Towards a History of Transtasman Literary Relations
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The Neglected Middle Distance: Towards a History of Transtasman Literary Relations TERRY STURM Prefatory Note. The following article was originally delivered as a public lecture at the University of Auckland. In some intro• ductory remarks I spoke of contemporary economic and political developments in Transtasman relations as giving some urgency to the more specific literary and cultural questions raised in the lecture. I was also conscious — in thinking about the ways in which New Zealand and Australian literature might be related — of pressures from a very different quarter : the burgeoning academic industry in comparative Commonwealth literary studies. I remain obstinately sceptical about many of its tendencies, and the lecture was an implicit argument against at least one of them : the anti-historical tendency in comparative studies to treat authors and works, and the national traditions they belong to, as autonomous, self-contained totalities. What is attempted here is a mapping of the historical contours of Australian cultural influ• ence on, and presence in, New Zealand literature: a continuous, shifting history within which any comparative literary analysis needs, in my view, to be situated. JLHE TITLE OF THIS ESSAY is a phrase used by Allen Curnow in a longish review of twentieth-century Australian poetry which appeared in the second number of the New Zealand magazine Landfall in 1947.1 Its implication was that New Zealanders had concerned themselves too little with understanding a neighbour• ing culture which occupied the "middle distance" of their out• ward perspective — too much, perhaps, with the Anglo-European and American horizons beyond. Until very recently, awareness of each other's literature has been at an even lower ebb, perhaps, 30 TERRY STURM than when Allen Curnow wrote. The serious authors most widely read in each other's country — Patrick White in New Zealand, for example, or Janet Frame in Australia — are read largely, I think, as a result of valuations conferred in the more distant Anglo-American "international" community, reinforced by inter• national publication. Ironically, the availability of Australian books in New Zealand (and vice versa) is largely dependent on the decisions of British- or American-based publishing firms whose international marketing operations are large enough to include both Australia and New Zealand. Very few books of poetry, serious fiction, or drama published by local firms within each country are ever seen in the bookshops of the other. One effect of these (and other) pressures is that there is no established discourse about Australian-New Zealand literary rela• tions in the literary historiography or criticism of either country: no documentation of the extent or pattern of literary influence, interaction, conflict, movement into or out of each other's culture — let alone any theoretical effort to account for such relations, or for their absence. Within New Zealand, the main emphasis — in discussion of matters of literary influence, dependence, and adaptation — has always been on Anglo-New Zealand relations from the colonial period onwards, which as a result have been exceptionally fully documented. More recently, in the wake of developments in New Zealand poetry in the 1970's, questions about American influence have also begun to prompt discussion and debate (though an adequate history of these relations, which would need to begin in the colonial period — at least as early as the 1850's — has also yet to be traced). In what follows I offer some hypotheses about Trantasman literary relations as they have affected New Zealand, together with some examples of the ways in which they might be tested, and of areas which need to be explored. What is involved, however, is not simply the filling in of a gap, the provision of information. Insofar as Australian cultural influence on New Zealand is significant, existing accounts (or explanations) of Anglo-American influence will be affected, and so too will existing versions of the internal development of New Zealand literature. The argument falls into two parts. In the first, I suggest that THE NEGLECTED MIDDLE DISTANCE 31 Australia's main cultural influence on New Zealand has always been expressed (and still is) through the forms and media of popular culture, and that this influence is much more extensive than is usually recognized (partly because High Cultural pre• dispositions have excluded it from literary criticism's angle of vision ). Its effect has not only been to transmit Australian values and attitudes, and reinforce stereotypical images and myths of Australian life, but also to mediate, in different ways, the values and practices of British and (increasingly, since the Second World War) American culture to New Zealand. The American• ization of New Zealand culture is nowhere as advanced as it is in Australia (a recent survey of Australian attitudes, announced in the news media, showed that