowded with images of arrival and departure.’† In both French and Sullivan the voyaging is askew in direction and purpose from heroic navigations and arrivals. It has been caught up in a larger theme, one that cannot be accommodated wholly within a bicultural destiny—that of migrations that do not end but continue outward, even into space.
In the consistent motif of migrancy—Māori, British, European, Pasifika, Asian—we find that the sense of ‘here’ as ‘elsewhere’ has not dissipated over time. It is present in A.R.D. Fairburn’s ‘Dominion’ (1938) as the weight of the sea-voyage across the hulk of the world:
In the first days, in the forgotten calendars,
came the seeds of the race, the forerunners:
offshoots, outcasts, entrepreneurs,
architects of Empire, romantic adventurers;
and the famished, the multitude of
the poor;
crossed parallels of boredom, tropics
of hope and fear, losing the pole-star, suffering
world of water, chaos of wind and sunlight,
and the formless image in the mind;
sailed under Capricorn to see for ever
the arc of the sun to northward.
Fairburn here treats migration as the condition of nationhood and he is keenly aware of the disappointments on arrival and the difficulties of adjustment for the mixed cast of characters that makes up the migrants. That sense of detachment also appears in European visitors Greville Texidor and Anna Kavan a little later than Fairburn’s poem. It is present still in Cliff Fell and Chris Tse in the 2000s, though with less complaint. The sense of being elsewhere is even found in Nigel Cox’s Cowboy Dog (2006) where a familiar sense of place—the iconic literary landscape of Mulgan’s Man Alone—has been translated into an exaggerated movie-Western narrative voice.
*
Despite this variety, we have not found a dramatic explosion of multicultural writing at the close of the historical narrative here covered. The full arrival of a multicultural literature, as found in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia or Canada, has yet to occur. A recent essay by Tina Makereti suggests one way in which the current model might develop:
My heritage has only ever consisted of a multitude of messy, conflicting, surprising stories. The more of them I discover, the more content I am that my personal story of loss and confusion and strange beginnings is not so unusual. I’ve sought them out, these fiercely independent, alternative lifestyle Pākehā grandfathers, to keep me company. To keep company with the kauri-brown ancestral wahine-toa I like to visit often. I bet they like it there. They know their place, and it’s better than where they came from. They’ve paid the prices that were asked of them, adopted the reo and tikanga, earned their turf through work and war and the making of babies. Their stories represent an earlier whakapapa, an alternative form of settlement. While Pākehā Māori ancestors had their own issues, could their stories represent another model of intercultural interaction for all of us? Could the story of Aotearoa-New Zealand develop differently if we recognised all the stories, not just those of conquest and confiscation, of laws and land courts, but the unexpected, the unpopular, the unwritten?*
Makereti carries us back to Pakeha Maori Worser Heberley as a model for the present, someone who falls outside the tomes of official history, who stands for disorder in terms of the official project of settlement dreamed up by Wakefield. He is riffraff rather than virtuous settler.† Makereti’s argument suggests to us paths into our collective literature that might profitably be taken. There is, for example, a line of inventiveness that proceeds through Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s gleeful exploration of the gothic potential of bad behaviour, David Ballantyne’s refusal to write about the local in any of the terms then approved, and the Māori renaissance writers’ licence to work outside the carefully policed parameters of Pākehā practice. In the sense of not quite belonging to either of the bicultural parties, there is also a line of literary visitors, outsiders and permanently estranged migrants—from the anonymous and deeply miserable author of ‘Original Lines’ from the Daily Southern Cross (1848) through the ambivalence of Renato Amato and Amelia Batistich to the exuberant arrival of Cliff Fell’s ‘The M at the End of the Earth’ (2007).
This anthology begins with the exchanges between Māori and European in the late eighteenth century. It concludes in a present where the themes and even the texts of the colony reappear in novels by Hamish Clayton and Alison Wong and poetry by Bernadette Hall. The difficulties of living in the new land encountered by Charlotte Brontë’s friend Mary Taylor in the mid-nineteenth century are rehearsed in the contemporary scene in Harry Ricketts’s essay, How to Live Elsewhere (2004). But at the same time, much of the focus of current writing is outward to the world, not inward to an exclusively New Zealand location or tradition. Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2006) is set in Papua New Guinea. In Daylight (2003) Elizabeth Knox—whose fictional settings range from Tawa to a Miltonic heaven—superimposes a New Zealand disaster, Cave Creek, on a caving expedition in the European Alps. Clayton approaches the elusiveness of Te Rauparaha—whom Bracken made familiar to his Victorian readers by invoking the measures of Longfellow’s 1855 poem ‘The Song of Hiawatha’—by way of the ambiguous figure from the intractably difficult Old English poem Wulf and Eadwacer. New Zealand literature is not in itself a sufficient context in which to examine literature produced here. The fantasy of constructing an anthology of national literature is that it can be discrete and of itself. In fact, just as New Zealand readers have always read, mostly, writing from elsewhere, so New Zealand literature has been like a sponge, sucking up influences, adopting conventions, accommodating new movements and mimicking alien voices from William Wordsworth to W.H. Auden to Charles Simic.
