It should not of course have been surprising to find racism in Lawson. Even in the 'real' name he gives to August—Sarah Moses instead of Mary Jacob (or as he called her Jacobs) there is sardonic amusement that Polynesians should adopt Jewish names, which he held in contempt, as is shown in this passage from a story published three years before Lawson arrived at Mangamaunu:

Lawson's hostility to Chinese is well known. One of its factors was his belief, as a child, that his brother Peter had been paid for with money from his money-box, bought from a 'Chinaman'.2

The hostility appears early in his verse. In 'The Cambaroora Star' (1891) he celebrates an editor who incited miners to evict 'the Chinkies … the Chows' from the diggings.4 In 'A Word to Texas Jack' (1890) he boasts of Australian proficiency in 'hoistin' out the Chow', which he values equally with 'stickin' up for labour's rights'.5 In 'After the War' (1896) a soldier who had been a member of a Sydney 'push' recalls an incident when he was 'held up by the traps for stoushin' a bleedin' Chow' only as an occasion of loyalty from fellow-members of the gang, a loyalty he repays in battle.6

As well known is Lawson's yellow peril jingoism. In 1896 when 'After the War' appeared Australia had never had a foreign war. Yet in 'The Star of Australasia', which was originally part of the same poem as 'After the War', an enemy invader is predicted.7 If the invader is unnamed in this poem and in two other poems published in 1904,8 he is clearly identified in later volumes as the coloured races. In The Elder Son (1905) Russia, involved in war with Japan, is seen as 'the vanguard/Of the West against the East'9 and the war itself as

In 'The Good Samaritan' Lawson anticipates the time

In 1899, though he had opposed Australian participation in the Boer War, he farewelled the Australian contingent with a sardonic warning against Africans:

In 1899 he praised solitary self-reliant adventurers who 'rule' 'unconquered tribes' by the 'lone hand and revolver', administrators in colonial outposts:

Lawson of course was not exceptional in his intolerance. It surrounded him from his childhood. It was the silly lies of his mother and grandmother that had given him his first remembered dislike for Chinese and Aborigines. Grandmother Harriet Albury, according to Gertrude O'Connor, used to frighten away Aborigines at Mudgee by making mime of a hanging or prodding them with the live end of a fire-stick.60 The idea of Australia as an exclusively European colony had been formulated by workers as far back as the 1840s.61

Intolerance of non-Europeans was a mainplank of Australian nationalism and of the trade unionism of the eighties and nineties with which Lawson identified himself. A resolution against Chinese immigration was passed at the first InterColonial Trade Union Congress at Sydney in 1879 and repeated at subsequent congresses until the last in 1898.62 If the economic aim was to remove the threat of cheap labour, it was not long before the exponents of white Australia developed a herrenvolk mystique.63 The platform of the Melbourne Trades and Labour Council in 1889 included a 'Bill to prevent the introduction of criminal, pauper or Asiatic labour'.64 The unanimously passed resolution at the fourth Intercolonial Trade Union Congress at Adelaide in 1886 supplied as its second reason the argument that 'the presence of Chinese in large numbers in any community has a very bad moral tendency.'65 The Bulletin was anti-Chinese from its founding in 1880; in 1887, after praising the Australians as egalitarians emancipated from the tyrannies of Europe, it declared: 'No nigger, no Chinaman, no lascar, no Kanaka, no purveyor of cheap coloured labour is an Australian.'66 It was even held against the Chinese by the anti-clerical Bulletin that they were not Christians. The Chinese, the paper said, would 'surely taint the comparatively pure blood of the Caucasian race and fill Australia with an effete, semi-Oriental nation', a fate forestalled only by a healthy 'sentiment of personal loathing which does so much to keep the races apart'.67 One partisan accused the Chinese in Australia of being dirty in their minds and in their housekeeping and unresponsive to the claims of mateship. Even the absence of organised resistance to white persecution is held against them. 'John Chinaman will leave his comrade to die in a ditch, or cast him upon the tender mercies of the whites.'68 On the one hand the Bulletin argued that the Chinese were a vigorous cultured people and all the more dangerous for not being barbarian; on the other it could say: 'Let him go back to his Middle Kingdom and turn himself into a monkey, and work slowly up the Darwinian scale as the white man himself had to do. Then let him come back to Australia a million years hence and try again.'69 The Bulletin was for more than thirty years Lawson's most frequent publisher; the Boomerang and the Lone Hand, to which he contributed, were racist in policy. The Boomerang in 1888 ran William Lane's serial White or Yellow, foreseeing a rising of Queenslanders against a dictatorship of Chinese immigrants; a story in its issue of 13 December 1890 told of Aborigines trying to cure a sick man by sitting on his chest to keep the cough down and so killing him; it accompanied Lawson's poem. 'The Cambaroora Star' with an illustration showing miners armed with whips evicting Chinese from a goldfield. At the Japanese defeat ofRussia in 1905, the Bulletin and the Lone Hand saw Australia as threatened by the 'Asiatic menace'. Thomson foresaw Australia attaining national maturity by means of resisting a Chinese invasion.70

The political results of this movement and the strong passions that promoted it were the restriction on Chinese immigration by 1888,71 the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1901 and the adoption, as part of the Labour Party's federal platform in 1905, of 'the cultivation of an Australian sentiment based upon the maintenance of racial purity'.

