Victoria University Press
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Victoria University of Wellington
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First Published 2006
ISBN-13: 978 0 86473 522 5
ISBN-10: 0 86473 522 7
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National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Stafford, Jane, 1951-
Maoriland: New Zealand literature 1872-1914 /
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-86473-522-5
ISBN-10: 0-86473-522-7
1. New Zealand literature—19th century—History and criticism.
2. New Zealand literature—20th century—History and criticism.
I. Williams, Mark, 1951-II. Title.
NZ820.9—dc 22
Printed by Astra Print, Wellington
To Cliff, Eileen and Dot, and in memory of Ron
We wish to thank our research assistant,
Parts of this book have appeared in the Journal of New Zealand Literature; the University of Toronto Quarterly; Kunapipi; Proceedings of the AASA Conferences, India, 2000 and 2004; Bulletin of the Bibliographic Society of Australia and New Zealand. Parts of 'Fashioned Intimacies: Maoriland and Colonial Modernity' are reworked here from Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 37 no 1, pp. 31–48. 'Victorian Poetry and the Indigenous Poet' is reprinted from Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 39 no 1, pp. 29–42. Both articles are used here by permission of Sage Publications, Copyright (© Sage Publications, 2002 and 2004).
Thanks to the audiences of papers delivered at the Stout Research Centre, Wellington, the English and History Departments at the University of Otago, and the English Department at Victoria University.
Thanks also to
Cover image:
The illustrations on pages 134–41 are:
Another decorative feature of Maoriland was the Pakeha fashion for adopting Maori names, H. W. [Harry] Orsman defines the term thus: 'Orig. or mainly a journalistic name for New Zealand as a whole (esp. freq. after the adoption of the term by the Sydney Maoriland is a Name for New Zealand still occasionally encountered, although it is no longer in everyday use. It is an archaic word with colonial associations, politically suspect in a postcolonial age. 'Maoriland' suggests the smug paternalism of a period now regarded with embarrassment, a world in which Maori warriors in heroic attitudes and Maori maidens in seductive ones adorned romantic portraits and tourist postcards. The decorative profusion of Maoriland — occasional tables carved with Maori designs and books of popular Maori myths — now have value as kitsch collectors' items.At Home in New Zealand: History, Houses, People, ed. Bulletin in the 1880s, now infrequently used)', DNZE, pp. 478–9. Tony Deverson observes that, while Maoriland was a 'common journalistic term in Australia in the 1880s … [it] had little or no domestic currency', NZWords, no. 4 (August 2000), p. 2. Yet its ubiquitous presence in the journalism and literature of the period argues that it was also an affectionate colloquial word used by Pakeha New Zealanders. In 1884 the Union Steamship Company issued a guidebook entitled Maoriland: An Illustrated Handbook to New Zealand, indicating that the term was a widely understood synonym for the country: Maoriland: An Illustrated Handbook to New Zealand, compiled by The Red Funnel in 1907, 'Netta' objects to the Australian source of the term but observes its wide acceptance in New Zealand: 'Have we not drawn our sins of advertisement to a head by tamely adopting the foreign label of "Maoriland" for our country? As a foreign label it is melodious and inoffensive. It might have been Damperland or Nuggetland, or fifty other worse names. As adopted and ratified by ourselves it is as apropos and dignified as a sale-board at the front gate. The firm, unscannable "New Zealand" conveys all to the ear of the native-born that the soft foreign "Maoriland" can never suggest', 'The "Colour Problem" in New Zealand Literature', The Red Funnel, 4 no. 1 (February 1907), pp. 31–3. Cited in Robin of Maoriland, wites: 'Maoriland is just another name for the little group of islands set like three shining emeralds in the blue waters of the Southern Pacific, and which the geography books call New Zealand', (London: Oxford University Press/ Humphrey Milford, 1929), p. 9.Bulletin, a term so familiar to readers on both sides of the Tasman that, as Bulletin School in New Zealand?', Historical Studies, vol. 20 no. 81 (October 1983)', p. 527. In the Bulletin the term signalled New Zealand's difference to an Australasian reading public. Queensland was known as Banana land. Australian National Dictionary (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988), lists usages of 'Banana land' beginning with the Sydney Bulletin, 26 June 1880.
Phillips traces the evolution of the term in the nineteenth century. Once the name Maoriland became established in Australia, he observes,
[s]ome in New Zealand, especially in the South Island, took offence at this term; but in fact 'Maoriland' had long been in use within New Zealand itself. The word had, however, changed its meaning. When, for example, Phillips, 'Musings in Maoriland', p. 527.
Old New Zealand [1863], he thought of 'Maoriland' as literally the land of the Maori, i.e. the territory and cutlure [sic] of the Maori. The Greenstone Door (1914) reflects that when The Greenstone Door (Auckland: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1950), p. 202.
Late colonial New Zealand produced verse, popular fiction and literary journalism in which the term appears frequently. In 1890 Musings in Maoriland. In 1901 The Maorilander.The Maorilander lasted just seven weeks.The Maoriland Worker, ran from 1910 to 1924. Anthology introductions of the day and essays in both New Zealand and Australian newspapers and journals earnestly discussed the characteristics and prospects of Maoriland writing. What were those characteristics? As the term suggests, the central feature of Maoriland was the use of Maori sources to provide the descendants of the settlers with a history peculiar to themselves. While drawing on the conventions of romanticism, this material is also filtered through colonial ethnology to give it an air of authenticity and of ownership. Maoriland writing is able to be both fantastic and encyclopedic, to simultaneously invent and record. The habit of appropriation occurs in a period when Maori are conveniently figured as a 'dying race'. Maoriland is also characterised by a sense both of the landscape's sublimity and of the problems of forging a literary relationship with that sublimity. The contradiction at the heart of Maoriland is that its archaism cohabits with and compensates for the colony's sense of its own modernity. Maoriland belongs securely neither in the Victorian nor the modern period, but is a meeting ground between the two: the writing of Maoriland both partakes of nineteenth-century romanticism and, at times, anticipates twentieth-century modernism. In this it is quintessentially Victorian.
'Maoriland', then, is not synonymous with colonialism or with the colonial period; it is, rather, a word that was used to describe late colonial and early Dominion New Zealand, New Zealand became a Dominion in 1907. Both published in London by Wright and Brown. Maoriland was popular in the titles of romance literature. Esther Glen's The Maoriland Worker changed its name to New Zealand Worker. But its resonances lingered: as late as 1962 popular novels by The Maori Gateway: A Romance of Maoriland, and Magic in Maoriland, still took advantage of the term's archaic and romantic associations.Robin of Maoriland is noted above. Rhapsodies of Maoriland appeared in 1945. As late as 1990 the genre is referred to in the title of Victoria in Maoriland, published by the feminist New Women's Press. The most tireless use of the term in book titles occurs in the collections of stories, travel accounts and sketches published and written by A. H. and A. W. Reed, Walks in Maoriland Byways (1958) being a representative example.
Throughout these shifts in meaning, Maoriland is a term that denies what it seems to state: that New Zealand is a land properly belonging to Maori. Maoriland is a land of settlers who, having claimed for themselves the designation 'New Zealanders' once reserved for Maori, See 'New Zealander' 1a, For an account of Maori writing in this period, much of it in the Maori language, see DNZE, p. 533.OH, pp. 5–21.
In the 1930s with the emergence of a group of modernising cultural nationalists determined to eradicate the colonial taint of New Zealand writing, Maoriland was made to represent a set of wholly negative qualities: an atmosphere of feyness, of fairyland romance, characterised by the relentless mythologising of Maori, the decorative use of native flora and fauna, and an addiction to outmoded verse styles. The high proportion of women writers in Maoriland was associated by See, for example, Glover's 'Arraignment of Paris': '— But who are these, beribboned and befrilled?/Oh can it be the ladies' sewing guild?/ … /Our ladies poets these', Vincent O'Sullivan, Denis Glover: Selected Poems (Auckland: Penguin, 1981), p. 7.Man Alone (1939). In Brett's Christmas Annual 1934 the elder Mulgan labelled a Goldie reproduction of Arawa chief, Long Journey to the Border: A Life of John Mulgan (Auckland: Penguin, 2003), p. 114.
Curnow, 'introduction to Curnow, The Spirit of the Rangitira (1889) New Zealand Literature: A Survey (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 71.The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse', Look Back Harder: Critical Writings, 1935-1984, ed. The Penguin Book', Look Back Harder, p. 136.A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923–45', Look Back Harder, p. 47. Kowhai Gold.Look Back Harder, pp. 33-5, 39, ff.
Phillips characterises the orthodoxy established by Curnow and others:
From the beginning of European settlement through the first three decades of [the twentieth] century, New Zealand high culture was largely provincial, imitative and undistinguished. In terms of literary quality there was only the lonely miracle of
Katherine Mansfield whose genius was able to flower once she had left her native land. Of native or distinctive traditions there was little trace.Phillips, 'Musings in Maoriland', p. 520.
