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- ,_) LA;A(JJFA LL A New Zealand Quarterly edited by Charles Brasch and published by The Caxton Press CON'l'EN'l'S Notes 311 Three Poems, Michae!Jackson 312 A Boy's Will, Janet Frame 314 The Root of the Matter, Miroslav Holub, translated by !an Milner 324 Beginnings, Maurice Duggan 331 Take Care to Leave the Brush-Marks!, Alan Roddick 339 The Visit, Michael Gifkins 341 Two Poems, Norman Bilbrough 345 Nobby Clark, Alistair Campbell 346 An Imaginary Conversation, Frank Sargeson 349 On a Five-fold Screen, Ruth Dallas 357 Beginnings, Colin McCahon 360 Two Poems, James K. Baxter 365 Fairburn, C. K. Stead 367 COMMENTARIES: Australian Letter, Judith Wright 382 Drama in Auckland, MacD. P.Jackson 385 REVIEWS: Sings Harry, Robert N ola 392 Pig Island Letters, Lawrence Jones 393 The Needle's Eye, For the Rest of Our Lives, A.J. Gurr 396 William Pember Reeves, W. H. Oliver 399 Meanjin, Preoccupations, Australian Literature, Terry Sturm 403 Correspondence, Peter Platt, John Miller, Jean Ann Anderson 411 Windows for a Chapel, Colin McCahon Cover design, Anthony Stones VOLUME TWENTY NUMBER FOUR DECEMBER 1966 LANDFALL is published with the aid of a grant from the New Zealand Literary Fund. LANDFALL is printed and published by The Caxton Press at 119 Victoria Street, Christchurch. The annual subscription is 30s. net post free, and should be sent to the above address. All contributions used will be paid for. Manuscripts should be sent to the editor at the above address; they cannot be returned unless accompanied by a stamped and addressed envelope. :1\(Etes EARLY SPRING brought shows by two painters, Doris Lusk and Margot Philips, whose persistent exploration of their own way of seeing and rendering gives their work a strength and authenticity beyond fash- ion; it is individuality such as theirs that will in time give not only painting but all the arts in New Zealand a distinct character. Dunedin Art Gallery presented in August a retrospective show of seventy-three works by Doris Lusk, chosen by the artist from some thirty years of painting. The show gave a very moving record of a painter's struggle to find and state, through her involvement with the landscape chiefly, her own painterly identity, which is nearly always an artist's hardest, life-long work. There seem to be no theo- retical preoccupations, either aesthetic or philosophical, behind Miss Lusk's painting, no unifying impulse except the responsive senses and mind, which sometimes she can harness together and sometimes not. After several remarkably sure and satisfying early oils, both landscape and figure, her work shows repeated uncertainty in aim and method; until in her water-colours of the sixties, especially those done at Onekaka this year, she struck a fine maturity of ease and subtle richness. A few oils of this year have something of the same quality, which marks her movement away from rather literal state- ment towards an airier, larger, more open apprehension of the mys- terious, atmospheric beauty of the country. Her approach and devel- opment, although very personal, in a general way are not untypical among painters and writers; she is almost a representative artist. Margot Philips cannot be called typical, and she works rather differently. She began painting only some fifteen years ago, in middle life, yet even her early paintings are quite sure in aim and method. Her first one-man show, at the New Vision Gallery, Auckland, in September, contained eight earlier works and twenty-four more recent ones, all landscapes in oil. In most of them, people, houses, settlements, appear only in the distance if at all, often on the horizon on top of a hill or ridge. She paints scenes distilled in the mind from real landscapes closely observed and deeply pondered; the intense greens of the W aikato, the wide, open airiness of small lakes in the hills under big skies, the dizzying pale sand and rock of the Negev Desert which she visited recently. In her best work, as in Doris Lusk's, any influences have been absorbed out of recognition; each artist is doing what is entirely her own and now our own; work of the loving imagination, truthfully of this time, of this place. 