Canadian Poetry and the Regional Anthology, R

A New•••aa Zealand Qgarter!J'

VOLUME SIXTEEN

1962

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 107 The Brothers, Kevin Lawson 108 Snowfall, Ruth Dallas 109 The Greaser's Story, 0. E. Middleton IIO Three Poems, Raymond Ward 129 Canadian Poetry and the Regional Anthology, R. T. Robertson 134 Washed up on Island Bay, W. H. Oliver 147 New Zealand Since the War (7), Bill Pearson 148

COMMENTARIES : Canadian Letter, Roy Daniells 180 The Broadcasting Corporation Act, R. ]. Harrison 185

REVIEWS: The Turning Wheel, ]ames Bertram 188 Poetry of the Maori, Alan Roddick 192 New Novels, Paul Day 195

Correspondence, David Hall, W. ]. Scott, R. T. Robertson, Wystan Curnow

Paintings by Pam Cotton

VOLUME SIXTEEN NUMBER TWO JUNE 1962 Notes

ON I APRIL, the New Zealand Broadcasting Service became a Cor- poration, and ceased to be a government department. That was the first change necessary if broadcasting, with TV, is to play its proper role in New Zealand life. On another page, Mr Harrison examines the Broadcasting Corporation Act and the measure of independence which it gives the Corporation. The Act is only a beginning; the change so far is largely one of name. A board of three men heads the Corporation, taking the place of the Minister of Broadcasting. They however are only a part-time triumvirate; the direction of and effective responsibility for the two services will be in the hands of the Director General whom they appoint. It is he, backed by his board, who must establish the working independence of the Corporation. If he is a man of vision and experience who understands the potentialities of the media (and no lesser man will be adequate), he will know that their task is to give pleasure and provide news (in every sense of the word) in such a way as to become, in the long run, an influence for enlight- enment and civilization. If on the other hand he is simply or chiefly an administrator, broadcasting will remain what it is today, a char- acterless purveyor of items of entertainment some better some worse, intellectually and morally a cipher; while TV, taking the line of least resistance, will be given over largely to so-called popular programmes of the kind which the public is supposed to want when they have had no chance of seeing and learning to want something better. In short, if broadcasting and TV are not adventurous and enlightened and progressive in tendency, their influence will become obscurantist and reactionary; they are active forces; they cannot be neutral. We have now a fine opportunity to let them develop to the full and become as vigorous and inventive as we know they can be, reflecting the rich variety of talent, taste and opinion in which the vitality of a complex urban civilization expresses itself. The kind of Director General needed is a determined civilized man who has shown his ability in more than one field preferably and not in New Zealand alone, and who understands the function of the two media in a democratic society. He cannot, by definition, be a mere administrator, whether he comes from broadcasting or 107 outside it. One scientist and two businessmen may do well heading the Corporation-this remains to be seen; but a far wider background is necessary for the direction of its services. The first Dir- ector of the N.Z.B.S., James Shelley, possessed the right sort of qualities. A man of his calibre is essential if broadcasting and TV are to be, on balance, powers for good in the life of the country. The Director General whom the triumvirate so quickly appointed is an unknown man who, starting as an accountant, worked his way up in the administrative branch of broadcasting. May he prove equal to his position.

THE vitality of the arts in this country usually depends at any given time on the work of a few gifted energetic people. In the theatre, we probably owe most, since the war, to Richard and Edith Campion. It is ironical that the company which they formed, the New Zealand Players (the first full-time professional company the country had had), collapsed about the time when the Arts Advisory Council was set up; one of the Council's objects is to support just such work as that company aimed to do. That Mr Campion has now accepted an appointment in Australia is a serious loss to both amateur and professional theatre. His productions never lacked quality, and he was particularly happy working with students and other amateur groups, which are the nursery of the professional theatre. The country is poorer and smaller for his going.

KEVIN LAWSON The Brothers

· THEY came as honest men, holding their sadness well as if death had not changed or broken their fierce pride, and went with a promise of friendship at my death.

I08 They came from the shadows, a few whose tortured minds cloaked a violent past. Some angered because I love turn from me not speaking. See, how noble they are.

Yet already they're hard with guilt of their dying out of the bitter work. Some day I shall think of them and know how well they disguised their terror.

RUTH DALLAS Snowfall

AGAINST the fallen snow Bushes bare and thorny A delicate structure show Like bamboo on a screen.

For a moment, when The snow was falling, Every tree stood laden With blossom of pear.

At dusk the bird-cries Haunting the garden, The hungry wax-eyes Disconsolately flying.

The round moon shines On mountain snowfields; Soooh, say the pines In the chilled air.

109 Pavement and houses Are sheeted over; Nobody passes. Lighted windows.

Close the door. The cat has come in With snowflakes in his fur. Outside is silence.

From time to time Fresh snow falls, Swish, like a broom, Or a dance of dry leaves.

0. E. M I D D LE T 0 N Jrhe (;reaser's Stor)V

THE Kaitiki was one of those reliable old ships which used to carry cargoes across the Tasman and around the coasts of Australasia. When I joined her, she had a mixed crew of Australians, English- men and New Zealanders, and her crew's quarters and food were poor by comparison with the newer ships. But there was a girl in Sydney I wanted to see again rather badly, so, although it wasn't my usual job I signed on as a greaser, hung up my shore-going gear in the locker, and looked around to see who my cabin-mate would be. He turned out to be a youngish fellow called Johnson from Liver- pool. He was slight and dark with a small scar on the fleshy part of his left cheek. He had a quick, jerky way of speaking, and a habit of darting his eyes about which you noticed the first time you met him. But you strike all sorts at sea. 'As long as he doesn't go throwing boozy parties in the cabin when I'm trying to get some shut-eye ... ' I thought. I found myself on the four to eight watch, Johnson got the twelve to four, and a West-Australian called Slim Young took the eight to twelve. One way and another, several of us found we had bumped into each other at sea, or in port, on other ships. No one IIO seemed to know Scouse Johnson though. In spite of the discharges he had, both coastal and deep-sea, no one seemed to have set eyes on him before. We left Wellington on a fresh June morning with general cargo for Sydney and Newcastle. There were the usual Westerlies in the Strait, but the wind dropped to a breeze as we cleared the coast and we seemed set for a steady, routine trip. Although she had none of the lines of the newer ships, the old Kaitiki was a good sailer. She had been under the same master for years and was reputed to have made millions for her owners in the years she had plied the Tasman. When I went down to relieve Johnson for my first watch, we chatted briefly at the foot of the ladder. 'How's she going, Scouse ?' 'Not too bad. She'd be like an oven in the tropics though.' It was true that the Kaitiki brought forth more noise and heat from her old belly than many a ship twice her size. She had been built in the first place as a coal-burner, but her engines had been converted to oil at about the time of the first world war. 'No wonder so many of the firemen ashore won't have her on' I said to myself as I went about with my can and lump of cotton waste. As soon as my stint was over and I had swapped a few words with Slim, I was glad to get up into the fresh air. When I had showered and hung my gear to dry on a steam pipe, I wandered into the mess for a cup of coffee and found a crowd playing cards. It looked as though Johnson hadn't turned in on coming off duty. He was sitting behind a fistful of cards in a school with the Peggy, the assistant cook, and two firemen, and they weren't playing for fun. I leaned against the bulkhead taking occasional swigs from my mug and trying to follow the run of the game. There is no better way of passing time at sea, as long as stakes are not too high and I kept glancing from face to face over the rim of my mug, trying to guess which way the luck was going. There was a faint rustling from the top of the food locker where the Peggy had left a parcel of fresh bread. As I turned to see what it was, I saw that Scouse had already looked up with that quick movement of his head, and was staring at something. The next moment he dropped his hand and made a dive for the broom, but by then the rat had run along a pipe and out of sight. Scouse put back the broom and picked up his cards again, but his hands were unsteady and I fancied his lower lip trembled. III 'Only a bloody rat.' It was the Aussie fireman. 'Nothing to do your scone over.' He raised the bet. No one else said anything, although the Peggy and the assistant cook kept their eyes on Johnson. 'The grog's got him,' their looks seemed to say, and I suppose most of us thought the same. Although he laid down three Jacks to the Aussie's thirty days, Johnson still looked white. I finished my drink, rinsed my mug, and went down the passage with the idea of turning in. I was in my bunk when Scouse came in and switched on the light again. He glanced quickly around the cabin and sat down on the bunk below. 'How did the game go?' 'Not too bad, you know. I'd still have been there only.... ' 'The others still there?' 'Yes. They're still at it.' He got up nervously, took something out of the locker, and stood looking at it under the light. 'Hope you don't mind mate. I brought a bit of poison for the rats. I'm funny that way. Always like to leave a few baits about to take care of the stray ones.' 'That's all right by me.' 'Good. I'll leave a few baits in the locker, and up under the deckhead in the mess.' He sounded relieved and quickly began tearing open the paper packet. 'You don't like rats, do you?' He turned his small face towards me. It was almost level with mine and the mark on his cheek seemed to stand out. 'I hate them!' He stared at me with his white face and in the light from the bare bulb his lips were trembling. 'We've all got our likes and dislikes.' I tried to soothe him. 'I'm not too keen on the brutes myself, but you get used to them.' 'Get used to them! Not me mate! Do you see this?' He reached under the bunk and pulled out a heavy air pistol, holding it carefully, muzzle down. 'Always carry it when I'm on watch .... ' 'For the rats?' 'You betcha. For the bloody landlords!' 'You should get plenty of sport this trip, then.' 'How do you mean?' He slipped the pistol away into his pocket and stared at me again. 'Well, the old Kaitiki seems to have her quota. I saw a couple as I came up the fiddley tonight. Then there was that one in the mess just now.... For every rat you see, there's fifty more in hiding, they say.' II2 'That's no lie. These blasted old tubs are always the worst, as well.' He had started to pace up and down the cabin and the effort of watching him was growing too much for me. 'Don't let it get you down, Scouse. I'm for some shut-eye now. Why don't you doss down yourself for an hour? Do you good.' Without another word, he put out the light and stretched out on his bunk. It's funny how you get used to the sounds made by a ship's insides as she goes about her business. You never seem to sleep as soundly ashore as you do in your own bunk at sea, with the friendly creakings, and groanings, the familiar motion of a ship under way. Just as I was dropping off that night, I couldn't be sure, but I seemed to hear above the straining of steel and timber, the beat of our engines, the slap-slap of an unlatched door, the squeak of a cork coming out of a bottle. . .

'Come on Jack! Wakey wakey!' Scouse stood beside the bunk, his face shiny with sweat and grease. 'You got twenty minutes.' 'Right. Everything O.K. ?' He looked over-tired, far more weary than he had any right to be on our second morning out. 'The job's all right, but the rats have been keeping me busy. I got three.' 'With the pistol?' 'Bet your life!' 'You want to watch out you don't go hitting any of the boys. One of those slugs has only to bounce off the plates and catch one of the engineers. . . . ' 'I'm no new chum with one of these mate.' He patted the pocket of his jacket and went away to finish his watch. I got my gear off the steam-pipe and climbed into it, yawning. The two firemen on the four to eight were already in the mess, breathing into their mugs. 'Everything under control?' It was Robbie, the little fellow from Glasgow. 'Not too bad, Robbie. Bit reluctant, as usual. But it'll pass off once we hit Sydney.' 'You can say that again, mate!' A thought struck me. 'You or your mate seen any rats so far this trip?' 'Yes. There was one of the brutes in the cabin last night, wasn't there Bill ?' 'Yeah. I heaved my boot at him. Big, black bugger. He ducked behind a stanchion and that's the last I saw of him.' It was time to go below and, still yawning, I followed them down. An hour later, I managed to slip along to the stokehold for a yarn with Robbie and Bill. Wilson was on duty in the engine-room. He nodded to me as I came down the ladder. 'How's your Scouse cobber making out?' His interest surprised me but I tried not to show it. 'He's all right. Bit nervy, but he's settling down. Someone reckoned he was torpedoed twice during the war. Why?' 'Oh nothing. McDermott was wondering about him, that's all.' McDermott was the engineer on Johnson's watch and it came to me that he must have seen Scouse at work with his pistol. TB have to warn him to be more careful,' I told myself. Bill and Robbie were having a breather under the vent. 'Funny you should be asking about rats,' Robbie greeted me. 'Look there!' In the shadows above the bilges three of the brutes were frisking. I picked up a piece of dunnage and threw it. There was a scatter, but in a few moments, first their heads, then their lean bodies came up again over the grating. 'Can you beat that!' Robbie was staring at them, flabbergasted. 'A man wants a pea-rifle down here.' He picked up a rake and sent it clattering over the plates, but once they hid below the grating there was no way of getting at them. We began to talk about Sydney. About the pubs and the girls we knew. We forgot the old Kaitiki and her rats and said what we'd do in King's Cross on our nights ashore. Robbie and Bill kept a close watch on their fires so that when Wilson looked in, all was well. The talk came around to ships we had known and at last to the Kaitiki and her rats, but there was work waiting for me upstairs and I had to go. As I went about my job, I kept my eyes open for rats and counted eight in various places before my watch was done. When Slim came down to relieve me I suggested he keep his own tally and pass it on to Scouse when they changed over. When I opened the cabin door I was glad to see Scouse in his bunk with his face turned to the bulkhead. 'Do him the world of good. It would be no joke if he cracked up now and Slim and I had to split his watch .... ' After breakfast, I did some washing and sat on the after deck 114 while it dried. The Peggy came up to hang out some dish-rags. He was a skinny, long-faced fellow from Manchester. 'You having any trouble with the rats, Peggy?' He looked at me knowingly. 'Cook found four dead in the galley this morning. Reckoned they had been poisoned. Seems the bloody old ship's alive with them. There must be hundreds. Nothing you can do about it, though. You'd never get rid of all of them in a year at sea. All we can do is hope some of them go ashore in Sydney.' I told him I had seen big droppings on top of the food locker. 'Don't worry, all the stores are locked away inside now. I don't like my grub gnawed by those brutes any more than you do.' I was glad to hear it and to know the cook was awake to the rats. A man rests easier in his mind when he knows his food is clean. There was not another ship in sight in the whole Tasman. As far as you could see every way there was only the grey-green sea ruffled by the Westerly, and astern of us, a couple of albatrosses swinging and soaring. I found myself thinking about Johnson, wondering whether his sleep had done him any good. Or was he, at that very moment, taking a swig of something to steady himself for his next stint? I looked up and there he was leaning against the rail only a few feet away. 'How's it now, Scouse?' 'Not so dusty. Everything all right below?' I glanced around to see no one was near. The Peggy had gone. 'All except the rats. We were right. The old ship's lousy with them!' I told him of my talk with Slim and about the idea of keeping tallies. He looked at me in a pleased way, the beginnings of a smile on his face. 'Now you got the right idea, Jack. There's only one way to handle these landlords, and that's to organize. We learned that when we were nippers. Now if we all had one of these popguns' (patting his pocket) 'and one or two packets of poison bait, we would soon show them who was boss.' 'Give us a look at that pistol of yours, will you?' He handed it over. It had a nice, solid feel in your hand. 'Can you get this make in Sydney?' 'I think so.' 'Be kind of handy against the rats. And a man could always have a bit of target practice on deck when he felt like it.' He screwed up his eyes and gave me a confiding nudge. 'You II5 got the right idea, Jack. The rat is man's worst enemy. We should never let him get the upper hand, or it's the end of us.' 'Here we go again,' I said to myself. 'He's got a kink about them and a man is a fool to egg him on.' Just then there was a shout from down near the galley and a clang like the sound of a dixie hitting the deck. As Scouse and I turned our heads, a rat streaked around the corner of the deck- house. The instant he saw us he stopped, darting his head from side to side to find a way of escape. It was the first time I had seen one like that, face to face, in broad daylight. I was too surprised, too taken up with the sight of his sharp head, the quick movements of his body, to ao anything. There was a short 'snap' like one of these target guns at a fun fair, and Mr Rat was kicking in the scuppers. 'Good shot, Scouse ! ' He didn't seem to hear me, but carefully reloaded and stood looking down at the rat. At that moment, the cook came around the corner with a poker in his hand. 'Well f .. k me!' We lifted the rat on the poker and dropped him over the stern. The birds came wheeling in, one behind the other, but even they seemed to lose interest when they saw what had made the splash. The cook was handling the pistol, examining it with interest. 'I could do with one of those in the galley. There's more rats in this ruddy old tub than I've seen in all my years at sea.' 'There's another customer, Scouse,' I said, when the cook had gone. He nodded vaguely, but went on staring out over the stern, his elbows on the rail. The birds had resumed their monotonous soaring. The Tasman was the same, monotonous grey-green, flecked with white. The Kaitiki, on her second day out from Wellington bound for Sydney, kept her even course. I was in the same place on the after deck two days later, watching my dhobie flapping in the Westerly and daydreaming about my girl in Sydney when Johnson showed up again. Now that the whole ship knew about the rats, he seemed easier in his mind and was getting his five or six hours sleep every morning, although he still spent his evenings playing cards in the mess. 'Don't tell me you're hoping to knock over another one up here?' He spat over the rail and looked away into our wake. The birds had gone and now there were only sea and sky. II6 'No. I came along here to forget about them for a while. Looking forward to a pint of that Aussie piss, though.' He ran his tongue over his lips. 'I reckon we all are. They say we'll be in tomorrow night, all being well.' He grew silent, staring down at the sea. In half an hour he would have to go below to eat his chow and begin another watch. With- out shifting my position, I studied him carefully through half- closed eyes. He was still in his twenties, yet there was a pinched look to his face, a weediness in his frame, that I had often noticed in his fellow-countrymen from the big cities. The kind of look a kid gets when he never eats enough of the right food and which seems to stay with him all his life. 'Funny the way a man drags his childhood with him, one way or another, wherever he goes,' I reflected. 'If it's not in the cut of him, the way he carries himself, it's in the way he talks.' It wasn't so bad for a seaman. You get all sorts at sea, and, thank goodness, a man's background means nothing. It's how he does his jo]?, how he stands up to the life that matter. And when he's been at the game a few years, and knocked around all over the place, he picks up all kinds of strange accents, little tricks of speech, and it's hard to say where he's from. Johnson seemed to get tired of standing at the rail, staring at nothing. He turned and sat on the deck beside me, his back against the bulkhead. 'Wonder how many Slim got this time?' 'Lucky if he gets any the way he blazes away. He's got no eye.' Scouse had taken to sharing his pistol with Slim and me so there was an armed patrol down below twenty-four hours a day, you might say. We all agreed that whoever killed the most rats by the time we reached Sydney would be shouted a case of beer by the other two. 'We'll be a floating armoury if all those others buy pistols in Sydney the way they said.' Johnson sniffed, and spat: 'It's not the answer, you know. It's only a way of self-protection, as you might say. To clean them out of this ship you would need to get at their hiding places. There's only one way to do that. . . . ' 'Fumigation?' 'That's it mate.' 'Still, it gives us something to think about, picking the odd one off. Think they'll leave us in Sydney the way the Peggy reckons they will?' II7 He snorted. 'What does he know about it. He doesn't even know a Norwegian rat from a ship's rat!' There was so much scorn in his voice that I turned to look at him. He stared back at me. 'I tell you our rats are not Sydney rats.' He stopped short as though he wanted to say more but didn't know how. It came to me all at once that he had purposely sought me out to unburden himself of something disagreeable. 'You wouldn't have a rat-catcher in your family by any chance, would you Scouse?' It was all he needed. 'Look here! Do you see this?' He leaned towards me, his fingers touching the part of his cheek where the skin was puckered into a small white scar. 'Do you know what that is?' 'Somewhere you hurt yourself when you were a kid?' 'Rat-bite!' He almost yelled it in my face. 'Happened when was asleep in my cot.' He gave a funny laugh and looked quickly around to make sure we were alone. 'Seems funny to you, I suppose. But it was something we grew up with where I came from.' There was nothing I could say so I kept quiet and waited for him to go on. 'It was nothing unusual in our neighbourhood. One kid lost half an ear. When you lived in a tenement area like ours you heard of plenty of cases like mine. Sometimes it got a few lines in the papers and I suppose the old dears who lived on the good side of town said "Tch! Tch! But what can you expect when they live in such awful conditions?"' 'What part did you come from, Scouse ?' He told me. 'I know that area. Near the docks. Got it bad during the bombing. Very little of it left now, is there?' For the first time since I had met him, he really smiled. That's right! Best thing that ever happened to it. They say the war did no one any good, but wiping out all those tenements was a wonderful thing. The only trouble was there were people in a lot of them at the time. . .. ' 'Some of your own?' 'My mother and kid sister. There were lots worse off, though. In some of them there were whole families wiped out.' 'I suppose it's all rebuilt now?' 'Most of it. Big blocks of flats with playing areas in between. Best thing that ever happened to that part of town. I went for a walk through there a couple of years ago when we were in the II8 Mersey. Did me good just to hear the din the kids were making. But when you've had a thing like that happen to you, it sort of sticks in the back of your mind. When you've woken up and felt something sitting beside your face in the stinking dark, ... felt its whiskers brush your cheek, and the teeth . . . ! ' His voice started climbing up and his eyes stared like those of a kid, scared of the dark. 'Take it easy, Scouse. Forget it.' I put on a flat, casual voice, but I couldn't help thinking 'Poor bastard! How a man takes his easy, New Zealand background for granted.' He quietened down and went on in his usual voice. 'All my schoolmates went to sea as soon as they were old enough-and some before-except the ones who got it in the air raids, of course. I had my first trip early in the war and I've been going to sea ever since. But I'd have thought twice about signing on here if I'd known.' 'If you'd known we had so many landlords?' 'You said it!' 'Where did you ever dream up that name for them?' I wanted to ease him out of his troubles. Keep him talking till he was clear of them. He glared at me, and this time there was no fear in his eyes; only the mean look of someone who has suffered and not forgotten. 'Did you ever see a scabby landlord creep down a street between rows of tenements on rent day, and half the people not knowing where the next meal was coming from-never mind his lousy rent?' 'Can't say I have.' ' ... With his rent bag in his hand and a tight grip on his stick for fear someone might waylay him?' 'That sounds more like a debt-collector to me. Surely the landlord himself wouldn't have dared to show his face in a neighbourhood like yours?' 'Maybe you're right. But the rat who collected our rent was always the landlord to us. He battened on us like those others in the walls and cupboards and there was nothing we could do about it! 'One way and another, the rats had charge of our lives, just as they have charge of this ship,' he went on. 'As I said before, it's something we grew up with. For us, a rat was always a landlord, and a landlord always a rat. Something I didn't know then and found out only afterwards was that some of the worst places were owned by the Church of England.'