There was also the opposition to indentured labourers in Queensland. In 1890 the Amalgamated Shearers' Union passed a by-law refusing admission not only to Chinese but to South Sea Islanders.72 In the following year the General Labourers' Union, meeting in Adelaide, imposed the same restriction.73 The opposition to South Sea Island labour which culminated in the repatriation of most of the labourers by the end of 190674 was without the moral opprobrium attached to the Chinese, since it was known there were abuses in the recruitment of the labour, and the labourers were seen as the ignorant dupes of the planters. The provenance of these labourers is important to my purpose and it is not clarified by the freedom with which contemporary partisans indiscriminately called them black, Polynesian, Kanaka, and Pacific Islander. Most of them were Melanesian: returns for the years 1868-76 cited by C. M. H. Clark give their sources as the Loyalty Islands, New Hebrides, Banks Islands (in the New Hebrides), and the Solomons. Only from the Banks Islands and some parts of the New Hebrides and one or two small outliers of the Solomons might there have been Polynesians.75 O. W. Parnaby, giving Queensland sources for 1863-1905, lists fewer than a hundred labourers from Polynesia proper (Rotuma, Samoa, Tonga) and the greatest proportion from the Solomons and New Hebrides.76 The number of Polynesians amongst the indentured labourers must have been small.

But if the Amalgamated Shearers' Union in 1890 would not admit Chinese and South Sea Islanders to future membership, it did allow eight of them who were already members to continue in the union77 and three years later the same union, extended and renamed the Australian Workers' Union, made specific exceptions to its restriction: 'No Chinese, Japanese, Kanakas or Afghans or coloured aliens other than Maoris, American negros, or children of mixed parentage born in Australia shall be admitted to membership'.78

The exceptions are interesting. What is common to all of these groups is their knowledge of English-in contrast to the indentured Melanesians79-and their familiarity with, or adaptability to, a European society divided into classes with opposed economic interests. Maoris and American negroes were frequently employed on Pacific ships; in the early years of the century there were two eases of negroes in Australia being popular with white settlers.80 There is an interesting parallel in a serial story in the Sydney Worker in 1894 in which some Australian itinerant labourers have as mates on the tramp first an American negro and later some Maoris.81 The teller's attitude is slightly patronising, it is true, since the negro is called 'a big American nigger', and 'Maori Ben' is admired for his prowess in pub fights and his expertise in catching and killing pigs; but they were accepted. That the acceptance of Maoris was due in part to experience of them as trade unionists is apparent from Spence's account of his efforts to recruit members for the Amalgamated Shearers' Union in 1887:

Spence's memoir contains an 'Honor List of Union Prisoners' imprisoned in New South Wales between 1891 and 1894 for unionist activity: one name is Polynesian, probably Maori, Paul Pahae.83 The Bulletin in a paragraph in its feature 'Aboriginalities' on 30 October 1897 notes with a mixture of amusement and approval that Maori shearers on Chatham Island had struck for higher pay. On the other hand, the Bulletin thought it a waste of time educating or even christianising Aborigines: 'Christianity was never intended for blackfellows. Its higher doctrines they are incapable of understanding.'84 It regretted that Aborigines had been so far corrupted by European vices that they were beyond reform; it deplored, but contemplated with equanimity, the current slaughter by settlers of Aborigines in Queensland and concluded: 'The aboriginal race is moribund. All we can do now is to give an opiate to the dying man, and when he expires bury him decently'.85

The basis then of the trades unions' hostility to Chinese and indentured Melanesians and Afghans was economic; so too was the sympathy for Maoris. The unionist attitudes, obscured as they are by racist and jingoist accretions, are parallel with those of Lawson. The Aborigines were no serious economic threat to workers, but they were unlikely to be economic allies, and it did not matter whether they were ignored or hated or occasionally indulged. There was a positive readiness to accept Maoris.

The bushman's code

In this book I use bush in its Australian sense of 'rural hinterland', not in the New Zealand sense of 'rain-forest', and bushman to mean a rural dweller or worker and not an axeman or timber worker.

But there is a polarity in Lawson's attitude to the bushmen, reflecting the difference in the mores, on the one hand, of the diggers and the nomadic workers, and on the other, of settled families on selections and in small bush townships. It is this difference, I imagine, that underlies the symbols, noted by Cecil Mann and Dorothy Green, of the Tent and the Tree.36 There is in Lawson's stories of the nomadic labourers a bias towards comedy or optimism and genial irony or sentimentality about human nature, and in his stories of selectors and bush wives a bias towards pathos and a pessimistic or darkly sardonic view, not so much of human nature as of life.

To explore this polarity it is necessary to sketch something of Lawson's personality and of the more immediate agents that determined it. Various images of Lawson have been cultivated by interested parties, and each of them has some truth. For some years after his death the nationalists presented him almost as the Noble Bushman himself; Marxists have promoted him as the exponent of the most healthy Australian traditions, the champion of the underdog and fearless spokesman against tyranny and injustice; his mates insisted on 'the real Henry'-a gentle, sensitive man with brown, searching eyes. There is plenty of witness to his geniality and amicability, and there is some to his moroseness. An inquiry like this that keeps in mind his misunderstanding in Mangamaunu must look for weaknesses and limitations, and result in a view of his personality that is incomplete. But in the main it is not necessary to go beyond Lawson's own view of himself.