*
This book, then, contains a history of literature in English in this country since contact, which begins in sailors’ chants as well as scientific record, and which is continually visited by external influence—cockney slang, Scottish dialect, Australian vernacular, American hipster cool, Pasifika inflections. Māori and English conjoin, fly apart, and progressively insinuate themselves each into the other. The languages of commerce and technology compete with those of the educated, the self-educated and the altogether uneducated. We include works constructed out of the language of money machine messages, of racing slang and the aberrantly creative names of race horses, of the idioms of Māori factory workers, and the bickering of a married couple in an Indian corner dairy. Conversely, and to mark the two most commonly owned books in New Zealand households of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we include as ‘found poems’ a recipe from The ‘Sure to Rise’ Cookery Book and an exposition on the quality of soil from the Yates’ Gardening Guide. There are romantic treatments of sublime nature and gothic versions of suburban life. The domestic world is excoriated in the 1950s and 1960s by James K. Baxter and Louis Johnson, and subject, by Jenny Bornholdt in the 1990s and 2000s, to an almost reverential contemplation—an understated romanticism of the familial and the ordinary. As Katherine Mansfield wrote in her notebook nearly a century ago of her childhood home in Wellington:
Oh, I want for one moment to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the old world. It must be mysterious, as though floating—it must take the breath. It must be ‘one of those islands’ …. I shall tell everything, even of how the laundry basket squeaked at ‘75’ ….*
Our purpose is not to present a canonical view of New Zealand literature. Rather we seek to register the work in its time, allowing for the different ways in which it has been seen. Alfred Domett was admired in his time (by Tennyson, Longfellow and Robert Browning, for example) and denigrated or ignored thereafter, both positive and negative estimations being widely and strongly held. James K. Baxter seemed for a time after his death to have suffered a similar fate. His reputation now is more nuanced, able to accommodate the vertiginous contradictions of the man and his work. A fluency of estimation has replaced fixed principles of evaluation.
The word ‘canon’ is ecclesiastical in origin and we are mindful that when Bishop Pompallier arrived at the treaty-signing at Waitangi in ‘full canonicals’ he represented an authority regarded as false and dangerous by the British signatories, and a threat to their power over Māori. To announce a literary canon as something authoritative, unchanging and linear is no longer of use. But the idea of the canon still has purchase and value so long as the works assigned canonical status are continually subject to objection, insurrection, assimilation by the opposition. We need to read with sympathy though not with complicity the unfashionable rhetoric of the nineteenth century. Leggott’s tradition of ‘singing women’ is very different from the Fairburn/Curnow/Glover line of the mid-twentieth century and we can listen to both sides of that difference with pleasure. The tradition of those singing men from the mid-twentieth cent
ury has not disappeared or diminished because other ways of writing have established counter claims to our attention. In the 2000s, an age where the building of a national literature gives way to participation in a global literature, we may enjoy the increasingly complex way that place is registered. What is important is the effort of open attention.
How to Use this Book
Dates of first publication are in brackets at the bottom of each work. As a general rule these dates reflect first publication in book form. In some cases, as with Robin Hyde, we wish to draw attention to the gap between a work’s composition and its publication; the date of composition is, therefore, in italics, followed by the first book publication in roman font. For plays, an italic date indicates the year of first performance. In cases such as the journals of James Cook and Ensign Best the composition date is more significant than the date of first publication; here we have italic dates at the bottom and no roman ones. Information about the later editions of these manuscripts is in the bibliography.
We have avoided inserting our own footnotes, in-text translations and glossaries. For Māori words we do not believe it is appropriate to supply translations in a modern New Zealand anthology. Noel Hilliard’s Maori Girl had footnotes such as ‘Kanga pirau—corn left for months in running water to rot; highly-prized food’. Nowadays, requiring the non-conversant reader to find the information that makes the text complete and available is an important part of being a bi- or multicultural reader. For texts that contain foreign words, similarly, we have not included translations unless they are part of the original publication. Sāmoan-English speech in Sia Figiel’s Where We Once Belonged would be unnecessarily interrupted by glossing; it is part of the structure and texture of the work and requires reader engagement. Nor do we feel a need to explain that ‘the Orange’ referred to in Peter Cape’s ‘Down the Hall on Saturday Night’ was a popular ballroom in Auckland in the 1950s and 1960s or that a guri in the same work is a farm dog. We have found Harry Orsman’s magnificent Dictionary of New Zealand English: New Zealand Words and their Origins (1997) invaluable and recommend it.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 4