Il9 I felt I knew Johnson better after this. The next time the Peggy made some sly remark about my rat-happy cabin mate, I told him it was a pity he wasn't more down on them himself. A couple of times, some of us found rat-dirts on the messroom table, and the Peggy came in for some rough talk for his slovenly ways. The rats were getting on all our nerves, and it galled me to see him with his fag stuck on his lip and his greasy cloth always on his shoulder, poking fun at Johnson for something he couldn't help. And in spite of all the traps, and old sailors' tricks we got up to to get rid of the rats, Johnson killed more with his pistol and packets of poison than anyone else. Although many more must have crawled away to their hiding places to die, we picked up fifteen poisoned ones in the alleys and in odd places before we got to Sydney. And when it came to knocking them over down below, Slim and I together shot barely half the number the Scouse did. We had the beer sent down to the ship for him as soon as we docked, and I carried it into the cabin myself, and dumped it on his bunk. Naturally, he wanted us all to have a drink with him before we went ashore, but I was keen to see my girl, so didn't wait for the others. Next day, Scouse was unable to turn to, so Slim and I took care of what there was to do, which wasn't much. He was better again the day after, and went ashore a couple of times with us in the evenings before we sailed. While they were unloading us, the Sydney wharfies found several dead rats among the cargo. There was talk of a stoppage because of the health risk, but it all blew over, for some reason. The Peggy and some of the others reckoned the rats would leave us before we sailed from Sydney, but the Scouse only shook his head at me whenever the subject cropped up. 'I keep telling you they're not Sydney rats.... ' They were still With us when we cast off and went out under the bridge, but at the time, I wasn't caring greatly. After the all too short reunion with my girl, my thoughts began to dwell, not for the first time, on the idea of a shore job. Several of the crew, including the cook, had bought air guns of one sort or another, so it seemed that our landlords were in for a lively time. But, scarcely a rat showed his head on the run up the coast. We struck Northerlies and it was dark by the time we tied up. New- castle is a town which has never appealed to me much, and after Sydney, I was looking forward to a few quiet nights anyway. John- son said he was going to look up some girl he had known when he was on the phosphate run a year or so before. He spruced himself 120 up and put on his best gear and seemed very cheerful as he waited to go ashore. 'Take it easy. Mind how you go!' I threw after him as he went out of the cabin. Two minutes later, he burst in again. 'Hey, Jack! For Christ's sake come and see this!' I got off my bunk and followed him up to the after deck. Some- thing flitted across the deck ahead of us as we walked to the rail, and Johnson aimed a kick at it but missed in the bad light. The way the tide was, our deck was roughly level with the quay. As I stood beside Johnson and followed his pointing finger, I saw that our rats were going ashore. There seemed to be no one on gangway watch, and they were scurrying down in twos and threes and melting into the shadows of the wharf buildings. 'Can you beat that!' It was the first time I had seen anything like it. There must have been scores, hundreds of them. Johnson made a sound beside me. It was half sob, half exultant laugh. 'Go, you stinking bastards! Back to where you belong!' 'You were right, after all,' I said. 'They seem to know when they are home.' The second officer and one of the engineers came out of their quarters amidships. They stepped onto the gangway, then froze in their tracks. At the same moment, a group of seamen went past us along the deck, cracking jokes, and stopped at the head of the gangway. Johnson was beside himself. I thought he would have choked with laughter as we heard the second mate's curses and saw the men dancing and skipping down the gangway. 'Make way for your betters!' he hailed them through cupped hands. 'All ashore that's going ashore!' 'Should be someone on gangway duty,' I said, half to myself. Johnson made an abrupt movement with his head. 'Let them go! What's the good of stopping them? Besides, a man at the top of the plank wouldn't hold them back.' 'Maybe you're right.' In any case, it seemed a good way of getting rid of them. They had got on all our nerves, become our number one worry. There had even been talk of holding a union meeting to deal with them. In a few more minutes, they all seemed to have gone. As John- san and I walked to the gangway, there wasn't a rat to be seen, on deck or along the quay. He hesitated a moment before going down: 'They're gone, Jack. The brutes have left us.' 'Off with you Scouse. See you tomorrow.' I was dog-tired and wasted no time getting back to my bunk. I2I There was no sign of Johnson all next day. 'Must have picked up with his doxy again all right,' the Peggy gave out at midday. The following day, there was still no sign of him. He was clearly adrift, and that meant trouble with the skipper and loss of pay when he got back-if he got back. 'Proper "one-way-Charlie" if you ask me,' sneered the Peggy. 'He just can't face the trip back with the rats, so he's jumped.' 'You forget, we're shot of them,' one of the down-below gang pointed out. But I was beginning to think the Peggy was right. 'With his background, this trip has been too much for him,' I thought. 'He's had a night on that cheap Aussie brandy, woken up with his nerves in pieces, and decided to let the old Kaitiki sail without him.' Of course we all guessed there was a woman in it somewhere. A man doesn't leave all his belongings and a fortnight's pay for nothing at all, no matter what the Peggy might say. That afternoon, a gang of us were repairing the condenser when Wilson asked if I knew anything about Johnson. 'He'll be back,' I said. 'All his gear's still in the cabin.' 'He'd better be ! Deserters get a rough time here, they tell me. Did he know when we were sailing?' I said yes, and hoped for Johnson's sake he did know and would rejoin us in time. We finished loading a couple of days later and were due to sail at 6 in the evening. With not having gone ashore, and with the overtime we had worked on engine-room repairs, Newcastle had saved me money, and I felt sorry for Scouse when he came alongside in a taxi in the late afternoon. He had only enough left to pay the driver and looked very much the worse for wear but he had the sense to see the engineer and report straight to the captain. He was sound asleep, still in his shore-going clothes when I stuck my head around the cabin door at 5.30, but he wasn't due on again till midnight, so I left him. By 5·45· some spares and stores the engineer had ordered still hadn't arrived, so our sailing time was pushed ahead to 7 p.m. By 6.45, they were still nowhere in sight, so the figures on the notice-board were again changed and we were set to leave New- castle at 8 p.m. The stores came down to the ship just before 7 and were stowed in a few minutes. At 7.30, I came up for a breath of air and a smoke. There was hardly anyone about. One or two port employees along the quay and the boatswain and his gang standing by to cast 122 off. I leaned my elbows on the rail, enjoying the breeze and the feeling you get when you are almost at the end of your watch, with another trip more than half over. Why did I glance towards the shadows of the wharf sheds, those ugly buildings which look the same in every port, as though I expected something to happen? At first they came like small shadows, flickering along the edges of the wharf buildings in ones and twos. But within the space of a few minutes, they swelled into a steady stream which swarmed across the quay and up the gangway. Scores were already in the ship before the Harbour Board men realized what was happening. Even when the boatswain's gang came running, hitting out with their boots and bits of dunnage, the stream kept coming. A few were killed, or pitched overboard, but for all the notice the others took, the men might have been so many bollards in their path. Once on our decks, the rats seemed to split up and go their different ways. As I stood still in the half-dark, watching it all, I could see dozens of them hurrying past me along the edges of the hatch combing to the crew's quarters. No doubt there were other streams heading for the 'midships' section, the engine-room and the holds. By the time the order was given to swing the gangway inboard, there were only stragglers left on the quay. The main body was snug within the old Kaitiki. As I made my way below, everyone was talking about it and several times when I glanced into dark corners, I seemed to see the eyes and sharp head of a skulking rat. When Slim came to take over, I told him what I had seen and when we had cleaned up, Robbie, Bill and I and some others sat in the mess, threshing the thing out. 'Queerest f .. king thing ever I saw!' said the Peggy, lighting one of his endless fags. 'Hundreds and hundreds of them, coming on like an army. What's his nibs going to say when he wakes up?' he finished, looking at me. 'Who? Johnson?' 'What are we all going to say?' It was Robbie. 'A ship with so many rats isn't healthy. Rats carry plague, all kinds of sickness. I say a man's got a right to clean conditions in a ship!' 'If you could have seen them . . .' the Peggy began again, the cigarette bouncing on his lip. I was sure he hadn't seen them. He had been nowhere in sight at the time-unless he had come up to empty a bucket of slops right at the tail end of it all. Most likely, he had heard about it from some of the A.B.s. And then, as we talked, out came the stories. The educated rat Robbie had met when he was taken prisoner by a German raider in the war; the rats somebody else had known who had learned how to break bottles to get at the sauce inside. The worst tale of all was one the Peggy told about rats which had grown fat on human corpses during the bombing. He was just coming to the end of it when there was a noise in the alley-way and Scouse came in. He got himself a mug of tea and sat down on the bench against the bulkhead. I wasn't sure that he had heard, but the Peggy had one of those carrying voices and, in any case, he didn't know Johnson's story. 'I see they're back.' Johnson was glowering at me over the rim of the mug he held cupped in both hands. 'Yes. It happened just before we sailed.' 'You can feel it, can't you .... ' He hunched his shoulders and his eyes flickered around the shadowy places under the deckhead. The Peggy got up quickly and went across to the other mess. Tomkins, one of the firemen on the twelve to four watch, shook his head. 'It's not a fair go. There was one in the cabin just now, tearing into a bunch of bananas my mate was taking home to his girl. A man is liable to wake up and find one of the brutes making a meal off him.' Johnson stared at Tomkins, his fingers tight around the mug. 'He's right, you know. It's happened before.' I expected him to go on and tell his own story, but that was all he said. Robbie joined in again then and the talk came around to what was to be done about the rats. In the end it was decided to call a meeting of the whole crew next day and we trooped off, feeling that at last we had done something sensible. I climbed into my bunk and lay watching the wash of white and green water past our port, feeling the free lift and roll of the old Kaitiki as she headed into the open Tasman. 'Wind's starting to freshen from the North again, eh Scouse ?' He only grunted and tried to steady himself against the locker as he pulled on his overalls. I rolled over and closed my eyes. We were beginning to move about a good deal and I wondered if the weather would delay us. A thought struck me and I turned towards the light again. 'Did you manage to catch up with your sheila when you were in New- castle?' He grinned up at me as he laced his boots. 'Bet your life! That's why I was adrift. It was worth it though.' 'Did he dock you much?' 124 'Couple of days. Nothing to grizzle about. If you could have seen Mary's face when I walked into the shop.... She said she knew I would turn up, one of these days. She had been waiting for me.' 'What, for eighteen months?' 'Yeah. It's not impossible, is it?' He bent his head and cursed as one of his laces broke. 'She must be some girl.' 'As a matter of fact, she is. I'm thinking seriously of getting a shore job and settling in Aussie. It doesn't have to be Newcastle. There are plenty of other places. It's a big country.' 'You're right there. It's a country with a future.' 'It's a wonder you haven't thought of settling there yourself, with your girl in Sydney.' He stood up, knotting his sweat-rag. 'I have.' 'What, and leave the sea?' 'Why not? There are times when it seems like a mug's game. And you bump into some funny customers, one way and another ' 'Like me, Jack?' He flashed me a knowing look, switched off the cabin light, and went out. Johnson was on duty again next day when we had the meeting, but all those not working came along to add their protest. A resolution calling on the company to take measures against the rats as soon as we reached port, was carried unanimously. A cable was drafted, putting the matter before our union executive, and we broke up feeling that we had begun to assert our rights as human beings. There was a bit of a scandal that night when Slim fired at a rat on one of the catwalks and the slug glanced off the plates and hit the engineer in the leg. From then on, the use of any sort of air gun or pistol was forbidden. We could only watch the rats at play, and do nothing. As Johnson put it, the landlords were in full control. For the next couple of days we had stiff Northerlies and Nor'- Easters. Impossible to spend any time on deck so we talked or slept or played cards in the mess. All the rat stories were brought out, polished up, and passed around once more, with some new ones added. One night, a group of us sat in the mess as usual. Johnson came in at about eleven for his mug of coffee and sat down quietly. Someone had just told a hair-raising yarn about a plague of rats on one of the Pacific Islands. Perhaps because he felt outdone, the 125 Peggy lit a new fag and started to tell his famous story of the bombed tenements. ' . . . It was days before they could dig some of them out. And when they got to some they were so badly gnawed they had a devil of a job identifying them. I remember there was one kiddy we found with hardly anything left of her. The worst of it was that some of them were still alive, but trapped like, so they couldn't get away, or fight the brutes off.' 'Jesus!' It came from Johnson. 'Where was that?' The Peggy stared at him impatiently. 'Salditch, on Merseyside.' 'Jesus!' Johnson let out again. 'I thought you were Manchester?' 'So I am. But I was down that way the first part of the war. Demolition. Why? Think it's a cock and bull story?' Scouse didn't answer straight away. He stared at the Peggy a while longer, as though trying to make up his mind about something, then glanced at me and around at the others. 'That kid was my young sister. There were more rats in those tenements than human beings and they lived better.' The Peggy's mouth had fallen open. The fag hung, forgotten, on his lip. 'Well, f .. k me!' 'I was at sea on my second trip at the time,' Johnson went on quietly, turning to him again. 'Although I heard all about it when we got home... .' As soon as we tied up in Wellington, our delegate saw the agent and told him the state of the ship and the crew's feelings. The company said they would look into it at the first opportunity and, that afternoon, one of their men came down to have a look. He listened gravely to the stories of those who had seen the rats, made a few notes, did a quick tour of the ship, then went away saying he would send down some traps and poison. When he had gone, a crowd of us held another meeting. This time Scouse was present and when he got up to speak we all listened as though he were an elder statesman. Next morning, the secretary of our union came down to the ship with men from the Health Department and the Marine Office. After a thorough inspection of the Kaitiki, it was decided that as soon as our cargo was cleared, the whole ship would be sealed and fumigated. The company was not at all pleased. Their schedule was upset and it meant that they either paid us for standing by while the snip was being cleaned, or got rid of us and signed on a new crew as 126 soon as she was ready for sea again. The newspapers wrote about 'unnecessary stoppages', 'another shipping hold-up', and threw out dark hints about 'agitators'. The company decided to keep us on, though anyone who wished could pay off. That afternoon, I went ashore with Johnson and Slim Young. 'Been a funny trip, really, hasn't it?' Slim put down his glass thoughtfully and looked at us. 'I bet old Anders hopped when he copped that slug! ' 'Telling me! One of the old company men too. Been with them for years. The kind who would like to pass a law protecting all rats from cruel matelots.' We all grinned. 'You going to stay on, Scouse?' Johnson emptied his beer, glanced down at his feet, and across at me before he answered. 'Can't say for sure. In a way I wouldn't mind another trip around this coast, then over to Aussie and back. It all depends. How about you?' 'I don't know. I promised myself in Sydney that this would be my last, but she's not a bad old ship. Reckon I'll go over as a passenger after this next trip though.' Scouse's face lit up: 'Imagine sailing as a passenger! Nothing flash, I mean. But just so a man could soak up all the sun he wanted .... ' 'Don't you believe it! You'd die of boredom.' 'Oh, I don't know, Slim. There's always the bar. Besides, a man's got a chance of meeting people when he's a passenger.' Well, I'm only speaking from my own experience. Some of us went over a couple of years ago to pick up one of those new freighters. The Waikamka it was. It was one of the dullest trips I've ever had. A man just didn't know what to do with himself. The bar's all very well. But a man begins to drink as much as he does ashore.' Scouse and I exchanged looks. 'A man can't spend his whole life at sea though Slim.' 'Why not? There are worse ways of spending it. And there are worse ships than the old Kaitiki. They'll get rid of the rats with their poison gas, you see. Then everyone will forget about this trip and the old Kaitiki will carry on till she goes for her survey. Then the Greeks will buy her and squeeze a few more years out of her.' 'Maybe you're right, Slim. See you later anyway. And watch out that Maori girl doesn't make a landlubber out of you!' 127 He left us, and Johnson and I stayed at the bar, talking and drink- ing beer until closing time. As soon as our hatches were empty, we were all accommodated ashore at company expense and the ship was sealed. When the gas had cleared and hatches, vents, cabins, lockers, storerooms, bilges, were opened, there were corpses everywhere. There were rats of all shapes and sizes, and for a few days, the papers made the most of it. We were 'The Pied Pipers of the Tasman', 'A Floating Hamelin' and so on. There were so many dead rats that we were delayed two extra days getting rid of them and no one was allowed on again until the health authorities were sure she was dear of corpses. Slim seemed to have gone adrift, but Scouse and I and the Peggy came down every day to watch the work. When the time came to carry our gear out of the hotel and up the gangway once more, Johnson seemed a new man. After living ashore, it was a bit of a blow to come back to the firemen's mess and the Peggy with his fag and his grey sandshoes. But although we were the same crew-except for Robbie's mate, Bill, who had got into a brawl ashore-a change seemed to have come over us. Now that we were rid of the rats, the old Kaitiki became a happy ship and she stayed that way for as long as I knew her. During the next trip, the Peggy smartened up a lot. He 'soogied' all the paintwork in the messes and washrooms and in the alley- ways and repainted it all himself. He got the carpenter to plug all the old rat-holes under the deckhead and around the lockers and pestered the steward until we got new cutlery and plates. When I left the Kaitiki six months later, Scouse, Robbie, the Peggy and some of the others were still with her. The last time I heard of Johnson he was sailing out of Sydney on a coaster which traded up as far as Queensland. I often wonder if he married the Newcastle girl, and whether he taught his kids to hate rats and told them how he got the mark on his cheek. It is a long while now since there was that piece in the paper about the Kaitiki's being sold and broken up for scrap. But I still think sometimes of Johnson from Liverpoo·l who made us see the danger of rats until you get together and wipe them out, once and for all.

I28 32i:-X23ii1S. Self Portrait. Oil, 1961.

PAINTINGS BY PAM COTTON 39!-x 22t ins.

Weary Man. Oil, 1962. 48 x 24t ins.

Kneeling Man. Oil, 1961. 36 x 22t ins.

Self Portrait. Oil, 1962. RA YMOND WARD A Privilege

THis man conjures me: to be old Is not easy. Although he is Quite free to let appearance go, Having no company or wife To be a credit to, he feels He must still put on some show of Interest in calendars and clocks. People look at him-he's alive, So he must dress respectably; When necessary, dam his socks. Even the wrinkles in his shoes, I notice, have just been polished And the wings of his shirt collar Trussed tightly with a safety pin. His chin has survived the closest shave I think I've ever seen. There's not A speck of dandruff on his lapels, And where he sits bolt upright in The trolleybus, faint smells only Of soap and chemicals mingle.

It is not easy to be old, Not to offend these harassed sons And daughters with his privilege- A privilege he can seldom share....

Towards a sunlit playground fringed With rustling trees, he turns his eyes- Yes'-almost furtively, as if His lonely pleasure in such things As these were a kind of stealing. Had I the confidence I would Speak to him. Although it might sound Presumptuous, I would like to say : 'Old man, I know that you are tired And lonely and afraid to die; If you thought my silence guilty 129 You were not wrong: it's not easy To feign indifference when young. Perhaps if we could find some way To begin,-your privilege would Seem less lonely. And then, old man, Like me, you might not wish to die.'

Wild Narcissi I

I IN their earliest years they were magic To the ones who had spawned, They smiled from their prams like tomorrow, They transfigured the ground. If the heart of the town had been empty, For a time it was filled: The loveless put on weight There was so much to eat! A cure for old age had been found, No one was scared in the street.

2 At first, fear swells the tongue. They have tried but cannot speak- Especially of love. Sounds come But are clumsy and uncouth. Words, in any case, betray: Better to be dumb As animals are dumb, To howl when hungry And whistle for a woman.

3 Dull blood-donors, some lounge at night Beneath street lamps now : Ugly their sallow, vacant faces- 130 Pressing our bank-notes to their lips- The rest they have spent, They are dressed in it! We have kissed them from head to foot, Our wild narcissi.

II Sarcastic serenades displease the ear They hope to flatter In their search for love; Yet it is laughter they would like to hear On the balcony above, And someone's daughter whom they hope to please- Which one or whose It does not really matter. Certainly they would never choose To sing for the police-- Or for these Elderly intruders looking down So drily at them, as at their own sons, With a paternal frown- These magi from the flourishing firms Of God, Big Money and the State- The inquisitive ones Who wish to understand their future citizens And come to terms with Youth- To lend a helping hand, Who will promise anything-even Love, To those they dominate From the balcony above. m They know what age desires: A nook in history and a bodyguard. But with no past in which to live Or venerability to insure the skin, Their need is simple : to survive. The role they are studying is ours- Watching us, their look grows hard. Such love might lead them to annihilation : Some have been seeking an alternative.

131 I The church they plundered was a wealthy house With its doors left open-nothing more. Mere negligence or possibly a stunt to prove How jolly trusting Christians really are. They could not reconcile the thorn-stuck brows With an ideology that sanctions war Or kneel before that kind of love.

The old man whose head they battered in Was no more innocent than they, But frail, defenceless and alone. With no policeman to uphold the law, His neighbours wept until the street was empty. Their heartfelt pity did not save his skin: He had been defeated in a kind of war Before anyone had time to lift the phone.

They made a game of interrupted love- The line of strategy some leaders think Resourceful when public honour is at stake. Duelling with cars, one called another's bluff And raced him to a suicidal brink : Chance jammed the door. He was the last to move- But pride alone survived his aimless wreck ....

2 We still have much to learn from those Amongst us who act differently, Who find the roles provided all unsuitable And, with no sounder stage on which to play, Devise their own. Truth sometimes grows In them more deeply than in melodramas That convince only the respectable. Let us admit we might have lost our way Less often had we praised their flash guitars.

Listen : although the hour is late And thumbs await the order to destroy, Slow fingers strum beneath the balcony, A voice, half broken, sings, but not of hate; While she, for whom their serenade is meant, 132 Peers at them through the curtain, dares not move- Knowing how much the guilty disapprove Of impulse; yet like to think her innocent.

The Cook, Ruminating

HALOED with down beneath the kitchen lamp My jerseyed silhouette commands the range : I am the Mephistopheles of the frying-pan Tonight. For us I shall brown the sausage And scald with butter the little frozen peas.

Keep the living-room fire well-banked with coal- We don't want the virgin breath of heaven, Night frost, or anything like that in here: We want a really hellish atmosphere Hot enough to roast a hypothetic soul.

Long after school, the kids all safe indoors, The right-of-way sounds quieter than usual- But just as steep and no less treacherous For being glazed with ice. Only a fool Would try to negotiate that Styx tonight!

Crossing the yard just now to tip the peelings In the rubbish bin was far enough; I noticed then how noises carry: as bright An engine's whistle to the ear as any star- My nostrils smoked infernally just breathing.

Through this fatty sizzle I couldn't hear the news- You can tell me later. It'll be the usual stuff- ! think you might as well turn the radio off. And you could make this underworld seem cozier By opening a bottle-no-not the orange-juice ....