His autobiography is invaluable to an understanding of him, and the tone of self-pity in the last passage quoted is characteristic of it. Yet, at least in the main, and best-known, part of the autobiography the self-pity is not offensive, and that part is curiously (to use Cecil Mann's word) 'satisfying', probably because the pity extends to everyone who comes into it, even those who hurt him.37

From the 'Fragment of an Autobiography' it is plain that Lawson's childhood was a pretty miserable one. Even his birth was attended by mishap. I prefer to disregard the melodramatics of the account given no fewer than six times by his younger sister Gertrude O'Connor,38 not only because she wasn't there, but because her aunt Emma Brooks,

I use the spelling Mrs Brooks used signing a letter in 1924.

The Maoris of the Kaikoura district in Lawson's time were predominantly Ngai-tahu. Other Maoris of Marlborough pro vince, north of the White Bluffs, and especially around the Sounds, were Rangitane and Ngati-toa. A tradition of the earliest settlement of the district is that a canoe Uruao brought a people calling themselves Waitaha direct from Hawaiki to the Kaikoura coast.1 According to later traditions the coast was subject to three invasions from the North Island tribes. In the mid-sixteenth century the Ngati-mamoe destroyed or eventually absorbed the Waitaha.2 In the mid-seventeenth century there was an invasion by the Ngai-tahu, who by the end of the century had occupied the Marlborough Coast from the Awatere to the Conway.3 The Ngati-mamoe were driven further south as the Ngai-tahu occupied the whole eastern coast of the South Island.4 There were about 2,000 Ngai-tahu in the Kaikoura district in 1829 when there was a further in vasion, this time by the Ngati-toa under Te Rauparaha, dispossessed of their own ancestral land by the Waikato tribes. In the raid on Kaikoura 1,400 Ngai-tahu were killed. The inhabitants of Omihi, about fifteen miles further south, were defeated and those not killed or taken prisoner fled to the mountains or south to another Ngai-tahu settlement Kaiapohia (Kaiapoi). Two of the survivors of the Omihi raid, Paratene Wahaaruhe and Ihaia Wahaaruhe, boys at the time and half-brothers, were in Lawson's time elders at Mangamaunu, both of them early members of the school committee, and one of them Mary Jacob's grandfather. For fear of retaliation by the Ngai-tahu in other parts of the South Island Te Rauparaha did not attempt to hold Kaikoura.5 He was defeated by the Ngai-tahu under Tuhawaiki at Oraumoa (Fighting Bay) near Port Underwood in 1835, and a formal peace was made which ratified his conquest of the Pelorus and Wairau districts, where colonies of Ngati-toa had settled.6 These districts were not Ngai-tahu territory but occupied by the Ngati-kuia hapu of the Rangitane tribe, who had come from the North Island after the Ngati-mamoe. It is to a garbled version of these events that Bertha Lawson refers when she said: 'Our Maoris … had originally been North Islanders, but had been defeated in war and were said to have been kept as slaves'.7 Henry Lawson's reference is derived from the same incomplete account: And the last that were born of a noble race—when the page of the South was fair—The sons of the conquered dwelt in peace with the sons of of the victors there.8

Refugees from the raid on Kaikoura were massacred in the Puhipuhi Valley behind Mangamaunu but there is no evidence of slaughter at Mangamaunu.9 By the 1840s the Ngaitahu were again in occupation of the Kaikoura district in very small numbers; in 1849 J. W. Hamilton, a government landbuyer, reported the population from the Clarence to the Conway to be no more than sixty.

It did not rise greatly through the century; in 1858 Hamilton reported eighty people in Kaikoura county, living in seven settlements; in 1878, sixty-seven; in 1881 the figure-is eighty-four; in 1896, the year before Lawson's arrival, seventy-seven.10 Of these forty-nine were Ngai-tahu and six half-castes, so that twenty-two must have been from other districts. Even if one allows for the inaccuracy of census-taking among a population semi-literate and seasonally migrant, the rate of natural increase was low: in 1878 Alexander Mackay, Crown Commissioner, counted only twenty-one children under 15 out of a total Ngai-tahu population of sixty-seven; in 1896, in a figure that includes Maoris other than Ngai-tahu, the number of children under 15 was only twenty-seven.11 In the six years preceding 1874, Maori births for the whole of Marlborough province, in a population of 452, exceeded deaths by only thirteen.12

The peace with Te Rauparaha had resulted in the recog nition of Ngai-tahu ownership over land south of the White Bluffs (between the Wairau and Awatere rivers), and the Kaikoura Maoris claimed special ownership of land from the White Bluffs south to the Waiau river, and extending inland to the Spenser mountains, a claim recognised by the Ngai-tahu of Kaiapohia and Rapaki in Canterbury province. Hamilton estimated the size of their lands as being between a million acres and a million and a half. Yet though, Hamilton said, the whole of the country had by this time (1858) 'long been occupied by [European] sheep-owners', no payment had been made to the owners of the land.13 Government land-buyers had assumed the land belonged to the Ngati-toa and had already made two purchases from them; £3,000 had been paid be tween 1847 and 1851 for the Wairau and neighbouring district, and at Wellington in 1853 the Ngati-toa sold all their claims in the South Island for £5,000.

