The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature

by Jane Stafford

  He was going desperately now and as hard and as fast as he could, swinging along and jumping from tree trunk to tree trunk on the steep side of the hills in an energy of excitement. He reckoned himself fit for a good two days or perhaps three. He slept well in a carpet of green and springy moss and was up with the first light of early dawn and a waning moon, but the afternoon of the next day found him tired and dispirited. He was exhausted by the effort of forcing his way through this jungle that seemed to grow more and more thickly as he went on. Supple-jack and bush-lawyer caught and tripped him. To go forward at all was an effort, exhausting at any time, but now that he was foodless, doubly so. To have had some opening as a goal in front of him would have made the struggle possible. The continual sightless darkness of the bush was like a nightmare.

  To add to his depression there came, in the early afternoon, a thin mist of drizzling rain that blanketed the hills and cut off the rare glimpses of country on which he depended. He plunged on desperately, not daring to stop, and relying on the slope of the valley to guide him. He stopped in the late afternoon and made tea again, building his fire in the shelter of a great tree that had crashed down the hill-side, tearing up its roots and bringing undergrowth and smaller trees down with it for a hundred feet around. As he drank the tea he began to feel that he was finished. The warm tea cleared his head, but could not take away his weariness or his hunger. He sat, feeling the ache in his legs, the torn side of his right foot where the boot had been wrenched away, his face and hands scratched and bleeding. He was wondering whether the few hours that were left of the day were worth further effort and saw then, without emotion, the clouds of mist that filled the valley divide as an eddy of wind caught and trailed them upwards. For a brief moment a watery sun shone through, catching the same endless line of the ridge on the far side of the valley and nothing beyond that he could see. But his eye caught then, what for a moment he could not believe, hidden in trees miles below on the far side of the valley, the tin roof of a hut. He stared at it till he could believe what he saw, then, standing on the tree trunk, checked it rapidly by the line of the sun and the curve of the valley. It was a good five miles away—a day’s journey perhaps in that country—just below the ridge on the western side of the valley. It was only plain to him there for a few minutes and then the clouds came down again, covering everything, and, moving up towards him, drove the fine, wet, chilling mist against him. He gathered his tea-billy and pack together and set off.

  Night came as he reached the river and he waited till daylight to cross it. He woke weak and tired, but optimistic, for the sky was clear and if no rain came there was less danger of missing the hut. Thought of food and shelter within reach sustained and encouraged him. But the mood of confidence passed in the first difficulty of crossing the river, which was steep and swift at this point. He crossed it at last and then, lighting a fire, made his last boiling of tea and went on, discarding the few remnants of kit which he had kept and taking only the small axe for help in the bush.

  By the early afternoon he knew, with a sick feeling of failure, that he had lost the line which he had set for himself. He had reckoned to strike diagonally up the western side of the valley and to be guided by the ridge at the top from going on past where the hut should be, but the ridge on which he had relied was deceptive, flattening out and dipping again when he had reached it so that it was impossible to keep to it. Also by this time rain was falling again, not just the mist of the previous day, but falling steadily and heavily. He was calm with the coldness of utter exhaustion as he turned back and fought his way down to the river again. He planned to go farther down this time and to strike up below the hut in the certainty that there must be some track running up to it. Two hours went in getting back to the river, and another two in struggling downstream. He was making only slow progress now, forced to long rests while he gathered himself for each new effort. As night came on, with rain still falling and the sky overcast, he knew that he must turn in now away from the river if he was to make the hut at all. It would be ill-fortune if he had not yet come far enough down river, but he could not trust himself to go on after another cold and foodless night in the bush.

  He began to go forward up the side of the valley again, often crawling and climbing on hands and knees, while the bush grew dark around him. His head was at first very clear and his senses seemed alert and over-sensitivised so that he could hear each sound from the patter of rain in the leaves to the rustle of small birds. But as time went on he began to talk aloud, arguing softly with himself, murmuring over each obstruction as he came to it. He went on, unable and not caring to stop, until the full pitch blackness of night was really around him and the rain still falling steadily. He planned not to stop consciously, but as he went on he could feel the strength of his resistance to unconsciousness lessening. The sense of reality that he had had began to go from him until he was struggling with ferns and creepers in dreams that succeeded each other.

  He stopped suddenly, not realising what was strange to him, and then, collecting himself, knew that he was in a clearing of some kind, that for the moment there was nothing in front of his groping hands. In the pitch blackness that held the bush he could see only shadows and forms. He stood up and stepped forward, feeling with his arms outstretched until he met the trees again, then back until he had placed them on the other side. He was on a track of some kind. He was too sick and exhausted now to understand all that this meant or to argue whether he should go up or down it. He had planned to come out below the hut so the hut must be somewhere up the track. He began, with the last effort of weariness, to walk up the track, stumbling over roots of trees that ran across it and fearful all the time of wandering off it into the bush again. The line of faintly lighter sky overhead sustained him.