133 R. T. R 0 B E R T S 0 N Canadian Poetry and the Regional Anthology

THE Oxford1 and Penguin2 anthologies of Canadian verse exhibit one vital difference : Professor Smith and Mr Gustafson cannot agree on what the term 'Canadian' means for poetry in that country. This difference affects both their choice of poems and their intention in assembling the anthologies. Mr Gustafson's 'Canada' is easily understood by non-Canadians and partakes largely of the general- ities of climate, geography, history and customs on which the Canadian himself must rely in casual exchanges with the natives of other regions. Professor Smith eschews these self-conscious pleas- antries in order to attempt the definition of a deeper meaning of 'Canadian'. In 1942 he congratulated Mr Gustafson on editing an anthology 'that a Canadian may show without mortification to an Englishman or an American who asks "But is there any Canadian poetry?"' Mr Gustafson's present anthology is superior in scope to his earlier one but it does no more than answer the same question affirmatively; for Professor Smith the question is 'Then what is Canadian poetry?' That each editor felt impelled to tackle this latter question in his introduction marks these books as regional anthologies. The regional anthology, of which we have scores in English, is distinguished from other anthologies by its sense of immediate relation to the literature and people of its region; its function is from time to time to exhibit the achievement of the region's writers, to trace the development of the regional literature, and to formulate the regional quality of that literature-the quality which distinguishes it from the literatures of other regions. The content of these two anthologies is Canadian poetry and in order to appreciate it I shall attempt to isolate the Canadian element in the poems; their common form is the regional anthology, and compari-

1 The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse. Edited by A. J. M. Smith. Oxford University Press. 1960. 2 The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse. Edited by Ralph Gustafson. Pen- guin Books. 1958. 134 son of the two offers an opportunity to examine that form for its relevance to us as New Zealanders. Placed side by side, the two anthologies show certain formal differences and similarities, and our consideration of either may illuminate the vital difference between the editors and lead us to the Canadian quality in the poems. The most obvious difference is Professor Smith's inclusion of French Canadian poetry (1858-1957) which occupies one third of his space; he gives eighty-nine poems by twenty-nine poets, of whom the tragic Emile Nelligan is most fully represented, as fully as the major English poets, E. J. Pratt and A. M. Klein. Professor Smith is the first editor to place the twin literatures together in an anthology, but, in spite of his per- suasive and competent running comparison of the two literatures, they remain two literatures. The situation is more than a matter of language. The complexities of geography as well as of history are recognized in a poem omitted from both anthologies, Earle Birney's 'Canada : Case-History' : Parents unmarried and living abroad, relatives keen to bag the estate, schizophrenia not excluded, will he learn to grow up before it's too late? The presence of the French in the Oxford anthology (a formal, not an essential difference between the two books) must encourage more young people in Canada to explore both their literatures. One can be grateful that the question 'What is a Canadian poet?' is absent from both editors' introductions, and that they can agree on fifty-seven poets whose work should be represented in an anthology of Canadian poetry. Their agreement silently testifies to the establishment of a tradition in Canadian literature that is less obvious in Australian and New Zealand literature (the first anthology of Canadian literature was published r864, the first handbook on the subject in 1867). One hundred years of recognition have built up an achievement that makes it easier for the Canadian poet to follow Leon Edel's dictum of more than twenty years ago: 'Let the work seek its own identity and one day it will be discovered to be Canadian as well.' That day is upon us, and it has arrived because the merit of the poetry as poetry now permits the further question of its Canadian quality; the propounding of the question has undoubtedly been influenced by the criticism of Canadians like Northrop Frye, and both editors conclude their introductions by attempting to answer it. Each identifies an essential quality and justifies it by his selection. 135 For Mr Gustafson 'the main objective correlatives and attitudes ... add up into the word, north'; Professor Smith discovers 'a distinctive quality-its eclectic detachment'. Mr Gustafson's is no very novel conclusion and any attempt by a non-Canadian to measure Canadian poetry by it leaves one largely with landscape pieces; as the direct object of the poem landscape is no longer valuable; it must be transmuted in some way and it will be transmuted by Canadians in a Canadian way. That is what Professor Smith means by 'eclectic detachment' but this term, though possibly understood by Canadians, does not help the foreigner to identify the Canadian element in poetry; for 'detachment' read 'isolation' and we are back in New Zealand verse, and possibly not even there. There is no doubt that the necessity of tracing the historical development of a Canadian quality in the chronology of Canadian poetry has made both editors come up with a definition that may be meaningful to Canadians but is ambiguous or useless for the rest of us. In spite of the care with which they discuss that development step by step in their introductions, a satisfactory conclusion about the Canadian-ness of the poems in these two anthologies is likely to elude us unless we try simpler, and possibly more fallible, methods. Reading Professor Smith on 'the modem movement in Canada', we recognize interesting parallels with the development of New Zealand verse in the same period, 1925-1936; bearing this in mind, and the similarity of Mr Curnow's 'island vision' to Pro- fessor Smith's 'detachment', we could work out some correspondence between New Zealand and Canadian qualities in poetry. If we knew the one, we could identify the other; in spite of Mr Curnow's labours l doubt whether that day has yet arrived. But we may be able to see how the Canadian editors came to their conclusion by examining those poems on which they are agreed. Approximately one quarter of the poems in each anthology is present in the other; of the Oxford's two hundred and twenty-five entries (in English) and the Penguin's two hundred and one, fifty- three poems are common to both anthologies. This is too large a number to work with; if we collate the thirty-six poems Mr Gus- tafson includes in both his Penguin collections with these fifty- three, we find only thirteen poems common to all three collections. Of these thirteen five were published in the period 1888-I897 and seven in the period 1930-1942, as far as can be ascertained from Professor Smith's Bibliographical Note. Only one common poem falls between these tWo dusters: John McCrae's 'In Flanders Fields'. The later poems can be regarded as belonging to the transition 136 period between poetry that treats Canadian themes and subjects in obviously Canadian terms (the use of landscape, for example) and that which is determined to speak on Canadian matters in terms other than Canadian. The best examples are Theodore Goodridge Roberts's 'The Blue Heron' and Raymond Knister's 'The Plowman'. One is a nature piece, the other a genre portrait, but each quietly utilizes a characteristic of Canadian poetry-imagery wrought of colour in Roberts's, a response to a meaningful human occasion in Knister-and both are charged with a continental presence that is not kindly to man. In none of the other poems of the later cluster is Canada present in quite this way, but the treatment of Canada in historical terms occurs in several poems which appear in both the Oxford and Pen- guin anthologies. A good example is Marjorie Pickthall's 'Pere Lalement' : the occasion is a past event but the poem rises to it with a sombre intensity that makes E.]. Pratt's similar occasion in Bn?beuf And His Brethren (1940) seem forced. Professor Smith ad- mires Pratt's 'vitality and power' but appreciates him more for the irony which 'gives Pratt's poetry its intellectual tang'. Both editors agree on the twelfth section of his 'novel in verse', and Professor Smith goes to pains to introduce his poetry and to present it at greater length than any other in his collection. Pratt is both the culmination and continuation of the earlier mode of poetry, and his energy and bite can be most moving, especially in passages of Towards The Last Spike, 'a verse panorama of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway'. From time to time his rhetoric palls but the sensation of size and gusto--another form of the continental presence-is so stimulating that one tends to take it for the authentic Canadian accent; but this is the way of Mr Gustafson, rather than that of Professor Smith. The accent must be modified, the subject transmuted as object before the poem can be discovered to be Canadian as well as poetry. This is achieved in the other poems of the later cluster and the struggle to achieve it can be traced in some of the poems present in both anthologies. For instance, Douglas Le Pan's 'Canoe-Trip' (1948) is a quieter rendering of Pratt's response to Canada, this time in geographical rather than historical terms; similar in its quiet tone to the verse of Marjorie Pickthall, Roberts and Knister, it combines the elements of the poems by the two latter poets already noticed-the dramatis per- sonae are Canada and Canadians, and the occasion the search for common identity. P. K. Page's 'The Stenographers' (1946) and James Reaney's 'The Katzenjammer Kids' have the pace of Pratt but their energy depends partly on their detachment from the object; office 137 life and the Sunday funnies are mocked bitterly in one, gently in the other; the irony noted by Professor Smith in Pratt is obvious here, and his final comment on Pratt more truly applicable to the close of these two poems: 'compassion humanizes it and gives it its final calm.' The apparent detachment of Page and Reaney, and the obvious engagement of Pratt, Le Pan, Roberts, Pickthall and Knister show the two stances available to the Canadian, or any poet. Life or Canadian life causes their repulsion and attraction; their poems share an intensity, overt or subdued, that is simply the mark of a good poet. Canadian-ness, if it is to be a unique quality, can be discovered best not in the fact or object of their emotions but in the quality of their expression, particularly their imagery, the true source of poetic energy. The Canadian image begins as colour in lsabella Valancy Crawford's Malco1m's Katie (1884): In this shrill moon the scouts of winter ran From the ice-belted north, and whistling shafts Struck maple and struck sumach-and a blaze Ran swift from leaf to leaf, from bough to bough; Till round the forest flash' d a belt of flame And inward lick'd its tongues of red and gold To the deep, tranced inmost heart of all. After 'The Blue Heron' it has absorbed the primary colours and reaches out for shocking contrasts which activate the verbs and force them to carry the burden of impact, if not of meaning, as a comparison of Roberts's poem with Margaret Avison's 'The Butter. fly' would show. This violence or energy is in full play in such poems as E. W. Mandel's 'The Fire Place' and Malcolm Lowry's 'Lupus in Fabula'-the correct adjective for it is fabulous. The poets whose first impact is stance rather than imagery all share this quality; the compassion that marks Irving Layton's 'The Bull Calf' and is reflected in A. G. Bailey's 'Colonial Set' and, in yet another dimension, in Pratt's 'The Truant' and A. M. Klein's 'The Still Small Voice' is supported by energetic images, especially those created from the details of daily life. The two latter poems make perfectly natural Professor Smith's dedication of his volume to Klein and Pratt 'with homage and with love'; for the perfection of 'The Still Small Voice' it is worth reading the whole volume. The rewards, of course, do not stop there; the final poem, 'A Bewilderment at the Entrance of the Fat Boy into Eden' by Daryl Hine is witty, compassionate and brilliant, a fitting conclusion to the volume in 138 its demonstration of three strands in the warp and woof of Canad- ian poetry: . . . Led by the gentle sessions of his demons, Now in the right and now in the left ear, The fat boy trod ungarlanded in Eden. Perhaps he knew of nowhere else to go. Affairs of the heart, concerns of money, too, Deprived him of all choosing of his route. Dreaming of disaster, he set foot At midnight in the earthly paradise. There is a fourth quality in this verse, a formality of utterance that seems to be truly Canadian. It is present as rhetoric in the poetry of E. J. Pratt and supports the apparently free metres of 'The Diver' by W. W. E. Ross and 'Train Window', by Robert Finch, two of the later cluster of poems with which I began this analysis of the Canadian poem. It is more easily apparent in the other three poems of that group, Leo Kennedy's 'Words For A Resurrection', L. A. Mackay's 'Admonition For Spring', and Pro- fessor Smith's 'The Plot Against Proteus'; this last poem shows how the use of mythic elements has helped the Canadian poet to subdue the overt reference and achieve the ambiguous reference to things Canadian while still making a Canadian poem. It is possible to read the conclusion of A. M. Klein's 'The Still Small Voice' as the cry of the Canadian maker for just that freedom, as it is possible to read R. A. K. Mason's 'Sonnet of Brotherhood' as a specifically New Zealand poem. This freedom to be at once both local and universal in meaning is achieved in part by formality, as in the close of L. A. Mackay's 'Admonition For Spring', and that inclination towards neatness or 'wit' (as one may call it) is a large part of the effect of the satiric poem in Canada. There is much enjoyable satiric verse in Professor Smith's collection, and it is largely ignored by Mr Gustafson; observe the conclusion to F. R. Scott's 'The Canadian Authors Meet' : 0 Canada, 0 Canada, Oh can A day go by without new authors springing To paint the native maple, and to plan More ways to set the selfsame welkin ringing? This is obviously not to Mr Gustafson's taste. Generally, this 'wit' is important in the work of such well-tempered ironists as Anne Wilkinson and Jay Macpherson, as in the former's fable on an epigraph extracted from Amos Tutuola and in the latter's 'The 139 Boatman'; it is a vital element in the sequences of E. W. Mandel ('Minotaur Poems') and James Reaney (A Suit of Nettles), which are as 'fabulous' as Mr Hine's work. These seem to exist at a great distance from Malcolm's Katie but to be equally Canadian; can it be that there is a quality in Canadian speech (possibly the Canadien element) which encourages the wit of this line, as some quality in Canada itself stimulates the imagery of the other? Professor Smith thoroughly appreciates these four qualities- compassion and detachment, wit and imagery-and his apprecia- tion makes the latter part of his volume much superior to Mr Gus- tafson's. If some local relationship of the four, one to another, could have been established, however, we should be almost within grasp of the Canadian poem. Certainly the essential principle offered by Mr Gustafson ('north') and the selection demonstrating it exhibit the dangers of occasional generalization. The crucial difference between the editors would seem to be their awareness of their subject. Mr Gustafson' s essential Canadian poet would appear to be E. ]. Pratt-'Canada is everywhere in him'-and he dates the emergence of what he considers to be Canadian poetry from Pratt's 1923 volume of Newfoundland Poems: 'Suddenly, someone was writing: A bull moose that had died from gas While eating toadstools near Ungava.' This possibly qualifies as compassionate, but one suspects that Mr Gustafson is unaware of the qualities we have drawn largely from the poems on which he agrees with Professor Smith; it is 'Ungava' that attracts Mr Gustafson. There is nothing here of the line of imagery enunciated by Miss Crawford, and the novelty of Pratt cannot be his wit or irony, for the source of these qualities is Will- iam Henry Drummond's dialect narrative 'The Wreck of the ]ulie Plante' (1897) and Alexander McLachlan's 'We Live in a Rickety House' (1861). Neither the experience and taste of the editors, nor the comparative analysis of their poems-in-common, can lead us to a sure definition of the Canadian poem, but the search has helped us to understand some of the characteristics of Canadian poetry, and this is precisely the purpose of the regional anthology. Similarly, the lack of agreement between the editors except in two short periods of Canadian verse can be regarded not so much as a difference in taste, though that certainly exists, as an indication that the regional anthology has a function to perform. In the work of the thirty common poets as old as or younger than Mr 140 Gustafson the Oxford and Penguin editors find only nineteen of their fifty-three common poems, and their divergence is marked from the work of the mid-forties to the end of the fifties. The agreement on certain poems has inclined us to regard them as a basis for establishing the Canadian poem. The disagreement about work before 1887 and after 1945 reflects different ideas about the development of Canadian poetry, and about what constitutes poetry in Canada at present; these are related problems and properly the business of the regional anthology. In both anthologies it is possible to distinguish in the chrono- logical ordering of the work three developing uses of the term Canada: Canadian as locale, Canadian as spirit, Canadian as aesthetic. The two passages of agreement between the editors occur as the use of the dominant term of the period develops into its successor; their disagreement on the earliest, the descriptive, phase is probably the result of works that seem more typical than excellent -neither of them can dodge extracts from The Rising Village, Saul, The St. Lawrence And The Sayuenay, Tecumseh and Malcolm's Katie-but the first serious disagreement occurs over Duncan Camp- bell Scott, though they are similarly at odds over Archibald Lamp- man and Sir Charles G. D. Roberts. If Professor Smith's view that Scott 'is both traditional and original' is right (and he argues it well in his article on Scott in Canadian Literature, Vol. I, No. I, 1959) then Mr Gustafson's comment that Scott 'is a technician of refine- ment' fails to do the poet justice in the development of Canadian poetry, and reveals what most of the disagreement corroborates, that Professor Smith belongs to the third stage of Canadian poetry, Mr Gustafson to the second. Although both were involved in the development of the third stage Professor Smith's volume contains more poems Canadian in the aesthetic sense, Mr Gustafson's more in the more obvious national sense. Professor Smith and Mr Gustafson, then, exhibit in their anthologies the critical debate that has raged in Canada in the last ten to fifteen years on the merits of what is called 'cosmopolitan' and 'national' verse. For all the advance noted by Professor Smith's review of Mr Gustafson's 1942 Penguin, the latter has moved little if at all beyond that view of Canadian poetry; Professor Smith's selection of the latest verse, while obviously satisfying his personal taste for what may roughly be called mythic vision, is a better selection of good poetry than Mr Gustafson's, and the cause of this divergence may be found in their views on Canadian poetry. This divergence begins in their introductions : for Mr Gustafson Canadian poetry is 'a poetry of distinction' and Canadian poets 'are I4I writing as well as any of their contemporaries in England and the United States'. When he attacks 'the prejudice ... that Canadian poetry is a feeble and pale reflection of the British poetic scene, that it is, in its later manifestation, obedient to American poetic activity' he reveals a provincial frame of mind. Professor Smith opens much more cautiously: 'Canadian poetry is a branch of Eng- lish or French poetry and to some extent also, particularly in the work of contemporary writers, of American poetry.' He goes on to define three periods of Canadian poetry : 'the colonial, the national, and the cosmopolitan' (corresponding to the three uses of the term Canadian suggested above). It is the implications of the last term that Mr Gustafson ignores, which throws him back into the arms of Lorne Pierce's Introduction to Canadian Poetry in Eny- Iish, a respected Ryerson Press anthology begun by Bliss Carman forty years ago and last revised in 1954; Lorne Pierce offers 'four primary modes of literary writing ... the descriptive, the lyric, the narrative, and the dramatic' and he deplores 'the utterly mistaken idea, particularly emphasised by Smith, that poetry speaks the language of the intellect.' What separates these two critical views is a change in literary taste and practice which has rescued Canadian poetry, as it has rescued all the poetries in English, from simple nationalism to some sense of internationalism; the change in poetry in English from the end of the first world war corresponds, as it should, to a change in the political relationship of those nations which use English as an official language. As we have a Commonwealth of Nations so we have a common wealth of poetry; this is not to abrogate the regional poetries but to relate them. The pressure to relate the regional to whatever can be established as supra-regional, without destroy- ing the values of either, is reflected in the true regional anthology which rises to this task. Professor Smith recognizes this and Mr Gustafson doesn't; the former is supported in his view by his long and arduous scholarship in Canadian literature, and by what is coming to be regarded as the Toronto school of criticism, headed by Northrop Frye. The Oxford Book. of Canadia11 Verse is the natural culmination of Professor Smith's labours, and his view of poetry, I suggest, has been formed by his study of Canadian poetry; this is a regional situation, reaching the universal through the local, and that it is to some extent a partial view, as all regional views must be, is indicated by his address to the Canadian Writers' Conference in 1955, which he concluded with the same passage as ends his introduction to the Oxford volume. In the course of the address he defines 142 poetry : 'Poetry is language and feeling purified of the superficial .... It is serious but not solemn; witty or humorous, but not good- humoured; sharp, not vague; imaginative rather than fanciful; con- densed, concentrated, and savage rather than diffuse and genial.' Much of this sounds comfortably familiar, but it excludes a great deal of our common wealth of poetry in English. Why can't poetry be solemn or good-humoured, vague or fanciful, diffuse and genial? The answer is that for us now it can't be-we, too, are part of the change in taste. And being caught in our own time makes the task of reading our regional past no easier. How much of Professor Smith's Canadian poetry falls into the alternatives he excludes? Being a regional anthology, his selection is committed to showing a straight line of development, from Goldsmith to Hine, and the demands of his chronology make him very wary of openly defining the Canadian poem. Mr Gustafson, using a more regional notion of his subject, is in an easier position here, though his conclusions are less satisfactory than Professor Smith's attempted relation of the universal and the local; in other words, Professor Smith recognizes a challenge which his regional anthology must accept, Mr Gustafson ignores it. 'The specifics of contemporary Canadian poetry', says the latter, '. . . add up into the word, north', and to reach this definition he uses only two critical terms, 'objective correlative' and 'fingering'; the latter he demonstrates in a comparison of Professor Smith's 'The Lonely Land' (in neither anthology) and a poem of Robinson Jeffers. Professor Smith retains much of the definition he offered the Can- adian Writers' Conference: the Canadian poet exhibits 'the characteristics of modernity in the poetry of Europe and the United States as well as of Canada. But the Canadian poet has one advantage-an advantage that derives from his position of separateness and semi-isolation .... This gives to contemporary Canadian poetry in either language a distinctive quality-its eclectic detachment.' 'Whatever is true vision belongs, here, uniquely to the islands of New Zealand', says Alien Curnow, and one can see that he shares with Professor Smith the idea that the regional anthology's function is to define that vision. The task of the regional anthologist, then, is a very difficult one. Not only is it to record the development of his literature; it is also to reconcile the claims of the contemporary cosmopolitan mode of poetry in English with the solid fact that regional works have a claim on his heart, that for him they are Canada, or New Zealand, or whatever his home region. And he will recognize his complete lack of sympathy for most of the development he records, being I43 himself (as most editors of the Penguin and Oxford series are) a modern poet, the product of a peculiar relationship between the regional and the cosmopolitan. Finally he will know that the regional anthology has a living relationship to the literature of his region; that is to say, it is produced for the region, not for tourists, and this is especially difficult when his anthology is to be published outside the region and its success is to some extent dependent on sales there. However he handles this last problem he cannot ignore that his anthology is an act of criticism of his region's literature. Indeed, it often contains the best criticism of regional literature in its introduction; the regional critic can only support his case with such wide reference that he needs an accompanying anthology to make the points of his introduction. His most pressing problem is the definition of the geographical term not as locale, not as national spirit, but as aesthetic; he must achieve an identification of subject in form so that we can, instructed by him, identify a New Zealand poem (if it exists) as we identify a metaphysical poem. Any complacency in the use of the geographical term as an indication of the nature of the contents of the regional anthology guarantees fatuity. This means that both scholarship and criticism are most finely tested in the handling of regional materials. Where neither are present, as in A. L. McLeod's The Commonwealth Pen (Cornell University Press, 1961), the result is like the baldest and feeblest of surveys of world literature. The critical failings in most of the contributors to that elementary survey are sufficiently obvious but anyone in this country who desires to check that can readily turn to Dr J. C. Reid's exhibition of how to write the worst brief history of New Zealand literature; it is possible that he is not to blame for complete absence of scholarship in the 'Selected Reading List' appended-indeed it is probable that he wasn't, for Dr McLeod exhibits his own erudition in Books Abroad (Autumn, 1961): 'Since Katherine Mansfield, New Zealand writers have eschewed the short story and espoused poetry, only recently showing sophistication and promise in the novel. Maurice Shadbolt suggests a renaissance of the New Zealand short story .. .'; you may write the rest of his review of The New Zealand1ers in the most improbable terms you can command. When the regionalist exhibits scholarship but little critical ability 3 one gets Tradition In Exile , 'a comparative study of social influences on the development of Australian and Canadian poetry in

3 Tradition in Exile. John Pengwerne Matthews. Cheshire (Melbourne) and University of Toronto Press. 1962. 144 the nineteenth century'. Dr Matthews reveals that he prefers the Australian national tradition, or tradition of nationalism, to the Canadian because 'Australian poets writing in the present century have been less influenced by foreign trends than were their Canad- ian contemporaries. Australian poetry did not pass through a phase in imitation of T. S. Eliot, for there were native traditions established that were more influential.' This naive conclusion is all the more curious because the one critical article used by Dr Matthews to define his terms is Professor Smith's 'Colonialism and Nationalism in Canadian Poetry Before Confederation' (1944), to which he refers at least twice as often as his index reveals. Had he pursued the definition of his critical terms he would have consulted the other articles by Professor Smith (listed, for instance, in Klinck and Wat- ters: Canadian Anthology) in which he develops these important concepts. The regional anthologist, then, should be a scholar, a critic, and, if his intention demands it, a writer of regional literature. Given this combination he will produce a living regional anthology which will examine the regional term in the only appropriate way, as a valid critical term. That this is the challenge Mr Curnow saw in compiling his latest anthology of New Zealand verse is best demon- strated by comparing his introduction with a pronouncement he made on the subject of 'insularity' in 1955: the use of this term, he said, 'concerns the limits of taste and judgement which must apply whenever any kind of thematic form is superimposed upon a wide range of literary material. I say "superimposed"; but there is a clear distinction to be drawn between constructions which emerge legitimately or inevitably from the literature itself and constructions like "insularity" which subordinate the original and superior organisation of poems to the occasional purposes of polite entertainment.' That is the situation of the regional anthologist in a nutshell; and, alas, how difficult is the task of achieving that 'clear distinction'! But how necessary! Northrop Frye offers one way of doing it, in his final review of Canadian poetry in the University of Tor- onto Quarterly, July 1960: As Canada is a small country, that fact raises the problem: do you estimate Canadian poets in Canadian proportions or in world proportions? . . . I have for the most part discussed Canadian poets as though no other contemporary poetry were available for Canadian readers. The reviewer is not concerned with the vague relativities of 'greatness', but with the positive merits of 145 what is before him. And every genuine poet is entitled to be read with the maximum sympathy and concentration. When he is, an astonishing amount of imaginative richness may be obtained from him, and without reading into him what is not there. Shakespeare is doubtless an infinitely "greater" poet, but there is a limit to what a limited mind can get out of Shakespeare, and if one continually tries to break through one's limitations in reading one's contemporaries, one may also achieve a clearer vision of greatness .... Then again, poetry is of major importance in the culture, and therefore in the history, of a country, especc ially of a country that is still struggling for articulateness. The appearance of a fine new book of poems in Canada is a historical event, and its readers should be aware that they are participating in history. To develop such awareness it is an advantage to have a relatively limited cultural horizon. Ubi bene, ibi patria: the centre of reality is wherever one happens to be, and its circum- ference is whatever one's imagination can make sense of. These words apply to the situation of literature in English today. We have framed our understanding of English literature upon its history, its development; the number of regional literatures in Eng- lish in the world today offers us an apparently conflicting notion, a horizontal line where we have been used to the vertical. Seriously contemplated these regional literatures offer us another insight into the nature of literature itself: that it will be found somewhere at the centre of all these regional literatures and, as it can only be discovered through any one of them, so it will be determined by all of them. It is this task of discvvery and determination that the regional anthology undertakes. That the success of Professor Smith's volume is only partial is because of the revolutionary concept involved in the regional anthology. That he appreciates the difficulty of compiling the regional anthology is evident in the words with which he closes his review of Mr Gustafson's 1942 Penguin: The ideal anthologist is a paragon of tact and learning. In him an impeccable taste is combined with a completeness and accuracy of information that is colossal. To an understanding of historical development and social upheavals he adds a sensitiveness to the finest nuances of poetic feeling. He is unprejudiced, impersonal, humble, self-confident, catholic, fastidious, original, traditional, adventurous, sympathetic, and ruthless. He has no special axe to grind. He is afraid of mediocrity and the verses of his friends. He does not exist. W. H. 0 LIVER Washed Up on Island Bay

RAPID· and harsh, the language of the waves Swells, breaks, and clamours on the wintry beach; Gulls circle a returning fishing boat; The rock pools fill and pour. Rapid and harsh The image and the word of land and sea.

