Composed on a Summer's Evening

VOLUME SIXTEEN

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 61, March 1962, p. 57, line 5, should read: day you will understand why', or even, 'Learn this now, because I

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 3 Two Poems, C. K. Stead 6 Lily of a Day, Ruth Dallas 8 Notes from the Welfare State, Keith Sinclair r8 Three Songs from the Maori, Allen Curnow and R. S. Oppenheim 20 Two Poems, Michael Jackson 23 Henry Ware, Neva Clarke 25 Composed on a Summer's Evening, Rowley Habib 30 Two Poems, Maurice Duggan 3 I World Enough, and Time, Stuart Slater 35 New Zealand Since The War (6), Leo Fowler 36 COMMENTARIES: Disaster in the Primary School, Margaret Dalziel 49 Townscape, P. M. Hill 61 Stravinsky et al., Royer Savage 64 New Zealand Opera, Jeremy Commons 68 New Plays in Wellington,]. L. Roberts 72 REVIEWS: After Anzac Day, Thomas Crawford 75 An Affair of Men, R. A. Copland 77 Short Story One, E. A. Horsman 79 The Cradle of Erewhon, etc., J. C. Beaglehole 82 Early Travellers in New Zealand, etc., Peter Maling 84 Children's books, Patricia Guest 87 University magazines, R. T. Robertson 90 Correspondence, June Higinbottom, Peter Munz, E. B. Greenwood, G. E. Fairburn 93 Paintings and drawings, T. A. McCormack, John Gillespie, Tony Fomison, R. Gopas

VOLUME SIXTEEN NUMBER ONE MARCH 1962 Notes

THE Literary Fund does not receive much public notice these days, although it is discussed a good deal in private. It seems to have been quietly absorbed into the accepted scheme of things, to have become part of the country's machinery of self-help. Since the Arts Advisory Council was set up, it is also less isolated and exposed. This should be conducive to sober and useful work. Its chief purpose is to subsidize the publication of books which might not be published otherwise. Among its chief difficulties (one supposes) is to decide about certain borderline cases, two kinds of which must come before it from time to time. There is the work by new writers showing talent but uneven or immature, about which opinion may well differ. And there is the work by established writers which although difficult or not wholly successful (but opinion may differ about this too) probably ought to be published, either because any work by the writer in question is of interest, or because publication of that particular work may be important in his development. In such matters no committee (and no individual either) will always make the right decision; there is still an important place for the publisher with convictions, who is ready to lose money (and perhaps win reputation) in order to bring out a book he believes in. The list of new books sponsored by the Committee of the Literary Fund which went out of office last August at the end of its three- year term is no doubt unexceptionable, but it is deadly safe (this is of course no reflection on the books themselves). Here it is. Fiction, Some Are Lucky by Phillip Wilson, Fear in the Night by Errol Brath- waite, A Gun In My Hand by Gordon Slatter; plays, The Tree by Stella Jones, The Pohutukawa Tree by Bruce Mason; poetry, The Living Countries by M. K. Joseph, Poetry of the Maori translated by Barry Mitcalfe, Collected Poems by R. A. K. Mason; a study of Wil- liam Satchell by Phillip Wilson; The West Coast Gold Rushes by P. R. May. The same Committee subsidized reprints of five novels and one other book. There is nothing here (both plays having been well proven on the stage) which a good publisher would consider dangerously speculative. It may be that nothing of the sort turned up in those three years; we cannot tell, not knowing what work came before the Committee besides that which it subsidized. But now and then the bush telegraph reports that some work seemingly 3 speculative (in this sense) has been refusedc a grant, and since such reports are unlikely to be always wrong, they cause disquiet. The Committee makes its decisions in good faith, without doubt. But, in the case of fiction particularly, might it not put more trust in the judgment of the responsible adventurous publisher with a reputation at stake? It puts such trust-it is bound to-in the judgment of editors, who ask for a grant for their journals as a whole and not for particular items in them, and whose reputations stand or fall much as a publisher's does. The Committee might feel freer to trust such publishers more if it were to adopt a practice which has been urged on it before and against which no convincing argument has been advanced, namely, insteadofmakinganoutrigMgranttoa publisher for any given novel (and perhaps any other book), to guarantee him against loss up to a specified sum. This would encourage the more adventurous publishers while ensuring that none made extra money out of clear successes. It would have been juster if for the two novels in the list above the publishers had been guaranteed against loss and not given outright grants. Grants to an overseas publisher, if justifiable at all, should be made on the same basis. But big English publishers do not need New Zealand help, and one must question those earlier grants to Alien & Unwin for books of verse by Eileen Duggan and Ruth Gilbert, and now one to Oxford to reprint H. K. Kippenberger's Infantry Brigadier-for the latter, as acknowledged in the reprint, the R.S.A. also raised money. During its three years of office the last Committee spent about £6,200 (less than its annual £2,ooo in one full year, more in the other). Nearly £3,500 of this went in grants towards cost of publica- ion (for new books, for periodicals, and for reprints); more than £2,400 in grants to writers (in awards, in direct grants not including the Scholarship in Letters of £500 a year, and through periodicals, assuming that not less than one-third of the grants to periodicals went in payment to contributors); and £300 in grants to P.E.N. for the last Writers' Conference and to the New Zealand Women Writers' Society to subsidize its bulletin. If, in future, Committees of the Fund were to make fewer large outright grants to publishers and instead to guarantee them against loss, they should be able to subsidize more books, to make the present awards more substantial, and to make more direct grants to writers. But, it will be asked, what about writers of best-sellers? The grant to Barry Crump to enable him to write his second book caused much surprised and indignant talk, after the huge success of A Good Keen Man. The grant was made, it appears, on the strength of galley 4 proofs of that first book, before its publication. Then why did the Committee not defer a decision until its next meeting, foreseeing a best-seller? The argument is inconclusive. No one wants the Com- mittee to be niggling, no one should grudge Mr Crump his success, and one or two successes in New Zealand will not make a writer's fortune. But if they should, why not? Is it wrong for writers to be successful? Clearly, the appearance of best-sellers here will now have to be allowed for. There is no evidence yet to suggest that, as some oracles pre- dicted, the help which the Fund can give is sapping independence and promoting timid conformity among writers. Such evidence as exists indicates rather that the Fund's support is allowing writers (and periodicals) to develop freely in their own way. Argument over the Committee's work will go on, as it ought to. While the Committee must be able to work in privacy, lists of its grants are properly made public a few times each year and need to be scrutinized. An earlier Committee was unlucky in making grants (in 1958) for two books which have not appeared and will not appear; grants are now made only on publication-and this may help incidentally to make publication a little quicker: at present it is often so slow that the name 'publisher' becomes a jest. Members of the Committee of the Literary Fund are, as noted, now appointed for a term of three years. A few members of the present Committee have served for several terms and probably all should be eligible for reappointment once at least; some continuity in the Committee's work is necessary, but perhaps no member should serve for more than two terms on end, without a break. Continuity would be ensured if the whole Committee did not come into office in the same year. Continuity can be overdone, however; the present chairman, Professor Gordon, who was appointed to the Committee on the nomination of P.E.N. when the Fund was set up in 1947, became chairman in 1951, and has remained chairman ever since, should be granted a long rest. Literary criticism has been little practised in New Zealand except in the short spurts of reviews. A sustained piece of criticism is still a courageous undertaking. Kendrick Smithyman's survey of New Zealand poetry since the war, of which the first part has appeared in Mate (no. 8, December 1961), promises to be the fullest we have, and the coolest. In publishing it, Matg is taking longer views than most periodicals of its kind, and deserves a proportionately longer life.

5 C. K. STEAD Of Two Who Have Separated For L-R I How should I put between us a right distance To speak friends' hurt, to speak what consequence It justly claims? There is a close perspective Brings common things, a common scene, alive- Where husband, wife, children seem to have made A measure of accord, measure of need, Domestic love. Or these may stand together Distant, as in some play's cold tragic weather Against the backdrop of all human hurt. Which view speaks best when friends or lovers part? Too close one seems, too large its claim upon The world at large. Yet the cold abstract scene Never assuaged two parted by guilty chance. How should I give their pain its consequence?

11 An image in the wedge of abstract thought Hardens: moonscape is it, or moonlit valley Where scattered thunder-stones like cattle lie In granite pastures? An age of ice has caught The shape of things-column and channel, dry Arena, foothills lifting into ranges : Nothing is made, nothing erodes or changes. Slow stars trail-northward is it ?-in the sky.

My steps ring out on their appointed stones: Absurd the noisy consequence of acts Where nothing loves, where light or shade exacts Its dues, no more. An image hardens.

Not warm Venusian rain nor the pricks of Mars Will quicken buds among those silent scars. 6 Ill I choose the close perspective of her face Between my hands, whose tears most tax my verse. That mask is some exact account of loss I guess at only, know by what is worse- Time and the yrass grow lony.

Passion she had not guessed, and resolution War in the air around her. In each glass The nobler disciplines surprise themselves. Smallest events repeat all things must pass- Time and the yrass yrow lony.

The city slides away beneath her sill: Useless to say that there her loss is housed Synonymous behind a thousand eyes. What pain has written seems uniquely phrased- , Time and the yrass gmw lony.

A Natural Grace

UNDER my eaves untiring all the spring day Two sparrows have worked with stalks the mowers leave While I have sat regretting your going away. All day they've ferried straw and sticks to weave A wall against the changing moods of air, And may have worked into that old design A thread of cloth you wore, a strand of hair, Since all who make are passionate for line, Proportion, strength, and take what's near, and serves. All day I've sat remembering your face, And watched the sallow stalks, woven in curves By a blind process, achieve a natural grace.

7 RUTH DALLAS Lily of a Day

SOME PEOPLE become absorbed in whatever they are doing at the moment, as though nothing else existed; they write letters in a crowded room, they remain calm when other people are in tears; in the midst of confusion they seem unperturbed as a lily on a pond. Linda Foster was like that. Even at fourteen, with her heart-shaped face, her high cheek bones and narrow grey eyes, her soft composed mouth, she had the mask-like features, the air of tranquillity that was to be hers for all time. She wanted to be a nurse; she found that she would have to wait till she was eighteen; but she didn't mind, she said. That year, When Linda was fourteen, and I was ten, Linda's mother had rented a holiday crib down the harbour, and had taken me along to keep Linda company. The crib stood on a high cliff above the water, dwarfed to a doll's house by a row of tall blue- gums that grew along the cliff's edge. Beyond the blue-gums there was nothing but sky and water. We had come from flat town streets, and the feeling of height and space enchanted us. Between the blue-gums and the crib lay a pleasant field of untrampled flowering grass with only a narrow footpath winding across it. But on the first day all was still half-hidden by rain. Linda sat in the window-seat with her head bent over her sewing as though her stitches were of the gravest importance, not looking up at the gusts of rain streaming down the glass, or the blue-gums waving wildly outside in the wind. I sat at the table, idly cutting out scraps from some old magazines I had found. The sighing and hissing of the blue-gums came through the open fanlight, disturbing me; I wanted to be outside; but the rain fell in sheets; I kept watching Linda, fascinated by her absorption in her work. All that day, our first day, the rain fell, the blue-gums tossed without rest, and we stayed inside. The roof leaked, and Mrs Foster had placed basins and buckets on the floor to catch the rain; ping, ping, ping, the drops fell steadily into the enamel washing-up basin by the leg of the table. To keep us she had made toffee, stretchy, soft, unsuccessful toffee, which stuck to its enamel plate. Towards evening, when the rain showed no sign of ceasing, she wrapped her legs in brown paper and string, like two parcels, donned an enormous 8 mackintosh that hung behind the door, and set off to walk to the store, which was about a mile away. Linda and I were left alone in the dark, well-worn living room, which smelt of its own smoky chimney, and the kerosene in a lamp that stood on a dresser. Everything seemed gloomy and unfamiliar, and I couldn't shake off the feeling that we had no right to be there. The previous tenant, a woman, had been drowned in the harbour. Mrs Foster had not thought to conceal this from us, accustomed as she Was to Linda's serenity; but I knew at once when I heard it that my own parents would not have told me, and I was haunted by it, wondering if any of the things in the room were hers. That mackintosh that Mrs Foster had taken from behind the door, for instance. The rain, the dripping roof, the blue-gums, waving wildly, as though they were tormented, the being left alone with Linda in the strange room, far from home, unsettled me, and I should have been afraid to stay there if it had not been for Linda's familiar, un- disturbed, gentle face, bent over her sewing as though she were in her own home and her stitches were all that mattered in the world. The light from the window fell upon her work, and her bowed head; her skin was pink and freckled, her lashes fair, as though she were red-haired, but her hair was brown, cut short, and curling about her face in an abundant, becoming, womanly fashion. It was hard to believe she was the same age as my cousin, Marion; she seemed so much younger. She had been Marion's friend, at first, not mine; but their interests had grown apart; she was, Marion said, 'too tame', meaning by this that she was not interested in boys. Marion used lipstick and eye-shadow, and practised mysterious glances over her turned-up coat collar. But I didn't find Linda tame. When she showed me her pictures of little island children, with their hands and feet deformed by leprosy, and pictures of the stiff, white, ghost- like figures who were the nurses who looked after them, and told me with that calm light in her eyes that she longed to go to the islands and nurse the leper children, I would be filled with admira- tion and dread. 'But you might get it yourself, Linda!' 'I wouldn't mind,' she would answer dreamily. Once she showed me a pamphlet about a vegetarian hospital in Australia. 'There they don't eat fish, flesh or fowl,' she said, spread- ing the pamphlet before me, like a teacher. 'Instead, they eat fruit and nuts.' At ten years, this diet seemed to me much more interesting than fish, flesh or fowl, and so I stared at the photograph of the large hospital buildings and asked her if she would wait for me and take me nursing with her, if she went there. 9 'All right,' she said. 'I could wait.' Then she came to my place one Sunday after bible class with the news that girls in India were married at the age of ten. 'They live in darkness, in India,' she said, solemnly. 'They need missionaries and nurses. Terrible famines come to the land. The people die on the roadside.' We fetched the tin globe of the world from an old cupboard, wiped off with our sleeves the grains of borer dust that had fallen on it since it was last used, and traced how far it was from New Zealand to India. 'You could go anywhere, really,' Linda said, running her finger over Egypt, Italy, Spain. 'Nurses are needed everywhere.' So calm was she, so easily did her finger slide over the globe, the world seemed to lie before us like the streets of our own town. We felt we were at the beginning of everything; we could go anywhere. No country was too distant; no language too great a barrier. Where Linda went, I would go, too. This subject had the added interest of being forbidden. Linda's mother had forbidden her to talk of nursing, and had burned the pamphlets. Linda's father was dead; she was an only child; her mother feared that nursing would take Linda away from her, and said so, openly. Mrs Foster was a lonely, sad little woman, with a tight mouth, and grey hair pulled so tightly back from her face that you could see the shape of her skull beneath the thin flesh, set with prominent, anxious, light grey eyes. I felt she did not like me, or my cousin Marion. But she had been kind to us that long, wet, first day at the crib, helping us to pass the time indoors, and it was only after she had taken the mackintosh and left for the store that the strangeness of the crib pressed itself upon me. At last it grew too dark to go on cutting out scraps at the table. I roused myself from a daydream in which Linda and I, in our white uniforms, stood waving from the ship's rail. How sad and strange it seemed to leave my mother and father and brother. Supposing we . were drowned? Tears of homesickness came to my eyes. 'Linda, I can't see. How can you go on sewing?' At once Linda put down her sewing. 'We'll light the lamp,' she said. Before she could cover the flame with the glass chimney a little moth blundered into the light and burnt its wings. As it fell to the table she hit it and killed it, at the moment that I cried out, 'Don't hurt it!' She smiled at me. 'They only live a day,' she said, and brushed it from the table. 'It's awful to die,' I said. This was something that had troubled IO me since one of my cousins had been drowned duck-shooting the year before. Now there was the woman who had been drowned in the harbour. Was this her lamp? Was she watching us? I was not used to lamplight and looked uneasily into the dark corners of the room. 'Do you think people that are drowned ever come back?' 'The dead never come back,' Linda said, 'or Daddy would have come.' She turned up the flame and brought her sewing to the table. The friendly light fell upon her work. Mrs Foster's steps sounded on the patch of gravel outside the door and a moment later she stood in the room with the water streaming from the mackintosh, the brown paper round her legs sodden to a pulp} her shopping bag packed with groceries. She was solid, and human, and had brought us food, and all my fancies at once vanished Only in sleep they came back to haunt me. In the morning I woke to the sound of bees outside the window, to the real world, where the rain had ceased. Outside the sun shone, the sky was blue, the tall gums were almost still; sweet air from the harbour sifted through their branches, bringing a feeling of open water beyond. In the grass before the house countless dandelions, which the day before must have been closed in the rain, had come out like stars. It was a perfect summer morning, With every leaf washed clean. Linda and I threw on our clothes, and without waiting for breakfast, ran slithering and slipping down the wet steep cliff path to the road below, and the open grey-blue harbour water. Then we climbed back up the longer, more sedate gravel road that wound along the cliff top between the houses and the gum-trees. As we climbed we tore long lengths of flowering convolvulus from the lupins by the roadside and decorated ourselves hilariously with the white flowers. 'They only live a day,' Linda said, as she wound herself round with their leafy, wreath-like stems that seemed to fall limp almost as soon as plucked. It was the first time I had seen them. Though some flowers were spoiled by the rain, others were so fresh and white they seemed touched With green, reflecting in their silkiness their own green base and leaves. 'A lily of a ckty' Linda began to recite in a sing-song, 'Is fairer far in May, Although it fall and die that night -' and then, as though sensing we were not alone, we both stopped short in the midst of our capers and stared at a girl in a red skirt who stood in a gateway, watching us. The girl stood in a graceful posture, one leg resting on the other, one hand upon one hip. She threw us a mocking glance. II 'Small things amuse small minds,' she said, in a superior, grown- up manner. Linda at once gave a cry of recognition. 'Meg Armstrong! What are you doing here?' At this, I, too, recognized Meg; she was an old playmate of Linda's who had moved to Wellington; but if Linda had not spoken I should not have known her, she was so greatly changed. Her pale hair, which had been straight and flat, had become a mass of dry curls; her lips were reddened; ear-rings shone in her ears; she wore a white transparent blouse, a red velvet skirt, fine stockings, and red, high-heeled shoes. As we drew near we saw through her blouse the strange narrow shoulder-straps and lace trimming of the underwear that grown-ups wore. There was an overpowering smell of scent. In a flash of self-consciousness I saw Linda and myself as I thought Meg saw us, two straight sticks of children, in coarse cotton dresses, bare legs and sandals, festooned with weeds from the roadside. 'Nobody calls me Meg now,' the girl said, with a rabbit-like wriggle of her nose and short upper lip. 'My name is Margaret.' 'What are you doing here?' Linda asked again. 'Same as you, I suppose,' Meg said, lazily. 'Holiday.' She put her hand behind her head and stretched her body languidly, as though with boredom, and looked about her. Then she suddenly stiffened, and said, unexpectedly, and with a kind of spiteful hiss, 'In this cemetery!' Her narrow, half-closed eyes, that were like the eyes of a cat when they are half-closed, moved unseeingly over the blue- gums, the deserted gravel road, and the half-hidden, silent holiday houses that dozed among the wild grass and overgrown hedges. The convolvulus wilted in our hands, a shadow, as of a cloud, passed over the grass where the crickets sang, and where a pair of white butterflies chased each other from flower to flower. The stones of the gravel road lay damp and still. 'You're mad!' Linda said, brushing away the bewildering moment as though it were a cobweb. 'It's lovely here.' 'It's dead,' Meg said. 'You should see Wellington! You should see the crowds of people! Did you know I was working? I go up five stories in a lift every day of my life. I work in an office where there are twenty-five people all in one big room. We have no end of fun. Fancy coming straight from that to this!' She glared about her angrily. 'Everyone has to have a holiday,' Linda said, staring at Meg as though she wondered if what she said could be true. Meg changed her tone, became friendly. 'Come for a walk down 12 to the bay,' she said, with a soft, supple, dancing movement of her limbs, 'and I'll tell you something.' 'Can't,' Linda said. 'We haven't had our breakfast. And I have to help Mum with the housework.' Meg closed her eyes and shuddered. 'I loathe housework,' she said. It seemed to me that an unbridgeable gap would stretch between the two old playmates now; as it did between Linda and my cousin Marion. Instead, Linda seemed to overlook the change in Meg, as she would have overlooked a pair of crutches, or a rash of pimples; it was something that was there and must be accepted. 'We could come this afternoon,' she said, thoughtfully. 'You come up for us after dinner.' Mrs Foster let us go, reluctantly, and with many cautions about not losing our way, or falling in the water. It was plain to see that she had the feeling she ought not to let us go at all. The bay offered neither shells nor sand, only sharp and slimy stones; for paddling one needed old shoes; but anyone could see at a glance that Meg was past such a childish amusement as paddling. A cool afternoon breeze blew off the harbour, ruffling the water, which had changed to a hard bright blue. Its colour suggested a holiday feeling; we strolled along the road not knowing what to do with ourselves. A small dark wharf poked out into deep water and two boys sat fishing from the end. We walked out on the wharf, Meg's high heels making a strange, grown-up tapping on the boards. I thought at first that Meg must know the boys; as we approached, they rolled their eyes at each other, and one said, 'Look who's coming! ' And the other said, 'Look who ! ' One was a rough-looking boy, with a head of thick short hair like a cap; he wore a khaki shirt and fawn trousers; the other was sleek, like a puppy, with black oiled hair plastered flat on his head; he was white-faced, thin and tall, in a White open shirt and grey flannels. Meg swept them with a glance from beneath her lashes, tossed her head, strolled about in a bored fashion, not looking at them. Watch your step ! ' the sleek boy said. 'You'll be stepping over the edge.' 'None of your business if I did!' Meg snapped back at them, angry, yet drawn towards them, as though against her will. 'It might upset the fish!' the rough boy said in a man's voice, loud, husky, and both boys laughed. 'You're not catching anything, anyway.' 'Oh, yes we are!' 'What are you catching?' 'Cold,' said one. 'Measles,' said the other, and they went into such exaggerated fits of laughter that we laughed too. But I had often fought with my brother at home and had found no reason to change my opinion that boys were bullies and were to be avoided. The contempt was mutual; my brother thought girls were 'too sissy' to be worthy of notice. For the last few weeks of term I had been sitting beside a boy in school as punishment for talking in class. And so I tugged at Linda to come away; but she wouldn't budge. She stared at the boys as though she had never seen a boy before. Thinking to draw her away by going away myself, I went down to the beach and began to look for rock oysters, which, Mrs Foster had said, were sometimes to be found on the rocks at low tide. From time to time, if I found a crab, or a coloured stone, I would call to Linda to come down and see, and she would call from the wharf, 'Yes, in a minute,' but she didn't come. One of the boys caught a fish and chased the girls with it, and shrieks of excited laughter floated down to where I poked among the rocks below. I had never known Linda to act so strangely. At last I grew careless with my feet, slipped on a rock and fell into the water. I was wet, but in no danger, for the water was shallow; but my sun-hat floated upside down out of reach, and at the sight I burst into tears. The four figures on the wharf came running to the rescue. Linda, full of self-reproach, tried to dry me with her handkerchief and the hem of her dress. The bigger boy rolled up his trousers and waded out for the hat. When they saw that I was safe, and the hat retrieved, they began to shout with laughter, all except Linda, who said, in her protective, solemn, authoritative way, 'It's not funny. She might have been drowned. A woman who was in our crib before us was drowned.' And she bustled me off home without a backward glance, as though the boys were to blame. Next afternoon, when Meg came for us, she said to me at the gate, as we left the crib, 'Peggy, you go down the cliff path, and Linda and I will go down the road, and we'll have a race to see who gets down to the bay first.' And so I tumbled down the cliff and reached the bay before they were even in sight on the road. The bay was deserted, the boys were not on the wharf, only the water slapped on the rocks and under the boatsheds. I waited a long time; I kicked a stone about, sat in the sun on a warm rock, scanned the road for a glimpse of the girls. After a while it occurred to me that there had been time for them to go up and down the road a dozen times. I set off to look for them, and soon found myself back at the crib without 14 having met them. Down the cliff path I ran again, and at last, after wandering haphazardly about the few roads that wound among the houses, I found them, or, rather, looked down upon them from the road above the reserve, where they walked beneath the gum-trees, arm in arm with the two boys of yesterday. Their backs were towards me; they strolled slowly; it was clear, that whatever they were doing they were not looking for me. I stared at Linda's brown head and blue cotton frock, unable to understand what I saw; I even wondered wildly if it could be someone else disguised as Linda. I could hear their voices, the gruff man tones of the rough boy, who was with Linda, the shrill cries of Meg, like a gull's cries. Meg still wore her red skirt and white blouse and leaned against the sleek, dark boy. In a few moments they had passed out of view. The reserve was deserted. Some sea-gulls rested on the grass; a piece of white paper was lifted by a gust of wind and turned over and over like a live thing; a rustling breeze passed like a shiver over the leaves of the gum-trees. Suddenly I felt a little afraid, as though I had stumbled upon some mystery, like the mystery of the woman who had been drowned in the harbour. What had happened? I had only to call out and Linda would hear; but even at ten one hesitates to call somebody who does not want to come. I went back to the crib to wait, where I rolled in the grass plucking clover and composing angry speeches that I intended to deliver to Linda on her return. A mass of sweet-peas grew outside the bedroom window on the wire-netting fence dividing our house from the next; they had been blooming uncut for a long time, and their clear colours drew me, pink, white, red, lavender, and orange-scarlet burnt by the sun. Their warm, summer scent made me feel drunk as a bee. I had a flower in my hands, examining it, when Mrs Foster tapped on the window behind me and said, 'Mustn't touch the flowers, Peggy. They're not ours.' She opened the casement window, leaned an arm on the sill and smiled as though to show that she was not really angry with me. 'Where's Linda?' she asked. 'With Meg in the reserve with two boys,' I said. Mrs Foster had been holding the arm of the window catch in her hand; it escaped from her grasp and the window swung wide with a clatter. She gave me a look of disgust, as though I had told a lie, or said something improper, and seemed about to dismiss me. Then her face stiffened, and as though by some trick of light, or a reflection from the leaves, her skin turned green. She searched my eyes incredulously, with a mounting fear that communicated itself to IS me. I could not have been more alarmed if the figure at the window had been that of the drowned woman. I saw her breast rise and fall, her nostrils widen and her prominent eyes grow strange. Then she retired into the darkness of the room and left the window swinging wide. I was overwhelmed by a feeling of homesickness; if I could have run then into the kitchen at home nothing could have coaxed me out again. In a few moments Mrs Foster came striding out of the house with her arms held out from her sides like the wings of an attacking bird. She carried the straw broom. She disappeared swiftly through the gate and down the road. To the reserve, there could be no doubt. I crept into a hiding place in the gum-trees over the road. From there I witnessed Linda's sad return, weeping, her fists in her eyes, her head bowed, her mother, still with the broom, march- ing grimly behind. It was the first time I had seen Linda cry. I stayed in the gum-trees for a long time. The shadows of the trees lengthened, moved over the flowering lawn in front of the crib, from which came no sound or sign of life. The air grew cold. The angry speeches I had made up melted from my heart. When I crept home at last there was no anger in Linda, either, or in Mrs Foster. Everyone was very subdued and polite. Meg did not come again. That was the last time Linda and I played together as children. In a day she had crossed over into the adult world. From then on, for her, all our games together were only excursions back into the child's world; she no longer lived in it. She had passed through the gateway through which we were all passing, late or soon, into different fields beyond. In less than two years, when she was sixteen, Linda had gone from our lives. It was my cousin, Marion, quick and bright and careless as a bird, who brought me the news, or, rather, threw it off in her flight like a drop of water, as her high heels click-clicked along the street. Marion was small and dark and vivid; she was wearing a little red hat like a pie, and with her bright eyes and sharp nose, her lipstick and rouged cheeks she reminded me of the gay birds in the aviary in the gardens. She had just turned sixteen, as Linda had, but she still seemed so much older than Linda, more neat, knowing, sophis- ticated. I was twelve now, and in my school uniform ran jumping beside her, for my brother and I were to have tea at her place, and I had come down to the bus to meet her as she came from work. She said, 'Did you know Linda was married?' Married? Married? I stopped. The street scene, the road, the r6 cyclists, the shop, with its ice-cream signs, the rough-cast fence we were passing, seemed to strike me as though I fell against it. 'Of course she had to,' Marion went on, nodding significantly. 'She was on the way, you see.' I stared up into her face to see if it could be true. To my surprise her face, always so assured, changed and trembled, and her eyes grew large and round, absent as though her thoughts were elsewhere. 'Supposing it was someone awful ! ' she said, not looking at me. 'Someone you did not want to marry! ' A warning seemed to pass between us. Without understanding half of what it was all about I caught her alarm as a grazing deer will catch the alarm of another. I was in the herd, with Marion, With Linda, with Mrs Foster, with others; as they acted so would I have to act. If they said, stand, or run, so would I have to stand or run. 'And how do you know?' Marion went on, following her own thoughts. 'How do you know you're going to go on liking him all your life? Till death do us part? How do you know that it's not going to be that you like him one time and then not another time? Some boys I used to be crazy about I can't stand now. There was Tom, and that one with the long hair who never even spoke to me.' But I didn't want to hear her boring old list of boyfriends, and said so, and we began to quarrel. Of course, we loved Linda's baby, when he came, with his composed, sleeping features, and his minute fingers that were always making dainty, meaningless gestures. And we loved the new Linda, absorbed now in her baby and her household tasks; but the old Linda, who wanted to nurse the injured and the sick, the lepers of the world, who spoke to us of Makogai, India and an countries, we never saw again. We saw the figure of a woman bent like a new moon over the baby, over the pram, over the cot, over the tub, as though she would never look up. In our lives, where she had been, there was a space like a death.

