Remindingly beside the quays the white
Ships lie smoking; and from their haunted bay
The godwits vanish towards another summer.
Everywhere in light and calm the murmuring
Shadow of departure; distance looks our way;
And none knows where he will lie down at night.
(1948)
Anna Kavan, from ‘New Zealand: Answer to an Inquiry’
Well, to begin with, in my picture of New Zealand, the country itself is immensely more important than its inhabitants. This may be because the social instinct is not very highly developed in me; or it may be because the population of the country is so small in relation to its size; or it may just be because of the sheer, overwhelming splendour of the natural scene in those weird islands, to hell and gone down there, near the south pole. Weird isn’t the word, really. It needs some more portentous, more sinister word to describe the land heaved up at a later geological epoch than the rest of the world’s land, land tardily shoved up by earthquake from the sea’s bottom into the light of day. Land evolving without animals; land given over to strange birds, the flightless kiwi, the moa unadapted to danger and preferring disappearance to the compromise of self-preservation. Land so unaccommodated to animal life that huge and majestic trees, survivors of centuries of storms and earthquakes, succumb to the petty nibbling of a deer.
It’s a place of the greatest natural magnificence, frightening in some ways, but splendid. In some parts stern with the solemn grandeur of sounds and mountains; in some parts densely and darkly matted with immemorial rain forests, two-thousand-year-old growths of rata, totara, rimu, where, till the coming of man, no single animal ever walked; in some parts steaming and bubbling and spurting with every devilish abomination of boiling spring and geyser that ever erupts out of the volcanic earth; in some parts bare like a desert; in some parts grim like a battlefield with the burnt broken stumps of trees pointing black fingers of accusation; in some parts green and domesticated with the willows and the orchards and the sheep grazing. But in all parts the country is full of strangeness, with its isolation, and the reversed seasons, and the black swans. You get (I mean, of course, I get) a feeling of the country being in opposition to man; to the white man, particularly. In spite of the farms and the fruit trees and the fat sheep, there seems to be a grim passive resistance somewhere in the background exerting a subconscious influence all the time. The fertility seems superficial, and every now and then there’s a sudden hint of the real oppositional background, bleak fissures of soil erosion, or boiling mudpools quietly chuckling to themselves, and in no wholesale glee either. It seems, fundamentally, to be a place of formidable alien power and of animal- and of human-life negation. In my picture I see the endless will of the land to throw off the intruders sparsely settled upon it and return to its original and sombre aloofness, no mammal stirring under the grave, enormous, antique trees, no sounds but the sounds of water and wind and the outlandish chiming of bell birds in the vast antipodean hush.
That’s what I see, in my picture, of the country, New Zealand. Always the desolation, always the splendour, always the loneliness, always the opposition, always the ancient trees, the birds which inhabit no other country, the volcanic mountains, the mud bubbling and chuckling. And always, everywhere, strangeness.
When I look at the towns and the inhabitants of the place, my picture turns into something more like an inchoate scenario.
Walking through the residential district of one of the cities between neat, modern, all-electric, 3–7 room bungalows, corrugated iron roofs, handy sections, convenient tram and bus, there’s a sort of provincial Sunday afternoon feel in the air. The air still, and full of the Sunday smell of roast mutton. The streets empty. The anti-alcohol slogans of the wowsers outside the churches. The bungalows full of the scene of roast meat and the hushed drone of music from the radios. Yesterday’s papers flap in the gutters like hooked flounders ….
The city is indeterminate. It isn’t England and it isn’t anywhere else. It’s null, it’s dull, it’s tepid, it’s mediocre; the downunder of the spirit. The houses are drowsing, the leaves are falling, the flies are circling, trucks full of sheep carcasses clatter drearily over the railway bridge, the firescreen worked by the wife of an early settler moulders in the museum.
What you may call the leit-motif of all this is a quiet parochial slowness. People wander up and down the main streets staring into the windows of shops that are full of agricultural implements and meat pies. Everything’s shut, there’s nothing to do except go to the pub or the cinema, or, if it happens to be the right day, to the races. No music, no theatres, no pictures except an occasional exhibition of local talent, no magazines of what’s termed cultural interest [….]