So complete was the dismissal of Maoriland writing by the generation centred on Creative Writing in New Zealand: A Brief Critical History (Auckland: The Author with Whitcombe and Tombs, 1946), p. 19.Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse dismisses the postcolonial stance of its editors by associating the book's bicultural organisation with the decorative use of Maori themes and markers in Maoriland verse: the editors, like Kowhai Gold, are dressing up New Zealand poetry by putting 'Maori in its hair'.The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1985), ed. Landfall, 39 no. 3 (September 1985), p. 299. On the treatment of Kowhai Gold, see Landfall 42, no. 1 (March 1988), pp. 19-26.Penguin History, p. 43. Iain Sharp, reviewing The New Place in the Evening Post, wittily presents the prevailing view the poetry of Maoriland: 'Alfred Domett makes me vomit/Pember Reeves makes me heave/And even Blanche Baughan is a technicolour yawn'. Creative Writing in New Zealand, p. 11.
Why, then, attempt to reanimate a period of our literature so universally condemned and so gratefully discarded? Our purpose is neither to discover neglected greatness nor to treat the literature of Maoriland merely as cultural information, but to attend to the writing of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century New Zealand as a
'The notion of a "black hole" in New Zealand writing between the 1890s and the 1930s — between the colonial impulses of the earlier period and the "genuinely indigenous" impulses of the latter is no longer acceptable without modification', Never a Soul at Home: New Zealand Literary Nationalism in the 1930s (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1998), p. 12.Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 6.
Our purpose, then, is to direct serious attention at New Zealand literature from 1872 when Domett's Michael King, Sir Robert Stout, 'The Rise and Progress of New Zealand', preface to See Phillips, 'Musings in Maoriland', p. 525. Ranolf and Amohia first appeared,Ranolf and Amohia was resissued in an enlarged English edition in 1883.The Penguin History of New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin, 2003), p. 218. The Greenstone Door in 1914 and the beginning of the First World War. Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 12. Musings in Maoriland (Dunedin: Keirle, 1890), p. 6.Making Peoples: a History of the New Zealanders: from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Auckland: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1996), chapter 13, 'Getting In', pp. 313–37.Half the World from Home: Perspectives on the Irish in New Zealand, 1860-1950 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1990), p. 6.
Moreover, around the turn of the nineteenth century, empire was an internationalising force in ways not often recognised. In settler cultures, alongside attitudes of deference, there was an optimistic expectation that the British Empire might evolve into an equal and progressive world community. Our own phase of globalisation has actually isolated national, apart from a select group of star authors, consolidating rather than ameliorating the hierarchical lines of power and influence in the publishing, distribution and marketing of books found in the late colonial period. Curnow, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Houndmills, Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 14-17ff.Writing at the Edge of the Universe, ed. A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923–45 argues that by the 1890s 'a New Zealand generation … had made up its mind about what was "English"; it had ordered the sun to stand still at an earlier period'.Look Back Harder, p. 48.
Maoriland writing is deemed to be 'colonial' in the sense of being second-hand, imported, out of date and inappropriate to the world it represents. The forms and values of colonial literature are, of course, Victorian, and in the past Victorian literature was viewed through the lens of a disdainful modernism. Present-day literary scholarship has ceased to apologise for Victorianism, but in New Zealand the modernists' disdain persists. Colonial writing characteristically responds to the new world in terms imported from the old one. 'Reality must be local and special at the point at which we pick up the traces: as manifold as the signs we follow and the routes we take', OH, p. 403.The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse', Look Back Harder, p. 133.Collected Poems 1933–1973 (Wellington: A. H. and A. W Reed, 1974), p. 79.
Jackson observes that 'much that is most distinctive in nineteenth-century New Zealand verse coheres around ideas of "absence and difference"'. Jackson, 'Poetry: Part One: Beginnings to 1945', p. 408. 'A Colonist in His Garden', See 'Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse', lines 85–6, An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English, eds. Agnes Grey and 1849 in Shirley, Journal of New Zealand Literature, 10 (1992), pp. 16–34; 'Anne Bronte, Agnes Grey and New Zealand', Bronte Society Transactions, 20 no. 2 (1990), pp. 97-99.Writers in Residence: A Journey with Pioneer New Zealand Writers (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2004), p. 148.Poetical Works, ed. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 302.
The efforts of Maoriland writers to explore their distance from both the world presented to them and the available conventions in which to write that world produced the beginnings of a literature in English distinctively marked by its New Zealand provenance. A later generation of cultural nationalist writers defined their poetic principles against what they saw as the colonial failure to notice local realities. In fact, the inadequacy of imported literary conventions was very frequently the explicit subject rather than the unexamined limitation of colonial writing. Here the boundaries between nineteenth-century writing and modernism blur; self-consciousness and the awareness of fragmentation, loss of the sense of the world as an organic whole are not concentrated on the near side of that divide. The colonial world was an ideal one in which to encounter modernity.
Maoriland was a period of both modernity and nostalgia. By the 1880s the world of the first generation of settlers had disappeared and the immediate memories of landing, contact and wars had dissipated. A consciousness of history was appearing at the point where its most dramatic period of making was moving into the past. This is the period in which In his memoirs Curnow comments on this in his introduction to A Bibliography of the Literature Relating to New Zealand (1909) and Ao-tea-roa: The Long White Cloud, which appeared in 1898. Musings in Maoriland, listing tonnages and debt ratios, as Reminiscences and Recollections (New Plymouth: Thomas Avery, 1937), p. 99.The Penguin Book: 'Their assumption [that is, "the colonial and pre-national generations"] that if there was to be a nation there had also to be a literature — not at all the same thing as arguing that literatures have to be national — was an entirely reasonable one', Look Back Harder, p. 138.New Zealand Verse:
There is a time which some of us look for, when New Zealand will be assigned a place among the nations not only on account of its exports of wool and gold, or for richness and worth in horses and footballers, but also by reason of its contributions to art and science; — when there will be more than one New Zealand scientist in the Royal Society, and more than one New Zealand poet in the anthologies; and 'when New Zealand books, New Zealand pictures, New Zealand statues and buildings will gain some repute and note in the civilized world.' That time has not yet arrived. Nevertheless, there are first fruits ripe already, and if the sheaf we have bound is a very little one, it surely holds ears with no poor promise of good grain to come. And even the hardest-headed race of farmers and shepherds and workers in wood and metal has its dreams and its seers of visions (and even sends some of them into Parliament), and may be helped by the labour of such towards the deep-breasted fullness of mature nationality.
W. F. Alexander andA. E. Currie , introduction toNew Zealand Verse(London: Walter Scott, 1906), p. xv.
King, Edmond, The Toll of the Bush [1905] and The Greenstone Door [1914])'.Penguin History of New Zealand, pp. 280–1.Representing the South Pacific, p. 191.Brown Bread from a Colonial Oven (1912), there aren't any colonial ovens any more; there are bakers and all the troubling signs of an energetic modernity. In Maoriland writing we encounter a voice speaking of cheese factories, cities, commerce, as if talking about London. At the same time, we find nostalgia for the pre-modern world of the colony: business is opposed to a vanishing authenticity. The romantic impulses of colonial writing, in fact, indicate not a lack of adjustment to new realities but a surplus of modernity in the immediate world.
At the same time that there is an insistence on modernity, there is also a continual recourse to the archaic. As Arnold says in 'Empedocles on Etna',
Indeed, modernity requires what '"Invented tradition" is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past', The Invention of Traditions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 1.
In spite of the name, then, Maoriland signifies an effort to deny the real presence of Maori in New Zealand in favour of a mythologised or decorative presence. As King points out, 'most Pakeha living in, say, the four main centres were by this time unlikely to come into direct contact with Maori, and even in a provincial centre such as Hamilton Maori appeared only to sell vegetables door to door and did not live in the town', King Quoted in See Penguin History of New Zealand, p. 240.Recalling Aotearoa: Indigenous Politics and Ethnic Relations in New Zealand (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 13.Rua and the Maori Millennium (Wellington: Price Milburn for Victoria University Press, 1979), p. 142. Man Alone the Maori farming family is still struggling with more than the Pakeha burden of debt.