In the government view the Wairau block extended inland as far as the Wairau River and south to a straight line run ning from the source of the Wairau to Kaiapoi: it included most of the land claimed by the Kaikoura Maoris. Naturally they did not recognise either the Ngati-toa claim to have won the land by conquest or the government purchase based on this claim, and in 1852 they had refused access to a government surveyor.14 The Kaikoura spokesman Whakatau in 1856 offered the lands for £150 provided that certain small areas were reserved for his people. But in the three years before the sale was made, Whakatau learned more of the value of his land; he at first asked for £5,000, but Mackay, the buyer, beat him down to £300 subject to 5,565 acres being reserved for Whakatau's people.15 This, the Kaikoura purchase, was signed in March 1859. The area sold lay between the White Bluffs and the Hurunui River, and extended inland to the Spenser and St Arnaud mountains: its area was two and a half million acres.16 The reserve land was coastal, and the Mangamaunu block was the largest-a strip of coast about 12 miles long and hardly a mile deep. At the Mangamaunu end it consisted of a beach of boulders and blacksand, a strip of flat with fern and flax and manuka backed by an abrupt 50-foot terrace on

South Island Maoris early recognised that their best hope of survival lay in education. Before establishing this claim it is necessary to dispose of definite assertions to the contrary made by J. W. Stack, Inspector of Native Schools in the South Island for the Native Affairs Department. Though Stack's part in the founding of Mangamaunu school was brief and initial, he had some effect on aspects of subsequent Native School policy, and I shall quote him at length because he represents one end of a spectrum of attitudes of those who claimed a desire for Maori advancement:

Stack reported prejudice against the school among parents at Motueka and passive resistance from the children.78 Mackay in 1868 reported difficulty in persuading Kaiapoi parents to pay their proportion of fees: 'they seem to be entirely imbued with the idea that the Government ought to provide schools for them free of cost in fulfilment of promises made to them in former years'.79 Stack reported opposition to schools at Wairau, Arowhenua, and Moeraki and related it to 'claims for unfulfilled promises'.80

Stack's mixture of dedication and impatience shows him to be one of those aggressive cultural mediators who became angry and frustrated when the people of the minority they work among prefer to follow their own counsel. There are several cases of his wishing to impose on Maoris the values of his own culture. In 1874 both he and Mackay commended the military type of discipline enforced by the master at Kaiapoi school, but in 1879 (after the school had been closed and reopened) he complained that the parents were apathetic and ungrateful.81 He complained of Maori children's dislike of restraint and of the inability of parents to force them to attend school; he regretted the Maori habit of holding meetings and taking their children with them.82 He even recommended that children should be taken away from parents opposed to education. He objected to parents having any say in school matters and was shocked that at Waikouaiti the school committee had the power to decide (with the master) whether or not European children should be admitted.83 He recommended that school committees should not be allowed to interfere with teachers and he thought the best teachers were those who knew no Maori.84 His model for a future Maori society was in fact a replica of a three-class European society: an upper class of hereditary land-owning rangatira; a middle class of small land-holders with the opportunity of moving, by dint of thrift and industry, into the upper class; a landless class of workers.85 Yet he knew enough to have been more charitable:

Stack knew the reason for the opposition to schools in much of the South Island. It was, as he acknowledges in two places, that the Ngai-tahu feared that by accepting education from the government they might compromise their claims for more equitable compensation for their land.87 Some account of this is necessary, though it is only indirectly relevant to the Ngaitahu of Mangamaunu.

More than four South Island blocks of land were involved in the unsettled claims for compensation, but the main block in dispute among the Ngai-tahu was the block known as 'Kemp's purchase' or 'the Ngai-tahu block', covering the whole of the east of the South Island from Kaiapoi to the Otago Heads, and purchased by Kemp in 1848, a purchase attended, according to the Ngai-tahu, by threats and by promises that had not been fulfilled. They claimed that Mantell who had completed the purchase had promised them schools and hospitals.88 The reserves set aside were insufficient for living off, and they had assumed that though they sold their land they would still have the right to gather wild food from it.89 An assembly of Ngai-tahu at Kaiapoi in 1874 agreed to petition the government for compensation, but apart from a generally favourable report on the petition in 1876, nothing was done till a joint committee of both houses, sitting three times between 1888 and 1890, set apart areas of land to provide for individuals of the Ngai-tahu who were found to be landless or insufficiently provided for.90 The relevance of this claim

That a later government thought there had been injustice is clear from the Ngai-tahu Claims Settlement Act, 1944, when the payment, over thirty years, was authorised of £300,000 in settlement of all outstanding Ngaitahu claims.91