A new country, a country so full of splendour and strangeness as this one, ought, one would think, to produce some new and splendid characteristics in its inhabitants. But does it? Well, of course, here and there splendid individuals do emerge …. But my impression of the mass of the people, the townspeople at any rate, and particularly those in the Auckland district, is that there’s something lacking in them. Perhaps it’s the humid climate that does it; but anyway they seem to me to lack vitality, warmth, enthusiasm, whatever you like to call it. The women look fine sturdy specimens, like professional tennis players, but walking round their houses and down to the shops is about as much as their energy turns to. The men look hearty and tough, but when you get to know them they seem depleted somehow, frustrated perhaps, and dissatisfied.
It’s a queer thing, really. For most of the year, anyhow, in this region, the sun shines and the weather is good. The country’s good to look at with plenty of hills in the background and small mountains, some of them even extinct volcanoes. The sea’s still better to look at, full of fishes and small islands. The smallest fishes jump up in large shoals to escape from the large fishes, the gannets fold up like umbrellas and dive after fish of all sizes, the cormorants hunt under water for fish and for shellfish, the kingfishers fish from the rocks, the men fish from boats, the gulls hang about in the air, on the water, and on land for any portions of fish which the others may choose to discard. It strikes me that the dissatisfaction around here should be the prerogative of the fish.
Why the dissatisfaction, then, amongst the human inhabitants? Why the lack of energy, lack of cordiality, why the defensive attitude?
It’s only their manner, someone tells me. Sturdy colonial independence. The difference between the old ways and the new.
Well, then, all I can say is that I don’t like their new manner. I don’t like the postman who doesn’t answer when you say good morning, it makes no difference if you say it once, twice, a hundred, or ten thousand times, he’s shut up like a clam, you’ll never get a response out of him, his independence goes on getting sturdier at every encounter.
I don’t like the defensive attitude towards newcomers, the old insular ‘Here comes a stranger, let’s throw a brick at him’ attitude.
What happens when a stranger enters what’s called intellectual circles? Do the sturdy Colonial intellectuals care if Einstein or the Cham of Tartary is in their midst? Brother, they do not care, they do not wish to hear from you, and unless you can speak louder than they can you are as good as dumb. I suppose they’re far too independent to display any interest in anyone from outside.
I don’t like the set-up between the sexes, either, the men getting together around the bottles and the women getting on with the chores. The men worrying about the Labour Government and the women worrying about something in the oven. The women not allowed to drink in a public place after five o’clock. Some wowser writing in the paper that a decent women’s place in the evening is in her home.
Individual New Zealanders, when you get to know them, are as fine as individuals anywhere; but why all the defensive reserve? Why is getting acquainted such heavy going? What’s behind all the display of sturdy Colonial independence?
Well, if you ask me, i
t’s dependency, and to these people independence means everything because, precisely, they haven’t got it, they’re still tied up to the home which they call England, they’ve never cut the umbilical cord, and when they realise their position they are full of inward trembling, and they depend on defending themselves with the defensive manner.
They depend on defending themselves with the good old middle-class atmosphere their predecessors brought with them from Bodmin and Nottingham, with china dogs on the mantle-piece, and the shades three quarters down over the windows to keep the carpets from fading and the neighbours from peeping in.
Of course you can see their point, they’ve got to defend themselves somehow against all that loneliness of water and the south pole and the bush, all the hoary, enormous, spectral trees standing massed against them, and getting them down, because, though they keep on burning and felling the trees, there’s still a huge mass of nature, indestructible, desolate, indifferent, dangerous nature, the oceans and the ice cap and the antique forests and the earthquakes, massing upon them, bearing down on them, separating them from Bodmin and Nottingham; and who are they, anyhow?
They are caused to tremble, being only a few transplanted ordinary people, not specially tough or talented, walking in gumboots or sandshoes among the appalling impersonal perils and strangeness of the universe, living in temporary shacks, uneasily, as reluctant campers too far from home.