I7 KEITH SINCLAIR

Notes from the Welfare State

AFTER a perspiring, preparatory dance The middle-aged set free their super-egos In ritual flight, to a Laurentian drum, Twittering through a forest of empty riggers; Then wait, in rigid, alcoholic trance, For a load of goods from a port beyond oblivion, A consummation guessed at, or a life lost, Possessing everything but not possessed.

Our forbear had more need to drink gin neat. In muddy gutters, wearing his ragged excuse, He bowed in half-belief to processions of priests, Or spat on wheels when silken pride rolled past, Yet envied the groom his high, uneasy seat-. Dry hopes to fill chaff bags to feed poor beast. How could he see, from the hovel of his lot, Where the eagle nests on cloud-sheeted rock?

From books and graves arises the unceasing crying Of crust-in-hand in a vision of loaves and fishes, Of black men shackled to a white task, Of the armless, twitched by strings of unreachable wishes, Of undoctored sick, of defenceless, beaten dying. Then men with long-jawed, angular, pale masks Arranged the world from their nobility, Their law a crime, their bible a pedigree.

Is he waiting with parental expectation To see us crowned with garlands of cold fire- The summit photograph (on alps of bones) Of those who have climbed out of animal nature? Beneath our farthest orbiting ambition, Fallen short of space- and super-men, We shrink, plead guilty, suffer no injustice; We have put away traditional excuses.

18 Our chosen leaders all have salesmen's voices; All pains are pilled, all children packed to school; And Mill's majority of happy Jacks Have pirated the blue-prints of Tocqueville. Rostow prescribes our economic choices In the age of mass consumption of high-class trash. In a saccharine woman's hour, the beds all made, The Bendix on, Jill dreams of the white slave trade.

From the towers of the forty hour week and the long Monogamous weekend arises a nocturnal howling; In a nameless back street, in forgotten slums Of the heart, is heard the brush of furry prowling; In a government basement priest-physicians have thrown A white goddess, to lie wide-thighed in chains, Who will come again, flaunting her carnal pennon, In a green riot, to set us free again.

:Votes to stanza I. In Auckland, if not elsewhere, a 'rigger' is a half-gallon flagon. In Melanesia, from time to time since European contact, there have arisen 'cargo cults', the followers of which have been obsessed with the notion that they have been deprived of their rightful goods (perhaps robbed by Europeans) and with the expectation of imminent arrival of a cargo from the spirit world. Note to stanza S· 'Rostow' is, of course, W. W. Rostow, author of The Stages of Economic Growth, etc., who writes of 'the age of high mass-consumption'.

19 Songs from the Maori Translated by Alien Curnow and R. S. Oppenheim Lament of Rewa for Mokowera

BROKEN, broken this day Is my white heron's feather. Oh captain, sleep soundly Under the pa Puhara! 'I have been defeated By men who are strangers.'

I claimed you, I, Rewa, For the prize of my battle skill. Death took you, oh my friend, And I- am denied my treasure. Receive this gift, god of battle. Gather it father sky. Take it, oh earth ... oh!

MIRIAMA TE POUREWA Sonn by a Puhi for her WronndoinB

I myself break off this betrothal. I tell you I have done something wicked. I have been accused, I am angry And the secret has got to come out. 20 Oh you old women, you gossip and make speeches Till everyone knows everything about us! All I say is that I must go from here. I've told you twenty times, my good name's gone.

Before this I was a girl, I had my mana. It has been stripped away. My spirit left me once this thing happened, This wicked thing I did. This canoe is not sound, the sides are scarred.

RANGIHINGANUI Lament for Te Aoturoa

WAKE up! the day's begun, Time to be stirring, you that used to sleep Your lazy days away.

To that burst of the sun The heart in my body Starts over and over Gently in the gentleness Of the morning waking. How good to be alone Bending, lending an ear To the body alone.

Death comes And there is no anger, nothing To be seen but the sleepy eye. Puanga, the star of plenty, Sheds light about you now You are gathered to your fathers Linked by that light.

Oh my daughter, if we could only open You and I, those brown eyes of yours, 21 Those eyes where the world is pillowed And the people are at rest! Oh stay here in the daylight my Aoturoa, Yes! in the shining day and in the twilight That can make you afraid. You are wasted where you lie. But in the deep of death, In that pit, that last darkness, I will find you, my child, My child!

NOTE TO THE SONGS The three songs presented here are drawn from : Nga Moteatea Volume II by Sir Apirana Ngata, published by the Board of Maori Ethnological Research, 1929. The numbers refer to this volume, where additional source references and notes may be found. Lament of Rewa for Mokowera (189). Mokowera was a chief of the Atiawa tribe who was killed at Puhara-te-Rangi pa, near Punehu in Taranaki, by a Ngapuhi war party. Rewa was a warrior (too) of the Ngapuhi party. c.1824. Song by a Puhi for her Wrongdoing, by Miriama te Pourewa of Rongowhakaata (99). A Puhi was a girl, usually of important line- age, who was forbidden the customary pre-marital sexual freedom allowed in Maori society. Her marriage enhanced the political and social status of her group. In this case the Puhi was suspected of committing adultery shortly before she was to be married. The girl was forced to listen to the speeches of accusation and defence, and finally made the truth known by singing the song in the meeting house. No date can be assigned to the song but it is unlikely to be later than about r86o. Lament for Aowroa by Rangihinganui (193). Aoturoa was the daughter of Rangihinganui of Atanatiu. The song presents some linguistic difficulties which indicate that it may date from pre- Treaty times, or perhaps include elements from older sources. Internal evidence suggests that Aoturoa died in childbirth. The song is less formal than the warrior laments such as 189.

22 MICHAEL JACKSON Nothing is Ever Lost to View

NoTHING is ever lost to view for those with words And as I think of you this night, Though nothing's heard, there is this image of the sky; The man who walks alone in secret through the moon, Mishandles it, an alibi Or symbol in his search for peace.

And in the same tow, ghostly to the point of stars I make my way, ply rivers, lightyears' Age to find:

In contemplating maps your presence made I can no more believe the desert ends, Finds close or breaks down into life With unpredicted rain Than wait without a creature comfort, rake The nomad ashen embers, knowing there's no love.

So many rumours fighting back, through Rough beds friendship and the false day make On memory, From chaos cut for sake of change Are so much drift upon an iron beach, The reaches pulled to bits by tide, Cast up like a shadow on the sand, Some double I can't leave undenied.

And in the same tow, ghostly to the point of stars I make my way, ply rivers, lightyears' Age to find:

The meteors that light my days, burnt out: They praise but never come to earth- Though they be gone as unsound love And grief be left, I know Nothing is ever lost to view for those with words, I am the man that walks alone. 23 We have been Shadowed

WE have been shadowed through the fallen city now For half a year; by countless places we have razed In memory for sake of love; but I despair At ever being free from you, my first love Or that wounded ground Where yet by night lost fires flare.

It might have been an age if I had held to miracles, But now the doubled guard outside my house Leaves me as lonely as some lake, drained to the floor By phrase or fiction, dumbfound dream, And looking back on plains escaping, can't accept Last harvest as the last or least.

Hunted by the sound of shattered voices, image Of the water falling where our locks had burst, Or rent-faced rock where I had thought to be The man of flesh, I come to break the bread I never made And drink myself to death with wine, when words Are threshed and all the grains of time are done.

See how the blackbirds fly up against the sun, The shape of wings dark beating where I kept my watch; rubble of a faithless youth Files past, the wind sands down the plain, And lastly how one young caught fledgling cries In the singing wires, fear screaming in its eyes.

24 R x 5 ins.

T. A. McCoRMACK

The Artist's Mother. Indian Ink, c. 1945. c. 20 x 16 ins.

R. GoPAs

Head Study. Oil, 1960. 40 x 3o ins.

Seated Figure. Charcoal, 1961. pants in honour of his Ma's birthday; and next was Wi Hopae from the bakehouse who didn't have no clean shirt nor good pants, but just his everyday jeans and tartan shirt; and Johnny Tahina and me a bit dressed up but nothing flash. On the eyes went to Jake's Ma on the one side of the fireplace, and across to my own Ma. It was queer, somehow, the way they seemed satisfied once they found her, as though a long search had come to an end. It seemed queer especially as Ma was touching sixty years, and Henry Ware was the age o' me and the boys-the age of loving and laughing, not the age to be noticing a woman getting to be real old, and one that wasn't well into the bargain, likemyMa. He took a step towards her and she screamed suddenly and dropped her glass on the floor, and soon everyone was mopping up beer and consoling Ma, asking her where it was she felt funny, was it her head or her insides. But she didn't answer. She just sat there, her brown eyes staring away in front of her at nothing at all, not us, nor the wall with the calendar on, nor anything else, and looking smaller than I could remember her looking before. Ma wouldn't be took home. She would wait for me she said. Wizened and miserable, she looked at me then, not taking her eyes off me, like there was a special reason somehow for not taking them off me. Jake's Ma moved her big grey chair over next to Ma's and stroked her hand for a while, and we gave her (Ma I mean) another beer which usually made her feel all right again, but nothing worked. Henry Ware sat on the arm of her chair, laid a hand on a shoulder, and said, 'I'll take you home', in a soft, persuasive voice, but Ma pulled away from him quickly, suddenly, like she was shocked, and for just one fleeting moment glanced up at him terri- fied. Jake dragged Henry Ware off the chair and gave him a beer. 'Where you from?' he asked, suspicious. 'Up from town.' 'What the hell you doing here-travelling for someone?' Henry Ware looked at us fellows with a long, sad face, like a shepherd when he looks at a sick ewe and says, 'It's all over. She's a bloody gonner.' As earnest as that Henry Ware was, except that what he said was, 'I'm looking for something precious', which wasn't sad at all like losing a ewe was, and there seemed no reason for his long face. Jake put back his head and laughed, spilling beer out of his glass 26 on to the board floor. 'Christ,' he said, 'you're one of them oil jokers.' Henry Ware didn't say a word, just like the rest o' them bloody oil jokers, secretive, as if we'd get the oil out of the ground and · process it with our bare hands if only they'd tell us where the damned stuff was. 'It isn't oil I came for,' he said after a while. 'It's a girl.' Ma began to groan and we all fussed about her again, but she telled us she was all right even though you could see she wasn't all right at all and she wasn't drinking her beer at all which was the test, 'cos there wasn't nobody on the Coast liked her beer more'n Ma who used to say herself she had to be real sick to turn down a beer. Near dead in fact. She had put her glass, full still, on the floor, and she was lying now with her head against the high back of Jake's Ma's twin chair, turning this way and that like she was in some sort of agony, drawn away from us all too, struggling all by herself to be free of something. Jake's Ma slapped at her wrist. 'Peg,' she said, turning, 'bring some water, and Jake, you go get Dr Earnshaw. I reckon Kate's as sick as ever I seed anyone in my life before. Looks to me she needs more help than perhaps even Dr Earnshaw can give her. You get him. Tell him to come right on over, even if he's got that girl from town with him. Tell him Kate can't wait for him to play around with no girl.' Jake went off out the door and Peg brought the water, and while their Ma and me tried to bring my Ma round, Wi and Johnny took the keg into the kitchen and then came back, trying to be helpful, picking up Ma's glass and putting it on the mantelpiece between a photograph of Jake's Pa who died last year and an ugly stuffed bird that'd been dead a lot longer, and trying hard to be sober. But they wasn't sober. That was that, and no amount of trying helped. But Ma being my own Ma and the only one I was ever likely to have, it seemed I'd never had a drink pass my lips. Suddenly I was that sober. Ma and me were the only ones since Pa left us to go to Auckland when I was small, and I wished as I knelt there clutching at her long black sleeve that he was here now to take from me the responsibility of trying to coax Ma back to life. She was groaning soft now since she'd had one sudden wild look around the room. 'Where's that other fellow?' I said. 'That Henry Ware?' 'Dunno,' Wi said. 'He must have went with Jake. He ain't here.' Wi went into the kitchen to check whether Henry Ware was there helping himself to the beer, but he wasn't there at all. 27 'Queer cove,' said Wi. Johnny shook his head. 'Couldn't name what's wrong with him, but, Christ, he'd give you the creeps. Never seen him round these parts before.' 'And this girl of could she be? Do you ... .' 'Shut up about him, will you,' I said. 'Okay. Okay.' 'I didn't mean to bark at you. It's Ma. I'm worried as all hell about Ma.' Jake's Ma was crying now and I knew she knew what I knew. Ma wasn't going to get better. Ma wasn't even going to wait for Dr Eamshaw to get here. She was just going to slip away from us out knowing it. I thought about that for a while. I wanted to say goodbye to her, but I couldn't, not there in front of Peg and her Ma and Johnny and Wi. I couldn't say, 'Ma, I know you're leaving. I won't forget what a good Ma you been to me. You ain't to worry about me, Ma, 'cos I can take care of myself. But, God, Ma, I just can't bear to see you going. I tell you I just can't stand the sight of you going like this. Ma come back. Come back.' 'You ain't to feel bad about it. There's times everyone cries,' Jake's Ma's VL'ice said. I hadn't known I was crying fit to flood the place, but when I knew I just didn't care and went on crying along with Jake's Ma, till Dr Eamshaw came and had Ma took away. I ain't gonna tell about the funeral or how everyone was so good to me that didn't mean a goddamned thing to any of them, but goodness was so much a part of the Coasters they couldn't help themselves. I ain't gonna tell a thing that doesn't have to do with the story. When Ma had rested herself on the hillside for a time, I went back from Jake's Ma's where I'd been staying, to the little house Ma and I had shared on the Main South Road, around Peterson's corner by the old mill-house. I went down the thin concrete path I'd put down so's Ma wouldn't get her feet wet, and I opened up all the windows of the house, or all that would open anyway, which wasn't many, and I stood in Ma's room and looked and looked, as though by looking I could make her stand there in front of me by the tall slatted end of her bed. I walked to her dressing-table and picked up her hairbrush with grey hairs stuck in the bristles, and I picked up her writing pad with a letter half written to Auntie Poll in the South Island. And I opened up a drawer and saw the long hairpins Ma used, and the jars of pills I didn't know she had, and a paper-back called Penny Gold, and a photograph, upside down. I picked it up to turn it over and I remembered doing that once be- 28 fore, taking it out of the drawer and turning it over like I was going to now-once when I was small and I had a Pa, and Ma snatching it from me and calling me names, bad names, and then whispering soft words about not telling Pa anything about a silly old photograph. And now I was turning it over again, without her to stop me or call me names. It was Henry Ware looking up at me from the frame, as clear as he had been at Jake's Ma's. So this was where I'd seen him before. But if he looked like that when I was small enough to have a Pa, how could he still look like it at Jake's Ma's? I didn't like Henry Ware, at Jake's Ma's or here in my hand and one thing I knew and knew damned well was I wasn't going to have him sitting around in this house with me, just the two of us together. I'd rip him to pieces and burn him before that. I pulled the cardboard backing off Henry Ware, but before I even finished doing that, before I could pull Henry Ware himself out and get my fingers at him, a page of notepaper fell to the floor. The writing was spidery thin and pale, like Henry Ware, and his name was down there at the bottom all right, or at least the H. was, which stood for Henry, which stood for Henry Ware. There wasn't no Dear Anything at the top, but he started right in: When you promised yourself to me, you run off with that no- good, Jo Peihana. I won't forget, you can be sure of that. I never wanted any girl but you, I've told you often enough, and if I can't have you, living doesn't interest me. So this is goodbye. Likely as not you won't care, but Kate John- son, it's you put the gun in my hand. And Kate Johnson or Pei- hana or whatever you call yourself, you won't ever be free of me, because every day of your life, you've got to expect me to walk in on you. You won't ever have any peace. Because, if I can't have you now, some day, sure as God, I'll come and get you, wherever you are. That was all, except the H. all by itself underneath, as important by itself underneath as R for Rex or Royalty or whatever it means, but important anyhow, and all-powerful and secretive, like the Ku Klux Klan or a witch's brew. H., Henry, Henry Ware, had won.