On 29 December 1875, Henry Lawson's father Peter and two other citizens of New Pipeclay applied, mainly at the instigation of Louisa Lawson, for a new school at Eurunderee.96 The school was opened in October 1876 and provided Henry Lawson with two-and-a-half of his three years' schooling.97 Less than two years after Peter Lawson's petition, K. Wiremu Kerei of Oaro, twenty miles south of Kaikoura, and forty-eight others, who had already petitioned for a doctor, petitioned for a school for Maori children to be built at Kaikoura, and offered to provide the land on which the teacher would live. R. J. Gill, Secretary for Native Schools, asked J. W. Stack to investigate. Stack went to the pa at Kaikoura and finding that the men were absent shearing he went to Mangamaunu and spoke to Ihaia and other elders. 'All expressed the greatest desire for the establishment of a school'.98 They hoped that the government would arrange matters as it had done for the people of Wairewa, where a school had opened in the previous year: the parents would provide the site but the government would provide buildings and the teacher's salary, and education would be free. They objected to the proposal to site the school at Kaikoura and to Wiremu Kerei's forwardness in making the proposal without consulting them. There were only three children at Kaikoura itself and between Kaikoura and Haumuri Bluff there were not more than a dozen Maoris residing. The obvious site was Mangamaunu, the biggest settlement and the home of most of the children. Stack found that there were twenty-nine children likely to attend, and recommended immediate erection. He estimated that the school would cost about £400 but the Native Minister would allow only £300.

Throughout the history of the dealings of the Mangamaunu parents with the government, one can see on their side a scrupulous concern to honour their contract, and an anxiety that the government on its side should fulfil its promises to the last detail. They were not slow to remind the government when it seemed to have forgotten its obligations. The first of a series of petitions is dated 6 March 1878 and these are worth quoting extensively since they are our only access to their thinking. This one is addressed to H. T. Clarke, Under- Secretary of the Native Department.

If there was a reply to this letter, there is no copy on the files. But by November the department authorised expenditure of £460 for building, fencing, and fittings. The files show payment of £90 in May and £289 in October-whether the difference between the amount paid and the estimated expenditure means that parents contributed to the cost cannot be settled, but it is unlikely since it was before the Native Schools Code which made such contributions a condition of starting the schools, and since, according to Stack's letter of 19 December 1877, the terms were to be as with the Wairewa Maorisbuildings and teachers' salary provided by the government.1 The building was supervised by a local runholder, Harry Ingles of the Puhipuhi estate, and presumably was complete at the time of payment in October. The finished work was described by Stack in December as a schoolroom 20ft x 16ft and a house of four rooms each about 10ft square. No school committee had been legally appointed. Stack recommended that the self-appointed committee should not be recognised in any other capacity than as persons friendly to the school. To give them any share in the administration would be to render the position of the teacher intolerable.' But since a committee would have to be formed, and committee powers were very limited in any case, there wasn't much point in not recognising them, and the old committee, headed by Ihaia te Awanui, was unofficially recognised.

A teacher was appointed, Thomas Danaher, employed at the time of his application as a clerk in the Native Department. He had taught for ten years, both privately and in a school in Ireland and his application was supported by high testimonials from Irish ecclesiastics. The Secretary for Education, Dr John Hislop made an odd memo: 'for Kaikoura I concur with Mr Habens in considering Mr Danaher likely to be suitable. Mr Danaher is (I believe) a Roman Catholic but Mr Habens sees no objection to this.' Danaher was engaged 'on trial', the appointment terminable on three months' notice from either side. When the Native Schools Code came into operation he was graded as 4th class certificated teacher. His salary was to be £120, with £20 to his wife as sewing mistress.

Danaher began teaching at Mangamaunu on 25 January 1880 with twelve pupils. Hislop suggested that there be a formal opening in February 'with a view to giving éclat to the proceedings.' He asked the teacher to let him know the cost of fencing half-an-acre for a garden and an acre for a paddock. The Maori men were away shearing and 'boating wool'; they planned an opening when they returned in February, with a feast and ceremony; they had already put up a post-and-rail fence enclosing the whole site. In March Maoris from Kaikoura and other settlements began building houses on the flat near the school, so that their children would be able to attend. Ihaia te Awanui applied to J. Bryce, Native Minister, for a grant to supplement the £3 already collected towards the opening. Bryce referred the letter to William Rolleston, Minister of Education who commented, 'We find no feasts'. The month's delay in replying to this request and the need to raise the further funds locally must have caused the postponement of the opening to 25 May. Stack was unable to attend and had no further contact with the school. Harry Ingles, the runholder who had supervised some of the building and other of 'the "well-to-do" people' were present. The school now had twenty seven pupils.

In 1879 the Native Affairs Department which had administered Maori schools since 1867 handed their management to the Education Department, created by the Education Act of 1877. There were fifty-seven Native Schools with 1,336 pupils.1 The Native Schools Code of 1880 provided for the operation of these schools and the establishment of new ones. The department would open a school on receipt of a petition from ten Maoris in a locality, offering 2 acres and proper title, promising to contribute towards the cost of the school building, and guaranteeing an average attendance of thirty. The department would provide a schoolhouse and a teacher's residence, fence the site and picket-fence an inner quarteracre for a teacher's garden.2 The Maoris were to elect a school committee of five whose sole function would be to provide firewood, arrange the cleaning of the school, and maintain attendance. Textbooks and cleaning materials would be supplied, and the school would provide for four hours a day, five days a week and forty-five weeks a year, instruction in English (reading, writing, spelling), the rudiments of arithmetic and geography, and, for the girls, sewing. There would be four standards of achievement, and in the upper standards there might be English composition, singing, drawing, and physical drill. Uncertified teachers would be accepted, and certified teachers would be ranked in four classes. The teacher's wife would act as sewing mistress, and basic salaries would be £80 for the teacher and £20 for his wife, with increments for rank and seniority, for high attendance and high pass rates, with the possibility of, in time, earning £225.