They are on the defensive because if they didn’t put something between them and the awful, patient, immemorial bush and the imminent Pole and the ambiguous smile of the darker race, these things would fall in on them and crush them. They would be crushed thin like dead leaves and the Polar south wind would blow them away to nowhere.
Hence the depleted vitality, the weariness of the secret eternal struggle, the heart unreconciled, but at home in another place, the mind preoccupied and closed against strangers, being closed against the menacing strangeness of an alien hemisphere.
At least, that’s how it looks to me in my picture. And how should I presume to criticise the people who venture to trust themselves to those weird, unearthly, resplendent islands, lost, lonely islands, implacably blockaded by empty Antarctic seas? In my picture these people look mad and heroic because they have courage to go on living at all in the face of that alien terror and loveliness, nothing between them and the South Pole.
(1943)
Allen Curnow, ‘At Joachim Kahn’s’
a quartet of Beethoven
Your ‘innermost Beethoven’ in the uttermost isles,
Half angel and half ’plane attains his peak
In weather like these southerlies that strike
But let your glass wall stand; his ceiling smiles;
He outclimbs all. Your room contains controls
To track in dazed skies an invisible wake
And pull his signals down just where you like,
It happens, among these unconnected hills.
The stone-deaf islands may resolve their pain
Easily, however distance howls them down,
By adaptation towards the albatross:
To rise on a stilled wing; or, on these tuned
Strings ride gales to patience; or, to cross
Motionless horizons as if not marooned.
(1943)
A Home in Thought
R.A.K. Mason, ‘Song of Allegiance’
Shakespeare Milton Keats are dead
Donne lies in a lowly bed
Shelley at last calm doth lie
knowing ‘whence we are and why’
Byron Wordsworth both are gone
Coleridge Beddoes Tennyson
Housman neither knows nor cares
how ‘this heavy world’ now fares
Little clinging grains enfold
all the mighty minds of old ….
They are gone and I am here
stoutly bringing up the rear
Where they went with limber ease
toil I on with bloody knees
Though my voice is cracked and harsh
stoutly in the rear I march
Though my song have none to hear
boldly bring I up the rear.
(1925)
Ursula Bethell, ‘Primavera’
I must pass you by, primroses, I must pass you by
When I boast of the fair flowers translated to please our eye,—
The sight of you here under the apple-tree has too sweet a sting,
So like, so unlike the sight of you in an English orchard in spring.
You should not be here, primroses, yet must I have you here
To look up at us with your patient smile in the strange spring of the year—
The strange September spring, whereas in April we should be
In the greenwoods or ever their green veil has lost transparency.
Not current coin, primroses, but a foreign token,
The wonted word out of the past that we never hear spoken,—
Coomb, coppice, spinney, aye, and primrose-wood,
Not understood, dale and meadow, not understood.
In patria, primroses, in patria— do you hear?
La patrie—la patrie c’est le pays du désir—
And everywhere by brake and hedge primroses may be seen
In a grey veil of netted twigs or ever the thicket is green.
If you were nothing more, primroses, than yellow and sweet,
I would ask Time to turn back again that youth and I might meet,
That I might go looking for you in a winding English lane,
And your tender fragrance so fresh in the mist, in the rain—
But there are reasons, primroses, there are secret reasons,
Why we shall not resent the sure process of the seasons,
Our transitory springtime and the quick passing of the years,
But like you with the dew on you smile up through our tears!
Beyond the sprinkled nebulae of the faint starry way,
Like your own starry clusters in the dusk of a clear day,
Far beyond dim avenues of planetary space,
The clue to your sweet look is hid in a celestial place.
And who but you should trim the brink of supernal Beauty’s spring?
Whose souls but yours adorn the groves where immortal choirs sing?
The sight of you here under the apple-tree has so sweet a sting,
—And in patria, primroses, in patria?
(1929)
Frank Sargeson, ‘Chaucerian’
When I was a young man I used to go to the Unitarian Church. In those days it was the thing for quite a number of young men to go to the Unitarian Church. It was their way of letting people know they had grown up and had independent minds. These days I think it is the thing for young men who want to let people know that they have grown up and have independent minds to join the Communist Party.