29 ROWLEY HABIB Composed on a Summer's Evening HAVE you ever stood and listened to the bees working amongst the wild flowers And wondered at the way their tone changed as they flitted from flower to flower, Their drone high-pitched then suddenly changing low Caught in some pocket vacuum or brought in on a sudden change of wind?

And have you listened to the thrush working in the bushes; Low to the earth, finding its way through the thick undergrowth Noisy and growling, to where its young lay? Or listened to the last rhapsody of the sparrows As they gather in the trees to chat noisy and restless before the night falls?

And have you heard the blackbird with frightened cry Start up from a hedge and wing away swiftly into the distance While somewhere the frail warbling of the pihipihi can be heard? Or listened while the lone cuckoo sings Its song clear and liquid spearing into the still evening falling?

And have you heard the hush in the trees That is brought in on a sudden rise of wind And as suddenly dies? Leaving you stilled and listening And full of wonderment. Trying to grasp something That eludes just out of reach, While .somewhere a bird sings still, that is to you unknown.

And all the while the scents of evening Are heavy in the air. And the peace that comes With the falling darkness deep-rooted in you. MAURICE DUGGAN Calypso

THIS was mortal reasoning beyond her understanding. She offered him the god-gift, promised him Immortality if he would marry her: Yet behold him, undecided, even sceptical, Pacing the vine-hung seaward terrace, His fingers teasing the harshness of his beard, Begging time to consider, time to weigh his answer.

Time! Ye gods! Time to consider The god-gift, the blazon of immortality! Was she not beautiful? Was she not young, High-breasted and not given to boisterousness? Was this not matchless dowry for heroic man?

She sought in thonged sandals to match his stride: Her eyes sought the focus of his seaward gaze, Swinging above vine and orchard of fig To where the light lay brazen, broken on the sea- Brazen as orient bangle at her wrist. Beauty, youth; and immortality to enjoy; Yet something ponderous, treacherous in his tread. How understand this mortal calculation?

Scars of journeys those scorings at his eyes, Season on season, sealight and sun of ceaseless seasons, And his mouth moist with juice of fig, his beard Streaked with the bleaching of an ocean's weather. Turning as he turned in the vine-wedged light She heard him mutter on the thought of time; A voyage through a circling calendar of seasons. It was less than she expected, much less than she hoped: Greek complaint and Greek suspicion of her promise. And all the while his hands, calloused from sword-hilt, Chafed and hardened from the long haul of a journey, Evaded the olive promise of her island flesh. Sated with nymph and immortal goddess His eyes held long the brass light of the sea. 31 Songs of a fading war, fading songs, a journey: What were the songs his mouth remembered? Time? There had been time enough. Immortal enjoyment of beauty and youth? The years, the seasons etching his face Had taught him soon love's quick mortality. Forever upon this island was too long By some many indolent, kissing lifetimes. Yet she was young, beautiful, high-breasted; Sang to his plucking like a tautened lyre, Paced short with him here upon the terrace, Flesh laved with running shadow, dappled in light, Turning and turning as the sealight burned, Hair dark as midnight in her midnight cave.

Nostalgia was it? It must be more Driving him in the direction of his destiny, Launched again on waters of a god-wrecked voyage. From brazen sealight his hard hand rose; On seaward terrace brazen bangle gleamed : Marbled, olive flesh dappled with leaves' light, Bronze sail filling splashed with sealight, Veined with trembling light. Under the vine, and distant, The tears stubbornly falling, the cry forming.

Refusing her gift he left her these tokens. These Greek and independent children. His boat beat seaward now, heeling To her parting gift of sailing weather, The breeze moving alder and cypress, Wafting smoke from the cedar-wood island fires, Troubling the unbound, dark and wondrous hair. Cloaked in stuff of bronze and gold, His head turned toward the horizon- He whom she had rescued solitary from the sea. Five years she had lain with him, nymph and bride, To lose him seaward now against the light: Her own hands had provisioned the boat Whose great oar opened now its wash, Fan of distance, wedge of his going, That wake in whose wake she gently mourned. Until he was lost, afloat in distance, Bearing his mortality like a god. 32 Dialosue after Midnisht

She But after this, what then? What then? After this night and springing day What next? What next of nights and days? All my wanting is that you Should want me more than I want you; Your need the flower with which I feed The flowery mouth of love.

After this springing night what days? After this loving what can love Secure for me of love's wild need? On what green love shall next I feed?

The present moment is never enough, The golden shower is never enough To nourish all the days to come, To gild a calendar of nights. Yet where the word that can inflate An instant to eternity?

After the next, what then? What then? A new green lover, an inconstant day? My past my future and both dead: How shall I answer night and day?

He No more of talk and tears, I am sick of tears and talk. In the moment is its loss; In the loss the loving. Eternity is confined Within the moment, and the cry That tells me more than tears Is all love's talk. This speaks for me- Your head thrown back, Your throat pulled taut- This is my eternity. 33 That the blind be lowered, That the day be bright OT darkness march the calendar, What are these to me? Promises I will not keep, Words I will not speak, What are these to me? Eternity is confined Within the moment, and the cry That tells me more than tears Is all love's guarantee.

I know not on what Your green love next may feed. Lie still. Moment on moment- No more of tears and talk. Loving the moment is enough Of golden shower for me, Who am enough for you, In this confined eternity. Enough of talk and tears : Over your ears my hands, Over your mouth my mouth. Why will this not answer All your springing need ? She I am happiest when sad, Most sad when happiest. My tears for the love We are making and losing; My words for the world We are choosing and breaking. Soon the door will swing, Curtain flare, your footsteps Pass along the rising path; And I of the calendar shall ask : After this, what then? What then? Sadness without happiness: Soon it will be morning.

Your mouth over my mouth, Your hands under my thighs : 34 What is this love we are making? What birth and death deceiving?

He Is it my fate To have for mate One such As talks too much? Lie still, and hush.

Soon it will be morning.

STUART ,:>LATER World Enough, and Time

WHEN the smell of dried grass is waved abroad By warm air full of invisible smoke of summer, When all the resilience that the spring has stored· Comes shaking out in a tenuous leafy shimmer- Sun-dance of eddies from the pores of the soil- Then the earth no longer resents our presence, But out of fullness gives us reward for toil, Content, after the harsh spring's intolerance That the wasteful struggle of growth and change must pass And the languorous season of bearing fruits succeed. So one burnt moment in the happy grass Wakes the rootless stirring of the new world's need-

A greater authority over earthy forces, And fresh flowers in the gardens of men's faces.

35 LEO FOWLER New Zealand Since the War

6. MAORI AND PAKEHA DR J. C. Beaglehole's statement, in his article in this series last June, that 'the critical fact about New Zealand since the war may be the relationship of Maori and pakeha', is provocative and important. My own first reaction to it was 'What Maori?'. There are, I think, more types and classes of Maori than there are types and classes of Pakeha in this country. There is a wider gulf between the university- trained Maori, assured almost to the point of assertiveness, and the Maori who has remained in the small, isolated Maori community of the Urewera, the far North or the East Coast, than there is between any two similar types of Pakeha. The gap however, though it may be wider in many aspects, is more easily and more frequently bridged. It is dangerously easy to speak of the Maori collectively, ignoring these differences. Before we can do so with truth and accuracy we must isolate the shared characteristics which link the extremes. First among them I would put pride of race. I have found Maoris to be very proud, some of them almost aggressively so, of being Maori. I have often asked my friends who have half, or even more, European blood whether they think of themselves as being Maori or Pakeha. Invariably the reply is 'Maori of course'. I think the second, in importance, of the commonly shared attitudes of the Maori is his shyness with, and his suspicion of, the Pakeha. This results in an attitude which at the one extreme is an almost arrogant contempt and at the other a lack of interest which is, perhaps, the harder to overcome. It is an attitude easily understood by the student of history. Its very deep roots go back to the race's early experience of Pakehas who professed one code of ethics and behaviour but who commonly lived by another and lower one. It goes back to the wars of which the result, if not the sole cause, was the acquisition of Maori lands. No one familiar with the originally proposed pattern of confiscation in Waikato, Taranaki, Bay of Plenty and Poverty Bay will wonder that a people who could recognize facts much more easily than they could understand the complexity of the forces contributory to those facts, should emerge from those wars with suspicion and deep distrust. 36 This bitterness has survived in a suspicion and a cynicism which many Maoris are not consciously aware they hold, and which pro- gressively fewer of them could trace to its original source. That it does remain is an undoubted fact. It finds expression in many forms. It is reflected very often in the words of their action songs, especially those which are composed to be sung among themselves, as a kind of modern folksong, at tribal huis and in the shearing sheds. I have often smiled to myself as Pakeha audiences, and more often Pakehas among Maori audiences, have joined in the applause for these songs, sung most frequently to Pakeha hit-parade tunes. I have wondered what the reaction of these applauding Pakeha would have been had they understood the real purport of the songs. I would not have it supposed, however, that these attitudes among the Maori people have their roots solely in the race-relations of bygone generations. I am sorry to say that the actions of the modern Pakeha all too frequently ensure a continuation of this distrust. I have, on a number of occasions, introduced visiting Pakehas to groups of my Maori friends. These visitors have been given a freedom with camera and tape-recorder which I should hesitate to ask for myself. Very often my Maori friends have gone to a great deal of trouble to change into traditional Maori costume, or otherwise to meet the demands of enthusiastic strangers. These visitors have in return, and almost without exception, promised to send copies of the photos or the tapes, or at least an account of what happened to the material when the visitor returned to his home. Almost without exception these promises were broken. I know of at least two occasions when the material was used widely and profitably overseas, in print and on television, but in neither case did the Maori group get so much as an acknowledgment. How often, too, have I been ashamed at the ignorance and dis- courtesy of my race when, at tangis and at huis, Pakeha visitors have run almost amok with their cameras, pointing them with an enthusiasm which almost matched their effrontery at some digni- fied old Maori couple hongi'ing as they shed tears in memory of some departed loved one. I think these attitudes, among both races, have become softened a little since the war. Partly this is so because the Maori earned such laurels as a soldier, more so because it brought such large numbers of Maori and Pakeha together in a shared experience which had physical, emotional and spiritual content. The participation of Maoris in so many patriotic efforts was another factor. Perhaps an even greater one was that the wartime vacuum in industry was so largely filled from a source of Maori 37 labour which Pakeha employers had not previously used or even known existed. Some Maoris indeed were replaced by Pakehas as soon as could be, sometimes indeed with almost indecent haste, but they piloted the way for many who followed because they had proved, on the whole, good employees and good workmates. Probably the greatest contribution to the improvement of these racial attitudes has been the spread of eo-racial education at primary and high school level. There is not a great deal of social mingling between the two races at school, both Maori and Pakeha tend- ing to cohere in racial groups, but there is inevitably a good deal of rubbing shoulders in class and out which has its effect on the tendency to think in terms of 'those Maoris' or 'those Pakehas'. The same force of loose association is increasingly conditioning their adult lives. Under the conditions of modern farming practice and modern living standards Maori lands, I am told, can support rather less than 20% of the Maori rural population. The remainder, perforce, trend inevitably townward Where they find employment mainly in industry or in labouring work. Here again mingling is incidental but increasingly takes place. Racial thinking, on both sides, tends to become less abstract. As far as my observations go it is difficult for Maoris to find employment in offices, semi-skilled positions and in the sub-strata of professional work. To some extent this is due to the educational background of the applicants and I shall refer to this aspect later. I cannot escape the conviction that it is much more generally due to a widespread if unacknowledged prejudice against the Maori as an employee. I have never met a Maori bank officer for instance. I know it has been said that there is no race barrier against Maoris as bank officers, but the fact remains that in an area where the Maori population is large and where an adequate number leave high school academically qualified, I know of none. Racial and colour prejudice does play a part in keeping the Maori out of the types of position I have mentioned but it is not the main factor. The prejudice is largely against certain alleged racial characteristics. One, and the commonest of them, is that the Maori is accused of being 'unreliable', likely to stay way from his work whenever there is a hui or a tangi, for instance. A friend of mine who is an American Fulbright Scholar married to a New Zealand schoolteacher, worked on an M.A. thesis on Absenteeism in Industry. I do not know whether it was completed or not but I do know that, at an advanced stage, it showed that the Maori had a much better record for attendance than the Pakeha. I have had two Maoris on my staff in the past few years. They were 38 not hand-picked but they proved good average employees just as reliable as their Pakeha colleagues. There does exist a strong and widespread prejudice against Maoris on the part of a great many Pakehas, and as I said at the beginning many Maoris hold Pakehas at an arm's length of distrust. These are prejudices rather than colour bars for they tend to vanish when people of the two races meet on grounds of shared interests or develop personal likings. Like most prejudices they are rooted in lack of understanding and in emotive thinking, but that does not make them any less of a barrier. On the whole I would say it is the Pakehas's responsibility to do something about fostering the understanding which will smooth the path for more social and cultural traffic between the two peoples, if for no other reason than that he is in a favoured position. It is not very often that the average Pakeha has to meet his Maori counterpart on Maori ground, but there are increasing necessities and occasions for the Maori to make incursions into the Pakeha world. Where the Pakeha does, from choice or from necessity, venture into the Maori world he will be assured of at least surface courtesy and will be unfortunate indeed if he does not find someone to spon- sor and guide him. The same cannot, by any means, be said to be the rule in the case of the hesitant Maori making his early contacts with the Pakeha. Here we encounter another shared characteristic of almost all sections of Maoris, shyness and innate modesty. However confident and uninhibited the Maori may be on his own marae, he tends to carry into the Pakeha world a sense of racial and social insecurity. He feels he is not equipped for the close association with the Pakeha into which social and economic forces are willy-nilly carrying him. At the same time, and with increasing momentum, the same forces are divorcing him from a pattern of Maori life which has, in the past, been the basis of his security as a Maori and as an individual human being. A generation ago Maori life was still largely based on the traditional pattern of small, and predominantly rural, social groups. These groups centred around the marae, by which I mean the common meeting place of a Maori community sometimes, but not always, associated with a meeting house. The patterns of living, of behaviour and of ethics in these communities were dominated, if not dictated, by the elders of the community. Even those who left these small communities to live in cities and to work in Pakeha en- vironments withdrew periodically to their home community where they were able to refresh their Maoritanga (Maoriness is a simple 39 interpretation) by re-association with a familiar environment. It was a process described by the late Dr Maha Winiata as 'co-mingling and withdrawal'. Leadership of the Maori by the Maori was then plentiful, beneficent and effective. The Young Maori Party of the early 19oo's and the Carron, Ngata, Buck, Pomare, Bennett, Te Puea, Tahiwi generation (to name but a few nationally recognized figures), had grown to greatness in maturity. In the famous words of Ngata they had grasped the weapons of the Pakeha while keeping their thoughts still centred on the treasures of their ancestors. They set standards to guide the Maori both in the strange world of the Pakeha and in their more familiar Maori world. They were strong enough to ensure that these standards were, on the whole, adhered to. They had behind them a still vital tradition that leaders were to lead and followers were to follow. I do not think the average Pakeha appreciates the greatness of these leaders in the eyes of their people, and in particular the greatness of the late Sir Apirana Ngata in whom became focalized the whole tradition of leadership. A power in his lifetime he has become a tradition in the comparatively short time since his death. There is seldom a Maori gathering at which his people's sense of loss at his passing is not referred to in speeches and in action songs and hakas. Alike to those who knew him intimately and to those to whom he is but a name, a reputation, a tradition, he has become a focal point of pride of achievement and of inspiration to further endeavour. The old order is rapidly passing. The maraes are gone or the people are going from them. The leaders are not leaders in the old- time tradition and their followers are not followers in that tradition either. We have seen that the Maori is, of necessity, migrating from the country to the town and this migration is destroying the marae as a tribal forum and as a spiritual focus. Maraes have been established in a few of the larger centres and are being established in others but they are not, for a variety of reasons, fulfilling the old function to an adequate degree. I think that the lack of something to fulfil the need catered for by the old marae system is finding compensation, to some extent, in two things. One is the growing attendance at huis on a provincial and on a national scale. The annual gatherings of the Maori churches; the Anglican Hui Topu, Hui Aroha, and Rau Aroha; the Catholic Hui Aranga, the huis of the Ratana, Mormon and other denominations have all seen increasing attendances during the past few years as has the annual Coronation Anniversary hui of the Maori King at Ngaruawahia. 40 If we take as an example the Hui Topu of the Diocese of Waiapu we find that it began as a small hui at Archdeaconate level about twelve years ago. When, in 1956, the second Hui Topu at Diocesan level drew an attendance of a thousand people at Ruatoria it was regarded as a stupendous record. Yet at the Rotorua Hui in 1960 there were over five thousand people and at the Hui Topu to be held at Ngaruawahia in May of 1962, the first to be held on a national scale, it is expected that there will be thousands more. It is significant that these are not exclusively religious or denominational huis, though originally they were intended to be so. They are still primarily so in purpose but they are acquiring the characteristics of inter-denominational and inter-tribal huis. This would apply, in varying degrees, to the huis of all churches. They are satisfying the religious needs of the Maori people indeed, but they are also satisfying a deep-rooted marae-hunger, a hunger for Maori- tanga, and a hunger for leadership. These hungers spring, as all hungers must, from unsatisfied demands. If any one saying could be held to embody the philosophy of the Maori people Ngata's words from which I quoted earlier would come nearest todoing so. They are quoted in an endless suc- cession of speeches, they form the motif of action song and patere, they sum up the racial outlook and for that reason, no less than for their intrinsic philosophy, they are worth quoting in both Maori and English. The English translation is by the Rt. Rev. W. N. Panapa, Bishop of Aotearoa and both translation and original were given to me by the late Sir Apirana's son, Mr H. K. Ngata of Gisborne. E tipu, e rea, mo nga ra o tou ao; ko to ringa ki nga rakau a te Pakeha hei ara mo te tinana, ko to ngakau ki nga taonga a o tipuna Maori hei tikitiki mo to mahuna, a ko to wairua ki to Atua, nana nei nga mea katoa. Grow up oh tender plant To fulfil the needs of your generation; Your hand clasping the weapons of the Pakeha As a means for your physical progress, Your heart centred on the treasures Of your Maori ancestors As a plume upon your head, Your soul given to God The author of all things. The second thing that I see as a newer development in this ful- 4I filment of the hungers I have mentioned is the growth in popularity of the so-called Young Maori Leaders' Conferences. I do not think the title of these gatherings was the happiest choice and I have hopes that it will be changed, but I think that these conferences themselves are one of the most important of all recent developments in the Maori world. Not the least interesting and important of their functions is that they are attracting the participation of many Pakehas who from choice or from vocation, find themselves mixing sufficiently in Maori circles to take an informed and sympathetic interest in Maori affairs. The Maori has not done a bad job, all things considered, with some of the weapons of the Pakeha. I have been told by quite a number of old people, at various times and in various places, that one of these weapons was Pakeha blood, which was accepted by an earlier generation with equal esteem, whichever side of the blanket it came from, in the confidence that it would sharpen the Maori mind in the usage of Pakeha weapons without materially diluting, in the child of mixed blood, the allegiance to the treasures of the Maori ancestors. I cannot help feeling that Ngata would experience some dis- appointment and disillusion could he witness the failure of many of his people fully to avail themselves of one of the most potent of all the weapons the Pakeha has made available. All Maori leaders, from the earliest converts to the present day, have recognized education as the primary weapon in fashioning for the Maori a secure place in an environment predominantly and increasingly Pakeha. Opportunity is indeed increasing, but there appears to be a lack of the purpose and the tenacity to take advantage of that opportunity. At high school level the Maori pupil has a much lower sense of personal objective than his Pakeha schoolmate. He has a less keen appreciation of the importance of education (or at least of the importance of the school certificate, which is not quite the same thing) as a key to unlock the door to opportunity. Maori parents on the whole seem much less capable of keeping their childrens' noses to the scholastic grindstone than are Pakeha parents. Consequently there is a tremendous wastage of potential material and a most un- justifiable direction of school-leavers to manual and unskilled work. This is a matter in which I have been personally interested for some years. I have been continually disappointed that year after year so many of my young Maori friends have failed to qualify for school certificate when I have been sure that, with proper encouragement, they could easily have passed the examination. I believe the same is true, in some degree, at university level. 42 Here my personal experience is more limited but from what I have gathered from students themselves, and from their elders, there seems a marked tendency to take the easier option and an inability to generate a sufficient sense of purpose to prove a defence against distraction. Opportunity undoubtedly exists at high school level and is expanding in the field of higher education. Determination to take advantage of opportunity is not keeping pace. Lack of adequate leadership is at least one of the causes of this gap between opportunity and the ability, or the willingness, to take advantage of it. I am not saying that leadership does not exist, for that would be wildly untrue, but there is insufficient adequate leadership at almost every level. It is numerically inadequate and it is inadequate in quality. I can find no figure in the Maori world today of the stature of Ngata, Carroll, Pomare or Bennett. There are indeed many leaders to be admired and in some cases revered, but for one reason or another they are not fulfilling the same functions of leadership that those I have mentioned fulfilled. This is partly due to the fact that existing leadership is being channelled, and therefore diffused, by over-modelling to Pakeha forms. The Pakeha pattern of leadership may be all very well for Pakehas. Pakehas are conditioned to democratic forms; at least an outward seeming of modesty and of social conformance is demand- ed of their leaders though this need not mean that such leadership is not astute and dynamic. Pakeha-type leadership is not leadership in the Maori tradition, and it is not the kind of leadership given by Carroll, Ngata and Pomare. It is not, either, the kind of leadership for which the Maori is ready. His tradition, and his condition of emergent development, both require a leader who is also a commander, a leader who per- ceives an objective clearly and who will pursue it regardless of uninformed opinion be it Maori or Pakeha. What is still needed in fact is a leadership with a touch of arrogance about it, but the arrogance of Ngata, which was a defiance of obstructions and obstruc- tors and not a personal or racial arrogance. This type of leadership at high level is still all too rare, though it may yet develop from an expanding source of sound and imaginative leadership at lower and more localized levels. All the things of which I have so far spoken condition the approach of the Maori to the Pakeha and to Pakeha institutions. The Maori will take responsibility in his own community but it is much harder to get him to do so in mixed ones. It is extremely hard, for instance, to get Maori members on the many committees which regulate the social and communal activities of every com- 43 munity. When they are persuaded to go onto such committees Maoris are, all too frequently, almost exasperatingly modest and self-effadng. These characteristics do not spring from any disinclination to serve. The Maori is the best worker and the finest giver I know. Ask any street-day collector. His effectiveness on the sort of committee I have mentioned is conditioned by a feeling of strangeness, an unsureness of welcome, which inhibits him from co-action with the Pakeha. He is unsure of his knowledge of Pakeha forms and formalities and unsure of his ability to participate without doing or saying something which will draw unfavourable attention to himself and his inadequacies. He is afraid of a loss of personal mana. If the Pakeha is going to wait until his Maori colleague over- comes this shyness and timidity sufficiently to cross the gulf between the Maori world and the Pakeha world he is going to wait a long, long time. If the Pakeha wishes to see the Maori integrated into a predominantly Pakeha world, then the Pakeha has a clear and urgent duty to set an example by crossing that gulf himself. He must find a new meaning to this suspect word 'integration', and he must make that meaning clear beyond doubt to his fellow citizen. As Mr Hunn has made quite clear in the report which has given such publicity to the word and concept of integration, the word means the combining of two parts, and not the assimilation of one part by another. Unfortunately the report is neither widely enough, nor clearly enough read. The term has outspread the report and in doing so it has acquired some nasty connotations. The first step to integration in its most wholesome sense is not to wait patiently until the Maori finds his way to ease and assurance in a predominantly Pakeha society: the Pakeha must take the first step by going more than half way to meet his Maori fellow- citizen. He must make the overtures, either on a personal or on a community level, preferably on both. If the Pakeha realizes that lack of sufficient or adequate leadership in the Maori world is holding back integration he must help in supplying the deficiency. I am not suggesting that the Pakeha should usurp or supplant Maori leadership in a Maori community, but he can certainly augment it and find himself welcomed in doing so. The Pakeha's reaction to the suggestion that he find his way into Maori circles and assist in overcoming Maori problems is surpris- ingly similar to that of the Maori who is asked to join in Pakeha affairs. There is the same initial shyness, the same immediate shrinking, the same fear of being thought presumptuous and of making himself ridiculous. 44 I have already mentioned that there is a deep suspicion of the Pakeha in the Maori mind. This is true. It is equally true that the Maori is so innately considerate and hospitable that the Pakeha will be given no inkling of this suspicion. By the time he has sufficiently attuned himself to Maori society to recognize it it will no longer apply to him and he will have gone a long way toward dis- pelling it in the Maori circle into which he has integrated himself. What he will find is a friendship based on kindness and a disre- gard of superficialities; and a naturalness which will be almost a revelation to the average Pakeha. It will take the Pakeha a long time to be accepted, but not anywhere near as long as it would take a Maori to be accepted to the same degree by a Pakeha community. The Maori is a shrewd and sensitive judge but he requires assurance of only one quality in the Pakeha, the quality of sincerity. Once he is convinced of that the walls of his reserve will come tumbling down more quickly and completely than did the walls of Jericho. The Maori will give the Pakeha the freedom of his institutions, his home and his heart. The Pakeha will find that slowly, almost imperceptibly, he will be dis- charging many of the functions of leadership and being entrusted with responsibilities the assumption of which, at the outset, he would have thought impossible. I have said that the Maori is not availing himself of the weapons of the Pakeha as effectively as he might. The fault for that is as much the Pakeha's as it is the Maori's. The Maori is not discrimina- tive of Pakeha values; he tends to be over-influenced by the tremendous output of second- and third-rate mass-produced material and cultural rubbish. Cheap comics, cheap films and bizarre fashions in clothes have found almost a special market among the Maori but that is mainly because nobody has taken the trouble to introduce him to anything better. Many if not most of my young Maori friends wear the extreme fashions which in European countries we have come to associate with the labels 'bodgie' and 'widgie', but they wear it simply because it has become a fashion. It has no suggestion whatever of being a uniform for decadence as it tends to have among many Pakehas. Besides failing to grasp fully the weapons of the Pakeha, the rising generation of Maori has a tendency to allow the traditions of his ancestors to become a wasting treasure. He is still too close to his race's pre-literate phase for the vast background of history, tradition, custom, poetry and genealogy to have been put into permanent form. The old culture is still largely dependent for survival 45 on oral transmission and much of it is still too jealously guarded by the initiate for oral transmission to be widely effective. This is a field in which the Pakeha has indeed laboured lovingly and mightily, as the works of Best, White, Cowan and Baucke (to mention only a few) prove. But the processes of writing and printing are too slow and the funds available too scant and too fiercely husbanded. The work of the Pakeha in this field is not ended. He cannot turn over to the Maori the responsibility for the continuance of all that is involved in what the Pakeha calls Maori culture and the Maori himself Maoritanga. I think most of those interested realize that much of the more important part of that culture will perish if the language perishes. The language itself seems to me unlikely to survive unless its survival is the concern of the Pakeha as well as of the Maori. If the Pakeha will give his goodwill to the teaching of Maori in schools he need do little more; without that goodwill I fear that the language, like the culture it expresses and of which it is the main custodian, will perish. The loss of the language, I am sure, is doing more than any other single factor to undermine the Maori's self-confidence. I am quite certain that the Maori adolescent of today is much more inarticu- late, whether in Maori or in English, than his counterpart was a hundred years ago in the community of his day. I feel strongly that the field of Maori culture is one in which the shadow is being grasped and the substance allowed to escape. It is still possible to preserve much of the wealth of Maori local and national history, tradition and everyday custom whiah are the real founda- tion of Maori culture, but little is being done about it. The preserva- tion di Maori culture, like that of the Maori language, requires the stimulus of Pakeha interest and approbation. But the main things which form the great treasury of Maori cultural heritage (which is also part of the Pakeha's cultural heritage) are being lost sight of through the over-emphasis on the more outward and visible signs of that culture, the action songs and hakas and the few handcrafts which still, precariously, survive. On the Whole the Pakeha is hindering rather than helping. He is damning, out of hand, customs he does not understand. I have often heard Pakehas deploring the 'time and money wasted at tangis', yet the very Pakehas I have heard complaining have never attended a tangi and have no conception whatever of its deep spiritual and emotional values and beauty. The Maori himself, in many cases, is helping to destroy many of his valuable cultural customs through thoughtlessness and indifference, oblivious to the tragic truth of 46 the old proverb that 'evil is wrought by want of thought as well as want of heart'. The criticism that the tangi is becoming an excuse for a feast and a drinking orgy, that it is becoming too expensive for the economy of the modem family unit, are valid criticisms, but these are merely harmful developments. The abuses of what I believe to be a beautiful and beneficial custom can be checked, and the heavy financial drain on the pocket of the individual family lightened by the revival of the old custom of each visiting party or person contribut- ing his small koha, or gift, toward the expenses. I have mentioned the tangi merely as one example. I must not let this thread of thought draw me away from the main subject. I think it is both inevitable and desirable that the Maori should continue, for some time to come, to co-exist with the Pakeha as a separate cultural and racial group, mixing freely and increasingly with his Pakeha fellow-citizen, but withdrawing at will into his own communal invironment. Maha Winiata's defined process of 'eo-mingling and withdrawal' is a wise and beneficial concept, but though the group into which the Maori withdraws may be essentially a Maori one, it need not continue to be exclusively so. The Pakeha will be welcomed into the most exclusive of Maori groups if his reason for going into it is one of sincere interest and sympathy. No people are more ready to learn, and to be helped, than the Maori if the teaching and the helpfulness do not carry with them the aura of patronage. If the Maori has become familiar with the Pakeha, his habits and customs and ways of thought, in the Maori's own environment, it will be much easier for them both when the Maori, in turn, crosses the threshold of the Pakeha world. Unfortunately the Pakeha's reaction to the concept of integration is, too often, 'let the Maori integrate with us'. It is a woefully insufficient and one-sided reaction. The recent Maori All-Black controversy provides an insight into the Maori point of view. Although the original reaction of the Maori was one of sensitive withdrawal and hurt racial pride, it is significant that, in the outcome, the Pakeha gained appreciably in the esteem of his Maori friends. The Maori attitude in general was, 'this is a situation the Pakeha has brought about, therefore it is up to the Pakeha to resolve it. Now let us see what he does about it.' It was the very real and widespread indignation among the Pakeha, and especially the public expression of that indignation through the press and the pulpit, through protest marches and depu- tations to Parliament, as well as through individual contacts, which 47 prevented the controversy from souring race-relations for years to come. The problem was not resolved but the Maori was left in no doubt that the mass of his Pakeha fellow-countrymen would have liked it to be, and would have wished it solved in the manner most satisfactory to the Maori. Not all issues are so clear cut, not all afford the Pakeha an opportunity to make public expression of his opinion about them. There are many problems on which the Pakeha has no informed opinion at all, though this does not appear to prevent him from talking loosely about them. Most Pakehas give lip service to the ideal of racial equality but too few know anything at all about the many things for which the Maori is criticized. Maori land usage, Maori education, Maori drinking, Maori crime statistics and the problems attendant on the townward drift of the Maori are all matters on which I have often heard Pakehas make ill-informed criticism. These are all problems which depend for their ultimate solution upon at least the passive co-operation of the Pakeha. He cannot give even passive co-operation until he is much more widely informed. There are some things in the Hunn Report with which I am not in agreement, but I would like tOI see that report published in a cheaper edition so that it could be read by every Pakeha. He would find it most interesting reading, partly for its accurate statistics and even more for its informed comment on those statistics. It should shatter a lot of Pakeha unfavourable illusions about their Maori fellow citizens. Probably the subject on which the Maori IS most criticized is that of drink. There is no doubt that it is a serious problem in the Maori world of today. I would suggest, however, that it is a subject on which the Pakeha should be better informed than he is. The Maori lawbreaker and the Maori drinker a:re not to be judged by the same standards as Pakeha offenders in the same fields. The Maori does not know the law because he has not had the same opportunities of knowing it. He has far less opportunity of learning about civics and ethics in his own environment than the Pakeha has. The change in the licensing laws allowing the Maori freer access to drink has put temptation upon him before he is equipped to resist it. When the question of extending the license to the King Country came up there were two schools of thought among the Maori people. There were those who wished a continuance of protective legislation and those who held that the Maori must learn to live with drink as the Pakeha has had to learn to live with it. It is a process of learning that the Pakeha had found lengthy and painful. We cannot be surprised if the Maori finds it the same. 48 This is a matter in which the Maori is not being helped by the Pakeha as much as he should be. Many a Maori drinking party has started off with a carton or tWo of beer and would have ended there had it not been too fatally easy to get the Pakeha publican to roll out the barrel, after hours. If the Pakeha continues his hypocritical winking at the licensing laws he is equally guilty with the Maori who falls victim to the consequent abuses. All in all Maori-Pakeha relations in this country have improved immensely since the war. This is to be credited, in the main, to the effort the Maori has made to overcome the educational, cultural and civic differences which separated the two peoples. If in the next comparable period the Pakeha will make an equal effort toward understanding, the two races will surge forward to a richer and fuller eo-citizenship.

