A New Zealand Qyarter!J

&A && A New Zealand Qyarter!J

VOLUME

NINE

1955

Reprinted with the permission of The Caxton Press

JOHNSON REPRINT CORPORATION JOHNSON REPRINT COMPANY LTD. 111 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10003 Berkeley Square House, London, W. 1 LANDFALL is published with the aid of a grant from the New Zealand Literary Fund.

Corrigendum: Landfall 34, p. 120, line 11, should read: -It's not me, Harry said. I was wondering about Miss Mackin-

fc/j /+94- First reprinting, 1968, Johnson Reprint Corporation Printed in the United States of America LANDFALL A New Zealand Quarterly edited by Charles Brasch and published by The Caxton Press

CONTENTS

Notes 271 In my Country, Colin Newbury 273 The Teacher, Peter Cape 273 Two Fragments, Arthur Barker 277 The Land of Punt, Louis fohnson 279 Farm for Sale, Phillip Wilson 280 Peraki, Paul Henderson 287 Sing again Tomorrow, Maurice Shadbolt 288 To God the Son, ]ames K. Baxter 292 Et in Arcadia Ego, Bruce Mason 294 The Happy Colony, E. H. McCormick 300 Commentaries : AUSTRALIAN LETTER, V ance Palm er 334 THE CHRISTCHURCH CONVENTION ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, W. H. Oliver 338 DOCUMENTARY FILM IN NEW ZEALAND, P. f. Downey 343 INTIMATE OPERA, Frederick Page 349 Reviews: THE JOURNAL OF KATHERINE MANSFIELD, Antony Alpers 351 THE VOYAGE CiF THE ASTROLABE, Angus Ross 352 SCIENCE AND CIVILISATION IN CHINA, ETC., ]ames Bertram 355 Correspondence, R. M. Ross 36o Photographs by Les Cleveland

VOLUME NINE NUMBER FOUR DECEMBER 1955 Notes

THE NEW Advisory Committee of the Literary Fund, appointed in September, consists of six members, instead of the eleven or twelve members of earlier Committees. The smaller body sounds more workable. One anomaly remains : that an advisory committee of persons chosen as professional literary men (and women) should include one member (at present it is the Speaker of the House) chosen for no reason except to represent the Government. What place a politician has on a literary committee it would need a politician to explain. Does the Government fancy that through him it will be able to keep a group of wild men in check, and possibly restrain expenditure? But four of these six wild men are appointed by the Government anyway, the Fund has only £2ooo a year to spend, and the committee is only an advisory one; the Trustees of the Fund, who must approve its recommendations, are the Prime Minister, the Minister of Finance, and the Minister of Internal Affairs. With no disrespect to Sir Matthew Oram, it may be suggested that he is being asked to waste his time. In September too the Minister of Education spoke of his hope that a body similar to the Arts Council in Britain could be set up in New Zealand 'at a suitable time'. What are we to understand from this statement? Is Mr Algie putting forward this scheme as one that he favours himself, or have approaches been made to him on the subject by persons interested and is he trying to gauge the public reaction? His speech as reported by the Press Association gave no clue. The scheme is at any rate not new; it has been proposed in a general way before; and Mr Russell Clark and Mr E. J. Doudney of the Canterbury School of Art sketched out a tentative plan for such a council last year. In Mr Algie's view its purpose would be 'to co-ordinate the activities of bodies interested in the pursuit of the arts'; he saw it as a means of centralizing and 'ration- alizing' public expenditure on the arts. These are close to the aims of the Arts Council in Britain, which acts as a channel for stimulating artistic life throughout the country, by subsidizing, guaranteeing and promoting a host of local enterprises, large and small, old and new, in all the arts; enterprises ranging in scope from Covent Garden opera, Sadlers' Wells ballet, the Old Vie, and the great orchestras, to modest festi- 27I vals of spoken poetry and small local theatre companies and art societies. The varied work of the Council is described, and its ·budget set out, in its Annual Report for 1953/4, published under the title Public Responsibility for the Arts. This includes some interesting comparative figures showing expenditure on the arts today in France, Italy, Germany, and Denmark, countries with a strong tradition of state or municipal support for the arts. A similar council in New Zealand could stimulate local and private enterprise in the arts in a similar manner, and so help to find employment for the talents, now too often wasted, of our painters, sculptors, designers, weavers, potters, actors and producers, singers, musicians, dancers, and other artists. It could work through and serve to strengthen bodies like the Federation of NeW Zealand Art Societies, the P.E.N., the British Drama League, whose scholarships and prizes do so much to arouse general interest as well as helping the recipients. Nor should it neglect other bodies, artistic, religious, educational, commercial, whose patronage can play a valuable part in our artistic life, and encourage diversity, individuality, experiment. With variety of patronage there would be less danger of that tendency to conformity and uniformity and consequent barrenness, which often follows centralization. The arts need encouragement, but encouragement to grow freely. They cannot be run like a government department; if they are tidied up and made official, they will lose their vitality and become a mere drug. What would be the place of the Literary Fund if an arts council were to be set up? It could remain an independent body as at present, or it could function as one of several panels which together would make up the council-that is, if the British plan is followed. In Britain, where no equivalent to the Literary Fund exists, the Arts Council includes a Poetry Panel, to support that one most needy branch of letters. The kind of activity an arts council in New Zealand could sponsor has been exemplified on a local scale at Auckland Art Gallery under Mr Westbrook's directorship. He made the Gallery the centre of cultural life in Auckland; by evoking an interest in the arts far wider and keener than anyone had suspected in New Zealand, he made it a centre such as the country has not seen before. It is a great loss to us that he is leaving. His experience would have been invaluable on an arts council. It is some indication of how he is regarded overseas that at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne he will occupy the most important art gallery position in the Commonwealth, outside the United King- dom. The pity of it is that he has been alone here; what the 272 country needs is half-a-dozen Eric Westbrooks, one at each of the four main galleries and two to sit on an arts council. Then the arts would really get a chance to show their vigour and their power to interest and delight.

COLIN NEWBUR Y In my Country

IN MY country at this time of the year, The wind of summer fans The sombre bush into flower, And tames wild water from the mountains. Brief is the blossom, the river stone dry and bare.

He stands close to the earth, My obdurate countryman, Drawing from the wind's breath, The arid sweetness of flower and mountain; Knows no green herb for the heart's erosion.

PETER CAPE The Teacher

PLEASE SIR, you got to tell Heni it wasn't his fault. He never meant to make the teacher do it, true, Sir. It was the teacher's fault because he didn't leave Heni alone. He never liked Heni, right from the time he came here, because Heni and his mother and father went to the pakeha church, and he'd never been teacher where Maoris went to the pakeha church 273 before. He didn't ever go to the church himself, and he didn't like Heni going, specially because Heni wanted to be a minister and talk out of the bible on Sunday. But he treated Heni worse when Tui came. She was Heni's sister and she been two years at the teacher's college. She didn't go to the church ever. The teacher must've been after her right from the start, because she was always telling Heni's mother and father how good the teacher was. But we all knew the teacher wasn't good. He skited too much about what a good fellow he was and how we were lucky to have a good teacher like him looking after the school. I think he only talked like that because he was scared, because he was only a skinny little fellow with glasses. I think he talked big to try and kid himself he was someone. Like the time he used the strap on Heni for breaking a window and Heni didn't do it, and Heni's father said he'd write to the Education Board about it. The teacher said Heni's father better not, because he was a pretty important teacher and the Education Board wouldn't take any notice of a Maori's word against his. But Heni's father wrote the letter and next thing the teacher went round to say he was working very hard for the Maoris and got very tired and perhaps he made a mistake after all. But we all knew he was scared really. Tui didn't think he was scared, though. She said he had certificates in his house to say that he was a mason and an inspector of something and that he'd been an officer in the war, and he must be a pretty good sort of fellow to be an officer in the war. Then Heni's father got mad and said he hadn't been a real officer, only a half-pie one that stayed home and fought with papers or something. Heni's father was a captain in the Maori Battalion. And he said Tui wasn't to go to the teacher's house any more. Then Tui got mad too and she'd do what she liked. She hadn't been inside the house anyway because the teacher didn't let Maoris inside, but she's seen the certificates on the wall when she was talking to the missus. I dunno if Tui told the teacher what her father said, but the teacher started to get his knife into Heni properly then. He used to keep him in sometimes, specially when he knew there was plenty of eels down the creek and we wanted to go spearing. And he was always giving him a growling for something, or making him do extra arithmetic, or sending him to pick up paper in the playground, just for spite, just because he went to the pakeha church, just because his father said he wasn't a proper officer. 274 One day, when he was keeping Heni in and I was waiting outside for him to go fishing, I heard the teacher talking to the missus in the teacher's room. He said, you got to break the bastards' spirit so they'll respect you. I didn't tell Heni, because I knew he'd tell his father and there'd be a row, and the teacher would get his knife into Heni some more. It was after that that Tui went with the teacher. The missus got sick and had to go away, and the teacher was by himself in the house. Heni told me about it after. His father woke up in the middle of the night because he heard a noise, and he went out and it was Tui getting in the window. And when Heni's father said, where you been, Tui said, out for a walk. But Heni's father didn't believe her so he said, you went out in your slippers. Then he got hold of Tui to make her tell, and her coat came open and she hadn't any clothes on. Then Tui started to get mad and said, you let me go, I'm twenty-one a:nd you can't touch me. But when Heni's father said, where you been, again, she said, I been with the teacher if you want to know. Then she started to cry. Heni was there and his mother too, and his mother started to cry as well because she was scared Heni's father might kill Tui. But he didn't do anything. He just stood there. Then after a bit he said, I'll go and see him. But Tui said, no you can't. The teacher made her promise she wouldn't tell. He said if anyone found out she'd lose her job. He didn't want her to lose her job, he said, but if it got round that she was the sort of girl that went with men the Education Board would give her the sack, quick. That was why Tui didn't want Heni's father to go to the teacher, because it would show she'd told. Then Heni's father said, did he make you go with him, and Tui· said, I'm twenty-one. And Heni's father said, did you want to go with him, and Tui just looked at the floor. Then Heni's father picked up a teatree stick by the stove, a thick one, and Heni's mother yelled, don't you hit her. He didn't hit Tui, though. He just said, Christ forgive you. But Heni says he twisted the stick in his hands until it was just a lot of splinters. After that the teacher used to get meaner and meaner to Heni. I think he did it to make people think he didn't care at all about Heni or Tui or their mother and father. But Heni, he thought he could tell when the teacher was going to be mean. He used to have to get up at night sometimes and go outside, and sometimes when he got up he'd hear Tui crying in the dark. And Heni said always after Tui been crying like that the teacher got to him. But when the teacher got mean Heni used to be very quiet and 275 didn't say anything. He didn't say anything because he wanted to be a minister in the pakeha church, and when you're a minister you don't say anything no matter what other people do to you. But I wasn't going to be in the pakeha church, and I used to say to Heni sometimes, wouldn't you like to kill that teacher? But he never said anything. Then yesterday the teacher set out to pick on Heni and make him mad. He started off by calling him Christian like it was his name, and at morning talk time he made him stand up and say what he did on Sunday morning, and Heni said he went to church. Then the teacher said, Oh, and what you do there, go on, tell us. Perhaps we want to go too. So Heni said there'd been hymns and a talk. And the teacher said, what else? And Heni looked down at the floor like he was shy and said, prayers. Oh, the teacher said, there were prayers, eh? What did you pray for? Heni didn't say anything, just rubbed his foot on the floor. Go on, the teacher said, tell us what you prayed for. And Heni goes on looking at the floor and rubbing his foot and won't answer. Then the teacher starts to get mad. Heni, he says. don't be dis- obedient, I order you to tell me. But Heni, he just shakes his head and won't say. The teacher starts shouting, you little whipper- snapper, do as I tell you, and he hits Heni over the ear. He must have hit him pretty hard, because Heni crashes into the table. Then the teacher grabs him by the shirt and says, you little slug, answer my question. What did you pray for? And Heni says, you. That must have made the teacher real wild, because when he's real wild he gets all quiet and snaky. So you prayed for me, eh? he says, and what makes you think that I'd have any use for the prayers of a snivelling little prig like you. I suppose you prayed that I'd become blind and stupid so I wouldn't see all the blind and stupid mistakes you make. That was it, wasn't it? You're like all the rest of the Maoris, too lazy to help yourself so you've got to find someone else to get you out of your scrapes. That's what you did, wasn't it. Please God, don't let the teacher see all the silly things I've done. And Heni said, no. I thought he was going to cry, but he didn't cry, even though the teacher got his hand up ready to give him another clip. Heni said, no, I prayed for you because you went with my sister. It was just like someone hit the teacher instead. His hand dropped down, and his face went like the colour of dirty white bread. He stood there for a minute just looking at Heni, then he went out of the room and we saw him going over to the house. 276 But he didn't walk like he does most times. It was like he was sick. A little bit after one of the babies put his head in the door and said anyone seen Miss Tui. We said no and he went away. But Miss Tui must've been in one of the other rooms, because we saw her go over to the teacher's house too. Then we heard the gun go off, twice. And then we sat still and didn't do anything, not for a long time.

ARTHUR BARKER Two Fragments from a series

You and I are caught In the uncharted vortices of air, desire, sensation, Of time making game of all things in unknowabie space, A dancing-floor for us all with music, compelling, But analysable only into nonsense. Perhaps you imagine that I hold a key Admitting to something coherent, To a room, perhaps, in which sounds a memorable melody- But in my inner rooms are only scraps and fragments.

The bus to your suburb is smooth, comforting, understand- able; But I and all the others have been swept into it upon capricious gusts Whose meteorology is secret - No map to guide and console. And you at the end of the brief run Are as unknowable as I have always known you to be; Coldly comforting in this, For the known (though so imperfectly known) is always healing; The expected, when it arrives, always a relief. So in your presence I am healed, Briefly, incompletely: 277 But lean between whiles upon the frail supports Of nicotine, sugar, alcohol, the touch of silk clothing, To gain the illusion that the fragments of life are mended.

Do NOT ... The times are tragic and their scope Passes our comprehension. Do not say, 'I love you! I have loved you days and years ! ' The freighted air spills unpredictable murrains. What limits has invention? Must the ideal Be always ideological? What weevil Mines the sick human mind? For if you speak These precious freighte<;l words, time will not stop, As well it might have done, the world's decay, To wait upon your speech and my reply. For us who dwell among the multiple wars - I, II, ... How many? - what arithmetic Totals the integral misery of man? We are but shadows in a great decline. Into what depths do we descend? What pit Awaits us? Are there splendid heights beyond? Flesh, ere it dies, is lovely. Do not point Its too unbearable frailty. Do not say, 'I have desired you night and day for years, Sleeping (in dream), waking (in waking nightmare), Waiting always the unpredicted end, Or new beginning.' See how millions stir In time's deep whirlpools - risings, revolutions, Suppressions alike of error and of truth; Devices to contrive a bitterer death In a contrived longevity, seventy years Stretched to a century. We are growing old In frail communal welfare. There was a time When longer life to love in seemed to promise Sweet counter to mortality. Today Years serve to await some great Hiroshima. 0 do not speak (lest Providence be tempted) . . . Poison - that is our fate - and universal Flood, famine, putrefaction. Dare you speak (Among these shadows) of loving, lest it grow (Before the sun be set) into new hate, Small mirror of the universal curse? 278 LOUIS JOHNSON The Land of Punt

ALWAYS, you find, the language of the heart achieves its place, full-feathered as a dream wings to fulfilment; or as royal desire - flame-tipped and arrogant - is different - touched with Divine - more than the common theme. So for her garden is the Queen afire thirsting in plenty for rare Wisdom's fruits; the blessings of another regal hand chosen and choosing her. Behind her eyes rises always that white magnificence of marble and fine trees in her dreamland, warm with the gold in which the sun descries his face ascendant, flooding the fair fields. And yellower than gold the harvest then - clearer the daughters - nobler the men given to conquest by a look, who'll yield yet graciously, in love's name, every gain, moving inspired as by some vaster vision than kings and all the mighty elsewhere strut. It is the holy land - the Land of Punt - harbour of royal lovers, to which come seekers of truth, priests of the Absolute - and that fair Queen, that Sheba, Hatshepsut sailing a myth to find the fabled Kingdom.

Hoist canvas now; the white bird of the soul, restive for peace is aching for its own full-flight and promised land. What days, what nights await to make it whole? How shall time count, or voices tell the tale and not aspire to wonder, rise in praise?

