The word Life to Miette was spelt m-e-n. In judging others according to her own constitution she was not unique. No, in this she was at one with the great average of humanity. She could only see through her own eyes, only judge others by her own code, for she had no transcendent or extraordinary qualities of mind or soul to enable her to recognise those qualities in others. She had little or no imagination.
The strength of the reproductive instinct in Margaret was her divinity, the godhead in her, because the glory of her mind and the beauty of her soul held it under proper control; but in poor Miette that instinct had run amok, unleashed by mind, debased by soullessness.
There, in fact, was the cause for the gulf between the two women.
As Miette rode away from the pen her cheeks were flushed and her puffy eyes glowed with excitement at thought of the chase. She would have to go into this thing scientifically. She was not crazy about the Scotsman as she was about Jimmy, therefore she could use her weapons better. She might get him or she might not, but she guaranteed one thing—she would make Margaret ‘sit up’.
This between those two was serious; a child could have seen that. Thinking thus, a doubt assailed Miette as to whether there really was anything untoward with Jimmy, after all. But if there was not, how dared the woman interfere with her amour? There must have been. She could not put her goody-goody stuff over her, Miette. She knew too much for that. Her experience (picked up in hotel kitchens, restaurants and such-like places) had taught her all there was to know about sex.
Margaret said to her: ‘I’m sure you must be tired now, Miette. Shall we go off home?’
‘Yes, if you don’t mind. I’m rather done up.’
‘You must have a hot bath immediately on arriving home. It takes the stiffness out of your joints.’
She called out to Glengarry and Barry, who were ahead, that they were going, and the men waved back a farewell.
So Margaret carried home her glad heart and happy thoughts, and the other thought out her envenomed plans for the ensnaring of Glengarry’s lust. Miette wanted to hurry home. She wanted to tell Ian of this new discovery, to show him another flaw in his idol. Ian did not pet her now to anything like the extent he used to; so much of his time was taken up talking to Margaret. Poor Miette! No wonder she actually did grind her teeth at that.
Meanwhile the dockers are at home. They make good money at this season of the year, when shepherds with good sets of teeth are in much demand. They shout and call and laugh and swear while they wrestle with the terrified lambs. The grass is soon torn off the enclosed ground, and in no time clouds of dust are churned up to envelop the men who choke and splutter curses on it, the heat and the animals.
Two men work together. A lamb is grabbed and held by one man. The other lifts his sharp knife; one slash and the tail is off; the ear is split with the station mark; then quick as a thought the castration is performed by the shepherd’s teeth. Blood spurts everywhere; the animal struggles convulsively; he is released, and the operator spits his mouthful into a billy and takes on the next. At lunch-time the contents of the billy are tipped into a huge frying-pan, and the men feed.
Savage and brutal, ay? The docker’s teeth are joined in and tear the living flesh so that there may be prime New Zealand mutton. The lamb must be denuded of its tail so that the health of the sheep be not affected by dirty wool. The poor tiny ear must be slit to preserve property rights, and out of it all, in the end, step the fashionable lady and gentleman.
Brutal and savage? The lamb suffers for a little time; it runs to its mother flirting its stump of a tail, and crying plaintively, and in a very little time its young flesh heals. And in great cities where the woollen goods are made, the workers in the mills have flattened chests and pallid skins, poor semblances of manhood and womanhood. Their tails have been cut off, their ears have been slit with the mark of property rights. Note them, and if you can see no remedy, then in the name of decency demand that the docker’s programme be completed, so that the earth be not replenished with their stock.
(1926)
Frank Sargeson, ‘Conversation with My Uncle’
My uncle wears a hard knocker. His wife put him up to it. She says it’s the thing for a man in his position, and my uncle’s position is pretty good. He’s a partner in one of those big firms. He grumbles a bit but who doesn’t grumble a bit? I admit that these days his trousers are a bit shiny but people don’t look at his trousers. They look at his hard knocker.
It’s difficult to have a talk with my uncle. You can walk under his nose in the street and he won’t see you, and if you sit next to him on a tramcar he’ll find out you’re there just as soon as you tell him. It chills you a bit if you’re a sensitive person. It’s because he’s got a lot to occupy his mind. He’s often told me that. You see he’s on the City Council and one of those Boards, the sort you get paid for being on. Once he stood for Parliament but he didn’t get in.
It’s very difficult to have a talk with my uncle. It doesn’t interest him to listen to what you’ve got to say any more than it interests him to look into people’s faces in the street. But he likes to get going himself. He loves the sound of his own voice and he’s all the time waiting for you to finish so that he can get going himself. I know we’re all like that a bit, but all of us aren’t as commonplace as my uncle. Oh Lord! I hope not. He never reads a book—well, just a murder story now and then.