The sea's recurrent syllables explode, Voice upon voice, beyond all common tongue. The gulls' calligraphy, their dip and cry Etched on the ear and eye, is rubbed away. The pauas grope across the rock pool floor.

The headlands hunch, the ragged island tears Waves into foam, rapid and harsh the wind Urges the swell, driftwood and seaweed spin; The gulls inspect a face-down cruciform Waterlogged hulk. Their cries impact and die.

Dissect the image and divide the word: The image shatters and the meaning fails. The crash and cry, the curve of wave and wing, Intact yield up no parallel of sense, Broken dissolve, obscure particulars.

147 BILL PEARSON

New Zealand Since the War

7· THE MAORI PEOPLE

THE MOST striking feature of the Maori situation seventeen years after the end of the war is the continued existence, within the welfare state, of rural enclaves of material poverty and, in city and country, spiritual insecurity. It is from these that the current vexed problems derive, determined as they are by acts of history and complicated by European preconceptions of desirable norms of behaviour and the terms of racial co-existence.1 Some bald statistics will illustrate my claim. In 1956 the average income for a Maori head of a household was nearly £2oo less than for a non-Maori: the position is probably no different today. The money has to go further: in a sample of 24 forestry-town house- holds Jane Ritchie found (in 1956) a median annual income of £85 per head; £41 in one household.2 The 1956 census showed that 8 in 100 Maori males earned £9oo+ (17 non-Maoris), that 41 in 100 earned less than £500 (I? non-Maoris). This is not greatly affected by the higher proportion of Maori youths, since there are comparatively few Maoris in low-paid apprenticeships. In 1939 the Under-Secretary for Native Affairs could say that at

1 For background to this article I am indebted to three or four dozen papers and articles too numerous to name, and to conversation with Bruce Biggs, Pat Hohepa, Hugh Kawharu, B. W. Kernot, Joan Metge, Erik Schwimmer and Matiu te Hau. Dr Mertge allowed me to read the finished chapters of a work in progress. I am also indebted to I. L. G. Sutherland's assessment of the Maori situation in 1951, published in the Journal of the Polynesian Society, 1952; to the 'Rakau Studies' by Victoria University of Wellington psychologists, and to David P. Ausubel's Maori Youth. My main claim to be able to present as far as possible a Maori point of view is six years' close association with Maori students, and my attendance at the young leaders' conferences organized by the Auckland Council of Adult Education in the Auck- land and Hawkes Bay Provinces since 1959. There was a national conference in Auckland in 1959; regional conferences in 1960 at Turangawaewae marae, Whakatane, Gisborne and Kaitaia; in 1961 at Tauranga-Taupo, Whakarewarewa and Wairoa. I have not seen the reports of similar conferences at Christchurch, Marton and Waitara. I would like also to refer to Leo Fowler's article in the present series, Landfall, March 1962. I have doubled long vowels in Maori words, except those in everyday use in English such as Maori and pakeha, and names of places and persons. 2 Childhood in Rakau. Wellington, 1957, p. 26. 148 least half of the Maori population were inadequately housed, that 'hundreds and hundreds of Maoris are living under appalling conditions'.3 The 1956 census estimated that 30 per cent of Maoris live in 'grossly over-crowded conditions'. In 1936, a third of Maori dwellings consisted of one or two rooms; in 1956, a seventh. One can still say that hundreds and hundreds of Maoris are living under conditions, which, if not so appalling as twenty-three years ago, would appal most pakehas. 40 out of 100 Maori dwellings in 1956 had neither bath nor shower, 48 no piped water, 50 no hot water, 67 no flush toilet, 8o no refrigerator or washing-machine. (The pakeha figures for the last three are 17, 44 and 41.) One may argue that these amenities are not ends in themselves; one must agree that it is undesirable that so many of a minority group should be without what so many of the majority group have. Further, most Maori houses are overcrowded: the average Maori house in 1956 had 3·9 rooms and 5.6 people, the average non-Maori house 4·7 rooms and 3.6 people; 50 per cent more occupants and 17 per cent fewer rooms, and the rooms themselves are smaller than in pakeha houses. It is hardly surprising that most Maori incomes leave little for the maintenance of such houses, let alone (without assistance) the building of new ones. Or that such derelict, overcrowded shacks, with bad sanitation and careless disposal of refuse, should make personal cleanliness difficult and should produce a high incidence of disease and a death-rate much higher in most illnesses than the pakeha. H. G. Turbott's 1935 survey of disease in Waiapu County showed greatly higher death-rates in tuberculosis, respiratory diseases, diarrhoea and enteritis, and typhoid fever: in 1960 medical statisticians could say: 'All the evidence available at the present time points to the fact that no very great improvement has taken place in the' comparative health standards of the Maori as opposed to the European during the course of the intervening quarter- century.'4 Though the crude death-rate of Maoris is slightly lower than for pakehas, when adjustments are made for the different age- structure of the Maori population, the death-rate is roughly twice as high and in the younger age-groups roughly three times as high : and expectation of life for a Maori male almost 12 years less than for a pakeha, and for a female 15 years less. Tuberculosis kills Maori men at 12 times the rate of pakehas, and women 19 times; a Report of Young Maori Conference, Auckland, May 1939, p. 18. 'Dept. ·of Health: Maori-European Standards of Health. Wellington, 1960, p, 4. 149 rheumatic heart disease 5 times; hepatitis 4 times; the Maori death- rate is higher for cancer, measles, hydatids, pneumonia, kidney disease, pregnancy complications, rheumatic fever, as well as for accidents and homicide. The only diseases where Maori mortality is lower are polio and ulcers of the stomach and duodenum. Infant mortality is particularly high. Children under five are particularly susceptible to dysentery, whooping-cough, meningitis, influenza, pneumonia, enteritis and anaemia, and die too frequently from accidents. 40 times as many children die proportionately from heart disease as pakeha children. Apart from the deaths, the sickness rate of the living is too high. Besides the children's diseases already mentioned, children suffer frequently from scabies and impetigo, and from discharging ears which are neglected (because, I am told, the mothers' grapevine has not yet caught up with the possibility of cure by anti-biotics) and result in the high proportion of Maori children in schools for the deaf: a survey of Murupara in January 1962 showed an eighth of the children as deaf. Anaemia is common in older children; and adults, according to Dr Gillon Maaka, suffer from gum and tooth troubles resulting from starchy foods and lack of oral hygiene, obesity, chest trouble, rheumatism, cancer and tuberculosis. Women, according to Dr Rina Moore, develop heart disease and foot trouble, from poor shoes and overweight. In spite of these disabilities, as is well known, the population is increasing and especially in the fertile and potentially fertile age- groups. Between 1936 and 1945, it increased by 21.5 per cent; since the war by 71 per cent, from I00,044 to J7I,523 (as at last Decem- ber). The birth-rate (46.41 per 1000) is almost twice as high as for the pakeha (25), and the rate of natural increase (37·57 per 1000 in 1958) is not only more than twice as high as for the pakeha (16.26) but is apparently higher than that of Western Samoa and has been described by a demographer as not only 'amongst the highest in any country of the world today'5 but probably as high as for any people in any period of history. Borrie projects a population of 31o,ooo within the next twenty years. Of the present population, 57·5 per cent are under 2o, and only 3.6 per cent over 6o. It is these facts which, in conjunction with past acts of policy, have determined a number of current vexed questions: the migration to the towns and cities in search of employment, and the con-

5 W. D. Borrie: 'Some Economic and Social Implications of Maori Popula- tion Growth in New Zealand', Journal of the Polynesian Society, December 1961, p. 410. sequent increase in contact or contiguity with Europeans; fragmentation of land inheritances; a greater effort on the part of government departments to promote what is called 'integration'; the increase in crime; the uncertain future of the Maori language; changes in patterns of leadership; comparatively poor educational achievement and insecurity of employment; a greater testing of our professions of racial goodwill. * * * Taken in isolation, the statistics are disturbing; but they have to be placed in a context of change. Maoris themselves are optimistic about the future and are more willingly emerging from their pre- war withdrawal, voluntary in some areas, geographical in others. It must be admitted that sanitation and housing have improved since the war, that the proportion of one or two-room dwellings is much smaller. If the comparative health of the people hasn't greatly improved, their attitude to it has : among the young, especially in the cities, personal hygiene is a matter of self-respect, and in the country there is not the pre-war distrust of pakeha medi- cines, of district nurses and hospitals. At Kaitaia it was estimated that only about 1 in 20 of the Tai Tokerau peoples would prefer to consult a tohunga for 'Maori sickness'; at Whakatane Dr Maaka thought the few old-time ritualist tohungas among the Tuuhoe and Ngaati-porou were harmless in that they provided psychological satisfactions for patients otherwise incurable. High infant mortality has been shown to be directly related to poor feeding, swampy housing sites, disrepair of houses, poor sanitation, and shortage of living and sleeping accommodation; and a vigorous housing programme would remove some of these causes. But other causes can be remedied only by Maori parents themselves-ignorance and the system of child-rearing that is forced by large families in small houses. Rural Maori mothers are frequently ignorant of hygiene and diet and the need for a regular routine for babies. Unfamiliar with symptoms of children's illnesses, they do not seek medical attention till it is too late; nor do they have peri- odical checkups on their own or their children's health. Except in the Hokianga (as a result of G. M. Smith's work) they do not attend pre-natal clinics-if there are any accessible-and often do not seek the services of the Plunket Society after birth. Branches of the Maori Women's Welfare League (formed in 1951) have attempted some education in health and child-rearing, but it is only the converted who belong to the League, and those who do not resent the League's interference. Several of the young leaders' con- 151 ferences have suggested koreros on health problems at huis; adult education courses in cooking, child care and homecraft; health campaigns organized by the Tribal Committees with the co-operation of the district nurse and the village school. To overcome the shyness of mothers too embarrassed at the condition of their houses to answer the door to the district nurse, it was suggested that Maori girls be enlisted as district nurses and that there be more Maori women doctors. It should of course be admitted that many Maori mothers are more enlightened than this, but it is true of the majority of mothers of the subsistence farming class and the unskilled working class living in the country or in the single-industry towns of South Auck- land. Such mothers are overworked and fatigued. As each new baby arrives, the one just older is consigned to the care of an older sister, and those over four are left to look after themselves. From the time they are confident on their feet, children are kept outside as much as possible, except when called to do jobs, and are forced to become independent of adults at an early age, relying not on their parents but on their siblings and playmates for advice. Moth- ers at Turangawaewae and Whakatane complained that fathers do not take enough part in child-rearing. Pakeha observers like Aus- ubel and the Ritchies find both mother's and father's punishment capricious and aggressive-either a 'growling' or a 'hiding'. At several of the young leaders' conferences there was lack of unanimity and some embarrassment at allegations of parental cruelty and neglect. Generally, delegates resented the charge of cruelty, or conceded it but said it was exceptional and usually the effect of alcohol. There was a more general admission of neglect, with the qualification that it was often unconscious neglect. It was said that parents often feel free to go to cards or to parties when the youngest is four, leaving the children alone in the house; that they do not see the need for a steady routine for the children, or plan their lives around the needs of the children. Only at Kaitaia was it said that the common practice of adoption by grandparents or other relatives was damaging to a child's sense of security. At Auckland, Dr Rina Moore strongly urged family planning, but at Kaitaia, even though a recommendation was passed advocating publicity for methods of family planning, the suggestion was clearly an embarrassment to some women delegates. Courses in homecraft and family budgeting were suggested: how to spend less on drink and biscuits and tinned jam and more on meat and fruit and vege- tables and children's clothing is a felt need. A Maori friend tells me that this is one of the attractions of the Latter-Day Saints, who

I 52 provide this and other directions of their members' lives. 6 It was a Mormon, Dr M. N. Paewai, who inaugurated the Kaikohe scheme by which parents voluntarily submit their expenditure to the sup- ervisor of a citizens' committee. The scheme has been hailed by Mr Hunn and copied in several North Island towns: but it has to be run by disinterested people: in Mangakino an enthusiast almost launched one by which the local shopkeepers would have been directing the buying of their customers. On the whole, there is a growing feeling among the younger Maoris-and especially the women-who are more familiar with European child-rearing, that Maori parents should assume more responsibility for their children. * * * What of housing? Before the Hunn Report, there was frequent complaint at conferences that the Department of Maori Affairs was not only not meeting current demand for houses but that the back- log itself was increasing. Under the 1949-57 administration, Mr Corbett was sympathetic to Maori needs but his Cabinet overruled him: apart from the assistance given by the capitalization of family benefits, Mr Nash's tenure of office was distinguished by its ineffectiveness. In August 1960, Mr Hunn reported 2350 applications for housing loans and 300 for State houses: the Department's target for that year was 62o; and Mr Hunn's guess was that, to meet immediate needs, 6ooo houses might be needed. Since the Report there has been a greatly increased allocation of money for housing and the Department has been buying group houses and houses put up by State Advances. Several conferences criticized the Department's supervision of building: builders economized by leaving much of the work to apprentices; too often the occupant was confronted with sunk foundations, warping, leaks and windows that wouldn't shut. At Turangawaewae and Whakatane, more freedom of design was recommended. Basically, the 900 square- foot Department house is an economy version of the State house : a roofed box divided into small single-purpose compartments. Most Maoris are so glad to get out of their shacks that they accept it; but it does not meet their needs. It does not lend itself either to large entertaining or to the accommodation of a number of tem- porary guests; nor can it easily be extended to meet an increasing family. Though the Department has increased its plans by one bedroom and allows applicants to make slight modifications, it continues with its constricting boxes.

6 Other attractions, I am told, are the provision of free secondary education, finance for small businesses, and a completely self-contained social life. 153 Since Peter Fraser, allotting 6o Maori houses to Auckland, insist- ed that no more than 3 should be built together, it has been departmental policy to disperse them among pakeha houses. Delegates at the Auckland conference generally favoured the policy as promot- ing better race relations, and as setting Maoris a more desirable standard of housekeeping. Most of the 98 Wellington mothers in- terviewed by Jane Ritchie preferred dispersal. Nevertheless, Auck- land delegates felt that they would like other Maoris to be nearby, either in a block of 4 or 5 houses in a pakeha area, or in several separated Maori houses in the same street, and the Presbyterian Maori Syriod has said that those who do not wish to be dispersed should not be forced. The Wairoa conference specifically condemned the action of a group of Tokoroa teachers complaining to the Department of 7 Maori houses together (on the ground that there were 50 children in the one street). A frequent complaint of rural delegates was of the departmental policy of refusing loans for building in remote areas. The Depart- ment has repeatedly replied that it will not lend if the house cannot be resold, and that this is unlikely where there is little prospect of employment. The Department's case seems unanswerable, yet it is often resented as one of the forces driving Maoris into the towns: another is the Town and Country Planning Act Which forbids building on sections of less than 5 acres, and fmces Maoris to abandon rural land that they own and are rated for, and move to a town where they have to buy a section. The cost of roading required by the Act forced owners of a Rotoiti land block to abandon a scheme of subdivision for eventual, but not immediate, settlement. Modification of the Act was asked for at Whakatane and Kaitaia: 'Pakeha subdivision is for the purpose of sale, Maori subdivision for the settlement of owners.'7 It has always been difficult for Maori farmers to obtain credit- except, recently, established farmers on the East Coast; and the Department since 1929 has developed unfarmed land, assuming ownership for a period long enough to recoup part of the outlay and then turning it over to the control of an individual Maori settler on a 42-year lease from its owners, with provision for compensation for improvements. Receipts from the stations temporarily farmed by the Department and repayments from farmers subse- quently settled have almost repaid the original outlay. Develop- ment has not fast. The area developed to grass after 30 years

7 Report of the Waiariki Young Maori Leaders' Conference, Whakatane, August 1960, p. 30.

I 54 was 403,600 acres, and in no post-war year has the area reached half of the 1940 figure of 22,100 acres. The total land remaining in Maori ownership is about four million acres, of which two and a half are considered suitable for farming: of this one million is leased to Europeans, another million is either in departmental control or is being farmed by Maoris. This leaves, according to Mr Hunn's 'guesstimate', about half a million acres to be developed, and might provide, by another guess, for 5,100 farmers. The Hunn Report has proposed a vigorous policy of development of this land, in the national interest, and already development has been put into the hands of the less hampered Lands and Survey Department. The system, under Maori Affairs control, was not wholly satisfactory in that some settlers, inexperienced, have mismanaged their farms: there has been some incompetent or ineffective supervision of the settler's first efforts; and on the other hand, distrust, apathy and hostility from settlers towards the mortgagee Department which still retained some control over the land it had turned over to them. In one Hokianga district the people regard a 2ooo-acre block which has been held by the Department since 1937 as a stock-breeding farm, as stolen from them. Farmers consider themselves impoverished by the budgetary control or the fixed repayments by which the Department recoups its outlay.8 In the Far North, most of the thousand Maori farms are unecon- omic: divided 30 years ago when 20 cows and 40 acres would keep a family, they cannot do so now, and farmers frequently leave their farms to wives and children and go out to work for wages. To quote P. W. Hohepa, who grew up in the district he is writing about, 'When the Department, the Dairy Company, the Hire Purchase firms, and the local store all take their share of the cream cheque, there is rarely anything left for the farmer. Most farmers in fact depend on Social Security benefits for the household's livelihood while the farming income acts as the debt eraser. Many still cannot make ends meet.'9 Two years ago some were abandoning their farms. (It is typical of pakeha miscomprehension that a comment 1 heard at the time from a city dweller was that it was because they preferred to live off social security.) The solution would seem to be intensification of farming, but lack of cap- ital or credit prevents it. At Auckland and Kaitaia, some delegates asked for more training of Maori farmers; others said that Maoris do not make full use of the schools existing. One-man dairy-farm-

8 P. W. Hohepa: Paerau: A Maori Community in North/and. University of Auckland thesis, 1961, pp. 63, 82. 9 Hohepa, op. cit., p. 84. 155 ing, with its long hours and regular routine, does not suit traditional Maori work-patterns; some in Hokianga have solved this difficulty by working as teams on one another's farms in turn. Yet it seems to have produced a strain of individualism : in Panguru at least the idea has developed that 'he who farms should have full control of the land'.10 In most of the farms there, the occupier has obtained from the joint owners either freehold ownership or a long-term lease. This development towards a European system of ownership is in harmony with the Department's theory of 'integration'; but not with the attitudes of Maoris in sheep-farming areas. More profitable has been the Maori initiative of incorporations, originated by Ngata among the Ngaati-porou, and working success- fully not only on the East Coast but in Hawkes Bay, Rotorua and the King Country. Incorporations are an adaptation of communal ownership to a capitalist economy : run by committees of management and employing executive staff, they can (subject to the approval of the Maori Land Court) undertake farming, milling, reafforestation and quarrying. Bulk-buying and high post-war wool prices have brought wealth to some of the 18o-odd incorporations in the Tairawhiti Land District; they have become more like private companies than communal enterprises. Some of the profits, however, are used for communal amenities: housing for workers and beneficiaries, scholarships, training of youths as farmers, the upkeep of maraes. At Tauranga-Taupo, it was recommended that incorporations be granted the freedom of private companies, even though at present they are taxed more lightly. They have been suggested as a source of credit for, say, the less fortunate dairy farmers of the Far North, but they are not empowered to reinvest. If this restriction is removed, one might see the development of Maori capitalism, the eventual emergence of an owning class. There would be sheer confusion if shares were freely disposable. One vexed question for which administrators like Mr Corbett and Mr Hunn have proposed drastic treatment is .the fragmentation of land holdings. This problem, attributed frequently enough to the growth in population, is in fact the direct consequence of the imposition since 1873 of a European system of individual ownership on traditional Maori land title, which, as is well known, was communal and hereditary. The owners of the land were its tem- porary occupants, 'trustees from the past and for the future' .U

10 John Booth: 'A Modern Maori Community' in J. D. Freeman and W. R. Geddes (editors), Anthropology in the South Seas, New Plymouth, 1959, p. 242. Under European law they were converted into individual share- holders, thousands of whom now own land assessed at only a few pence; the succession orders involve effort and expense costing more than the value of each share. The unsatisfactoriness of title divided among hundreds of scattered owners prevents any part- owner from taking the initiative and farming the land. Devices to meet this problem have not been successful. 'Consolidation', by which an owner of interests in several blocks can exchange them for several interests in one, is slow and laborious; and a consolid- ated holding fragments as its owner dies. In 1953, Mr Corbett introduced 'conversion', whereby interests worth less than £25 can be bought by the Maori Trustee (a public servant) and sold to other Maoris; but there is a natural hesitancy on the part of other Maoris to offend the taangata whenua by purchasing land which is traditionally theirs. Since 1957 there has been 'the £ro rule' by which the Land Court can take from its inheritor an interest worth less than £ro and give it to another who already has more. There has been some voluntary use of the system of family arrangement by which a family agrees that one of them shall buy the others out and have freehold title. All of these go against traditional Maori attitudes (though the last indic- ates a change in attitude) and all work in the direction of sole ownership. Mr Hunn's proposal that the base-line be raised from £ro to £5o has been strongly opposed by the Presbyterian Maori Synod and by elders who discussed it in Auckland last July, as have his suggestions of primogeniture, or that fathers should nom- inate a successor by word of mouth. The reluctance to make a will is not superstition: it is a conviction that it is wrong to exclude any of one's children from his inheritance, that all one's descendants are entitled to inherit the land one has held in trust for them. Mr Hunn's alternative suggestion, however, has the inspiration of Ngata's conception of incorporations, and has been welcomed by the Synod : the incorporation of tribes as land-owning bodies, in which every member shares but has no rights of disposal. It is a return to the traditional conception of ownership. There would no doubt be administrative difficulties in defining a tribe and in working out whether or not some people are entitled to membership: but these difficulties would seem fewer than those that follow from fragmentation. 'Land is more than soil', the Synod says. The man who owns a