Commentaries

MARGARET DALZIEL Disaster in the Primary School

THE New Zealand Department of Education published in 1961 a new English syllabus with the title Language in the Primary School. The syllabus of reading, originally published in 1953, was then re- issued without change of content as an appendix to the syllabus of language. And since there have appeared two much longer books entitled Suggestions for Teaching English in the Primary School, the first and second of a series of bulletins designed to help teachers interpret the new syllabus. In this discussion I shall be concerned most with the syllabus of language. And I am quite ready to acknowledge that I am chiefly though not exclusively concerned with its value as a syllabus of instruction for children of rather more than average ability, for children who may continue their education to Teachers' College and University, who may enter professions, and among whom will be those who in their turn will help to hand on to future genera- 49 tions the chief achievement and instrument of civilization, the language. I know that schools have a duty to all children, of whatever ability, but I think they have a special duty to those who will be specially responsible for guarding and transmitting the culture which the schools themselves represent. Let us first consider the aims of teaching English as set out in these publications. The first page of the language syllabus presents them, quoting in part from the last two revisions of the syllabus, in 1928 and 1946, as follows: There are no important changes in ultimate aims: the teacher must still aim 'to develop in his pupils facility in expressing their thoughts clearly, fluently, and correctly in speech or in writing, to train the pupils in the proper use of books, and thus to foster an appreciation of English literature' (1928 syllabus). It will always be 'the responsibility of the primary schools to teach children to be good writers of English, as well as good speakers, readers, and listeners' (1946 syllabus). It will always be true, too, that 'A good writer may be defined as one who has something worth expressing and can express it clearly and exactly in correct, idio- matic English' (1946 syllabus). On page 2 we read : The purpose of teaching English to New Zealand children is to contribute to the general aim of education in this country-to help each child to develop fully as an individual and a citizen. This will be done by helping him to think more clearly, to express himself more adequately, and to communicate more effectively. All the language skills contribute to this aim. And on the first page of the reading syllabus we find: In short, the ability to read well has become so important that both social competence, and full intellectual and emotional growth, depend upon it. To be inadequate as a reader is to be to some extent inadequate as a person, a citizen, and a worker. I am sure that the people who compiled these syllabuses know what these statements imply. The implications are still clearer if we compare them with the statement of aims in the opening of the section on English in the primary school syllabus of 1904. This, often called the 'great syllabus', was largely the work of that wise man, George Hogben, at that time Inspector-General of schools and later New Zealand's first Director of Education. The chief objects of the instruction in reading shall be to impart to the pupils the power of fluent reading, with clear enunciation, 50 correct pronunciation, tone, and inflexion, and expression based upon intelligent comprehension of the subject-matter; to cultiv- ate a taste for and an appreciation of good literature; and accord- ingly to lead the pupils to form the habit of reading good books. The reading of such books might, indeed, well replace all other kinds of home-work. Poetry set for recitation should, while suited to the age of the pupils, be chosen for its literary merit as well as for the interest it arouses. There is such a wealth of simple and beautiful poetry in English literature that there is no reason to select for repetition verse that is not worth the trouble of learning by heart. One of the objects of making children learn verse or prose by heart is that they may have stored up in their memory masterpieces that may develop their imagination, and may, whether the children themselves are conscious of the operation or not, mould their taste for good literature.... The object of the instruction in composition shall be to train the children in the correct and ready use of their mother-tongue, both in speech and in writing. There is a sense in which the aim of the new English syllabus, to help children to develop as individuals and citizens, to make them adequate as persons, citizens and workers, can justifiably be put before the teacher, as before the parent, parson, youth-leader, sports- coach or anyone else who has any part in bringing up children. Since it is both preceded and followed in the language syllabus by a stricter statement of the general aims of teaching the 'language skills', anyone who objects to it can be accused of pettiness. But I think that these statements are important and should be seriously discussed, for they are surely intended by the writers to convey their sense of the revolution often summed up in phrases like 'child- centred education', 'teach the child, not the subject', and so on. They underlie a great deal of what follows them, in particular the failure to state any aims specific and detailed enough to be of much use to the practising teacher. I admit that my general mistrust of large and grandiose aims in education is here strengthened by my special mistrust of these aims, in particular of the desire to produce good citizens. In so far as I find any architectonic principle governs my work as a teacher, it is to help my pupils to understand themselves a little better, in relation to the Creator and creation. The last thing I want is to foster more of the kind, well-meaning, muddle-headed, uncritical New Zealanders who, as educational authorities must know very 5I well, form the bulk not only of our population but also of our teachers, whose efforts at helping children to develop as individuals and citizens will therefore be almost inevitably controlled by their own characters. (This is not to say that I have much success in pro- ducing anything else.) I believe 'education for citizenship' is likely to be a dangerous thing, dangerous in proportion to the rigidity with which the term 'good citizen' is defined. No doubt we in New Zealand are lucky in that we understand the term fairly loosely, which helps us to ignore the confusion it hides. But the confusion is there (just as in the phrase 'education for democracy', which so often obscures the fact that in a proper sense schools are places for authority; truth is not determined by counting votes), and the concept of the good citizen seems to me of little value to the teacher faced with a class that has to be taught 'English'. Less objectionable than talk about citizenship, but little more likely to help the teacher, is the description of young children's education in Suggestions for Teaching English in the Primary School (r): This is their real and serious business, to place themselves in the scheme of living things and to learn the care and the responsive- ness which is part of our humanity (p.26). Admirable; but in what way does this distinguish the child's schooling from his life at home and at play? But leaving aside the proper aim and nature of all education, let us consider that the school has the child for about twenty-five hours a week during about forty weeks of the year. For the rest of the time, parents, family and society are doing their bit to help him develop as an individual and citizen, and most teachers know the limitations of what they can achieve in a contest with these forces. Where the sc}.lool can achieve something is in the limited sphere of schooling, and why we should be ashamed of this limitation I cannot think. It is here that the efforts of parents and other unprofess- ional helpers are notoriously ineffective; here, in this proper pro· fessional field, the teacher has an unrivalled opportunity to impart knowledge and skill. For this reason I should expect to find in a syllabus of English a clear statement of the aims that are specific- ally pursued in teaching the language, and that dearly distinguish it from other subjects of instruction. I think that it is indirectly, by the devotion and success with which he carries out this proper limited task that he, like other teachers and other professional men, doctors or lawyers or civil servants, will most powerfully affect children's moral development. Good citizenship, character-training 52 -these, like happiness, are by-products of the life of action directed to specific ends. To this it will be objected that the new syllabus does state certain ends. It reiterates the aims stated in the syllabuses of 1928 and 1946, and it lists thirteen skills which 'by the time they leave the primary school children of average ability can be expected to have mastered reasonably well' (p.8). It continues: 'In all their oral and written work they should achieve the skills and the standards of accuracy that are suitable to their stage of development.' These skills, the product of eight years' education, have a very miscellaneous character and seem to differ greatly in importance, as when we are told that 'a beginning should have been made in establishing such skills as . . . the use of alphabetical order, for example, in making and using a dictionary or reference file of pictures, or in using an encyclopedia; selection and discussion of the main ideas in a passage of prose or a poem read silently or orally' (p.9). Perhaps this does not matter. But what does matter is the uncertainty suggested in the general description, 'the skills and the standards of accuracy that are suitable to their stane of development'. We find the same sort of thing in the details; for example: 'They should have acquired some method in editing work to be presented to others', and 'They should have some idea of how to plan a handwritten or printed page or notice for presentation to others' (p. ro. Italics in all cases are mine.) If we look back to see in any detail what is to be expected of children at earlier stages in their schooling, we get a dusty answer : In the primer classes, most will learn to write several simple, consecutive sentences correctly, and to use capital letters and full stops. Many children will go well beyond this; but it is not possible to say what children should be able to do in any detail, because individual patterns of development and home circumstances have so much bearing on achievement that any arbitrary standard could be misleading. The standard to set is simply the best that each child can achieve with all the help the teacher can give (p. 6). Under the heading 'The Standard Oasses' we read : The general criterion for the use of language is its fitness for the occasion, and its effectiveness in carrying out the user's intention. Standards of fitness vary with the occasion, and children vary greatly in the effectiveness with which they can use the language to carry out their intentions. The linguistic standards that teachers should require from children must therefore be flexible, 53 relating on the one hand to the needs of the occasion and the intention of the users, and on the other to differences in ability (p. 7)· The compilers of the syllabus have been perfectly consistent about this, for near the beginning they say, 'The content is no longer arranged in class programmes of exercises and activities.' The first book of Suggestions opens with a clear statement that the title means what it says, and that no teacher should feel obliged to adopt any of the ideas it contains. This marks the departure from the traditional practice of saying in more or less detail what the teacher of a particular class should be trying to do; it is interesting to compare the new syllabus in this as in other ways with that of 1928, which said: An attempt has been made to make the syllabus much more definite than its predecessor, so that the young teacher will receive more real help from a perusal of its contents (p. 5). A further quotation from the 1928 syllabus shows clearly the change of educational theory since then. In 1928 the Department of Education said : It is intended that the teacher should provide for the rapid promotion of children of quick and bright intelligence, so that they may reach the secondary schools at an earlier age than at present (p. 6). But the 1961 syllabus implies the principle of social promotion (or, as it might equally well be called, social retardation) in all its rigidity. One reason why it is found impossible to make a fairly precise statement of the work for a particular class is that children who are grouped together on 'social' grounds are so different in intelligence and achievement. In fact, a rigid and mechanical grouping of children by chronological age has replaced fixed standards of attainment. The aim of language teaching is again stated under the heading 'Using language in the daily work of the class' : The standards to be aimed at are those of the educated adult community, that is, clear and coherent expression and correct usage. Success in reaching these two standards-one concerned with precision of thought, the other with grammar, spelling, and punctuation-will vary according to the abilities of the children. In the first case the teacher's task is to help children to value clarity and coherence; in the second to help them to form correct habits of speaking and writing, and to show them how these habits contribute to clarity and coherence. In doing this the teacher will 54 also share with the children their pride and pleasure in achieving these standards as far as they are able (p. 7). The reference to the standards of the educated adult is the only piece of dry land in this bog of platitude and relativism. And here we come to a fact which, however unpleasant, should be stated and faced. In New Zealand, as in other countries, very many trained teachers are not, so far as their knowledge and use of the English language are concerned, educated. The implication of this syllabus is that teachers are being given more freedom and responsibility to work out the details of teaching a language of which they themselves are masters. If we believe this we are deceiving ourselves. Through my work I am in touch with many trained teachers and teachers in training. They know and use the English language no better than the rest of my students, and are no fitter to hand on to children the standards of the educated adult. I believe that we must clear our minds of cant and realize that teachers need a good deal of detailed help if they are to teach English well, help of a sort that this syllabus conscientiously denies them. The only freedom a teacher can profitably use comes from command of his subject and his craft. Without this, freedom becomes chaos. This refusal to suggest fairly precise goals to be aimed at seems to indicate a curious failure of responsibility in responsible and serious people (for this syllabus is certainly drawn up by people with excellent intentions). Do they know, or do they wilfully refuse to face the fact that many teachers cannot speak or write good English? Do they, on the other hand, believe that New Zealand teachers in 1961 are so silly and so badly trained that they need to be reminded again and again that children differ and will not all learn to read and write English equally well? And do they believe that inexperienced teachers-or many experienced ones-have a clear idea of what standard the 'average' child should be expected to reach at different ages? Have they, indeed. any such idea themselves? It is significant that the syllabus contains not one reference to the use of models; it has omitted even the cautious reference made in the report of the Revision Committee published as a supplement to National Educatioil in August 1959: When children are old enough to realise that they may learn how to do something they wish to do by observing how other people do it, they are old enough to use models. But models should not be used mechanically, nor directly for creative work; nor is any one model satisfactory for a whole class. When a child 55 needs to know more about some point of usage or construction, he may be directed to study the work of the professional writers (preferably his own favourite authors, if they are reasonably good ones) to see how they do what he wants to do. But regular imita- tion of style, even from good models, is bad practice (p. 16; italics in the original). Even this suggests timidity, a failure of nerve on the part of people responsible for education, and uncertainty whether there are in fact proper ways of using English and whether teachers of English know what they are. But it is better than nothing, since it also suggests that at least in 'points of usage and construction' there are authorities to be consulted, and, in a shortened form, it appears in the second book of suggestions. It would be most unjust to say that the new syllabus makes the teacher's job easier. This is how it is formulated: The problem of language teaching in the primary school is thus seen as one of establishing conditions that will encourage and challenge children to think and to use language to further their thinking, and of helping them to use language well. This help implies direct teaching whenever the teacher thinks it necessary (p. 2). At first sight it may seem that his task has been lightened, especially if we consider what could be meant by the last sentence. Schools, we might think, are now not only places where children may learn-if all the circumstances conspire to make this possible and desirable; but also places where teachers may teach-if they think it necessary. But this suggestion that teachers need not teach is balanced by saying that they must do something far harder, create encouraging and challenging situations which will trick their pupils into learning something. While I can see a little truth in this formulation of the teacher's job, I think it is vague, pretentious, and misleading. For one thing, it implies what is indeed insisted on in the next paragraph, that children 'should understand what they do and see point in doing it'. This seems to me nonsense. Every parent who has taught his child to wash his hands before a meal knows how much education begins with what to the child must seem arbitrary and unreasonable commands; parents and teachers are both familiar with the failure to make a child understand the point of a command and the final 'Stop arguing and do as I say'. It is only when the adult has lost faith in the rightness of the command (or of course been worn down as we all are at times by the rubbery resistance of 56 youth) that he abnegates the responsibility of handing on the beliefs and habits and knowledge which are the child's heritage. If we love the child and the heritage, and no one should be teaching who doesn't, we shall not be afraid to say, 'Learn this now, and some day you will understand why', or even, 'Learn this now, and some say so'. Provided the child acknowledges the unspoken claim, 'I say so, and I know a lot more about it than you do' (and only people who inspire this confidence in children should be teaching), this can lead to a very satisfactory response. Again, I don't want to overstate the case. Obviously the more anyone understands what he is doing, and why, the better. If we had teachers enough and time, we could lavish them on the creation of ingenious situations and persuading children that there are reasons for learning to spell. Any sensible teacher will spend some time in this way. But first things first. The teacher who loves knowledge is so confident of its value that he will not feel he has to justify it to his pupils. Behind all this insistence on creating conditions rather than on teaching and learning ('Oearly the first and most important duty of the teacher is to provide the right kind of environment and the materials that children need to stimulate their development'-p. 27 of Suggestions for Teaching English in the Primary School (1) ), lies a lack of confidence in the importance of the mind. I suspect that this is connected with much that is characteristic of attitudes to knowledge in 'new' countries, and this subject has often been discussed. The longest section in the Suggestions concerns the 'Development Programme', and is largely made up of suggestions about things to play with, ranging from water, wood, sand, to toys, tools and dressing-up materials. Equally significant is the exaggerated emphasis on the importance of feeling. Children must have the security of the teacher's love and under- staflding to draw them out, and a good deal of freedom to choose the activities through which they will express their feelings .... A cut-and-dried, all-day-long routine leaves teacher and children with no leisure for casual conversation that so often brings a feeling of comfort and security .... Every child must be brought to feel that reading is an interesting and exciting thing to do and that his classmates and the adults that he meets find delight in it (Suggestions (1), p. II). As if the vast majority of small children did not go to school wanting to learn to read ! Also implied, especially in the second book of suggestions, is the 57 idea that old ways of doing things should be viewed with mistrust. Teachers are adjured to question traditional aims and methods, and are told that we now know more abo11t how children learn and what we should achieve in education than was known in the past (see pp. 5 and 129). It almost seems as if teaching were a science rather than an art. It is true that in science the new often super- sedes the old; but teaching is a matter of human relationships. Greek science may have only historical interest, but we have nothing to add to Plato's understanding of the relationship between master and pupil. This attitude to the past is part of the belief that children can successfully be taught only what touches their immediate interest and experience. In all the suggestions for teaching older children I noticed only one passing reference to the study of history, and that was to 'New Zealand in Pre-pakeha Times', though fortunately there are many books about our own past, the past of Europe, in the lists for the school library. It is implied that the child should read and write and talk about his immediate surroundings, both civil and natural, and about life in other countries at the present time, but not about the past of his own culture-a restriction of the content of education to the suffocating region of the here and now. But it is natural that conditions of work in a 'highly developed' country like ours should also affect attitudes to education. Now that the hard work has been taken out of most manual jobs including those in the home, we are encouraged to believe that it can be eliminated from mental activities too; why, in a world where anything is possible, should it be every bit as hard to learn to read and write in 1962 as it was in r862? Clearly something is wrong. Add this half-conscious resentment of hard work felt by both teacher and pupil to uncertainty whether what can be attained by hard work is worth having anyway, and you get the belief that the teacher's job is to woo children, to put them in the right frame of mind and the right environment for learning, rather than to impart to them something so precious and important that his enthusiasm carries both him and them along. I suspect that its difficulty is the real reason why the teaching of grammar is reduced in this syllabus to getting the child to pick up a few grammatical terms as he goes along. At any rate I find most of the other arguments commonly advanced against teaching grammar unconvincing. The criticism that grammar is generally useless as a means of improving written or spoken English may be valid-I am not sure-but it certainly has its use for learning a foreign language, which fortunately a good number of our children still attempt. That knowledge of grammar fades is again 58 true; but we do not stop teaching spelling, despite the fact that it is numbered with grammar among the most quickly lost of scholastic skills (see John E. Watson, 'The Permanence of School Learn- ing', Education x (1961), 99ff.). And the implication that the structure of our language is so uninteresting and unimportant that it is not worth study for its own sake is surely, when we bring it out into the open, quite appalling, and contradicted by such things as the great popularity of Professor Arnold Wall's broadcast talks on English. Indeed, I am horrified when I read in an American book recommended to Teachers' College Students, and also by the Revision Committee, the following statement: Formal grammar is a professional tool like the technical knowledge which doctors, lawyers, mechanics, and others use in carrying on their professions. It is needed by the linguistic speci- alist, the editor, and the copyreader in a publishing house, but not by children nor by the average citizen in carrying on his vocational and personal life. Good usage is the school's goal- usage that makes it possible for the individual to merge his interests and activities with those of others without being conspicuous and without needing to give thought to his use of language (Ruth G. Strickland, The Language Arts in the Element- ary School, 2nd edition, 1957, p. 358). Inconspicuous unconscious use of the same sort of language as everyone around you-what an aim for the teacher of English! The argument that traditional English grammar has been displaced by modem structural linguistics has very limited applica- tion to what the primary school teacher should be doing. And traditional grammar, in so far as it has been displaced, has been replaced by a system which is more flexible and leads to better understanding of the language, to greater awareness on the child's part of its nature, that is, by a system which is worth more attention than the old rather than less. But it is not easily learned. Neither are those two valuable techniques, precis and paraphrase, which the syllabus does not include among the Opportunities, Situations, and Activities that Encourage or Demand Development of Language Skills. While there are references to teaching children to take notes, not one of the twenty-eight Opportunities etc. listed says that they must have been faced, by the time they are thirteen, with the hard necessity of writing down accurately in their own words either the full meaning or a summary of a passage of simple prose or verse. Yet what skill is more obviously important? But it is laboriously learned, and has to be worked at by teacher and pupil; 59 many children will not see the point of it; and it is probably not capable of being learned by children of much less than average ability. Are these adequate reasons for neglecting it? These are the points that make me think that the new syllabus of English language in the primary school, in spite of its manifest good intentions, is a disaster of the first magnitude. Its aims are pretentious, ill-defined, and unrelated to the limited possibilities of classroom teaching; it gives teachers no reasonably precise idea of what they should attempt in the various classes; and it implies that teachers are themselves so skilled in the understanding and use of the English language that they can safely be left to determine their own aims and standards. At a time when classes are still too big, and when it is still necessary to admit to Teachers' Colleges students who have just passed the School Certificate Examination and to give them only two years of training, this implication seems completely out of touch with fact. My very short experience of teaching infants convinces me that only an exceptional woman, with no nerves, indiarubber legs and three pairs of hands, could organize the kind of classroom that the syllabus and the accom- panying suggestions regard as desirable, and at the same time teach even twenty-five or thirty young children to read and write as well as their intelligence allows. The section 'Arranging the Day in Infant Classes' ends with the terrifying statement 'It is unlikely that many more than half the days will be "normal'' ones' (Sug- gestions (1), p. 49)-'-as if an established orderly regime were not one of the fundamental needs of small children. Similar excessive demands are made on the teacher of the standard classes. I think that teachers and administrators who believe that we have, or are likely to have in the foreseeable future enough teachers of such calibre are deceiving themselves. And there is a curious and dis- astrous paradox between this excessive faith in the teacher and the lack of faith in his traditional task of imparting the knowledge of reading and writing, knowledge on which civilization ultimately depends.