  He had not far to go now and came at last to the end of the track where it turned suddenly into a clearing, and he saw the hut. It stood backed against trees, but through them showed clearly a glint of light from its window. Johnson gathered himself together and walked across to the door of the hut. Dropping the small axe which he had carried all this time from his hand he knocked on the door and without waiting threw it open and went inside.

  (1939)

  Allen Curnow, ‘The Unhistoric Story’

  Whaling for continents coveted deep in the south

  The Dutchman envied the unknown, drew bold

  Images of market-place, populous rivermouth,

  The Land of Beach ignorant of the value of gold:

  Morning in Murderers’ Bay,

  Blood drifted away.

  It was something different, something

  Nobody counted on.

  Spider, clever and fragile, Cook showed how

  To spring a trap for islands, turning from planets

  His measuring mission, showed what the musket could do,

  Made his Christmas goose of the wild gannets.

  Still as the collier steered

  No continent appeared;

  It was something different, something

  Nobody counted on.

  The roving tentacles touched, rested, clutched

  Substantial earth, that is, accustomed haven

  For the hungry whaler. Some inland, some hutched

  Rudely in bays, the shaggy foreshore shaven,

  Lusted, preached as they knew;

  But as the children grew

  It was something different, something

  Nobody counted on.

  Green slashed with flags, pipeclay and boots in the bush,

  Christ in canoes and the musketed Maori boast;

  All a rubble-rattle at Time’s glacial push:

  Vogel and Seddon howling empire from an empty coast

  A vast ocean laughter

  Echoed unheard, and after

  All it was different, something

  Nobody counted on.

  The pilgrim dream pricked by a cold dawn died

  Among the chemical farmers, the fresh towns; among
>
  Miners, not husbandmen, who piercing the side

  Let the land’s life, found like all who had so long

  Bloodily or tenderly striven

  To rearrange the given,

  It was something different, something

  Nobody counted on.

  After all re-ordering of old elements

  Time trips up all but the humblest of heart

  Stumbling after the fire, not in the smoke of events;

  For many are called, but many are left at the start,

  And whatever islands may be

  Under or over the sea,

  It is something different, something

  Nobody counted on.

  (1941)

  Allen Curnow, ‘The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch’

  The skeleton of the moa on iron crutches

  Broods over no great waste; a private swamp

  Was where this tree grew feathers once, that hatches

  Its dusty clutch, and guards them from the damp.

  Interesting failure to adapt on islands,

  Taller but not more fallen than I, who come

  Bone to his bone, peculiarly New Zealand’s.

  The eyes of children flicker round this tomb

  Under the skylights, wonder at the huge egg

  Found in a thousand pieces, pieced together

  But with less patience than the bones that dug

  In time deep shelter against ocean weather:

  Not I, some child, born in a marvellous year,

  Will learn the trick of standing upright here.

  (1943)

  Denis Glover, ‘Centennial’

  In the year of centennial splendours

  There were fireworks and decorated cars

  And pungas drooping from the verandas

  —But no one remembered our failures.

  The politicians like bubbles from a marsh

  Rose to the platform, hanging in every place

  Their comfortable platitudes like plush

  —Without one word of our failures.

  (1945)

  Depression

  F.S. [Frederick Sinclaire], from ‘Notes by the Way’, Tomorrow

  We inhabit a land of dreadful silence. New Zealand is the country in which no one says anything, in which no one is expected to say anything. It would be pleasant to believe that ours is the golden silence of a people brooding mystically on some aspect of eternal reality, the preparatory silence of strength collecting and marshalling its resources. But for any such flattering belief there is no evidence. It looks as if we are silent because we have nothing to say. The hope is that our voices have grown rather thin and husky only from long disuse. We have not been encouraged to use them, except as echoes. Semi-articulate voices are indeed heard from time to time among us. The voice of anger rises now and again from the patient ranks of our growing army of the dispossessed and hopeless. Fitful and incoherent, it has its elements of courage and honesty: it is a cry for justice and decency. In our present plight, it is perhaps the only evidence left us to show that we possess at least the remnants of a soul. If this suggestion seems extravagant, where shall we turn for better evidence? To our leaders in politics, in industry, in commerce? To our intellectuals? They too—these leaders—have a sort of voice. It is the voice of ‘optimism’, less coherent, less manly and honest than even the voice of anger. Anger destroys, but the official ‘optimism’—the unwritten creed which is the standard of orthodoxy in New Zealand today—weakens and corrupts, and its catchwords, as they gain currency, are turning us into a community of knaves and cowards, hardening our hearts and softening our brains, and undermining our manliness. If anger will not heal our diseases, still less will a policy of dodging and evading fact, and of playing with pretty phrases. The appointed end of such evasion is that state of moral bewilderment in which the realities of good and evil, of justice and injustice, of truth and falsehood, are lost in a fog.