From the start there was this element of payment by results, and it was strengthened in 1886 when salaries were made more dependent on average attendance, and in 1893, when under the stress of a depression and government retrenchment, the basic salary was reduced to £60 and increments were tied more closely to attendance and examination marks.3

The first appointee to the new post of Inspector of Native Schools was J. H. Pope who took office on 21 January 1880 and held it till December 1903 and was the architect of a policy that continued, with only administrative modifications, till 1931. Pope had been a master at Otago Boys' High School and Inspector to the Taranaki Education Board. A. G. Butchers, eulogistic historian of New Zealand education, describes him as 'characterised by conspicuous honesty and honour, and by a simple and kindly nature that eminently fitted him to work among the Maoris, whose confidence and affection he very soon gained'.4 Reweti T. Kohere recalled him: 'He was of a lovable nature and so perfectly transparent that he won your respect and confidence at first meeting. He was a big man and I never cease to wonder how much he managed to travel all over New Zealand and much of it on horseback when the roads were so bad and many rivers unbridged'.5 Until the appointment in 1893 of H. B. Kirk as his assistant, Pope travelled the length of the country, visiting each Maori school twice a year; the number of the schools fluctuating in that period between sixty-three and eighty-three. He 'rapidly' learned Maori; he wrote two Native School Readers, a textbook on civics, and another on hygiene which was voluntarily distributed by Apirana Ngata and a friend in their Christmas holidays in 1891.

From the outset the department's policy was paternalistic, but in a kindlier way than Stack's authoritarian kind of paternalism. In his instructions to Pope, the Rev. W. J. Habens, Inspector-General, said: 'In the work you are about to undertake you will have a splendid opportunity of doing good to the Maori race-an opportunity which I feel assured you will value very highly, and use with enthusiasm as well as with tact and ability'.6 All these expectations Pope fulfilled; no less paternalistic than Habens, he was dedicated, fair-dealing, and

In Thomas Danaher, Hislop and Pope had an ideal executor of the new policy. The initial situation at Mangamaunu was of an avuncular department, an enthusiastic teacher, and willing parents and pupils. Hislop had advised Danaher to learn Maori, and within three weeks of his arrival, both he and his wife were learning the language and he reported that 'we have thoroughly ingratiated ourselves with the old people here'.45 The committee had asked him to take night classes for men, and, until the shearing season, ten elders were learning arithmetic and reading three nights a week; more would have attended if there had been enough books. Pope, inspecting in June, recommended that Danaher be paid extra for this service. For the children Danaher gave extra classes in singing and he wrote for the scores of the National Anthem and the Christy minstrel songs. There is excitement in a letter written six weeks after opening, when he reports that some of the older girls had already made dresses for the younger ones: 'I do not know if all Maoris are quick but these children appear to have a facility for learning and also a desire to understand what they do learn.' Pope reported in June: 'Mr and Mrs Danaher are well qualified [as] Native School Teachers…. They both work with a will…. The Natives have a high opinion of both teachers…. The children … are fond of the school.' The committee offered to save the department the expense of fencing off the garden and paddock if the money could be used to build a veranda to keep the rain from beating in the windows and door of Danaher's house, and for a bell to call the children in the morning, and a clock for the school. The department accepted the offer. Danaher invited the editor of the Kaikoura Star to visit the school.

But the harmony had an interruption. On 1 December 1880 this letter was written to the department:

Danaher's own tuition had probably gone into a translation in a different hand but on the same sort of foolscap, which accompanied the original.

It was not, of course, Henry Lawson who chose his occupation in New Zealand, but chance and a shortage of government posts. According to Bertha the choice was hers, in the hope (as she explained forty-six years later) of finding him a job that would 'leave him free to write' and be 'right away from hotels'.1 But Henry seems to have accepted the offer willingly. It was managed through the help of Lawson's friend Edward Tregear, Secretary of Labour, poet, and student of Maori culture and Polynesian languages. Tregear was reputed in the Australian working-class press to be 'an avowed Socialist' and in 1893 he had found Lawson work and lent him money in 1896.2 Bertha's account of the appointment, conflated from her two not entirely consistent memoirs, is that prepared with a letter of introduction to the Prime Minister, R. J. Seddon, from J. F. Archibald, editor of the Bulletin, she called on Tregear who told her that Seddon was due to leave next day for London for the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, and advised her to ask Seddon simply to minute the letter and hand her back to Tregear. Seddon obliged; then Tregear introduced her to 'Mr Ward, the Minister for Education' who called in F. K. de Castro, a clerk to the department, who offered Mangamaunu school, which she apparently accepted on Henry's behalf. The boat for Kaikoura was to leave in two days; on the same day as the appointment she asked for an advance of a month's salary to pay fares and buy furniture and ship it to Kaikoura (in her second version she says she concealed the fact that they had no furniture); de Castro agreed and she bought a mattress, a kettle and pots and groceries.

