Journal of New Zealand Studies Leaving the Straight Path: Cultural Time Travel in the Seventies 34 Compare Claudia Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi, Wellington, 1987. 35 Ward, ʻInterpreting the Treaty of Waitangiʼ, p.100. Leaving the Straight Path: Cultural 36 For instance: Giselle Byrnes, ʻJackals of the Crown? Historians and the Treaty Claims Processʼ, The Public Historian, 20, 2 (Spring 1998), pp.9-23; Bronwyn Dalley and Jock Time Travel in the Seventies Phillips, eds, Going Public. The Changing Face of New Zealand History, Auckland, 2001; Michael Bassett, ʻMichael Bassett Talks to Virginia Larsonʼ, North and South, August 2002, pp.63-68; Giselle Byrnes, The Waitangi Tribunal and New Zealand History, MARK WILLIAMS South Melbourne, 2004. 37 Quoted in P.G. McHugh, ʻConstitutional Theory and Maori Claimsʼ, in I.H. Kawharu, Victoria University of Wellington ed., Waitangi. Maori and Pakeha Perspectives of the Treaty of Waitangi, Auckland, 1994 (c. 1989), p.162. 38 Ward in Renwick, Sovereignty and Indigenous Rights, pp.124, 126-7. See also Alan Ward, An Unsettled History. Treaty Claims in New Zealand Today, Wellington, 1999. In 1986, the Canadian poet, George Bowering, published a poem in Landfall A condensed version is Wardʼs 1999 Stout Annual Lecture at Victoria University of which describes encountering the past when you visit New Zealand: Wellington, 24 May 1999: ʻAn Unsettled Historyʼ, published in New Zealand Studies, 9, 2 (1999), pp.30-37. It makes the point that the Treaty of Waitangi was not drafted Everyone agrees, as a legal or constitutional document but to embody a political compact between Maori when you visit New Zealand and the Crown to join under the Crownʼs aegis to build a functioning nation-state (to deal with new exigencies) where no functioning nation-state as yet existed. you are back in the Fifties. 39 Ward agrees with the Aboriginal magistrate Pat OʼShane on this point. See her ʻA Treaty for Australiansʼ, in Renwick, Sovereignty and Indigenous Rights, pp.147-54. The Fifties! My father is still alive! 40 Alan Ward, ʻNew Zealand Experience: The Treaty of Waitangiʼ, in David Lemmings and I looked round for him on the long main street of Wellington. Katherine Lindsay, eds, Treaties and Constitutions, Special Issue 5 of The Newcastle Law Journal, 2001. I kept turning on Cuba Street to see if he was behind me. 41 Ward, Land and Politics, p.i. I listened for his quiet voice in the Auckland airport. 42 Klaus Neumann, Not the Way it Really Was: Constructing the Tolai Past, Honolulu, 1 1992, p.77. I lifted the brims of bent sheepmenʼs hats, looking for his face. 43 Mark Francis, ʻSettler Historiography in New Zealand: Politics and Biography in the Here the gap between the present time of the rest of the world and the Early Colonial Periodʼ, Political Science, 52, 2 (December 2000), p.172. 44 Spencer, Ward, Connell, New Caledonia, p.1. marooned time of New Zealand is a mere matter of three decades. It 45 Ward in Renwick, Sovereignty and Indigenous Rights, p.115. lacks the grand scale with which New Zealanders have often represented 46 Alan Ward, ʻThe Crisis of Our Times: Ethnic Resurgence and the Liberal Ideaʼ, Journal themselves to the rest of the world as separated by tracts of time as well of Pacific History, 27, 1 (June 1992), pp.83-95. as distance. For a country conscious of its youth, New Zealand has been surprisingly keen to image itself by way of antiquity: pastoral scenes, sublime mountains, a noble and ancient race draw the eye backwards in time. At the international Exhibition held in Christchurch in 1906-1907, a model pa displayed a perfectly preserved ancient race to visitors. As a traditional people, the Maori participants were even forbidden to use the mouth organ to accompany their songs.2 A century later, the 100% Pure NZ campaign still attracts tourists with the prospect of Maori culture in the picture postcard poses of antiquity cultivated in the late colonial period. George Boweringʼs New Zealand is not the exotic Maoriland of moko and traditional dance or the primeval scenery of Peter Jacksonʼs Lord of the Rings; it is merely a provincial version of the rest of the world, nostalgic, charming, amusing, vaguely irrelevant. For those of us who grew up, placidly enough, in the fifties only to feel the pull of the modern in the early seventies, Boweringʼs New Zealand as 80 81 Journal of New Zealand Studies Leaving the Straight Path: Cultural Time Travel in the Seventies a place one enters by so trivial an act of time travel is more discouraging or Maori traditionalism. The fact is that they came in numbers, captivated than the vertiginous leaps into imagined pasts offered by film and tourism. as well as sceptical, prepared perhaps to believe, though few were persuaded It evokes the shameful sense of being just behind – not romantic inhabitants to do