The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature
Page 23
Always rub butter or lard into the flour with the fingers, not the palms of the hand.
Currants, sultanas, raisins, or sugar equal lb. in barely level breakfastcup.
Edmonds’ Baking Powder should always be mixed in dry ingredients, unless otherwise mentioned.
One breakfastcup of milk equals ½-pint; 1 teacupful of milk equals 1 gill.
A cake should rise before browning to its full height, especially sponge cakes.
You can always guess amount of butter to use in cooking by dividing the lb. squares.
(1914)
William Satchell, ‘Song of the Gumfield’
In the slighted, blighted North, where the giant kauris grow,
And the earth is bare and barren where the bush-bee used to hum,
When the luck we’ve followed’s failing and our friends are out of hailing,
And it’s getting narrow sailing by the rocks of Kingdom Come,
There’s a way of fighting woe, squaring store-bills as you go,
In the trade of digging gum.
And the new-chum and the scum
And the scouring of the slum,
And the lawyer and the doctor, and the deaf and halt and dumb,
And the parson and the sailor, and the welsher and the whaler,
When the world is looking glum,
Just to keep from Kingdom Come,
Take to digging kauri gum.
In the scrubby, grubby North when the giddy sun is set,
And the idiot owl cicada drops the whirring of his drum;
When the night is growing thicker and the bottled candles flicker,
And the damned mosquitos bicker in a diabolic hum,
There’s a way of ending fret and pulling down a debt
In the task of scraping gum.
And the new-chum and the scum
And the scouring of the slum,
And the lawyer and the doctor, and the deaf and halt and dumb,
And the parson and the sailor, and the welsher and the whaler,
When the world is looking glum,
Just to keep from Kingdom Come,
Take to scraping kauri gum.
In the sloppy, floppy North through the dismal winter rain,
When the man is merely muscle and the mind is nearly numb,
When the old, old pains rheumatic fill the bones from base to attic
And a sound of words erratic sets the pannikins a-thrum,
There’s a way of killing Cain and an antidote to pain
In the task of hooking gum.
And the new-chum and the scum
And the scouring of the slum,
And the lawyer and the doctor, and the deaf and halt and dumb,
And the parson and the sailor, and the welsher and the whaler,
When the world is looking glum,
Just to keep from Kingdom Come,
Take to hooking kauri gum.
And the man of law has gambled through another man’s estate,
And the doctor’s special weakness at the present time is rum,
And the parson loves the clocking on a pretty maiden’s stocking,
And his sermons (mostly shocking) scare the neophyte new-chum.
By the smouldering ti-tree fire, when the wind is howling higher,
They are cracking jokes that blister the Recording Angel’s slate,
And the matters that they mention are too primitive to state
At the scraping of the gum.
But the new-chum and the scum
And the scouring of the slum,
And the lawyer and the doctor, and the deaf and halt and dumb,
And the parson and the sailor, and the welsher and the whaler,
When the Day of Judgment’s come
O, won’t they be looking glum!
As the mighty trumpets thunder and the harps go tinkle-tum,
And they’ve finished with the digging and they’ve scraped the final crumb,
And the bottom’s gone for ever from the trade of kauri gum.
(1900)
Blanche Baughan, ‘The Old Place’
So the last day’s come at last, the close of my fifteen year—
The end of the hope, an’ the struggles, an’ messes I’ve put in here,
All of the shearings over, the final mustering done,—
Eleven hundred an’ fifty for the incoming man, near on.
Over five thousand I drove ’em, mob by mob, down the coast;
Eleven-fifty in fifteen year … it isn’t much of a boast.
Oh, it’s a bad old place! Blown out o’ your bed half the nights,
And in summer the grass burnt shiny an’ bare as your hand, on the heights:
The creek dried up by November, and in May a thundering roar
That carries down toll o’ your stock to salt ’em whole on the shore.
Clear’d I have, and I’ve clear’d an’ clear’d, yet everywhere, slap in your face,
Briar, tauhinu, an’ ruin!—God! it’s a brute of a place.
… An’ the house got burnt which I built, myself, with all that worry and pride;
Where the Missus was always homesick, and where she took fever, and died.
Yes, well! I’m leaving the place. Apples look red on that bough.
I set the slips with my own hand. Well—they’re the other man’s now.
The breezy bluff: an’ the clover that smells so over the land,
Drowning the reek o’ the rubbish, that plucks the profit out o’ your hand:
That bit o’ Bush paddock I fall’d myself, an’ watched, each year, come clean
(Don’t it look fresh in the tawny? A scrap of Old-Country green):
This air, all healthy with sun an’ salt, an’ bright with purity:
An’ the glossy karakas there, twinkling to the big blue twinkling sea:
Where the boat I’ll never handle again, sits rocking to and fro:
There’s the last look to it all! an’ now for the last upon
This room, where Hetty was born, an’ my Mary died, an’ John ….
Well, I’m leaving the poor old place, and it cuts as keen as a knife;
The place that’s broken my heart—the place where I’ve lived my life.
(1903)
Anonymous, ‘Digger’s Farewell’
Just as you say, sir—I’m off once more.
The Palmer River, that’s my way.
I landed here in ’sixty-four,
That’s ten years’ struggle along the Grey.
Ten long years’ since I landed here
In a trackless land of wet and cold.
Some of our lives were pretty severe,
But who lacks hardship looking for gold?
The whistle. A drink before I start.
A step to the corner, I hear you say.
My last on the Coast. With all my heart.
A brandy straight and then I’m away.
Here’s a long farewell to the old West Coast
And a heart prepared for whatever I find.
‘Success to the Palmer’—is that your toast?
Mine’s—‘Here’s to the land I leave behind!’
(c. 1890s; 1928)
Colonial Gothic
Edward Tregear, ‘Te Whetu Plains’
A lonely rock above a midnight plain,
A sky across whose moonlit darkness flies
No shadow from the ‘Children of the Rain’,
A stream whose double crescent far-off lies,
And seems to glitter back the silver of the skies.
The table-lands stretch step by step below
In giant terraces, their deeper ledges
Banded by blackened swamps (that, near, I know
Convolvulus-entwined) whose whitened edges
Are ghostly silken flags of seeding water-sedges.
All still, all silent, ’tis a songless land,
That hears no music of the nightingale,
No sound of wate
rs falling lone and grand
Through sighing forests to the lower vale,
No whisper in the grass, so wan, and grey, and pale.
When Earth was tottering in its infancy,
This rock, a drop of molten stone, was hurled
And tost on waves of flames like those we see
(Distinctly though afar) evolved and whirled
A photosphere of fire around the Solar World.
Swift from the central deeps the lightning flew
Piercing the heart of Darkness like a spear,
Hot blasts of steam and vapour thunder’d through
The lurid blackness of the atmosphere.
A million years have passed, and left strange quiet here.
Peace, the deep peace of universal death
Enshrouds the kindly mother-earth of old,
The air is dead, and stirs no living breath
To break these awful Silences that hold
The heart within their clutch, and numb the veins with cold.
My soul hath wept for Rest with longing tears,
Called it ‘the perfect crown of human life’—
But now I shudder lest the coming years
Should be with these most gloomy terrors rife;
When palsied arms drop down outwearied with the strife
May Age conduct me by a gentle hand
Beneath the shadows ever brooding o’er
The solemn twilight of the Evening Land,
Where man’s discordant voices pierce no more,
But sleeping waters dream along a sleeping shore.
Where I, when Youth has spent its fiery strength
And flickers low, may rest in quietness
Till on my waiting brow there falls at length
The deeper calm of the Death-Angel’s kiss—
But not, oh God, such peace, such ghastly peace as this.
(1919)
William Satchell, from The Toll of the Bush
‘Water is surely to be found somewhere about here,’ he said. ‘Let us go a little way along the channel and explore.’
And, as though the bush sought to play with its victims, they came presently to the thing they sought. The water lay in a pool at the foot of an abrupt descent, where the winter cataract had worn deep into the rocks. It was both abundant and pure, and when, an hour later, they quitted the brink of the pool they did so with strength and courage renewed.
By this time the sun had reached his highest altitude. The heat on the hillside was like that of a hot-house, and reaching the tree at length, they were glad to sit down and rest before the final stage of their journey was attempted.
Then again the struggle began. For hours it was impossible to estimate their progress, no opening, even of a hand’s-breadth, permitting them a view of the country they were traversing. So far as was possible where insuperable obstacles to a straight course were for ever occurring they kept to one level, but after awhile, beyond an occasional slight undulation, the suggestion that they were on a hillside vanished, and thenceforward it was but a blind burrowing through the growths. Deeper and deeper they penetrated into the primeval solitudes, where no man had come perchance since the beginning of the world. Nothing they had yet seen equalled in grandeur and beauty the scene they now invaded. Everywhere huge trunks of hoary antiquity rose like ponderous pillars of masonry into the obscurity of the forest roof. Monstrous plants of strange growth and in unnumbered variety choked the earth and wrestled with one another in a fierce battle for life. Overhead, mosses and epiphytes, vines and climbing ferns draped the branches, and lianas and the rugged cables of the rata bound the woods together in a grip of steel. Now and then they burst into a tiny glade sacred to some majestic tree, the record of whose years might serve for the lives not of men but of races. At other times, less fortunate, they came on tangles of bush-lawyer, against whose ferocious claws no strength or agility might avail, and again and again they were driven away in search of easier country.
So in the hopeless struggle the day wore itself away, and again in the mysterious murmur of the leaves they read the signal of approaching darkness.