But Bertha's reminiscences of thirty-four and forty-six years later are understandably unreliable.3 To be accurate so many years after would be a long haul on anyone's memory; and the second memoir was ghosted by her de facto second husband, Will Lawson. More seriously, she was recalling the most promising period of her marriage to Henry Lawson across the bitterness of their separation in 1903, her prosecutions for his defaults in maintenance, and her own mental breakdown. For example, it could not have been Joseph Ward to whom she was introduced, since he never was Minister of Education, and had in fact in the previous winter resigned his several ministries because of his bankruptcy and the scandal of his private financial manipulations.4 The man she meant could only have been William Campbell Walker, who was Minister of Education from 1896 to 1903. Indeed it is more likely that it was Henry who presented himself at the department and, being partly deaf, misheard the name. Since he was in Wellington and had made no written application, the department would hardly have appointed him without seeing him.

A letter from Tregear to William Pember Reeves, the preceding Minister of Education, confirms this: it is dated 13 April 1897.

Bertha's account of their stay in Wellington is telescoped. She suggests that she called on Tregear (and Seddon) the morning after their arrival, got Henry the job on the spot, went home to tell him, returned to ask de Castro for an advance and dined with Tregear that evening. The following day, the day that Seddon was to sail, she bought the household goods; the third day caught the boat; and 'the second day out' from Wellington they landed at Kaikoura and went straight to Mangamaunu. According to this account they were installed in Mangamaunu within five days of reaching Wellington.

But in fact the interval was nearly four weeks. They disembarked from the Anglian on 9 April, a Friday.6 They had several days in which to wait on Seddon who did not sail till the following Thursday, 15 April.7 The Evening Post reports Lawson's appointment (to 'Mangamaume') on 1 May. Departmental records are more definite. The offer of Mangamaunu school to the retired teacher was made on 22 April. Tregear's testimonial for Lawson to Habens is dated 27 April, and on that day Arapere Panita was notified of Lawson's appointment.8 They sailed on the Wakatu (registered tonnage: 95) on 4 May.9 Lawson reported to the department that he reached Mangamaunu on the afternoon of Wednesday 5 May. Apparently the appointment was not as perfunctory as Bertha suggests. Habens was certainly consulted. Nevertheless no obstacle was seen in Lawson's lack of schooling. Tregear's testimonial made three points, that Lawson was a 'distinguished literary man', that Mrs Lawson would be an admirable helpmate, and that the two of them were in need of assistance. The only handicap that Habens, in a note to Walker, saw was Lawson's partial deafness, which could be offset by his wife's assistance and the smallness of the school. Whether de Castro was as liberal in his advance as Bertha says cannot be checked, since monthly salary payments are not recorded on the school file; but there is a receipt, signed by Lawson and dated 18 May, for £1 5s. 'advance for travelling expenses'.

Civil Service regulations required the presentation of a 'proper voucher' before travelling expenses could be refunded. N.Z. Gazette, 1878, p. 1208.

Tom Mills, however, saw the appointment as a political favour, and shared the hope that had moved Tregear to recommend Lawson:

A brief account of Lawson's successor throws some hindlight on Lawson's stay. W. H. Comerford, aged 52, was appointed on 22 November; he had passed the teachers' E examination.79 Although he was appointed on the understanding that his wife and family would accompany him, his wife was an invalid who could not leave Christchurch and needed their daughter to look after her. The school reopened without a sewing-mistress.

Comerford arrived on 24 November and stayed with a fellow Freemason who lived in the district-Walter Gibson, the former county chairman. He complained (from 'Mangamanua') that he 'found the School-room and School-house in a filthy condition' and that the water tank was empty. De Castro had already advised Gibbes that Lawson had told him he had left the key of the house with Mrs Knight who undertook to leave it with the constable when she had cleaned the house.80 De Castro reported further that he had visited the school on 7 November.

Habens replied to Comerford criticising his 'standard of zeal and straightforwardness'; the department privately suspected that he was loath to leave his friend's house to face the prospect of living alone and was at pains to justify his reluctance. After that Comerford's letters to the department were more polite and the handwriting more careful. But in March he told Gibbes again that the house required certain repairs before it was 'fit to inhabit'. De Castro insisted that the only room that needed re-papering was a small back room which 'Mrs Lawson used as a scullery and for washing purposes, there being no outbuildings'.

Walter Gibson, for reasons one can only guess at, wrote to the Minister of Education praising his ability as a teacher and asking that he be sent to a larger school than 'Mangumana'. For short periods during the year Gibson's two daughters acted in turn as sewing-mistress. Comerford complained of 'the backward state' in which he had found the children.82

For all his initial reluctance to accept Mangamaunu, Comerford remained for twelve years and was well accepted by the community. Mrs Walsh remembered him clearly. He reintroduced singing for the first time since Danaher.83 He played the piano, to the accompaniment of fiddle and accordion, at public dances in the schoolhouse. Mr McAra, the Presbyterian minister who had visited the Lawsons (not McCawra, as Bertha spells it)

I owe this information to J. M. Sherrard, a grandson of McAra.