11 Maori Synod of the Presbyterian Church of N.Z.: A Maori View of the Hunn Report, Christchurch, p. 21.

I 57 pennyworth of land in his home district, even if he has moved to the city, has turangawaewae, a place to stand, which implies his right to speak on his home marae, and gives him a sense of belonging. Maori adolescents may not bother themselves with questions of inheritance and may know neither their whakapapa (genea- logical table) nor their hapuu (subdivision of a tribe); yet they frequently feel the need to return to their ancestral home, for consolation and renewal of security, to lick the wounds of the city. Without this sense of belonging and the certainty of a home to go back to, Maoris would feel alienated and dispossessed : the frustrations and privations of the city would cause more demoralization and crime. Both the Whakarewarewa and W airoa conferences opposed Mr Hunn's suggestion that ownership of an urban 'home' might be an acceptable qualification for turangawaewae: to a Maori a house is private property, but his land is not. This is assimilation with a vengeance. Whakarewarewa delegates discussed the continued existence of the Maori Land Court and concluded that, in spite of its irritatingly slow and cumbrous processes, it should be retained as a protection of the remaining Maori land. The Court is empowered to prevent sales of land to non-Maoris but in practice for some years has contented itself with seeing that a fair price is paid. Maori land is still being alienated, since 1953 at an average rate, according to Mr Hunn's figures, of 17,ooo acres a year; according to figures given at Waitetoko by his predecessor, T. T. Ropiha, of between 20,000 and 3o,ooo a year. Mr Ropiha added that if this rate continues a further million acres will have gone by the end of the century and there will be only the mountain-tops left. Land can be taken under the Public Works Act for roading, for public amenities and for urban development. It can be sold on the resolution' of three owners, with the onus on the other owners (if they see the notice in the paper) to dissent and apply for a partition of their shares. Further, the transfer to sole ownership and freehold title, current in the four northern counties, increases the possibility of such land being sold to non-Maoris: it depends only on one man. It is not surprising that elders with their long memories of fraudulent buying and confiscation suspect such devices, and the suggestion that they be extended, as subtle new refinements of pakeha land-hunger. There is dissatisfaction with rating of undeveloped land by local bodies: since 1953 land on which rates have not been paid can be leased or even sold by the Maori Trustee. There is understandable impatience on the part of County Councils at the difficulty of tracing multiple owners. Nevertheless, Maoris have real grievances. 158 Tuwharetoa delegates at Tauranga-Taupo said that the Taupo County Council had raised the rates on lakeside land, valuing it as potential pakeha bach-sites. One owner, whose land adjoined a forest, had his rates raised because of the future value of the seed- ling pines that had sprung up on his property. Owners have been forced to sell in order to pay the rates. Local bodies have often shown an unwillingness to understand that amounts to cultural arrogance. The Rotorua Town Council, ashamed of the ill-sanitated slum that confronts tourists at Whaka- rewarewa, has forbidden further. building and has offered the resi- dents resettlement at Koutu, but does not understand their reluctance to leave ancestral land. Twelve years ago the Auckland City Council compelled the Ngaati-whaatua (after about seventy years of confusing pressure from the Council, government departments and the Land Court) to leave their derelict shacks at Orakei marae and move into rented State houses on 'Boot Hill', as they called it; someone put a match to the meeting-house, no one can say who, but the Ngaati-whaatua are convinced it wasn't a Maori match. No doubt the people are materially better off, but for some time their resentment at losing their land caused a good deal of anti- social behaviour in Kitemoana Street. It is understandable that they did not warm to the City Council's offer to develop the old marae as a tourist display.12 The site for a new marae is not taken as full compensation, since it has not the ancestral associations of the old one. Last March a three-man board of trustees (with the approval of the Maori Affai·rs Department) ordered the demolition of sub- standard houses at Omahu near Hastings. People in their beds were wakened by bulldozers pushing at their walls. Their reluctance to act on the warning they had received may be explained by the fact that though they will have title to subdivided sections and will eventually have new houses, they will have to pay for both and were not given any choiceY Elders feel that the remaining land must be retained so that, as the Synod puts it, 'the old home of the people may remain a sheet anchor for the sons and daughters who go forth to make a life in a new world'. Maoris, it was said at are 'afraid

12 This incident is complicated by the fact that the offer was a keen coun- cillor's perversion of a scheme of Maharaia Winiata's-a cultural centre set on the old marae. Dr Winiata himself did not consult the taangata whenua, a serious omission for which the Council cannot be blamed. 13 This account is based on reports in the N.Z. Herald and the Napier Daily Telegraph. I 59 of the unfamiliar',14 and it may be some generations before migrants cease to feel the need for their old home, if they ever do. Nevertheless, it can only support a lessening proportion of the people. The absolute numbers of rural dwellers will rise, however, and they can only be supported by land development and more intensive farming. Several conferences have suggested the establishment of industries in rural areas, but they were not sanguine, and a Gisbome round table frankly admitted that the idea was un- realistic. Elders at the Auckland conference suggested that Maoris should set up co-operative industries, financed by the wealthy incorporations. They could cite the experience of an incorporation between Taumarunui and Tokaanu, which cut timber and milled it, and running into restrictive practices from pakeha companies, treated it and set up two joinery factories. But this incorporation has since sold its milling assets to a timber company and has turned to developing the land for farming. * * * It was possible for the 1939 conference to deplore the movement to cities and for I. L. G. Sutherland in 1935 to see no future for the race but a life based on the land. Now it is recognized that for a good proportion migration is inevitable. The 1956 census showed 30.7 per cent of male Maoris employed in 'agriculture, forestry, hunting and fishing', and 54·4 per cent in manufacturing, construction, transport, storage and communication. The latter proportion is likely to increase. The high proportion of juveniles means, as Borrie has said, that for every person for whom employment had to be found in the past, there will be more than two in the future. Finding a job is the first concern of the Maori who comes to a town, and the Auckland conference suggested the appointment of special placement officers and that the Department of Maori Affairs should set up a Labour Bureau. Most migrants go into unskilled labour, often seasonal; and those who come to the cities often shop around from job to job before they settle. Insuf- ficient education and unfamiliarity with the range of employment keeps many Maoris of high intelligence in jobs that pakehas of the same intelligence would not be doing. One might expect this to lead employers to prefer Maoris as employees, but not many have woken up to it. Many employers are reluctant, fearing absenteeism, laziness, stupidity and difficulties of understanding. Girls find it

1' Report of the Waikato-Maniapoto Young Maori Leaders' Conference, Turangawaewae, May 1960, p. 20. r6o hard to get any work except in factories, laundries, restaurants and hospitals: shopkeepers and banks often turn them down. At Whakatane it was said that in one South Auckland company town the company discriminated against Maoris; but I am told that since a take-over, the new direction actually prefers Maoris (as freezing- works do) because they are often stronger, develop physical skills quicker, are more confident with machinery, and, it is probable, are less conscious of union awards than pakehas, less suspicious of the management. The last can lead to occasional tension with non- Maori unionists. (The Maori ideal work-pattern is one of vigorous, efficient, co-operative team work for a purpose: and the Latter Day Saints were able to harness this in building the Temple and College at Tuhikaramea on subsistence labour.) Few lads are at- tracted to apprenticeships except, it was said at Gisborne, in the motor-trade, though a carpentry training-school in Auckland has been a success, and another has just opened in Christchurch. The reason for this is not only insufficient education-Maoris are quick to pick up skills in handling materials-it is that living away from home, a youth cannot support himself on apprentice's wages, without subsidy from home, and that is usually not possible. The high proportion of Maoris in unskilled labour makes them vulnerable to any economic depression : queues for jobs would be mostly Maoris, and racial friction among the workless would be almost certain.

* * * Youths migrating to the cities arrive often without permanent accommodation and without enough money: they probably have relatives to stay with till they find board, though the relative's house may be overcrowded. They may find one of those bed-and- breakfast places that 'welcome' Maoris and charge more for the privilege, or insist on their being out all day, even at weekends. They may prefer to go flatting with friends. They are likely to have pakeha neighbours complaining, and police interrupting, if they sing at parties. They keep shiftling from place to place. They are removed from the restraints of their home district-the Tribal Committee, wardens, older relatives who sit and watch them at the youth club dances; and they are glad to be free of the parental nagging that descends at adolescence. They are exposed to the excitement and anxiety-ridden values of the films and popular music. They frequently get into trouble. In 1960, a fifth of magistrate's court I6I convictiOns for 'distinct prisoners'15 in arrest cases were Maoris, and 17 out of 100 prisoners sentenced in the Supreme Court; 31 of 100 prisoners received were Maoris. It is possible, as was argued at Whakatane, that the statistics give an inaccurate picture, since there are no figures for undetected crime, and it might well be that most Maori crime is detected. Maoris are less frequently represented by counsel and more often plead guilty. Delegates at Whakarewa- rewa claimed that adolescents under police interrogation confess to crimes they haven't committed in the hope of escaping an anxious and unfamiliar situation: the 1955 inquiry into the Ruka- Harris case confirms that this has happened at least once. Police are seldom willing to call in a welfare officer or the tribal committee. Magistrates in Hamilton and Rotorua have stated that Maoris are not obtaining proper counsel, but in other towns seem to be provoked into strictures: pakeha offenders are not called a disgrace to their race. A year or two ago, one magistrate took it on himself to deliver a completely misinformed attack on the Ringatu religion, and order a youth to abandon it. But if there is any prejudice in the magistrates' courts, the statistics show only a slight difference between the proportions of Maoris and non-Maoris who are not convicted.16Measures suggested at conferences were the provision of legal aid, and co-operation between the police and welfare officers or tribal committees. Since offenders will talk more freely to Maoris, more participation of Maoris in the processes of justice is desirable: not only Maori policemen, but Maori J.P.'s. It is a pity there are so few Maori lawyers; consequently there is no immediate prospect of Maori magistrates. Maoris are excluded from jury rolls, but at present Maori leaders prefer to accept this as a restriction incurred by the right of a Maori who has committed a crime against another Maori to be tried by a Maori jury. But since most Maori offences are not against other Maoris, and the right is seldom invoked, I cannot see why the right to be tried by a Maori jury should entail the exclusion of Maoris from other juries.

15 i.e., prisoners as distinct from charges. 16 It is possible that no conclusion can be drawn from the published statistics which show only a selection-arrest cases only (which are only a tenth of total distinct cases) and only about half of those, without any indication of how these cases were selected. For what they are worth, the percentages worked out from the selection of distinct arrest cases from the Magistrates' Courts in Reports on the Justice Statistics of N.Z. are: 2.84 per cent fewer Maoris not convicted than non-Maoris in 1958; 3.52 per cent in 1959; 3.64 per cent in 1960. Most of the crimes are against the person (assault, sexual offences) or against property, particularly theft, breaking and enter- ing, and car conversion. At Kaitaia it was said that in a small community where everyone is related it is no crime to help oneself to another's property, and that Maoris do not take so serious a view of carnal knowledge. This defence is not a strong one, but it points the need for Mr Hunn's suggestion, supported by two conferences, that youths about to leave for the city should be instructed in 'per- missible conduct'. But surely one factor in car conversions is the discrimination against Maoris (imposed by insurance companies) by rental car firms. For the rest the reasons for juvenile crime are boredom, insecurity, unemployment, frustration from overcrowd- ing or from boarding where one is not welcome, and a desire for kicks. Several conferences suggested more provision for recreation and social life: in the country there are the youth clubs, in the cities there are the pakeha sports organizations and the Y.M.C.A., and Auckland has (for schoolboys) its police-run Boystown. Well- ington has its Ngaati-Pooneke Club; Auckland's Community Centre is more of a hall for dances and talent quests than a true social centre-and factionalism has held up progress with the proposed Ngaati-Aakarana marae. Several conferences have seen the problem as one of reception of migrants as they reach the city. A Welling- ton soft-goods firm, with the help of welfare officers, found accommodation for twelve girls it was bringing from Wairoa, but obviously the possibility of this sort of arrangement is limited. Elders at the Auckland conference suggested tribal 'embassies' in each city, financed by tribal Trust Boards, as meeting-places and reception- centres. Six-month transit hostels have been suggested. And the simplest and most radical suggestion, from the Tauranga discussion group who prepared a paper on employment for the Whakarewa- rewa conference, is that pakeha homes should take Maori boarders. The Tauranga group's statement is worth quoting since it gives an insight into how Maoris see the problem. If the English is awk- ward, it should be remembered that it is a foreign language, and, further, that it would be unusual in European society to have a group meeting fortnightly to discuss a serious public question, consisting of secondary pupils, an apprentice, four clerks, a labourer, a telephone operator, a hotel domestic, three teachers and three farmers: The whole situation requires fundamental thinking for, at the present time, where Maori youth must leave the spiritual security of their homes, and the society in which they have grown 163 to live in an alien and not-understood environment, the guidance necessary in the growing up period of adolescence and early adulthood must be supplied. This is the very period when all humanity needs guidance but is least willing to accept it even from their own family. The problem is not so much the provision of board and lodging but the provision of those spiritual neces- sities which culminate in that feeling of 'belongingness' to the community from which stems self-respect. . . . So here we put out clarion calls to both Pakeha and Maori. To the former we ask that you go out of your way to welcome us into your communities and into your homes and that you be not over-critical of those behaviour patterns which do not conform to yours. If at times we jar we shall at least be being given the opportunity to learn how to conform. Without your sympathetic co-operation we shall find the results of all our strivings to be in vain, consequently not worth the effort entailed. Take our youth into your homes as boarders, rent us your homes not your derelict buildings, give our families who come to live among you the courtesies of neighbourliness. To the Maori people we say, if, as is now the case, you have for the economic stability of yourself and your family, to leave your home district and take work in towns then accept those unknown difficulties, so frightening because they are unknown, with the set idea that your inherent abilities and strength of character can overcome them; realise that it is a sad fact that the behaviour pattern of many of our race has over the years been such as to warrant condemnation, and determine to eschew them. The acceptance of those requirements on each side will do much toward the elimination of the necessity for so much hostel accommodation. It is of course not only city Maoris who come before courts but it is in the city that the Maori is exposed to the greatest pressure to abandon his traditional securities; and consciously or uncon- sciously every Maori is engaged in a personal debate whether to assert or abandon some particular attitude or habit, whether to adopt or reject some new one. A similar situation may evoke from him a response differing according to whether it is in a Maori or a European or a mixed context. The new values and criteria that are most impressed on him are those for which European society tries to provide its own safeguards-those of the films, the comics and the teenage idols. Juvenile delinquency is not a peculiarly Maori problem; yet if a youth dresses like a bodgie or a girl sweeps up 164 her hair and wears leopard-skin matadors, these people are funda- mentally different from their pakeha counterparts. They respond more spontaneously to friendliness; they respect old people; they are capable of enjoying themselves with no more artificial stimula- tion than a guitar. There is merit in Mr Hunn's proposal for segre- gated Borstals: Maori inmates would be more amenable to en- couragement from welfare officers and clergymen if they were free from the sneers of pakeha inmates. From two sources I am told that racial friction is high in a maximum-security establishment like Invercargill where there are 35% Maoris; it probably reflects the different pressures and psychological tensions that motivated the two groups of prisoners in their crimes. The Presbyterian Maori Synod suggests short terms in strict-discipline reformatories, but this may be theological harshness. I would suggest that for Maori prisoners group counselling would be profitable. When all is said on crime, it is sobering to remind oneself, not of the 5% who offend (1.5% pakeha) but the 95% who don't. * * * Few Maori offenders have been educated beyond Form IV, and in all conferences education was seen as the solution to problems of health, child-rearing, employment and crime. Maori elders have long seen education as the hope for their people; Trust Boards and incorporations provide grants and scholarships to pupils and students of their tribe; the Ngata and Ngarimu post-graduate scholarships are more generous than any other in New Zealand. Yet the paradox is that there are far too few Maoris in the upper forms at secondary schools and at university, and in contrast with the keen- ness with which Maoris 120 years ago learned to read and write, there is a depressed class of parents ignorant and apathetic to, or incapable of advising on, the future vocations of their children. It is necessary to look at the schools Maoris attend. There are 155 Maori primary schools in rural areas, and Io Maori District High Schools. The Maori primary schools are administered by the Education Department and have often been served by teachers not only aware of the special needs of their pupils, but dedicated to their work and likely to stay longer in the one place; nearly half of them now are Maoris. Parents look on the school as theirs, talk to the teacher about their children, and turn up with batches of scones when the inspector visits. Most Maoris who are in the professions were educated at these schools. At secondary level there are eleven church boarding-schools with a mainly Maori roll, which inculcate 165 a pride of race, and half of the Maori graduates at Auckland Uni- versity in the past four years have been to these schools. But they cater for only a minority of the Maori school population : two-thirds of the primary pupils are in Board schools, and four-fifths of the secondary pupils are in public secondary schools. A great many Maori children at these schools, feeling that their teachers take no special interest in them, become apathetic and find themselves pushed into the lower streams. They are usually about a year behind pakeha pupils in attainment, and the gap widens. Pupils coming from Maori primary schools to public secondary schools are discouraged by the impersonal atmosphere, and some do not recover from the change. Many of their teachers look on them as dumb and their parents, shy of a pakeha institution, take little interest in the school. Measures taken to deal with the problem are inadequate. The Post Primary Teachers' Association has set up a committee on Maori education. In 1955 an advisory commit· tee was set up to advise the Education Department. An officer of the Department has access to all primary schools where there are Maori pupils. The measures have not met the problem : the provision of that warm personal interest to which Maori children re· spond and without which they are lost. It has been noticed that the pupils become keener when they have a Maori teacher. Various suggestions have been made at conferences : that at Board schools with a high Maori roll, there should be a sympathetic teacher with special responsibility for them; that Education Boards should have advisers on Maori education; that Maori parents should participate in Parent-Teacher Associations; that there should be more Maori vocational guidance officers. As a result of the Marton conference, a voluntary group at Wanganui set itself up to advise Maori pupils on education and careers; another at Palmerston North; and the Whakatane group which prepared a paper on education for the Whakarewarewa conference has formed itself into a permanent Maori advancement group. A Maori pupil suffers from a number of disabilities which have a cumulative and long-term effect. He may have to travel an hour and a half each way to school. He is not encouraged to be inside the house except to do chores which he may resent and which cut into the time he needs for homework. He cannot do homework in an ill-lit home where the only place is the kitchen table, perhaps already occupied by adult elbows and cards and flagons; where the tradition is that children should not distract adults from their occu- pations. He cannot discuss his homework With his parents, whose conversation is in any case limited to people and local preoccupa- I66 tions; there are no books in the house, and there is no tradition of reading to children at bed-time. Economic pressures may force him to be absent from school: perhaps Dad is away shearing, Mum is ill and he has to look after the younger ones; he may have accom- panied Dad on his shearing trip; he may have had little sleep after a late adult function in the house or on the marae. The cost of his staying on at school is a real problem for his parents. He is greatly attached for emotional security to his age-group, and when they leave school, he leaves with them. There is money to be earned and he wants to be independent. He does not find it easy to defer immediate satisfactions for the sake of a distant goal : he has not been trained in the pakeha habits of foresight, thrift, patience. At Kaitaia it was said that some parents fear education as something that will take their children away from them. Since they can only be removed by attention to health and housing and by education of the parents, these disabilities are not likely to disappear for some time. One delegate at Tauranga-Taupo said that Maori children will not perform as well as pakeha children till a generation of parents has had secondary education. Frequently it was said at conferences that parents must accept more responsibility, make more sacrifices, plan their lives around their children's vocational needs. A useful practice at Reporoa could be widely imitated: school certificate pupils use the local school for evening study. Even at university level, in spite of the effect of boarding-schools, these disabilities have their effect. Most of the Maori students I have known are practical rather than imaginative; concentrate on passing rather than involve themselves in their subject of study. A good many of them fail because they are subject to more tempta- tions : they have more friends than pakeha students and consequently there are more parties and outings. The Maori student has not the individualist incentives of the pakeha : according to Ausubel and the Ritchies he has a deep-seated fear of distinguishing himself for fear of attracting criticism, but I cannot say that I have noticed this; though it is true that he is afraid to ask questions in tutorials for fear of making a fool of himself. He is likely to say- and genuinely mean-that his aim is to help his people, then dis- mayed at his failure to apply himself, to retire from the effort. The 'Rakau' researchers would attribute his performance, among other things, to a deficiency in the use of imagination and fantasy;17

17 Ernest Beaglehole and J ames Rite hie: 'The Rakau Maori Studies', Journal of the Polynesian Society, June 1958, p. 137. 167 Ausubel to an inability to handle abstract concepts. He may be right; all I would say is that in his first year a Maori is likely to feel his English vocabulary inadequate, and to be imprecise and unsure in his use of abstract concepts in Enalish. Yet quite a few have managed to graduate; and, as far as I can see, the difference between those that have and those that haven't-apart from intelligence-is simply that the graduates have worked steadily, usually encouraged by their wives or friends or interested lecturers. Most Maoris who have School Certificate go in for teaching. Those who enrol at university go mainly for arts courses; there are fewer in science and medicine; a few in fine arts, and only an occasional engineer, commerce student, lawyer or architect. There has been pressure for the transference of Maori primary schools to Board control, a transference that the parents do not desire. James Ritchie has given an account of how, through dis- respect for Maori methods of arriving at communal decisions (by which silence means dissent and a question is fully talked out till unanimity is reached), through restrictive chairmanship, through confusion and misunderstanding, a parents' meeting at Murupara apparently assented to a decision they actually disagreed with. Since then the Department has agreed in principle to the recommendation of the Advisory Committee on Maori Education that, while it recognizes that eventually the distinction between Maori and Board schools will disappear, no school should be transferred without the free consent of the parents. Nevertheless the Education Department shows signs of impatience to hurry the process. Puke- kohe is a case in point. Ten years ago a separate Maori school was established there as a result of pressure from parents and teachers who complained of the dirty habits of the children of Maoris working in the market gardens; they had already imposed segregation of toilets and shelter-sheds. The Maori parents deeply resented the Department's action, since they were not consulted; but-and here Ausubel is out of date-since the school has been established, they have wholeheartedly and unanimously accepted it as a school where their children have self-respect. Department policy now is to integrate the three local schools, but the Maori parents are opposed and even financed the school bus when for a time the Department discontinued it, and will resent the transference if it is imposed in defiance of their wishes. They fear that their children will not get a fair deal at the Board schools. It is often said that integrated schools are nurseries of good race relations, but it would seem to depend on the proportions, on the race relations outside the school, and probably other factors. It 168 was said at Rotorua that relations between Maori and pakeha pupils are good where Maoris are in a majority of about 6o%; they are probably good where pakehas are in a clear majority with only a few Maoris. Where there is a Maori minority of about 25%, it was said, relations are poor. It looks as if pakeha children resent an unassimilable minority. But all this must depend on the state of race relations in the district: in a church boarding-school the pakeha minority is popular with the Maoris; in Pukekohe there would be friction, whatever the proportions. Advisory committees like the ones in W anganui, Palmerston and Whakatane could identify bright pupils and encourage their parents to send them to boarding-school if they can afford it. The most spectacular outcome of the Hunn Report was the setting up of the Maori Educational Foundation with the aim of providing secondary scholarships and trade training for gifted pupils. Since the scholarships come only from interest on investment, the immediate prospects are limited (about 75 scholarships), but they will grow. The board of trustees is weighted on the side of the Government, and there is some caution on the part of Trust Boards and incorporations about doing what Mr Hunn has urged, channelling all their educational grants into the Foundation : it is a question of control of their own money and a natural preference that it should be used for members of their own tribe. It is not possible to predict how the current drive for donations will proceed. All success to it, but it is being run like a grand charity, and I suspect there is a certain sales resistance (from pakehas) on the ground that the public is being asked to subsidize an undertaking that is usually considered entirely a Government responsibility. Besides this Government action, there are from Maoris themselves signs of hope : at conferences a concern over absenteeism, proposals for starting supervised play-centres on the maraes for pre- school children, and this statement from the Tauranga discussion group: 'In spite of all the difficulties we see in the way, in spite of all calls for assistance which we have made in this evaluation, we admit that, in the final analysis, in all efforts made on our behalf to help us cope with economic circumstances, the primary and fundamental effort must come from ourselves.' * * * The currency of the Maori language cannot be accurately described. A recent Education Department 'survey', consisting of an on-the-spot questionnaire to headmasters of Maori schools, was worthless. On the East Coast, in the Urewera and in the Far North, 169 Maori is spoken in the homes. There are districts where the children know no Maori. One hears of children in Maori-speaking areas who resist using Maori and answer their parents in English. In the cities there is the pressure of courtesy, by which Maoris in the company of a pakeha, use his language-and there is usually a pakeha around. No doubt, if it is indicative of a trend, this is pleas- ing to those pakehas who look on a non-Indo-European language spoken by fewer than qo,ooo people as an anachronism and an irritating disconformity; one suspects that educational policy-mak- ers would be happier if the language did not exist. The Pope policy for native schools, followed from 1877 to 1930, assumed that in order to prevent the disappearance of the race, rapid acculturation was necessary and only English must be used : the Ball policy from 1930 admitted some elements of Maori culture, but not the language as a teaching medium, on the grounds that Maori children should not speak inferior English.18 But after 85 years of compulsory English Maori parents and children often still speak a dialect of English with a limited vocabulary and range of constructions. And many teachers implemented official policy by strapping children if they spoke Maori-a thing for which a well-known Kuia (old woman: a term of respect) told me she would never forgive my race. When they first come to school some children are taught in a language they either do not know or only partly know. In English-speaking districts the kind of English spoken is not standard New Zealand English. The question arises of the psychological effects of linguistic frustration : of not having a language in which to express one's most complex thoughts or most intimate feelings. And it is arguable that there is a connection between self-respect and knowledge of a language which expresses one's ethnic traditions. Language like land would seem to be an anchor against demoralization. But until some reliable research is done, no one can accurately say how widely, or by what age- groups, Maori is spoken. There have been, both at young leaders' and students' conferences and from the Gisborne Jaycees, a number of recommendations that Maori should be taught in schools. So far as one can distil the common agreement of all these motions, it would be that Maori should be available at all secondary schools with a good proportion of Maoris, and that Maori studies and correct pronunciation of place-names should be compulsory at all primary schools. A stronger proposal was that Maori language should be compulsory for all