Since the late 1980s work has appeared which has as its purpose the identification of women's writing in the colonial period. Notable examples are: Phillips, 'Musings in Maoriland', pp. 520–35; The Material Gathered in this book is largely new. Much of it has lain in archives and libraries, untouched save by the occasional scholarly researcher. Virtually all Maoriland texts are out of print, and most are sequestered in rare book collections. Anno Domini, or Women's Destiny was republished as a curiosity in 2000 with an introduction by The Toll of the Bush (1905) is in print, The Greenstone Door (1914) is not. The poetry of the colonial period is more available through anthologies, with the 1997 Anthology of New Zealand Poetry ed. Bornholdt, et al. including it, after exclusion during The New Place: The Poetry of Settlement in New Zealand, 1852–1914 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1993) covers the whole colonial period, though much of the material comes from the Maoriland period. Mansfield, of course, is easily available but she has long been seen as separate from Maoriland. Stories by Happy Endings: Stories by Australian and New Zealand Women, 1850s–1930s, eds. Oxford Book of New Zealand Short Stories (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1994). Both Some Other Country: New Zealand's Best Short Stories, ed. The Flamingo Anthology of New Zealand Short Stories, ed. The Ideal Society and its Enemies (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1989); Akenson, Half the World from Home; Belich, Making Peoples and Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000 (Auckland: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2001).New Zealand Literature: A Survey. Bulletin School in New Zealand?', appeared in 1983. Heather Roberts, in Where Did She Come From? (1989), considers colonial women writers; Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English (1991, 1998) covers the ground of each genre; his recent book on Writers in Residence: A Journey with Pioneer New Zealand Writers (2004) offers a biographical account of a range of colonial writers from Country of Writing: Travel Writing and New Zealand, 1809–1900 (2002). We note growing interest by postgraduate researchers in colonial writing generally and are indebted to a number of theses and recently published articles.Bulletin, 1880–1900', Ph.D. Diss., Australian National University, 1968;
In this book we endeavour to bring to light as much as possible of the primary sources. We are also concerned to place the material so gathered in the particular cultural and critical contexts that we judge to be most useful. Methodologically, we have been inspired by a number of recent works in colonial discourse studies, cultural anthropology and history: Edmond, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (1995), Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (1997), and Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (1994). While connecting the cultural forms of Maoriland to larger patterns of contemporary colonial discourse we aim to avoid the theoretical generalisations of what Representing the South Pacific, p. 12.
Although we place each writer in their cultural and literary context, our focus is primarily textual, and we are conscious that much research needs be done on the history of publishing and readership, and the question of audience — actual and imagined — in late colonial New Zealand. Most poets and short story writers in this period published initially in newspapers and periodicals, local and Australian, and publication in book form came, if at all, later, 'publishers' being generally jobbing printers or newspapers. (Domett is the exception here, his poem We are aware that a history of Ranolf and Amohia being written to effect his entry into the British literary establishment.) Novelists, on the other hand, were usually published in Britain — for example, An Unsettled Spirit: the Life and Frontier Fiction of Edith Lyttleton (G. B. Lancaster) (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003), gives a detailed and instructive account of her relations with her publisher.
This book is not a comprehensive survey of late colonial literature. We are aware of numerous other writers in this period — Maoriland focuses on a selection of writers who illustrate what we see as the key concerns of the contemporary writing community: The Spirit of the Rangitira appeared in 1889, The Heart of the Bush appeared in 1910, The Greenstone Door, in 1914. The centre of the book, then, is situated in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century, the period later commentators like Curnow and Phillips identify with Maoriland. Ranolf and Amohia, although earlier, is a foundational document. Our discussion is based on the 1872 version of his poem, which was written in New Zealand. We felt that to use the second edition of the poem, published in 1883, would have been unsatisfactory as the revisions and enlargements were added on his retirement to England in 1871 in response to the English literary culture of which he was so avidly a member.
Our purpose is not to defend Maoriland writing, but to examine it in less restrictive terms than those in which it has been examined so far, to look for its complexities rather than to repeat the negative generalisations that have usually served to characterise it. It is the period from which much of the reputation of this country for progressive social legislation derives. It is the period where the sources of modern feminism are to be found. It is the period that supplies us with the vocabulary with which we describe the landscape. It is the period from which we source, unwittingly or not, the roles by which we enact our bicultural relations. It is a period that still shapes the attitudes and values of our own time in ways of which we are not always aware.
Emma Young to Emily Secretan, c. 1904, Hall Griffin papers, British Library, Add. MS 45, 564, fol. 66–68b, n.p. W. H. Griffin, 'Early Friends of Robert Browning', Young to Secretan, n.p.From the Late 1820s to the mid 1840s the family home of Contemporary Review 87 (March 1905), 427–46, p. 440.Venice (1839), though he probably knew some of the members previously: he had been at school with Domett's brother Edward, and may have known Domett as early as 1830. Emma Young, Fred and William's sister, wrote later 'what an interesting set they were, Poets, Philosophers. Scientific — Literary all'.
The young men were all connected through school and a network of family, business and marriage alliances:
Interestingly, for Domett's later career in New Zealand, Browning's biographer,
Although a surprisingly large number of the group were destined to be involved in the development of the Victorian British Empire, Arnould in India and the Youngs and Domett in New Zealand, they saw themselves as liberals, colonizers, and free traders, not as nationalist imperialists.
John Maynard ,Browning's Youth(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 104–5.
As just such a liberal, William Curling Young, The English in China (London: Smith, Elder, 1840).The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1845–1846, ed. Elvan Kintner (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), vol. 2, letter 523, 26 August 1846, p. 1005. This contrasted with the position of The Diary of Alfred Domett 1872–1885, ed. Diary (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 14 April 1873, p. 80.
Camberwell, where the Brownings lived and where many of the group met, was at that time a suburb of London, quiet, leafy, relaxed, suburban in a new sense of the word, representative of a new kind of middle-class society: Carlyle, meeting Browning in the 1830s, described him as wearing a coat suggesting 'proclivities for the turf and scamphood'New Letters of Robert Browning, eds. The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Contemporary Review, vol. 215 (1969), p. 316. In fact, he was not strictly upper class. He was from the wealthy commercial middle classes but had been educated to think of himself as a gentleman.Robert Browning and Alfred Domett, ed.
In 1840 when Christopher North Blackwood's Magazine.(Blackwoods Magazine, 1837), The Diary of Alfred Domett, introduction, p. 1. 'A Christmas Hymn' was republished in Domett's Flotsam and Jetsam: Rhymes Old and New (London: Smith and Elder, 1877), p. 44.Sordello, which proved a complete critical disaster.
DeVane, A Browning Handbook states that 'Sordello has become so notorious as the least comprehensible poem written in the English language — at least before 1920 — that little comment is required here.'A Browning Handbook (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1955), p. 85.Sordello!Browning Handbook, pp. 85–6.
Opinion seemed to centre on the relationship between the subject matter — medieval Italy, faith and doubt, the problems of introspection versus action — and the style in which it was expressed. DeVane, Browning Handbook, p. 85.Penguin History of New Zealand Literature of Ranolf and Amohia, first published in 1872: 'Like a stranded whale, the poem lies rotting on the beach of New Zealand literature, an embarrassment that no one knows what to do with.'The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature (Auckland: Penguin, 1990), p. 43. Ranolf and Amohia as a problem for contemporary readers and critics, especially those engaged in writing literary history. Sordello was a problem for Browning, and his reputation took twenty-five years to recover.
Browning gave Domett a copy of 7 March 1840, Kenyon, British Library MS Ashley 247. Domett writes in his diary that in his opinion the intricacies of the plot present more difficulties than the '"subjective" phrases': 'I had scribbled in pencil on the book, two or three impatient remarks such as "Who said this?", "What does this mean?" &c', 8 March 1872, Horsman, n.d., Kenyon, Sordello in March 1840 soon after the poem had appeared, writing, 'I hope you will like it a little, and beat it famously yourself ere the season is out.'Browning and Domett, pp. 27–8.Diary, p. 49.Browning and Domett, p. 84.Pippa Passes. The critic is described thus:
A black squat Beetle, potent for his size, Pushing tail-first by every road that's wrong The dirt ball of his musty rules along His tiny sphere of grovelling sympathies, — Has knocked himself full-butt with blundering trouble Against a Mountain he can neither double Nor ever hope to scale. So, like a free, Pert, self-complacent Scarabaeus, he Takes it into his horny head to swear — There's no such thing as any mountain there! Domett,
Flotsam and Jetsam,p. 25.
A key aspect of the friendship between Domett and Browning was obviously their faith in each others' powers. When Domett left for New Zealand he wrote to Browning from on board ship, ' Perry, 'Waring', p. 79. 22 May 1842, Kenyon, Write (to the world) — and to me at New Zealand.'Browning and Domett, p. 35.
It could be inferred from the account of it in Browning's poem 'Waring' that Domett's departure for New Zealand was unexpected. But this can hardly be the case. His circle had New Zealand connections, and his cousin William Curling Young had gone ahead, settling in the Waimea Valley near Nelson. Domett left on the ship See the entry 'New Zealand death', Letter to Capt. Nairne, 28 August 1842, 'William Curling Young: Letters and Notes 1840–2', compiled by Mary Young, J. C. Beaglehole Collection, Victoria University Library, Wellington, p. 224. In this manuscript, Mary Young transcribes a letter from Domett in which he writes of Curling Young's death being still fresh in the mind of the inhabitants of Nelson when he arrived: 'People of the Labouring Class often pass me in mourning for him.' Curling Young's time in Nelson is discussed in Sir Charles Forbes heading for Nelson in 1842. The news on his arrival was tragic, and this set the tone for the way in which his English correspondence represents his enterprise: Curling Young had been drowned (drowning was known locally as 'the New Zealand death')DNZE, p. 531.black and lifeless when they told me of this shocking event, and though I have in some degree, recovered my interest in it, the Colony will never be to me what it was before.'Nelson: A History of Early Settlement (Wellington: A. H. and A. W. Reed, 1965), p. 181.