279 PHILLIP WILSON Farm for Sale

IT HAD been a wet night with a very heavy downpour about nine o'clock, and when the knock sounded on the door at six-thirty in the morning I was puzzled to know who it could be. 'It must be Harry,' Helen said. I got up and opened it, and that's who it was all right. 'Where did you come from?' I said as we went into the kitchen. He looked cold and rather miserable. 'I slept in the car, Arthur,' he said. 'The road was so flooded about thirty miles out of town that I couldn't see a thing except the white posts along the sides. So I decided to stop there and let it go down. It would have been too late to knock you up by the time I got here.' I switched on the heater and told him to sit down and warm himself while I made a cup of tea. I lit the fire and started to get breakfast ready while he told me what had been happening to him since he passed through a couple of days before on his way north. 'Did you get a farm?' I said, jokingly, because I didn't really expect him to have anything yet. 'I've got an option on three farms,' he said. 'And I've only got to decide now which one I want.' 'That's wonderful news,' I said. 'I've also definitely given up the idea of settling in the South Island.' 'I should think so,' I said. 'I've been telling you that all along.' Harry had been looking for a farm for nearly a year, ever since he'd sold his old place in the Waikato and gone south to buy something else. He had always wanted to go back to where he'd worked in his younger days, but after he decided to take the plunge and sell up he got into a whole lot of bad luck. First of all he paid a deposit on a place just outside of Christchurch, on that light Plains soil which isn't really a good proposition, and then he got the wind up when his lawyer told him the price was more than double the Government valuation of two years back. Luckily he got out of the deal through a technicality over some water race rents which weren't mentioned in the sale contract. 280 But it cost him four hundred, and the whole experience unsettled him, made him lose confidence in himself. He leased a house down there for twelve months so he could have a good look round, but he wasn't able to get onto anything else. Most of the farms in the South Island were either on poor land which wasn't worth the money asked, or were wrapped up in families which passed them on from one generation to the next so that they never came on the market. He was nonplussed. He ranged over Otago and Southland, and looked at a couple in North Canterbury, but again thought the prices asked were too high. He talked to people he had worked for in the old days and they all told him the same thing, that southern properties weren't as good as those in the north, that cropping was an expensive business on account of the amount of machinery he would have to buy, that the summers were so dry the stock-carrying capacity wasn't up to that in the north, and so on. He'd just about got to the stage of believing that grassland farming was best after all, but he couldn't give up too lightly the dream which had obsessed him for so long. 'The south is much the best place to live in,' he had told me. 'How's that?' I said. 'The people are the sort I understand,' he said. 'Not like these jumped-up Waikato types I've been working among for the past few years. And it's more civilizea down there. Life is more stable and people are more considerate.' Harry was one of my oldest friends. We had been brought up together, gone to the same grubby King Country school among a crowd of Maoris in the heart of the mountain country where our fathers had mated up as contractors. We separated after we left school. He went farming in North Canterbury and I got a job in the city. We were away in different theatres during the war, and didn't see each other again until we were married and raising families. I passed my accountancy exams and settled down at the bank in Wellington, and he used to invite Helen and me up to his place for the Christmas holidays. He had bought his first property soon after the war, a dairy farm in the Waikato that had a heavy mortgage on it. But he managed to pay it off very quickly, thanks to the good prices for butterfat and the liberal policy of the Stat\: Advances Corporation which had financed him. However, he hated being tied to the cows seven days a week, and as I've said he had this dream of going south again as soon as he was able to make the break. Otherwise he would have liked to have a fairly big sheep run in the King Country. 281 The peculiar thing about Harry was that he was so old-fashioned in a number of ways. He was a puritan, and he was an idealist. I was always saying how the world was being ruined by greed and corruption, but he couldn't see it. In his imagination he used to live in the old free-and-easy friendly pioneer days, and he tried to make his own existence approximate to that life, an aim natural enough I suppose for someone who was brought up in the bush. For instance his favourite remark was that a man should always stick to his mate, no matter what happened, because that was the great colonial virtue. And after that a man ought to stick to his family as long as they lived. He didn't only think people should do these things, he thought they actually did. He had a simple code that left him open to treachery and deceit, though he had managed to survive all right so far. As I got older myself I tried to persuade him that people weren't always loyal to their friends or their families either, when considerations of personal and private gain came along. But he wouldn't take much notice. His failure in Christchurch was a s1.10ck to him in consequence. He was distressed, almost broken in spirit, when he realized that the man who was selling that property had lied to him about the quality and condition of the land, had asked an exorbitant price, and hadn't even told him he would have to pay for his irrigation water. All his personal beliefs were contradicted. He took it very hard, and it was the blow to his ideals, I think, as much as anything, which made him jump out of that purchase so quickly. Strangely enough, Helen couldn't see it that way. 'I don't think he knows what he wants,' she had said. 'Oh, he knows all right,' I told her. But he had mooned away the whole winter down there brood- ing over his mistake and thinking of his capital being slowly used up by living expenses. He kept in touch with land agents in both islands, and spent a good deal of time travelling back and forth across the Straits looking at farms. In the end he got pretty desperate, largely because his wife was dissatisfied with the life they were living. Yet he couldn't make a decision. When he stopped by last Friday it must have been the sixth time he had been through. He was ready by then to take the first place that showed up, because his lease on the Christchurch house would soon run out, and he regarded this trip as his last chance: He stayed the night and we talked for a long time about the old days, and in the morning when I saw him off in his car I tried to give him some advice. 'Take it easy,' I said. 'Take it slowly and don't make up your 282 mind in a hurry. You've got plenty of time, and plenty of money. Everything's in your favour and you shouldn't take a place until you're sure it's exactly what you want.' 'You know me, Arthur,' was all he said. But now he was back already, and with this fantastic tale which he told me over breakfast. His main object had been to have a look at a farm in the Te Kuiti district. It was about eleven hundred acres and sounded pretty steep and would probably in- volve aerial top-dressing. There was no power and he would have to buy an electricity plant. It was also isolated. I hoped he wouldn't take it. Well, he had a good look and decided it wasn't the place for him, but took an option on it anyway. While he was there an agent had told him about a farm near Thames. Though it was a dairy farm and not a particularly good buy he took an option on it too for a week. He set off back to Wellington, and when he was passing through the Rangitikei district he remembered a newspaper advertisement for a farm which he had put in his notebook. He rang up the Wellington agent to check on its exact locality and went out to have a look at it. This farm was six hundred acres, all sheep, and it turned out to be in two sections, the homestead block of two hundred acres of first-class land, and the remainder a piece of not so good land across the road. The house was on an adjoining area of thirteen acres of Maori land on leasehold. He liked the look of the country, and went into the house to talk to the owner. He was met by a woman, the owner's wife, and he told her that he was an ex- serviceman and all the usual stuff about his wife and kids down in Christchurch. 'Come and meet my husband,' she said. 'He's out at the back mustering.' 'I'll find him myself. You don't need to come,' Harry said. 'You've got a fat hope of making him hear if I'm not around,' she said. 'He's been stone deaf since the First World War.' 'Oh,' Harry said. 'He was one of the Gallipoli Anzacs,' she said. They walked up a fairly steep hill and soon Harry could hear the dogs barking. Her husband, Shergold his name was, saw them and came over. Harry said he got a bit of a shock. Mrs Shergold was fresh-complexioned and had black hair without a streak of grey in it, and didn't look a day over forty. But the old man's hair was white. His face was pretty lean but clear enough, and he was as upright as if he'd been an army sergeant-major all his life. All their conversation had to go through her, and Harry soon 283 realized that Shergold was reading her lips. She said later that he worked the dogs by signals and had run the farm for the last forty years as efficiently as if he could hear as well as the next person. But she must have been his big support all the same. Harry asked him what he wanted. The old man said he was asking twenty pounds an acre, but seeing Harry was an ex-serviceman he would let him have it for eighteen. The farm had never been on the market before, and he didn't want to sell it even now. But that was the proposition. If he liked it he could have a week's option to talk it over with his wife in Christchurch. Harry said he'd agree to that, and walked back to the house with Mrs Sher- gold. 'Why are you selling if you don't want to?' he said. 'It's all because of our son Ray,' she said. 'He wants his share of the estate now, instead of waiting until we die, so Dad has decided to let him have it. He isn't interested in the farm now that Ray has decided to go and settle somewhere else.' 'You mean to say you were keeping the farm for him and he doesn't want it?' Harry said. That's right,' she said. 'It happened this way. Before the war Ray always worked on the place with Dad and showed a great interest in it. Dad's whole ambition was for him to take it over when he passed on. But Ray joined the Navy under Scheme B and got a commission, and those years he spent overseas didn't do him any good, I'm afraid. He developed a taste for liquor that he never had before. And when he came back he started getting around with a girl called Ruth O'Reilly. Her father is in the liquor business, and soon Ray began going out with him on his deals.' 'What happened then?' Harry said. 'Well, Mr O'Reilly has a licence to operate booths at the country race-tracks around here. He's made a lot of money out of it too. Ray said he used to come home with a bucket full of banknotes in each hand and his pockets stuffed with them. He was making so much money he didn't know what to do with it. The next thing we learnt Ray was going to marry his daughter. It cut Dad up because she's a Catholic, but Ray didn't seem to mind. He was fascinated by this liquor business of O'Reilly's. After all, it's a much easier way to make money than farming.' 'I bet it is,' Harry said. 'Now Mr O'Reilly wants to leave the district and move up to Rotorua. He's managed to get licences to operate booths at the race-courses around there, and he also has a chance to buy a stud farm. He wants to sink his spare capital in the farm, and he's 284 offered Ray a half interest in it and the job of looking after some of the race-track business at the same time. Ray wants the money from this place to finance his share of the stud farm.' 'He doesn't seem to be a very grateful son,' Harry said. 'I'm afraid we've spoilt him,' she said. 'It's our fault really. But what can you do when your boy takes that sort of idea into his head and goes off with a Catholic girl? Naturally we don't want to sell. The farm has been Dad's whole interest and he'll be lost without it. But he's a stickler for fair's fair, and has decided to let Ray have his share of the property in cash if that's the way he wants it.' 'I'm sorry to hear it,' Harry said. 'Well, it's not your worry,' she said. 'You let us know what you decide in a week's time.' Harry said he went away to think it over, and he was so sunk in his thoughts that he didn't notice he had a flat tyre until he'd been driving for some time unconsciously holding the wheel against a tendency of the car to swing to the side of the road. He stopped at the next service station he came to, and the man told him he'd have to put on a new tyre and tube, because the others had been cut to pieces through driving on the rim for so long. Harry told me he couldn't understand his carelessness. He'd never had that happen to him before. While he was waiting for the garage chap to change the tyre he went into a store that was open nearby to get some bread and cheese to eat. The proprietor asked him if he'd like to have a spot, and when he said yes told him to step through to the back. He thought it would be just a set of living quarters behind the store, and he was surprised to find the man was leading him down a flight of steps into a big cobwebby cellar stacked up with rows of bottles around the walls. There was every kind of liquor you could think of in it, he said, and the proprietor cracked a bottle of wine and gave him a drink. He opened a bottle of brandy for himself. 'That was nice,' I said. 'Oh, he was a good joker,' Harry said. 'A fat chap with a baggy face, big pouches under his eyes like a kangaroo's, and a corporation as big as the mayor's.' Well, they sat and talked for a while. It was late on Sunday afternoon and the man seemed to want to chat. He told Harry that he had one of the few licences in the country, apart from the big breweries and wholesalers, as a direct importer of spirits and liquors. He'd had it for forty years and more, but now he was 285 lonely and had lost interest in the place because his daughter had run off with a no-good drinking young fellow from down the road, and a Protestant, mind you. He was so ashamed of her marrying outside the Church that he was leaving the district. But just the same he was going to do the decent thing and stake her to a good future if her husband could find enough to put up his share in a farm he had his eye on. 'It gave me the creeps to be sitting there in that cellar,' Harry said as he tucked away some of Helen's bacon and eggs for breakfast. 'Cobwebs all around and rows of bottles twinkling in the electric light, and this bloke swigging down brandies like nobody's business.' 'And then?' I said. 'What do you think?' Harry said. 'After I was back in the car I noticed an old sign painted above the verandah of the store which said, "J. O'Reilly, Licensed to Sell Spirituous Liquors". You could have knocked me over with a feather. I didn't sleep much all night. It was very cold in the car, with the rain pelting down, and I kept thinking about the Shergolds and the O'Reillys and the way their children had betrayed their parents' trust in them. I just didn't feel like buying that farm at all. I knew that if I didn't take it somebody else would, but I didn't want to have that business of young Ray Shergold and O'Reilly's daughter on my mind for the rest of my life. With that liquor and race-track business in it too it didn't seem -right, somehow.' 'But if the place is what you've been looking for all along, especially as the price is so decent, then you ought in common sense to buy it,' I said. 'I can't see that,' Harry said. He spent the day in town talking to Shergold's agent about the farm, and went down to the boat in the evening. I saw him off. He still hadn't decided what to do, but a couple of weeks later I had a letter from him saying he had bought the Thames property and was moving north. Helen was amazed that he had done such a thing, but she hasn't known Harry as long as I have. I told her I knew that was how it would turn out. 'Maybe he'll call himself all kinds of a fool for not taking the Shergold farm,' I said. 'But from his point of view it would be wrong for him or anyone else to take that place.' 'But I still don't see - ' she said. I went over to the kitchen window and looked out at the blue mountains to the north of the city, with their snow-covered winter peaks. 286 'Harry's a stubborn chap,' I said. 'To him farming is something that shouldn't be mixed up in things like that. His standards and ideals are different from most people's, and you can be mighty sure that he wants to retain them. Yes, even if it means returning to the slavery of a dairy farm for the rest of his life.'

PAUL HENDERSON Peraki

SAND blows along the beach like drifting snow, Blizzard belaboured, and all akin to arctic Is the bald bay, facing south. Few come, clinging over the steep shutting-out hills, Drop down the chasm between black headlands To walk with lost whalers, still there. Still felt in rusted trypot, incredible bones Lain loose through leagues of years, bell-tolled In a cathedral sea. Blown Over with sand the ribs of whales impress, Still are magnificent. But too among the rocks Are pools, that shelter seaweed. Minuscule shells, and little fronds like lace Make motion cupped in the crevices of cliff Where hourly tides are told; And these tether the days to a year's turning Down, down over the deep and deadly void Where lie all pasts, all futures; Giving the silver bones of shrimps, frail flutes Of incandescent creatures, jelly fish, and stars (All luminous and lovely Inhabitants of beaches) place in the slow sad wheel Beside the spurning whales of Hempleman and Ahab And their gargantuan bones. 287 MAURICE SHADBOLT Sing again Tomorrow

THE five Saunders kids packed into the little Morris eight. It was crowded and uncomfortable but they forgot to notice as the old engine started with a roar and they shot off down the road away from the farm. Ahead was Saturday night in the town and the local dance, and it wasn't very long before they began to sing. It was Judy's big night. Just turned sixteen, Judy Saunders was going to her first dance. Her mother and her sister Margaret bustled endlessly round her getting her ready. The three boys had been impatient, eager for the coloured lights and music, but the women had been firm. It was Judy's night, they said, and the thing would be done properly. After all, they added, it was only fair to Judy that she should look well at her first dance. So the boys had stood around waiting and affecting a bad humour, but each of them secretly pleased for Judy. And the two women had fussed like moths round a fluttering flame, and then at the end of it was Judy, pale little Judy, baby of the family, dressed in her first dance frock, with the child- freckles on her flee gently powdered over, and with just a hint of red on her lips. And everyone had stood around admiringly saying nice things. It was certainly Judy's night, they said.

Clem, the oldest of the children, was at the wheel of the Morris. He was a rising twenty-eight and popular with the girls, but the hardest boy in the district to catch. Some people doubted whether Clem would ever marry. All he was interested in, they said, was the farm. But whether that was true or not, it had never stopped Clem from going to the Saturday night dances and taking the rest of the family. The weekly pilgrimage had begun when he was twenty and the proud purchaser of the second-hand Morris. One by one the rest of the family had made their coming out with Clem acting as a strict but well-meaning chaperone, until now everyone was going. It had been raining, and the country road was greasy, but Clem drove the car firmly and swiftly through the darkness toward the distant cluster of lights that marked the town. Beside him, singing loudly, was Fred, the good-looker of the boys and the smartest first five-eighths the town's Lion team had 288 played in years. Twenty-three years old, Fred was soon to be engaged to Peggy ]ones, the pretty girl from across the other side of town. Any day now people were expecting the announcement. In the back seat with Judy were Peter and Margaret. Peter was eighteen, in his last year at high school and hoping to be a school- teacher. Margaret was twenty, attractive and popular. But she was the grumbler, the only one in the family wanting to get away from the farm. Every now and then she would whisper something comforting to Judy. For Judy was terrified. She sat huddled in the corner listening to the others cheerfully singing and talking in anticipation about the dance and the further towards it they went the more frightened she became of the whole thing. She wished they would stop the car and let her walk back to the farm and the familiar warmth of the Saturday night fireside, but she was too afraid to ask them. The promise of attendance at the Saturday dance, once so bright and elusive, was now something dark and ominous. But it was soon too late for going back. The car rattled through the town and came to a halt outside the hall and they climbed out and hurried up the steps towards the music. Fred stayed behind, driving off to pick up his girl friend. Under the hall's coloured light-bulbs and streamers Judy was small and pale and afraid. Girls in silken-swishing frocks and boys in dark suits swirled past her as the small orchestra throbbed out a hit-parade quickstep. Clem, Margaret and Peter waved greetings to people in different parts of the hall. They seemed to know a lot of people. But she hardly knew any of them very well. They found seats and Margaret helped her take off her coat. -Gosh, it's warm in here, Margaret said. -Yes, Judy murmured, and as she looked across the floor at the smooth and confident grace of all the dancers, she thought she had never been more miserable in her life. She vowed she would never come to a dance again, no matter what happened.

-It's a good dance, Clem announced after his eighth time on the floor. Enjoying yourself, Judy? -Yes, she said timidly, half-afraid that Clem would detect her in a lie. Yes, it's fun. She had danced exactly four times: with Clem, with Peter, with a friend of Margaret's, with a friend of Clem's. Margaret had even sat out two dances declining invitations in the hope that someone might ask Judy. But no one had. The boys passed by the thin little 289 girl in the too-big frock who sat solemn-faced beside her sister and brothers. The dances slipped by, and still no one asked her without prompting. The others were embarrassed for her, and she was embarrassed for them, and a cloud came over the evening. But nothing was said. Everything had started so promisingly, everything should have been all right, but now this had happened. Then came the supper dance, and right out of nowhere, from across the hall, came a young man none of them had seen before. And he politely asked Judy for a dance. She was stiff and awkward in his arms, and trembling. Somehow she managed to make the first rounds of the floor without stumb- ling. Then, little by little, she began to lose her nervousness, and she followed him more easily. She tried to listen to what he said as he made casual comments about the dance, and the floor, and the people. He was young, too, and thin-featured, with slicked-back brown hair, not at all like her brothers. His fingers were heavily nicotine- stained and he had a funny breath. But he talked nicely and politely to her and by the time the dance had ended and he had taken her to the supper room, she felt she knew him very well.

He asked her for the dance after supper, and for the dance after that. He danced beautifully, she thought as he spun her round in a waltz. She grew out of breath, a numb feeling clutch- ing at her chest, and she began to feel a giddiness, but before she could appeal to him to stop, he was guiding her gently to a seat. -Sit down for a while, he said. You don't want to get too excited. -I'm not used to dancing, she apologized. -Well, you need to take it easy at first, he explained. Dancing's something you've got to learn to enjoy. It's hard to get into the swing of it straight off. -Where did you learn to dance? she asked, surprised at her own boldness in asking. -Oh, he said, in lots of places. Mostly in the city. At different dance halls. -1 just learned at home, she said. My brothers taught me. -You're lucky, he said. A lot of girls don't have brothers to learn from. -Do you live in the city? she asked, gaining confidence. -Yes, he said. I'm just having a holiday here. A dead sort of place, isn't it? She didn't know quite what to reply, but the dance ended and he took her back to the others. She saw him go outside with some of his friends. A little later Clem took Fred to one side. Look, he said, I don't like that chap and the gang he's with. They've got drink outside. They've been going out to booze after every dance. -What about it? Fred asked absent-mindedly, looking across to where his future fiancee was sitting. -He's dancing with Judy, Clem said. -Well, what are you going to do about it? -Stop her. -You can't do that. Everything's been touchy enough Without that. -Well, we can't let her dance with him. That's all there is to it. I know his type. -All right, have it your way. But I think Judy knows enough to look after herself. But Clem decided he hadn't needed to discuss it with Fred; he had already made up his mind. He walked over to Judy. -If that chap comes back again, tell him you can't dance with him. -Why? Surprise and hurt flickered in her eyes. Why can't I? -It doesn't matter now. Just tell him No, that's all. -Why? she demanded. Why.? -It doesn't matter now, he repeated. -Leave the kid alone, Margaret said. He's all right. He's not doing her any harm. -You shut up, Clem said. I'll handle this, if you don't mind. -You're getting a small-town mind like all the rest of them, Margaret said. Just because someone drinks .... -Shut up, he said and turned away. -Don't take any notice of Clem, Margaret said. If he asks you again, you dance with him.

After the next dance had been going a little while, the young man came over and asked her again. She hesitated, wondering whether the quivering feeling in her throat would let her speak. -No thank you, she said at last. I'm tired and I don't think I'd better. -What about you then? The young man turned to Margaret. And Margaret rose up into his arms and was swept quickly away. She watched them until she thought she could not stand it any 291 more. They were a graceful couple, swaying smoothly round and round the floor, and as they danced she could see them talking to each other, and smiling. Then suddenly Clem was standing beside her. -Put on your coat, he said. We're going after this. Without protest, Judy did as she was told.

Fred made arrangements for someone else to take Peggy ]ones home, and Clem finally shepherded everyone into the car and they began the drive back. A pale moon had come out from behind the rain clouds to light the countryside. There was no talking on the way home, no singing. The silence was punctuated occasionally only by the scrape and flare of matches as cigarettes were lighted. And presently there was the lonely sound of Judy weeping. Margaret slipped an arm round her. -It doesn't matter, Margaret said. There's always another time. And Clem, clenching the wheel tightly, strained to see beyond the headlight-bright road ahead, beyond the moon-silvered countryside, to see the comforting dark outline of the shelter-belts that marked the beginning of the farm.

J A M E S K. B A X T E R To God the Son

STRANGER beloved, see all weakness cries In my dark house; rough, importunate I came to you with false forced praise Only for doctor's orders, purges, meat, A raging beggar, hungry for a hand-out. You gave; I too was sworn to give The good not mine, the borrowed love; In my clenched hand it turned to blood and dirt. No, not in heaven's corridors, but blind, Weeping, deformed, between the sheets of pain 292 You share our terror, in the secret man Labour to be. 0 maimed immediate friend, What torture you have taken on your love In my wrung night, in my dead house to live.

Stranger beloved, strange to any tongue That stuttering pride, danger, twitch of lust Wake more than you the cold heart strung To utterance, making wives of dust. Because the inward-grating worm of pride Brings sleep by poison, because life's grain has worn Too smooth, because our wit is crucified With you, robbed of familiar food for scorn, Therefore the language of your wounds wakes Guilt, not the loyal anger of the just. Your distance, bitter to me, does not take Judgement back home, it takes from the iron breast Strength to bear judgement. Do not judge unless To wound and wake to love my stone of loss.

Stranger beloved, all roads lead it seems To that great tree planted upon a skull. Be then our death your death, our wormwood dreams Cut down by fury of your axeman will, And in that death news of the first world's calm Will break. Obedient, my living love (If it be not so, let it be so then) Into the unrejecting natural arms Of flesh and rock you were brought down From that one solar eminence of pain In which our agonies desire a grave. Teach that obedience which I lack the most, Obedience to love; and with your face, Stranger beloved, lighten my dark house.