18 Report of Young Maori Conference, Auckland, May 1939, p. 22. 170 Maori pupils and optional for pakehas. The difficulty is to find the teachers. For the last few years, Maori studies has been taught at two training colleges, but not language: yet as far back as 1939 this very request was made by young leaders. Desirable as these proposals are they will not transmit the language as a current medium of communication. Only Maori parents can do that. Frequently enough one speaks at morning-tea to a delegate who has supported such a proposal and finds that he and his wife use English at home. But whatever the Maori people decide to do with their language, we should at least not hamper their freedom in deciding. * * * The Council for Educational Research recently received a £3o,ooo grant from the J. R. McKenzie Trust for research in Maori education. In its 85 years experience of Maori schooling the Department of Education has done no research and has conducted its policy by hit-or-miss methods and according to the personal theory of some administrative 'architect'. No one can provide an answer to such questions as would be of practical use to the Department's teachers, such questions as Dr Bruce Biggs asked at Kaitaia : 'If a child is bi- lingual at school-'entry, what will be the actual words he is likely to know in each language? Is his total vocabulary in both languages equal to the total vocabulary of a unilingual child? Does he distinguish conceptually between the two languages? Does he have different emotional attitudes to the two languages? Just what Eng- lish constructions does he use? What constructions in English are unfamiliar to him? Does it help or confuse him to explain usage of one language by another? On exactly what points is his use of English unacceptable as New Zealand standard English ?' 19 Suggest- ions made at a Wellington conference called to discuss how to use the McKenzie Trust grant were that an experiment be done in a Maori-speaking community in using Maori as a teaching medium to Standard II, and teaching English at first as a second language (as is done in Samoa); that there be research into methods of teaching Maori; a study of the factors behind the success of Maori graduates; evaluation of existing institutions like Maori District High Schools and boarding-schools. There has been unofficially sponsored research into wider questions in the last few years. David Ausubel' s chapters on race rela-

19 Report of the Northland Young Maori Leaders' Conference, Kaitaia, October 1960, p. x. 171 tions in The Fern and the Tiki are unique as a brief popular survey of mutual attitudes between the tWo peoples: his Maori Youth, though its testing methodology has been dismissed by a psycholo- gist21l remains a shrewd rough assessment of the Maori situation in 1958. More challenging to accepted ideas are the 'Rakau' studies by the University of Wellington Department of Psychology, studies of children and their parents in a forestry town. The methodology of these studies too has been dismissed by a psychologist.21 I know nothing of the validity of the tests that were used, but the observa- tions on family life contain many insights. Yet the hypotheses the researchers claim to have confirmed are suspect, and some of them I cannot reconcile with my experience of Maoris. Their picture of the 'Rakau' personality is of one determined by an infancy experience of extreme indulgence followed by a 'rejection' when the next baby comes, an unsatisfied seeking for security in the group of siblings and playmates, and a tenuous rapprochement with parents during adolescence. They delineate the finished 'basic personality' as insecure, anxious, full of unresolved aggression, conformist, afraid of involvement, craving love but unable to give it. I doubt if Freud can be applied to Maoris or that one can limit one's study of Maori children to the household family of Mum, Dad and the kids. I fear that we are being given a new stereotype, and one that has less relation to its model than the usual one of cheerful, happy- go-lucky Hori. The studies are admittedly ethnocentric, but I suspect that they may have the effect of carrying the pakeha sense of cultural superiority to the point of ceasing to envy the Maori his freedom from our obsessions and insecurities, since he is mentally in a worse case than we are. For years our administrators and urgers have been telling the Maori what is good for him : now we are probing into his personality and telling him that is out of order too. * * * How then does Maori culture differ from our own? It is not a matter of carving, and genealogies, mooteatea and patere, though the old people still sing them, or of pois and action-songs. It is a matter of a different kinship system, different values and aspirations, a different system of child-rearing. There is the attachment to the land; the sense that (unlike the pakeha) one's ancestors have lived here for seven or eight hundred years and that this is the home of one's descendants. Beyond the household family there is

21! Richard Thompson in N.Z. Monthly Review, September 1961. 21 Dugal Campbell in the Journal of the Polynesian Society, Dec. 1958. 172 the wider whaamere, which as Pat Hohepa defines it, consists of all the descendants (with their spouses and adopted children) of an ancestor who has died within living memory (usually the father of the oldest living member). 22 Beyond the whaamere there is the sense of belonging provided by his membership of the tribe. There is the preference for spells of hard, long group work for a group purpose which can be achieved in foreseeable time, rather than for sustained, regular work for oneself. There is the concern for the immediate, rather than for the distant future; the admiration of generosity and sociability and hospitality, the deliberately happy- go-lucky attitude to time and money, the high value placed on personal relations, and the consequent preference for the company of others who feel the same way, that is (usually) for other Maoris. There is the preference for sea-foods and food cooked in a haangi. And in spite of local factionalism, there is the loyalty to one's tribe, and then to other Maoris as against the pakeha. To be a Maori is to know and feel for each one of the hundred-odd members of one's whaamere, to expect a welcome .when one visits them, wherever they are; to feel the obligations of aroha and feed and accommodate a guest and help any relative or friend in difficulty. At the present time too, it is to be more familiar with bereavement-since a number of one's relatives, even younger ones, will have died. It is to be more understanding towards the criminal, since one probably has a relative or two who have been 'in trouble'. There are, too, the ceremonial· of the marae, the big huis, the religious hui toopuu (of which Mr Fowler wrote in his essay), the opening of meeting-houses, the tangi, the formal meetings of representatives of two whaamere to arrange a wedding. and the distinctive character of Maori wed- dings, unveiling of tombstones, Maori church services, twenty- first birthday celebrations, and parties with their endless repertoire not only of action-songs but songs in English that everybody knows but few pakehas have ever heard of. What can be called Maori culture today is closer to European culture than to Maori culture at the time of European contact; in its informing spirit, however, it is quite distinct and is not likely to be 'integrated' away by administrators. Most Maoris participate in at least some of its expressions. It is made up, as Maharaia Winiata put it in a data paper prepared for the Auckland conference in 1959, of 'those things in the modern world to which the Maori clings to help him keep his

22 Hohepa, op. cit., p. 122. Also Joan Metge: Maori Society Today, Auck- land Council of Adult Education, Lecture No. 3. 173 sanity in what for him is a confused and confusing world'. It is a source of security and stability, and in districts where it is aban- doned there is more drunkenness and demoralization: if youths in the cities are bereft of it there will be more crime. It is on this question that the Hunn Report has been most severely criticized-by the Presbyterian Maori Synod, by Bruce Biggs and by Richard Thompson, who called it 'essentially a European document' .23 Mr Hunn sees no more of Maori culture than a few 'relics' -language, arts and crafts, and the institutions of the marae. He is in a hurry to promote integration by swifter urbanization, but his conception of integration is close to assimilation. At Waitetoko marae he illustrated his view of its pace with the hypothetical case of a Maori girl who at 20 married a pakeha, whose daughter at 20 another, and her granddaughter likewise, so that the woman at 6o would have eighth-caste grandchildren. It is hardly a typical case. The Hunn Report is to be commended as the most important official statement in years on Maori inequalities in housing, health and educational achievement. It has resulted in increased housing allocation, a committee on Maori health, plans for more vigorous land development and the Maori Educational Foundation. In some of its suggestions on land title it overrides Maori sensibilities, though it contains the inspired suggestion for the incorporation of tribes. But in its theoretical basis it is confused and over-simplified and unacquainted with the spirit of Maoritanga. * * * It is a paradox in New Zealand that those least sympathetic to Maori aspirations often invoke an abstract equality as their sanc- tion for wanting the abolition of Maori schools, the four seats, and the Department of Maori Affairs. A good many liberals and sympathisers are taken in by the slogan. An Australian socialist once accused me of being a racialist because I was 'stressing differences'. It is, as Dr Biggs has put it, something that has long been a bug- bear of New Zealand thinking, a confusion of equality with uni- formity; and the most intelligent official statement for some years is Mr Hanan's: 'What suits one person or one race does not always suit another. To treat people equally you sometimes must treat them differently.' Even Mr Hanan was surprised at the opposition of the Maori M.P .s to his proposal on juries. Pakeha resentment at 'pampering of the Maoris' was stimulated when Labour's majority was equal to the number of Maori seats

23 In Comment, winter 1961. 174 held by Labour. But the post-war record of the Department of Maori Affairs, especially its pre-Hanan housing policy, can hardly be called pampering. The Department continues its role of mediator between the State and the Maoris, and Maoris still feel the need for it. Yet its attitude, at all levels, leaves a lot to be desired: one informed commentator has called it Mr Hanan's cham- pionship of Maori rights is unlikely to be translated into the day- to-day transactions at district offices. Further there is the paternal way in which the Department is represented on so many organizations set up and financed by Maoris-the Maori Purposes Fund Board, the boards that award the Ngata and Ngarimu scholarships, for example, or the way in which such organizations are often persuaded to leave crucial decisions to subcommittees made up of pakeha public servants. The Women's Welfare League had to resist attempts at departmental supervision. There is departmental control of the Maori-financed T e Ao Hou, and its timid, uncontrover- sial policy, even under Erik Schwimmer's editorship; the avoidance of controversy on the niggardly quarter-hour of news in Maori on Sunday evenings. It is arguable that continuation of the Depart- ment's paternalism will produce dependence on advice and assistance. On the other hand, sudden withdrawal of the Department's mediation would be leaving the Maori people to sink or swim, and most of them would sink. A progressive, even if leisurely, wither- ing-away should be foreseen, and a necessary prerequisite is that Maoris should be allowed more control of their own affairs, and that where decisions (as they more frequently will) affect both races, their opinion should be consulted and given more than pro- portionate weight. Peter Fraser's Economic and Social Welfare Act of 1945 provided for Maoris to police themselves through honorary wardens, to attend (within the limits of State direction) to their own welfare by the appointment of welfare officers, and to govern some of their local affairs through tribal committees and tribal executives. At Gisborne it was said that about a quarter of the 8o executives and the 440 committees were inactive: otherwise the system has worked well. Last year's Act completes the organization at a national level by setting up a Domini_on Council of representatives elected by tribal executives. There will be a voice for the Maori people independent of political parties. Before Apirana Ngata died he predicted that in ten years Maoris might be considering the need for the abolition of separate parlia-

24 'Hohere', in Here and Now, October 1957. !75 mentary representation. The question was brought up at the elders' round table at Turangawaewae, but a secret ballot showed that, though the elders thought it must come sooner or later, they did not want it yet. There are three possibilities: abolition of the seats; requests for one or tWo more seats to meet the increase in Maori electors; reduction of the number of the seats in line with the proportions of pakeha electors. A motion at Gisborne to ask for more seats was lost. On the other hand, at several conferences, it was thought to be too optimistic to hope that on a single electoral roll, there would be four Maori members elected. It was said, further, that electoral areas are too large, many electors do not know their members and that Maori representation should not be tied to pakeha party politics, that some elecors prefer to consult the local . pakeha member. At present Maoris must register on the Maori roll, half-castes can opt to be on either roll, and less than half-castes must register on the European roll. But the system is flexible in that it is by one's own declaration that one is Maori, half-caste or European; and apparently some Maoris prefer to be on the Eur- opean roll, and some less than half-castes enrol as Maoris. A suggestion at Turangawaewae and Whakatane was that Maoris be allowed the same option as half-castes; and this might meet the needs of the urban Maori whose Maori member may be more concerned with rural problems. In 1960, meeting a group of his electors on the All Black issue, Mr Anderton banged the table and said it was absolutely incon- ceivable that Labour could ever lose the Maori vote. The policy of the 1949-57 administration did not lose Labour any votes. Yet there is among more educated Maoris a general dissatisfaction with the alliance between Labour and Ratana and with the inactivity of their own representatives, except perhaps Sir Eruera Tirikatene. George Harrison standing fm National, Arnold Reedy for Social Credit, did not represent endorsement of the total policies of those parties so much as opposition, in the only practical way, to the present representation. Perhaps the Dominion Council of tribal representatives will alter this. Whether post-Hunn policy can seriously reduce Labour's majority in the Maori vote in the short time before the next election is doubtful. It is possible that Cabinet's support of Mr Hanan is based on this hope, but it would be a pity if an enlightened policy were withdrawn because political calcula- tions were not confirmed. Not enough trust has ever been put in Maori initiative. It was Maori initiative that was ultimately responsible (at a Maori Labour conference in the thirties) for the 1945 and 1961 Acts; for the I76 formation of the Maori Women's Welfare League; for the 28th Battalion Association and the leadership conferences that began in 1959. If the initial direction of such moves is withdrawal from the pakeha, it is only for the purpose of establishing identity: frorri this position pakehas are invited to share in activities. There are pakeha members of Tribal Committees, of the League; the 28th Battalion's club at Opotiki is open to all ex-servicemen; pakehas have participated in the leadership conferences. There is no fear of Maori nationalism-Paul Robeson speaking at the Auckland Community Centre, pointing to inequalities of economic status, urging militancy, failed to strike a chord of sympathy. In some ways Paul Robeson was only saying what Mr Hunn has said. But militancy does not attract Maoris, because they have an ideal of racial harmony. Maori policy is one of taihoa, by and by. On the one hand elders put up a passive resistance to the pace of 'integration', on the ground that Maoris are being asked to cope, in less than two hundred years, with an advance that took Europeans something like two thousand. On the other hand they meet European impatience with patience. Bay of Plenty elders did not make public protests when the magistrate condemned Ringatu, but invited him to a hui where they explained the tenets of their religion. In the harmonious New Zealand society that they envisage, they wish to retain their identity; what they seek is recognition, not as individuals, but as a people made up of different tribes and with the right to disagree among themselves and with preferences of behaviour as valid as the European's. Intellectuals and sympathisers often get impatient because of hesitancy of Maoris to interest themselves in wider public or inter- national questions. It should be remembered that the Maori people are in deep confusion about the New Zealand pakeha world, let alone the whole world, or the stressful western pattern of living we are trying to impose on them. The local confusion may reflect simple unfamiliarity with pakeha institutions-a father wishing to decide on an atlas for his schoolgirl daughter visits a library but does not know where to look and does not ask for assistance because he doesn't know whether he has to pay.25 Often they avoid confusion in relation to the world situation by a simple acceptance of the official doctrine. Soldiers volunteering to shoot whose quarrel with their Government is of no interest to them do

25 The incident is taken from 'Kaumatua' in N.Z. Monthly Review, July 1961. 177 not doubt that, as they are told, they are shooting bad men. (No doubt there are other attractions-as Erik Schwimmer has given them26-secure employment, a regular life, the presence of other Maoris, pleasant inter-tribal rivalry.) I remember a Maori who turned up at a committee meeting of the Citizens' All Black Asso- ciation and argued that since Her Majesty the Queen had said 'We are one people', the Rugby Union was defying her, and that if this were pointed out to them they would be horrified at their effront- ery and immediately mend their ways. Maoris are not trained in the subtleties and sophistications by which we discount the hypo. crisies we profess. Nor do any except the more educated appreciate the fact that there is not one 'pakeha way' but dozens. At the conference on research into Maori education it was suggested that there should be a sociological study of a European village by Maori social scientists. The suggestion was not made in any spirit of smart alecry-though it would be interesting to have 'Rakau' opinions on the way university psychologists bring up their children-but as a means of educating Maoris in the details of pakeha life. Maoris in general like pakehas-provided they are friendly. I am told, though I take it with a grain of salt, that in 1939 when the question of Maori support in the war was at issue, Apirana Ngata told Peter Fraser that after long consideration the leaders of all the tribes had decided they would rather have him than the Japanese. There is something admirable in the calm and courtesy in which Maoris indiscriminately listen to Paul Robeson, teach action-songs to a Chinese theatre company, entertain an Indian diplomat, a Formosan or American Indian MRA man, Kath- erine Dunham and Rewi Alley. The trend of Maori progress towards a cordial adjustment to the European occupation is in two apparently dissimilar directions. On the one hand, their freedom to withdraw for such affairs as they wish, to be Maoris among Maoris when they want to be. On the other hand, and this is less possible without the other, a greater participation in European activities at all levels-not only in employment, but in local bodies, voluntary organizations and in the arts and entertainment. There has been progress in this direction. Maori viewpoints are frequently expressed from positions in a pakeha social structure-a Presbyterian Synod, an article by a staff journ- alist, an adult education tutor-organizer, a women's welfare organization. The changes and difficulties of contemporary leadership were represented in the apparent inconsistencies of Maharaia Wini-

26 Te Ao Hou, September 1961. q8 ata. Seeking ways to advance his people he chose the Methodist Church, anthropology, adult education and the King Movement, which he saw as symbolic of a possible national Maori identity- but which alienated him from tribes that traditionally did not recognize the Maori King. Seeking at the same time ways to bring about workable race relations he espoused Moral Rearmament, the Citizens' All Black Tour Association, visited China to study the treatment of minorities and it was possibly he who contributed informed notes on Maori affairs to the People's Voice. Maha alive made many enemies : dead he was unanimously praised. If he struck some pakehas as anti-pakeha, it was that pakeha arrogance and patronage made him angry. In his haste to achieve his goal, and his impatience with inter-tribal suspicion, he sometimes viol- ated Maori protocol. He represented a change he himself theorized about, a change in the channels of leadership. Increasingly Maori leadership will come not from outstanding figures like Ngata and Te Puea, but from hundreds of smaller local people who are speci- alists in their own professions. In the arts and entertainment there has been significant movement. Maoris have practically taken over popular entertainment. In the more sophisticated arts there have been stories in English in Te Ao Hou, the poems of Hone Tuwhare and Rowley Habib, the wood-sculpture of Arnold Wilson, the paintings of Ralph Hotere, Kataraina Mataira and Muru Waiters (it is difficult to imagine a prominent pakeha footballer who also paints). The work of all these artists is informed with a quality not European. Maoris have distinguished themselves in amateur acting and professional opera. If they have not entered other arts-symphonic music, few architects, no ballet dancers from a people so sure on their feet-it is because they are not familiar with these arts, as in the case of the father Who didn't know how to use the library. From the other direction in the last few years there has been from pakeha artists and intellectuals an increasing interest in the Maori (not as a symbolic figure, as Roderick Finlayson saw him), but as a person in his own right: there has been Noel Hilliard's Maori Girl and a greater number of short stories with Maori characters, two good children's books about Maori boys. And Bruce Mason's Pohutukawa Tree, for all its distorted view of race relations and its improbable Maori psychology, represented a gesture of pakeha conscience. More pakehas, partly dissatisfied with their own culture, have taken the role of what Erik Schwim- mer calls 'mediators' and found Maori company enriching and satisfying. My guess is that, among the educated, intermarriage, !79 especially between Maori men and European women, is increasing. It may be too much to hope that this movement, at educated levels of society, will be powerful enough to offset the unpropitious attitudes of a great many pakehas-the potential hostility, the impatience, the arrogance, the patronage and that kind of paternalism that is hostile to Maoris making their own decisions, the readiness of State-Advanced suburbia to condemn them in terms of its own inhuman values; the forces that made David Ausubel foresee a worsening of race relations. The way of life we have been trying to 'integrate' on to the Maoris is a spiritually impoverished version of a deeply anxious, individualistic and often sadistic (and dirty-minded) Euro-American culture. If instead of forcing them into our uniform, we would allow Maoris to be themselves and recognize them as themselves, we could at once rid ourselves of our intermittent worry about what we are 'doing for the Maoris', and at the same time they could enter more confidently into bi-racial New Zealand activities, to our enrichment. If I may add a personal coda, if New Zealand weren't the home of the Maori people, it wouldn't be mine for long either.