I wish you had said more about yourself, and more encouragingly. But I take refuge now in what I used to deprecate once, your habit of painting everything
en noir: as long as you canswim,for instance, how should you be 'crippled'?8 November 1843, Kenyon,
Browning and Domettp. 95. This is borne out by later letters quoted byHelen Blythe , 'Paradise or Hell:Ranolf and Amohia,the New Zealand Colony, and Alfred Domett' in 'The Idea of Place', special issue ofAustralian-Canadian Studies,18: 1–2 (2000) 113–28, though Blythe's interpretation differs from ours.
But the news of the 'Wairau Massacre', as it was then called, suggested that matters could not be simply written off as a product of Domett's gloominess. A group of settlers from Nelson led by Belich, Making Peoples, p. 205.
… how unutterably glad and thankful I and all your friends are, that you are out of the horrible story of the
massacre.But what melancholy work for you — most of the poor fellows must have been your friends …8 January 1844, Kenyon,
Browning and Domett,p. 99–100.
Arnould, certainly, felt the emigration to have been ill conceived, though he conceded its initial attraction. He writes:
To have asked you
not to gowould have been as wild and hopeless as to request the Spring tide with compliments to defer its daily flow; but now you have been, you have seen, you have learnt all that experience can teach, and I wager anything that in your heart of hearts you pronounce the whole thing a failure. Well, what is there to tie you with your thirty-three years of life to a damned dull collection of log huts in the Antipodes, while you might have a very decent roomchez moias long as you liked to stay — a year's pupillage in the law without payment of your 100 guineas.n.d., Kenyon,
Browning and Domett,p. 81.
The irony was, of course, that the Wairau incident was the making of Domett in the colony. He wrote an account of the affair for a special supplement to the Nelson Examiner, and served as a representative taking the settlers' viewpoint to Auckland, a position that began his career as a politician and administrator. All this was beyond the understanding of
Law at Nelson! — all the bitter, and none of the sweets which time and prescription, and sociality, and classicality of a sort, and
lucri odor, help to wring out of London Law-Life!23 February 1845, Kenyon,
Browning and Domett, p. 109–10.
He goes on to deprecate the very mention of 'something about a crop of potatoes, and net expenses, and loss — horrible!' Domett was certainly complicit in this representation, deploring 'the lounging shooting-jacket existence, Mrs Wray's … aesthetic tea, Miss Essex's piano, the brandy and whist-cum-cigar evenings'. Horsman, Maynard, Diary, p. 15.Browning's Youth, pp. 17–18.
Despite the distance, Domett's involvement in the literary affairs of his friends and British literary life continued; indeed, there is little sense in their letters of Domett's geographical isolation. The progress of 13 July 1842, Kenyon, n.d., Kenyon, Martin Chuzzlewit is referred to, and 'Locksley Hall' is discussed in detail.Browning and Domett, p. 40.Browning and Domett, p. 84.
'So far away so long — and now Returned to England? — Come with me! Some of our great "celebrities" You will be glad to see!' Carlyle — the Laureate — Browning — these!These walking bipeds — Nay, you joke! — Each wondrous power for thirty years O'er us head-downward folk Wrapt skylike, at the Antipodes, — Those common limbs — that common trunk! 'Tis the Arab-Jinn who reached the clouds Into his bottle shrunk. The flashing Mind — the boundless Soul We felt ubiquitous, that mash Medullary or cortical — That six inch brain-cube! — Trash! Domett,
Flotsam and Jetsam, p. 75.
In return for the books, Domett sent Browning and Arnould New Zealand newspapers: 'I have received 13 July 1843, Kenyon, 19 March 1846, Kenyon, Horsman, Examiners in abundance,' Browning writes,Browning and Domett, p. 126.we all feel when they come to hand and heart. Surely the new dynasty will avail itself of your services,' he writes in 1846, as Domett's political ambitions grow.Browning and Domett, p. 122.Diary, p. 25.
Browning, left behind, had fantasies of escape. He wrote to Domett:
I have a sort of notion you will come back some bright morning a dozen years hence and find me just gone — to Heaven, or Timbuctoo; and I give way a little to this fancy while I write, because it lets me write fully what, I dare say, I said niggardly enough — my real love for you …
22 May 1842, Kenyon,
Browning and Domett, p. 33.
The literary political and personal scene seemed to him overwhelmingly dull and petty by comparison with the details of Domett's pioneer existence:
Here everything goes flatly on, except the fierce political reality
(as it begins to be). Our poems, &c., are poor child's play — and I do, without affectation, very often think of you, and your progress, and welfare, and return one not verydistant day: — so that (I mean to say) while, out of the myriad things thatcouldbewritten of, scarcely one seems worthier note [sic] than another,youcannot write about acorn-planting or house-building or bird-shooting without interesting me.13 July 1842, Kenyon,
Browning and Domett, p. 42–3.
Despite, or perhaps in contradiction to the characterisation of New Zealand as provincial, Browning can also express the idea that English literature needs the vigour of the colonial: 'we are dead asleep in literary things, and in great want of a "rousing word" (as the old Puritans phrase it) from New Zealand or any place 15 May 1843, Kenyon, out of this snoring dormitory,' he writes.Browning and Domett, p. 54.
Here the vilest mill goes round and round; one quarterly has an article on Leibnitz, another on Spinosa, a third on Descartes. And outside the dry dust track is a strip of sand, and beyond — your country.
15 May 1843, Kenyon,
Browning and Domett, p. 57.
Fantasising about emigration, Browning writes, 'New Zealand is still left me!' 15 May 1843, Kenyon, Browning and Domett, p. 56.
It seems disinspiriting for a man to hack away at trees in a wood, and at the end of his clearing come to rocks or the sea or whatever disappoints him as leading to nothing; but still, turn the man's face, point him to new trees and the true direction, and who will compare his power arising from experience with that of another who has been confirming himself all the time in the belief that chopping wood is incredible labour, and that the first blow he strikes will be sure to jar his arm to the shoulder without shaking a leaf on the lowest bough? I stand at present and wait like such a fellow as the first of these; if the real work should present itself to be done, I shall begin at once and in earnest… not having to learn first of all how to keep the
from flying back into my face; and if I stop in the middle, let the bad business of other years show that I was not idle nor altogether incompetent. axe- head axehead 13 July 1846, Kenyon,
Browning and Domett,p. 128
The cure may not have been emigration, but, as it turns out, it certainly involved leaving England. In February 1845 he writes to Domett of 'some divine things by Miss Barrett', a much better known poet who had flatteringly included a reference to his pamphlet 'Bells and Pomegranates' in her poem 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship'. 23 February 1845, Kenyon, Arnould's description of Barrett to Domett was surprisingly hostile: 'the Browning and Domett, p. 113.soidisante invalid of seven years, once emancipated from paternal despotism, has had a wondrous revival, or rather a complete metamorphosis; walks, rides, eats and drinks like a young and healthy woman — in fact is a healthy woman of, I believe, some five and thirty — a little old — too old for Browning — but then one word covers all: they are in Love, who lends his own youth to everything', 30 November 1846, Kenyon, Browning and Domett, p. 136. In fact Barrett was 40 years old.
My love is here. Where are you, dear old friend? How rolls the Wairoa at your world's far end? This is Ancona, yonder is the sea.
Robert Browning , 'The Guardian Angel',Poetical Works, vol. 5, eds. Ian Jack and Robert Inglesfield (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), p. 413. The editors are incorrect in identifying the Wairoa as the river of that name in Hawkes Bay. Browning is referring to the Wairoa near Nelson.
Domett wrote in 1864 after 1 March 1872, Horsman, Diary, p. 46.
Browning's poem 'Waring' was written soon after Domett's departure in 1842, and phrases from Browning's letters to him are echoed in the poem. Critics have stated that the main difference between Waring and Domett is that Waring has gone to Russia, not New Zealand, but careful reading of the poem shows this not to be the case. Waring has simply gone, and it is left to the narrator to imagine where he might be. 'Travels Waring East away'?Poetical Works, vol. 3, eds. Ian Jack and Rowena Fowler (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), pp. 225-35.
Contrive, contrive To rouse us, Waring! Who's alive? Our men seem scarce in earnest now.
All of this is quite consciously nonsense, a pastiche of the exotic language of place. Browning cannot imagine Waring or Domett away, hence the absurdity of the imaginary destinations. Browning wrote to Domett:
I could easily fancy you were no farther off than Brighton — not to say Exeter — all this while, so much of you is here, and there, and wherever I have been used to see, or think about you.
13 December 1842, Kenyon,
Browning and Domett, p. 47.