293 BRUCE MASON Et in Arcadia

A CHAPTER OF REMINISCENCE

THE THEME of this essay is snobbery. I will suggest that its genesis is specifically colonial. There are some of us for whom a royal bow is the summit of human experience; others, who in their more rarefied, intellectual worlds will hear the words they exchange with a lion of the arts reverberating in their memories as a fabu- lous music. I once belonged to this latter class, and I propose to tell you how it came about. One Sunday afternoon, late in 1944, I found myself with nothing to do, and strayed into a concert in the Albert Hall. I was stationed in London at this time, and was feeling over-stuffed with the intellectual food which London, then as now, offered so prodigally. Moiseiwitsch played the G Minor Tchaikowsky con- certo, with glittering skill, I recall, but the rest of the concert has vanished in the miasma of the past. I sat next to a young American airman, and armed with the usual anti-American prejudices, as well as a natural, though stupid hauteur, I did not speak to him. He, however, had observed my New Zealand flashes, and in the interval, spoke to me. He said he would like to shake by the hand any man from Katherine Mansfield's country. I found that he knew her stories much better than I did: what do you think of 'The Woman at the Store', and isn't 'The Doves' Nest' superb? What was I doing after the concert? My prejudices melting like snow before the sun, I said I had no plans. 'Then let me introduce you to the Churchill Club', he said, and thus it was that I found myself in the spacious, elegant rooms of Ashburnham House, formerly part of Westminster School, which had been turned into a servicemen's club for the duration. Mrs Churchill, as she then was, had lent her name to the club, which a devoted band of titled and distinguished ladies had started with the aim of introducing servicemen from overseas to the best in British culture. I discovered quickly that this was no idle claim. The art gallery was hung with pictures by the best British painters, and if one needed an amiable guicle, Sir Kenneth Clark would willingly perform this service, or *This is a slightly revised version of a talk broadcast on the YC link in December of this year. 294 the painter himself might be there to answer questions and talk about his work; first-rate recitals were given by leading musicians, actors and writers talked about their craft. I soon found that if London offered a vast banquet so varied that each course must be selected with care, here at the Churchill Club was a pill so concentrated that I could think of nothing to do with it but swallow it whole. I came often to the Club in the next few weeks. Somewhat to my surprise, I never met another New Zealander there; it did not seem to be advertised at New Zealand House, and perhaps its austerely cultural programme may have intimidated some. But I, seeing and meeting the great, preoccupied in the amusing game of attaching famous names to the most unlikely physiques (Arthur Waley was one shock, Henry Moore another) shone with euphoria, and filled notebooks with entries beginning thus: 'Kenneth Clark says that New Zealanders are the only colonial (sic) aristocrats'; 'Saw Stephen Spender tonight ... Arthur Waley believes ... Harold Nicolson avers .. .' and so on. And if to the affable reader this is absurd, let me remind him that I was twenty-two; that like a child, I was learning to populate what had hitherto been a hazy, almost mythical landscape, and let me say that the prospect of a lecture by T. S. Eliot (vote of thanks by E. M. Forster), readings of poetry by the entire Sitwell family, or an illustrated lecture on the ballet by Margot Fonteyn, Robert Helpmann and Frederick Ashton, would beguile, reader, even you. I would like to give an example of the kind of thing which could happen at the Churchill Club to a raw country lad. I was playing the piano one morning in the music room, and a woman came in whom I did not particularly notice. I was playing the Ballade in G minor, by Chopin. She stood for a moment at the back, listening, then came forward until she stood behind me. Wondering at her interest, the back of my neck began to tingle. Suddenly, she started playing the treble herself, an octave higher. I turned round, and found myself looking into the warm, Jewish features of Myra Hess, who often came to the club. She spent half an hour with me, patiently explaining where I was wrong. After a week or two of this sort of thing, I was no longer living in the real world : this was Arcadia. Once a week, there was a gala evening at the club, and a formal dinner was given in honour of the guest speakers, and a few favoured servicemen were invited to join them. I saw to it that I was invited as often as possible, and the most surprising juxtaposi- tions could sometimes be observed. Once I found myself at a table 295 for four with E. M. Forster, novelist, Henry Moore, sculptor, and Stephen Spender, poet. Awed by this formidable battery of intellect and distinction, I sat petrified, too abashed to open my mouth, but keeping my hand cupped, as it were, to scoop up the pearls, which I felt, in all conscience, should be cascading from them. They talked in a homely, though devoted way, of cooking and rail- ways, and nothing else. I confess to some disappointment that the tone had not been more elevated, that the conversation was not sufficiently memorable for a glittering entry in my daily log, but it is absurdly unreasonable to expect one's heroes to act always in the aura of their fame, and this was a salutary lesson to me, reminding me that the great are also human. Now I should like to describe in detail two gala evenings at the club. The first was a lecture on Milton by T. 5. Eliot, and the second, a reading from their poems by Edith, Osbert and Sache- verell Sitwell. As I mentioned, some servicemen were lucky enough to be invited to the dinner which preceded the lecture, and thus it was that I found myself sitting at table between Archbishop Lord Lang, and Mr Eliot himself. Lord Lang, who, it will be remembered, was Archbishop at the time of the abdication, was now in his retirement. He was an elegant, white-haired old man, with a face of remarkable spirituality. I found him much less intimidating than Eliot with his ramrod back, and worn, powerful face 'of clerical cut'. The Archbishop chattered away to me about New Zealand, mentioned some ecclesiastical colleagues he had known there, most of them dead many years before I was born. He was a charming, courtly old fellow, and put me quite at my ease. Eliot was quite different: he did not say a word for some time, but ate and drank in silent, and it seemed to me, gloomy absorption. Crushed by the weight of his enormous reputation, I remained speechless also, feeling that I had to wait for him to speak to me. Finally, Lord Lang spoke to Eliot about a fund to restore Reims Cathedral, in which he thought Eliot should have a lively concern. Eliot expressed a fervent interest, and I decided that the ice was broken. After a great deal of rapid syntax and mental arrangement of words, I finally came out with this: 'Doesn't it seem to you, sir,' I began haltingly, 'that there has been a grave degeneration in the conduct of the war?' I might mention that this was the period of the Arnhem debacle, and the war seemed to be gaining in horror and ferocity : the newspapers made even more depressing reading than usual. As soon as I had opened my mouth, I wished I had kept it shut: it sounded inflated and absurd. Eliot, however, received my question as if it had been an observation by Albert 296 Einstein or Rabindranath Tagore. He was silent a moment, preoccupied. Then he turned to me. 'I observe', he said chillingly, 'no such degeneration.' Blushing, I returned to my soup, and now, Lord Lang, who had observed my discomfiture, rallied to my side with a charming ecclesiastical joke. He leaned across me, his eyes gleam- ing with mischief. 'Oh, Eliot,' hE> said in his high old voice, like the twangling of some ancient instrument, 'I hear you have a great number of progeny.' Eliot, in the act of despatching a mouth- ful of soup, almost choked. 'What was that, sir?' he asked, his face a pale, interrogative mask. The Archbishop did not wink at me, but he cast a benign glance in my direction. 'Well, Eliot: I was talking the other day to a young poet, and your name came into the conversation. Oh, Eliot, said the young man: he's the father of us all!' and the table tinkled to his high, tinny ecclesiastical laughter. Eliot smiled a moment, then disconcertingly brayed twice: 'Har, har!' and the slight uneasiness which had hovered over the meal was dispelled. The lecture after the dinner, was to me, and I think to many others, a sad disappointment. I do not know how Eliot .. performs on more academic occasions, but this address to a mixed audience was lamentable. He was gracefully introduced by the Archbishop, who detailed most of Eliot's well-known accomplishments, omit- ting, however, that he was American born. This nettled a clot of Americans behind me, who began muttering. Then Eliot began. 'My Lord Archbishop,' he said, in a voice from which every trace of his American origin had been sloughed away, 'I am here tonight to talk to you about Milton.' And so it went on, dry, academic, and entirely humourless. When towards the end of his talk, he had occasion mildly to upbraid Milton for his lack of humour, there was an ironic cackle from the floor, with which everyone was in ardent sympathy. The best moment of the lecture was when E. M. Forster proposed a vote of thanks to the speaker with an elegant tribute to Eliot as a literary figure, but carefully saying nothing about him as a speaker. Great poet Eliot undoubtedly is, and great man, but the gift of oral communication evidently eludes him. · The second gala evening I would like to describe is the Sitwell invasion. Let me first attempt to orientate you into the emotional climate of that period. The flying bomb raids were giving all Lon- don the jitters. All day and night the things were coming over, dozens at a time, and though one rarely saw them at close quarters, they were appallingly noisy. If they passed over you, the racket was deafening, then suddenly and ominously they would cut out, and 297 you knew then that another was diving to earth: another sicken- ing moment, and then the explosion. London at night was a nightmare city: explosions all the time from V2 rockets, the roar of flying bombs, the crashes, the shattering glass; the strain of all this showed in everybody in some way or other. It was in the middle of all this that the Churchill Club invited the Sitwell family to read their poems. If there was a gala dinner to welcome them, I was not invited. And so a crammed lecture hall awaited them on a bleak December evening in 1944, with every few minutes a muffled explosion outside to remind us what the world was made of. The door flew open, and Edith entered, followed by her brothers. She was dressed, as far as I could judge, as Mary, Queen of Scots. She wore a floor-length crinoline of black velvet, and a high collar of starched lace. On her head was a white felt hat of outlandish design, with a semi-transparent veil, which reached to her upper lip. Behind her, walking solemnly in step, came Osbert and Sacheverell, dressed soberly enough in identical tweed suits, but giving the odd feeling from their detached air and their strange physiognomies, that their doublets had been left outside, and that they had put on fancy dress for our benefit. We broke into delighted applause. What we were trying to convey to them by our fervour was a tribute to a family who cultivated their eccentricities in the face of the most crippling assaults to individuality which a city well can suffer-whatever happened, one felt the Sitwell family would continue to be obstinately and royally their own highly cultivated, curious selves, and at such a time they seemed not merely eccentric, but magnificent. And so we applauded loud and long. Edith kicked off first, if I may use so homely and remote an image for a family who shun sports like the black plague. She rose to her feet, tossed back her veil like a mettlesome horse, and began to read. She read several of her later songs from a book just then published, entitled Green Song. I find her earlier work artificial and remote, but her later poems, which deal directly with suffering in terms of a series of very rich, stylized symbols, are to me much more real. She had not been reading long before I realized that she was incomparably the finest reader of poetry I have ever heard. Her voice is penetrating but full, rich yet astringent, and she made her poems live, not so that one heard them merely, but became involved with them in such a profound and intimate way, that while the poem lasted, one seemed to enter its very substance and texture. Osbert, who followed her, was a very different kettle 298 of fish. I imagine he does not take himself very seriously as a poet, being now the acknowledged master of a solid, magisterial prose style, but his feeling for poetry is doubtless no less profound than his sister's. He is, of course, ferocious to anyone who will not give his sister and brother their due as poets : in fact, their family feeling, at once touching and monstrous in intimidative power, was evident throughout the evening. Each seemed to have dedicated his or her poems to one, sometimes both of the others, and the dedications were carefully read before each poem. But back to Osbert. His poems are hardly lyrical at all: he showed us two modes, the angrily nostalgic and the savagely satirical, and he read several poems to illustrate both. His delivery was witty, and in S@me way weary, which I cannot quite define. I still recall the sardonic relish he gave to the words 'Heigh-ho, heigh-ho' in his excoriating 'Song of the Journalist'. Then came Sacheverell. In some ways he was the greatest surprise of the evening, for if Edith was the best reader I have ever heard, Sacheverell was undoubtedly the worst. He read an immensely long poem in an absolutely flat, even monotone, and I cannot recall one moment of distinction, either of thought, imagery or delivery. This is perhaps grossly unjust to a genuine poet: it remains my impression after eleven years. I was glad when he sat down. Then, after a suitable pause, they began again. Edith started to read a long piece called 'Eurydice'. She had been speaking for a few minutes when a dull humming in the distance announced that we were going to be visited by a flying bomb. Edith slightly raised her voice. The roar grew louder. It was so loud, at length, that not even Edith's magnificent cor anglais could prevail against it. Spreading her skirts like a great, dark-plumaged bird, she sat down. The roar was by this time deafening, and all the lustres in the big chandelier above our heads were tinkling. Then came the ominous silence. Edith rose to her feet, slightly craning her neck, so that she reminded me momentarily of one of those strange, listening figures by Henry Moore. 'Has it gone?' she asked, her voice booming in the petrified silence. There was a terrific explosion. 'Oh,' she said briefly, 'it hadn't,' and then after a moment said: 'Well, that's over,' and resumed reading again. Their composure was no less absolute than the authority of the whole bizarre family. At the end of the evening, they rose to their feet, Edith flanked by her two brothers, and the astonishing family likeness became once more apparent. No one could call them good-looking: more like a trio of immensely distinguished rams. Then they smiled, a fixed formal family smile, and passed out of sight in solemn procession. 299 So ended my most memorable evening at the Churchill Club. So there it is, my glittering snobs' pageant, already, no doubt, somewhat idealized by the benign lamps of memory. There are some New Zealanders who put their names down for the Royal Garden Party when they are abroad, attend it, and when they return, will regard it as the high point of their trip. Arrant snobbery, of course, but I cannot claim that my desire to gawp at the great was different in kind. A royal bow, a few words with T. S. Eliot: this is the basic coinage of snobbery, but the value of the currency depends only on what it will buy. Well, of course it buys nothing at all, and he would be a fool who thought it did. It didn't matter: I had my four weeks in Arcadia, and was then shipped overseas for more urgent tasks in the Pacific Ocean. And it was just long enough. I could not have borne it for much longer. The open-mouthed, goggle-eyed, ear-to-the-ground phase of one's life must come to an end sometime, and it is better that this should be early than late. And what I did not realize then was that as a serviceman, I was fantastically over-privileged. Doors flew open at the sight of my uniform, which, when I revisited England in 1949, remained obdurately shut. And when I tried in a desultory way to revive some of the friendships T had made five years before, I found them all quite dead.

E. H. M c C 0 R M I C K The Happy Colony

FIRST, if I may, a few words of explanation. The origins of this paper* lie in a distant past when, having acquired an interest in our early literature, I set out to discover something about those who wrote it, more especially what sort of people they were and what brought them here. Though in the succeeding years I have failed to answer these questions with any finality, discursive reading has brought to light a collection of facts about New Zealand's beginnings. The contents of this untidy cupboard I am exposing *A revised and much expanded version of a paper read on 3 June 1954 to the Literary Club, Auckland University College. 300 Fishing trawler, Jackson's Bay

THE WEST COAST

Photographs by Les Cleveland

tonight. I have tried to dress the material suitably for a literary occasion, but it may in reality belong to a branch of history; or perhaps I should rather say to a conception of history that I owe to the philosopher of New Zealand colonization, Thomas Chol- mondeley. A century ago he wrote, 'For the melancholy of History is like that caused by the aspect of the ocean, or a great landscape, or a great city. It raises the most touching questions, which no mortal can answer. We keep asking and praying, Good God, what is all this for? Why so many heavings and sinkings . . . so much fraud and violence; such insight, such blindness; such deep sorrow, such abandoned levity; such ludicrous nonsense, mixed up with such ghostly horrors ... ?'1 This, the first pebble in a mosaic of quotations, may suggest the nature of what is to follow and has a further relevance in anticipating your probable response.

New Zealand seems to have made its chief impact on the literature of the English-speaking world through an imaginary figure invented by a writer who never saw this country. That, at least, is the conclusion suggested by dictionaries of quotation. The other day, while searching these useful compendia for a lost reference, I noted all the New Zealand quotations I could find. The labour involved was not heavy. In the half-dozen ·books consulted (including all the standard works), I came across three items in all. One compiler had dredged from Froude's Oceana, 'The four eights, that ideal of operative felicity, are here a realized fact'. (This was explained by the superannuated apophthegm, 'Eight to work, eight to play, eight to sleep and eight shillings a day'.)2 Another cited Clough's line with its doubly tragic implications, 'They are married and gone to New Zealand'.3 The third quotation turned up without fail in every collection. It was, I need scarcely say, Macaulay's 'when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul's'.4 Why the passage has gained such wide currency, to become almost as trite as a familiar phrase from Shakespeare or the Bible, is readily perceived. A master of rhetoric has here expressed in the most concrete terms a powerful, if not very profound, human sentiment; and so far from being out of date, with each decade of the present century the imagined tableau has seemed to advance towards realization. Lately, in fact, a modish version of the 301 traveller made his appearance in Aldous Huxley's Ape and Essence. Those who have read this fantasy will remember that the inhibited hero is Alfred Poole, D.Sc., Assistant Professor of Botany at the University of Auckland. The year is 2108 and Dr Poole is Chief Botanist of the Re-Discovery Expedition sent from New Zealand to study the remains of a civilization extinguished by the Third World War. New Zealand has survived, it seems, 'because, like Equatorial Africa, it was too remote to be worth anybody's while to obliterate'.5 The goal of the expedition (an ironical variation on Macaulay) is not the ancient capital of the Commonwealth but Southern California somewhere in the region of Hollywood. Before the cataclysm and Mr Huxley's (for '.ls) too-comforting conclusion, we may see other renderings of this theme. My intention is not, however, to discuss the present-day significance of Macaulay's traveller but to elucidate his meaning for the nineteenth century. And for that purpose I must go into his antecedents. William Colenso, pioneer scholar in the humanities, as in so many fields of local research, was, I think, the first to point out earlier parallels to Macaulay's famous passage. Since Colenso's time other analogues and possible sources have been found, and there is little doubt that intensive search of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature would add to the present score. The earliest so far traced appeared in the London Magazine in 1745 and runs, 'When I have been indulging this thought I have, in· imagination, seen the Britons of some future century, walking by the banks of the Thames, then overgrown with weeds and almost impassable with rubbish. The father points to his son where stood St Paul's, the Monument, the Bank, the Mansion House, and other places of the first distinction.'6 The next expression of the idea, now more fully elaborated, occurs in a letter from Horace Walpole to Horace Mann written in 1774. Colenso knew the passage but robbed it of half its force by giving only the last sentence. Here is the full quotation, 'The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, in time a Vergil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last some curious traveller from Lima will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St Paul's, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.'7 From this point onwards the same or a similar idea appears in a succession of literary works. A poem, published in q8o, purports to be written by an 'American Traveller' who dates it from 'the ruinous Portico of St Paul's in the year 2199, to a friend settled in 302 Boston, the Metropolis of the Western Empire'.8 The sentiment again appears in Ruins, or a Survey of the Revolution of Empires by Volney, the French antiquarian; in Henry Kirke White's poem 'Time'; and in the preface to Shelley's 'Peter Bell the Third'. Though I have no wish to multiply quotations (having scarcely begun), I must produce one further text, a passage from La Billardiere's Voyage in Search of Perouse, of which an English translation appeared in 18oo. 'Without obtruding our own sentiments on the reader,' it modestly opens, 'We may be permitted to ask ... whether, as has hitherto generally happened, the advantages of civilisation may not, in the progress of events, be transferred from the Europeans, who have but too little prized them, to those remote countries which they have been so diligently exploring. If so, the period may arrive, when New Zealand may produce her Lockes, her Newtons, and her Montesquieus;* and when great nations in the immediate region of New Holland, may send their navigators, philosophers, and antiquaries to contemplate the ruins of ancient London and Paris, and to trace the languid remains of the arts and sciences in this quarter of the globe.' 9 It becomes obvious that Macaulay had been anticipated by many writers, and he himself used the idea more than once before pre- senting it in the form we know .. In 1824, reviewing Mitford's History of Greece, he spoke of a time when 'civilization and knowledge shall have fixed their abode in distant continents ... when, perhaps, travellers from distant regions ... shall hear savage hymns chaunted to some misshapen idol over the ruined dome of our proudest temple ... .' Five years later, in a review of Mill's Essay on Government, he repeated the thought, still in generalized terms, and finally in reviewing Ranke's History of the Popes gave it concrete and classic expression. This last review was published in 1840.10 Colenso announced his discoveries in a tone of mild reproof, citing the well-known passage as one of Macaulay's many plagiar- isms. Schooled as we ha-ve been by T. S. Eliot and students of seventeenth-century literature, we may take a more lenient view; plagiarism in our eyes appears not so much a moral lapse as a literary technique. Furthermore, no theory of stealing or legitimate *I have been unable to trace to its source an earlier expression of this idea, attributed to Gibbon: '"If in the neighbourhood of the commercial and literary town of Glasgow, a race of cannibals has really existed, we may contemplate in the period of the Scottish history, the opposite extremes of savage and civilized life. Such reflections tend to enlarge the circle of our ideas, and to encourage the pleasing hope, that New Zealand may produce, in some future age, the Hume of the Southern Hemisphere.' "-quoted in Wakefield and Ward, The British Colonization of New Zealand, p.273. 303 borrowing is really necessary in order to explain Macaulay's use of the idea. As the numerous parallels show, it had been the common property of poets and speculative writers for nearly a century; it was a stock romantic sentiment. Unfortunately, in giving it final, graphic formulation, Macaulay obscured its meaning; or, to be more accurate, he emphasized one of two related ideas at the expense of the other. For the parallels also show that the notion of a destroyed civilization is combined with the compensatory notion of a new civilization arising to replace the old. Macaulay's traveller is therefore not merely a lay figure; he is a pledge of con- tinuity, the promise of new life. Why, it may be asked, a traveller from New Zealand? Why not, in the traditional manner, an American? Or, if he wanted a symbol of outlandish remoteness, why did Macaulay not choose a Pata- gonian or a Sandwich Islander? As he wrote, he may, of course, have had La Billardiere in mind. But there are other possible explanations which I shall later ask you to consider.

Nearly seventy years separate Macaulay's passage from Wal- pole's, years of change perhaps unparalleled in European history. Between the writers lie the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and not least the revolutions in agriculture and industry. Is it fanciful to see the differ- ences reflected in the two fragments of prose? Walpole toys with the idea of a vanished civilization as he might with some bibelot on his desk at Strawberry Hill. Writing with Augustan assurance, he does not for a moment believe in the spectacle he has conjured up. To Macaulay, on the other hand, the fall of kings and states was something of a commonplace; and civilization was advancing so fast that it might well be hurtling to extinction. Hence perhaps the vividness and compelling force of his conception; no longer an idle fancy, it has entered within the limits of feasibility. At the beginning of the hungry forties even a writer of Mac- aulay's sanguine temperament could hardly survey the future without some misgivings. The sturdy peasantry of England-or a large proportion of it-had been transformed into a sullen pro- letariat; the balanced economy of the eighteenth century had been replaced by the anarchy of laissez faire. What further marked the age was a bewildering set of contradictions. While wealth was created at an unprecedented rate, there was greater and more 304 widely diffused want than ever before. The prosperity of the times, moreover, was by no means constant; booms regularly alter- nated with slumps, affecting every social class. And for a society haunted by the spectre conjured up by Malthus, one of the most alarming portents was over-population. Except for convicts and a few voluntary emigrants, the masses had been pent up since the American War to increase with a terrifying fecundity. What could be done? The early and middle decades of the nineteenth century teemed with social prophets and panaceas. Carlyle thundered his gospel of work to the legions of the unemployed; the young John Ruskin composed his letters to The Times; Karl Marx formulated his explosive theories in the British Museum; the Chartists gathered signatures for their monster petition; the heirs of Jeremy Bentham marshalled themselves in Parliament. Some- what apart from these men and movements, though touching them at various points, were the planners of ideal states and model communities. To Robert Owen, pioneer of benevolent industrialism, salvation seemed to lie in groups of a thousand persons who would apply and extend the principles of his own New Lanark settlement. The inhabitants would live in communal fashion, employing themselves mainly in agriculture and educating their children 'in a pleasant manner, interspersed with singing, dancing, and other exercises'. Similar measures, proceeding from comprehensive social and metaphysical theories, were proposed by the disciples of Fourier and Saint-Simon in France. Fourier's unit for a regenerated society was the Pbalange, a community of some eighteen hundred tillers of the soil living together in the Pbalanstere, a pile of buildings surpassing Versailles in elegance and extent. These cells of righteous living, once established, would proliferate and ultimately encompass the world.U In crowded, sceptical Europe, weighed down by the burden of the past, the problem was to establish the initial cell-and here we meet again the idea of an outworn civilization. Since Europe was effete, why not set up the model community in one of the new lands where space was ampler and minds more receptive? The way had already been pointed by the youthful Coleridge whose Pantisocracy was to rise on the banks of the Susquehanna. There he and his disciples, freed from the exactions of 'civilised' life, would labour for sustenance only three hours a day, spending the remainder of their time in 'study, liberal discussions, and the education of their children'.12 So Robert Owen led the settlers of New Harmony to the Wabash River, with disastrous results to his fortune though not to his faith; and the Fourielists planted their 305 doctrines in the hospitable soil of New England. In 1840 it was estimated that Fourier had two hundred thousand followers in the United States, and for a time a homely Phalanstere flourished at Brook Farm in the neighbourhood of Boston.13 There was a tendency, it may be added, for the communal principle to spread beyond the economic sphere, so that more than one New Jerusalem dissolved in scandals of free thought and free love. Such (in a grotesquely simplified form) were the conditions in which Edward Gibbon Wakefield developed his scheme of systematic colonization; and such, I suggest, were among the speculative influences which coloured his conception of New Zealand as a 'Brighter Britain'. The Wakefield system, if I may refresh your memories, was intended to supersede the practice in most nineteenth-century colonies, of granting to almost any settler cheap land in large areas. The result of this policy (or lack of policy), Wakefield argued, was that settlers were dispersed over immense tracts which they could not work profitably; for where an estate could be had almost for the asking it was natural that every settler should become a land-owner; thus labour became scarce or unprocurable. Instead, he urged, land should be sold at a 'sufficient' price which would cut down holdings to manageable limits and, by restricting ownership to men of substance, ensure a constant supply of labour. Besides this economic aspect, emphasized by most commentators, the system had important social implications. Under the old method, Wakefield pointed out, colonial society reverted to a primitive state-'to that backward stage in the social progress when every one, or nearly every one, is a cultivator on his own account' .H The colonist, whatever his antecedents, became a back- woodsman, his wife a domestic drudge. With the adoption of the new system, colonists, checked by the sufficient price, would be concentrated into smaller communities where a civilized manner of life would be possible. More than this, a part of the revenue from the sale of land could be used to endow churches, schools, and other amenities so that members of every social class (except the lowest) would be encouraged to migrate. No longer would colonies be regarded as dumping grounds for paupers and convicts. They would again become places for the settlement of ordered communities as they had been in the days of ancient Greece and Queen Elizabeth. Evolved in the misery of Newgate, misapplied in South Austra- lia, Wakefield's theories were to be tested in a series of New Zealand settlements which culminated in the pilgrimage to Canter- 306 bury. The enterprise, as Cholmondeley put it, 'was to be an adventure like a romance; the colony was to boast of unexampled institutions; and pledges were to be obtained from the British Government, against any imperial interference which might im- pede the free growth of the new Anglo-Saxon community.... In short, everything was done to enlist in favour of the new colony the longing desire which really exists among the English-to have a child in their old age after their own image.'15 At least one English authority looked on the infant with little favour and cast disparaging reflections on its parents. When proposals for New Zealand colonization first came before Parliament, The Times sourly commented, 'We are to have a Radical Utopia in the Great Pacific, wherein, in pure honour of Queen Victoria, and in pure spite of home institutions, the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham and Robert Owen are to realize such unheard of triumphs as shall utterly shame and outstrip the laggard progress of more antiquated nations.'16