311 MICHAEL JACKSON Execution WHERE thousands of tiered cheering faces threw their fears away and a blue flag broke, crossed by red and bearing a gold star, another Independence was handed over like an unwanted child six years ago on this very square. But today in another throng, pressing leaves and shadows on the sunlit square white monuments surround, where I took coffee so many evenings, chatted with friends, bought peanuts from orphan vendors, or scorned the fat landlords of Europe buying cheap artefacts among the G.I.'s smell of soap, and brazen accents ... there, they are hanging four men. I cannot imagine if cheers will go up as I heard they did in other dark ages. I have never seen the fear, as it is called, of men found guilty of God knows what purpose, sentenced to be hanged accused before not justice but their own damned history which once was ours, and then, inheriting it like a suicide in the family, mine for one year. An elegy to myself is all I have put down, turned to the wall of radio announcements and dirt in a square where gibbets summarize the dawn, and tiered stands for dignitaries wait the first tin blare of the band's anthem. I too found independence there, I thought, but now my independence is these men's act. I have overthrown no government, I have taken insults, 312 risked nothing, given only my dreams a decent burial, and come back home to little else except the bitten hours after bad news, and time in which all done to prove our worth is trapped and hung on history's gate, warning us away from this green plot upon a blackened ground. :J(gt Only Strings THE guitarist's melancholy touches not only strings but continents. Couched in the dark west wing a bird soon flees resounding passages. Heartsick a bat flies heavenward; My eye encircles all but blue. I hear the desperate sentiment of misplaced love beside a wall. Impossible accompaniment has overcome the notes we had in us to play. Sadness begins with ends upon a threshold somewhere near Equador. Somewhere too when your guitar begins the bird becomes what I cannot say. The 'R.!;d 1\gad THE red road led to nowhere I could go Nowhere was a village I would never know: For days I drove companionless along it The forest had no horizon I wore a mask of red dirt The wheel steered me My body ached At night I lay awake in terror at the night: 313 People everywhere Saw to me with the same indifference They shared their food I passed through country Only on a map And came back along the same road Nothing in particular fulfilled: The red road led to nowhere I could go Nowhere was a village I would never know. JANET FRAME u113oy's Will ALL THE WILD summer holidays Peter was angry. The rain came down heavily almost every day but it was not the rain that angered, it was people-family, visitors, neighbours who moved judging, complaining in their subtropical sweat and steam with their damp skin clinging to the new plastic-covered chairs in the sitting room and their voices tired and their eyes puzzled when they looked at him, as if they did not understand; and then he grew puzzled too for he did not know what they were trying to understand. He wanted to be left alone. His fourteen years belonged to him like trophies. He sensed that this, his fifteenth year, would be so much prized by himself and others that he would need to fight to preserve it for himself. Everyone had suddenly become intensely interested, seeming to want to share him and explore him. In the first week of the holidays when in answer to his mother's question, Where have you been?, he said, -Nowhere, his aunt Lily who had come to stay began to chant with an inexplic- able triumph in her thick country throat, 'Where have you been? -Nowhere. -What did you do? -Nothing.' -It's begun, Cara, she said softly. She was standing by the telephone pressing her hand gently upon the cradle, circling her index finger on the black polished curves. 314 -It's begun, Cara. Her hand quivered as she spoke. What did she mean by her chant? 'Nowhere, nothing, no-one?' Why did everyone know so much about him? About his future too, what he would become, where he would live, how he would feel in his most secret self? His aunt had said, -In a few years, Cara, he'll want to break away. You can see the signs already. His mother replied, -As I've told you, Lily, it's a scientific career for him. With his I.Q. His I.Q. was high. He'd heard them say it was so high it couldn't be marked. His mother had said in tones of awe as if she had been describing an elusive beast instead of his intelligence that it was so high it had 'gone off the page', while Aunt Lily had replied in a sour dry voice, -These tests are not as reliable as they were once thought to be. Then his aunt Lily sighed as if she wanted something that would never be given to her and though he possessed skates, a transistor, a half-share with his brother Paul in a dinghy and there were few things he wanted desperately, he identified the feeling Aunt Lily had and he felt sorry for her with her hairy chin and her footballer's legs.