6o P. M. HILL

Townscape: Streets, Squares, Trees

IN GENERAL, New Zealand towns and cities have little or no merit as visual experiences. Of course parts of them are interesting but these are small compared with the sprawling, dull suburbia and the choked jumble of the central areas. One thing which has determined the character of many of our towns and prevented expression of community sense, has been the 'gridiron' plan of roads and the resultant small blocks of land between. There seem always to be long streets which do not end but peter out in dusty tracks with sagging wire fences and give no feeling of security or comfortable enclosure. Also, the large number of intersections brings traffic problems and in the centre of the blocks, where access is difficult, lie derelict sheds and wasted land. When the High Street developed, man's sense of showmanship brought bright faces to the buildings fronting it but only at the expense of even greater dereliction behind. It is amazing to see this tradition copied in new shopping centres such as Naenae in the Hutt, where an otherwise good attempt was made to give a sense of community to the central area. This 'fat;ade' theme too has dogged our architecture and thought in town design for a long time. An example is Arrowtown or, for that matter, any of the early South Island mining towns where good solid well-proportioned stone buildings were given light wooden wedding-cake Victorian fat;ades which jostled with their neighbours like pre-war sandwich-men. Today the High Street, Lower Hutt, and many other High Streets are no better. The Vic- torian wedding cake which at least had richness of shadow and decoration is on its way out and the flat shining, and often char- acterless, aluminium front is on its way in, but still only as a fat;ade with often the old building behind. This could all be looked upon and accepted as an expression of the age for it must be ad- mitted some of the buildings are well designed, but there is an insistence on coating everything, including stone and timber, with a layer of paint and advertisement: The buildings and the materials used lose their identity and we are left with false fronts looking 61 like cardboard film sets with the same air of impermanence. The result is a conflict in colour and conflict in shape which the eye finds too disturbing to sort out. Street advertising is an art in itself requiring a strong sculptural sense in space and has yet to be tried here, though one could point to some of the lanes leading off the Square in Christchurch where it is used in a restrained decorative manner enhancing the shape of the buildings. Another blot on our towns is the so"called 'street furniture' which includes such things as bus shelters, telephone booths, lighting and power poles. I know of no bus shelters worth mention and telephone booths could be better designed, but lighting and power poles with their jumbled rhythm of near verticals and tangled web of overhead wires are the real offenders. Vertical elements at order- ed heights and intervals can help the design of a street but the poles are rarely vertical and invariably gather cluttered festoons of timber, wire and metal gagdets. Some attempts have been and are being made to lessen the eyesore by putting cables underground and designing new lighting fixtures as has been done in Cathedral Square, Christchurch, but it seems that somebody has yet to tackle with sufficient vigour the economic hurdle always quoted. It is in the centre of our cities that we must make the real effort. There is a strong need for a core of which we can be proud and which represents the community as a whole. Of the main cities Christchurch sets a good example with the Cathedral and the Square at the centre and whichever way Christchurch grows in the future, these will remain the images of the city carried in our minds. The competition commissioned for the redesigning of the Square produced, in the winning entry, a good combination of quiet pedestrian and noisy traffic areas, both of which are needed to re- tain the vitality of the city centre. Unfortunately, the prize was too small and did not encourage a full study of the problem, especially when the narrow shopping lanes surrounding the Square need more colour and gaiety. Development such as this however could be a spur to other cities not so well endowed and then perhaps Well- ington and Auckland might be encouraged to create small relief spots at crucial points along the main shopping streets where shop- pers could rest in shelter. It seems difficult to understand why local authorities do not spend more to provide lunch-hour spaces in areas obviously related to civic and commercial activities. Instance of the need is the great use made of the outside facilities provided in Wellington during the Festival periods. Since the National Art Gallery and Dominion 62 Museum are too far away the answer to be a small building and outside space associated with the Civic Buildings for use as exhibition, cafe and dance area. The brilliantly designed Memorial Hall at Wanganui should provide inspiration here as it serves a similar purpose and at the same time is well placed in its surroundings, using textured concrete slabs, limited and defined shrub and flower areas and simple seating to enhance the formal parade space. Similarly, the Government Departmental building in Auckland has set itself free and stands out as a clear shape amongst the other buildings with generous paved open space for the pedestrian. The surroundings are also enlivened with well-shaped planting boxes, a fountain, excellently designed seating and a piece of, unfortunately out of scale, sculp- ture. So with these as guides, it should be possible to answer one of the great needs of the town centres, space for pedestrians separated from traffic. Separation is the positive cure for accidents and the best way to make shopping enjoyable so that the towns will again be a pleasure to be in. Another need of our towns is the use of trees. Local authorities seem to spend their time either cutting down or maiming them yet it is trees which give character to such vaunted suburbs as Taka- puna and Remuera in Auckland, Khandallah and Karori in Welling- ton and Merivale and Cashmere in Christchurch. Some parts of these suburbs are very pleasant and though not designed from one end to the other, many of their streets compare with the best overseas. In all of them the local authorities, designers and individual residents have played their part in relating the houses, hedges, walls and kerbs to the trees and everyone is willing to put up with the slight nuisance of dead leaves and branches to enjoy the beauty of the trees. They bring light and shade and shelter as well as colour and texture and give relief from stone and concrete. The state housing layouts timidly realized their value when they broke away from the gridiron plan, but it would help to take inspiration from the Christchurch parks, such as Woodham or Elmwood, where subtle planting has created delightfully varied and contrasting spaces. Most of the parks cater for the young and old with areas for sport, for paddling and playing or just walking and sitting quietly in seclusion. Each area is suitably defined and designed to create the right mood relative to the activity. They are all well related to the streets, each one giving something and helping the street and yet the street is so well screened from the park that it is forgotten. Exploring one space after another one discovers a sequ- ence of enclosures strongly akin to good architecture and a fore- 63 taste of what can be done with our towns by sensitive designers. The solution may lie in some form of direction from the local councils which would allow a coherent pattern to emerge in the town as a whole by encouraging the development of character without imposing too rigid sterile controls. Controls of this nature together with advice from Arts Councils are common overseas and guidance should be given here by a special department in the local councils or, alternatively, by outside consultants.

ROGER SAVAGE Stravinsky Et Al.

1961 exposed Wellington to a good many hours of contemporary music, many more than I as a new-comer had expected. No brick- bats were thrown-I didn't have one with me the night the Allegri Quartet killed Michael Tippett's delightful Second String Quartet (2o May)-and audiences were large: that is to say, if Auntie had come to hear her favourite war-horse, she didn't leave before the modem nonsense started, though in the case of John Hopkins's powerful handling of Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin (r July) several of her had left before it stopped. I only wish all the pieces given had been really prepared or were really worth preparing. The tired and tentative readings which the National Orchestra gave Stravinsky's Danses Concertantes (29 August) and the Phoenix Choir Britten's Hymn to St Cecilia (3 October) only stressed the general truth behind Schoenberg's 'my music is not modem, it is just badly played'. And as for what was played, Schoenberg comes to mind again. No harm may be done by indulging musical quirks in a London, a Paris or a New York; but Wellington can hardly afford to squander its slender concert-time on irresponsible choices. Does Mr Hopkins really think, I wonder, that N.Z.B.S. should mount Alberto Ginastera's meretricious Variaciones Concertantes (29 August) in a city which has yet to hear Schoenberg's Orchestral Variations op. 31, or, if a lighter-weight piece is in order (and granted the Ginistera was given at a serenade concert), the op. 43b Variations? And was the Chamber Music Society quite powerless to stop the Fine Arts String Quartet (23 September) inflicting that 64 monstrous and very dead dodo, Bloch' s Fifth Quartet, on an innocent audience when one of Schoenberg's would have been equally novel but immensely more rewarding? When a case can be made for putting on second-rate music by New Zealand composers, why import Ginastera, Bloch, Viozzi, Liebermann? Not that everything was dully written or played in 1961. Live dodos are a different matter, and I was grateful to the National Orchestra for importing Walton's Second Symphony so quickly and playing it so vitally (8 April). Maybe there is something dishonest about the late-romantic droop of Walton's moustache in the sad, sad slow movement; but maybe I am the dishonest one for sneering. Then I remember particularly a concert by the Fine Arts in the new University Theatre which revealed the humanity and elation of Elliott Carter's 1951 Quartet (22 September). I had thought of this as a work of formidable integrity and complexity, but suspected that it protested too much, that it tried too hard to be The Great American String Quartet. The Fine Arts proved that it has blood as well as sinew. Another revelation was Guy Hender- son playing Britten's Six Metamorphoses after Ovid for unaccom- panied oboe at a concert of the Wellington Society for Contemp- orary Music (3 September). This time, music I had recalled as scraps from the studio floor at best gripped all the attention with its concentrated inventiveness. Perhaps I was too gripped. We were hearing in a small concert-room what Britten had intended for the open air, where some of the rather febrile immediacy of Mr Henderson's performance would be blown away. Still, my experience of the Metamorphoses alfresco (wishing the rooks would drop dead, hoping the grass wasn't really too damp to sit on) made me grateful for indoors and Mr Henderson. Most rewarding of all, though, was Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements played by the National Orchestra under Robert Craft at the concert on 18 November which Craft-Stravinsky's protege and finest exponent-shared with the composer. The cru- cially placed alia breve fugue for harp and piano in the last movement misfired, though perhaps the composer is as much to blame as Miss Corner and Miss Cunninghame : I've never heard it brought off convincingly. But the exasperated, exhausting energy of the first movement and the shell-shocked grace of the second were put across magnificently by an orchestra scarcely recognizable in its litheness and pungency as the same that had muddled through the Danses Concertantes and done scant justice to Petrouchka (8 July) earlier in the year. Which is not to imply that Mr Hopkins can't cope with Stravinsky. He had directed a fine Scenes de Ballet in the 6s same programme as the new Walton Symphony. But the presence on the rostrum of a complete talent like Craft's, plus the awareness that the World's Greatest Living Composer ipse was listening in the green room, could hardly fail to produce something extra-alert. Stravinsky himself, tiny, fragile, an aristocratic spider, conducted the second half of the concert, which ended with a scarcely better- able Finale from the Firebird, rose-petals, a standing ovation. The main work he directed was the suave, lyrical ballet for strings of 1928, Apo>[]on Musagete-which left me in two minds. The fast movements were superb. Stravinsky may be nearly eighty, but the intelligence behind the rhythmic revolution of Le Sacre du Prin- temps can still communicate a vital pulse and tension to an orchestra. The slower movements I found less happy. The composer con- jured a richness of sound from those fickle N.Z.B.S. strings which I would not have thought possible; but I'm not sure either that I found it quite desirable, especially as his tempi were so broad as to be almost static. Stravinsky the conductor made it all so warm and mellow that the ice with which Stravinsky the composer had frozen significance into those daring gestures d'apres Delibes and the rest threatened to melt. Had it been any other conductor, I would have called it the magnificent realization of a dangerously sentimental idea of the score. As it is, perhaps he was tired, perhaps I was tired, perhaps the orchestra was tired. In his old age, Stravinsky has been converted to the faith of Schoenberg and W ebern : for the last ten years he has been using serial methods of composition with growing thoroughness, and these techniques have enabled him to write with a continuing inten- sity and, if anything, greater musical concentration. Two conclus- ions can be drawn, I think: one for the listener, one for the composer. The Wellington listener who has seen Stravinsky in action, who has heard his work intelligently played ('my music is not modern ... .') can have no patience with the vulgar error that the man is a mere icicle at best and a charlatan more often than not. The obvious next step is a curiosity about his recent music and about the musical family it belongs to. The Wellington Contempor- ary Music Society should be, and to some extent has been, satisfying this curiosity. It had already presented a programme which included (with the Britten Metamorphoses) three impressive piano pieces with nothing in common beyond a crucial debt to Schoenberg for opening up certain roads : Skalkottas' sonorous Passacaglia, Cop- land's clangorous Piano Fantasy and Stockhausen's extraordinary Eleventh Piano Piece. And the evening after the Town Hall triumph, it put on a concert of Stravinsky's chamber works which included 66 the Shakespeare Songs and In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1953, 1954), both of which speak a serial language of sorts. (My only clear recollection of the evening-! was juggling with music-stands and box-office returns most of the time-is of a chaotic unconduct- ed attempt at the Wind Octet of 1923, which would probably have been received less warmly by the audience had they heard how thrilling the work could sound firmly directed, as Robert Craft had directed it at rehearsal.) The conclusion for composers-for our attitude to New Zealand music rather-is not that they should drop everything and jump on the twelve-note wagon; but that they should always be aware of the example of a musician who has refused to be locked in a style, who has seen that the artist works With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling. Stravinsky's example lies in a vigilant determination to renew his equipment, in a refusal to be mastered by mere idiom, even when this, paradoxically, has given him the reputation of a malign chame- leon, by turns folklorist, back-to-Bachian, ape of Tchaikovsky, pseudo-Burgundian, twelve-note-spinner. 'I risk nothing with myself,' he has said; 'I risk everything with the public.' In so much of 1961's New Zealand music I detected the imprecision of feeling which goes with risking nothing with the public, with being mastered by idiom. A concert featuring music by New Zealand composers given by the Alex Lindsay Orchestra (4 December) illustrated this all too clearly. A clarinet concerto by John Ritchie, polite, tweedy, vacuous; Larry Pruden's Harbour Nocturne, a mid-Atlantic piece by Appalachian Spring out of Peter Grimes; Anthony Watson's Prelude and Allegro for Strings, which began as a paraphrase of the opening of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra and Went on like a re- jected sketch for the String, Percussion and Celesta Music. Obvi- ously Mr Ritchie is a craftsman, Mr Pruden has an intelligent ear and Mr Watson is not a note-spinner (though his First String Quar- tet, which the New Zealand Quartet had given three months earlier at the University (8 September), did seem to me over-long by at least five minutes, though it was far less oppressively Bartokian and most idiomatically written for the instruments). But I couldn't help being reminded of Ezra Pound's 'beauty is a brief gasp between cliches' as I listened to these men industriously making cliche out of the significant statements of their masters. Yet Alex Lindsay's concert did include one work of positive quality, however unpretentious: David Farquhar's suite of witty, wistful dances for Ring Round the Moon. 67 Sources, the critic's stand-by, can be sought out (lbert's Divertissec ment perhaps, and the pub-dances from Crimes, which themselves derive from Berg's Wozzeck pub-dances). But the pursuit is irrelevant. This music spoke for itself, as Mr Farquhar's Elegy for Strings- 'for Constance Scott, in sympathy' -had done at the previous Lind- say concert (31 October). Here I was reminded of Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem, which the National Orchestra had tackled so well a few months before (13 May); but only because Mr Farquhar was working most movingly in the same tradition. There was no cliche- making. The statement had its own significance.