Ill

Misled by old animosities:.._its suspicion of Wakefield since his imprisonment in Newgate, its dislike d the Philosophical Radicals who supported him in Parliament-The Times erred in its dia- gnosis. A utopia perhaps but surely not a Radical utopia. For the Wakefield system proves on examination to have borne only a superficial resemblance to the plans of Owen and similar theorists; the scheme for a Brighter Britain was marred by no taint of communism, atheism, or free love. What Wakefield advocated in reality was the return to a vanishing order. New Zealand was to be a colony of agricultural settlements where a land-owning gentry and a dependent peasantry would dwell in amity as they had done in the rural England of yore. Here the errors of the industrial age would be avoided-its poverty, its slums, its feverish competition; the man of capital would earn his rightful profits, the labourer his just hire; purged of its baser elements, society would return to the ancient pieties of Church, State, and hearth. The colony, in other words, was to be a Conservative utopia. Though these conclusions may, I think, be reasonably drawn from Wakefield's published words, you may search his writings, as I have done, and find no direct reference to a social utopia and little that may be described as visionary; he presents his views in terms of eloquent common sense. For after all the Great Pro- 307 mater wrote to convert capitalists and politicians who are not, in general, responsive to abstract or idealistic argument. His supporters and subordinates, however, were curbed by no such restraint, and it is in them that one discovers explicit evidence of utopian speculation and planning. Take, as a favourable example, the instructions issued to the New Zealand Company's chief sur- veyor to guide him in laying out the first settlement: The Directors wish that in forming the plan of the town you should make ample reserve for all public purposes such as a cemetery, a market place, wharfage, and probable public buildings; a botanical garden, a park, and extensive boulevards. It is indeed desirable that the whole outside of the town, inland, should be separated from the country sections by a broad belt of land which you will declare that the Company intends to be public property, on condition that no buildings be ever erected on it. The form of the town must necessarily be left to your own judgment and taste. Upon this subject the Directors will only remark that you have to provide for the future rather than the present, and that they wish the public convenience to be consulted and the beautiful appearance of the future city to be secured, so far as these objects can be accomplished by the original plan, rather than the immediate profit of the Company.17 Here undeniably is 'utopianism' of the right sort; and if extensive boulevards are conspicuously lacking in the present capital, it still retains in its town belt a precipitous relic of this high- minded planning. Again, at the outset of the movement for colonizing New Zea- land, there is the code for the reclamation of native chiefs devised by the Reverend Montague Hawtrey who went beyond the eighteenth century, beyond the age of Elizabeth, to conceive of a New Zealand decked in feudal panoply. Like other items in this record of eccentric theorizing, Hawtrey's scheme proceeded from wholly admirable premisses. With an insight rare at the time, he recognized the importance of chieftainship among the Maoris and the need for preserving the institution. Every chief who disposed of his lands to the British and freed his slaves should, he recommended, be granted a tract of land that would put him on terms of equality with the principal English settlers. On terms of equality, . that is, in the ownership of land; otherWise he would still remain a 'rude and untutored denizen of his own heights and valleys' .18 The next step would be to transform the dusky aristocrat into a 308 civilized gentleman, a duty that would be undertaken by the principal English settlers. As Hawtrey explains, 'It would, therefore, be incumbent upon the members of the best families among the English to lay themselves out, as one of the finest occupations in which they could engage, for the cultivation and improvement of the native mind, for training them up to civilized habits, courteous behaviour, decorous conduct, and generous sentiments.'19 How was this civilizing office to be discharged? The author hereupon outlines a system of social alliances between the English families and their indigenous counterparts. The alliances would be contracted 'on a special occasion, in set terms, and in a formal manner ... a solemn and ceremonious observance well calculated to impress the imagination of the New Zealander, and strictly in accordance with his feudal character.'20 The word 'feudal' touches off a whole train of suggestions. The sons of native aristocrats might be introduced into the homes of their English protectors 'to undergo that wholesome mixture of education, service, manly exercise, and moral discipline, which the sons of our English gentry were once accustomed to receive in the houses of the wealthier nobility'. As for their daughters, they 'would be the especial care of the English ladies, and would receive from them such instructions, and render them such services, as would best fit them for their place in society'.21 As a means of reclaiming their charges, the English might do well tc revive other obsolescent institutions of the feudal age. 'And it can scarcely be doubted,' Hawtrey observes, 'that these alliances would be more palpably and more gracefully cemented, were the English family to confer on the New Zealand family a coat of arms, somewhat similar to their own, but with such a modification as the rules of heraldry might prescribe ... .' 22 They might also, he suggests, have recourse to the heroic poets and the romances of chivalry; and he recom- mends readings, in the native language, of stirring passages from Homer or affecting incidents from the pages of 'Sir Thomas 23 Maleore'. · We may safely assume that Hawtrey's views won few converts among the principal families of Port Nicholson and resulted in no great rush of applications to the College of Heralds. Nevertheless, he probably had some influence on the future of the colony. He was, on the authority ofT. M. Hocken,24 a friend of Wakefield's, and his hand seems to be discernible in the instructions to the Company's principal agent directing him to reserve one-tenth of the land in the settlement for 'the chief families of the tribe by whom the land was originally sold'. This, as the instructions 309 expressly stated, was to ensure that the 'rangatiras or gentlemen' would preserve 'the same degree of relative consideration and superiority as they now enjoy in their own tribe' .25 Hence came the troublesome legacy of the native tenths. With the foundation of Nelson and the creation of a Public Purposes Fund 'for rendering the settlement commodious and attractive', 26 further encouragement was given to colonizing theorists. To one prospective settler, John Ward (writing under the pseudonym 'KAPP A'), a major problem in the colony would arise from the more abundant leisure of a reformed social order. Faced by the same situation, you will recall, Coleridge intended employing the Pantisocratic brotherhood in study, liberal discussions, and training the young. Ward's prescription is much the same. 'There is', he writes, 'solid ground for hope, that, in no case, will the excessive toil of body and mind be required to gain a decent and comfortable subsistence in this colony that has been found necessary at home; consequently, that much more time will be left for the cultivation of the mind ... .'27 Not merely the cultivation of the mind, for after generalizing piously on the subject of education he addresses himself to what he terms 'the means of social betterment'. Each means is discussed separately and illuminated by quotations from an American philanthropist, Dr Channing: Music-' "It should be spread as an accomplishment through the community, regarded merely as a refined pleasure; it has a favourable bearing upon public morals; it is calculated to 28 exert a higher influence. . . ." ' ; Dancing-' "It is to be desired that this accomplishment should be extended to the labouring classes of society, not only as an innocent pleasure, but as a means 29 of improving the manners.'' ' ; The Theatre-' "purified from its debasements, would be the noblest of all amusements, and would take a high rank among the means of refining the taste and elevat- 30 ing the character of a people." ' ; Literature-'Another encouraging circumstance of the times ... is the creation of a popular literature, which puts within the reach of the labouring class the means of knowledge .... It is greatly to be hoped that all who feel an interest in the colony now under consideration will use their utmost efforts to provide it with a literature that shall be improving and advancing as well as amusing.' 31

IV By the late eighteen-forties, when the Canterbury Association was formed, the essentially conservative nature of Wakefield's

310 system had been recognized. His earlier Radical supporters had now drifted away to be replaced by Tories and Puseyites who saw in the Britain of the South a refuge for institutions and traditions menaced by the advance of liberal ideas at home.32 The avowed ambition at first was to found a colony populated by members of the Anglican Church.33 Upon this foundation of inviolable ortho- doxy the model state might seem to have a fairer chance of realization. Canterbury planners, furthermore, could count on more solid material support than their forerunners; the Public Pur- poses Fund, estimated at a modest £5o,ooo in the Nelson scheme, had now swelled-on paper-to a round million.34 Aspirations were correspondingly grandiose. 'Why', asked the Reverend James Cecil Wynter, 'should not noblemen and gentlemen embark for the colonies now as well as the labourer and artizan? ... Why should not we erect there a cathedral which may be a glorious rival of Westminster or of York? Why not send out a bishop endowed with the learning of Pearson [sic] or of Bull-with the piety of the sainted Wilson-with the -gentleness of the accomplished Heber? Why not found a university which may be no mean rival of the scholastic honours of Eton and of Oxford? '35 The plea did not go unanswered. A candidate for episcopal office came forward in the person of the Reverend Thomas Jackson whose views were expounded to an enthusiastic gathering presided over by dignitaries of Church and State. To embark as a colonist, said the 'expected first Bishop of the Canterbury Settlement', was to encounter hazards, discomforts, positive evils: the colonist 'will go to a country where the English language has lost its nerve and purity; where his children will unlearn the manners of their fore- fathers; where slang will be substituted for conversation; where, as some one said, with much homeliness of speech, but much truth, "Men drink, and do not dress for dinner." (Applause.)' With cautious optimism he then went on, 'Evils like these cannot be remedied at once .... But we may have, even with this frugality, the graces of refinement. ... The habits of the Christian gentleman may be retained, and the safe footing of the Christian gentleman maintained in all its influence .... (Applause.) We may surround ourselves with the poetry of the old country, and of Greece and Rome; I trust that I may live to hear Horace quoted by many a boy born in Canterbury... .' Excessive faith, the bishop-designate cautioned his audience, should not be placed in the Public Pur- poses Fund : 'The evils to which I have adverted, or the fears which I have expressed, will not be remedied or allayed by any mere money arrangement. This will not give us a loyal peasantry, 31I courteous and friendly towards their own class, and respectful towards their superiors. Nor will mere money of itself furnish a race of Christian gentlemen, extending the dignified courtesy of the higher classes, in colonial society, towards those beneath them.' 36 It was the Public Purposes Fund, none the less, that would presumably finance the building of a college to the contemplation of which Mr Jackson then turned his eloquence. The institution was to be erected 'in the second or third pointed style of architecture' and was to 'embrace' two departments: first, a public school where 'the Canterbury boys, sons of gentlemen', would 'learn Latin and Greek, as well, it may be hoped, as if they enjoyed the advantages of Eton or the Charter House'; secondly, an upper or collegiate department in four divisions, theological, classical, mathematical and civil engineering, and agricultural.37 Further particulars were later supplied in a 'Scheme for the Establishment of a College, in or near the Capital City of the Settlement of Can- terbury, New Zealand, and to be called the Christ-Church College' 38 and in an even more elaborately detailed 'Plan of College, founded by the Canterbury Association' .39 Besides the indispensable classical studies, the syllabus of the public school was to include Model, Landscape, and Figure Drawing together with Vocal Music, 'especially that which will enable them to take part in public worship'. In the collegiate department, the academic curriculum would be varied by practical studies suited to an agricultural community- botany, grafting, budding, agricultural chemistry, the tending of cattle, and 'such elements of medicine and surgery as will enable them to act in cases of emergency'. Pupils of the Lower Depart- ment would wear a simple and uniform costume, students of the Upper Department the traditional cap and gown. The College would be an Independent Society, consisting of a Warden and not fewer than five, nor more than twenty Fellows; it was primarily for the education of the youth of Canterbury but would extend 'its benefits as far as possible to the whole colony of New Zealand, and even more widely-to the British possessions in Australia and India'. On the strength of these and similar undertakings, Martin Tupper was able to predict with confidence, Fifty years hence-look forward and see it, Realm of New Zealand, what then shalt thou see? (If the world lives, at The Father's So be it,) All shall be greatness and glory with thee! Even should Britain's decay be down-written 312 In the dread doom-book that no man may search, Still shall an Oxford, a London, a Britain, Gladden the South with a Home ::;_nd a Church! 40 Beneath the doggerel vesture, you will have recognized the lineaments of Macaulay's traveller, a presence which in various guises haunts the literature of Canterbury colonization. He is indeed the subject of the opening chapter in Thomas Cholmon- deley's Ultima Thule, the only work of permanent value (apart from diaries and letters) to have emerged from that wordy pilgrimage. 'A new country', Cholmondeley begins, 'ought to produce new thoughts.' 41 The sermon he constructs on this text for optimism ends, however, with the recurring lesson that new countries do not produce new thoughts, that what has been in the past will continue to be-for Cholmondeley, to the detriment of his optimism, had actually lived in a new country. But a habit of speculation, once established, is not easily changed, and before he reaches his sad conclusion the author explores the more hopeful train of thought, playing with ingenious eloquence every conceivable variation on the Macaulayan theme. The colonization of New Zea- land opens 'a new chapter in the book of the world'; it gives 'a new form and a new connection to the life and dealings of before- existing nations';42 it is interpreted in biological terms as Nature's attempt 'to recast and reform some work which she deems too valuable to fling aside, until it has produced its like';43 the colony is a 'pledge of new life', a source of 'new faculties' and 'fresh energy';44 again it is 'a clean new conscience', a field where men 'may reap the great blessing of experience, without being any longer bowed down by the overwhelming debt of its purchase' .45 New Zealand is these and many other flowers of speech; it is also -and this gives Cholmondeley his peculiar distinction-a physical reality, a known terrain, peopled by colonists whom the author himself has observed with sympathetic but critical penetration. 'What, then,' he asks, 'is the religious condition of the ordinary colonist? He finds himself struggling in a new country, not as he struggled in the old-in the midst of a town or village community trained and minded like himself. No; English, Irish, Welsh, and Scotch are flung together. What is the consequence? They com- pare thoughts, ways, actions, and words; they discuss systems; exchange customs; sift, weigh, and balance their arguments and positions one with another. From an old church catechism, down to some new method of planting potatoes, nothing escapes. It is an atmosphere of vigorous speculation and improvement, but also 313 of recklessness and wild audacity. For the common mind, when divorced from its old habits, even in small things, loses reverence, and begins to consider all it has and sees a matter of market test and barter.'46 So much, then, for Mr Jackson's vision of a respectful peasantry! So much, to anticipate further, for the whole scheme of Brighter Britain in the hard light of Cholmondeley's experience as a working and observing pilgrim! Yet dreams die hard, and at the close of his' survey, drawing again on his resources of metaphor, he writes of New Zealand, 'I can here indulge in such a vision of the future, as the state of Europe and our own domestic history can by no means furnish to my mind. It affords an alleviation to regret-it creates new life under the ribs of death-and energy in the place of languor.' Then insistently, disconcertingly, the truth breaks through; he adds, 'That this is in a great measure imaginary, I well know. Whatever has been will be again .... Whatever slight changes may give variety to the future history of the children of men, it will be, in all its greater features, only a repetition of the past.'47

Up to this point in my attempt to describe and illustrate the aura of utopian theorizing which surrounded New Zealand colonization, I have drawn on rather slight and fragmentary records-a speech, a paragraph in a set of instructions, a few lines of verse, or, as in the case of Cholmondeley, allusions in a book of larger scope. I can now cite, in the treatise whose title I have borrowed for this paper, a more comprehensive work, one in the great tradition of ideal commonwealths. I am far from suggesting that Robert Pem- berton's Happy Colony should be rescued from neglect and placed in a niche beside the classics of Plato and More; but it has this much in common with its illustrious forerunners-it presents the vision of a reformed social order based on articulate views of man and society. Here, nakedly explicit, are certain assumptions that Pemberton shared with more cautious or more reticent colonizing theorists; and here again may be found conceptions about New Zealand current in the mid-nineteenth century. The theoretic basis of the book, endlessly reiterated in its later sections, first appears in a sprawling prefatory sentence, 'This philosophical work, deduced from the discovery of the human mind, which at once developed the perfectibility of man, gives the practical system of working out his perfection and happiness, 314 and points out to the oppressed classes of society the way and means of accomplishing their perfect emancipation from the false systems of training, governing, and estimating the human race ... .' 48 The discovery turns out to be the carte blanche theory of the mind, with Rousseauist and nineteenth-century trimmings, leading inevitably to an elaborate scheme of education. 'Who can deny,' asks Pemberton, 'that the child of man is a pure carte blanche to all true and natural teachers of his own order?'49 Then, by the next step in a familiar train of reasoning, the infant mind is not merely a tabula rasa but a tabula diviha, and its defilement has been brought about by corrupt institutions. All effort must therefore be directed towards the right education of the child, for 'Full grown persons cannot easily change their habits, whether they be princes or peasants, philosophers or mechanics. But children can be trained to any state of harmony, happiness, and agreement, and to dwell together in unity and love ... .' 50 At this stage of his argument (to impose some logic on the chaos of the original) Pembertqn reveals himself as uncompromisingly radical and denunciatory, at once a kind of poor man's Carlyle and a poor man's Marx-and so, of course, at the opposite pole in politics to Wakefield and his disciples. 'The world not half occupied,' he declaims, 'and man in misery and want! The seas covered with ships, and splendid navies always ready to convey fighting men to any part of the globe, but none to spare to convey the unhappy workman to the promised land. What poverty in the midst of riches! What wolves are the children of wealth! What abject slaves are the children of labour! '51 Nor does his denuncia- tion stop short at material poverty. 'But what the better,' he asks, 'are the mendicants or the millions for the sublime genius of an Angelo or a Raphael? They receive no fructification of the beautiful, or delicious pleasure from the Muses; they are slaves, and degraded-and why? Because they possess no money.' 52 In a distich he sums up his indictment of the old society and his scheme for the new: The Kingdom of Mammon is Wealth, and the last refuge of feudalism and tyranny. The Kingdom of God is Labour, upon which alone the perfection and happiness of the human race can be established.53 The Kingdom of Mammon, Pemberton urges, must be replaced by the Kingdom of Labour. But so complete is the corruption of the old world that the oppressed classes cannot hope to build there a New Jerusalem: 'All attempts at bettering their condition in the 315 old countries will prove a failure-will prove abortive ... 'there is no possible way of escaping from so degrading a state, but by flight to primitive lands ... :ss 'America?' prompts a disciple. The suggestion is spurned. Slavery reigns in America, her kingdom also is founded on wealth. ·'Her thirst for wealth, territory, and possessions, is perhaps more boundless than that of the countries of Europe .... Her big cities, the same as in other countries, swarm with gamblers, thieves, cyprians, drunkards, and murderers, even up to her professors! '56 Pemberton accordingly invites the workmen of Great Britain to form a society 'for the express object of establishing a happy colony in one of the beautiful islands situated in the Pacific Ocean'.s7 As the perfect setting in that limitless expanse Pemberton then selects from all others what he terms 'the beautiful island of New Zealand', 'as it may be said to be in its infant state, and uncor- rupted by any large collection of people; and more especially as it has been held sacred, and kept free from the contamination of the offenders from the mother country ... :ss With greater precision but no greater command of local detail, he specifies further, 'the land to be selected from the most fertile part to be found-say somewhere in the neighbourhood of Taraniki, now called New Plymouth-and to have one end of the tract of land adjoining the sea shore, that the treasures of the deep may be at the command of the colonists'. The whole colony will occupy two hundred thousand acres and will be divided into ten equal districts, each centred on a model town of uniform design.59 The model town, as indeed the whole scheme of the Happy Colony, seems to owe a good deal to the principles of Fourier. Its plan will be circular, in the form of a series of 'belts' intersected by roads radiating from the centre. The roads will be 'wide, spacious, and planted with ornamental trees'. The chief industries of the colony will be agricultural, but some manufacturing will, it appears, be carried on in rural surroundings.60 Living will be partly communal: public 'club houses or eating-houses' will be supplied from public bakehouses, breweries, and wine-cellars. The drinking of wines and malt liquors, though not forbidden, will be regulated by law-'which will exclude for ever all inebriation' .61 Records will be kept of the population, the supplies of food, and the yield of crops, 'so that the supplies may be always regulated, and those dreadful famines, which have taken place in the artificial money countries, avoided. . . .' 62 Since the future of the Happy Colony must depend on. its children, the science of breeding man will be 'brought to the highest perfection', and 'every feature relating to 316 the getting of children will be recorded and registered-such as the health of the parents, the age of the germ which has produced the child, whether of one month or two, three, or six months, and the weight and appearance of the child at its birth.'63 In the centre of the town, the pivot of all its activities, will stand the Colleges, where selected teachers will dispense a reformed system of education, joint product of the carte blanche theory and Pemberton's social ideals. At the age of three months the child will enter the Infant Temple to begin a course of training which will end when he is twenty-one. For the first seven years he will be instructed in 'the nomenclature of all science in nature and art; with some manipulating labour for the fingers, in sewing, platting, netting, split willow basket-making, and exercise for the body in running and walking'. From the ages of seven to fourteen, the curriculum will include 'practical lessons in all the manual arts valuable to man, with the continuation of the teaching of languages and all intellectual knowledge in nature and art, and the art of dancing'. The third stage, from fourteen to twenty-one, will see merely 'the perfecting of all manual labour, science, and languages' Provided with a perfect environment and this early and intensive training, mankind will at length realize its true potentialities. 'It is impossible to calculate', writes Pemberton, 'the beauty and grandeur of mind to which youth will attain, when bred from childhood in the knowledge of all science, and hearing daily rehearsed the best portions of the works of writers. . . .' (Here follows an immense list of authors in all languages from ancient to modern times.)65 'And,' he later prophesies, 'as all the people will become orators and poets, our public places-whether for worship, or for lectures in every field where oratory can display its divine powers-will be amply supplied, so that the life of the Happy Colonists will flow on in harmony, peace, and love. The little antagonism or emulation would only be in the beautiful, for enriching each other's joys.'66 To convey his intentions concretely and perhaps to impress some show of coherence on his ideas (for no summary can suggest the tropical disorder of the original), Pemberton supplied the book with two plans, 'Model Town for the Happy Colony, To be established in New Zealand by the Workmen of Great Britain' and 'View of the Colleges for the Happy Colony'. In their graphical nakedness, these finely lithographed illustrations underline both the absurdity and the pathos of Pemberton's grandiose schemes. The innermost circle, an area of fifty acres, is bounded by four 317 colleges built in an architectural style that blends the Parthenon with the Crystal Palace. Adjoining each college (so runs a caption) are conservatories, workshops, swimming baths, and riding schools; the whole group of buildings encloses a miniature farm and other properties required by the empirical pedagogy of the Happy Colony-terrestrial and celestial maps, botanic gardens, groves 'embodying' history, the muses, mythology, geometrical forms. Next comes a circle of 'manufactories', each equipped with twin cupolas and a Versailles fountain, followed by two circles "of barrack-like buildings which are separated by gardens, fountains, and churches. Beyond these again is a park three miles in circum- ference, and in the outer segments lie the agricultural demesnes with their regularly-disposed communal dwellings. The draughts- man has suffused the plans with a celestial radiance, as if to imply his conviction that the wide boulevards and the parks, the temples of learning and the Phalansteres would never be occupied except by the grotesque human dots that a kindly but sceptical fancy has dispersed in the foreground of the second plan. In both illustrations are suggested the qualities of a dream.