I’ve tried talking about lots of things with my uncle but it’s too difficult. Once I asked him, suppose he went to a picnic and there was only one banana each, would he try to get two bananas for himself, or three or more? He said he never went to picnics. Now you might think my uncle was trying to be funny. He wasn’t. He can’t suppose. So I said, say anyone went to a picnic they wouldn’t try to monopolise the bananas, would they? Not if they were decent? He said, no, of course not. Then I asked him, what about the social picnic? Social picnic? He repeated the words. He didn’t understand and I had to leave it at that. He was so puzzled I felt sorry for him.
Once or twice I’ve tried talking to my uncle about risky subjects. Just out of devilment. He’s an ascetic, my uncle is. He eats only a few mouthfuls of food a day. He’s very thin, very cold to shake hands with. His wife says his hard knocker is the thing for a man in his position. I say it’s the thing for a man with his asceticism too. He dislikes me when I bring up a risky subject. He says, Change the subject. A decent man doesn’t let his mind dwell on those things. He looks very serious, very responsible.
Oh Lord! It’s a good job everybody isn’t like my uncle. We don’t want a world full of dead men walking about in hard knockers.
(1936)
A.R.D. Fairburn, ‘Rhyme of the Dead Self’
Tonight I have taken all that I was
and strangled him that pale lily-white lad
I have choked him with these my hands these claws
catching him as he lay a-dreaming in his bed.
Then chuckling I dragged out his foolish brains
that were full of pretty love-tales heigho the holly
and emptied them holus bolus to the drains
those dreams of love oh what ruinous folly.
He is dead pale youth and he shall not rise
on the third day or any other day
sloughed like a snakeskin there he lies
and he shall not trouble me again for aye.
(1930)
H.W. Gretton, ‘Double-Bunking’
I heard this sad song-oh
In the Orongorongo:
‘There’ll be no more double-bunking, double-bunking for me.’
I said to the vocalist,
‘Oh, why do you so insist,
“There’ll be no more double-bunking, double-bunking for me”?’
There’ll be no more double-bunking,
Double-bunking, double-bunking.
No more double-bunking, double-bunking for me.
He said, ‘I’ve had a gutsful
Of tramps
where the hut’s full.
There’ll be no more double-bunking, double-bunking for me.
I’ve weakened and lost weight.
I’m nervously prostrate.
There’ll be no more double-bunking, double-bunking for me.’
My tongue’s covered with fur too,
And I can’t eat my burgoo.
There’ll be no more double-bunking, double-bunking for me.
I’m washed out like a dish rag,
And, I’ve ruptured my sleeping bag.
There’ll be no more double-bunking, double-bunking for me.
(c. 1936)
Cultural Nationalism
More than in any other section in this anthology, the writers here saw themselves as having a deliberate agenda and being part of a self-conscious effort to create ‘a home in thought’, a truly original national literature.
What was needed, they argued, was a way of writing that was free from dependency on dated British literary models, a unique literary language structured by literary forms both novel and relevant, which would be expressive of New Zealand surroundings and catch ‘the local and special’. Although they were aware, to a greater extent than later generations, of the local literary production of the late nineteenth century, they dismissed it as irrelevant, imitative, journalistic and genteel (a coded way of saying written by women).
And yet, for what is seen as the beginning of a national literature, the writing in this section is extraordinarily pessimistic. It de-prettifies the natural world. There is no place for romantic contemplation or touristic aggrandisement of its singular beauties. New Zealand is an insecurely inhabited land, diminished by economic history and present circumstance.
This is in part the literary record of a world depression. Farmers have been ground down and squeezed out by mortgages; nature is recorded not by the tūī or the kererū but by harsh exotic birds which provide an indifferent chorus to accompany failure. Māori are represented by a diminished and dislocated residue. And, in sharp contrast to late colonial self-satisfaction, failure is a central preoccupation: failure of the whole settler enterprise, the difficulty of adapting to a place which, now that the overblown rhetoric of the nineteenth-century descriptors has been rejected and affiliation with the culture of home has been ruled out, is seen as bleak, uncultured and distant. The most that can be hoped for is that in this enterprise the foundation might be laid for some future literature of authenticity.
Despite this section’s slightly manufactured sense of its own novelty, the reader is not struck here by the sense of a modernist breakthrough. The poetry looks back to the turn-of-the-century Georgians and sideways at contemporary English left-wing poets such as W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender, building on colloquial rhythms and demotic voices. The prose is realist and trenchant, driven by social and cultural imperatives as much as formal ones.
The harsh masculinism of the cultural nationalists has been much criticised by later generations, and the world depicted here is largely, though not exclusively, one of men—mateship, its contents and discontents. But the range of treatments of the masculine is surprisingly diverse and, in keeping with the general tone of unease, neither entirely confident nor dismissive.