so. Unable to adopt Baxterʼs world-denying example, wary of his of an imaginary unspoiled world but lagging citizens of the actual one. dramatic stances – ʻdramaticʼ in the sense of being theatrical as well as This is the source of embarrassment the baby boomers have struggled to extreme – equivocal about his contempt for middle-class comforts, they eradicate over the last 30 years. nevertheless shared his desire to reform the ossified structures of Pakeha I associate the seventies with two related conditions: belatedness and New Zealand. embarrassment. The first condition was a product of coming just after the They sensed the flawed assumptions in Baxterʼs salvific social programme: culture heroes of the sixties – the generation born around 1946 – who had that those rejected by society are necessarily spiritually purer than those already noisily broken with the rules of normalcy and decency that had caught up in it; that poverty ennobles those who willingly embrace it; governed post-war New Zealand. In the year I started university – the first that modern social life can be divided into the dead world of bourgeois of the new decade – I was well aware that others had made more outrageous materialism and the authentic world of tribal communalism. Caught between gestures of opposition than I had courage for. Besides, I was ill-equipped for idealism and cynicism, the dream of a just society and the desire for self- the strenuous demands of drug-taking and promiscuity; I lacked cool, I was advancement, their ambivalence registered the difficulties in any response easily embarrassed and, like most of my peers, I did not wish permanently to a social vision as wilfully eschatological as Baxterʼs. Nevertheless, it was to abandon the straight path, merely to visit the wild places. they, not Baxterʼs chosen tribe of the wounded and outcast, who over the Let me cite one small diversion from that path: the journey from next two decades would shift a sluggish citizenry away from its Anglophile Wanganui in the summer of 1970 up a dusty metalled road where sheep dreaming into the uneasy negotiations of biculturalism. It was they who, trucks, farmers and country boys in Holdens ignored city boys hitchhiking to as teachers, professionals and civil servants, would protest against sporting Jerusalem. At the end of the journey was Hiruharama, signifying drugs, love, contact with apartheid South Africa, cast their votes for a non-nuclear New aroha and idealized poverty. It was a place where the disenchanted young Zealand and support Treaty settlements. It was they who would discover went to find versions of the past – Maori, pastoral, communal – although an enthusiasm for New Zealand literature, especially books by women, most considered themselves in pursuit of an ideal future, trailblazers of books by and about Maori, histories and biographies. And it was they, as consciousness heading away from the deadness of suburbia that Baxter calls publishers, journalists, cultural bureaucrats and readers, rather than the ʻcivilised comaʼ in ʻThe Ballad of the Junkies and the Fuzzʼ.3 artist as romantic outsider, who would move the arts into the mainstream For me, the experience of Jerusalem was not the consolidation of my of New Zealand life. vague anti-bourgeois ideology but the deepening of a suspicion about the Yet Baxterʼs influence should not be underestimated. Dying only two counter culture, and especially about the drug culture. The little world of months before Norman Kirkʼs third Labour government came to power outcasts which Baxter conceived as a point of opposition to materialist in December 1972 and having identified himself so potently with the and middle-class values turned out to be riddled with the snobberies and disenchantment of youth, Baxter provided a model for idealistic gestures of hierarchies of what it opposed. Up close, Baxter himself was a flawed the period like the ohu scheme, perhaps the most curious of the changes of messiah. His taste for flagellation and rumours of his heroic dedication to the the Kirk government. The ohu were government-backed communes modelled sins of the flesh were at odds with the dour conformity of Irish Catholicism chiefly on the kibbutz, but they drew more generally on imported alternative in New Zealand. But medieval extravagances did not add glamour to the culture, localizing the communal lifestyles of California in the sixties. The religion of the Christian Brothers so recently escaped, and Catholicism ohu also looked back to Baxterʼs Jerusalem and to a history of communes in seemed an unlikely way to get laid. New Zealand never before endorsed by the state. As government-sponsored The road to Jerusalem was full of students that summer. Frank McKay alternatives to mainstream society, ohu were a tentative and confined remarks that many of them ʻused the place, and then moved off.