The Happy Colony, it is needless to add, remained the substance of dreams; the model town, the colleges, the reformed social order, the whole apparatus of 'happiness' got no farther than Pember- ton's manifesto. In r854, when he issued his appeal to the workmen of Great Britain, it would in fact have been difficult to find for his ample purposes an area of New Zealand not occupied or claimed by colonists already in situ. And only three years later the corruption of his beautiful island was so far advanced that it supported a critical review-a review, moreover, which exposed The Happy Colony to the unkind blast of ridicule. 'The author belongs to the order of the "universal genius" ', commented a writer in the New Zealand Quarterly Review. ' .... His scheme for the regeneration of the human race ... is the establishment of a quasi Agapemene in the form of a quasi Crystal Palace ... for the site of which he has chosen, of all places in the wide wide world, the earthquaky surface of our own Happy Colony ! '67 Having demonstrated with ample quotation the absurdities and heresies of Pemberton, the reviewer went on to enquire, 'Is he after all more than an exaggerated caricature of the speculative legislator,-the theoretic social and educational reformer? We commend his 318 treatise as a beau ideal in this way, an adaptation to New Zealand of the Voyage to Laputa.'68 I hope that one day a scholar, following up this hint, will trace the connection that exists-or does not exist-between the theorizing of the colonial period and the social ideals that have shaped our history. He might go farther and trace to its source a common New Zealand attitude, the conviction that 'happiness', though unattainable here, may be found in some distant clime- England, Russia, the shores of the Mediterranean. And he might analyse that vestigial Happy Colony, the fantasy of a 'New Zea- land that might have been', cherished by a number of our writers (Mr Sargeson and Mr Sinclair, for example). These would be large and complex enquiries from which I turn to consider a simpler but perhaps related question-the effects of utopian theorizing on the character of the settlers brought here by the New Zealand Company. There is a legend, more widely current once than it is today, that New Zealand's founders were for the most part educated people who included in their number a liberal quota of gentlefolk and younger sons. The legend contains a grain of truth (and more than a grain of Wakefield-inspired propaganda), but it does not, of course, survive the most casual examination. Though the passenger lists of the original settlements have not yet, I think, been fully an.alysed, a cursory glance reveals a preponderance of labourers (many of them illiterate), while a census of the Wellington and New Plymouth settlements, taken in the early forties, showed that of a male population numbering 1247, only 133, or slightly more than ten per cent, were 'gentlemen', 'capitalists', or 'professional men' (a category that included the ambiguous 'lawyers of all grades' and the doubtful class of 'schoolmasters').69 Not all in this upper stratum were educated men, and in the conditions of Pem- berton's Britain few labouring emigrants could have received more than an elementary schooling. Of the Company's settlers in general, it is quite obvious, an overwhelming majority had no great pretensions to learning and fewer still to gentility. All this notwithstanding, there is some evidence to support the legend in a severely modified form. The excellent writing in certain newspapers and journals, the well-selected books that survive from older libraries, the eloquence and penetration sometimes displayed in debates of the first parliaments-these, with other facts I shall presently adduce, tend to suggest that in its early years New Zea- land attracted what was, for a nineteenth-century colony, a rather high proportion of educated and even gifted settlers. This view 319 does in fact appear to have been held by the settlers themselves. The report of an address given by Mr Justice Chapman to the Wel- lington Mechanics' Institute in 1852 runs, 'He was of opinion that, in proportion to the population, there was a greater number of literary and educated in these settlements than could be found in any other British Colony. Mr Chapman mentioned thirty-six authors who had distinguished themselves in various branches of literature, including law, jurisprudence, political economy, natural history, divinity, etc .... in all the Settlements, and even at the remote sheep and out stations there was to be found a degree of education and refinement, to an extent to which no body of Settlers in any of the other British Possessions, similarly situated, could lay claim.'70 Self-complacency, one might comment, is the oldest trait in the national character. And in his definition of 'distinguished' Mr Chapman must have taxed the judicial conscience to the limit; the bookish inclinations of the colony are less well attested by achievement than by its links with notable names in nineteenth-century letters. In these literary associations one finds further evidence of a superior leavening in the early population and with it a qualify- ing corollary-established writers failed to emigrate but their friends and less-gifted brothers did; at best the culture of the settlements was second-rate. Details of the associations are fairly well known, but for the present purpose it is convenient to mention the more important, listing them in geographical sequence. If we omit Sir George Grey (a celebrity in his own right and so acquainted with many eminent writers of his day), we find the nakedness of early Auckland draped by only one association : Paul de Quincey, a son of Thomas, arrived as an officer with the 7oth Regiment in 1861 and later served in the Maori Wars.71 The next link is found in New Plymouth, the home from November 1841 to June 1842, of Charles Armitage Brown, Shakespearian scholar and member of Landor's circle but more distinguished as the close friend of Keats and collaborator with him in Otho the Great.72 Wellington also had its ties with the eminent: the naturalist W. B. D. Man tell, one of the original Port Nicholson settlers, was a correspondent of the Carlyles and Geral- dine Jewsbury;73 but better known are the Taylors, Waring and his sister Mary, who migrated in the forties and appeared in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley as Martin and Rose Yorke.74 In the South Island associations cluster more thickly. Among the brilliant group of young men gathered in early Nelson were Alfred Domett, Brown- ing's friend, and Thomas Arnold, brother of Matthew.75 A passenger 320 in the Charlotte ]ane to Canterbury under the leadership of James Edward FitzGerald (himself a correspondent of authors) was the much-quoted Cholmondeley, scion of an aristocratic house but more notable here as a friend of Arthur Hugh Clough's and, extending the range of association, as the benefactor and friend of Thoreau.76 Other Canterbury settlers in the early fifties were two nephews of Jane Austen, Arthur Charles and Richard Knight, who named their sheep station 'Steventon' after the Austen vicarage.77 And, despite the editor of The Times, New Zealand is unlikely to forget that Samuel Butler reached Canterbury in I86o and established himself on 'Mesopotamia' station.78 Finally, Otago supplies two links with Scottish literature.: the spiritual leader of the settlement was the Reverend Thomas Burns, nephew of the poet;79 and a later arrival (she reached Otago in 1879) was Mrs Robert Gilkison, daughter of James Hogg, the 'Ettrick Shepherd' .80 As the muster-roll of 'associates' discloses, all, with the exception of de Quincey, Butler, and Mrs Gilkison, migrated in the decade when the New Zealand Company was active. And only de Quincey (as a soldier presumably an involuntary colonist) lived outside the Company's territory. Their presence thus seems related in some way to Wakefield's colonizing scheme. Whatever its significance, the record is a striking one, unparalleled, as far as I can discover, in the early history of any other British colony. Thomas Pringle, friend of Scott and Coleridge, is known as the 'father' of South African literature.81 American literary historians mention that Cot- ton Mather corresponded with Quarles, that Mather Byles wrote to Pope, and that William Byrd of Virginia was a friend of both Wycherley and Congreve.82 (The migration of George Keats and numerous other associations lovingly commemorated by Van Wyck Brooks fall outside the colonial period.) Canada seems to have had no personal links with English literature worth recording and Australia only a handful: Barron Field, friend of Charles Lamb; Thomas Woolner and James Lionel Michael, both associates of the Pre-Raphaelites; Henry Kingsley, brother of Charles, and, of course, a novelist in his own right;83 and the unfortunate Alfred d'Orsay Tennyson, fourth son of Dickens.84 Further names could probably be added to these totals, but it seems unlikely that the New Zealand associations could be surpassed in number and importance. In the twilight era of the nineteen-twenties, when much was written and spoken on the subject, it was generally assumed that the presence of these celebrities and near-celebrities conferred some special lustre on the name of New Zaland. Though we had no 321 literature to speak of, the implication seemed, we could at least bask in the lunar radiance of Brown's friendship with Keats and Mary Taylor's with Charlotte Bronte. More than that, in this list of eminent (or nearly eminent) names was further proof of our genteel beginnings. No emphasis was placed on other conclusions which might have been drawn from the facts-that many of the 'associates' were transients; that most of them never published a line in their adopted home; that, apart from certain early writings of Samuel Butler, the major production of these exiled literati was a gigantic poem of monumental dullness. If the contemplation of this rather discredited topic only ministered to a sentimental relic- worship or served merely to foster a snobbish myth of origins, we should certainly be well advised to 'get rid of Butler' and the rest. But I hesitate to follow such drastic advice-the more so as I hardly know how these names are to be erased from the records of New Zealand history. What, then, is their significance? Or, to put the question concretely, what induced Domett, Arnold, and the rest to leave behind them friends, careers, native associations, and transport themselves to the newest, remotest, and rawest of British colonies? The motives doubtless varied with the men and at a century's distance cannot be uncovered in their complexity and confusion. Some of these migrants may have sought 'adventure', others the charm of the primitive; most, it may be fairly assumed, set out in order to better themselves or their families. Of the meagre testimony that has survived much, however, points in one general direction. Refer- ences scattered through books of reminiscence, embryonic novels, and other literary remains suggest that a few, at least, of these men set out to 'better themselves' in other than a material sense; they comprised not merely the educated but also the thoughtful, the aspiring, the visionary, the 'Happy Colonists'.

VII

The first witness is Thomas Arnold who, in the memoirs he published at the end of his life, set down in some detail the circumstances that led to his brief stay in New Zealand. At Oxford he had experienced a spiritual crisis that later brought him to Rome. 'Restlessness of mind,' he wrote, 'with which the theories and criticisms of Strauss's Leben ]esu had much to do, beset me from the time of taking my degree.' His spiritual doubts were combined with a vague desire to join some reforming or revolutionary cause 322 which no contemporary movement would satisfy: 'Discontent with the social institutions of the country seized upon me, and the science of English political economists, engaged with the sole problem of increasing the national wealth, and, to that end, emancipating its industry, seemed to me inadequate to the solution of the formidable questions which threatened to set capital and labour fatally at variance.' English socialism, then represented by Robert Owen and the Chartists, he found unattractive 'because it lacked culture'. Fastidiously he sought for a more congenial cause: 'Some kind of Pantisocracy, with beautiful details and imaginary local establishments such as Coleridge never troubled himself to formulate, seemed to my groping mind to be the thing that was wanted.'85 Throwing up his scholarship at University College and an assured 'opening to a life career', in 1847 Arnold decided to emigrate to New Zealand. 'Even before my father's death,' he explains, 'the colonization of New Zealand ... caused me to read everything about New Zealand that I came across. The descriptions of virgin forests, snowclad mountains, rivers not yet tracked to their sources, and lakes imperfectly known, fascinated me as they have fascinated many since. And joining the two lines of thought together, my speculative fancy suggested that in a perfect locale such as New Zealand it might be destined that the true fraternity of the future-could founders and constitution-builders of the necessary genius and virtue be discovered-might be securely built up.'s6 The theorizings of the Oxford circle to which Arnold belonged are again reflected in the reminiscences of James Anthony Froude, grown patronizing and a trifle incredulous with the lapse of time. 'The sight of New Zealand', he wrote in 1885, 'gave me very strange sensations. Forty years before I had thought of emigrating and settling there. It was at the revolutionary time which preceded the convulsions of 1848, when the air was full of socialism and republican equality. Arthur Clough and I had come to a conclusion that we had no business to be "gentlemen," that we ought to work with our hands, &c., and so we proposed to come to this place, and turn farmers. Clough wrote his "Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich,'' constructed a hero who should be the double of himself, married him to a Highland lassie, and sent them off instead. I, with all my life lying behind me, was here at last, but was flitting by like a ghost.' 87 Even at the time it is doubtful whether Clough regarded the enterprise at all seriously; his contemporary hexameters suggest 323 the ironically detached observer rather than the solemn young visionary: So the good time is coming, or come is it? 0 my chartist! So the Cathedral is finished at last, 0 my Pugin of Women; Finished, and now, is it true? to be taken out whole to New Zealand!

Live, and when Hobbes is forgotten, may'st thou, an unroasted Grandsire, See thy children's children, and Democracy upon New Zealand!

They are married and gone to New Zealand. Five hundred pounds in pocket, with books, and two or three pictures, Tool-box, plough, and the rest, they rounded the sphere to New Zealand. There he hewed, and dug; subdued the earth and his spirit. ...ss A rather similar tone is adopted, in retrospect, by the sardonic George Chamier, the most gifted of New Zealand's early novelists. 'For it was all the vogue in those days,' he wrote, 'for a certain class of people, of good social position, but with very little capital, less knowledge, and no practical experience whatever, to emigrate to New Zealand, and settle down upon a section of land-from a forty-acre allotment upwards-and attempt to live "according to Nature" .... nearly all of them brought very exalted notions concerning the dignity of labour, the resources of the land, and high- class farming. These ingenious settlers, if they did not all succeed, at least they formed a goodly company-while they lasted.'89 The final taunt, at least, could not be levelled at Alfred Domett who remained in New Zealand for thirty years, carving out for himself a useful career as politician and administrator. Though Domett seems to have left no account of his early life to parallel Arnold's, from his published writings and other sources it is possible to deduce a fairly clear idea of the motives underlying his migration. In 1833 he left Cambridge and the same year published Poems, containing poetic philosophizings on 'Death', 'Night', 'Winter', 'Remorse' (A Fragment), with translations of Horace and the Greek dramatists and the customary oddments of such collec- tions-epigrams, vers de societe, album verses. It was a tiny trickle from the Romantic stream, imitative, characterless, yet obviously the work of a young man of education and that undistinguished good taste common enough at the time. The opening lines of his 324 next work, Venice (A Reflective Poem), published in 1839, suggest the direction of his development : Vanished the vine-clad level of the Lombard, The close ways opened on the glimmering Sea; Along the horizon trembled lights unnumbered, In conscious cowering glee! 90 Had Domett been no more than a feeble precursor of Swinburne, he would no doubt have remained in England to continue a life of literary dilettantism. But he was, in Arnold's words, 'a passionate, fiery nature, full of suppressed energy, as proud as Lucifer'/1 a man not likely to be content with the obscure career that seemed mapped out for him. An alternative that he already seemed to be considering is presented in this poem. The first part describes the spectacle of Venice in decay : The stucco peels from every time-stained wall; O'er bridge and quay the grass unheeded grows; Each palace piecemeal drops;-mart-mansion-hall In cold neglect repose. 91 In the next part the decay of Venice is made the occasion for the familiar stock sentiment : A state Is but a man upon a larger scale, A life of longer date! And nations have their youth and age, A part to play on history's stage; Their manhood wasted, they decay,- Their end fulfilled, they pass away! 92 Then in the last section of the poem, with an action that is almost automatic, follows the contrast between the effete old world and the tabula rasa of the new : What eastern tracts yet rough with nature lie!

By scented seas whose laughing billows woo Coy aromatic isles, to linked lagoons In that young world, where Nature, born anew, Scatters unheard-of boons ....93 Domett was ripe for the propaganda of the New Zealand Company, as a later passage of the poem even more plainly shows : 325 There lurks the raw material of Renown! There Genius yet shall dare the perilous verge Of passionate Thought-some Bacon there hurl down Old prejudice, and urge The tide of mind to channels new. . . .94 In 1842, a year after he was admitted to the Bar, Domett sailed for the Nelson settlement. A version related by Arnold fills in not improbable details of this incident which also formed the subject of Browning's 'Waring': 'He seems to have tried his hand at poetry during several years after leaving Cambridge, but not much came of it. Mortified at this-too proud to complain-resolved that "they shall hear of me"-he ... silently withdrew himself from amongst his friends to the new land beyond the sea.' 95

VIII

There, in 'the new land beyond the sea', the Happy Colonists should perhaps be allowed to rest; but the hunger for truth (or it may be merely the appetite for 'evidence') compels the enquirer to penetrate this vaguely specified haven and note the consequences of the 'Brighter Britain' proposals. Their lasting result was, of course, simply in the transportation of British subjects who, without benefit of theory, were forced to accommodate themselves to an alien land or else perish. As for the immediate outcome, the grandiloquent schemes and the inspired blue-prints resulted in little more than a temporary influx of reforming visionaries, a 'State of widespread disillusion among the settlers, and a quantity of invec- tive aimed at Directors to whose eyes 'visions of empire in the Southern Ocean' had opened; at theorists who 'had declared the country a Paradise, its inhabitants not merely a superior race of savages, but astronomers'; at Nobles, honourables, M.P.'s, and esquires who sanctioned the enterprise by their names, and 'under the gaudy banner of a pseudo philanthropy, have been parties in sending emigrants to New Zealand. Ship them off! ship them off! is the cry, careless of what fate awaits the emigrant on reaching his destination.' 96 It was a fate succinctly depicted by the Bard of Port Nicholson as, with untaught command of rhythm, he recorded the trials of his fellow-settlers: Their lands ! where are they? All their hopes Are blasted, and themselves are sunk 326 To hopeless ruin. Deep they've drunk Of mis'ry's cup

Content, if they could cross the waves, To lie down in their fathers' graves! 97 The truth was that, for all its plausibility, the Wakefield system was found unworkable even in Canterbury, where conditions were most in its favour. In other settlements it was opposed by the Government, by the Maoris, by Nature itself, and was never applied except in the most truncated form. 'I left New Zealand', wrote Arnold, 'without seeing any of the vague hopes of the rise of a regenerated society within its borders fulfilled. Domett, the Wake- fields, Frederick Weld, Dillon Bell, Duppa, and a few others of finer mould than the generality of mankind, had each turned to his special line of work, and no association on poetic or ideal lines was dreamed of.' 98 In the universal reorientation of ideals even the religious enthusiast was compelled to temper his ardour to a due sobriety. 'At present,' reported Governor FitzRoy to the Church Missionary Society, 'I will only say that the Bishop's Puseyism is quite worn off-that he has become a practical hard working Chris- tian Missionary-that his sermons and conduct are strictly such as you would approve of very cordially-and that the notions with which he landed in this country about building up a Church-as if by magic-have been altogether changed. He is now a sober-hardworking-practical and Evangelical Christian.'99 (The Bishop, it may be added, was not the Reverend Mr Jackson but George Augustus Selwyn whom it is a little surprising to encounter in this galere; after a short sojourn in the colony, the 'expected first Bis- hop' returned to England, his episcopal, didactic, and architectural ambitions unrealized.) The contrast in these quotations between 'ideal', 'visionary', 'poetic' on the one hand and 'sober', 'practical', 'hardworking' on the other points to the inevitable readjustment that followed dis- embarkation. Experience of the brute necessities had an immediate and salutary effect. The inveterate Romantic, provided he had the means, departed elsewhere in search of his Happy Colony-or gladly returned to the source of all corruption. The sturdier-the Selwyns, the Dometts, the Welds-shelved their ideals or adapted them while they applied themselves to the urgent and usually prosaic work of pioneering. John Robert Godley, leader of the Canterbury pilgrims, admitted, 'When I first adopted and made my own, the idea of this colony, it pictured itself to my mind in the 327 colours of a Utopia. Now that I have been a practical colonizer, and have seen how these things are managed in fact, I often smile when I think of the ideal Canterbury of which our imagination dreamed. Yet I see nothing in the dream to regret or be ashamed of, and I am quite sure that without the enthusiasm, the poetry, the unreality (if you will) with which our scheme was overlaid, it would never have been accomplished.'100 This attitude of philosophical resignation, the resolve to 'make the best of things', with a humorous but tender backward glance to the first rosy visions is found in the occasional verse of the period. Here are a few lines by the lively and intelligent Sarah Raven:

We left our homes with hearts elate, Utopian visions dreaming; "Adieu," we cried, "to tax and rate, Adieu to wrangling and debate, Adieu to strife 'twixt Church and State, And welcome hope and freedom!"

Alas ! alack ! the space how far 'Twixt things that seem and things that are, Stern truth and the mind's bright phantom! Our beautiful church is tumbling down, And over its relics we fight and frown, In a manner far from handsome ....101 And a verse or two from 'A Growl in a Sou'-Wester' by Dr Rouse : Eden of the Southern Sea, I devote my lay to thee, Thee, of whom at home they tell Things to make the bosom swell. . . . So that men have christened thee, Eden of the Southern Sea.

But I have located here; No alternative, I fear, But to make the best of thee, Only longing to be free; Patiently to bear thy clime, And anticipate the time When, my transportation o'er, 328 I shall seek some genial shore, Never to return to thee, Eden of the Southern Sea.102 'A Growl in a Sou'-Wester' was first published in Canterbury in ' July 186o, six months after Samuel Butler reached the colony. Butler, it is fairly clear from a First Year in Canterbury Settlement, was no deluded Utopia-seeker himself; he came to New Zealand to get away from his family and make money. He was not long, however, in joining the group of cultivated rhymesters and prose- writers who contributed to the Christchurch Press; and in 1864 his 'Note on "The Tempest," Act iii, Scene 1' appeared in Literary Foundlings along with work by Mrs Raven and James Edward FitzGerald. From these and similar informants it seems likely that he heard of the ideals which a decade earlier had inspired the embarking pilgrims. Is it not possible that this knowledge, pondered over in the fastness of 'Mesopotamia' station, was the seed that later flowered in Erewhon? If the conception of that inverted Utopia did take shape in Canterbury (as certain of its elements- the articles contributed by Butler to the Press-unquestionably did), then the traveller from New Zealand takes on a novel aspect. He now appears as the old-world sceptic, confirmed in outlook by his experience of the new, come back to survey the ruins of a faith and a civilization dissolved (in a figurative sense) by the force of his own corroding intellect.