Acorn planting and log huts simply don't supply a vivid enough picture, and certainly not one capable of poetic articulation. Browning wrote in puzzled tone: 'We two [Dowson and himself] went up our hills (what are 5 March 1843, Kenyon, your hills, now?) and talked about you.'Browning and Domett, p. 51.
Oh, never star Was lost here, but it rose afar! Look East, where whole new thousands are! In Vishnu-land what Avatar! Browning, 'Waring', p. 235.
In March 1872, Robert Browning, widowed, elderly, successful, wrote to a friend:
Waring came back the other day after thirty years' absence, the same as ever — nearly. He has been Prime Minister at New
Zealand for a year and a half, but gets tired, and returns home with a poem. Browning to
Isabella Blagden , 30 March 1872, Kenyon,Browning and Domett,p. 145.
The poem was The first version of 18 March 1872, Horsman, 22 March 1872, Kenyon, 25 March 1872, Horsman, Perry, 'Waring', pp. 168–9.Ranolf and Amohia, Ranolf and Amohia subtitled A South-Sea Day-Dream was published by A Dream of Two Lives was published by Keagan Paul, London, in 1883. Subsequent references are in the text.Sordello. Domett arrived in London with the manuscript of the first version complete, in search of a publisher. Their friendship re-established (Domett's diary of these retirement years are a major source for Browning biographers) Browning suggested Domett try his own publishers, Diary, p. 50.Browning and Domett, p. 149.Diary, p. 51. Ranolf and Amohia at the author's expense. Domett sent a copy to Browning, who in reply praised the poem, noting its 'subtle yet clear writing about subjects of all others the most urgent for expression and the least easy for treatment' (a polite way, perhaps, of saying it was not easy to read) and noted the stylistic range and the way that Domett introduces Maori material — 'such treasures new and old of language, and such continuance of music in modes old and new'. There is perhaps a desperate note of suppressed hysteria, common among readers of Ranolf and Amohia, when he speaks of 'the affluence of illustration and the dexterity in bringing together to bear on the subject every possible aid from every conceivable quarter'.
The first version of 9 January 1873, Horsman, Ranolf and Amohia was subtitled A South-Sea Day-Dream. At 500 pages it was longer than Paradise Lost. Domett proceeded to use his English retirement to revise and enlarge this text, adding another four thousand lines in the second edition, published in 1883 with the new subtitle, A Dream of Two Lives. Domett sent a copy (of the shorter version) to Diary, p. 69.
There is ample space in it to move and breathe. It reminds me of the great pictures of the old masters, and of what a Western woman said, when she first saw the ocean; 'Well, I am glad at last to see enough of something.'
7 September 1878, Horsman,
Diary, p. 223. Domett says: 'While he has a quiet hit at the unconscionable length of the poem, in other respects his opinion seems sufficiently grateful.'
The Perry, 'Waring', p. 179.Spectator praised the poem's 'power, buoyancy, intellectual subtlety' and 'vigorous and vivid sketches of modern doubts and faiths', although there was perhaps a barb in its opinion that there was 'picture enough in this book to make a great many poems' and it closed with an ambiguous conclusion that '[n]o one who really understands the book can help thoroughly enjoying it'.Sunday Times, the Civil Service Gazette, the Literary Churchman, the Illustrated London News and the Manchester Guardian. A Century of Australian Song (1888) described it as 'the principle achievement of Australasia in poetry' and Domett as 'a writer whom it is as impossible to represent fairly in selections as it would be to represent the Iliad or the De rerum Natura'.A Century of Australian Song (London: Walter Scott, 1888), pp. 6–7.Chicago Times praised it, even though the reviewer thought it was set in India. Despite this, and despite the melodrama of the poem's plot, two discussions of Ranolf and Amohia, by New Zealand Rulers and Statesmen from 1840 to 1897, rev. ed. (London: Sampson Low Marston, 1897), p. 116.
[
] is the epic of New Zealand, not merely because its scene is laid there, but because its finest and most attractive passages are those which describe the romantic scenery of the islands (including the wonderful, and now lost, Pink and White Terraces) and the customs and mythology of their native inhabitants.Ranolf and Amohia Kenyon,
Browning and Domett, p. 18.
Certainly, Domett was at pains to display his ethnographical knowledge of Maori language, custom, history and lore. There are explanatory notes, a guide to pronunciation, and appendices on the Browning, DeVane, Ko nga moteatea, me nga hakirarao nga Maori), legends (with acknowledgements to Grey's Polynesian Mythology [1835]), and 'Natural Objects' (trees and shrubs, plants and insects). In this, the poem resembles Sordello with its opening insistence on truth: 'Who believes me shall behold / The man… Only believe me. Ye believe?'Sordello, Browning, Poetical Works, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), eds. Ian Jack and Margaret Smith, p. 195.Sordello by consulting thirty books in the British museum,Poetical Works, v. 2, p. 174.Robert Browning, ed. Sordello or Ranolf and Amohia: Sordello that '[i]t was a fine poem before the author wrote it'.Browning Handbook, p. 77.
More acute local critics recognised Quoted in Perry, 'Waring', p. 176. DeVane, Ranolf and Amohia's place in British rather than local literature: Sordello: 'The historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires; and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study.'Browning Handbook, p. 73.
Essentially Ranolf and Amohia is not about New Zealand any more than Browning's Sordello is about Italy or his 'Waring' about Russia or Spain. As the subtitle of its first edition describes it, it is a 'South-Sea Day-Dream', part of that fictional construction of exotic place; it is Maoriland, a fantasy alternative version of New Zealand, the modern progressive colony. Domett's Maoriland is a literary place, archaic space, peopled by the ghosts of a now dying race, warriors, maidens, and tohunga, in settings sublime and exotic, all configured by the conventions of European Romanticism and its nineteenth-century modifications, from Rousseau to Ossian to Ruskin to the Celtic Revival. Its relationship to modern New Zealand was that of self-justifying Ranolf and Amohia as noble, brave, beautiful, and seductive, because they are carefully hermetically sealed in an invented past. Ranolf can even, after misgivings and near disaster, marry Amohia and take her back to England: as he can visit and leave Maoriland, so she, by virtue of his love and approval, and licensed by romance conventions, can renounce her place there and become his wife in the world of the present. Maori knowledge of the world, of religion and philosophy, can be accorded space and respect in the poem, as it operates only within the circumscribed parameters of Ranolf's overarching and Browningesque account of European systems of knowledge.
As Browning in Camberwell invents medieval Italy as a stage for his metaphysics, so in Ranolf and Amohia, Domett conjures up a world as far removed from the colonial life he experienced as fact is from fiction. Thus his work fitted into the colonists' project by which the 'damned dull collection of log huts in the Antipodes', the potato harvest, and the painfully provincial sociality, cut only by random and bleakly incomprehensible tragedy, could be transformed and safely re-presented to the world as the mysterious, intricate, romantic and exotically seductive realm of Maoriland.
The Plot of Ranolf and Amohia is relatively straightforward. Ranolf, a young Briton (in spite of his iconic Englishness, the details of his parentage suggest a Scots background) is shipwrecked off the coast of New Zealand, saved by the local Maori tribe, and meets and falls in love with Amohia, the daughter of the Rotorua chief, Tangi-Moana. Kangapo, the conniving tohunga, observes Amohia's love for Ranolf, and sees that it will interfere with his plans to marry her off for strategic purposes, so arranges to have Ranolf kidnapped. Ranolf is rescued by Amohia who arranges his escape to an island; she learns of her imminent marriage, and swims across the lake to join him. They flee through the bush, returning to Rotorua in time to take part in a battle
In spite of a lack of subplots, Domett takes 150,000 lines to tell his story. He is not unaware of his prolixity:
Then pardon us, although Beguiled, dear Reader, at this stage too long, (Alas for sins of inartistic Song!) O prithee pardon, if with little skill We fling these scraps together — skip who will! (69) Elsewhere, a long descriptive passage of 'moving mountains and still Main' is curtailed by the admission, 'In brief, dear tortured Reader — it was near / The dawn' (473).
There are long and graphic descriptions of the landscape in which the poem is set, the thermal region of Rotorua, 'this remote sweet wilderness, / This Life-deserted, Life-desiring land' (79), including passages describing thermal geysers, boiling mud pools, the native bush, and the Pink and White Terraces.
Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 9. Ranolf and Amohia is constructed in a similar fashion. The immediate and the actual are pushed into the past and the fantastic and invented elements are moved to the foreground: '[W]e pause — we pale before it, / Fairest reader — that soft splendour!' (252). Domett employs the somewhat exhausted language of the European sublime:
… these glades And glens and lustre-smitten shades, Where trees of tropic beauty rare With graceful spread and ample swell Uprose … (7)
But it is invigorated by the strangeness and particularity of the New Zealand landscape:
Aye! in this realm of seeming rest, What sights you met and sounds of dread! Calcareous caldrons, deep and large With geysers hissing to their marge; Sulphureous fumes that spout and blow; Columns and cones of boiling snow; And sable lazy-bubbling pools Of sputtering mud that never cools … (7)
It is, says Domett, as if'Green Paradise were flung over Hell' (8).