JEREMY COMMONS New Zealand Opera: 1961 in Retrospect

THE theatrical public of this country, I believe, is going to look back on 1961 as the year in which the New Zealand Opera Company turned a momentous corner, leaving behind the small-time days when it struggled valiantly to make ends meet and send an annual production on tour round the country, and became, at last, what we can justly call a national institution-an established company that forms an essential part of our artistic life, enjoying a degree of financial security, benefitting from the services of a permanent musical director, and working with an orchestra not exclusively its own, but at least its regular partner. And a great deal of this growth to maturity took place last year, in 1961. Quite apart from artistic successes, the year brought the Com- pany three major developments which, taken together, completely changed its status and prospects. The first step came in March in the form of a state subsidy, for among other grants to the arts, the Arts Advisory Council allotted the Company £15,ooo annually for three years. There had, of course, been earlier grants, but this new subsidy no less than tripled the greatest of its predecessors. It is still-£15,ooo a year-little enough when compared with the sub- sidies enjoyed by some European theatres, but here, in a country 68 where state patronage of the arts is not of long establishment, it must be regarded as 'big money'. There is a condition attached to the grant which must also be mentioned: after the first year only half of it is automatic, and the payment of the second £7,500 depends upon the Company's meriting it. This is a condition not to be regretted : for the Company it is an added incentive, for its audience (and for the tax-payer, that frequently evoked paragon of conserva- tive responsibility) a guarantee of endeavour and quality. The second major step came in September when the Minister of Broadcasting announced that the Broadcasting Service intended to form a second full-time orchestra-smaller than the National Orchestra-to be used with opera, ballet and choral groups. This Theatre Orchestra is to be under the conductorship of James Robert- son, who also formed the subject of the year's third major development: the Opera Company's announcement that it had appointed him as its musical director. The organizational intricacies of these plans are of no interest here; what is important is the co-operation they reveal between the operatic authorities, the ballet authorities, and the Broadcasting Service (only with this far-sighted co-operation can opera and ballet really become established in a country of this size) and the evidence they provide of care in the choice of the new conductor-director: a musician who is not only peculiarly suited to the position by virtue of a predominantly operatic training, but who knows New Zealand already and understands the conditions in which he must work. We stand, then, upon a new threshold. And I do not believe that this applies only to the administrative arrangements of the Com- pany; artistically, too, it is ready for new developments. We are still apt to adopt a patronizing attitude towards New Zealand's incursions into opera and ballet, and say that this or that performance, considering the size of our country, our population and experience, is of such-and-such a standard. This may be so, but it is surely time the Company deserved critiques that are untinged with hints of unnecessary excuse. It is by now quite capable of measur- ing up to such criticism. All three latest productions (to go no further back than that) have displayed an artistic maturity that one looks for, overseas, in, for example, the better performances at Sadler's. Wells. We may not-do not, in fact-have voices of inter- national calibre, and our artists are generally young, without wide experience.· Their performances cannot be compared with those of the world's major opera houses, but they do compare with those of smaller overseas opera houses that aim at giving homogeneous, integrated performances, using resident principals, chorus and orchestra. 69 The three latest productions, furthermore, represent success in very different genres: Don Pasquale belongs to a well defined tradition of stylized comic opera; Amahl and the Night Visitors, on the other hand, is a recently written work free from the interpretative problems posed by a stylized tradition; and Tosca is so much a part of a musical development-the 'verismo' or realist movement in Italian opera-that it can be fully appreciated only if that movement and its conventions are known and understood by the per- formers and at least accepted even if not intimately understood by the audience. To say that we should try to avoid the Latinate tem- perament and conventions when presenting Puccini and other Italian composers simply because they do not coincide with our own Anglo-Saxon outlook, is simply to reject tradition without attempt- ing to understand it. Stefan Haag's production of Don Pasquale, for example-and I am here highly critical, for it was a gloriously gay and enjoyable evening's entertainment-came as close to the irrev- erent as one dared go. It was played for laughs, and much of the humour, instead of growing naturally from the music, was extrane- ous and super-imposed. A more sympathetic production would have allowed the music (and it is a deliciously pointed and witty score) more scope to speak for itself, and the buffoonery that dogged Pas- quale himself (he was a gentleman after all, even if a foolish one) would have been less heavy-handed. What kept this production on the rails, particularly in the brilliantly successful performances at the Auckland Festival (by which time, incidentally, the harsher moments of the production had had time to mellow), was the fact that no such liberties were taken musically by the conductors. Both Waiter Stiasny and Georg Tintner, the latter exerting considerably more control over his forces than the former, gave readings of the score that kept strictly within the radius of the composer's intentions. Though liberties of production may pass in comic opera, they are far harder to accept in serious works. When the Company decided to present T osca, the most effective melodrama in the operatic repertoire, it very wisely invited an Italian-whose versatility stretches to several fields of operatic activity-to produce it and perform the role of Scarpia. As a singer, Marcello Cortis is sup- remely authoritative and intelligent even if not large-voiced; his acting is equally impressive, and his Scarpia in consequence was superbly repellent and unscrupulous. His production, though slightly less good, should nevertheless in many respects prove an object- lesson for New Zealand producers. My reservations spring from the fact that it was peculiarly the production of a singer, a solo singer, 70 and while it took admirable account of each of the soloists, it sadly neglected the chorus and supers. Two perambulating guards were allowed completely to distract the audience's attention from the very important and beautiful prelude to Act Ill; and rarely have I seen a worse shambles than the Te Deum scene at the end of Act I-a series of blunders all the more inexcusable since they flaunted the whole direction and movement of the procession as clearly and sensibly conceived by the designer. Yet if the faults of the production were conspicuous, so were its virtues. Signor Cortis had drilled his soloists in every possible detail. The evidence for this lay in the fact that both Toscas (one with rather more authority than the other) and both Cavaradossis (one with considerably more ability than the other) conveyed precisely the same nuances of interpretation throughout. And these nuances expressed not only the emotion of the words and general situation, but the dramatic impulse of the music as well. Physical movement was always the counterpart of musical movement. This was most clearly seen when exaggerated-Angelotti, for example, staggering into the church of S. Andrea, undoubtedly overdid his display of exhaustion, but every movement nevertheless strictly interpreted the musical dynamics; and in the hands of an artist of the calibre of Vincente Major, this attention to musical movement produced a performance of extraordinary sensitivity. It is a distinctly operatic brand of acting, obvious enough when described, but not something that necessarily comes naturally : its absence from La Traviata was possibly the most disappointing feature of that production. In Tosca, it was one of the most timely and penetrating lessons Signor Cortis had to teach us, and it was coupled, in the orchestral pit, with a masterly reading of the score on the part of John Hopkins. This production has been widely acclaimed as the Company's most successful venture to date; certainly its greatest faults were of a type that could have been eradicated with a few moments' reconsidera- tion, while its virtues-and particularly the unity of intention between stage and orchestral pit-were the result of a great deal of hard work and endeavour on the part of all concerned. What then of the future? The announced plans for the winter of 1962 consist of a new production, Carmen, and three revivals, The Barber of Seville, Madam Butterfly and The Marriage of Fiyaro. There are doubtless administrative and practical reasons to account for this choice-most obviously the fact that the Broadcasting Ser- vice's new orchestra has yet to be assembled-but even the pros- pect of an imported leading lady and producer for Carmen cannot, in all honesty, make the programme sound very enterprising. By 7I this I do not advocate that we should rush into unknown highways and byways of operatic history-every company must keep its eye on its box-office returns, and conditions in New Zealand make this more than ever imperative. But at the same time no company is paid a subsidy with the intention that it continue to present only sure box-office hits that would form its staple repertoire under any circumstances. In tbis country, I believe, a subsidy would best be employed in presenting, not stock favourites nor yet erudite rarities, but those many works which, though they rank among the world's masterpieces, have never yet been seen here. The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni, Fidelio, Otello, Fa/staff, Turandot-these should not now be too far beyond our scope; if the next few years were to see successful productions of any or all of these, they would be years of rich promise fulfilled on the part of the New Zealand Opera Com- pany. Of course, the best possible use for a subsidy in New Zealand would be, whenever possible, the production of a New Zealand opera. And I am happy to add, by way of postscript, a piece of information that has come to hand since the main part of this article was written. The year is to end with a Christmas production that may well prove an important milestone in the history of opera in this country. It is to be a new work, A Unicorn for Christmas, written by the New Zealand composer, David Farquhar, and based on a children's play by Ngaio Marsh, The Wyvern and the Unicorn.

J. L. R 0 B E R T S New Plays in Wellinnton

A DOUBLE bill of New Zealand plays was presented last November at Victoria University's new theatre by the Theatre Workshop of the New Zealand Theatre Company. James K. Baxter's Three Women and the Sea promised to be a further step in the progress made by jack Winter's Dream and The Wide Open Cage which, despite some derivative writing and rather pretentious symbolism, had impressed with rich and urgent language. Unfortunately, Mr Baxter doubled back on his tracks. His characters are archetypes. Thus the cuckolded teacher becomes. the 72 Cuckolded Teacher, the virtuous whore, the Virtuous Whore, and so on. Drama is concerned with spiritual experience, sin and even with archetypes, but it is principally concerned with the interaction of people in a society whose characteristics are established by the play. If the people are not there in their place ,and time there is no drama. Naturally, such analysis needs caution. There are Brechtians, for example, who seem to adapt an equally false formula in saying 'Marxism-Leninism is all ye know and all ye need to know'. The dramatist can have whatever credo he likes but he must create a milieu for his characters as well as moral problems if his drama is to work. In Three Women and the Sea the people are cut-outs and their spiritual anguish does not interest us. The plot can be quickly summed up: Sensitive wife is mismated with priggish ideologue who would (apparently) rather curl up with a cosy anti-bomb petition after a hard day's lecturing at the Train- ing College. Wife seeks consolation with callow Catholic poet and quondam student of the master of the house; gets pregnant, discovers love for husband, sets boy-wonder free (he runs like a rat up a drainpipe) and settles down to hard-won mutual bliss with husband who, all along, has yearned dumbly for her behind his New Statesman. At obtuse angles to this geometry are a girl hobo drifting until her man gets out of jail, the life-denying but comical social-climbing sister of the adultress who has anaesthetized her erogenous zones to make her bourgeois world safe and a Roman Catholic Fisherman, natural philosopher-one of the meek hanging about to inherit the earth-with a private telephone to the deity. Such a mixture-Saroyan, Steinbeck, Rattigan-of recent literary cliches sets a daunting task for the author. Mr Baxter, as an outstanding critic himself, can scarcely have missed the difficulty. Of course, with feeling for the drama and great care in the writing these cliches can come freshly minted from the stage. But Mr Baxter tries to distract us with his views on their moral and spiritual failings. I had hoped, after the first act, to see the play rescued by a con- frontation of Roman Catholic and Atheist-intellectual views on sin. In fact Mr Baxter dodges this clash. Of the two Roman Catholics, one is a contemptible fraud and the other a useless onlooker. Some Roman Catholics may be like this but there is not much to be made of them dramatically. As usual the intellectuals are impotent. Mr Baxter has to employ an irrelevant dramatic device to sort things out. This is the goddess out of the machine in the person of the travelling slut who en passant teaches the cuckold how to love. As played by Irene Esam the character is rather fay and amusing. She 73 makes marital adjustment seem as simple as the denouement of a Debbie Reynolds film. Since one assumes that Mr Baxter wanted to go to the heart of the matter, the audience may be forgiven if it feels the scene to be incongruous. The contrast between three kinds of female sexuality (let alone a presumed pelagian relationship which escaped me entirely) does not emerge. If this was the point, then Mr Baxter submerged it under irrelevant byplay. If it was not the point why draw it to our attention in the title? Despite all this Mr Baxter's verbal command is implicit beneath these lilliputian absurdities. It will be a great event for the theatre when he shrugs off the self-imposed bonds of the well-made play. One hopes that Mr Baxter took to heart the lessons of Free by Joseph Musaphia, the other half of the double bill. Free is a model of control. Mr Musaphia does what he sets out to do. His people are palpable individuals in a recognizable milieu. Their problems are their own yet touch an imaginative chord in the audience from which the drama can grow. The action is set in a flat shared by three young men, a tram conductor, a mechanic and a house painter. The mechanic, Phil, is a gawp whose claim on his companions is a facility for outrageous behaviour when drunk. (Mr Musaphia brilliantly portrays the nos- talgic recollection which is the chief value of these escapades to the characters involved.) But Phil's soul is troubled by the reform- ing demands of his nurse girl-friend; dimly he sees that following the bosses' orders for five days of the week and filling in the other two With beer, loafing on the beach and a little stoush on the side may be limiting his opportunity for a fuller life. The break from his bachelor mates pains him almost as much because he discerns, without the capacity to rationalize, his dis- loyalty to the domineering trammy, Frank. Frank, for his part, cannot bear to see his slave, the butt of his savage humour, emancipate himself. He demonstrates the truth that those who demand emotional dependence use their dependants as a crutch. The other character Geoff has kept his freedom by refusing to become involved at all. He gives his whimsy, his time and his money to his friends but never himself. Frank's assault on Phil's love affair is painfully indecent to him but his efforts to prevent it are ineffectual. In the end each man is left alone in the prison of his own immatur- ity and the audience is uncomfortably but usefully enlightened. It is a minor achievement that one aspect of New Zealand behaviour is evoked but there is much more than acute observation. Mr Musaphia's first play whets our appetite for more. 74 Richard Campion, the producer, sustained whatever drive there was in both plays. One love scene in Three Women and the Sea fairly scorched compared with the usual limp formalities. It is curious that Mr Campion is always more impressive with the quasi-amateur than he is with the semi-professional. The acting was generally good particularly the noli me tangere Geoff of Russell Duncan in Free and the bitch of a socialite sister, which was played with such style by Helen Brew in Three Women and the Sea that the part almost acquired validity.

Reviews

AFTER ANZAC DAY. Ian Cross. Andre Deutsch. 15s. FoR ALL his interlocking ironies, Ian Cross is at bottom a conform- ist, and if he is critical of the Public Service his values are still those of other 'material interests', however much he may disguise them as Independence and Simple Goodness. The God Boy and The Back- ward Sex were made out of fashionable, yet typical, situations- the broken home, the adolescent whose repressions hover constantly on the edge of violence. After Anzac Day takes the process further, for it is fabricated from what can only be called stereotypes. The coloured girl in a bourgeois home who happens to be 'in pod'; the old man upstairs, living in the past; the frigid, slightly snobbish wife; the routine sneers at suburbia and the body-blows at public servants and left-wing trade union leaders; the 'tragic failure of communication between individuals, even between husband and wife'; the obsession with cowardice-we have met these so often before that only the finest literary craftsmanship can now make them interesting. That Mr Cross does hold our attention is a testi- mony to his considerable skill as a writer. My first reaCtion, it is true, was one of irritation. Why does Jennie Page have to be part Maori-why can't she be a Pakeha, and her Jimmy a Maori? Why do we have to put up with so much belly-rumbling (all 'in character', of course) against the Welfare State? Why does Rankin, Mr Cross's anti-hero, guilty of a failure of courage, have to be an ex-'pinko' bureaucrat-couldn't he have been a bank-director, the descendant, say, of a Waipu settle11 family? For the first few chapters I felt that the book was consciously or unconsciously rigged-that it was the social realism of the Domin- ion and the Federated Farmers. Though it very soon rises above this level, there are occasional traces of political prejudice in later sec- 75 tions-for example, in the whole treatment of Mr Sammy Trotter, the left-wing union leader, who resembles nothing so much as an atheist's distorted picture of a minister or a priest, sexual aberra- tions and all! Judged as a whole, however, the novel is a competent and readable attempt to present character in historical depth, as well as, through Rankin, to unite both personal and political themes. Behind all his wit and pathos, and all his technique, Mr Cross is trying to come to terms with contradictory tendencies in his country's past, and to show them as organically related to the lives his characters live today. He would have been more successful, I feel, if he could have escaped altogether from his virtues-if there had been less succinctness and economy of line, and if he had not chosen to convey the past by means of the irritating device of multiple flashbacks. What was required was a novel of almost Victorian proportions; what we have is a made-to-measure performance that cannot transcend the unsuitable form imposed by the necessities of modern publishing. Mr Cross's characters are chosen (and this disposes, surely, of my initial irritation at Jennie Page's Maori blood) so that the historical dimension can be introduced into such a short novel. He tries to establish an identity of values between Jennie Page and 'the brown tart' of Creighton's youth; between Maoris and Pakehas at the time of the Maori Wars (both 'united in a single party'), their conflict being conveyed in part by a symbolic fight between red and black stallions; between the courage of soldiers in two world wars and the courage shown by Bill Page during the political marches of depress- ion days; between young Creighton's flight from 'the brown tart' and Rankin's cowardice towards Elizabeth, his mistress. The political side of the novel, however, is the least adequate : despite all his good intentions, Mr Cross cannot escape from his prejudices-he cannot really like Rankin, and it never occurs to him to try to like Mr Sammy Trotter. Among the book's positive values are-primitive courage; the simple truth of Jennie Page's love for Jimmy, the father of her child; the orphan Jimmy's delinquent protest; and perha-ps-very much in the background-Jimmy's Christianity. Despite his overt denials, he 'believed in his beads, in God; in his rather peculiar fashion.' Now in the very next paragraph to the sentence from which I have quoted, Jennie's thoughts pass from Jimmy's Catholic- ism to her father's former belief in the working class, thus imply- ing that her father's creed, because transient, is less valid from the novelist's point of view than belief in God. This is one of the central parts of the book, revealing a fundamental opposition of philosophies in Mr Cross's society; and his treatment of it is tendentious, exactly as socialist realism was tendentious: But the only religion she had known concerned the union, be- 76 cause her father was so dedicated to it. All dead and gone by the time she knew Jimmy, however. And the union did not have a God, although it did have Mr Sammy Trotter. For most of his life Dad believed in the union with all his heart and soul, so Mum told her; but, in the end, his belief was nothing. It is no defence to say that this is Jennie talking, not Mr Cross. Mr Cross has manipulated Jennie's mind in the interests of a pre- conceived belief to produce propaganda, not art, at this point. Again, when Bill Page decides to support the authorities during the waterfront dispute, we are given only the merest hint of his inner conflict and ambivalent motives; his deterioration-if it is deterioration, for we are never really sure-is inadequately suggested by means of a few of the details of physical deterioration, and we are not clear how this relates to the other, parallel, failures of courage -Rankin's and Creighton's. Though it has its faults, After Anzac Day is important in that it attempts to bring a historical dimension into the New Zealand novel. It is assured, efficient, and beautifully shaped; as a 'thing in itself', it is more impressive than most of the works of the Amis- Wain-Braine-Sillitoe generation in Britain or, for that matter, of their American counterparts. For all that, the book just isn't good enough. I have said that it is ironical; perhaps the most ironical thing about it is that, though it was completed during the tenure of the first Robert Burns Fellowship at Otago, the Scottish writer whom Mr Cross most resembles is not so much Burns as Scott, both in his middle-of-the-road historical imagination and in his tendency to caricature his opponents. Even so, I feel that Sir Waiter was fundamentally more tolerant and-the supreme irony! -more of an artist than Mr Cross here proves himself to be. Thomas Crawfo,rd

AN AFFAIR OF MEN. Errol Brathwaite. Collins, in conjunction with the Otago Daily Times. r6s. ERROL Brathwaite's second novel is a companion to his first. This time the action is centred not upon the airmen brought down in enemy territory, but upon the Japanese patrol which is tracking them down. Thus it is Captain Itoh, leader of a nine-men party, who is the chief character and the escaping airmen remain out of view. As a novel An Affair of Men is much better than Fear in the Night. Mr Brathwaite displays again a quite extraordinary flair for realizing the physical situation but in this novel we are spared that exhaustive handyman detail (a sort of forty-hour-week heroism) which made more of the mechanical contrivance than of the men. 77 Yet the greatest gift of the author is still his power to perceive rather than conceive his characters. Captain Itoh is watched in his minutest movements and so aware are we made of the physical sensations of all the characters that a high level of actuality is maintained. Mr Brathwaite inevitably reminds one of Defoe with his strong practical understanding and his fertility and fidelity of detail. Nothing escapes his inventory of the situation; just when the captain seems to be smoking more cigarettes than he could be supposed to carry, he himself counts them and imposes a ration. The success of this novel rests largely upon its compulsive and complete record of the events. But An Affair of Men attempts more than this. Mr Brathwaite seeks for the springs of action and his Japanese captain of marines comes remarkably alive. I say 'remarkably' because after all the actions of the man are so utterly typical that the personality itself can hardly transcend the type. In spite of the author's diligence and imagination Captain Itoh still recalls those military manuals from which sergeant psychologists would deliver an exegesis upon 'the Jap' as a collective singular noun. For all this Captain Itoh is undoubtedly truer to life than the tenderer images of the Japanese military character which recent motion-pictures would have us accept. The Russians are not the only people to reWrite history. Mr Brathwaite's Japanese soldiers display a calculated ferocity and a bestial indifference to cruelty inconceivable to minds evolved in the moral atmosphere of Christianity. This brings me finally to observe that it is precisely the collision between oriental imperial ruthlessness and Christian pacifism that is the theme of this novel. Slicing and booting his way through native villages of Bougainville, ltoh runs upon a colony living in remoteness and dedicated to primitive Christian principles. The headman, Sedu, has established himself in the land as an agent of Christian peace, charity and healing. The clash of philosophies is worked out as a clash between Itoh and Sedu. The novel for all its realism is idealistic, seeking to demonstrate literally that the meek shall inherit the earth. It cannot be conceded that Mr Brathwaite has managed the theme well. If Itoh remains a type Sedu is never more than a symbol. It is unhappily just the author's fine gift of actuality that leads us to demand realism in the characters. Sedu strung up to the pillar, his body hanging from pinned hands, is confirmed in the role of a Christ-figure, an abstract of virtues astray in a novel that is otherwise resolutely realist. So his triumph looks humanly accidental. It depends partly upon the misjudgments of Itoh and partly upon the thickness of Sedu's skull under battering. And in any case Itoh himself, the benighted, never receives a ray of Christian light and it is with frustration that we turn page after page to find him still 78 blind to the nature of his defeat. The situation exists and is aggrav- ated, but morally it never develops. Itoh loses his men but never his prejudices. There is a certain naivete in Mr Brathwaite's conception of moral victory. A vague idea of miracle is suggested and no one really knows how the crucial stages in Itoh's destruction were achieved. When all this has been said one must pay tribute to Mr Brath- waite's ingenious and convincing accounts of Itoh's bafflement. His ability to misread the evidence letter by letter always consistently within the terms of an alien philosophy, makes Itoh's mind fas-- cinating. This is a vividly imagined novel to which the author's philosophical aspirations, even it they are not fully realized, give an added depth and sincerity. R. A. Cop/and