So, by a circuitous route, I have returned to Macaulay and the rather different place the traveller held in the heyday of New Zealand colonization. Then, as I have amply shown, he seemed to some British minds a symbol of regeneration. And for a few years New Zealand became a favoured setting for that ideal commonwealth which, recurring through the ages, appeared with special force and frequency in the early nineteenth century. Utopian thought at this period was clearly linked with the movement we know as 'Romanticism' (as also, of course, with the spread of industrialism), and was at first focussed on the New World sancti- fied in the imagination of Rousseau himself. By the eighteen-forties, however, America seemed less attractive to the eyes of visionary architects, particularly those of British origin. To transport one- self across the Atlantic was to forgo the birthright of nationality; 329 it was to court the gigantic disaster which had overtaken Owen's New Harmony; it was, moreover, to entrust one's ideals to a land which had learned only too well from European precept-'Ameri- can' as a term of disparagement occurs not only in Pemberton but in Wakefield and Cholmondeley. America was too vast, too un- manageable, already, alas, too corrupt. The need was for something smaller, perhaps more remote, above all untouched. The choice fell on New Zealand. Whether the colony would have achieved this distinction un- aided by the publicizing genius of Wakefield is more than doubtful. As early as 1836 he confided to a parliamentary committee, 'Very near to Australia there is a country which all testimony concurs in describing as the fittest in the world for colonization, as the most beautiful country with the finest climate, and the most pro- ductive soil; I mean New Zealand.'103 On this note of persuasive hyperbole he wooed tl;le support of noblemen, members of Parlia- ment, churchmen, City merchants, social reformers-or, at the worst, impecunious idealists. Working in the strange demi-world of notorious anonymity to which his youthful errors and the public proprieties had consigned him, he engineered the New Zealand Association into being; and when that body was demolished by the actions of an unsympathetic government, he quickly raised on its foundations the New Zealand Company. In the face of official disapproval, a preliminary expedition left in 1839, and by the end of 1840 the Company had shipped more than a thousand emigrants to its first settlement at Port Nicholson.104 Of these activities Macaulay was well aware. In 1838 he returned to England after service on the Supreme Council of India, and the following year, on re-entering Parliament, was given office as Secre- tary-at-War in the Cabinet where Lord John Russell was Secretary of State for War and the Colonies.105 He was thus near the centre of the acrid controversy between the Company and the Colonial Office and as a member of the Cabinet must have known something of the events that led to the proclamation of British sovereignty. Nor is it likely that so acute an observer was ignorant of the larger pretensions of the Wakefield colonizers-their 'Arcad- ian visions' and yearnings for 'a moral and political paradise', as The Times contemptuously described them.106 Consider then what went on in his mind while, in composing his review during the second half of 1840, he tried to give some novelty to a rather trite idea. Did he pluck 'New Zealand' from the void as an example of remoteness and barbarism? That seems most improbable. Or did he perhaps ransack his recollections (even his notebooks?) and light 330 on the reference in an obscure tome by La Billardiere? Anything of that kind was possible for a man of Macaulay's voracious reading habits and prodigious memory. But the likelihood was, it seems to me, that he drew on immediate experience, struck an allusion familiar to most of his readers, and, with his rhetorician's skill in blending the topical with the timeless, wrote the passage that has ensured for New Zealand its immortality in the quotation dictionaries. Macaulay, we have seen, did not invent the prophetic mode he used here with such striking effect. Nor was he the last to employ it in a New Zealand context; a small anthology might be compiled of passages written in conscious or unconscious recollection of his classic tableau. In completing the pattern of this crowded mosaic, I shall cite a few examples. First there is Froude, writing of Roto- rua: 'and here it will be that in some sanitarian salon Macaulay's New Zealander, returning from his travels, will exhibit his sketch of the ruins of St Paul's to groups of admiring young ladies. I have come to believe in that New Zealander since I have seen the country.' What he means by the last sentence is perhaps explained by an earlier passage: 'If it lies written in the book of destiny that the English nation has still within it great men who will take a place among the demigods, I can well believe that it will be in the unexhausted soil and spiritual capabilities of New Zealand that the great English poets, artists, philosophers, statesmen, soldiers of the future will be born and nurtured.'107 By way of contrast, there is Thomas Arnold, reflecting on New Zealand at a distance of half a century: 'In respect of natural beauty, and the general excellence of the climate, New Zealand may be compared with Lycia in Asia Minor ..... But how different the civilization of the two places! Science thrives in New Zealand; art flourished in Lycia. Two centuries hence, should English civilization and power be overthrown, a few ruined embankments, bridges, fragments of locomotives and dynamos, and ugly buildings of all sorts, would alone testify that here the English empire had been planted.'108 The prophetic convention has a continuing vitality. Arnold's grandson, Aldous Huxley, contemplates the nation which has survived the atomic cataclysm: 'Such nice people! And the civilization they represent-that's nice too. Nothing very exciting or spectacular, of course. No Parthenons or Sistine Chapels, no New- tons or Mozarts or Shakespeares; but also no Ezzelinos, no Napo- leons or Hitlers or Jay Goulds, no Inquisitions or NKVD's, no purges, pogroms or lynchings. No heights or abysses, but plenty 331 of milk for the kids, and a reasonably high average IQ, and everything, in a quiet provincial way, thoroughly cosy and sensible and humane.'109 One final reference, if I may, to the inspired pages of Thomas Cholmondeley. As he, too, peered into the future he foresaw a danger to which 'a small and isolated society of men, enjoying no small share of material prosperity' would be exposed. These conditions, unchecked by civilizing influences, would first result in 'ignorance, presumption, and lawless recklessness, unfortunately too compatible with ease and abundance'. In its next phase the society would see 'a degraded standard of morals; a low state of public opinion; a deluge of trashy information ... over-weening self-estimation; utter flimsiness of fashion, thought, and purpose'. The third and last act of the melodrama (there is no pessimism so black as that of the defrauded idealist) would disclose 'gross delus- ions; hideous perversions; imbecility; indifference; vile tyranny; abject servility'. 'It is a danger,' remarked the author, 'which will not perhaps be felt sensibly in the present generation . . . but which, if permitted to parley, or indulged with the truce of a faint opposition, will slowly, but surely, sow seeds of diseases in the commonwealth, far more intolerable to the sons than the poverty and cares which drove the fathers from their ... native land.'m

REFERENCES TO SOURCES (Acknowledgments are due to the Library of the Auckland Institute, the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, the Hocken Library, University of Otago, Dunedin, and the Dunedin Public Library.) 1Thomas Cholmondeley, Ultima Thule; or, Thoughts suggested by a Resi- dence in New Zealand (London, 1854), p.327. ZHoyt's New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (New York, 1923), 11, p.794. 3The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 2nd. ed. (London, 1953), p.146. 4Ibid, p.324; H. L. Mencken, A New Dictionary of Quotations (New York, 1942), p.l80; Sir Gurney Benham, Benham's Book of Quotations (London, 1948), p.224; etc. 5Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence (London, 1949), p.28. 6Hoyt, I, p.687. 7Ibid, p.688. 8Benham, p.224, f.n. 9W. Colenso, Three Literary Papers (Napier, 1883), pp.39-40. lOJbid, pp.37-8. 11 M. Kaufman, Utopias (London, 1879), Chs. V-VI. 12Mrs Henry Sandford, Thomas Poole and his Friends (London, 1888), I, pp.97-8. 13Leon Edel, Henry lames: the Untried Years (London, 1953), p.36. 14[E. G. Wakefield and J. Ward], The British Colonization of New Zealand (London, 1837), p.7. lSCholmondeley, pp.12-13. 332 16 10 February 1838, quoted by A. J. Harrop, England and New Zealand (London, 1926), p.53. 17J. Lord to W. Mein Smith, 1 August 1839, encl. in J. Ward to W. Wake- field, 1 August 1839, National Archives, NZC 102/1, pp.7-8. 18Wakefield and Ward, Appendix A, 'Exceptional Laws in favour of the Natives of New Zealand', p.409. 19Ibid. 20lbid, p.410. 21lbid. 22Ibid, p.411. 23Ibid, p.413. 21A Bibliography of the Literature relating to New Zealand (Wellington, 1909), p.81. 25John Ward, Information relative to New Zealand, 4th. ed. (London, 1841), pp.120-1, referred to by J. S. Marais, The Colonisation of New Zealand (London, 1927), p.59 f.n. 26Marais, p.56. 27KAPPA [John Ward], Nelson, the Latest Settlement of the New Zealand Company (London, 1842), p.21. 28Ibid, p.26. 29Ibid. 30Ibid, p.27. 31Ibid, p.29. 32Marais, p.315. 33Plan of the Association for founding the Settlement of Canterbury, in New Zealand (London, 1848), p.16. 31Marais, p.56; Plan of Canterbury Association, p.14. 35 Canterbury Papers (London, 1850-2), p.50. 36Ibid, p.95. 37Ibid, pp.97-8. 38Ibid, p.101. 39Ibid, p.284. 1°Ibid, p.115. 11Cholmondeley, p.l. 42lbid. 43Ibid, p.3. 41Ibid, p.4. 15lbid, p.5. 46Ibid, pp.270-l. 17Ibid, p.344. 48Robert Pemberton, The Happy Colony (London, 1854), p.[v]. 49Ibid, p.21. 50Ibid, p.109. 51Ibid, p.61. 52Ibid, p.92. 53Ibid, p.100. 54lbid, pp.77-8. 55lbid, p.207. 56Ibid, pp.24-5. 57lbid, p.6. 58Ibid, p.25. 59lbid, p.77. 60Ibid, p.82. 61Jbid, p.206. 62Ibid, p.l13. 63Ibid, p.211. 64Ibid, p.128. 65Ibid, p.197. 66Ibid, p.202. 67New Zealand Quarterly Review (Wellington), 11, April 1857, p.l33. 681bid, p.138. 69New Zealand Journal (London), 17 February 1844. 7°Wellington Independent, 8 May 1852. 71 G. H. Scholefield, A Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (Wellington, 1940), I, p.201. 72Ibid, pp.99-100. 73Mantell papers, Alexander Turnbull Library. 71Scholefield, 11, p.376. 75Ibid, I, pp.20, 214. 76Cholmondeley, p.42; Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau (Boston, 1939), p.326. 77L. G. D. Acland, The Early Canterbury Runs (Christchurch, 1951), p.226. 78Auckland Star, 30 April 1954, p.4; Scholefield, I, p.127. 79Scholefield, I, p.l22. 80 0tago Witness (Dunedin), 20 December 1879, p.16. 81 The Cambridge History of English Literature, XIV (Cambridge, 1916), p.373. 82A History of American Literature, I, (Cambridge, 1918), pp.158-9; Literary History of the United States (New York, 1948), I, p.45. 83Cambridge History of English Literature, XIV, pp.361-3, p.369; William Gaunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy (London, 1942), p.37. B4Una Pope-Hennessy, Charles Dickens 1812-1870 (London, 1945), p.413. 85Passages in a Wandering Life (London, 1900), pp.63-4. 86Ibid, pp.64-5. B70ceana (London, 1886), p.242. 88H. S. Milford (ed.), Poems of Clough (London, 1910), pp.160-2. 89A South Sea Siren (London, 1895), p.135. sop.s. 91P.7. 92P.13. sapp.22-3. 94P.27. 95A Wandering Life, pp.109-10. 96John Wood, Twelve Months in Wellington, Port Nicholson (London, 1843), pp.5, 13. 97William Golder, The Pigeons' Parliament (Wellington, 1854), pp.66, 70. BBA Wandering Life, p.120. 99'Government Letters ... 1840-45', M.53, Letter 43, Hocken Library. 1ooLyttelton Times, 25 December 1852. 333 1°1The Book of Canterbury Rhymes (Christchurch, 1866), pp.39-40. 102Ibid, pp.83-4. 103Quoted by Harrop, p.39. 104lbid, p.244. 105Ibid, p.105 f.n.; Arthur Bryant, Macaulay (London, 1932), pp.45, 73. 106Quoted by Harrop, pp.53, 59. 1070ceana, pp.239, 275. 108A Wandering Life, p.121. 109Ape and Essence, p.34. 110Pp.318-9.

COMMENTARIES

VANCE PALMER Australian Letter

THE TITLE of this letter must not be taken too literally since, for most of the year, I have been away from the Australian scene; first, at Helsinki, whither I went as a guest to the World Peace Conference-without commitments, though with a belief that nothing but good could come from such a gathering. It turned out to be an even more broadly-based affair than I expected. Nearly all the countries of the world were represented; more than that, the Conference managed to include an amazing variety of political and religious opinion in its two thousand participants-Canadian nonconformist and Greek archbishop, French scientist and Indian visionary.. Italian catholic and Eastern communist. Even the West- ern parliamentarians were well represented, and New Zealand had, in its small delegation, that powerful and original figure, Rewi Alley, who divided his time between the composition of delightful verse and acting as intermediary between us and his Chinese friends. There was (as had not been the case at previous conferences, I believe) a complete tolerance of diverse ideas as long as they fell within a certain framework, the creation of a peaceful world. A good many writers were to be found in the mixed assemblage and there were plenty of chances for them to talk over their own particular problems, both in the commission devoted to cultural exchanges and in private meetings outside. Two such occasions stand out in my memory. One was a reception given by the Finnish writers (mainly young people, novelists and poets) to the writers 334 from abroad. It was held in the most beautiful surroundings imaginable-a casino overlooking a lake, with the water lapping under the room where we met and the steep, wooded shores crowding close about the open windows. A few notorieties were among the guests-Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Ehrenburg, Fadeyev, Anna Seghers-but it was not an evening when names counted or people were called upon to make formal speeches. The Finnish writers did, indeed, improvise a jolly little ceremony of welcome, a sort of chant, each line being repeated in different languages by four young men and girls; the long, summer night, however, was mainly devoted to private talk, interspersed by a few folksongs and dances. Another evening, I remember, was taken up with discussion of the problem of language and communication, as it faces so many writers of the small countries, both European and Asiatic. I had gone out to a lake-island near the town with a Finnish novelist, Ji:irn Donner, to enjoy the Johannus festival, which is celebrated in many countries on the shortest night of the year, but nowhere with such happy fervour as in Finland, where they say bad luck for the next twelve months will attend anyone who goes to bed before dawn. We had listened to the singing of thousands of voices in a great natural amphitheatre in the centre of the island and had watched the strange ritual that seemed to have been handed down from pagan times-a ritual that ended with Sillenpaa, the aged novelist, being carried to the centre of the ring in a boat, a boat that was later to be symbolically burned. Now the great bonfires had been lit around the lake and we sat on the sloping shore, listening to the resonant voice of Sillenpaa as he read a passage from one of his own works. The voice came forth in a rolling chant and was spread by loud-speakers cunningly hid in the trees and rocks, so that it seemed to issue from the earth itself. The fires lit up the night, and a spell was laid upon the masses of people crowding the small, wooded island. 'You writers born to English are lucky,' said Donner ruefully, 'the way is open to you from the start.' He was thinking of his own difficulties in a bi-lingual country. Like most middle-class Finns he had begun to read in Swedish. Growing up, his gods had been Kafka and Joyce. Yet he was a patriotic democrat who, in his writing, was intent on communicat- ing with his people, those people who were now surrendering so completely to the work of the old Finn, Sillenpaii I don't know the work of Sillenpaa, but he seems to be a homely novelist, deep- rooted in tradition, and writing in a language understood by peasants and workers. The problem of the younger writers was not 335 only to master this language, but to introduce into it concepts in keeping with modern life. Sillenpaa, for all his earthy lyricism, was merely celebrating the past. I found the same kind of problem was facing Indian writers. It was put to me forcibly by an old friend, Iqbal Singh, who, like most of his generation, had been brought up to write in English. I don't think there are many Indian writers who have attained such a mastery of English as Iq bal Singh: it was shown twenty years ago in his first long story, 'When You Are In It', an intense drama of life among the cotton-spinners of Bombay, and it is even more evident in his recent subtle and penetrating study of his namesake, Iqbal, the Muslim poet. But the bulk of Indians don't read books written in English and the only way to communicate with them is through Hindi, now the national language. A book written in Hindi can be understood by three-quarters of the Indian population, but how to make Hindi a language capable of expressing thought and sensibility! It has a long pedigree reaching back to the classic Sanskrit, but it has been subject to change and degeneration, particularly in the last century or so. Until India gained her independence, English had largely supplanted it among the official classes and, in spite of Gandhi, it was becoming merely a patois of the bazaars. 'No one has ever written a thesis in Hindi', said Iqbal Singh. Yet there are new novels being written in it by the thousand, he and his friends told me, and I was able to corroborate this later when prowling about the back streets of Bombay. They seemed, these cheaply-printed books, to be all on a low level-a replica or a caricature of the sentimental slush mass-produced in America, perhaps spiced with a more definite pornography. And the language, I was assured, was not moulded for anything else; it was a headache to find words for the simplest intellectual concepts in Hindi. Yet the Indian writers were taking this difficulty as a challenge; they hoped, within a generation, to make Hindi a language capable of expressing the finest thought, both in the intellectual sphere 'and in that of the creative imagination. These problems of language may seem a little remote from the Australian scene, but they have some connection with it; particularly now, when our work is beginning to be translated for the readers of other countries. A few of our writers-Frank Hardy, for one, and I should think Waiter Kaufmann and Katharine Prichard -are drawing their chief income from the large editions of their books being sold in the Slav countries, and within the last year two anthologies of Australian stories have been published there, 336 one in Poland and the other in Jugo-Slavia. The Polish volume is slightly tendentious: the stories chosen are mainly those dealing with working-men and their jobs or the tensions caused by black men meeting white. The Jugo-Slav anthology, on the other hand, is more catholic, including such writers as Marjorie Barnard, Dal Stivens, Alan Marshall, and E. 0. Schlunke, whose work has no special ideological slant. But the appeal of Australian stories to Central European readers -and they do seem to have some appeal-would seem to lie in the way they deal with the incidents of the working-world in a robust, lively fashion. A good many of our writers have worked with their hands; they don't look at life from some detached point of vantage, well above the battle. There may be limitations about this stance of identification with the anonymous mass, and English critics have been quick to point out these limitations, but there are other values than those of Bloomsbury. Looking at the current literary scene from abroad, I think that a more justifiable criticism of our writers would be the way they tend to be over-preoccupied with mere subject-matter. Novelty of scene or the organization of practical affairs takes precedence over the creation of character and the exploration of human relation- ships. Up to a point the pressure of the man in the street and the journalist-reviewer can be blamed for this. To these people the subject-matter of a piece of work is the important thing. 'Here is an enlightening story of the search for uranium', they say; or, 'A novel of coal-mining in the Hunter Valley'. And the writer comes to think that his work will have value according to the subject he chooses. Talking to Jack Lindsay, an Australian writer long resident in England, I found that this question had received a good deal of attention from Soviet writers, whose novels and plays have not been accepted so uncritically by their own people as some outsiders think. Lindsay was asked to Moscow last year to deliver the Field- ing lectures for the English writer's bi-centenary, and he stayed on to attend a Writers' Congress. Though he doesn't speak Russian very easily he understands it well enough to follow discussions, and these seem to have been quite frank and uninhibited. Dissatis- faction with current writing came, in the first place, from the theatre, which complained of the lack of human conflict in most of the plays submitted to it, and the boredom of having to present, in drama after drama, a stereotype of the heroic shock-worker. But there were also complaints about writers who lived in Moscow and went out to agricultural centres to do their hack assignments. A novel about orgamzmg a kolkhoz! A play on the triumph of a factory fulfilling its quota ! Acceptance of such an attitude to writing, the critics asserted, led to dullness and unreality. And such criticism can be brought to the home ground. To seize on new material and exploit it-tliat is the privilege of journalism. Literature, on the other hand, calls for a different approach. To absorb the new material slowly, with the mind as well as the senses; to get it into perspective; finally to transfigure it-that is the way of art. My experience in the past few months makes me feel that the literary pitfalls and possibilities of new countries and new societies are curiously alike, whatever their ideologies.

W. H. OLIVER The Christchurch Convention on International Relations A Note on the Popular Discussion of Politics in New Zealand

NEW ZEALANDERS, especially the more radical and humanitarian of them, attend conferences, word remits, move and pass resolutions with formidable diligence. Usually they do so within monolithic single-principle associations. An employers' federation finds it easy to pass judgment on an economic issue; its members merely proceed from broad ideological agreement to a verbal and tactical decision. This Convention (which followed the Auckland one of last year) was the reverse of monolithic; its multitude of official delegates and unattached individuals* can be divided into three (overlapping) classes-the fanatics, the idealistic do-gooders, and the ordinary sincere citizens. Such an unlikely combination reached a degree of unanimity which a single-principle group *Forty-three organizations, ranging from the Christian Pacifists to the R.S.A., from the League of Empire Loyalists to the Communist Party, with a full distribution of moderates in between, sent accredited delega- tions. Private individuals made up the three hundred-odd total. In all, there were two hundred and forty-two full members, twenty-five complementary members (e.g. speakers), and thirty part-time members. 338 might envy. The loss that balanced this gain was in emphasis; many findings were unanimous because they lacked teeth; others had meaning and practicability. These latter represent both the usefulness of the Convention and the victory of the sincere citizens; in the end, the fanatics were totally and the idealists partially squeezed out. This victory was won within an intricate and shrewd framework of organization.

The Organizational Framework The convenors, commendably matching zeal with craft, designed a framework likely to encourage friendliness, to elicit common principles, to disarm fanaticism by giving it no more than a safety- valve. Each day had a main topic; each topic was opened up by a long and erudite address; each address was followed by a merci- fully short burst of steam from the fanatics. Information had struck a strong blow at ignorant zeal. In the afternoon, the assembly divided into study groups; each was addressed on a sub- division of the major topic by: .. a minor expert. Here began the of taming the fanatics. Extreme sat down by extreme; both were hemmed in by the ordinary sincere citizenry who had been impressed by the flow of information directed upon them and were beginning to form opinions upon this factual groundwork. Even the fanatics and idealists were conceivably beginning to realize that fact had some bearing upon opinion. Talk took the place of set speeches, thought that of preconceived judgments: Mere proxi- mity inched even the most unwilling towards compromise. (I recall with keen pleasure the spectacle of an R.S.A. delegate, a Christian pacifist and a communist helping each other frame a sentence that would bring them all in. Such an event might mark them all for life, even if their resolution was lost to posterity.) Findings emerged from the group, reluctantly perhaps, and coaxed by midwiving chairmen. Over four days this process snowballed. The voice of reason was faint on the first, strong on the second and third, unchallenged on the fourth, when a new framework was introduced. In the morning of this day the assembly split up into three commissions; each commission welded together the findings from all the study groups on each main topic. Thus dis- tilled, they went to the last refinery-an afternoon meeting of the whole Convention which made the final affirmations. Unanimity prevailed throughout this intricate process; in the study groups, in the commissions, and in the final assembly. This I would call 339 the substance of the Convention; the bread. The circuses were laid on in the evenings.

The Flat Stone Upturn'd The evenings were given over to panel discussions in which a group of experts juggled with questions thrown to them by the study groups. The fanatics from the floor took over when the platform had exhausted the topics. This feature prompted a hostile observer to ask if the convenors had upturned every flat stone in Christchurch. The question was unfair; the little creatures emerged without invitation. But their presence was a sufficiently striking part of the Convention's public showing to merit some comment- comment, in fact, upon the climate of thought in New Zealand. The miasmas did not eddy up from the pit-they erupted. The daily press headlined these splenetic vents. Only two comments are needed. In the first place, many of these diseased limbs were visitors to the Convention and took no part in the daytime working groups. Some of them, the constant bawlers, seem to have strayed from the Lancaster Park embankment; others, with a single idea and a rare chance to use a public address system, came crusading from the hideouts of seamy religion and politics. In the fiecond place, it is well that the mis-emphasis of the press should be corrected; these exhibitions were an insignificant part of the total work of the Convention. The safety-valve continued to fulfil its purpose; the boiler did not burst. If there is a serious criticism to be levelled against the intellectual standing of the Convention, and against a common New Zealand attitude to all questions of morals and politics, it is a much different one.

The Uncritical Itch The Convention suffered, and New Zealand suffers, less from a surfeit of recognizable evil, than from too much uncritical human- itarianism itching for scope to do good. There is a widespread conviction that a damaged world would be repaired if only everyone loved everyone a little more. No doubt this is so, in ultimate terms -but social love, like social security, needs administration; it poses questions of where, how, when and how much. These are knotty questions which are not answered by shouting: 'everywhere, all the time, and everything' -a slogan I recommend to the apostles of brotherhood. Specifically, these criticisms may be illustrated from some discussions about aid to South East Asia. Humanitarians 340 of many kinds rejected the suggestion that New Zealand could with honesty help her neighbours because she knew that distress and illiteracy within their borders would breed communism, because she looked with fear at the prospect of communist neighbours, because (even) she felt that most South East Asians would live happier lives under stable non-communist governments than otherwise. It was asserted that New Zealand could not honourably follow a policy equally based on self-interest and on friendship for others. It was held impossible to combine friendship for a people as they are with apprehension at what they might become. This sort of argument makes so much nonsense of the considerations that always govern the relations between countries, that it can only be called dangerous and destructive in its naivete and self-righteousness. Not a few findings, notably on South East Asia and on the Commonwealth, sprang from such a process of thought. The Convention was simply reflecting a nation-wide intellectual defect. It is an attitude of mind that has so much honest kindliness about it that one takes no delight in trying to kill it. But it is sometimes a duty to recall that abstract idealism in politics is as great an evil as the most corrupt selfishness. To the extent to which information can undermine this idealism, it was undermined at the Convention. The best speeches, however, cannot remedy a defect ingrained in the national consciousness-a failure to look steadily at the realities of politics and behaviour, a failure not (I suspect) unrelated to the fact that conservative social thought has never taken deep root in this country.