Domett cannot wholly retreat from the present into the seductions of myth. His problem is that he is not as removed from the actual as Browning or Tennyson. Browning researched 16 January 1864; quoted in 14 March 1863; quoted in Bohan, Sordello while sitting in the Reading Room of the British Museum. While he was writing his vast epic, Domett was actively involved in the running of the colony, dealing with actual rather than mythical Maori. 'Everybody likes Mr Domett; everyone admires his vigorous, cross-grained, charming, cantankerous mind,' wrote the Christchurch Press.Blest Madman: Fitzgerald of Canterbury (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 1998), p. 244.Press put it.Blest Madman, p. 229.
The uncertainty then of boundaries, the mixed and complicated nature of the relations between chiefs and individuals as to ownership, but much more, the unchanged character of the natives, their subtlety, cunning, cupidity, and perfect disregard for truth in deed and word — for of these qualities, whatever excellences they are coupled with, and these are many, there can be no doubt, exemplified as they have been in frequent sales of land belonging to other natives, re-sales of land already parted with, and false assertions on the investigation of them — these causes have conspired to produce the dissatisfaction and delay respecting claims justly founded and purchases made with liberality and good faith.
Quoted in Stevenson, 'Alfred Domett', p. 27.
Domett held that Maori understanding of property rights was primitive and that mana meant simply 'might is right'. Stevenson, 'Alfred Domett', p. 116. Quoted in Horsman, Quoted in Horsman, Diary, p. 16.Diary, p. 18.
Leonard Bell asks, 'Why were there so many images romanticising Maori at a time when government policy and the dominant ideology looked forward to the end of a distinctive Maori culture and the incorporation of Maori into European structures? 'Colonial Constructs: European Images of Maori 1840–1914 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1992), p. 3. Ranolf and Amohia can be related to a local particularity is arguable.
European artists formulated multiple, at times seemingly conflicting 'views' of Maori people, culture, and history. For instance, Maori could be presented as savages existing at a primitive stage of social development. Maori could be presented as romantic beings, as noble, as ignoble, as relics of antiquity, as exotic curiosities, as picturesque, as hostile, as friendly or deferential, as objects of desire or display, as participants in a spectacle, as members of a dying race, as ethnological specimens, as marketable commodities, as antipodean peasants.
Bell,
Colonial Constructs,p. 4. There was a standard stereotype of 'the primitive'.Andrew Wawn describes the Viking in nineteenth-century writing in terms that parallels Maori representations: 'variously buchaneering, triumphalist, defiant, confused, disillusioned, unbiddable, disciplined, elaborately pagan, austerely pious, relentlessly jolly, or self-destructively sybaritic. They are merchant adventurers, mercenary soldiers, pioneering colonists, pitiless raiders, self-sufficient farmers, cutting edge naval technologists, primitive democrats, psychopathic berserks, ardent lovers and complicated poets.'Andrew Wawn ,The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain(Cambridge and New York: D. S. Brewer, 2000), p. 4.
Belich delineates the colonial categories of Maori as grey (declining or dying), black (unsalvageably savage), red (ferocious, formidable), brown (natural subordinates, comic and unimprovable), green (Nature's gentry, at one with their environment) and white (almost European). Belich, Making Peoples, p. 21.
Amohia is the most mythically conceived to the extent that one critic interprets her appearance at the end of the poem as an apparition. Bell, Polynesian Mythology.Colonial Constructs, pp. 140–3. Bell is discussing an 1879 painting, 'Hinemoa: A Maori Maiden' by
The Hinemoa story is the most famous of the Europeanised legends of the Maori, perhaps because it allows the Pakeha reader a glimpse Ranolf and Amohia differs from its source in that the couple are Maori and Pakeha, and in the sense the reader has that Ranolf, 'Supreme Civilisation's tender heir' (151), is more interested in talking to (or at) Amohia than disporting himself with her. Rather than being purely erotic, Amohia represents the beautiful, romantic associations of Maori culture, and this is being rescued and redeemed from the unacceptable, unassimilable savage elements. Significantly, Amohia, the assimilable Maori, is literally drawn from myth rather than being a representation of reality. Assimilation is figured by the romance plot, in which marriage is both conquest and possession.
Domett's second category is that of the recalcitrant but engaging Maori, and is represented by Tangi-Moana, whose chiefly authority is a version of that of the British aristocracy; indeed, Domett calls Tangi and his warrior companions 'unkempt Aristocrats' (89):
His many merits how shall we repeat? In all that most adorns a Chief, complete. Highborn — of ancient perfect pedigree, The carved and saw-notched stick, his family-tree And roll heraldic, where each tooth expressed A male progenitor, concisely showed How still through these his lineage proud had flowed … (88)
If Amohia is readily assimilable, indeed, marriageable, Tangi is resistant yet not ignoble. He is still in a state of savagery, but near the pinnacle of the carefully graded Victorian imperial racial ladder. His warrior status locates him within the discourses of European romanticism, the noble savage inhabiting a world where courage and honour are terms not yet debased by modernity. This looks forward to Goldie's portraits, although by then a consciousness of their fabrication was stronger.
He had his Heaven, be sure; where warriors brave Found all the luxuries their rude tastes would crave … (415)
Tangi compares the old Maori ways with Christianity, 'our dark world of chance and change' (184). His contempt for the Christian doctrine The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed.
The world of Spirits was their dumb Police, And Ghosts enforced their lightest Laws. (101)
In contrast to the uncanny sublime of the landscape, Maori society and culture in general are seen not in a romantic light but as savage and degraded:
What dwarfish forms those ponderous heads upbear: Their crooked tortoise-legs, club-curved and short; Their hands, like toasting-forks or tridents prest Against each broad and circle-fretted breast … (144)
What Ranolf admires and becomes absorbed in are the legendary renditions, by Amohia and others, of Maori myth, cosmolgy and metaphysics, which speak in a particular way to his own preoccupations. The bulk of Ranolf and Amohia, what modern readers find indigestible and Victorian readers praised, consists of the philosophical discussions and meditations of Ranolf, a 'sailor-student' akin, as Landfall, 22 no. 4 (December 1968), p. 377. McEldowney points out that in fact '[Domett's] "sailor-student" … hardly shares the concerns of the scholar gypsy but Domett may have sought some credence from the verbal similarity'. Ranolf and Amohia and the descriptions of place are subsumed under Ranolf's subjective ground on those mudbanks of Doubt,' he laments. But his instincts, though they are firmly non-sectarian, are not entirely to reject belief: 'What need of Temples', he asks:
… All around Through Earth's expanse, through Heaven's profound, A conscious Spirit, beauty-crowned, A visible glory breathes and breaks, And of these mountains, moors and lakes A Holiest of the Holies Makes! (61)
Ranolf's (and Domett's) stance is Darwinian and triumphalist. He states:
… all creatures — foul or fair One universal endless progress share; In their procession headed by mankind … (5)
George Bornstein Writes of the way in which the Romantic lyric's organic relation between the speaker and nature was, in Victorian poetry, infused by 'linguistic self-consciousness' and 'textual defensiveness': while the Romantic poet strives to minimise the self-division inherent in the relationship, the Victorian exacerbates it.Poetic Remaking the Art of Browning, Yeats and Pound (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1988), p. 39–40.Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 13.The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Ranolf and Amohia, infused with a sense of distance and strangeness, beautiful and terrible but also unsettlingly wrong and subjectively
The intellectual totalising of Domett's poem — the attempt to contain the fracturing universe of high Victorian thought — was a not unusual colonial activity. The critic
During the period of the consolidation of the East India Company, the British in India produced surprisingly large quantities of one commodity that could not be traded — poetry … questions of value and fetish [are] raised by such prized, yet priceless goods. Why should a nascent colonising culture, confident of both its mercantile and military prowess, expend so much labour on the production of such apparently unsalable goods and services?
Rukmini Bhaya Nair ,Lying on the Postcolonial Couch: the Idea of Indifference(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 5. Nair writes of 'the complex poetics of early colonialism, during which time buccaneering instincts were locked in a reflexive struggle to turn themselves into the image of bureaucratic respectability' and the consequent 'transformations of subjectivity and profession', p. 3.
Nair implies that poetry is a form of dilettante experience at odds with the world of commerce and colonial authority, but this is arguable. Colonial poetry was a part of public as well as private discourse, not so much a commodity in itself, but a means of organisation and classification for both the world of the mind — or as Domett and Browning would have put it, the Soul — and the commodified world of empire. This is the aspect of Ranolf and Amohia that produced admiring interest in Victorian readers and still unsettles its few modern readers, sensitive to questions of appropriation.
From all over the globe the British collected information about the countries they were adding to their map. They surveyed and they mapped. They took censuses, produced statistics. They made vast lists of birds. Then they shoved the data they had collected into a shifting series of classifications.
Thomas Richards ,The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire(London: Verso, 1993), p. 3.