SHORT STORY ONE. Diana Athill, Maurice Duggan, Maurice Gee, C. K. Stead. New Authors Limited, Hutchinson, 18s. THis is the first volume to open to shorter fiction the opportunities of early hard-cover publication which New Authors Limited has offered since 1957 to full-length novels. As the three writers who occupy 165 of its 238 pages are hardly 'new', at least to readers of Landfall, the volume opens opportunities for reappraisal which are equally welcome. Mr Duggan is well represented by four pieces which show him, characteristically, working outwards from inner life. In 'Chapter' the material is of a kind common enough in New Zealand stories--- the flight to the backblocks, 'life without ... anonymity', roughish drinking and reckless bus-driving-but it is all transformed by an odd and interesting state of awareness on the part of the central character. Admittedly this emergence from a 'nightmarish world created by himself over the years', as if 'barely recovered from a long illness', is in itself merely sketched, but Mr Duggan finds moving correlatives for it in the external world-for instance, a dirty railway carriage window separating the hot and gritty solitude within from the wind-grazed world outside, inhabited but inaccess- ible as it passes and so giving to the imprisoned passenger no opportunity for relationship. In such a context, where strongly realized details serve to establish an inward state, and in turn take their significance from it, the events which follow-the singing and drinking in the bus, the new schoolmistress and her anxieties present and future, the casual exchanges with two or three other women and the easy talk about brothers with one of the Maoris from the bus-are not the small change of an author 'describing New Zealand life' but the stages in a progress from a solitude of guilt 79 and fantasy. It is this which holds the reader so that he doesn't care about any antecedent reasons for the solitude. In 'Towards the Mountains' the strategy is the same but the tactics differ, for the antecedent reasons are inner ones and they are given a separate part of the story split off rather selfconsciously from the outer world of consequences and judgment. In 'Salvation Sunday' the point lies in two different responses to the same events. The things to which the main character and his companion respond may be clumsily hand- led-the Dickens-grotesque evangelist, suggesting 'something bitterly malign', the milk-bar customers with 'tragic empty eyes' and 'jaws bitterly merciless'-but the main distinction is deftly made, with a mixture of the serious and the comic which is exactly right for adolescence. All of these are surpassed by 'Blues for Miss Laverty'. Not only is the main character more substantial, but the things and people surrounding her are effortlessly and economically controlled so that her mode of seeing and living emerges with a clarity which carries its own compassion. If a short story is one in which the material is limited in order to bring into greater clarity everything that material contains, Mr Duggan is essentially a short story writer. By the same token, Mr Gee is perhaps essentially a novelist. His object is not the intensive exploration of a simple donnee but the extensive exploration of a tract of social life. He does not avoid inner reference but his manner of making it shows he is more interested in the group than in the individual. Presenting, for instance, at one point, an ex-bookie, a trainer and a horse-owner playing poker, Mr Gee dives in and out of the mind of each, mixing his points of view in a manner which may offend the purist brought up on post- Jamesian theory, and which may puzzle the reader who thinks the story is merely about the horse-owner. But it is concerned with a social group, racing people, defining the quality of their life as a whole. Their personal feelings enter into this, but the author's concern with them is less as ends in themselves (as Mr Duggan's perhaps would be) than as means to his total exploration. The result is a rich novella in which the parts are fully imagined so that the varied and contrasting personal relations interest us, while all are brought to a climax which horrifies but draws the whole story satisfyingly into one. The reader's sense of achieved knowledge arises from the presentation of a tract of life so as at once to engage our impartial participation in it and sharpen our judgement of it; the more fully we have lived our way into the parts of the story, the better we can see the judgement which those parts imply in their juxtaposition and interaction. Mr Gee's other piece 'The Eleventh Holiday' stands up less well to consideration. His imagination is less fully awake in the parts of the tale, lessening their ability to surprise us, and as a whole the thing is more mechanically 8o fashioned, with its preliminary identity parade (though the rather eighteenth-century manner fits an author whose interest is man in society), its sharp alignment of characters and its climactic imbro- glio. It is as if the author had had his mind too much made up to start with, and his imagining of the successive situations had revealed little more to him as he went along. So the resulting comment is too simple. Our sympathies have not been fully exercised, the author has not left enough for us to do, so that we do not put the story down with the sense that only its echoes will complete it. This of course is the risk run by taking the outward-facing subject, the social group or the social problem. Mr Stead applies methods which resemble Mr Duggan's to achieve ends which resemble Mr Gee's. That is to say he is using an individual mode of seeing things-that of a middle-aged Englishwoman -in order to define two contrasting social groups, one of which is his 'Race Apart'. But this has at once to be qualified, for the irony of the story doesn't spare even its title, and 'using' suggests the wrong relationship between author and narrator. She and her family may be a little too typical of the middle classes whose success has brought them from the midlands to the home counties, but they are more than lay figures, and the gaiety and freedom with which they are presented attach the reader at once. As for the defining of social groups, it begins as a matter of contrast no doubt, but it becomes, as the story widens the gap between what is so and what is thought to be, a matter of mutual misunderstanding among individuals. It moves, that is, towards the dissolving of the barriers of social groups -indeed it all takes place under the shadow of the New Zealander's marriage, despite his conventional criticisms of England, to a county heiress'-just as it moves towards the dissolving of other stereotypes -'my Greek god', 'a kind of goddess trailing clouds of glory out of a mythical past'. The reader is left wanting to read the book about the whole business by the American who is given the last word, for it seems most unlikely that there would be 'nothing in it' which the narrator of the present story didn't 'already know'. A double time scheme-the time of events and the later time at which their significance seems to be understood-has started a series of circling ironies which not only deal wittily with both English and New Zea- lander but suggest endless possibilities of mutual misunderstanding. That the story should handle its English setting with such assurance and have as its interpretative fulcrum an American viewpoint heightens and deepens its comedy and will give relief to those who may have been oppressed by evidence of inbreeding and provin- ciality in some New Zealand short stories. Whether even this final story will reassure readers who are dis- comforted at being dropped off the smooth surface of Miss Athill's work into a rather different medium, is doubtful. Certainly it is dif- 8r ficult to take her work on the same level as what follows it. Accom- plished and diverting though it is, it remains an accomplishment and a diversion. E. A. Horsman

THE CRADLE OF EREWHON. Joseph jones. Melbourne University Press. 30S. SAMUEL BUTLER AT MESOPOTAMIA. Peter Bromley Maling. W eJJing- ton, Government Printer, in conjunction with the National Historic Places Trust. 7s. 6d. PROFESSOR Jones has written an agreeable rather than an important book. His sub-title is 'Samuel Butler in New Zealand', and his mis- fortune is to have published before Dr Maling; for it is precisely the detailed investigation of Butler's movements and physical traces as a station-owner, or a would-be station-owner, in New Zealand that Dr Maling devotes his acute intelligence to, and Professor Jones seems to have been just too early on the scene to have picked up a cardinal document which would have given him great joy. The other Jones, Festing, who wrote some nine hundred pages about Butler, did not know a vast deal about the New Zealand epi- sode. This Jones, a Texan professor, came to New Zealand to find out what more he could. He knows his Butler, he had a look at the Butler country, met people, read up all the local books, dug into the files of the Christchurch Press, and resurrected from it four articles that may quite possibly be Butler's work. His idea was to get at the Erewhonian background-or should one say the cradle ?-and to trace its influence not merely in Erewhon itself but, briefly, in the later work. With a lavish use of quotation, he gives the reader a very fair idea of the Canterbury run-holding country and of Christ- church, that capital home of intellect and society, marks the importance of the Press in Butler's own intellectual development, and does what can be done, perhaps, about the 'ethnological' elements of the great satire. Such things as this, certainly, were beyond the capacity of a Festing Jones, and they were worth doing. The interesting conclusion that Professor Jones comes to is that Butler made a mistake in returning to England-even if, to quote his own words, 'the life [in New Zealand] was utterly uncongenial to me'. All right, says Professor Jones: but in Canterbury Butler was by no means an intellectual giant among pigmies. After accumulating a modest but presumably competent fortune, he did return: for what? To mew himself up in Clifford's Inn and walk a sheep trail back and forth to the British Museum; to write one book that England would consent to read and to spend the rest of 82 his days, and substantial sums of his capital, on others that it would largely ignore; to lose in speculations the 'birthright' fortune he had won; to find stimulating friendship with one woman and to know few other individuals above mediocrity; to trap himself into scientific polemics that embittered and withered him; to anticipate the Handel revival, composing oratorios that were never heard. How could New Zealand, short of drowning him in the Rangitata, have served him worse? The colony held a wide circle of better friends than he ever came to know in England (other than Shaw) and-conceivably-better things for him to do. When he turned his back on New Zealand, he cut himself off from the deepest creative urges he had known. Here, one feels, speaks the voice of Texas. It may all be perfectly true, but is it really and truly relevant? One of the deepest things about Butler was that he was an Englishman; and if he was an eccentric he had to be an English eccentric. The English are odd people: some of them do indeed prefer Clifford's Inn to the Rangi- tata. Who that has read John Butler Yeats's words about this one (in Essays: English and American) can see him permanently settled in New Zealand, being creative? Would New Zealand have given us the Notebooks? Or anything better? He might, of course, have been a good thing for New Zealand. There are a number of small verbalisms and other awkward- nesses in the book that one regrets. Was, for instance, Captain Cook 'the most influential champion' of New Zealand's attractions? 'Royal pre-emption rights on land' are new to us. Has anyone ever heard a New Zealander call Paraparaumu 'Pairpram'? 'Parapram' by all means. When we get this statement: 'Mechanism gave the Darwinians something they took to be a firm basis for control which was not long in extending itself to politics, as, for instance, in the design of the French social philosopher Comte for the ideal society to be ruled by experts', we may (even if we can stomach 'mechanism' for a theory of organic evolution) look at the dates. Origin of Species, 1859; Comte's Positive Philosophy, 1826 to 1842, and even his General View, 1848. Scholars should not say such things. Dr Maling gives himself a much more limited assignment, though he too draws the moral : 'Samuel Butler Was not the last to find new country, but had he found his mountain land without a struggle, and had he not even then been impelled by a restless spirit to make further quest for available sheep country, Erewhon might never have been written'. His booklet is an essay in the best sort of precision. Where exactly did Butler go up Forest Creek and what was his run there? What exactly was the composition of Mesopotamia, and how did you get there? What, where, and how, exactly, did Butler build? It is all very well done, good detective- work; and in addition to the answers to these questions Dr Mal- 83 ing presents us With the scoop of two hitherto unpublished Butler sketches and the first appearance, in full, of what he calls the 'Forest Creek Manuscript' -i.e. the bulk of the manuscript of one of the articles contributed by 'Our Emigrant' to the St John's Col- lege magazine, The Eagle, in I86o. This is a high-spirited, amusing (apart from one or two facetious bits, temp. I86o) informative document, well worth the printing, and one blesses the young man who bought the book in the Caledonian Market (what book?), found the MS and sketches stuck between its leaves, and realized their value. There are also, for good measure, three letters to J. B. Acland and one to G. G. Tripp, from the Canterbury Museum. Both volumes are well printed, both well (Dr Maling's excep- tionally well) illustrated. But it is a defect in the latter, sixty-six pages plus seventeen pages of blocks, merely to be saddle-stapled. Alas for high production-costs! ]. C. Beagleho.Je

THE DISCOVERY OF NEW ZEALAND. J. C. Beaglehole. Second edition. Oxford University Press. 2Is. THE EXPLORATION OF NEW ZEALAND. W. G. McClymont. Second edition. Oxford University Press. 21s. EARLY TRAVELLERS IN NEW ZEALAND. Edited by Nancy M. Taylor. Oxford: at the Clarendon Press. 63s. THIS, by any standards, is a notable trio. Dr Beaglehole takes the bare canvas of the South West Pacific and sketches in the outlines of our islands. Mr McClymont blocks in the main features of the country and Mrs Taylor paints in some of the vivid detail that goes to make up the fascinating picture of what was generally an inhos- pitable interior. Each is therefore complementary to the other. A few years ago the first edition of Dr Beaglehole's book, published as one of the Centennial series of 1940 at a price of ss, fetched up to £2 on the secondhand market. Mr McClymont's, published in the same series at the same price, exchanged hands at up to £5. These figures give some idea of the demand in the post-war years for these two little books destined to become, if they have not already done so, classics of our early history. Second editions of these slim volumes-the text of Dr Beaglehole's is 85, and Mr McClymont's II4 pages-are thus very welcome. Dr Beaglehole's encyclopaedic knowledge of the exploration of the South West Pacific has crystallized round his researches into Cook's voyages and the fruits of this work are being published by the Hakluyt Society. It must have been a formidable task to con- dense the available material on the discovery of New Zealand into the limits set by the present work. For brevity's sake he has chosen 84 to treat his subject in a strictly conventional manner and in this he succeeds admirably. The story begins with the Polynesian voyagers, lip service only being paid to Andrew Sharp's theory of accidental voyagers, and ends with D'Urville's third visit in 1840. Nearly half the book is devoted to Cook, but to my mind it is a pity Dr Beaglehole did not expand his thesis a little more. For example no space is found for even a mention of the sixteenth cen- tl!_ry group of charts, based on Portuguese originals, of which Jean Rotz's is the best known. Historians delight in castigating de Sur- ville and Dr Beaglehole does not spare him, though he admits that we must not deny de Surville the merit of skilful and determined navigation. But no mention is made of the little known fact that his voyage in 1770, from Doubtless Bay in New Zealand to Chilca on the coast of Peru, was the first recorded west to east of the Pacific. De Surville's own journal has never been published. Here, perhaps, was an opportunity to say a little more of this, the first of the French navigators to reach our shores. Mr McClymont treats his subject, the exploration of the hinter- land of New Zealand, in less conventional manner. As he himself notes, he has, without neglecting the official explorer, mentioned traders, whalers and gold miners where reliable information is available. This enhances the interest and the historical value of his work, which must remain the starting point for future researches in this field. The journeys of explorers are followed chronologic- ally until about 1840, and then, with activity expanding rapidly in both islands, a change to a geographical treatment is made. This is effective and gives a comprehensive coverage. The coastline of New Zealand was completely, if inaccurately, charted by 1840. But some remote, rugged corners of the country remain unexplored to this day and so Mr McClymont's story perforce continues down to the present. The result is an entirely satisfying summary. Samuel Butler's aphorism, quoted by Mr McClymont, that 'Ex- ploring is delightful to look forward to and back upon, but it is not comfortable at the time, unless it be of such an easy nature as not to deserve the name' rings true, time and again, in the of Nancy Taylor's monumental volume. I have a rooted dislike for volumes as thick as this-they are poor bed-fellows. But I confess to having enjoyed greatly the varied fare presented in these six hundred pages. Mrs Taylor has selected eleven travellers who had in common the fact that each kept a diary of which the contents have survived. She allows them to tell their story in their own words. Besides informative footnotes and glossaries she- introduces each journal with a few pages about the writer. These biographical sketches are the fruit of much research and are often enlivened with touches of humour. Writing of Bishop Selwyn's skill as a sailor and prowess as a walker and swimmer she says, 'The respect 85 that these physical abilities won for him is summed up in the story of a hard-bitten old salt Who watched the bishop sailing a boat up Auckland harbour against a strong wind. "Look at him," said he, "it's enough to make a man a bloody Christian!"' Her story-tellers range from missionaries to a goldminer, from surveyors to a young naval officer. The north and south islands receive about equal attention and the narratives range from the 184o's to the 187o's. Mrs Taylor helps greatly by identifying the early place names and it is in this context that she refers to a map used by Bishop Selwyn. She writes (p. 90), 'James Wyld, of Charing Cross, published several highly inaccurate maps of New Zealand, put together from divers sources, during the 183o's and 4o's.' I hasten to defend poor Wyld who performed a signal service to New Zealand cartography by publishing more maps of these islands in succesSive editions than any other map maker of his period. The coastline, for which Mrs Taylor chides him, follows that of Thomas McDonnell's original published by Wyld in 1834, and the blame can perhaps be laid on McDonnell's shoulders, as he had at least travelled extensively in this country. Certainly there were errors in plenty in all the charts of New Zealand published at that time. London chart sellers greedilv snatched snippets of information from returning mariners and travellers and incorporated them. rightly or wrongly, in new editions of their charts. Editions of Wyld's charts were still appearing in the 185o's and 6o's. Many of Mrs Taylor's travellers were keen and sensitive observ- ers-none perhaps more so than Colenso, though Heaphy with his sound and extensive knowledge of geology runs him a close second. As one might expect of an artist who has left us such skilful. delicately executed watercolours. Mrs Taylor (or her publishers at the Clarendon Press, Oxford) eschews illustrations. But how Heaphy's lively drawings during his trip to the Arahura would have enhanced his journal. At least four of these, now in the British Museum, have survived-delightful pictures of Kehu snar- ing the inquisitive weka with 'Te Hauraki' towering in the distance. of Brunner descending the Miko cliff by flax ladder With dog and gun dangling on a separate rope, and of the pa at Arahura. There are however too many good things in these pages for one to be critical-Charles Abraham's impish delight in depicting Bishop Selwyn in unusual scenes, J. T. Thomson's comparison of the life of a surveyor in India and in New Zealand, and scores of other absorbing passages. Many.of the stories relate hardship in travel of which we who motor three hundred miles in comfort between dawn and dusk can scarcely conceive. Hungry and weary beyond belief, yet these dauntless men observed and noted. Into their grim records creep human touches and expressions of philosophy which lift them above the ordinary and make them an im- 86 mortal part of our heritage. Nancy Taylor deserves the highest praise for collecting, collating and clarifying these journals and making them readily available to the public. Peter Maling