Australians themselves felt, a little nostalgically, that New Zealanders were about twenty years be• hind them) — but much of what has occurred in New Zealand, as with British influence earlier, has occurred not simply through direct contact with the United States, but through and because of Australia. The second part takes High Culture as its province. It looks briefly at the history of New Zealand involvement in Australasian poetry anthologies, and at a number of differing réponses by New Zealand writers to the Australian presence in "the middle dis• tance." My aim here, as in the discussion of Australian popular culture in New Zealand, is to suggest that these relations are also more extensive than they are usually acknowledged to be, and that the patterns they reveal raise questions about the conditions and problems of writing in New Zealand as significant as those customarily asked about New Zealand's relation to English or American traditions. I My first examples of Australian popular culture are the com• ponents of a personal image remembered from a New Zealand childhood in the 1940's and early 1950's. I think they would be fairly representative — at least for a boy — during that period, although they seem heterogeneous. There were encounters, at primary school and elsewhere, with the popular Australian tradi- 32 TERRY STURM tion of songs and bush ballads dating from the 1890's — anony• mous songs like "Click Go the Shears" as well as Banjo Pater- son's "The Man from Snowy River," "The Man from Ironbark," and "Waltzing Matilda," which were absorbed alongside the British poems of Masefield, Newbolt, and Alfred Noyes. My first contact with the larrikin elements within that tradition — since I missed the popular vogue in New Zealand, in the 1920's and 1930's, for the "Sentimental Bloke"—was a comic strip called "Bluey and Curly," syndicated in the Auckland Star, which offered an appealing mixture of racy knockabout farce, horseplay, and mateship, presented in a recognizable Australian idiom and environment. There was also the field of popular magazine journalism, in which Australian enterprise — then as now — dominated the New Zealand market: providing a wide range of home-and family-centred journals like the Australian Women's Weekly and New Idea, alongside general interest magazines like Australia Post, Pix, and People with their glamourized and hedonistic images of Australian surf, sand, and turf, as well as glossier products like Man and motoring magazines, which catered for the escapist fantasies of a male readership.2 Most of these magazines were based on British or American models, whose general conventions, styles, and attitudes were thus transmitted to their New Zealand readership, alongside the more specifically Australian stereotypes and images they pro• moted. Man, for example, was originally modelled, in the 1930's, on the American magazine Esquire, and itself reflected a shift in popular cultural allegiances, within Australia, from Great Britain to the United States. Despite its eariy efforts to marry this American allegiance with an Australian identity — many of its 1930's contributors, like Ion Idriess, were regular writers for the Sydney Bulletin — its postwar history was one of increasing Americanization until its demise in the 1960's, when Playboy moved in and took over the market. At the other end of the scale, cartoons like "Saltbush Bill" in Pix (the title presumably based on Banjo Paterson's character of that name) offered farci• cal images derived from the earlier myth of outback Australia constructed as a literary tradition in the 1890's: comic swaggies and farmers, wearing grotesquely misshapen hats with corks THE NEGLECTED MIDDLE DISTANCE 33 dangling, surrounded by swarms of malevolent flies ; a climate of intolerable extremes of drought and flood, infested with talking snakes and goannas; farms going back to wrack and ruin, popu• lated by mangy dogs, impoverished cattle, and decrepit horses; and finally the racist stereotype of the comic aborigine, depicted as cheerfully enjoying the squalor of humpy life and, in compari• son with the perpetually discomforted Europeans, possessed of a childlike simplicity and guile. New Zealand radio, in the 1940's and 1950's, also provided a significant outlet for Australian enterprise. One of New Zealand's most popular programmes in those years was an Australian family serial, which ran to several thousand episodes in Australia itself — a serialization based on fictional sketches which had originally appeared in the 1890's in the Bulletin, and been published as a book in 1899 entitled On Our Selection. Its author was Arthur Hoey Davis, his pen-name "Steele Rudd," and the title of the radio series was derived from its two main characters, "Dad and Dave." In fact Steele Rudd wrote numer• ous follow-up "Selection" volumes, and by 1940 On Our Selec• tion alone was estimated to have sold a quarter of a million copies. In 1912 the first of a number of stage versions appeared, starring Bert Bailey as Dad Rudd, which successfully toured New Zealand.