Given this excess, the fantasy of colonial literature was the text that Middlemarch with his inevitably unfinished work The Key to All Mythologies to McIntosh Jellaludin in Plain Tales from the Hills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 240.
Even though the indigenous people are imprisoned within the texts, and their traditions distorted by being reduced from oral performance to print, nevertheless they are accorded a participatory role within the text, and thus in the historical sequences. Moreover, the textualisation of traditions is in effect a demonstration that indigenous traditions have a place within the discourse. Once the indigenous people were located in the textual world as participants, and their traditions were accorded status within the discourse, they could not be erased.
Peter Gibbons , 'Non-fiction',OH,p. 61
The ur-text for all this ethnographic epic literature was the work of the Scottish poet Ossian, supposedly third century, and (scholarly opinion varied) either collected, recorded and translated by For a fuller discussion, see An example of this is discussed in The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988).Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, spec. issue: 'Books and Empire: Textual Production, Distribution and Consumption in Postcolonial Countries', eds.
Writing creates rather than reflects reality. That Ossian's work is now recognised to be a forgery and a fabrication, the product of Macpherson's Romantic imagination rather than, as he purported it to be, a work of scholarly collection, did not matter to the many Scottish immigrants throughout the empire who carried his text in their cabin trunks. Ossian represented, by its fraudulent manufacture, as much as by those fragments of genuine traditional poetry Macpherson had included, not only a Romantic response to the problems of the modern, but also nostalgia for a Scottish nation, albeit one non-existent outside the novels of Scott, as well as the invention of a set of traditions by which nationhood could be forged, or at least imagined. Peter Gibbons has spoken of the late nineteenth century in New Zealand as a time when '[t]he "native-born" colonists were trying to depict themselves as the indigenous people'. Gibbons, 'Non-fiction', OH, p. 55.
The Romantic elevation of the primitive fed into a sense that modernity had obliterated all trace of the past, save for the fast-vanishing oral record; the epic is a heroic story in an unheroic age: as Arnold says in 'The Scholar Gipsy', it is counter to
The primitive integrity of these texts would, it was thought, act as an antidote for
Poetical Works, eds. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 261, 260, lines 203–5; 172–5.
For colonial writers and readers these epic texts had an added dimension. The Idylls of the King or
… we cannot yet throw off our literary allegiance to Old England [yet] we may rejoice … in the hope of a beauty and sublimity in our national literature, for no people are richer than we are in the beauties of nature … every rock shall become a chronicle of storied allusions; and the tomb of the Indian prophet shall be as hallowed as the sepulchres of ancient kings.
Quoted in
Steven Olson ,The Prairie in Nineteenth Century American Poetry(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), p. 89.
Longfellow used Lonnrot's metre, but he also relied on the work of He who ever so slightly explores this epical ocean, will indeed perceive defects, excrescences, differences, and breaks of artistic style and structure. But in the simpler nobler sections, the Sanskrit verse (oft times as musical and highly wrought as Homer's own Greek), bears testimony, I think, — by evidence too long and recondite for citation here, — to an origin anterior to writing, anterior to Puranic theology, anterior to Homer, perhaps even to Moses. Preface to Kalevala (1835, enlarged in 1849), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), Mabinogion (1838-49), Idylls of the King (1833-85), Mamba the Bright-Eyed (1867), Congal (1872), Indian Idylls (1883) and The Song Celestial (1885), Lady Gregory's works of 'Kiltartanese' (1900s), Vancouver Legends (1911) — all use various methods to insist upon their authenticity and authoritative status. They do so in various ways: within the text; in the apparatus surrounding the text; by the collection principles; in terms of the supposed degree of archival record versus imaginative redaction and of the relationship of the collector/editor/author/poet to the original material.Information Respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes in the US appeared between 1851–57. Ferguson's Irish epic Congal was based on The Battle of Dun-na-n-Gaedh and The Battle of Magh Rath published by the Irish Archaeological Society in 1842 though he claimed that he balanced 'the largeness of purpose, unity and continuity of action which are the principal elements of Epic poetry' in his sources against their 'inherent repugnancies'. Arnold's two Indian epics were a somewhat tendentiously colonial reading of the ancient Indian epic the Mahabharata:Indian Idylls, (London: Trubner, 1883), p. xii.The Song of Hiawatha from Kalevala, appealed to the universality of his material: 'Whatever resemblance … may be found between the poems of the"Kalevala" and mine … is not of my creating, but lies in the legends themselves.' But he also stressed the authority for his version of the legend of Hiawatha:
My authorities will all be found in the notes. All these strange stories are in Schoolcraft and the other writers on Indian matters, and this ought to shield me from any accusation of taking them from Finnish sources.
Letter to
Theophilus Carey Callicot ,The Letters ofvol. 3 (1844–56), ed.Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ,Andrew Hilen (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 503.
There is a paradox here, as there is in the structure of Domett's encyclopedic fantasy. Longfellow is claiming that all legendary material is ultimately unified, while at the same time insisting on the particularity of his own version.
Ranolf and Amohia far from being, as it is usually represented, something unusual and local is part of this general phenomenon. Domett's immediate source was Polynesian Mythology (1855). Grey, in turn, had relied on information from Ranolf and Amohia before he took it to Britain. Grey for his part saw his recording of poetry, legends, and mythology as pragmatic as well as scholarly. He could, he wrote in the preface to Polynesian Mythology,
Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race as Furnished by their Priests and Chiefs (London: John Murray, 1855), pp. iii–iv, vii.
Domett's political career in New Zealand and his hard-line involvement in Maori affairs demonstrate his pragmatic side. For an account of this, see Blythe, 'Paradise or Hell', pp. 113–28. Ranolf and Amohia's orientation was neither pragmatic nor local. It was a poem to take back home, a demonstration not of what was unique about New Zealand but what was universal. What he approves of in New Zealand is that which can be generalised — the sublimity of the landscape and the metaphysical speculation it prompts in Ranolf; what he disdains even as he catalogues is what a later and more economical poet calls the 'local and special'.
As a Victorian of a doubting cast of mind, Domett believed in the unitary nature of all mythologies and systems of belief. The beliefs, practices and traditions of the Maori are, to him, unfamiliar and repugnant but only on a superficial level. His poem instructs the reader — the British reader — how such material should be contexualised and universalised. Despite the Romantic descriptions of the landscape and the action scenes — shipwrecks, floods, thermal eruptions, warfare — the bulk of Ranolf and Amohia is a dialogue between the lovers, British Ranolf and the Maori princess Amohia, which allows him to explain European philosophy, as she, in return, gives her version, in song, story and legend, of what is essentially the same body of knowledge. Ranolf describes this material as 'recastings from the ancient mould':
Greek, Gothic, Polynesian — all Primeval races on a train Of like ideas, conceptions, fall. (115)
Ranolf and Amohia: A South-Sea Day-Dream(London: Smith, Elder, 1872), p. 114. We use this edition as it was the one wholly written in New Zealand. The 1883 revision was done during Domett's retirement in London.
There is, of course, a difference in the status the poem accords each system. Darwinian hierarchies are important to Domett and to Ranolf. Both emphasise the inferiority of the Maori and the difficulty of interpretation: 'were this a German tale, / Not artless Maori', he says at one point, 'who could fail / To hit its sense, extract its pith / So pregnant, palpable a myth!' (123). Equivalents between European mythology and Maori can be worked out, but an act of translation is necessary. He muses:
But how translate In German style the mystery? — Shall Hapae our URANIA be? (127)
What Ranolf sees as the crudity and unsophistication of Amohia's system is balanced by its noble simplicity. He is intrigued by the fact that for Amohia knowledge and history are cast as mythological narrative:
Can that dark forest overgrown Be Metaphysics? And the crone So watchworn, Kant or Hegel is't? (128)
The implication he draws is that philosophy is a development from, or later stage of, myth:
Myths may be construed many ways …. That savage story strangely rings With echoes of profoundest things … … [N]ought can stifle or repress Man's upward tendency … (130)
Listening to Amohia, and others, tell him their stories Ranolf gains an insight into the nature of such material and its origin:
'Well, these are genuine Myths at last,' Thought Ranolf, 'samples from the Past Of modes men caught at to record Notions for which they had no word; So clothed, unable to abstract,Emotions deep in fancied fact; To else unutterable thought Imaginative utterance brought …' (198)
The unity of this system and the identical nature of Maori and European thought can be discovered through their respective mythologies; this is central to Ranolf and Domett's understanding of the world as '[t]his vast Machinery for making Souls':
… as that Law of Storms Cannot be gathered from a single breeze Or local gale; so must a myriad forms Of lives and their environments be learned And disentangled ere can be discerned The law that flows around each, unguessed, unseen, Like fluid wool that through the ribbed machine Which looks so bare, so finely runs and fast O'er whirling cylinders, a viewless stream … (485)
Ranolf assumes that Amohia does not understand the implications of what she is telling him: his role is thus not simply to record her material but to interpret it:
… this Song, a glimpse, a hint, An impress from Reflection's mint Struck faintly of a theme so vast — Of a wide bee-eyed truth one tiny facet With nothing but simplicity to grace it — The fancy of the native girls had caught (Who only of its literal meaning thought)…. (205)
Although he learns quickly, Ranolf's knowledge of the Maori language limits him, especially as he is explaining to Amohia 'the stately ship of Western thought'. The poem makes it clear that, textually and technically, it has to make up for this seeming deficiency, substituting 'phrases freer, fuller and more flowery' in place of 'the rudeness of his simple Maori' (135). The written text is not a transliteration of what Ranolf says, but is tailored for a British reading audience: 'all the interruptions we omit', Domett says at one point, '[w]here foreign thought or phrase required explaining …' (285). He is aware of the insufficiency of one language to describe the concepts of another culture: Ranolf is, the poem says, 'constraining / Strange words and strange ideas to fit …' (285).