In 1899 with the arrival of the new settlers of the subdivided Puhipuhi estate the roll rose suddenly from eighteen to thirty-two; in 1900 there were more European children than Maori. Kirk reported: 'The recovery of this school is a most astonishing thing to me. It is now a promising school and there are several babies in the settlement. It is quite possible that the marked improvement in the way of living of the people accounts for this.'85 In this year every child who sat the examination passed.

But Comerford reported in May 1901 that attendance was falling, owing to influenza and the departure of several children with their parents to the whaling station. Pope considered whether the school should be transferred to the control of the North Canterbury and Marlborough Education Boards, but concluded: 'it may be urged that it would be a pity to let the 13 Maoris attending, and their parents, suffer discouragement through the loss of their school'.86 In the same year the clerk of works reported that the school buildings were in a 'dirty and dilapidated condition'-the roof of the house leaked and every ceiling was stained; the closet, last blown down in 1898, was standing on its roof. W. W. Bird, newly appointed as inspector, calling in February 1902, found Comerford teaching outside while the repairs were being done.

Comerford carried on without assistance, except in 1904 when his daughter came up from Christchurch, till his retirement. Reports were consistently favourable. 'The master has a fatherly way with the children which they appreciate'.87 'The teacher keeps order by his voice and manner but the children do not seem to be frightened'.88 The Kaikoura bank manager wrote to A. W. Rutherford, member of the House of Representatives for Hurunui electorate, that Comerford was 'a painstaking teacher, and who takes great pride in his native pupils'.89

In 1908 Comerford complained of irregular attendance and asked the department to ask the constable to threaten offending parents. Proceedings were taken against some parents. Bird, who had succeeded Pope, recommended that if attendance did not improve the school should be transferred to the control of an Education Board.90

Comerford, nearing the retiring age of 65, wrote asking to be retained another year: in support of his request he said he had vegetable and flower gardens 'in splendid condition', had bought a horse and gig, built a fowlhouse and reared poultry.91 Gibbes refused. On 16 February 1910 twenty-four parents and residents-seven of them with names recognisably Maoripetitioned James Carroll, Minister of Native Affairs, for the retention of Comerford, 'a gentleman who is so eminently fitted to instruct our children and who has done so much to uplift our settlement'. W. B. Ingram, the proprietor of the Kaikoura Star, forwarded the petition with an accompanying letter. The same twenty-four petitioners wrote to the Minister of Education:

But Gibbes regretted it was not possible. Mrs M. E. Moss was appointed and until she arrived in May 1910, Comerford voluntarily stayed on. There is some irony in the fact that after twelve years of bachelor housekeeping Mrs Moss found the house neglected: she needed a new stove, hearth, and cupboard and a new floor for the scullery; the sitting-room needed re-papering, the chimney needed cleaning and altering; and she wanted a washhouse and bathroom. Comerford had done his washing under a tree in a kerosene tin.

In the community's eyes Lawson must have been a disappointment. If, as a teacher, he was less incompetent than Beck, the children had learned little and he feared their being examined; they had expressed their loss of confidence in him in their absences from school. As a man in the community he had begun on good terms, adopting a familiarity his predecessors had not used, but when the actions of people did not please him, he fell back on authoritarian bluster. His decision to leave the school was an unwitting recognition of the justice of Pope's statement: 'Maoris have as good an idea as most people of what is just and fair, and in the long run they nearly always take the right side. It would seem, then, that a teacher who cannot get on amicably with the Natives, should try to earn a living in some other way.' Both Danaher and Comerford demonstrated the possibility of serving the community while maintaining friendly relations. But for Lawson this would have involved a deeper commitment than he was prepared to make. Yet, as will appear later, the community remembered him for some years afterwards, with more affection than he felt for them.

Lawson's intention when he went to Mangamaunu was to settle and work. His first visit to New Zealand, too, had begun with benevolence and the intention to settle. 'Scenery climate and people all different from Australia', he had writ-tenwritten in 1893. "The people are much nicer over here'.92 At Tuamarina near Blenheim he had written in 1894:

'You stand a grand chance to lead the nations', he told the readers of Fair Play. And in a poem in Truth, before he left for Wellington in 1893, he wrote of himself:

But with such extravagance of sentiment, it is not surprising that that visit lasted only eight or nine months.

When he landed in Wellington in April 1897, he told the N.Z. Mail he intended to stay in New Zealand 'for several years', the Evening Post that he contemplated 'an extended stay', and the Press of Christchurch, reprinting a Wellington cable based on the Post interview, said that he intended 'taking up residence in New Zealand, which, he says, he prefers to all the other colonies'. Tom Mills wrote: 'If Harry can get a billet here he will settle in Maoriland. I sincerely hope we may secure him.'95

There is no doubt that he spent much of his time writing while he was at Mangamaunu. He planned to write a series of sketches from his Mangamaunu experience. At the beginning of his mid-year break he gave two accounts of the plan, to Hugh MacCallum and to Angus and Robertson, and at about the same time to Tom Mills.

It was possibly from Lawson himself or from Tom Mills that Walter Woods, editor of the Hobart Clipper, heard:

Tom Mills's two accounts are the less reliable for their glibness: