by Michael King
In their view, much about pre-European and nineteenth-century Maori had been noble and dignified. There had been old-world courtesies, codes of honour, psychic and spiritual perceptions, handsomeness and virility in ‘pure-bred’ chieftains and warriors, and winsomeness and dusky beauty in maidens of similar pedigree. According to this view, throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Maori had been in physical, cultural and moral decline as a consequence of abandoning old ways and of prolonged contact with alcohol and disease. Cowan tended to view his elderly informants as survivors from a pristine age, as men and women who exemplified the most worthy features of their culture, which were destined for extinction. He described one of them, Hauauru of Araikotore, in this manner:
[He] is a picturesque figure who, in my memories of the past, personifies much of the departed savage glory of the Maori race. He typified the splendid dying manhood of his people. Born in the New Zealander’s Stone Age, he survived [as] flotsam of the primitive world stranded on the shores of modern progress … A Homeric personality was that of this old cannibal warrior, a savage but a gentleman, full of courteous friendly feeling for the whites whom he had once fought and bitterly hated, and full of the hospitality of the true Maori rangatira …
Such a view was limited on several counts. First, it sentimentalised Maori life to the point of unreality. At whatever moment writers chose to ‘freeze’ history there would always have been Maori whom they would regard as ‘good’ and ‘bad’, courteous and discourteous, traditionalists and innovators, activists and idlers. Second, it suggested that everything worthwhile about Maori life lay in the past and would soon be lost irretrievably. And, third, it tended to blind observers to the fascinating and innovative adaptations that Maori were making at the very time Cowan was writing and Goldie painting.
Such views were, however, well-intentioned. They did at least place positive value on Maori perceptions and customs. Yet Cowan’s verbal and Goldie’s pictorial images served with their gauze of romanticism to place Maori and Maori considerations into a kind of never-never land, safely beyond the political and social preoccupations of contemporary New Zealand life. In such a vision, Maori need not be claimants on the national purse and conscience, their social and economic difficulties need not be the responsibilities of the country as a whole. They recede to being merely a colourful element from New Zealand’s past, surviving in the mountainous and rural hinterland.
The imaginative equivalent of Cowan’s descriptive writing was the fiction of authors such as William Satchell (The Greenstone Door), F. O. V. Acheson (Plume of the Arawas) and A. W. Reed in his novelisation of the Rudall Hayward film Rewi’s Last Stand. These men depicted romantic Maori figures – noble heroes, beautiful and tragic heroines, unrequited love – through a haze of poetic imagery. The figures they created bore little relation to life and conditions in twentieth-century Maori communities, and for the most part they made no distinction between Maori of different regions and tribes – distinctions that would have been crucial in Maori eyes.
From the 1930s more able writers such as Frank Sargeson, A. P. Gaskell, John Mulgan (in his novel Man Alone) and especially Roderick Finlayson would devise more credible Maori characters and situations that were closer to the realities of Maori life. There was still, however, in the words of Patricia Grace, ‘the temptation … to find in the Maori virtues that are missing in the Pakeha and to use him as a criticism of Pakeha society’. Stereotyping continued (‘happy-go-lucky, lazy people, mostly not too bright … or the big-brown-eyes and little-bare-feet touch’), and these writers experienced severe difficulties in conveying Maori English. Fiction involving Maori did not lose these elements of awkwardness or reflect the varied patterns of Maori experience until imaginative writers who were also Maori, most notably Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace and Keri Hulme, emerged in the 1970s.
In non-fiction, apart from the ethnologists such as Elsdon Best and Peter Buck (both of whom, like Cowan, tended to equate Maori adaptation to Western influences with pollution of a formerly ‘pure’ cultural stream), the earliest perceptive writers on Maori matters were the journalist Eric Ramsden, who made earnest and frequently successful attempts from the 1920s to interpret Maori preoccupations to non-Maori audiences and Pakeha authorities; and I. L. G. Sutherland, New Zealand’s first recognised social scientist. Sutherland and his successors, Ernest and Pearl Beaglehole and James Ritchie, highlighted for the first time reasons for lack of Maori advancement in socio-economic as well as cultural terms, while recognising the intrinsic worth of Maori concepts and values.
There was no comparable body of literature to mirror Maori views of Pakeha over the same period. But what has been published by way of reminiscence by such writers as Eruera and Amiria Stirling and Reweti Kohere suggests that there was a Maori stereotype of the Pakeha as someone who was self-centred, materialist, acquisitive, unfeeling about their extended family and callous in their treatment of the dead. By highlighting and caricaturing European qualities that were distasteful in Maori eyes, Maori commentators such as Apirana Ngata and Te Puea Herangi also communicated indirectly the qualities they most valued according to their own mores. These examples suggest that a wide and continuing gap existed between the lifeways of Maori and Pakeha.
There were further gaps, too, within the otherwise coherent domains of Maori and Pakeha cultures. The positive effect of conformity – a society in which there was widespread agreement about what was right and what was wrong, about what constituted appropriate and inappropriate behaviour – gave pre-war New Zealand considerable social cohesion. The negative effect was that people who did not conform in their views or behaviour were either treated harshly or lived in fear of disclosure and retribution.
Women, for example, both Maori and Pakeha, still had nothing like the freedom available to men in the choice of an occupation, or even in deciding whether to be married or unmarried. Right into the 1930s New Zealand society, in Miles Fairburn’s words, continued to believe that a woman’s place was in the home.
Mothers were taught to be professional child carers, and girls learnt home craft in schools. Women, especially working class women, were given limited scope for fulfilment outside family life. Women’s occupations had diversified … since the turn of the century. Domestic service, the traditional mainstay, diminished in relative importance and office jobs, nursing, teaching, and working in shops had increased. But the proportion of female school leavers designating the ‘home’ as their destination remained very high … Very few women still worked after marriage. The fraction of all women actively engaged in the workforce remained at around 17 per cent to 18 per cent from the turn of the century until the 1930s …
Women who chose to live outside these expectations, such as the sex hygiene campaigner Ettie Rout, whose book Safe Marriage was banned in New Zealand in 1923, and the writer and sexual liberationist Jean Devanny, faced condemnation and ostracism (Rout eventually committed suicide in Rarotonga in 1936, and Devanny emigrated to Australia). Even so innocuous an activity as writing poetry in preference to doing housework provoked horror, as Janet Frame’s mother, Lottie, discovered in Oamaru in the 1930s. In such New Zealand towns, even among families who were poor, pretension and social ambition were rife and women’s domestic reputations could be made or lost according to how well they scrubbed their front doorsteps.
Thoughout these years, the justice system was especially punitive towards male homosexual behaviour (though not, surprisingly, towards the female kind, which was not recognised by law and probably not conceivable in the public imagination). The Crimes Act of 1908 outlawed sodomy and any form of ‘indecent’ behaviour between men. Penalties were severe: usually gaol terms with hard labour, most often in New Plymouth prison which was, conveniently, built alongside a quarry.
In the face of such sanctions, homosexual men who were aware of their sexuality had to choose among several options. They could embark on a life without any form of sexual expression (and that was most
often the advice given to them by ministers of religion, who conveyed the further bad news that God also opposed same-sex transactions). They could disguise their nature by marrying, having sexual relations that they found difficult and distasteful, and fathering children. They could emigrate to a country which had a degree of toleration of homosexual activity (and for most New Zealanders, like the writers James Courage and Lionel Grindley, this meant living in London). Or they could accept the risks inherent in active homosexual behaviour and the constant state of anxiety that accompanied such risks. Some New Zealand men, at different times of their lives, adopted more than one of these strategies.
That the risks involved in active homosexuality were high was illustrated by the experience of Charles Ewing Mackay, a Wanganui lawyer who became mayor of the borough in 1913 (he had previously stood for Parliament in 1908 and 1911). Mackay’s achievements were considerable. He was responsible for building the much-admired Sarjeant Gallery, he enlarged the borough and its resources, and set in motion plans to build a museum and library to complement the gallery. He was unusual in New Zealand local body affairs for being as interested in cultural activities as in commercial and administrative matters.