The Findings Unanimity was discovered at that elusive point where the minimum demands of extremists coincided with the maximum concessions of moderates. A finding on the revision of the U.N. Charter illustrates this. We urge that a study be made by the U.N., its member governments and peoples, of the areas of sovereignty which it may be necessary to transfer to the U.N. in order to assist in bringing about the control of war and of weapons of mass destruction. Here may be detected the minimum demands of the World Federal- ists and the maximum concessions of the moderates who prefer not to tinker with a machine that is at least not breaking down. In many cases the price of unanimity was lack of emphasis; in others this was not entirely so. 341 On the United Nations, it was laid down that trust territories should be administered as trusts and not annexed by trustees; that the Security Council could be enlarged; that disarmament could start from the prohibition of the manufacture of thermo-nuclear weapons (Foreign Ministers and other anxious enquirers will look in vain for help on the administrative problems of inspection and supervision); that the U.N. would be more effective if the People's Republic of China was represented. The findings on South East Asian affairs roundly condemn 'colonialism' and uphold national- ism and self-determination. They ask New Zealand to put more money into Colombo Plan assistance and to set up a School of Oriental Studies. Great Britain is requested to negotiate rather than demand unconditional surrender in Malaya. At least three of the findings on the Commonwealth of Nations have some immediate point; it is held that New Zealand should make it easy for people of other races to visit and study in this country, and that she should revise her immigration laws to admit a quota of Commonwealth non-Europeans. In Africa, it was urged that the further extension of South African rule should not be allowed as long as that country maintains her present racial policies. Two points of immediate practical utility can be singled out; first, that New Zealanders should add personal affection to public benevolence by being hospitable to Asians brought here under the Colombo Plan; second, that the experts we send to South East Asia under the same plan should be socially and intellectually as well as technically equipped -they should be something more than mere experts, they should know and like the people they work among. This selective summary may be filled out and corrected when the Report of the Convention is published. I would do no more than make the comment that the world would be more pleasant if these suggestions were followed, and pleasanter still if men knew how to go about following them. It is surprising how much history is basically administrative history.

342 P. ]. DOWNEY Documentary Film in New Zealand

FILM production in New Zealand continues to be an enigma. We have been shown many films that have substantial merits in technical craftsmanship; and yet so many of our films, whether produced by the National Film Unit or by private firms, lack the essential element of unity. Sometimes it is a lack of unity of atmosphere, but more often the failure lies in the presentation and development of a theme. In most of the work they produce our film-makers no longer have anything to say that shows sincere feeling or conviction. On the few occasions on which they do express themselves with real sincerity the films that they make are of an extraordinarily high standard and are deserving of thoughtful examination. The history of the New Zealand film industry dates for all practical purposes from the formation of the National Film Unit in 1941. Although part of the general war-time propaganda machine of the state, the Film Unit Weekly Review quickly found itself an authentic New Zealand tone, and consequent widespread popu- larity. Audiences were delighted to see reflected on the screen the face of workmate and acquaintance, and in the background the New Zealand landscape, with its distinctive conjunction of rolling pasture and raw hillside, awoke a faint sense of affectionate fami- liarity. At that time it was only necessary to set the camera rolling and to present whatever was shot in order to gratify the New Zealand audience. Very soon however the Film Unit was producing documentary films of a highly creditable standard. During its fourteen-year life however film-making in New Zealand has failed to achieve stability. Good films continue to be produced only at irregular intervals. These stand out sharply and tend to be over- praised. Among the commercial producers Pacific Films under the guidance and enthusiasm of Roger Mirams and John O'Shea, has built up a clientele of sponsors. Robert Steele in Auckland, and Cinecraft in Wellington produce on a very small scale and have no regular contact with the New Zealand public such as the monthly magazine produced by Pacific Films. In Pacific Magazine many of the items are sponsored by commercial firms or government agencies. A cinema chain provides regular screen time, but no payment is 343 made for the distribution rights. In order to pay for itself Pacific Magazine, which is intended solely for the New Zealand market, must contain a regular dosage of advertising plugs for anything from house-sheathing to fertilizer. While it is comparatively easy to show a flying-boat, clearly labelled TEAL, reopening the air route to Samoa, it is not so easy to provide an excuse for advertising a brand of paint. In cases of real difficulty comedy is relied on. An entertaining example of Pacific Films's ability to handle a comedy situation is provided by the recently released advertising film Cookery Nook. This film contains some slapstick, plenty of local idiom, and two rising stars in the strongly featured tin of a well-known brand of baking powder and the Commercial network's breathlessly exuberant Aunt Daisy. Skilfully photographed and with an entertaining commentary, Cookery Nook is as effective an advertising film as could be made. It has even earned the distinction of being mentioned in cinema advertising as a special short subject. Pacific Films's more recent production Nine Lives, made for the Transport Department, is a neat and clever piece of work. In the past two years this company has produced several long films including The Link, a big tourist film made for TEAL; Dances of the South Pacific, an interesting and exciting piece of film editing; and Carpet of Grass, a sincere tribute to the life work of Sir Bruce Levy. This latter film is rather long and occasionally disjointed, but it remains in the memory because of the beautiful composition of many of its shots. The commentary however is unsatisfactory. It has a tendency to be technical and didactic. It tries to impress with statistics instead of relying on the use of a simple adjective. The casual audience will accept a statement that a large amount of superphosphate can be sown by one aeroplane; but ratios of tonnage to acreage to time mean very little to the urban ear. A more serious fault with the sound track is the use of several commentators. There is often no vital shift of point of view in the film when the voice change is made, and consequently the commentary proves to be a distraction. Carpet of Grass is an interesting example of the strengths and weaknesses of present New Zealand film production. As long as the film-makers concentrate their attention on delineating the face of the land they produce work that is beautiful and satisfying. Once they move out of this simple visual sphere however, and attempt to construct a film around a theme there are difficulties, hesitations, and contradictions. As far as the National Film Unit is concerned this can be partly explained by the fact that even 344 now after fourteen years there are no script-writers on its staff. Generally speaking the producer, andjor the director, is responsible for the preliminary treatment, for the shooting script, and for the final commentary. Professional writers could be expected to provide more suitable dramatic mechanisms, and to give more adequate expression to many of the themes the films are endeavouring to develop. Our present film-makers, through the excellence of their camera-work, can easily be led into a lyrical admiration of the New Zealand scene. But the films they produce contain mere snatches of song with no consistent line of development. Such a broad generalization about the disappointing standard of locally produced films must of course be qualified in face of the fact that a number of excellent films have issued from the Miramar studios of the National Film Unit. The most outstanding of those produced in the recent past are Pumice Lands and Hot Earth. Although, in line with the Unit's usual policy, no credit titles are provided it is generally known that these films are the work of John Feeney. They clearly establish him as a talented director of documentary film. Pumice Lands and Hot Earth show that he has mastered both forms of the documentary film established in England in the 193o's. The political and social implications of Pumice Lands would delight Paul Rotha; and Hot Earth has a poetic atmosphere which recalls the best work of Basil Wright. Both of these films serve as excellent illustrations of John Crier- son's classic definition of documentary film as the creative treatment of actuality. Pumice Lands is notable for the sincerity with which it has been conceived and for the magnificent manner in which it has been presented. The story of the breaking in of the pumice land in the black heart of the North Island is one that could have been made into a pretentious and clumsy film. The treatment of the timber forests in No Random Harvest, made about the same time, gives some indication of how easy it would have been to have spoilt the subject. Feeney has avoided the stereotyped approach however without losing a natural directness. The strength of the film lies in the firmness of the directing and the effectiveness of the editing. There is no waste footage, for each sequence adds something specific to the fulfilment of the whole. The cutting is varied to fit the tempo of a sequence, being sharply dramatic in the scenes showing the breaking in of the land, and steady and measured in that showing a meeting of the Lands Settlement Board. Each shot has been selected with obvious care as to its effectiveness in filling out the general pattern. There are many beautifully com- 345 posed shots, but the camera never lingers on them unnecessarily long. Nothing is allowed to detract from the unity of the whole work. It is unfortunate therefore that the music chosen to accom- pany the film should tend to be melodramatic;· but this is a slight flaw in an otherwise fine film which tells a story of social achievement with restraint and quiet pride. The second of John Feeney's films, Hot Earth, has as its subject the volcanic line running from White Island to Ngauruhoe. Feeney has ignored the scientific and instructional possibilities offered by this geological feature. He has instead approached it in an attitude of fascinated wonder. Thus for a large part of the running time the screen is filled with natural patterns produced by floating bubbles, boiling and spouting soda waters, belching mud pools, and the continuous wash of shallow water over corrugations of glistening silica deposits. Through the use of these natural forms Feeney has produced an animated expressionism that recalls the work of Norman McLaren for the National Film Board of Canada. By virtue of its sophisticated but poetic vision Hot Earth conveys a sense of the mystery of the forces of nature. That such a film could be made in New Zealand under the auspices of a government department is as surprising as it is impressive. These two films of John Feeney illustrate the old adage that well made articles are the best publicity. Their success should encourage the Film Unit to experiment further, and to adopt a more independent attitude to control from the Tourist and Publicity Department. The quality of tourist films, those produced solely to glamourize the country, varies a great deal. Films such as Taranaki and Waka- tipu, both in Kodachrome, have little to recommend them apart from a few carefully selected picture postcard scenes. Egmont and the lake are carefully posed at their photogenic best, and the remainder of the footage consists of a series of animated snapshots which have very little relationship to one another. The peculiarly episodic nature of these films appears to be endemic in the work of the Film Unit. It can be seen in such films as that about Massey Agricultural College, Graduate Harvest, and in the more recent but equally unsatisfactory People of the Waikato. These films all lack a coherent centre and consequently tend to rely for their appeal on the technical ingenuity of the cameraman. Some attempt is usually made to cover faulty editing and lack of development by a verbose script, but this serves only to make the films more unsatisfactory. Too many New Zealand films are not well articu- lated, and equally unfortunately they are not inarticulate. The essential unity of a film must be visual, it cannot be imposed on 346 the material by such incidentals as music or commentary, even when these are, taken in themselves, of the highest standard. The question of film music is of course a vexed one. The per- sistent reliance on canned music must have a bad effect on New Zealand films. The film-makers will be in danger of growing into the sterile habit of regarding film-music not only as the mere adjunct which it is, but as having no real value in the making of a successfully complete film. Reasonably appropriate mood music will not always be available to fit a particular film no matter how voluminous the record library of background movie music. The provision of music is not something that can be left, like the pro- cessing of the film stock, to technicians. The problem raised by the relationship between the screen image and the accompanying sound track is found in a most acute form in Brian Brake's beautiful film The Snows of Aorangi. This is a film that was edited with the specific intention of cutting it to fit the sound track. It is in fact a fantasia on music of D'Indy and verses by James Baxter. A state of tension is thus developed· between the visual and the aural elements in the film, and for all his ingenuity Brake has failed to produce a true synthesis. The film should have been about either the emotional and symbolic value of the }Jps, or the sport of skiing, or it should have been a visual variation on a musical theme. Unhappily it is each of these things in turn, as well as being a tourist plug for the snowfields and for the golden glory of Queenstown in the autumn. Taken in its parts the film is magnificent; but taken as a whole it fails to satisfy, though it certainly does not fail to impress. Quite apart from these technical criticisms the film does have an extraordinary lapse. Right in the middle there is an abrupt and wholly unreasonable shift from the slopes of Mt Cook to the snowfields of Mt Ruapehu, and then just as abruptly the scene returns to Mt Cook. This peculiarity, and the unseasonable introduction of the autumn tones of Queenstown, makes one suspect the finger, or more appropriately the heavy hand, of the Tourist and Publicity Department. For all its beauty The Snows of Aorangi is not as successful a film as The Snowline is their Boundary, produced by Oxley Hughan. This is a film that cannot be praised too highly. More leisurely in mood and more spacious i'l manner than Pumice Lands of John Feeney, this film has a distinctive feeling for the land. Treating simply and faithfully of sheep-farming in the Rakaia district the film can afford to linger over the many beautiful shots of mountain, valley, and rolling foothills which the cameras have 347 caught. The total effect of the film shcws an affection for, and an appreciation of, this particular part of the country. There are no false notes struck and no false values suggested. The film is concerned with the land, the people, and their way of life, and it is satisfied to show them as they are. The Snowline is their Boundary is a film that sings with a genuine feeling for the New Zealand landscape reminiscent of the sense of delight in his South African homeland that inspired the more lyrical descriptive passages of Alan Paton in Cry the Beloved Country. The film is so consistent in temper that it catches up the imperfections of a sometimes un- skilful commentary and occasionally obtrusive music, and carries them along with it so that they are hardly noticed. The present state of film-making in New Zealand (both for the Film Unit and the private producers) is apparently doomed to be one of continuing uncertainty.* It is impossible to tell whether Pumice Lands, Hot Earth, The Snows of Aorangi, and The Snowline is their Boundary indicate a developing maturity, or whether they · are accidents jammed in between the production of trivia for the monthly Pictorial Parade. The items that go into the Pictorial Parade are selected apparently on the basis of government policy or of novelty value. Recent issues of the Parade deal with such subjects as the need for dentists, the need to conserve electric power, naval exercises in Cook Strait, canoe racing, Judo exercises, and the inevitable trip to the Zoo. These pieces are always well photographed, and the commentaries are usually, though not always, adequate and well-spoken. Pictorial Parade illustrates the great danger and temptation facing New Zealand film-makers, the tendency to produce films that are disjointed and fragmentary. As long as they can avoid this fault and concentrate on depicting the face of the land the New Zealand film producers have shown that they can make documentary films equal to the best that are being produced overseas. *There has been no attempt made to reorganize the film industry on the lines suggested by Mr Robert Allender in his article 'Disordered Cinema' in Landfall 20, December 1951. All film work in New Zealand continues on a hand to mouth basis. FREDERICK PAGE Intimate Opera

A NEW group calling itself the New Zealand Opera Society put on two one-act operas in Wellington in the last week of September. The operas were Menotti's The Medium and Wolf-Ferrari's Susanna's Secret. Bruce Mason produced, James Robertson con- ducted, sets were designed by Raymond Boyce and John Fyson, singing and playing were on a professional level. This professional approach put the group on another level from that of the various amateur groups that have worked in this field of intimate opera. As these have been fairly active over the last seven years they are worth a mention here. Landfall has already noted the performance of Dido and Aeneas in Dunedin. Unity Theatre in Wellington put on The Beggars' Opera in 1951; it was poorly sung and produced; trulls appeared in Kate Greenaway cos- tumes and looked like Sunday-school teachers from Lower Hutt. (I doubt whether this lubricious touch was intended.) At a Cam- bridge Summer School, some seven years ago, Owen Jensen produced Vaughan-Williams's Riders to the Sea. This was run up from nothing, black curtains, a kitchen chair, red paper over a globe to suggest a hearth-fire, but Mr Jensen had trained a fine small chorus to sing off-stage and had the flair to find Bertha Raw- linson for the part of the old peasant woman. Such was the imagination brought to this production by Mr Jensen that it resulted in one of the most moving performances of a piece of music that I have ever heard in my life. It was a pleasure later to tell Vaughan-Williams himself of this. Riders to the Sea with Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona went on tour in the Auckland area. Layton Ring produced the Pergolesi, very skilfully I am told. By now Donald Munro had been enlisted as a singer, and Menotti's The Telephone was added to these Auckland productions. In 1954 La Serva Padrona and The Telephone were brought to Wellington. Menotti's one-acter, produced by David Galbraith, was brilliantly done. The decor was run up from bits of lath and string, a borrowed lamp, a couch bought in Molesworth St for £1, the singers slipped into their parts as though they had been created for them, and a few enthusiasts went night after night to applaud a little masterpiece. I saw three productions by the London Opera Group in London 349 in I950, Milhaud's Le Pauvre Matelot, Donizetti's Il Campanello, Alessandro Scarlatti's Virtue Triumphant; they were in no way better sung or better produced than this modest production in Wellington. And one would have expected the Concert Chamber to have been booked out for its short run. One would have thought that the Thespians, the Repertorians, the Unitarians, the various Kunstfreunde of our community would have turned out, and perhaps have learned something of the way music can make clear the emotional impact of a situation in a play-even so slight a play as The Telephone, and that from this our producers might have learned how to make words tell. Alas, the season was a financial flop. This year, a New Zealand Opera Society has been formed; its intention is to work with Mr Munro's group of players, or any other group it can find, so that two or three small-scale productions of opera will be put on each year. Meantime Mr Munro took the Menotti and the Wolf-Ferrari, the latter ably produced by Raydia Farquhar, through the Wellington province; and Mr Mason came to light with an operetta of his own, The Licensed Victualler. This was an amusing skit on women's institutes in our small country towns; we were shown the women running their men-folk, com- peting for the best home-made peg-bag, for the flower of the month and so on. Mr Mason has a naughty touch for our little foibles. The music was light, with a good opening chorus of women, knit- ting and clacking away to nonsense syllables, and had Mr Mason kept this up he would have written something quite lively. As it was, the music fell away, as though he did not trust his own skill; but the work has had three performances about Wellington and Mr Mason may have started something. But to come back to Susanna's Secret and The Medium. It was a pleasure to hear Mr Robertson on his own ground, his handling of Wolf-Ferrari's pretty score, his coaxing of the singers, Donald Munro and Raewyn Lamb, in this charming little piece, in which Ferrari wrote the tunes and Wolf the orchestration. As for The Medium, one can only say that from her performance Bertha Raw- linson must be ranked as the finest actress in New Zealand; and that one wishes Menotti could have seen it; she has a true voice for Menotti's music, haunting and compelling. She has too the lucky gift of intuitive movement on a stage, she can suggest the years in the dreadful Baba's life beyond the immediate moment. It will not be possible to forget her breakdown into terrified laughter, her final question to the mute boy, 'Was it you?' Two other singers, Alice Graham and Jill Evarts, got exactly the right quality of 350 Menotti's sound. It is important that our singers extend their range beyond the annual oratorio and the microphoned art-song. With this company they have shown that they can grasp the chance.

REVIEWS

THE JOURNAL OF KATHERINE MANSFIELD. Edited by John Middleton Murry. Definitive edition. Constable. 30s. IN 1927, four years after her death, Mr Middleton Murry gave the world the Journal of Katherine Mansfleld, a short book which had evidently been edited with considerable art; and for twenty-five years or so the world has been familiar with the delicate ethereal figure there presented to the mind: a sort of literary equivalent, one might say, of some sculptured female nude from a master hand, small and demure in scale, in the form of the flesh, but pre- eminently spiritual in character. 'Her perfectly lovely mind', wrote H. G. Wells of one of Katherine Mansfield's posthumous works, 'has rendered one whole day beautiful for me.' Now we have the 'definitive', or unabridged, edition of the journal, a much larger book which fills in all the gaps made by deliber- ate omission in 1927. Its publication been a strange experience. It is as if our sculptured figure, whose spiritual beauty has long sirice been accepted as an enduring memorial to its dead creator, had been visited in the night and subtly altered, by the original artist. We cannot deny the changes; they are incontestably authentic, and they belong. But where, before, all was spirit, suddenly an animal touch has appeared. The lips, by some scarcely per- ceptible change, have acquired a trace of malice; the hands are more like human hands; infinite patience of suffering has been replaced by something more human, too; there is even a hint of sensuality. Which of the two books, then, will in future be regarded as the Journal of Katherine Mansfleld? Which one is 'true'? For my part I think Mr Murry has made an artistic error in assembling this fuller version, which even includes scraps of his wife's conversation from his own notebooks. Concerned, perhaps, with Katherine Mans- field's own passionate desire to tell the truth, he seems to have overlooked the role played in the processes of self-knowledge by the blessed human gift of forgetfulness. In life, we enjoy a freedom to obliterate from the mind some of our own excesses. The memory records, but it also edits, and the printed image of ourselves that 351 we try to live by is subject to constant correction; in pursuit of the ideal, we vary the inking so that sometimes the type is faint, sometimes bold. In the 'definitive' edition of Katherine Mansfield's journal all is recorded with unvarying emphasis. In the earlier version there was selection. True, it was not Katherine Mansfield's selection but that of her husband, but it was better than none at all (I speak of course from the artistic point of view, not the biographical). And we are not without clues to the kind of selection she might have made herself. If the journal endures as a work of literary art, I think it will be in reprints of the 1927 edition, with its fixed-up ending, 'All is well'. Perhaps I should add that very little in the new edition was completely new to me. As an exception, there is the revelation of the intensely physical revulsion Harold Beauchamp engendered in his daughter, with his 'hairy hands', etc. The fragments of a notebook quoted by William Orton in The Last Romantic have been in- serted, various pieces formerly allocated to the Scrapbook have been put in, and the Francis Carco episode of 1915 is filled out. The Maori words and place names in the section describing the caravan journey across the North Island have been checked, with help from New Zealand. Antony Alpers