Well, I went to the Unitarian Church. As far as I could make out about a dozen other people went there too. Sometimes there were less. There was something wrong somewhere. I couldn’t make out just what it was.
Then one lunch hour I went for a walk in Freeman’s Bay. In case you don’t know I’d better say that Freeman’s Bay is that part of Auckland over beyond Hobson Street. It’s a very interesting place. Any New Zealand poet who hasn’t absolutely dedicated herself to kauri trees and bell-birds couldn’t do better than go and live there.
As I was saying, I went for a walk one lunch hour in Freeman’s Bay and I saw a big navvy with bowyangs tied round his trouser-legs. He was striding along hand in hand with his little girl, and the little girl had to run to keep up with him; and the next moment they both disappeared into the bar of a pub. I was shocked. You wouldn’t blame me for that if you knew how strict my parents were. I didn’t know a thing for all that I was letting people know that I had grown up and had an independent mind by going to the Unitarian Church. From where I stood I could see inside that bar and I saw the barman pump up some
beer and put it in front of the navvy. The little girl had a rag doll under her arm, and after she had stood on her toes and tried to look over the bar she came out to the door and tried to make the rag doll sit on the door-knob.
Now I admit that in those days I didn’t know a thing. My parents had been too strict. But I had read a few books, and I was fond of reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Well, as I stood there watching the little girl trying to make her rag doll sit on the door-knob all my confusion about myself and about the Unitarian Church suddenly left me. I got the idea that what I was looking at was about as near as I’d ever get to the Canterbury Tales outside the covers of a book. I’m not quite clear about how I got inside that bar but I did get in. And I drank two half-handles with the navvy. Sure enough he told me things that might have come out of the Canterbury Tales. And he called me mate. The little girl showed me her doll. It was called Humpty Dumpty and could have done with a dry clean.
Well, it all happened a long time ago; and it’s a long story. The navvy and his wife were looking for a boarder.
As I say it all happened a long time ago. The little girl is grown up now, and she’s got a mind that’s a good deal more independent than mine is. A moment ago she looked over my shoulder and said, ‘You big silly, what do you want to write about that for?’
I’m glad I didn’t marry that Mabel Tittering who was so good at playing Winking at the only Unitarian Church social I ever went to.
(1935)
M.H. Holcroft, from The Deepening Stream
The soul of a nation is that indestructible work of the collective spirit which can knit a people into a unified group and strengthen it against the struggles and calamities from which no age can hope to escape. It is by no means a state of mind, indigenous or attainable, that could be said to justify any claim to a static condition of peace and prosperity, even if this were possible in the time-space sequences of man’s earthly environment. The sense of national completeness is a condition of survival. Without it a nation can withstand no serious assault. And I believe that it can be gained only in the way that an individual shapes his soul from the strain and shock of life, making every new crisis or personal tragedy an area of experience that must contribute some portion of faith, knowledge or wisdom. This, of course, is the concept of Keats, outlined in a famous letter, a theory of the world as the ‘vale of soul-making’, that was later given philosophical attention by Pringle-Pattison in his book, ‘The Idea of God’. If we are to apply it to a nation instead of an individual we must be careful to keep in mind those real distinctions which make it unwise to speak of a people as merely a collection of individuals. The collective mind is compounded of many separate minds; but it also develops an extraneous identity that can be recognised—and then dimly—only at a distance in time or space. It would be idle for me to seek to describe the New Zealand mind as it now exists. If I attempt to build up a composite view, based on evidence painstakingly collected, I shall be in danger of setting up a list of unrelated particulars, and will remain as far as ever from discovering the essential principles which alone could provide them with unity and significance. It is not the New Zealand mind I am seeking, however. Nor am I attempting to discover that elusive abstraction, a New Zealand soul. What I am trying to decide is whether or not New Zealand is engaged in the task of shaping a soul, not merely as the accidental result of experiment, or as the work of chance and physical change, but in the scattered manifestations (many of which may be superficially contradictory) of some deeper impulse within the nation’s life. Once it is possible to frame an opinion on this fundamental question it should be easier to understand the implications of so much that is puzzling and disappointing in the contemporary life of a young country.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 48