  *

  As yet the fog has not settled irretrievably upon us, and, please God, it never shall. For, unlike the people who try to conceal their funk by shouting optimistic incantations in the dark, we of ‘Tomorrow’ have faith in New Zealanders. This faith of ours is not based on butter, nor is it writ in wool, nor does it depend upon the hypothetical movements of foreign capital, or the manipulations of international pawnbrokers. New Zealand has assets better than these, and better than the manly anger and the unmanly phrase-mongering which we have cited as evidences of spiritual activity. These better things are simply intelligence and goodwill, and it is amazing how little they have been allowed to operate. ‘Methinks,’ wrote Milton of England in 1664, ‘I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep.’ Why may not a New Zealander in 1934 be permitted to think as nobly and hopefully of his own people in 1934? The purpose of ‘Tomorrow’ is to play its part in the arousing of those splendid energies which for the most part lie dormant in New Zealand today. We have no dogmas to thrust down the throats of our readers. We have nothing to sell them. We appeal to them to help us in breaking the uncanny and ill-boding silence. Let us see if we cannot in New Zealand get up an argument about something else besides sun-bathing and body-line bowling.

  (1934)

  A.R.D. Fairburn, from ‘Dominion’

  for my wife

  UTOPIA

  I

  The house of the governors, guarded by eunuchs,

  and over the arch of the gate

  these words engraved:

  HE WHO IMPUGNS THE USURERS IMPERILS THE STATE.

  Within the gates the retinue of evil,

  the instruments of the governors:

  scabs picked from the body of the enslaved,

  well-paid captains and corporals

  in the army of privilege

  taking the bread of tyranny, wearing

  the livery of extortion; and those who keep

  the records of decay,

  statisticians and archivists,

  turning the leaves with cold hands, computing

  our ruin on scented cuffs.

  For the enslaved, the treadmill;

  the office and adoration

  of the grindstone god;

  the apotheosis of the means,

  the defiling of the end;

  the debasement of the host

  of the living; the celebration

  of the black mass that casts

  the shadow of a red mass.

  Backblock camps for the outcast, the superfluous,

  reading back-date magazines, rolling cheap cigarettes,

  not mated;

  witnesses to the construction of life essential

  to the maintenance of the rate of profit

  as distinct from the gross increment of wealth.

  II

  In vicarage and manse

  love is loose-lipped and flaps its feathers,

  its talk is full of ifs and whethers,

  spume of futility blown

  from raging seas of sin

  that lift and heave in the gales of chance,

  beatified Nature, unhindered circumstance.

  The Church Hesitant seeks for balm

  in sunlight studies, a chatter of talk,

  dead prayers and spurious calm:

  and the dog-days claim for their own

  the theological bone

  the cracked and bitten shin

  that can crawl but cannot walk.

  III

  In the suburbs the spirit of man

  walks on the garden path,

  walks on the well-groomed lawn, dwells

  among the manicured shrubs.

  The variegated hedge encircles life.

  In the countryside, in shire and county,

  the abode of wind and sun, where clouds trample the sky

  and hills are stretched like arms heaped up with bounty,

  in the countryside the land is

  the space
between the barbed-wire fences,

  mortgaged in bitterness, measured in sweated butterfat.

  IV

  In this air the idea dies;

  or spreads like plague; emotion runs

  undamned, its limits vague,

  its flush disastrous as the rolling floods,

  the swollen river’s rush; or dries

  to a thin trickle, lies

  in flat pools where swarms of flies

  clouding the stagnant brim

  breed from thick water, clustered slime.

  V

  Gross greed, mated with fear,

  that feeds on the bread

  of children, buying reprieve

  with philanthropic pence, making profession

  of charity: the pitiful cunning of the depraved.

  Small greed, the starveling weed

  that grows in desperate soil

  in the hearts of the enslaved,

  hugging a bitten crust

  with the closeness of a trust

  clinging to an oil concession.

  VI

  The press: slow dripping of water on mud;

  thought’s daily bagwash, ironing out opinion,

  scarifying the edges of ideas.

  And the hirelings; caught young;

  the bough bent and twisted

  to the shape of evil; tending the oaf

  who by accident of birth has property

  in the public conscience, a ‘moulder of opinion’;

  turning misshapen vessels, and jars for subtle poisons;

  blinde mouthes;

  insulated against discontent

  born dumb and tractable, swift to disremember

  the waif, and the hurt eyes of the passing stranger,

  and the statistics of those who killed themselves

  or were confined in asylums for the insane.

  And the proletarian animal,

  product of perversion and source of profit,

  with a net paid circulation of a million,