SMITTY DOES A BUNK. Brian Sutton-Smith. Price Milburn. 13s. 6d. THE BOYS OF PUHAWAI. Kim. Paul's Book Arcade. I4S. 6d. THE HAPPY SUMMER. Alistair Campbell. Whitcombe & Tombs. 14s. MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF MAORILAND. A, W. Reed. Reed. I8S. 6d. KUMA IS A MAORI GIRL. Dennis Hodgson and Pat Lawson. Hicks, Smith & Sons Ltd. 8s. 6d. Smitty Does A Bunk is the title of Brian Sutton-Smith's sequel to Our Street, those adventures of Smitty, Brin, Horsey and Gormie which caused such a storm of disapproval on their appearance in the School Journal in 1949. The behaviour of the children was mis- chievous, destructive, cheerful, amoral and normal; their speech was the language of the playground. The stories, it was considered by many people, would encourage both moral and linguistic delin- quency. Brian Sutton-Smith's answer to these charges was that they were originally intended to be pegs on which to hang class discuss- ions of the moral and social problems involved in them, and when the stories appeared in book form in 1950, they were prefaced with no fewer than four introductory notes explaining this background. Now, ten years later, a new generation is presented with a sequel which contains none of this prefatory material, and it is not clear whether this second book is also didactic in impulse. The boys, who in Our Street were likeable Standard Three pupils, have in the inter- vening years moved up to Standard Six which, considering the apparent level of their intelligence, is only slightly slower progress than one would have expected. The illustrations by Dennis Turner depict them as heavy, unattractively loutish youths, a good five years older than the lads they represent. But the boys have changed from the days of Our Street. Their early, rather innocent delin- quency has begun to give way to adolescent restlessness. Smitty wants to run away and work on a farm, and dreams incessantly of the day when his plans to 'do a bunk' will be realized. This book roused little sympathy and some irritation in young readers I know. 'They are such stupid kids,' said one impatiently, 'and they do such silly things you can't be bothered with them. Like holding up Horsey's father with an empty rifle to stop him drinking too much. Or cutting off a girl's hair. They're just feeble.' The charm of Our Street lay in the fact that Brian Sutton-Smith was writing his stories for children he knew; the background and the children themselves were absolutely familiar to him, and his 87 touch was sure. I have the impression that he may have lost contact with his material, and this was to some extent confirmed when I discovered that the expression 'does a bunk', so common once, is no longer, in Otago at least, current slang, and that it was understood by only two out of eleven children asked its meaning. It is possible that this author is similarly out of touch with contemporary behaviour patterns, and this would explain the failure in communication I have observed. Certainly for humour, adventure and enjoyment of the racy vernacular, children prefer Barry Crump's A Good Keen Man every time. The Boys of Puhawai by Kim tells of the summer's experiences of three friends, one Irish and two Maori, in an attractively drawn setting of bush, sea and a small country township. The boys' sheer animal spirits and youthful energy are well portrayed, and the relationship between them sensitively delineated. This is nearly an excellent book, but it is marred by one or two distasteful episodes. While one realizes that violence is an inevitable part of human experience and that in the past many children's books have been saccharine, and although one is aware that the battle between the generations cannot always be won by the children, or, indeed, the savour of battle is lost, the brutality of the scene where the dog Kuripai is thrashed, then killed, is too discordant to be resolved within the scope of the book. Another unpleasant scene concerns a drinking bout where the father of one of the boys walks off his job saying 'I've had a gutsfull of(the boss). Let him do his own work', drinks four bottles of beer, flinging the last empty at his wife's head. He then vomits and col- lapses into drunken sleep from which the boys eventually rouse him by dousing him with water from the creek. This scene was not essential to the development of the plot, and would, I think, have been better left out, although this experience may be one many children have had. It is interesting that two of the books written for children this year should mention paternal drinking as a problem to children. On the whole, however, The Boys of Puhawai is a most attractive book, illustrated with pleasant drawings by Dennis Turner and a group of excellent photographs which convey the spirit and the background of the story admirably. · That I do not feel more enthusiastic about Alistair Campbell's The Happy Summer surprises me, because this book is full of inn(}- cent childish pleasure in the sun and the sand, the boats and the bathing-suits of a delightful summer holiday enjoyed by Jimmy and Sue Tucker. It would be read by almost any ten-year-old with enjoyment, but I doubt whether it would be re-read, since it seems to have been kept deliberately at a superficial level, leaving no hidden beauties or complexities to be unravelled later. The author has not, perhaps, had sufficient trust in his young readers; he appears to have 88 Written out of a nervous apprehension of losing their attention, so that he keeps up a pace of incident that leaves no time to develop depth. That this distrust is unnecessary is proved by the success of authors such as C. S. Lewis, ]. R. R. Tolkien, Kenneth Grahame, Tove Jansson or, to come nearer home, Maurice Duggan in Falter Tom. All these authors allow their stories to develop at their own pace without regard apparently for the young reader who may be extended, but who goes back again and again until the covers fall off the book and a new copy is bought. Without this central integrity, a children's book cannot be anything more than a 'rattling good yarn'. In 1947, A. W. Reed's Myths and Legends of Maoriland won the Esther Glen Award. This new edition contains an extra twenty thousand words, making it the most comprehensive collection of Maori legends yet produced in a single volume, and as such it is a valuable source book and a useful addition to any family bookshelf. The style, however, is jerky and the rhythmical quality of earlier translations has been lost. The vigorous illustrations by Dennis Turner convey the spirit of the stories very well, but the book itself loses attractiveness by the small print and the cramped inner margins of its pages. These are not fundamental objections to a Work as extensive as this; they amount perhaps to an ungenerous regret that a good collection should not have been even better. A new addition to the 'Children Everywhere' Series is Kuma is a Maori Girl and it is well up to the high standard set by earlier volumes. The day to day life of an eight-year-old Maori girl who lives near Auckland is told in a simple brief text, illustrated on each page with excellent photographs. The amount of information packed into this short book is quite surprising, and this is done without any false note of sentimentality or obvious didacticism. Children merely enjoy its story-telling quality; adults can appreciate its absence of patronage of the child or the Maori race. Patricia Guest CRITIC (Literary Issue). Vol. 27, No. 12. Edited by John Harris. Otayo University Students' Association. DRUM Number One. Edited by Kevin Lawson and Patrick Craddock (Wellinyton). EXPERIMENT 8. Edited by John Fowler. Victoria University Literary Society. KIWI 6r. Edited by W. S. Broughton and Wystan Curnow. Auck- land University Students' Association. MISCELLANY. Edited by David McGill. The Glenco (W ellinyton Teachers' Colleye). NUCLEUS FOUR. Edited by Wystan Curnow and Tony Hammond (Auckland). NEW ZEALAND UNIVERSITIES LITERARY YEARBOOK No. 3· Edited by Laurie Williams and David Wallace. Arts Festival Committee. REVIEW 61. Edited by Victor O'Leary. Otayo University Students' Association. THE SPIKE 1961. Victoria University Students' Association. ONLY a strong sense of duty compels editors :to compile, contributors to fill, student bodies to publish, other student 'bods' to buy, and reviewers to read these literary periodicals. The strain is obvious on almost every page-strained syntax, emotions, ideas, pockets and eyesight; all in the name of our duty to the college, the country, Mankind and Art. We can be thankful they generally come but once a year, for when they mass together they amount to nearly five hundred pages of articles (45), stories (37) and poems (147) by about one hundred and twenty writers, of whom at least one hundred must be students at university or teachers' college. Hag-ridden by 'representation' and possibly by pagination, some of the editors have ventured to adopt what John Fowler in Experi- ment calls 'the revolutionary criterion of literary merit'; W. S. Broughton and Wystan Curnow realize that 'their task is less to select on the grounds of formal taste than to present what they believe to be a fair edition [sic] of contemporary writing from Auckland University.' They can be assured that their Kiwi is a much more tasteful job than that bird is commonly supposed to be, both in appearance and meat; but their disclaimer seems to have had serious effects on their spelling and punctuation. The duty of a college editor, it seems to me, must extend as much to the finer points of proof-reading as to the honour of the institution, for the tWo are not totally unrelated. The bumper crop of bloomers in all these periodicals so turned my stomach there were times I wanted to head this review SIC SIC SIC. Drum is the worst offender by a long chalk but its inherent faults-purblind ideas and a dead ear for language-crop up in most of these publications and could have been eliminated by editors who found the notion of literary merit a little less revolu- 90 tionary. Two of Drum's pieces (poems by Elizabeth Allo and N. W. Bilbrough) might have been readable had the stencil been profess- ionally cut; otherwise all I get from it is the hollow blurp of youth doing a little reading (from Lorca to Damon Runyon) and telling the world where it gets off. Spike has as many articles as the rest put together and here it's not the ideas that are so bad as their expression; but the editor admits this in a cheerful proem and James K. Baxter saves the day with his 'Essay On the Higher Learning'. Dip- ping a pen lightly in vitriol and truth he etches a personal impression of varsity life, demonstrating to the rest of the proseurs who thrash around with the Bomb and Sex and Jazz that lively laughter and lively spite is their province. We greybeards need to hear from students not the sins of the world but the faults of the squire, to reverse the advice of Tennyson's churchwarden to his curate. If they can't write an essay along Mr Baxter's lines (and I admit the experiences he records may be wildly unrepresentative), then the solution would seem to be a good critical article. MacD. P. Jackson in Kiwi and W. S. Broughton in Nucleus write on the poetry of A. R. D. Fairbum and James K. Baxter with an ability and understanding that demonstrate their calibre as students of literature; one could object to the 'quote-hopping' in the one and the waspish tone in the other but since the first quotation Mr Jackson cites from Fairbum is precisely what I would urge on the poets who are out to save society in the flat and floppy poems of these periodicals, and since I have argued that Mr Broughton's acidity is to be welcomed in student publications, neither objection can be sustained here. Particularly welcome is their attention to New Zealand literature; students in all four centres complain that English departments do not pay enough attention to that subject; the remedy lies at least partly in their own hands. In other respects both these Auckland periodicals show their superiority, particularly in their gracious brevity. Kiwi's only short story, D. S. Thomas's 'Broken Bottles And Bare Feet', is a low-toned sketch of immigrant life; high-lighted by a couple of eccentric characters and organized as a story by the ironic ending. The writing competently matches the vision of the writer and this happy recipe is responsible for the satisfactory genre pieces of R. J. Smithies and James Lawrence in the Yearbook, Garth Carpenter in Miscellany and Les Cleveland in Spike. Outside this category most of the other short stories try for the greater imaginative power of guest contributions, such as Maurice Shadbolt's 'Nightfall' (Spike) and Alexander Guyan's 'The Countess' (Review), but time and again a good idea is ruined by poor technique, as it is at the close of Peter Bums's 'Still Going Strong' (Review). None of the students can reconcile a close observation of a specific and ordinary locale with an awareness (if not always a command) of language as John 91 Hooker does in 'Ferris Wheel' (Critic). This is the best writing in these periodicals (I prefer to treat it as prose) for the simple reason that Mr Hooker has more than the desire to hector his public-he has the imagination to feel the meaning of event for his characters; but then Mr Hooker is a student of writing, not of the university. This imaginative reach will not be achieved by the fantastic story, in spite of the success of Howard Patterson and David Mit- chell in Miscellany. The better way is demonstrated in Experiment, whose editor is to be congratulated for giving us more stories in proportion to poems than any other periodical; James Lawrence's 'The Sound Of Summer' is an almost wholly successful short story of young love in Paraparaumu-a difficult theme and difficult locale. Three of Renato Amato's stories follow roughly the same theme but the locale is exotic and the effect jazzy (largely because he relies heavily on dialogue; where this escapes tedium, as in 'Gods Had Feet Of Clay', it is effective). But Albert Wendt's two stories, particularly 'The Cross Of Soot', are probably the best student writing in all nine periodicals; the dialogue is pointed toward some inevitable conclusion, the characterization is vivid, and the sense of compassion shows a maturity, a sense of having lived and loved, that is almost completely lacking in the rest. Especially in the poets. It is probably a combination of inexperience and loquacity that makes this gross of poems so bad. No guest contributions of any moment-apart from those of Peter Bland and Gordon Challis in Spike-appear in this student preserve; the critic can salvage here a line, there a stanza that communicates but cold (and fuzzy) print kills most of them. This reviewer is tom between appreciat- ing the occasional lyric gift and deploring the absence of polish that could have come from sheer hard work on many of the near- poems. Sometimes the gifted utterance is sufficient to carry a poem to its conclusion, as in David Mitchell's work in Miscellany, and occasionally a relaxed description will carry the body of the work -there are numerous examples in the Yearbook-but too often an utterly unconstipated sensibility takes over the gift of speech and we get what David McGill, editing Miscellany, calls 'typical student "love" poetry, with its pessimism, loneliness and mawkish frustration'. Recognition of that rock doesn't, alas, save Miscellany from the whirlpool of an hysterical social conscience. Both faults are, by the students' own showing, largely male; Fleur Adcock, Hilaire Kirkland, Elizabeth Allo and even Ngaire Atkinson show a just appreciation of the potential in and the dangers of using a fairly light touch, largely because they support their poems by a tough logical structure. The men go in for rhetoric or masterfully prosaic statement; not all of them, of course-the poems of Vince O'Sullivan, Rob Brown, John Paisley, N. W. Bil- 92 brough, Victor O'Leary, and most of the poets in Nucleus and Kiwi are worth reading, but they are few in spite of their occasionally lavish representation. There are a number of interesting ways in which this review could have approached these publications. But I have preferred to take a flying tackle at the editors, the half-backs of this game, because their labours, though doubtless long and valuable, have been marred by carelessness (a casual attitude shared by the writers, possibly the crux of their failure). The plea of youth would be as embarrassing to them as it has been in the criticism of New Zea- land literature; we need good editors and they are not born to us but made by hard experience. Perhaps next year. . . ? The final word in what is beginning to sound like a prize-giving address is for the writers: Most of you would have profited by severe criticism; you haven't had enough of this assistance from your editors and you do not seem to be able to transfer the habit from your studies. There is another answer: the seminar in creative writing. You have been warned. R. T. Robertson

Correspondence

To THE EDITOR SIR: Much of Mr Greenwood's criticism of Hiroshima Mon Amour is I feel based on some shining misinterpretation. It is surely necessary to sidestep the temptation of seeing the film merely as of the 'Hiroshima disaster' integrated 'with a personal story'-even if one concedes as Mr Greenwood does in his quotation from Auer- bach that Hiroshima Mon Amour exploits to the full, dramatic techniques in the condensing of time and space. It seems to me that the paradoxical title points straight away to a multi-thematic interpretation, with themes relating contrapuntally to each other in synthesis, in antithesis; in variety and depth : not separate, linear themes or stories, which interpretation, despite the Proust· ian excursions back fifteen years to the heroine's girlhood, stems attenuatedly from Aristotelian logic rather than from the 'logical paradox', 'it is and it is not' of the title. In the title, Hiroshima may first and most obviously stand for the Japanese lover whose name it is, the 'My Love' for him, the heroine's lover-in the erotic sense. Symbolizing love in the most honorific sense, Hiroshima can next be regarded, hypothetically, as the 'perfect' being whose attraction to the powers for 'good' 93 in the heroine, can bring about their regeneration. When Hiro- shima represents the inhabitants of that place, 'My Love' is compassion and when Hiroshima, the place, symbolizes destruction, 'My Love', though less obviously, is still interpretable. Mr Greenwood seems practically to discount the 'personal story'. And he doesn't see that it is not the heroine's ero·ticism that is 'negative, nihilistic and destructive', but her personality, during the period of her amnesia: he fails to see, within the framework of the personal story, the phenomenon of her amnesia essentially as a failure to hang on to her integrity. The story shows how impossible were the odds against her. It also shows in the flashbacks to the period when she was an eighteen-year-old, and no·t negative and destructive that she was then positive, strong or creative or whatever adjective in fashion nicely describes also her childlike innocence. Her love affair is much more than the 'psy- chological anatomizing of l'amour'. It is strikingly childlike and like a French child that doesn't understand why it is no longer sanctioned to play with its German friend, she doesn't understand that the war has altered values, in many cases reversing values completely; she is permitted now to hate the young German-but not to love him. With the young German lover also, impressions of innocence are conveyed and this is a very dreadful part of her grief that he, in his essential innocence, should be shot in cold blood by one of her fellow citizens, left to die in agony and his body lumped on to a truck to be disposed of. Also, she, a woman, has been permitted in a way that men aren't, in this culture at any rate, to put love in all its forms from brotherly love to motherly love, before· the necessity for law and order. It is essential for it to be seen that within this lies the germ of her downfall. When the oft-mentioned 'amnesia' is considered again, it can be observed that it is not merely traumatic, 'the result of shock'; and the additional loss of her senses of hearing and sight, effects the tragic portentousness symbolic of her drastic character change. During the next fifteen years, by implication, she leads a 'normal' life, making a mariage de convenance; but, the moralists among us would probably agree, she can still be said to be suffering from 'amnesia'. During the same period, on the other side of the world in the place, Hiroshima, after the dropping of the bomb, the man, Hiroshima, has made a similar 'marriage'. Mr Greenwood asks only tentatively whether we are to take it ironically when Hiro- shima says that he is 'happily married'. How otherwise, even weren't the phrase one that more often than not is cherished by seekers after the banal. But it would be irrelevant to bring in ethical considerations of the marriage bond. These two hollow liaisons made in the aftermath of war and destruction are not, surely, in the economy of the film, to be regarded as marriages. 94 The woman's life with the young German was her genuine relationship and it is interesting to note that (the fifteen years having passed) when the love and compassion of the Japanese, Hiro- shima, give her courage to re-live to him her experiences relating to the German lover, she speaks of the latter in the second person, so that with the identifying of the two lovers an impersonal flav- our is added to the two love affairs and again a wide conception of love is hinted at. Still in defence of the heroine: it is obviously very difficult for her to give up the dead-easy familiarities of fourteen years, for a face-to-face relationship with an honest man which includes also a facing of her persisting nihilism and an acceptance of living in many more of its aspects. Mr Greenwood is also critical of a too 'prominent eroticism', as depicted in the alternating cinematic images-described by him nevertheless with poetry : the images of the 'scarred, burned flesh' of the slowly dying atomic victims-scenes of mutilated trees also come to my mind-in 'visual contrast' to 'the smooth flesh' of 'dark intertwining limbs' 'in erotic play'. But here the dialogue is valid both for the erotic and the destruction-suffering images. Phrases disturbing to the determinedly puritanical and also to some 'masochism' -fixated psychologists, such as 'You are killing me', 'The night will last forever', 'Mutilate me' relate surely not only (a) to the portrayed suffering atomic victims, but also (b) in a Lawrentian the embracing lovers. (c) It could also be taken in a therapeutic sense: the woman made aware of her destructiveness and nihilism, suspects that it can be 'killed', 'mutilated', by the bracing love and sympathy in her Japanese lover. (d) I feel sure that the writer of the script must have also intended a 'mystical' interpretation of the images: the phrases could have come straight from, for instance, the poems of St John of the Cross and seem to allude to a fallible but potentially creative person seeking fusion with and discipline from the 'Beloved' of the Christian mystics, in the belief that the various kinds of death and suffering cause the pullulation of more life. June Hig,inbottom

SIR: Mr Greenwood's sententiously scholastic condemnation of the cinema as art is very annoying. He says that most films are trash. If he means this statistically, it is a common platitude which is true of books, paintings, plays and every other conceivable form of art. In every other sense, the statement is nonsensical. He argues that films are not art because they are 'the product of a mechanical device for reproducing the visual semblance of actuality in 95 the same visual medium by which actuality itself is apprehend- ed-namely light.' I would like to ask him to give a second thought to that sentence. Does it really make an interesting or even mean- ingful assertion about films? Do paintings not fall into the same class? And would he condemn books read out aloud because such reading reproduces a semblance of actuality in the same auditory medium in which the author may have heard of the events he describes? The film, on the contrary, is to me the most lively and exciting form of contemporary art. Cocteau's Orpheus, which Mr Green- Wood superciliously rejects as adolescent preciosity, is a moving and profoundly impressive piece. There is certainly no novel written in the same decade, except Dr Faustus, and no painting paint- ed in the same decade, which has had quite the same effect on me. And I have read no recent poetry to compare with Antonioni's L'A vventura. The tone-deaf make poor music critics-even if they justify their lack of perception with cumbersome words. Peter Munz

SIR: When Matthew Arnold replied to Francis Newman's criticism of his Homer lectures he began by quoting Buffon's 'Je n'ai jamais repondu a aucune critique... .' and commenting on 'the baneful effects of. . . controversy' in checking 'the free play of the spirit'. It is with this warning in mind that I take the opportunity afford- ed me by the editor to answer the two correspondents who have taken issue with my article on Hiroshima Mon Amour. I find Miss Higinbottom's argument difficult to follow. What is it, for example, that stems from Aristotelian logic? Presumably my treating the film in a linear way. Aristotle has had many sins laid to his charge and I am sorry to think I have perpetrated yet another. No doubt a 'multi-thematic interpretation' of the film is possible, but it is necessary to have some criterion of relevance whereby certain interpretations can be ruled out (Empson's 'ambig- uities' in poetry are a parallel here), a criterion drawn, somehow, from the work itself. It will just not do to arrive at some vague formula such as 'a wide conception of love is hinted at'. It needs more than a shared metaphor (that of wounding) to postulate a connection with the mysticism of St John of the Cross whose poems contain many other elements from spheres with which the film has nothing to do. I can only see the reference to him as idiosyncratic and irrelevant. However, Miss Higinbottom and I differ in particulars of interpretation only, we concur in seeing the work as a serious one worthy of close attention. With Dr Munz disagreement is wider and perhaps unbridgeable. I will skirt the amenity of such a sentence as 'the tone-deaf make 96 poor music critics' and ask Dr Munz what personal meaning he attaches to the word 'scholastic' ? Having been accused of being an Aristotelian I suppose it is only logical that I should be accused of being a schoolman too. The opening phrase of my article was thrown down, perhaps too crudely, as a challenge to adulators of films to judge them by the very highest standards as set by works of literature, painting and music and not, as so often happens, by 'peculiar' standards of 'greatness'. It was a platitude in the sense that it pointed out the obvious-the fact that very few films can survive such judgement, but then platitudes are often statements of home truths we are inclined to ignore, so that when we meet them we hasten to stig- matize those who have drawn them to our attention. Dr Munz is obviously in no need of such a challenge. His invoking Mann's work shows that he does habitually judge by the highest standards. The point is that many film critics do not. The crucial point at issue between us resides in the sentence from my article which Dr Munz quotes and asks me to reconsider. Well I have reconsidered it and ask him to reconsider it-in context of course-and reconsider his own questions about it. I hope even my 'cumbersome words' will show that the media of painting and literature and the medium of film, as film, are not in pari materia. Paintings do not fall into the same class as films because their medium is not light, but pigment. Whether the artist makes something new or matches his picture with other visual phenomena his medium is something over which he, as artist, has full manipulative control. If an artist paints a still life, say a bowl of flowers, the material of his painting (pigment) is completely different from that of the model. If a writer sets out to describe a bowl of flowers his medium-words-is again in a completely different material. A novelist's dialogue is not the same thing as real speech, but an invention within certain conventions of the written language and remains so even if read aloud. If, however, one films a bowl of flowers one simply makes use of certain mechanical de- vices which simulate the effect of light on the retina, the exposed film being, of course, the equivalent of the retina. There is no actual artistic manipulation of the medium itself. One may of course arrange the lighting and the flowers one is filming to achieve certain effects but the actual transference of the visual phenomena to the film (and its subsequent projection) remain purely mechanical processes. After all a painter may arrange his 'still-life' but that leaves him with his real work to it. If Dr Munz thinks this is merely 'scholastic' hair-splitting let him film a bowl of flowers, paint one and describe one in words. Perhaps he will then agree that the two latter activities are different in kind from the former. E. B. Greenwood 97 SIR: At the risk of disrupting the common-room with a brawl about contemporary art, may I take Mr Curnow up on a few matters arising from his review in the September Landfall of the Pacific Art Exhibition? Half his space is used to discover what was obvious at a glance-that the geographical hypotheses on which the exhibition was built were all but meaningless. Although he could have given some more of this space to a consideration of the important Japanese section, it would have been even more interesting to have an explanation or description of the criteria by which he was able to condemn, say, Simmonds, Patterson or Snad- den and praise Hassell Smith, Lundeberg, Diebenkorn or Billy Al-Bengston. I suggest (a) that his judgements were purely subjective, (b) that a great deal of European painting and nearly all of the West Coast and New Zealand work shown in this exhibition is symptomatic of the decline and decay of the Romantic Move- ment in those countries and (c) that subjective criticism has contributed to that decline. Armed with catch-phrases such as 'micro- cosm-macrocosm dynamic', 'positive-negative motifs', 'symbol-making' and 'convulsive empathy', and neglecting the classical criteria of line, colour, tone, shape etc., one could take the work of even Mr Snadden or Mrs Simmonds, for example, and produce a grossly inflated judgement. For a specimen of this method I offer the last half of the last paragraph of Mr O'Reilly's letter on p. 291 of the September Landfall. Perhaps Mr O'Reilly was writing about Mr Snadden and Mrs Simmonds ! G. E. Fairburn NEW CONTRIBUTORS

Neva Clarke. Born in Gisborne 1920 and educated at Gisborne High School. Commanding Officer of the Clerical Division of the N.Z.W.A.A.C. in Italy during the war; worked briefly in the Prime Minister's Office; married and lived in Palmerston North, where she was an active member of Manawatu Repertory Society. Now lives in Wellington. Began writing in 1956. Jeremy Commons. Born in Auckland 1933. After graduating in English from Auckland University and Merton College, Oxford, spent a year in Italy as an Italian Government scholarship-holder studying early nineteenth-century opera. Returned to N.Z. in 1959 and since then has been working with the Department of External Affairs. Tony Fomison. Born in Christchurch, graduate of Canterbury School of Art, aged 22. His interest in art and archaeology combined at present in tracing local Maori rock drawings for the National Historic Places Trust and the Canterbury Museum. Exhibited last year in a five-man show in Christchurch. Leo Fowler. Born in Liverpool 1902. Emigrated to N.Z. with parents 1910 and settled in far north where he first met Maoris. Has been bullock driver, navvy, salesman, bushman, journalist, coal-miner. Joined N.Z.B.S. '1937; Director of Broadcasting in Western Samoa 1949-52; now Manager of Sta- tion 2XG Gisborne. Has written on Maori subjects forTe Ao Hou, Journal of the Polynesian Society, etc. Is on the committees of several Maori organ- izations. His first novel Brown Conflict published 1959; his radio play The Taiaha and the Testament (from another novel) was broadcast from main national stations in February 1961. John Gillespie. Born in Masterton 1936, educated at Nelson College, gained a Diploma at Canterbury School of Art in 1959. Has exhibited in Christ- church at Gallery 91, with his wife Julian Royds in 1960 and in a five-man show in 1961. At present shows at the Several Arts. Peter Maling. Born in Temuka 1912, graduate in science, Canterbury Col- lege, erstwhile geologist in Persia, educated at St Thomas's Hospital, medical practitioner in Christchurch since the war. J. L. Roberts. Born in Wellington 1927, educated at Wellington College, degrees Ll.B., D.P.A., Victoria University. At present senior Lecturer in Public Administration at Victoria University. Roger Savage. Born 1935 in Greater London. Educated at Dartford (Kent) and King's College, Cambridge. Arrived in Wellington early 1961 to teach English literature at Victoria University.