Mackay was unpopular in some quarters, however, particularly among the ranks of the town’s Returned Services’ Association, which he prevented from holding a separate welcome for the Prince of Wales when he visited Wanganui in May 1920. Some RSA members persuaded a visitor to the town, the fellow returned serviceman and future poet Walter D’Arcy Cresswell, to act as agent provocateur and invite overtures of intimacy from Mackay. When these duly occurred, Cresswell told Mackay that he had to resign the mayorality or else he, Cresswell, would report the indiscretion to the police. In a panic Mackay drew a pistol and shot Cresswell, wounding but not killing him.
In the subsequent trial for attempted murder, Cresswell, who was also homosexual but failed to disclose the fact, was wholly exonerated (‘no blame could be attached to [him] and the action he took would be commended by all right-thinking men’, thundered the Chief Justice, Sir Robert Stout). Mackay pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment with hard labour. His name was sanded off the Sarjeant Gallery foundation stone and his portrait removed from the borough council chambers. His wife successfully petitioned for divorce and he was never again allowed to see his daughters. After his early release from prison in 1926, Charles Mackay went to Europe and became a journalist. In May 1929 he was covering a clash between communists and police in Berlin when he was accidentally shot.
Another public figure who had married but retained homosexual associations was the public servant Alister McIntosh, foundation Secretary of External Affairs and from 1945 permanent head of the Prime Minister’s Department. McIntosh was widely admired for his sagacity and his support of library and cultural projects, such as the 1940 centennial publications, and for the sound advice he gave to four Prime Ministers, Peter Fraser, Sidney Holland, Walter Nash and Keith Holyoake. In 1965, in what was to be the pinnacle of his career, he was nominated for the position of first Secretary-General of the Commonwealth and widely regarded as having the inside running for election at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London that year. At the eleventh hour his nomination was withdrawn after the New Zealand Prime Minister, Holyoake, had been visited by British security officials. They apparently advised that McIntosh’s sexuality made him vulnerable to blackmail and therefore a security risk in the position. The British Government would not now support his candidacy. Advised of this, McIntosh himself withdrew, citing health reasons (he had an inner ear disorder which affected his balance and his hearing). Instead, the New Zealand Government sent him to Rome as the country’s first ambassador to Italy. He was knighted in 1973 on the advice of the Kirk Labour Government.
Other homosexuals in government departments whose personnel required security clearance were forced to remain sexually inactive and to conceal any clues as to their inclination. In one case an External Affairs officer serving abroad was caught by police soliciting sexual companions in a public lavatory. He was repatriated and transferred to a department in which security clearance was not required.[1]
The writer Hector Bolitho, like the novelist James Courage, moved to England in the 1920s in part because of his sexuality, and his popular books on members of the Royal Family earned him the designation ‘biographer royal’. James Courage, by contrast, wrote short stories and novels in London, his first being published in 1933. Some of them dealt with themes of sexual orientation and same-sex relationships and one, A Way of Love, was banned in New Zealand for this reason.
Other homosexual writers chose to live in New Zealand and negotiate the difficulties. Frank Sargeson changed his name from Norris Davey because of a conviction for indecent assault in Wellington in 1929. He lived much of the rest of his life in Takapuna in fear that the conviction would become public knowledge, or that his homosexual activities might again bring him before the court as a result of police surveillance. Travelling to Wellington to receive the prestigious Katherine Mansfield award for short stories in 1965, he forced himself to remain awake all night in the train because his sleeping-car companion turned out to be a detective and Sargeson feared entrapment.