THE VOYAGE OF THE ASTROLABE-1840. An English Rendering of the journals of Dumont d'Urville and his Officers of their visit to New Zealand in 1840, together with some account of Bishop Pompallier and Charles, Baron de Thierry. Olive Wright. A. H. & A. W. Reed. 30s. THE content of this volume is adequately described in its subtitle. Although coming from a different press and publisher, it appears as a companion volume to New Zealand r826-r827 which was published in 1950. Many of us New Zealanders lack the interest and the time to turn to the original French as contained in the ten volumes of d'Urville's Voyage au Pole Sud, et dans l'Oceanie and available only in specialist libraries such as the Turnbull and the Hocken, and therefore we should be grateful to Miss Wright for her highly competent English translation of the sections of the french visitors' journals of 1840 which deal with New Zealand. Miss Wright's ability to produce a reliable and entertaining translation of d'Urville's journal, supplemented by a biographical essay and useful historical notes, was amply demonstrated in 1950. It will be sufficiently high praise for her latest venture to say that it com- pares very favourably with her earlier work. If the comments made by the distinguished French navigators and scientists in 1840 lack the freshness of approach that char- 352 acterized some of their observations in 1827, this is compensated for by their having a basis of comparison unusual among early visitors, apart from James Cook. D'Urville and his officers are united in decrying the moral degradation of the Maoris. M. Dubouzet, for instance, contended that formerly the chiefs offered only their slaves as prostitutes to the European sailors but in 1840 'we had occasion to observe how rapid had been the process of degradation in this respect, for the majority of the natives now offered their wives and daughters, gambling on the passions of the sailors who man the whaling vessels'. In some of the comments made by these observant Frenchmen there is much sense but, in others, there is more than a trace of anti-English feeling. They were obviously somewhat chagrined to find that Captain Hobson had proceeded with 'his so-called annexation'. As d'Urville had no official instructions on how to act in these circumstances, he declined to recognize Hobson as the Governor of New Zealand until France had acknowledged the legality of the English rule. But the severest criticisms were reserved for the English missionaries. Again and again, the Protestant missionaries are charged with land-grabbing, with stirring up hatred against the French, and with being self-seeking tradesmen, whereas 'the first concern of our missionaries among the New Zealanders has been to relieve their poverty and clothe their nakedness'. These criticisms are interesting, both for the modicum of truth they contain and as revealing the outlook of the educated Frenchmen of the day. As a report on Maori culture, d'Urville's journal of 1840 is obviously not so valuable as was his 1827 diary. In 1840, both d'Urville and his senior officers were too interested in describing the effect of European influences and English annexation to be very concerned about the material culture or social customs of the Maori. Miss Wright's two chapters on the two Frenchmen of note who were living in New Zealand in 1840 are based on the most reliable general source material on both Pompallier and de Thierry. The Bishop's own writings are quoted extensively and he is shown to have been more keenly interested in spreading the Gospel than in the political intrigues of which he was suspected. De Thierry is found to be 'a pretentious dreamer' whom it is difficult to take seriously. Miss Wright is apparently not acquainted with the articles in the Bulletin de la Societe D'Etudes Oceaniennes nor with Check to Your King by Robin Hyde. Actually, neither of these chapters tells us very much that is new, and they would appear to have been included mainly to add bulk to the book and thus make it resemble its earlier companion volume in size. This conclusion is perhaps confirmed by the concluding chapter on the Bay of Islands which is made up of a series of extracts from contemporary sources. Publication of the rather pathetic letters from the 353 sick Hobson to his wife would also appear to have little justifica- tion in this work. The notes added by Miss Wright as editor as well as translator of the French journals are normally useful and informative. Per- haps a second edition could correct one or two minor mistakes. For example, in commenting on d'Urville's passing reference to what he had been told about 'natives from Dusky Bay' who 'two months before we came' had massacred the Maoris at Akaroa, Miss Wright states that it must be assumed that the reference is to the raids from Cloudy Bay and that this assumption is supported by the more detailed reference of another French officer, Montravel, to the 'disgraceful bargain with an English captain'. So far so good! But she then proceeds-possibly in her enthusiasm to show that her hero was not entirely mistaken-to say 'the passage remains unsatisfactory, unless a second error be assumed and d'Urville's two months be changed to two years. The last of the expeditions connected with Te Rauparaha and Captain Stewart took place in 1838.' In fact, Captain Stewart and the brig Elizabeth paid their last visit to Akaroa in 1830. When, in January 1831, the government in Sydney took depositions concerning this unsavoury affair, Stewart departed quickly for South America and was later reported to have been drowned off Cape Horn. Another mistaken date is the 1829 given by Miss Wright or her printer for the census of white persons taken by the Rev. Henry Williams. This mistake is more important than may at first appear, as it could add fuel to a minor controversy concerning the size of the European population in New Zealand in the third decade of the last century. Several well-known writers have grossly exaggerated the size of that population, and it would be a pity if this mistake were allowed to add weight to their claims. It is note- worthy that in neither of these cases does Miss Wright attempt to document her statements. In fact, the census estimate prepared by Henry Williams is contained in a manuscript letter of date 11 January 1839, which is in the Hocken Library, Dunedin. No doubt the Turnbull has a typed copy of this important letter and this may justify Miss Wright's final bibliographical note 'All the source material referred to in this book is to be found in the Alexander Turnbull Library'. But, if this is SO, why does Miss Wright elsewhere refer to her indebtedness to the staff of the Dominion Archives? Angus Ross

354 SCIENCE AND CIVILISATION IN CHINA. Volume One: Introductory Orientations. Joseph Needham (with the research assistance of Wang Ling). Cambridge University Press. 52s. 6d. CHINA PHOENIX: The Revolution in China. Peter Townsend. ]ana- than Cape. 25s. CHINA AND THE COLD WAR. Michael Lindsay. Melbourne University Press. 21s. THE PEOPLE HAVE STRENGTH. Rewi Alley. Published by the author, Peking. 1954. IMPERIALISM AND CHINESE POLITICS. Hu Sheng. Foreign Languages Press, Peking. 1955. THE HURRICANE. Chou Li-po. Foreign Languages Press, Peking. 1955. AN IMAGE of China haunts all our minds today. The image, Protean as any Arabian jinnee, may resemble the good and kindly giant of Rewi Alley and Chou Li-po, or the feeble-witted giant who has appeared to Lord Lindsay in an academic nightmare, more fright- ening than any cold-blooded power-seekers in the Kremlin or the Pentagon. The image-for it has a venerable ancestry-may keep something of the colours of Mr Peter Townsend's flashing phoenix, or the natural force of Dr Needham's Mysterious Commander of the Thunder and Lightning. However seen, it is in violent motion, displacing that hermit sage or contemplative lohan who once so comfortably represented past cycles of Cathay. With this new dynamic China, we are all uneasily aware, we must somehow come to terms. But who is to be our interpreter? Who, for that matter, is to perform the essential introduction? The six books listed above-by a convenient accident, three of them come from Western presses, and three from Peking-all make their contribution, however unequal in value, to our under- standing of contemporary China. Far and away the most important, is the first volume of Dr Joseph Needham's pioneer work on Science and Civilisation in China. Here, for once, it is hard for any reviewer to resist hyperbole : for in what other terms can he greet a scholarly treatment of one of the great cardinal subjects hitherto unexplored by historians of East and West alike? Especially when it appears, as this does, in the shape of one of the handsomest books ever to come from a home of fine printing. Dr Needham's first volume is only a preliminary survey of an immense field of human discovery and influence; but the six volumes to follow- already written, their range and scope listed in detail in a table of contents filling more than twenty pages-should convince the most sceptical that this is an achievement on the heroic scale. No library of any serious pretensions (and there should be at least a dozen of these in New Zealand) can afford to be without the complete work; the first volume, which contains the best general introduction to China ever assembled between two covers, has a much 355 wider reference range, and should certainly be ordered while it is still available. The peculiar value of this work may be briefly indicated. Science and technology are universal and international in a way that religious, philosophical and political concepts and practices can perhaps never be. The debt of the West to the East in the fields of religion and art has never been under-estimated; but it has very commonly been assumed that in the field of theoretical or applied science, Europe and the Mediterranean have always led. So Toyn- bee: 'There is no doubt that a mechanical penchant is as characteristic of the Western civilisation as an aesthetic penchant was of the Hellenic, or a religious penchant was of the Indic and the Hindu.' 'It is to be feared', Dr Needham comments with deadly mildness, 'that all such valuations of East and West are built on insecure foundations.' He lists for us, in tables any school- boy could follow with ease, some Chinese inventions that did not reach the West until after a time-lag of several centuries. These include-in addition to such relatively familiar examples as the magnetic compass, porcelain, paper and printing, and gunpowder -items that might impress an American engineer : the use of cast iron, the iron-chain suspension bridge, the technique of drilling deep bore-holes, all in evidence in China a thousand years before their appearance in Europe. The blackboard demonstration is as simple as the patient checking of original sources must have been laborious. Altogether, Dr Needham proves convincingly that, until the great forward movement given to science in Europe after the sixteenth century, Asia was far ahead of Europe both in scientific knowledge and practice. The great historical problem-why the East, with such an enormous advantage over the West until late medieval times, should have failed to systematize and carry forward the development of science and technology that has transformed the modern world-is presumably discussed in detail in later volumes. Now if all this material had been brought forward in a con- troversial manner by some Asian antiquarian or Communist apologist seeking to discredit the anginal scientific achievement of the West, it might well have done more harm than good. But it is the great distinction of Dr Needham's work that it has been conceived and executed in the most catholic spirit of humane learning. He himself terms it no more than a 'reconnaissance' : but the necessary equipment for such a survey is very rarely combined in any single individual-who must obviously be, as he points out, a professional scientist (preferably qualified by original research work) familiar with the social and economic background of Euro- pean science, but also with knowledge of the Chinese language, with first-hand experience of Chinese life and conditions, and able to count on the guidance and assistance of a wide range of Chinese scientists and scholars. This combination in Dr Needham's own 356 case has produced not merely a work of precise and beautifully documented erudition, but a highly personal book of great candour and readability. That the material of the whole survey should never before have been put together in any language is, of course, its primary and unique recommendation. But the tone of the writing-brisk or discursive by turns, generously appreciative of earlier research but always alertly critical, urbane, undogmatic, modestly assured-is Dr Needham's personal contribution, and his passport with every reader who turns his pages. It should be made clear that this first volume of 'Orientations' is virtually complete in itself. It contains, in addition to a plan of the work and a Gibbonian account of its inception and carrying forward over many years, a remarkably lucid note on the Chinese language; two brilliantly compressed introductions, geographical and historical, which are more up-to-date than anything else of their kind; and a long chapter on 'Conditions of Travel of Scientific Ideas and Techniques between China and Europe' which is of quite absorbing interest. There are elaborate bibliographies both of the original sources and of studies in Western languages; illustrations and maps are of the highest standard. Resisting the temptation to illustrate the fascinating and often (in a 'Kubla Khan' sense) wildly romantic detail of this book, I enter only a faint protest at Dr Needham's chosen form of transliteration of some Chinese names, and at his rather too flattering verdict on W ang An-shih. Tshao Tshao (for Ts'ao Ts'ao) has a curiously drunken air; and not even a preference for science subjects to literary ones in public examin- ations can commend to us the rigorous prosecutor of the pao chia system. From the Pisgah-sights of Dr Needham, we descend abruptly to the candid-camera of the contemporary reporter. But Mr Peter Townsend's China Phoenix has more value than many tidier and more skilfully-written interpretations of China in her latest phase. This is no 'slanted' commentary on a whirlwind tour, but the patently honest account of a young Englishman who spent more than ten years in China from 1941, working with the Chinese In- dustrial Co-operatives, and living in closer contact than most foreigners with ordinary Chinese. When he describes rural and industrial conditions, and how these have been affected since 1949, Mr Townsend writes with competence and first-rate authority: these parts of his book must command expert attention everywhere. Inevitably, however, he tries to fill in the military, political and social background of the Chinese Revolution, with the result that his book sprawls unevenly, and only a careful reading will distinguish those chapters where he has new facts and fresh personal observations to put forward. Particularly useful are his accounts of the crossing of the Yangtse by the Communist forces, and of the occupation of Shanghai; his examination of land distribution and 'mutual aid' among the peasants; and his pictures 357 of ordinary life in Peking after the establishment of the People's Government. For the general reader who wants a comprehensive account of what has happened in China since the war years, and of why it has happened, this book may be recommended as the best in the field-with the reservation that some chapters are marred by sketchy and superficial treatment, and the arrangement is anything but systematic. On balance, this is a favourable and optimistic account of the latest phase of the Chinese revolution, presented with a studied moderateness of statement from a liberal rather than a partisan point of view. Michael Lindsay is a liberal of a less accommodating sort. Our own age has long ceased to be astonished by abrupt changes of political outlook, and the confessional urge that seems to accom- pany them. But Lord Lindsay has evolved a mode of political dis- enchantment that is peculiarly his own. To those already familiar with his long attachment to China, his co-operation with the Chinese guerrillas against the Japanese, and his defence of the Chinese Communists against misrepresentation during the post- war years, it must seem disconcerting to find him now one of the sternest critics of recent Chinese conduct, crying doom from Can- berra in the accents of an Old Testament prophet. Lord Lindsay's chief charge against the Chinese leaders is not of bad faith, but of criminal ignorance and 'irrationality'. The result of all this is the most Confucian book ever written about China by a foreigner. China and the Cold War-the book is unlucky in its timing, and its title-began as the sequel to a long-range correspondence with Rewi Alley about the Peking Peace Conference of 1952. Under- standably annoyed about his failure to secure a public hearing in Peking for criticism of those Chinese attitudes he regarded as hardly conducive to world peace, Lord Lindsay embarked upon a minute analysis of the ineptitudes of Chinese international policy since 1949. Few national policies will emerge unscathed from such scrutiny: because he is a fair-minded man, Lord Lindsay is just as acid about American blunders and British weakness as he is about Chinese inflexibility. In his elaborate analysis of the nature and philosophy of Chinese Communism, he cannot conceal his disappointment that the leaders he knew as political pragmatists occasionally ready to compromise should have turned into dog- matic Marxists and uncritical supporters of the Soviet Union. But what revolutionary party is not changed by its accession to power? And what option, in foreign policy, had the Chinese been left·? The most valuable parts of Lord Lindsay's book will be found in some scattered points of historical detail, usually contained in flashbacks to personal wartime experiences, or in footnotes less bedevilled by a general theory than his text : these points are often fresh and illuminating, and are always well documented. If academic hair-splitting may offend, one must similarly regret the harshly propagandist tone that mars Rewi Alley's The People 358 Have Strength. Indignation at the evils of the old regime in China, or at the suffering of Korean civilians, may find expression naturally enough in a private diary; but when that diary is edited for readers abroad, some concessions should surely be made in favour of objectivity. Many people who might be prepared to follow with interest Rewi Alley's account of his travels from his old training- school at Sandan through Peking, Shanghai, Hankow, Canton, the Huai River, Mukden, will be put off this book by the rather irritable political exhortation that accompanies an unpretentious description of things seen, heard, and felt in China from 1951 to 1954. That is a pity, for there is here all the raw material for a splendid panorama of New China at work, interpreted by an observer whose strong social sympathies are apparent in everything he writes. It remains raw material; this diary is shapeless, and never becomes a book. Hu Sheng's study of Western imperialism in China from 1840 to 1924 is of considerable interest, ac; a specimen of the sort of text from which the Chinese student nowadays reads history. The outline is familiar enough, and no events are seriously distorted; but the emphasis is characteristically Chinese, and movements like the T'aip'ing revolt, or the Yi Ho Tuan ('Boxer') rising, look very different analysed in domestic terms against the background of an alien dynasty. There are some slashing portraits of leading figures: foreign favourites such as the 'Old Buddha' and Sir Robert Hart are roughly handled; so too are Chinese generals and officials of the Manchu court. Less excusable is the animus against such 'bour- geois' Chinese reformers as K'ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (and even Sun Yat-sen); and the spint which omits the-names of Chen Tu-hsiu from the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, and Hu Shih from an account of the May Fourth movement, is very different from the spirit in which Dr Needham writes. The vocabulary of this work is relentlessly Marxist, and very tedious. Chou Li-po's novel, The Hurricane, is a story of land reform in a Manchurian village in 1946. This translation is equally ill-adapted for foreign readers ('I'm a big bad egg', says a scoundrelly land- lord confessing in a public meeting. 'I've done lots of bad things because of this bad puppet-style brain of mine.') Yet the novel- which is a leisurely piece of 'social realism' in the manner of Sholokhov-is not unimpressive in its cumulative detail : it is like an infinite expansion, in the human terms of rural comedy, of one of Mr Townsend's condensed factual chapters. Anyone who per- severes to the end will find that he really knows what Chinese land reform was like in practice. The book is well produced and printed, and illustrated with charming lively little woodcuts by Ku Yuan. ]ames Bertram

359 CORRESPONDENCE

To THE EDITOR SIR: Sir Howard Kippenberger's recent letter on Documents in- creases rather than resolves the confusion over some points. There is the problem of gaps in documentation for instance. He originally stated: 'all important messages relevant to the different topics are included; those omitted are of a trivial or personal nature. There has been no censorship.' Last March he said I had 'detected some gaps in ... documentation of the furlough scheme discussions .... The missing cables ... are not to be found .... we should have provided an editorial explanation in footnotes or a supplementary report ... The omission to do this was an oversight we regret.' But in September he said: 'There is no necessity for ... anyone ... to become disturbed about gaps in the documentation of the Furlough Scheme .... I am not going to be goaded into saying what was omitted from the message of 28 September 1943 .... the Fur- lough Scheme . . . was not abandoned, became the Replacement Scheme, and is adequately covered in Volume II.' (See preface in Documents, I, and the relevant issues of Landfall for the full text of these statements.) I repeat that the reasons for the high-level policy change- from furlough to replacement for long service men-are not adequately documented. It is interesting to note that a message sent by the Prime Minister of New Zealand on 28 September 1943 to the GOC 2 NZEF, discussing 'the return of the first furlough draft to the Middle East' is, in the opinion of the Editor-in-Chief, 'of no public interest'. Sir Howard Kippenberger uses the words: 'what Mrs Ross calls "the Court of Inquiry faced by General Freyberg" .' I remind readers that my authority is General Freyberg, who said: 'After two months of heavy fighting, on arriving in Egypt on June 2, I found myself facing a court of inquiry. The court was a British court, assembled by the Commander-in-Chief, Middle East.' Sir Howard Kippenberger's opinion that the report and proceed- ings of this inquiry 'have nothing to do with policy and precious little historical value' must be weighed against the opinion of the person most directly concerned in the inquiry, and most deeply concerned in matters of policy-the GOC 2 NZEF. Lord Freyberg said: They [the court] upheld my action. The complaint against me was that I stayed with the rearguard instead of going back to the beaches to organize the defence. My position was that I had my Division together for the first time. We had not even had a signal exercise because our signals had been separated from us. In the state they were in I thought it would be better to stay 360 with the rearguard and be certain we got them back, rather than go back and find nobody coming back to me. The court upheld my action and gave me an unsolicited testimonial. I tell your Lordships this because I want you to realize that ... my Prime Minister was dissatisfied with the way the New Zealand Forces were being integrated into the Army in the Middle East. (See the House of Lords' Hansard, April 1953, for the full text of Lord Freyberg's speech. This speech made public for the first time: (1) that Freyberg had faced a Court of Inquiry after Greece; (2) what had prompted the inquiry; and (3) Fraser's immediate re- actions.) If my original review and the subsequent correspondence have achieved nothing else, historians now know how four of the original documents were paraphrased. It is to be hoped that the instruction issued by the United Kingdom Cypher Policy Board covers all messages between the New Zealand Government and other governments, and between the New Zealand Government and the GOC 2 NZEF, and not just the four quoted by Sir Howard Kippenberger, and that the documents dealing with the Pacific theatre, to be published in Volume III, will appear unparaphrased. In submitting a review of the first two volumes of Documents, after they had remained unnoticed in Landfall for nearly three years after the publication of Volume II, it was not my intention to 'goad' Sir Howard Kippenberger into anything. But I would have welcomed, and I said so, a precise 'definition of the Editor-in- Chief's views and policy on the functions, limitations and editing of official documents'. In the continued obscurity of the editorial policy which directed the preparation of these volumes, I see no point in discussing the matter further. R. M. Ross

NEW CONTRIBUTORS Antony Alpers. Born in Christchurch 1919, educated at Christ's College. The Press, Christchurch, 1936-41; N.Z. Listener, 1942-7; England (research- ing for biography of Katherine Mansfield), 1947-51; Auckland Star, 1952-. Married, with one son. Les Cleveland. Born in Adelaide 1921, went to school and university in N.Z., and fought in the 2 NZEF. Has worked as newspaper reporter, motor mechanic, bushman. Mountaineering led him to Westland, and as a photo- grapher he has been collecting material about West Coast life, especially remains of the early days. Maurice Shadbolt. Born in Auckland 1932, has lived much in the King Country. Attended Auckland University College, then worked in a variety of labouring jobs, as a reporter, and as editor of a small country newspaper. Now employed on production staff of N.Z. National Film Unit. Has written and directed short films. A novel nearing completion. 36! PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED Greek Vases in the Otago Museum. J. K. Anderson. Otago Museum Hand- book No. 2. Dunedin, Otago Museum. 6s. 6d. Traveller's Litany. James K. Baxter. Cast on the Doting Sea. Robert Thomp- son. The Dark Glass. Louis Johnson. The Gay Trapeze. Kendrick Smithy- man. Poems in Doggerel. W. Hart-Smith. The Islands where I was born. Gloria Rawlinson. Poems in Pamphlet. The Handcraft Press. 2s. each. Overtime. A comedy drama in three acts. Claude Evans. The Pegasus Press. 10s. 6d. The Secret Parables. Dora Hagemeyer. The Pegasus Press. 12s. 6d. Christianity in the Roman Empire. Harold Mattingly. University of Otago, Faculty of Arts, Open Lectures No. 1. Dunedin, University of Otago. 7s. 6d. Toi. A Play in Four Acts. E. T. Rogers. Distributed for the Author by Paul's, Hamilton. The Parihaka Story. Dick Scott. Auckland, Southern Cross Books. 14s. 6d. The Copy for the Folio Text of Richard Ill, with a Note on the copy for the folio text of King Lear. J. K. Walton. Auckland University College, Monograph Series No. 1. 20s. (cloth) or 15s. (paper). Corporal Punishment in Home and School. A correspondence in the Timaru Herald. Preface by W. J. Scott. 2s. 6d. Unesco. Report of the N.Z. Delegation to the Eighth Session of the General Conference, 1954. Wellington, Department of External Affairs. 1s. 6d. Adventure in Prague and other Stories. Salamon Dembitzer. Translated by Vera Jones. Sydney, Villon Press: 139 Old South Head Road, Bondi Junc- tion, N.S.W. 14s. 6d. Canadian Journal. Alfred Domett. Edited by E. A. Horsman and Lillian Rea Benson. London, Canada, The University of Western Ontario. 5s. (Obtain- able from E. A. Horsman, Manor Lodge, Gilesgate, Durham, England.) False Witness. Harvey Matusov. Sydney, Current Book Distributors. 7s. 6d. Teacher Pupil and Task: Elements of Social Psychology applied to Educa- tion. Edited by Oscar A. Oeser. Tavistock Publications. 18s. Working-Class Anti-Semite. James H. Robb. Tavistock Publications. 15s. The Mirage. F. B. Vickers. Australasian Book Society. 18s. 6d. The Courier. No. 1, 1955. Unesco, Paris. Monthly. 6s. p.a., 7d. a copy. Epos. A Quarterly of Poetry. Edited by Will Tullos and Evelyn Thorne. Vol. 7 No. 1, Fall 1955. Lake Como, Florida, U.S.A. $1 p.a. 30c. a copy. The Ford Foundation Report for I954. New York, The Ford Foundation. Patterns. A Verse Quarterly. Edited by Alexander Taylor. Vol. I no. 2. January 1955. Box 323, Glen Falls, N.Y., U.S.A. Quarterly. $1.50 p.a., 50c. ·a copy. The Poetry Public. Edited by Lawrence R. Holmes. Vol. Ill no. 1. Box 898, Chadron, Nebraska, U.S.A. Quarterly. 50c. a copy. The Saturday Review. British Writers and Writing Today. 7 May 1955. (By courtesy of the U.S. Information Service, Wellington.) Venture. Edited by Joseph J. Friedman. Vol. I no. 3. Winter 1954-5. The Writers' Workshop of Arts, Sciences and Professions. 35 W.64th St, New York City 23. Quarterly. $1 p.a., 25c. a copy.