Commentaries

ROY DANIELLS Canadian Letter

I WOULD give a good deal to be able to report something new and exciting. Perhaps, indeed, it is visible between these lines. On the face of things, however, the past year has presented us with the customary ambivalence and paradox. In criticism, in education, in every one of the arts, there has been hard, honest, well directed endeavour and we have been pushed forward on all fronts. But we do not seem to have grown and this is disturbing because no Can- adian finds it possible to view the arts except as pointing toward a hoped-for future. !80 French-Canadians are talking separatism again and have at least three parties devoted to making Quebec independent of Canada. I trust they will not succeed. After a recent meeting of the Governor General's awards committee, the three French and three English members were bidden to a dinner at the home of the chairman, Guy Sylvestre. To find oneself in this atmosphere of warm lucidity and charm, this oasis in the wilderness of Ottawa's wintry streets, was to hope that M. Sylvestre and his compatriots will not go off and leave us. One finds it impossible to believe that we should be better off Without them. And considering the map of Canada and the fix that Quebec would be in with customs and immigration barriers at the Ontario and New Brunswick borders, it is hard to believe they would be better off without us. There is in fact no us that does not include them. Separatism is, then, consciously or otherwise, a play for greater French participation in the economic and cultural affairs of Canada and as such it calls for continuous readjustment to which no end can be seen. The state of the French language in the rest of Canada is deplorable. My wife, after two years of midnight oil, can now speak French fairly fluently and can read Mallarme with ease and Colette with joy. But there is no one to speak to, and formal conversation lessons have to be ar- ranged to avoid losing what has been gained. How far off, one wonders, is a genuinely hi-cultural society? Within a few decades the population of Canada will have to double if we are to survive, and what proportion of this extra eighteen million will be French speaking? or capable of understanding what may be said in French? At this end of the country a persistent racial problem of a totally different kind has lifted its ugly head. The Doukhobors. These eighteenth-century spirit-wrestlers came from Russia to Saskatchew- an in the 189o's and sent a group of settlers to British Columbia in 1908. This produced its own group of extremists, the Sons of Free• dom. At least six formal studies have been made of the Doukhobor problem. The last of these, conducted by a New Zealander, Harry Hawthorn, recommended relocation of the sect at Adams Lake in a remote area of good land and asked for a relaxation of the effort to put Doukhobor children into the normal type of Canadian school. Neither recommendation was carried out and the perennial Dou- khobor dream of a stable agricultural community, prosperous, self- contained and undisturbed, has not and perhaps cannot come to realization. In the meantime we have had fires and explosions, cul- minating in the dynamiting of a tower carrying a high-voltage transmission line, which disrupted mining operations and endan- gered life, in the Kootenay area. A special prison for Doukhobors 181 is being built of pre-fabricated metal on cement slabs; furniture and bedding are fireproof. The Doukhobors are worth considering because they furnish an extreme concentration of one type of problem. The Sons of Freedom believe that in repudiating material things, avoiding modern education, renouncing war and politics, burning schools and blowing up railway lines, they are doing the will of God. Canadian governments have hoped that long forbear- ance and much persuasion would lead to a gradual accommodation of the rising generation to Canadian life. In practice we get arson and bombing in waves of growing intensity and periodic segregation or imprisonment of Doukhobors. The Sons get no freedom and their neighbours have no peace. In the meantime, education-our everlasting Canadian hope- continues to absorb attention. A conference was held last month in Montreal, organized far in advance to represent every conceivable group likely to have a stake in teaching and research. This means almost literally everybody and about two thousand people attended. Francis Leddy, in a dosing address, hammered at the need for federal financial support of a massive kind. Reliance on federal aid is anathema to Quebec, afraid it will lose its autonomy in educational matters. Yet, as Leddy's address bluntly put it, 'What is really at stake today-the freedom and welfare of all Canadians, threatened in a divided world by the relentless hostility of slave states, or the traditional privileges of our provinces, as conceived and protected a century ago? You know the main issues as well as I do, and you are aware that Canadian survival in the twentieth century is geared closely to the effectiveness of Canadian education -in every province.' Leddy, who is a classical scholar and Dean of Arts at the University of Saskatchewan, took pains to identify himself as an English speaking Catholic 'affiliated by language and culture with the majority, and by religion with the minority'. Poets and writers of fiction have been active during the past year, though the results are equivocal. How customary this note of hopeful disappointment is I have realized afresh in doing a review article (for Canadian Literature) of 'Letters in Canada' which since 1936 has been an annual feature of the University of Toronto Quarterly. In going over the reviews of the past quarter-century, the impression one receives is of a long-enduring Spring, its green shoots striving toward a state of ripeness which only the odd ear ever achieves. To a demand made in 1936 for better criticism of Canadian letters, it was replied, 'As well assemble the harvesters in May'. Twenty-five years and many hundreds of books later we are in much the same position. Isolated achievements do not seem to !82 cumulate; good poets appear but no one takes his direction from them; novelists record the scene but no later novelist can do more than record it afresh. The present real dilemma was strikingly illustrated by the latest awards of the Governor-General's medals. The award for poetry in English went to Robert Finch who in 1961 put out two admirable volumes, Acis in Oxford and Dover Beach Revisited. That one of the most perceptive and sensitive minds we have should find his poetic materials, not here and not even in the memory of Canadians at Dieppe, but in a play staged in an Oxford college and in a recollection of the Dunkirk evacuation leaves one astonished. The fiction award went to a posthumous book of stories and sketches by Malcolm Lowry, Hear Us 0 Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place. Lowry, who brought with him from England a sensibility and a style already well developed, lived for fourteen years in a shack on the beach across the inlet from Vancouver. Once more, the reader who cares for the future of Canadian letters finds it difficult not to be 'afraid with any amazement'. Locally there is unlimited poetic ferment among university groups and this may be our best assurance of a future. Canadian Literature continues its steady progress. Prism, a magazine devoted to creative writing, devoted the whole of its last issue to student efforts. The success of Prism has produced Tish, a periodic cluster of mimeographed sheets devoted to the poetry of natural rhythm, word clusters, breath and syntax control. A Montreal poet rejoic- ing in the name of Milton Acorn has replied, 'The proof is in the poet's pudding. And I get the impression from this end that you're using Instant Mix.' Also in reaction are a group planning a period- ical issue of poems in the Romantic manner and traditional forms. And as these lines are being written, in comes Mr Zilber, a man of equable temper and judicious mind, who is devising a new magazine of satire and parody and has promise already of sufficient poems and ten-dollar bills to produce a first number. Distinct from this springtime grassroots activity is the continuing labour to build legal, administrative, institutional and financial frames of reference within which the arts can flourish. A wire this morning from Toronto says that there is now on the order papers of the current session of parliament a resolution to complete the passage of the bill to bring Canada into the Universal Copyright Convention. The Canadian Broadcasting League has been rather desperately reorganising itself during the past few months, so as to bring persuasion to bear on the government to keep our Broad- casting Corporation under public control, to save the programming of both public and private stations from complete submersion in 183 the flow of American material, to ensure that all authorities and agencies are responsible to parliament. The struggle will be increasingly severe; it is the unceasing curse of radio and television that advertisers have them by the throat. The Canada Council has again apportioned the income from its inadequate endowment with skill and imagination. How long it can continue to appear to cope with legitimate requests from every quarter remains to be seen, Hopes of increasing the endowment by appeals to industry and to the federal government have so far been frustrated. Amid all the necessary, admirable and hopeful activity (including a little theatre for this University, which will be completed by the end of this year) we listen for the still small voice of new creation, for the report of a vision. We continue to wait, crossing our fingers, holding our breath. In the meantime, there is gratitude for all help and, among the poets for example, there is a kind of notation that will serve others later on. These few lines are from Dorothy Roberts : My grandparents lived to a great age in the cold- 0 cruel preservative, the hard day beginning With night and zero and the firewood Numbing the fingers. God could have been in the flame Responsive among the birch sticks, roaring ... But for them he stayed in the cold . . . And gave them the white breath and the blood pumping Through hard activity stringing out the muscles Into great age .... And what prevents these perceptions from rising into the rich and complex utterance that everyone keeps hoping for? We are perhaps in the position of the village historian hustled from his table and strongarmed into a plane taking off for what Auden calls 'altogether elsewhere'. Poetry as a sacrament or even as a ceremony is harder and harder to achieve. The portents of something unknown and imminent are too strong. As my younger daughter all too accurately rendered her line in a nativity play this past Christ- mas, 'They presented unto Him gifts; gold, and Frankenstein, and myrrh.' R. J. H A R R I S 0 N The Broadcastin9 Corporation Act

THE Broadcasting Corporation Act which came into force on 1 April made one immediately effective change in the pattern of control of broadcasting in this country. Caesar has been deposed by a triumvirate. A Corporation of three members is established to exercise the powers and perform the functions which were pre- viously those of the Minister of Broadcasting. This is a step forward. Broadcasting and television as media of mass communication are in many ways comparable to the Press. The freedom of the Press from government interference is generally acknowledged as necessary to the success of democracy. Broadcasting cannot, of course, be completely free from government control because fre- quencies are not like printer's ink and paper. They are limited and they have to be allocated. Controls, too, are needed to prevent the misuse of the mass media, particularly by the exploitation of a monopoly position. But these needs can be fairly easily distinguished from the general principle that the mass media should not be controlled by the government for political purposes or by an agency which will dance to whatever tune the government calls. The new Act, by removing direct responsibility from the hands of the Minister should, on the face of it, give the New Zealand Broadcasting system more independence. The service has been criticized in the past for being too wary of treading on any political toes; for its failure to provide its own news service and its own analysis of the news, particularly domestic news; and for following the example of the three monkeys when confronted by a domestic fracas. The last of these criticisms was sometimes exaggerated. The first two are matters of fact. Perhaps they were only to be expected when there was direct Ministerial responsibility. In any case, the announcement by the Chairman, Dr Llewellyn, on only the second day after the Corporation came into its own, that a full-scale radio news service is to be established is, one may hope, a portent of a more vigorous and independent news policy. However, not everything has been done that might have been done to foster this independence. True, the terms of appointment xBs of the members of the Corporation are reasonable enough, though I think a four-year term would be better than three. And it will undoubtedly be a source of strength to the Corporation that it has continuity of membership, secured by the provision for a staggered retirement and appointment system, one retirement and appointment taking place each year. True, the Corporation has considerable financial independence. But the powers of the Minister of Broadcasting under Clause I 1 of the Act are very broadly defined; so broadly in fact as to make it impossible to describe any sort of interference whatsoever as 'illegal'. The Corporation is to 'comply with any general or special directions given in writing by the Min- ister pursuant to the policy of the Government' in relation to broadcasting. There is a corresponding clause in the licence of the B.B.C. re- quiring the Corporation to transmit an announcement or other matter at the request of any Government department and to refrain from sending any matter which the Postmaster-General orders not to be sent. But this clause in the B.B.C. licence also provides 'that the Corporation may at its discretion announce or refrain from announcing' that it has been given such a direction. The Director- General of the B.B.C., Mr Carleton Greene, has said that this is the important point as far as the Government's directive powers are concerned and it has so far protected the Corporation that 'no Government-not even in war-time-has made use of this power in connexion with any particular programme or item, and it is now pretty well politically unthinkable that it ever could be made use of.' This independence applies to overseas broadcasts of the B.B.C. as well, and, for example, the handling of such subjects as the Suez crisis and the various nuclear demonstrations, though they revealed deep divisions within Britain, bore no sign of Government-imposed restraint or Corporation timidity. New Zealanders may compare the treatment given by the N.Z.B.S. of New Zealand reactions to the same and similar subjects (including the Rugby tour of South Africa) and make their own comparisons and evaluations. They may also remark with some foreboding that the new Act leaves the Minister, rather than the Corporation, with the power to supervise short-wave broadcasts. All programmes from short-wave stations are to be approved by the Minister and he may require any programme or matter he wishes to be broadcast. The provisions of the Act which relate to the appointment of the Director-General raise more doubts about the prospective independence of the new Corporation. Under the B.B.C. Charter the 186 Corporation appoints the Director-General or Directors-General. The Government is not even consulted on the appointment. The New Zealand Director-General is to be appointed by the Govern- ment on the recommendation of the Corporation. Futhermore, the Minister fills any unexpected vacancy in the office. One of the bulwarks of the independence of any board and one of its most important tasks is its appointment of its chief executive. It is apparently to be denied the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation. The mere existence of a Corporation is no guarantee of independence from Ministerial direction. Public corporations have been set up in New Zealand that have no more independence in policy making than ordinary government departments. Much depends on powers taken and granted by Statute and more depends on the self-restraint exercised by Government. Much depends, too, on the type of service being rendered by a Corporation, and whether public opinion sanctions interference. Broadcasting is a type of service in which political meddling is resented if it becomes evident, and this factor, taken in conjunction with the considerable financial independence of the Corporation and its continuity of membership, should be sharp sword enough for three determined men. The Cor- poration may not be allowed to broadcast notice either of political directives they have received or of the extent of Ministerial influence in the appointment of their Director-General but they will certainly be able to make them known through the Press. There are two other questions of some importance raised by the Act. They bear upon advertising and private radio stations. Until 1959 it was required by law, and it was the practice, to provide an alternative service wherever a locality was served by a station from which advertising programmes were broadcast. The Corporation is still required to do this wherever practicable for sound broadcasting but not for television. There is also provision in the Act for the Corporation to conduct surveys to ascertain whether any locality is inadequately served by the existing broadcasting system and in such a case to call for applications for the setting up of privately owned and operated stations, and, after hearings, to make recommendations to the Minister. Private stations, I think we may assume, are something of a bogey. It is very unlikely that the Corporation would take the initiative in surrendering any of its functions to a private body in any locality where a station could be operated profitably; and the Labour Opposition's promise to cancel any private licences granted will make private bodies loth to embark on such an enterprise. Both private stations and commercial broadcasting from stations 187 operated by the Corporation do, however, constitute a threat to programme standards. Radio and television are forces whose potentiality for influencing the general culture of a society at all levels-in its artistic and musical tastes, its fashions, morality, religion, politics-we suspect, though we do not know, may be very great. There is some question whether such a force should be, to any extent, subject to the influence of a section of the population who are interested primarily in making it financially profitable or in using it to help them sell something. It is almost inevitable that selling time to advertisers means accepting some of the demands of advertisers in relation to programming. The advertiser wants programmes with the broadest possible appeal-pop music, soap operas, quiz shows. De gustibus non est disputandum, but it is worth insisting that in this, as in other fields, the needs of minorities-minorities, incidentally, who may be found within the majorities-should also be considered. An alternative to commercial television then, even though the latter is in the hands of the Corporation, should become a first priority.

Reviews

THE TURNING WHEEL. Ruth Dallas. The Caxton Press. ISS. THE POETRY of earth is never dead: more to the point here, it can never for long be out of fashion. When Ruth Dallas's Country Road appeared ten years ago (at a moment when there was a good deal of talk about the need for poetry in New Zealand to become more urban and less bucolic, less self-consciously insular and more self-consciously cosmopolitan) these short lyrical poems with their clearly marked regional setting and firm traditional technique seemed curiously above and beyond any literary battle. The 'island and time' themes were familiar, and were treated with unusual sensibility; the quality of the writing was undeniable. Miss Dallas's place was politely and respectfully indicated for her by our literary historians: 'lone poet of Southland', 'low-toned reticence' nicely adapted to that chilly environment, and so forth. Yet Mr McCor- mick at least perceived that this was a nature poet with a difference, definitely a thinking reed. He was prepared, in 1959, to risk the judgment : 'No poetry of recent times has shown at once equal fulfilment and equal promise.' How far does this second volume meet such expectations? Much 188 of the work it contains has already appeared in Landfall, and it does not bulk large. Two lyrical sequences, a group of six songs, and one free, impressionistic piece written for broadcasting. The last, we may note, is one of the few intimately autobiographical poems Miss Dallas has published. For once there is no distancing filter: we are brought very close to the immediate experience of a New Zealand childhood, two sisters 'Singing in the Back-yard'. Of the two sisters, we learn, it is the girl with the guitar who has become the mother of children, the girl devoted to canaries who has become the 'quarantined singer of songs'. Most striking here is the equanimity with which personal destinies are accepted, and the way sentimentality is avoided (in a poem of sentiment) by a single well-placed word. The 'Six Songs' are true songs, beautifully finished, catching without apparent effort an older English music: Each day the thrush is heard On pole or bough Singing as though no bird Found voice till now. Determined modernists, no doubt, will find it merely exasperating that anyone can continue to compose in so unfashionable a mode; not even an occasional Yeatsian rhythm will reconcile them to what might have given pleasure to their grandfathers. Yet Ruth Dallas, one may assume, would have an answer ready : Alas, alas that the ears of common men Should love the modem and not love the old. Thus it is that the lute in the green window Day by day is covered deeper with dust. And these lines (from one of Arthur Waley's versions of Po Chii-i) bring us to the two longer sequences, 'Letter to a Chinese Poet' and 'The Turning Wheel', which really measure the extent of this poet's progress since Country Road. An interesting essay might be written on the subject of Chinese and Japanese influences on European poetry in the twentieth century. Ezra Pound and Jmagism, Yeats and No drama, Klabund and Rilke--this is one phase; Brecht, and the influence of the Chinese Chalk Circle on his later plays, is another. In England, there has been the diffused influence of Arthur Waley's translations over a couple of generations, and the direct experience of a number of poets-from Hodgson and Blunden to Empson and Enright-who have lived for a time in the Far East. Even Within the narrower circle of New Zealand writing some links have been established: the translations and informal verses of Rewi Alley, the remarkable China poems of Robin Hyde. In all this, it is clear, writers have taken from the Eastern world whatever seemed most useful to them-a hint or a gimmick, a tone or a philosophy, 189 glimpses of another manner of life often imperfectly understood but none the less stimulating. The spirit can communicate even across language barriers, and in English we have been especially fortunate in our interpreters. However it happened (probably through the W aley translations, and reference to such works as his Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China and the delightful Life and Times of Po· Chii-i) Ruth Dallas developed the special sympathy for this most human and accessible of the great T'ang poets that prompted her 'Letter'. And what may have begun as a simple tribute or debt of gratitude for a new experience became this sequence which moves so freely in time and space, and compasses so wide a range of moods. A unity of spirit is established, and because the spirit of the older poet is so richly humane, so deeply rooted in traditional Chinese conceptions of an ultimately harmonious universe, the modem poem is strengthened at every point in its own deeply personal intuitions. A reading of the first part of this sequence in Landfall made it clear that Miss Dallas was writing with a new zest and confidence and a new sense of structure; now that the poem has appeared in full, it is seen as a really impressive work, carefully planned and integrated. Most of Po Chii-i's poems were occasional, dealing with small incidents or experiences that had moved him; many were in the form of letters to friends-especially to his closest friend, the poet Yiian Chen, or to members of his own family. Once this convention has been accepted, with the particular precedent of the poem Po wrote for his brother Hsing-chien that is mentioned in the opening lines : You, when your brother had been dead a year, Wrote him a letter full of family news there is nothing artificial about the way the sequence proceeds, with its recurring allusions to Po Chii-i's own poems (most of these allusions are self-explanatory, though a reading of Waley's Chinese Poems will certainly help). These poems have lived on and crossed the seas, as have rose and chrysanthemum, to take late root in the Antipodes; so have problems they raise of human behaviour and injustice, to which no satisfactory answer has been found. There are always compensations in natural beauty: even though No monastery is built in air; You would not find a pilgrim stair, Hermit sage, or man of prayer, But voices of the earth there. The central section of the 'Letter', which develops some critical apen;:us of New Zealand society, With the rather abrupt introduction of pioneer members of the poet's family, seems to me less certainly realized-these are the risks of a larger scheme, and a 190 technique of counterpomtmg European rhythms and Christian echoes produces, deliberately or not, a few false notes. But the last poems are very beautiful-The Void', 'Reeds', 'The Sea', 'The Year's End'; and the last of all, 'Beating the Drum' (the title refers back to the anecdote about Chuang Tzu recalled in the first lines) has an imaginative sweep and a purity of diction which seem to me the mark of major poetry: Warming a set of new bones In the old fire of the sun, in the fashion Of all men, and lions, and blackbirds, Finding myself upon the planet earth, Abroad on a short journey Equipped with heart and lungs to last Not as long as a house, or a peony rose, Travelling in the midst of a multitude Of soft and breathing creatures In skins of various colours, feathers, fur, A tender population For a hard ball spinning Indifferently through light and dark, I turn to an old poem, Fresh as this morning's rose, Though a thousand summers have shed their blooms Since the bones that guided brush or pen Were dust upon the wind. The poem ends-an 'Ash Wednesday' with Taoist instead of Christ- ian overtones-rather as if it too were an answer to the endings of 'The Waste Land' and 'The Hollow Men', and carries in its own way just as strong a conviction. 'The Turning Wheel' is a shorter sequence, pivoting upon an evocation of 'That harsh lizard-backed mountain range' of The Remarkables, Queenstown, which becomes the central symbol of the flux of natural history. If this cycle merely made vivid one poet's response to the revolutions of the seasons from summer to spring, and to the broader process of natural change-'Time at rest in moving cloud and tree'-it would be a memorable achievement. One finds here the same clear singing voice, and an even greater compression of thought and language: but with them, something of that attitude towards the universal laws of nature which Dr Waley has described (in The Way and its Power) as 'one not merely of resignation nor even of acquiescence, but a lyrical, almost ecstatic acceptance, which has inspired some of the most moving passages in Taoist literature'. The ultimate validity of such attitudes is not here in question; they will not appeal to every Westerner. But what is clear, I think, is that one New Zealand writer has got a very great deal from her reading of Chinese I9I poetry, and that it has helped her very considerably to extend the range of statement and structural power of her verse. ]ames Bertram

POETRY OF THE MAORI. Translations by Barry Mitcalfe. Paul's Book Arcade. I2s 6d. THIRTY POEMS. Barry Mitcalfe. Auckland: Hurricane House. 9s 6d. VISITORS to New Zealand have often expressed surprise that Maori poetry should have had so little influence, either stylistically or thematically, on the poetry of the pakeha. This is due in part to the strength of European literary tradition here, but also to the unfortunate fact that few writers can have had any direct contact with Maori poetry. (I must mention here that I myself do not know any Maori; for this reason, I should like to acknowledge the help given me by Mr S. M. Mead, of Whatawhata, who is well known as an authority on Maori language and culture: my comments, below, on certain points of translation, were all suggested by him.) For most people, the only means of access to Maori poetry is through translations, but until recently these have been so over- laid with English literary conventions and social preconceptions that anything essentially Maori in the originals has been almost completely obscured. Because of this, any new, accurate and vigorous translations, which are also. good poems in their own right, are to be welcomed both by pakeha poets and by the literary public in general: as well as the simple enjoyment new poetry may afford us, the chance to see things from another cultural view- point is always valuable, and these should be something Barry Mitcalfe's new translations give us. In his useful introduction to the collection, Mr Mitcalfe acknow- ledges certain limitations he has had to accept in order to produce satisfactory English poems as counterparts of the Maori originals; he lists, too, a number of stylistic devices which he has not been able to reproduce in translation. The versions of the waiata which follow employ irregular, generally short lines, with flexible rhythms, which both convey the dignity of movement often found in the originals, and largely avoid such irrelevant associations as must inevitably accompany more traditional and elaborate English verse forms. This alone is a great advance on most earlier translations : freed from echoes of familiar English verse, we may have a better chance of appreciating the Maori texts on their own merits. As poems in their own right, however, Mr Mitcalfe's translations are only moderately successful. Their greatest asset is their economy of line and phrase, but they suffer from an irritating lack of 192 subtlety in rhyming. Arbitrarily placed, seldom grouped more inventively than as couplets, and too often on flat, monosyllabic words, his rhymes frequently have a cheapness quite out of keeping with the tone and movement of the poetry. Indeed, rhyme might have been better not used at all, since it is not found in the Maori anyway, and where it occurs in the translations it rarely manages to look either natural or inevitable. Although we may grant the translator some freedom as far as the form of his English versions goes, we must ask for a certain accuracy in his rendering of imagery. By this I do not mean literal accuracy, but rather what might be termed 'truth to the original'; Mr Mitcalfe clearly realizes the complexities of the matter, saying, as he does in the Introduction (p.12), 'It is in the transfer of impact, of the many-sided image, not simply of the superficial meaning, that most Maori translations fall short.' However, it may not always be possible to convey more than one or two of the many sides at once. Here, for example, is Mr Mitcalfe's translation of the opening lines of 'He waiata mo te moe punarua' on p.69: Within me, thrusting endlessly Against the belly that betrayed me- Swollen now like Wharewera Hill- There's a little thing that would see If you are his father still. And, for comparison, the version given in Sir A. T. Ngata's Nga Moteatea, Part I, p.121: Within, alas, my thoughts are vainly thrusting outwards; It was this servile body which did me confound, Spread out now is my view of Wharewera Hill, Whilst inwardly I long for the man she now possesses- Quite apart from the completely different grammatical roles played by 'Wharewera Hill' in the two versions, there is in the latter no suggestion of the woman's carrying a child-a major difference which forces the reader to wonder which translation is more likely to be 'true to the original'; or whether some expression like the biblical 'her bowels yearned for . . .' might not be closer to the Maori, since the belly could be the seat of strong emotion such as this. Whatever the answer, Mr Mitcalfe might well have given a note indicating that alternative readings are possible, especially where the difference between them can be so great. Again, one might ask why he did not translate the word koro in the poem on P·34· For one thing, this makes it look untranslatable, which it is not (being a respectful term of address, equiva- lent to 'sir' or 'sire'); and for another, the reader who knows no Maori may, as I did, think it a term of abuse (also untranslatable, and probably also obscene), which again is far from the truth. 193 (I should mention here that Mr Mitcalfe's notes are generally in- formative and relevant, but in this case a dozen words on the meaning of koro would have been more valuable than the two paragraphs we are given on how to dry heads.) Yet another example of a misleading translation occurs on p.2o, in what is otherwise an admirable poem. Here, the damage is done by a kind of dislocation and re-setting of components in lines 6 and 7· In the Maori text, the woman Rangiaho is directly com- pared to 'the slender flax stem', but in Mr Mitcalfe's translation this phrase has been lifted across a break (marked by a full stop at the end of line 6), and used for a comparison of the woman's soul rising 'from the first to the second heaven', with an arrow shot into the air-a good image, certainly, but one impaired by the dislocation of the text needed to attain it. Here again Mr Mitcalfe's readers may be left wondering just how he is able to do this; and if they are confused, they may also feel a little mistrustful of him. And this would be a pity, since he has produced some lively and generally accurate translations, done from a difficult language-no mean accomplishment; and when in addition some of these achieve the authentic ring of poetry, we should only be the more grateful. If then I have queried the accuracy of some of Mr Mitcalfe's images, this is because it is mainly through the imagery that we may come to see the world through the eyes of the Maori poets, and the extent to which we are enabled to do this may give us a measure of the success of the translations. It is hardly surprising to find that some of the strongest pieces in Mr Mitcalfe's own Thirty Poems are on a Maori theme-for instance, his sequence 'The Parihaka Block'. As a whole, though, this collection suffers badly from its arrangement. The first five poems fail to make a good initial impression : metaphors are mixed (as in 'Most People': ' ... which others sheathe/ beneath a pose as sweet as death'), the thought is confused, as in the tortured anatomical imagery of 'Road past the Mountains', and there is a prevalent structural and grammatical weakness (the latter due perhaps to careless proof-reading), such as that in the third stanza of 'Landscape with Church, Pakanae'. The next group of poems (three sequences: 'Country District', 'The Bush : Two Views', and 'The Parihaka Block'), contains the best writing in the collection, but unfortunately they do not quite make up for the faults of the preceding poems. Although these sequences are by no means free from all the flaws: mentioned above, their structure is better organized, and Mr Mitcalfe manages to keep his metaphors from running away with him. In addition, he shows a deeper understanding of his subjects (farmers' wives, sharemilkers, trampers, Te Whiti and his followers), and strikes some telling images and expressions :