His friend Bill Pearson, a writer and academic, was another who navigated these shoals but managed to survive without the stress of an arrest and conviction. According to another friend, ‘the fear of being outed, the public shame, the potential loss of unsympathetic colleagues, the loss of his job and a jail sentence – all this haunted Pearson and drove him underground’. He attempted to write a novel about a homosexual schoolteacher on the West Coast, based on his own experience in Blackball in 1942, then turned it into a story with a heterosexual protagonist because he feared that his original plot would disclose his own sexuality. The book that resulted, Coal Flat, eventually published in 1963, has thus been described as ‘a gay novel in straight drag’. It was not until 1986 that Fran Wilde’s Homosexual Law Reform Act decriminalised homosexual acts and lifted the burden of secrecy and anxiety which had blighted the lives of so many gifted men – and, no doubt, of many who were less gifted than ordinary.
Other New Zealanders declined to be covered and protected by the blanket of conformity. The pre-1930s writers, such as Alan Mulgan in his 1927 book Home: a New Zealander’s Adventure, had on the whole accepted that New Zealand’s place in the world was defined and determined by its historical and colonial relationship with Britain. In the 1930s, however, dissenting voices subversive of that consensus began to be heard more often.
One was that of the scholar Ian Milner, whose father, Frank Milner, Rector of Waitaki Boys’ High School, was one of the most John Bull-ish characters in the country. ‘[We] stand on the threshold of a new order,’ wrote the younger Milner in the Canterbury College Review in 1932, ‘looking about [us] for suitable weapons in case the door has to be broken down. You will find this new spirit informing the work of our best younger poets …’ And so it was. The best of them were R. A. K. Mason, Allen Curnow, Denis Glover, Charles Brasch, A. R. D. Fairburn and Robin Hyde. They were joined in this stance by the fiction writers Frank Sargeson, Roderick Finlayson and (again) Robin Hyde, and the essayist Monte Holcroft. Part of their fundamental viewpoint was signalled in Glover’s 1936 poem ‘Home Thoughts’:
I do not dream of Sussex downs
or quaint old England’s quaint old towns –
I think of what may yet be seen
in Johnsonville and Geraldine
These writers, who came to be known as ‘cultural nationalists’ or, to distinguish them from the aspirations of Maori, ‘settler nationalists’, stood in silhouette against the colonialist themes and preoccupations of the generation that preceded them, and against the Georgian ornateness of the writing of their predecessors (for example, Eileen Duggan, Alan Mulgan and Hubert Church). In Erik Olssen’s judgment, they ‘rejected the view that they should celebrate natural beauty … and instead chose to explore
the human predicament … [Their] dominant tone was caustic.’ The new breed of writers were seeking in their own genres what Allen Curnow called ‘an uncompromising fidelity to experience’. They were pursuing a ‘New Zealand-centred truth’ based on the notion that ‘we [are] a nation with a history and a will of our own’.[2]
In the words of one cultural historian, this movement should be seen as part of the ‘task of staging settler cultural legitimacy … [Their] narrative of settlement emerges as the battle of humans against the elements, unmediated by any significant prior occupation. The history of struggle between Maori and Pakeha [was] displaced by the myth of Pakeha struggle with the land …’ It is perhaps not surprising that the ‘headquarters’ of cultural nationalism should have been Christchurch, where the absence of Maori and the ‘vast open spaces’ combined to offer an opportunity for a different kind of European acclimatisation than might have occurred in the North Island.
More immediately influential, however, Christchurch was the home of the left-wing journal Tomorrow (1934–40), edited by Kennaway Henderson, and of the Caxton Press, founded and funded by poet and printer Denis Glover. Tomorrow and Caxton published all the writers who would come to be seen as making up the cultural nationalists’ school. Caxton in particular was publishing the best of New Zealand poetry, fiction and essays from the mid-1930s until well into the 1950s. Its influence was detected and admired beyond New Zealand. The London editor John Lehmann referred to it as ‘a focus of creative activity in literature of more than local significance’. It brought together ‘a group of young writers … who were eager to assimilate the pioneer developments in style and technique that were being made in England and America … to explore the world of the dispossessed and under-privileged for their material and to give their country a new conscience and spiritual perspective …’