Distance Looks Our Way
Allen Curnow, ‘Landfall in Unknown Seas’
The 300th Anniversary of the Discovery of New Zealand by Abel Tasman, 13 December 1642
i
Simply by sailing in a new direction
You could enlarge the world.
You picked your captain,
Keen on discoveries, tough enough to make them,
Whatever vessels could be spared from other
More urgent service for a year’s adventure;
Took stock of the more probable conjectures
About the Unknown to be traversed, all
Guesses at golden coasts and tales of monsters
To be digested into plain instructions
For likely and unlikely situations.
All this resolved and done, you launched the whole
On a fine morning, the best time of year,
Skies widening and the oceanic furies
Subdued by summer illumination; time
To go and to be gazed at going
On a fine morning, in the Name of God
Into the nameless waters of the world.
O you had estimated all the chances
Of business in those waters, the world’s waters
Yet unexploited.
But more than the sea-empire’s
Cannon, the dogs of bronze and iron barking
From Timor to the Straits, backed up the challenge.
Between you and the South an older enmity
Lodged in the searching mind, that would not tolerate
So huge a hegemony of ignorance.
There, where your Indies had already sprinkled
Their tribes like ocean rains, you aimed your voyage;
Like them invoked your God, gave seas to history
And islands to new hazardous tomorrows.
ii
Suddenly exhilaration
Went off like a gun, the whole
Horizon, the long chase done,
Hove to. There was the seascape
Crammed with coast, surprising
As new lands will, the sailor
Moving on the face of the waters,
Watching the earth take shape
Round the unearthly summits, brighter
Than its emerging colour.
Yet this, no far fool’s errand,
Was less than the heart desired,
In its old Indian dream
The glittering gulfs ascending
Past palaces and mountains
Making one architecture.
Here the uplifted structure,
Peak and pillar of cloud—
O splendour of desolation—reared
Tall from the pit of the swell,
With a shadow, a finger of wind, forbade
Hopes of a lucky landing.
Always to islanders danger
Is what comes over the sea;
Over the yellow sands and the clear
Shallows, the dull filament
Flickers, the blood of strangers:
Death discovered the Sailor
O in a flash, in a flat calm,
A clash of boats in the bay
And the day marred with murder.
The dead required no further
Warning to keep their distance;
The rest, noting the failure,
Pushed on with a reconnaissance
To the north; and sailed away.
iii
Well, home is the Sailor, and that is a chapter
In a schoolbook, a relevant yesterday
We thought we knew all about, being much apter
To profit, sure of our ground,
No murderers mooring in our Golden Bay.
But now there are no more islands to be found
And the eye scans risky horizons of its own
In unsettled weather, and murmurs of the drowned
Haunt their familiar beaches—
Who navigates us towards what unknown
But not improbable provinces? Who reaches
A future down for us from the high shelf
Of spiritual daring? Not those speeches
Pinning on the Past like a decoration
For merit that congratulates itself,
O not the self-important celebration
Or most painstaking history, can release
The current of a discoverer’s elation
And silence the voices saying,
‘Here is the world’s end where wonders cease’.
Only by a more faithful memory, laying
On him the half-light of a diffident glory,
The Sailor lives, and stands beside us, paying
Out into our time’s wave
The stain of blood that writes a
n island story.
(1943)
Charles Brasch, ‘The Silent Land’
The mountains are empty. No hermits have hallowed the caves,
Nor has the unicorn drunk from the green fountain
Whose poplar shadow never heard the horn.
Lives like a vanishing night-dew drop away.
The sea casts up its wreckage, ship or shell,
Beams of day and darkness guardedly
Break on the savage forests that from groins
And armpits of the hills so fiercely look.
The plains are nameless and the cities cry for meaning,
The unproved heart still seeks a vein of speech
Beside the sprawling rivers, in the stunted township,
By the pine windbreak where the hot wind bleeds.
Man must lie with the gaunt hills like a lover,
Earning their intimacy in the calm sigh
Of a century of quiet and assiduity,
Discovering what solitude has meant
Before our headlong time broke on these waters,
And in himself unite time’s dual order;
For he to both the swift and slow belongs,
Formed for a hard and complex history.
So relenting, earth will tame her tamer,
And speak with all her voices tenderly
To seal his homecoming to the world. Ah then
For him the Oreads will haunt the fields near the snowline,
He will walk with his shadow across the bleaching plain
No longer solitary, and hear the sea talking
Dark in the rocks, O and the angel will visit,
Signing life’s air with indefinable mark.
(1945)
Charles Brasch, ‘The Islands (2)’
Always, in these islands, meeting and parting
Shake us, making tremulous the salt-rimmed air;
Divided, many-tongued, the sea is waiting,
Bird and fish visit us and come no more.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 47