Late in the afternoon they had been seduced by easy stages into a country of unsurpassable difficulty and gloom. The vast trees still remained, blotting out the sky in a dense interlacing of foliage, but the place of the varied undergrowth had now been taken by one plant—the supple-jack. Casting its black canes from tree to tree, scrambling across the ground, turning and twisting snake-like on itself, this hellish vine added the final touch of horror to the scene. The dead sooty blackness that had displaced the vivid green of fern tree and palm, the distorted and suffocating saplings seeking to break upwards from that pit of terrors, the hideous fungoid growths like huge cancers on the trees, the chill air, the ominous rattling of the canes—formed together a scene in which the imagination of a Dante would have revelled.
Despite the care with which he had guarded it, Geoffrey’s knife had been dragged from its sheath and lost in the scramble, and this loss now added greatly to their difficulties. At every step the canes had to be forced apart and the body adapted to the opening thus provided. Almost fainting with fatigue, the girl endured this final torment in heroic silence, while the man, his eyes dark with sullen rage at his powerlessness, spent himself in her service till every nerve in his body vibrated discordantly.
Once, frantic at the sight of her sufferings, he opened his clenched lips and railed at himself, cursing the day he was born, accusing himself of bringing this misery of torture upon her; but the touch of her hand on his stilled the evil mood, and for a grateful moment he held her fast in his arms.
‘We will try no more,’ he said at last. ‘When we get out of this hell—if we ever do—we will stay still and wait. And if we wait for death, better so than that we should struggle forward to meet it.’
And as though there were a charm in the words to break momentarily the net that held them, presently the maze opened into a little fern-covered glade, set about with lofty trees, kahikatea and totara and rata, with at their feet the glancing foliage of palms and the tender green of clustered tree-ferns. Scattered about the centre were the last white decaying remnants of the foretime giant tenant of the opening, and a mound such as is raised by man to mark the resting-place of his mighty dead covered his immemorial dust. Whether it were merely the contrast with the Inferno from which they had emerged, or that there actually was something in the peace and loveliness of the scene to inspire delight, the two looked around them and at one another with smiling eyes.
‘But that water is probably wanting this is an ideal camping ground,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Surely the good spirits of the forest must have spread it for us in the midst of the desert.’
‘It looks like a cemetery,’ Eve said suddenly. ‘Look at the white things like stones among the green fern.’ Her eyes still retained their smiling expression.
‘A cemetery it is. Here lies the dust of one who flourished probably in the days of Solomon, and whose resting-place is sacred even in the fight for existence which is being waged here.’
In the reaction from the severe labours of the day all thought of the terrors that awaited them passed from their minds, and inspired with fresh energy, they set about their preparations for the night. From the palm trees Geoffrey tore the leaves by brute force, and, Eve plaiting them together, a protection was soon formed against the heavy night dews. The approaching darkness rendered it impossible that anything more elaborate should be attempted that night, and the remainder of the brief twilight was devoted to the collection of fuel and the building of a fire. The tree-ferns under which the shelter had been erected formed with their trunks, to which the spent fronds still clung, a species of rough hut, and by piling other fronds against these a certain amount of comfort was secured. Their water-bottle was more than half-full, and three sandwiches remained from the store Lena had cut for Geoffrey. Thus the second night began.
The sky above the opening was of a perfect cle
ar darkness, deep also with a depth that passed infinitely beyond the stars. Sirius blazed, the binary star in Orion darted his rich colours through the trembling leaves, the Pleiades emitted soft beams as of lamp-lighted pearl, the ‘most ancient heavens’ were ‘fresh and strong’.
‘Can you read the stars?’ Eve asked at last. ‘Do they tell you anything of where we are?’
‘I know the constellations,’ he replied, following the direction of her gaze; ‘but where they should be at this time of the year or at this moment of time I have no idea.’
‘But if we watched their motions, should we not be able to distinguish the points of the compass?’
‘Yes, within limits. But to make a further attempt to get out would be suicidal. Could you endure another day such as this has been? Our mistake was in ever leaving the spot where we camped last night.’
‘Do you think they are searching for us?’
‘That depends on how much is known of your movements.’
She reflected a moment. ‘And what is our chance supposing a search party is out?’
‘It was good yesterday, not so good to-day; tomorrow, if we move, it may vanish altogether.’
Eve looked thoughtfully into the fire. ‘What brought you to the place where we met?’ she asked suddenly.
He checked the words that framed themselves on his lips. ‘Fate,’ he said briefly.
‘To save me?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Why, then—when it was too late?
‘Was there something before—something from which you desired to be saved?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yet you chose between us—with your eyes open.’
‘No!’ she said passionately,—‘no! He blind-folded me; he lied away my reason. It seemed incredible that a man should love God and serve the devil. Every instinct of righteousness urged and compelled me to believe him.’
‘Could I have broken down a belief so founded?’
‘You could have tried.’
‘Did I not try?’
‘You should have held me by force,—you should have compelled me to listen—to believe. If you had killed me for my obstinacy I should have died worshipping you.’
‘Eve!’
‘I loved you—I loved only you. Every hour which brought me nearer to him was an agony—yet you stood by.’