194 His land will not be measured in fingered five-pounds Brought from the back of beyond to behind the counter Gone from the calloused stubs to the soft flip of fingers Dabbling in notes like ducks in mud. ('One Man's Measure') Of the remaining poems in the volume, the most impressive is 'Cancer'; the others do not sustain the interest aroused belatedly by the three sequences, being in the main either trivial or inadequately worked out, and too many look suspiciously like make- weights. The same might be said of the last piece, 'Notes for a Biography'. This long, rambling composition contains a number of ideas which might potentially have formed the germs of a group of shorter poems; strung insecurely together by the biographical thread, these add up to no clear poetic statement. Although the title may be meant to excuse this, and to announce it as merely a work in progress, it is doubtful if the poem was worth publishing in its present state. Although this is an uneven collection, it is interesting to read it alongside Poetry of the Maori. As Mr Mitcalfe says himself, in order to translate waiata into English poetry 'a knowledge of poetry, both Maori and English, is desirable'. Perhaps then we may regard Thirty Poems partly as additional evidence of his qualifica- tions to translate Maori poetry. Alan Roddick

FACES IN THE WATER. Janet Frame. The Pegasus Press. qs. 6d. ICE COLD RIVER. Ruth France. Paul & Constable. r8s. 6d. HANG ON A MINUTE MATE. Barry Crump. Reed. I6S. jANET Frame's latest novel Faces in the Water is a striking report of what it is like to be mentally ill and an inmate of New Zealand psychiatric hospitals. Istina Mavet, the central figure, is consumed by unreasoning fears. In her own words 'I was put in hospital because a great gap opened in the ice-floe between myself and the other people whom I watched, with their world, drifting away through a violet coloured sea . . . .' She spends three separate periods in two different institutions, the first and last in the South Island, the middle period in the North. In a matter-of-fact prose that is accurate and detailed, the author conveys the horror of Istina Mavet's experience. The appearance and organization of each hospital, the characters of nurses, doctors and fellow patients, the inevitable callousness and cruelty that accompany chronic understaffing, the appalling sights, sounds and smells-these are registered by the eye of sanity and recorded by a born writer. 195 This makes the reportorial element sound paramount: but it is not so. Into her framework of meticulous observation and ordered objective statement Miss Frame has introduced a macabre surrealist structure of images, which convey the anguish, revulsion, lone- liness and compassion of a soul lost in an inhuman wilderness of casual brutality. The book is a moving exorcism of despair. 'You must forget all you have ever seen-go and live a normal life in the outside world', Istina is told at the end of the story. Her comment is-'By what I have written in this document you will see, won't you, that I have obeyed her?' This makes it clear that writing Faces in the Water provided a kind of catharsis; yet there is a touch of irony in the final question, which may imply that for Istina Mavet the horror is neither ultimate nor forgotten. However that may be, the firm design of the writer's poetic vision has wrought chaotic experience into a novel of unusual flavour. It offers a perceptive comment on the tragedy of the sensitive and the afraid in a conforming society. Miss Frame shows the hospital as a totalitarian microcosm-a society in which everything is supposedly done for the individual's benefit; where terror reigns, and humanity is forgotten by a ruling class whom power has utterly corrupted. In opposition to this corporate image she narrates the pilgrimage of the individual, through the circles of an Inferno that culminates in the refractory ward, 'in a room full of raging, screaming, fighting people, a hundred of them ... .'; cling- ing with determination to whatever shreds she can of humanity; responding to form and colour in nature; remembering the far-off songs of childhood; exchanging bawdy talk with the men patients -anything rather than '(being) silent, just being Lawn Lodge people and knowing there was no hope for us'. Istina Mavet is by nature a solitary. Other societies have been more tolerant of such people; in the middle ages she might well have become a religious in a closed order. But modern life makes no concessions to the solitary. In defining the terms of a world of individual martyrdom with such haunting power Miss Frame has written a novel that will endure. Ice Cold River tells the story of a family Christmas celebration on a Canterbury farm shattered by a sudden flood which disrupts communications, maroons the party on the top floor, and leaves them uncomfortably aware of uncontrollable forces which govern their lives. Into this simple narrative is woven an intricate fabric of personal relationships which, the writer seems to suggest, parallel the blind fury of the river in the power with which they sweep through the lives of the individual members of the family. Mrs France, by juxtaposing the trivial round of domestic routine and !9{} the thunderclap irruption of disaster and emergency action, has achieved a nightmarish effect, one that reaches its climax in the scene where the family solemnly proceeds with Christmas dinner while water gurgles round the piles of the house. With Mrs France's pictures of natural landscape and with her narrative of action little fault can be found. Here her writing is taut, acutely observant and sensitive to atmosphere. The great plains, the latent power of the river, are painted in a prose that charges them with imaginative life. With the human figures that move to and fro on her grand canvas the writer is not so confident. Though observation and sen- sitivity are still evident, and though Mrs France works hard at giving realistic insight into the world of this family collection of heterogeneous humanity, she cannot be said to be uniformly successful. Not that the characters are without individuality; the group (composed of three married couples, their children, a maiden aunt, a maiden great-aunt and a pair of grandparents) is nicely contrasted and assorted so that an impression of life is readily forthcoming from their doings. But it is life of a selfconscious and fussy kind. One feels, as various groups are summoned and depart, that all is done before spotlights : and this impression is heightened by the incident of the mysterious appearance and disappearance of the ruby brooch, a cheaply melodramatic detail which is of little obvious relevance, in that it adds little to the known lineaments of the individual characters involved in it. Much of the action is seen through the eyes and experienced through the reflections of the timid and uncertain Julie (whose relations with her husband Thomas remind one of those between Stanley and Linda Burnell). The childless Julie is haunted by the childhood memories which flood in on her as she revisits the old family home: these memories of the past round out the picture of the present. Yet here too inner monologues are occasionally too trivial and diffuse: sometimes significance is cheaply bought by a histrionic change of mood which clashes with the careful realism of the narrative method. Mrs France's novel existed first in embryonic form in a poem of Paul Henderson's-'After Flood'-of which the final lines are resonant with echoes of doomsday, ... a day When there will be too little warning, too Little concrete, and no safe shepherding from disaster. Mrs France has domesticated disaster in this novel : her interest has passed over into the family portrait: the disaster passes, the family moves on about its affairs, a crisis of relationships is resolved. Altogether Ice Cold River, though not without tedious passages, is a richer, more satisfying book than The Race. 197 It would be wrong not to mention the very poor job of book production Constables have done with Ice Cold River: it is far below the high standards invariably set by Paul's: nor is there any acknowledgement of Colin McCahon's dust jacket. Barry Crump's second book roars along at an enviable pace and assaults the reader with varied incident and lively dialogue. Is it carping to detect some strain in the maintenance of these qualities? Sam Cash, the archetype of the woman-hating footloose Kiwi, tells young Jack innumerable stories in between adventures: some are good stories, some seem slightly laboured. The Kiwi lingo is as pungent, the varied scenes of outdoor toil as vivid as those in A Good Keen Man: but Sam Cash, the versatile hardbitten rogue, is less engaging than Crumpie the improving deerstalker. The Eden- like freshness of the first book has gone. In its place there is a gesture towards a plotted form that is little more than a gesture. Apparently equally anxious to establish Sam Cash as a heroic figure in mill and stockyard, and to avoid the conventionally heroic trait of devotion to a cobber, the author has left Sam Cash with only a vestigial emotional equipment. Mr Crump's vein is not worked out but it is showing diminishing returns. In the words of his hero 'A man's got to keep moving'. Paul Day

Correspondence

To THE EDITOR SIR : After two consecutive three-year terms, now concluded, as a member of the Literary Fund Advisory Committee, I find a good deal to disagree with in your consideration of the committee's workings. I do not, for instance, accept your dictum that the subsidizing of books which would be commercially unviable is the chief purpose of the Fund. Personally I regard the helping of writers by direct grants to sustain them while attempting creative work as its major function. Nor would I agree to restrictions on the term of office. It sur- prises me that you should so unquestioningly slip into our common assumption that things are better done when everybody has a turn (for all persons are equal in capacity) so beloved of the broadcasting service, which smells so essentially just in our egalitarian nostrils. Actually there is a case for a longer term. I am sure that each of the two committees in which I served made less adequate decisions in its first year of office than in the succeeding two. Your 198 reference to the chairman overlooks that his long experience adds considerably to his value in the committee, and the peevish tone of that reference sounds perilously like another common attitude of ours, the distrust of any form of distinction. If he has been there too long, what are we to think, sir, of your own case? With the aid of public money you have imposed your taste for fifteen years now-with one brief holiday-on the readers of Landfall. Should you not hand over to a committee, changed every six months, in the interests of fairness and variety? The restriction of grants to publishers to cover their actual loss, which has attractions as a principle, would be difficult to Work and would probably eliminate one present benefit of subsidizing books, a substantial reduction in their price to the public. Pub- lishers' actual costs, the size of the edition and the price of books are rigorously scrutinized and the conditions of any grant tie publishers down to a moderate, set return, which they receive in full only if they sell all copies of an edition. In any case it is questionable whether a publisher is less entitled than the printer whose bill he pays, or the bookseller who receives a third of the published price of a book, to some return for his work and risk. There might be some warrant for a requirement that publishers should pay back something to the Fund if a book goes into a second, unsubsidized edition within a year of publication (the time factor is of some importance here), but this might prove merely a deterrent to second editions. You flatter the Literary Fund Advisory Committee when you imply that it should have deduced from reading the proofs that A Good Keen Man would be a best-seller. If such predictions were possible, publishing would cease to be the most hazardous of all business enterprises. David Hall

SIR : The new English syllabus that Dr Margaret Dalziel described as a 'disaster' was based on one prepared by the Revision Committee of which I was the Chairman. She has so seriously misrepresented both it and the bulletins of suggestions that accompany it that I ask for space to correct her more flagrant errors. I do so as one who at the same time strongly agrees with most of her assump- tions about education-for example, that the brighter children will have the main responsibility for 'guarding and transmitting the heritage'; that learning is primarily an intellectual matter demand- ing much thought and effort; and that the teacher's job is to teach children what they ought to know and to get them responding to what is worth responding to. 199 I share too her 'mistrust of large and grandiose aims' in education, but she has obviously on this occasion let it get away with her; for by wilfully isolating the aim of education for citizenship and enlarging on its presumed dangers she has distorted the statement of aims in the language and reading syllabuses from which she quotes. This particular aim, incidentally, was not mentioned in the Revision Committee's syllabus, but I cannot see that in its full context in the two official syllabuses it is either dangerous or unclear. In the context 'citizen' goes with 'individual', 'person'; 'clearer thinking, more adequate expression'; 'full intellectual and emotional development', etc.-a conjunction that gives no warrant whatever for her clucks of alarm. In any discussion of the meaning of 'good citizen' and 'education for democracy' that I have taken part in with students and teachers there has invariably been a ready naming of the traditional democratic virtues, and never any toleration of the idea that truth is determined by counting votes, in the classroom or anywhere else. I think, indeed, that such terms in the above context are decidedly clearer and much less grandiose than her 'helping them [children] to understand themselves a little better, in relation to the Creator and creation'. Miss Dalziel is wrong in asserting that 'the 1961 syllabus implies the principle of social promotion' and that 'behind all this insistence on creating conditions rather than on teaching and learning lies a lack of confidence in the importance of the mind'. I can assure her that the Revision Committee did not intend to imply any such principle; its intention was to produce a syllabus that, properly applied, would engage children in work that claimed their full attention and demanded the best efforts of all, including the most able. We have a good deal of evidence that the new syllabus does come nearer to this ideal than the earlier syllabuses. A very large majority of the nearly 1000 teachers who took part in the three years' trial of the draft syllabus strongly approved of its principles and prescriptions; the general conclusion was that their children now wrote and spoke with greater fluency, coherence and zest and with no loss of correctness. The teachers who attended the 1958 W allis House conference on the syllabus all spoke of the marked improvement that had occurred in their pupils' attitude to their work in English. All also stressed their own much greater interest in and enjoyment of teaching. I spent a whole day recently at a refresher course for the teaching of gifted children listening to the teacher of the top class of a large intermediate school as he described and illustrated his use of the syllabus. The amount of work of high quality done by his children (I.Qs n6-I4I) was remarkable. In the hands of this teacher the new syllabus is certainly providing for these abler children work that claims their full attention and demands their best efforts. I had a good deal to do with the making of the 1946 syllabus, 200 and think I am in a better position than most people to compare the new syllabus with it and the 1928 one. I am sure that no teacher, however able, who was using the older syllabuses could have got from children work of a range and quality comparable with that described above. In the words of the 1961 syllabus the teacher had 'established conditions that encouraged and challenged his children to think, and to use language to further their thinking', and was helping them to do this well by giving direct lessons on usage, grammar, order, style, whenever he thought them necessary. Unlike Miss Dalziel he did not for a moment imagine that the syllabus gave him any authority not to teach directly as often as he thought such teaching was needed. It is Miss Dalziel's opinion that the above formulation of a teacher's job, implying that children should 'understand what they do and see point in doing it' (Syllabus p.2), is nonsense. And she counters with : 'If we love the child and the heritage . . . we shall not be afraid to say, "Learn this now and some day you will understand".' Just what in her teaching of English to primary school children would she apply this method to? To poetry? Making a class of primary-school children learn, say, Keats's 'Ode to Autumn' on the ground that some day they will understand it seems to me sure and certain proof that we have little love for either them or the heritage. The chapters on 'Creative Writing' and 'Reading and Writing Poetry' in the second and third of the bulletins (she seems to have read the first two of these with the same kind of unfair selectivity as she did the statement of aims) show something of what teachers who love both child and heritage can do to help the one and transmit the other. To grammar? I can think of nothing more likely to defeat its own purpose. To what then? And who is writing nonsense? Miss Dalziel is severely critical of the syllabus for not containing a fairly precise statement of the work to be covered in each class and the standards to be attained by the children in it. The relativism she complains of has been somewhat accentuated by the Department's abridgement of the syllabus we handed to it, but it occurs in both our version and the Department's because the ways of learning and using language on which the syllabus as a whole is based do not permit the work to be divided into tidy progressive stages. Unlike the earlier syllabuses, this is a language-in-action- now syllabus, asking for the use of language by children in real contexts, purposefully, as the means to a desired, present end; and they have to be helped to use it correctly and appropriately in these contexts here and now. The use of the common devices of punctuation and many questions of usage are likely to arise at every stage after the children learn to write; punctuation and correct usage must therefore be taught as they are needed for the successful performance of the purposeful tasks that the children 201 are currently engaged in-story, poem, description, explanation, summary or report in social studies or science, etc. The teaching of these skills is necessarily relative-to the purpose of the speaking or writing to be done, to each child's stage of mental and emotional development, to his intelligence and present achievement. But it is wrong to infer that this relativism means having no reliable measure of progress and attainment. As the chapter on Evaluation in the third bulletin (pp.78-82) clearly shows, regular checks of specific kinds are to be kept on the progress and attainment of the pupils by class teachers, headteachers, and inspectors. Finally a few words in reply to her contention that our primary- school teachers are not themselves competent enough in the use of English to apply the syllabus properly. I agree that very many teachers (including post-primary and university teachers) do not know and use the language well, but I am convinced also that the teachers I have mentioned and many others, including dozens of infant mistresses with normal nerves and legs and only one pair of hands, are getting better results from this syllabus than from its predecessor. The Revision Committee knew that it would be difficult to apply-hence the recommendation to the Department that special help be given to teachers, through in-service courses and bulletins of suggestions. Several dozen such courses have already been held, and there will be many more. The three bulletins are already in teachers' hands. No previous syllabus was tested, explained, prepared for as this one has been. Miss Dalziel's fears of disaster are liars. W. f. Scott

SIR: In his review of Joseph ]ones's The Cradle of Erewhon (Land- fall 61) Dr]. C. Beaglehole appreciates the achievement of the book but disagrees with its conclusion that Samuel Butler's return to England was unfortunate for his life and work. Dr Beaglehole reverts to the familiar argument that Butler was 'an English eccentric' and discredits Dr ]ones's conclusion by criticizing details peripheral to the main argument. The author is the appropriate person to reply, but his friends in this country (to whom he dedicated the work) will be as disappointed in Dr Beaglehole's inability to appreciate its conclusion as the latter's friends must be saddened by the meretricious train of evidence which caused this lapse of scholarship. Dr ]ones did not come to this country 'to find out what more he could' about Butler; he is as much 'a Texan professor' as Dr Beaglehole is a 'Victorian' professor; and he does not speak with 'the voice of Texas', whatever that may mean. Dr ]ones's 'effort to interpret more adequately than has hitherto been done the meaning New Zealand had for Butler's life and 202 work' was undertaken to counter the agreement of English critics that New Zealand stood for a pot of gold in Butler's life and not for the beginning of the rainbow of his work. Dr }ones's conclusion to his study of 'New Zealand' in Erewhov. is marked by his dismay that New Zealand literary scholars had allowed this English ignorance so to restrict their understanding of Butler that they treated him as a distinguished visitor; offering an alternative, attempting to estimate the deeper meaning of New Zealand in Butler's work, is Dr }ones's fit way of expressing the gratitude he feels for his own experience in this country in 1953. He came to us a professor of nineteenth century American literature, and he left us dedicated to the study of Commonwealth literature, to which, in part, his eyes had been opened during his stay here. That he is not the only Fulbright scholar to have had this experience is shown by Dr Joan Gries's action in founding on her return from New Zealand the Commonwealth Literature group of the Modern Language Association, of which group Dr }ones is now chairman. I would not intrude these personal matters, sir, were it not that Dr Beaglehole in his Margaret Condliffe Memorial Lecture, The New Zealtmd Scholar, demonstrates a similar illumination, one that has likewise had a permanent effect on his life and work. That lecture is even more pertinent to the subject of Butler, for Dr Beaglehole confesses that it was this illumination which saved him from the eccentric (and very English) notion that his life could be profitably spent in walking 'a sheep trail back and forth to the British Museum'. Dr Beaglehole' s inability to appreciate the similarity of a 'New Zealand' experience in the cases of Butler, }ones and himself comes, I suggest, from his English notions not only about Butler but also about Texas. The notion that there is something risible in the very idea of professors in Texas reveals a provincial attitude which causes the New Zealand scholar to speak with the voice of Wellington. R. T. Robertsov.

SIR : Since Mr Fairburn chooses my review as a testing ground for a number of his critical devices I would like to make a few remarks as to their 'credibility'. In the first place his missiles fall on friendly territory-only the fall-out finds its mark and rather indiscriminately at that. I am happy to subscribe to the belief that much of post-war western painting is romantically decadent but I am at a loss to understand Mr Fairburn's examples. What is decadent about Al-Bengston, Lundeberg, or Diebenkorn (who has been likened to Bonnard, and Hopper, for example)? Mr Fairburn's missiles fall short because they are riddled with 203 mechanical faults. It would be a mistake on his part to assume that I described the exhibition in general terms because I was unable to examine particular paintings at length. The nature of the show demanded a general treatment and Mr Fairbum has completely misread my review if he thinks that half the space was devoted to discovering that 'the geographical hypotheses on which the exhibition was built were all but meaningless'. My purpose was to re- define these geographical hypotheses and that should have been 'obvious at a glance'. The best paintings supported, to my mind, such a redefinition and more than twenty works (in a collection of eighty-one) are referred to in the course of my argument. In view of the space available the coverage was fairly broad and I considered a broad coverage essential. Certainly my judgements were subjective, I would not want them to be anything else. I do not, however, accept the imputation that it is a critic's duty to preface his remarks with an exposition of his aesthetic. It is sufficient that his words make good sense. If my 'catch phrases', as Mr Fairbum chooses to call them, do not make good sense I would expect him to question them on the basis of their objective meaning and submit the reasons for his bewilderment. Furthermore, I would hasten to add that one does not need my catch phrases to come to 'inflated judgements' etc. Mr Fair- bum knows as well as I do that the classical criteria (is this a catch phrase?) of which he speaks can be and are used to arrive at the most peculiar conclusions. I refer him to Bernard Berenson on modem painting. I refuse to be press-ganged into an imaginary world-wide demolition network of critics committed to laying charges beneath the 'classical criteria of line, colour, tone, shape, etc.'. It is surely a commonplace to say that a picture is made up of lines, colours, tones and shapes and that we react to these things in a picture when we look at it. It is also a commonplace to say that a painter uses these elements to make a statement and I am more interested in what an artist has to say than in complimenting him on his delicate use of chiaroscuro. Wystan Curno·w

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