The relationship between the two lovers is figured as a meeting of an oral and a literary culture. Amohia describes reading as 'the white man's art / Of seeing talk' (344). In contrast with the limitless memory of Amohia and her kin, Ranolf must write down what he cannot remember of his experience (236). As he tutors Amohia in the philosophy of
… that simple scrawl — Pothooks and hangers painfully produced — Disjointed — childlike! yet a wonder all, In one to symbolled language so unused, And with such marvellous aptitude acquired … (451)
But essentially Amohia is of an oral culture. The poem makes clear to its readers that, just as Ranolf's crude Maori has been altered to meet the requirements of poetry, so Amohia's recitations of legend and song have been translated not just from Maori into English, but from the performance values of her oral literature into the structures of Victorian poetics:
An ancient legend she began to tell Of one God-hero of the land, Of which our faithful lay presents Precisely the main incidents, Diluting only here and there The better its intent to reach, The language, so condensed and bare, Those clotted rudiments of speech … (120)
Actual words — song, haka, narrative — recorded by the ethnographer must be expanded by the poet, not simply for aesthetic effect, but in order that the true meaning of the Maori can be conveyed. At one point Domett speaks of
Orality and performance (in this case, 'half chaunt-half shouts, deep melancholy cries') give additional meaning to the words. Such material cannot be simply transcribed and translated. The transcriber must employ equivalent but different poetic strategies to compensate for the absence of the actual person, the 'living book'. Domett explains this quality and process in his Glossary:
Of the songs above specified, those invented are, it is believed, sufficiently in accordance with the ordinary tone of native feeling and thought; while those paraphrased or amplified will perhaps in their English dress have much the same appearance to an English reader as the originals to a native hearer. In songs or other compositions orally transmitted, it should be remembered that the hearer receives them in most cases from a source which can itself supply the associations, details, or explanations, which so often render paraphrases necessary to make them intelligible to others. The reciter is a
livingbook, ready to answer every query, and amplify to any extent desirable; adapt itself, in short, to the greater or less degree of imaginativeness in the hearer. Perhaps that may partly account for the exceeding simplicity and terseness of most early and oral poetry, quite as much as any presumed severity of taste in the composers. Poetry so communicated always had, besides, the expressive looks, tones and gestures of the person communicating it — to facilitate brevity. (502)
He gives an example of this, defending his use of the term 'immeasurable abyss' as 'but a slight amplification of an epithet not uncommonly applied in their songs by a woman to her lover' (498).
Domett was perhaps alerted to the question of translation by his source, Grey, who writes in the preface to Polynesian Mythology that:
it is almost impossible closely and faithfully to translate a very difficult language without almost insensibly falling somewhat
into the idiom and form of construction of that language, which, perhaps, from its unusualness, may prove unpleasant to the European ear and mind … Grey,
, pp. x–xi.Polynesian Mythology
Grey claims for his text an authority and an authenticity in terms not just of content but of voice:
For the first time, I believe, a European reader will find it in his power to place himself in the position of one who listens to a heathen and savage high-priest explaining to him, in his own words, and in his own energetic manner, the traditions in which he earnestly believes, and unfolding religious opinions upon which the faith and hopes of his race rest.
Grey,
, p. xi.Polynesian Mythology
Grey and Domett are placing themselves within a wider intellectual debate, originating from Prolegomena ad Homerum, which argued for the late, disparately authored and orally transmitted nature of
On one side it is said that the translation ought to be such 'that the reader should, if possible forget that it is a translation at all, and be lulled into the illusion that he is reading an original work, — something original … from an English hand' … On the other hand … [it is said that the translation ought] 'to retain every peculiarity of the original, so far as [the translator] is able,
with the greater care the more foreign it may happen to be'; so that it may 'never be forgotten that he is imitating, and imitating in a different material'.
Matthew Arnold , 'On Translating Homer',The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, Vol. One: On the Classical Tradition, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), pp. 97–8. Arnold is summarising the views of Ichabod Charles Wright andFrancis W. Newman , both of whom had translated Homer. Both men objected to Arnold's representation of their positions, Wright inA Letter to the Dean of Canterbury on the Homeric Lectures of Matthew Arnold(1864), and Newman inHomeric Translation in Theory and Practice: A Reply to Matthew Arnold(1861).
Grey subscribes to the latter position, hence his fear that his work 'may prove unpleasant to the European ear and mind'. Domett is attempting to retain the accuracy of the latter position — as Arnold represents it, '[t]he translator's first duty … is a historical one: to be faithful' — with the aesthetic pleasures of the former, while justifying and explaining the process to the reader.
Modern critics of … four simple and effective sentences (amounting to just over one hundred words altogether) in Grey's English account of the legend of Tawhaki are expanded by Domett into seventeen rhymed trochaic octameters totalling nearly 200 words. Jackson, 'Poetry: Beginnings to 1945', Ranolf and Amohia have been interested in poetics not ethnology. The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature complains that
OH, p. 407.
But Domett explains in the poem why such amplifications are necessary as an act of faith to the original: the poem is not simply the words, it is the performance of those words. Oxford History, supports his position when she says of nineteenth-century Maori-language texts authored by Maori that:
[s]ome writing … presents difficulties for the reader because the authors employed the oral style of composition which assumed the understanding of an immediate audience conversant with the tradition.
Macrae, 'Maori Literature: A Survey',
OH,p.8.
It is significant that McRae is writing in the section 'Maori Literature', Jackson in 'Poetry' — different standards are being applied. As McKenzie, 'The Sociology of a Text', p. 196.The Book History Reader, ed.
Domett wrote Ranolf and Amohia at the conjunction of an oral society and a print culture. One of the processes the poem works through is how to represent Maori literature in terms that are consistent with its oral performance, as encoded and contained within a Victorian poem. Domett's processes and values are those of a Victorian coloniser — how could they be otherwise? But they are not miles apart from a Waitangi Tribunal report of 1983 on reading practices appropriate to bicultural New Zealand's founding document, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi:
A Maori approach to the Treaty would imply that its
wairuaor spirit is something more than a literal construction of the actualwords used can provide. The spirit of the Treaty transcends the sum total of its component written words and puts narrow or literal interpretations out of place.
Report, findings and recommendations of the Waitangi tribunal on an application … on behalf of the TeAtiawa tribe in relation to the fishing grounds in the Waitara district(Wellington: The Tribunal, 1983), p. 55; quoted in McKenzie, 'The Sociology of a Text', p. 207.
Sir John Mckenzie, prominent Liberal party politician, baleful member of the House of Representatives, and Minister of the Crown, died in 1901, five weeks after being knighted by the visiting Duke of Cornwall and York, the future
Settler societies necessarily have an ambivalent attitude towards history and modernity.
The new country is a site of contradictory demands: the need, ultimately, to forget the old country, and the need to ignore people who already inhabit the new country. To resist the indigenous presence the settler must retain some sense of the old-country self to be able to draw on a strong and authoritative identity. But in order to settle in the new country, to find oneself at home, the settler must forget the old country and become acclimatised, that is, discover a new-country identity.
Stephen Turner , 'Settlement as Forgetting',Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand,eds.Klaus Neumann ,Nicholas Thomas andHilary Ericksen (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1999), p. 21.
Forgetting, acclimatisation and discovery — these were central to the task of the writers of the Maoriland period. A generation after first settlement, their writing provided a means by which the achievements and conflicts of the emerging colony could be presented — to itself, and to the world. From the Maori Sea, begins without any concessions to the Antipodean location. This is the burial of a highland chieftain, and even the weather is Scottish:
They played him home to the House of Stones, All the way, all the way, To his grave in the sound of the winter sea. The sky was dour, the sky was gray. They played him home with the chieftain's dirge Til the wail was wed to the rolling surge! They played him home with a sorrowful will To his grave at the foot of the Holy Hill; And the pipes went mourning all the way.
Jessie Mackay , 'The Burial of Sir John McKenzie',From the Maori Sea(Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1904), p. 23.
Behind the conventional rhetoric of mourning — 'the dark of the earth', 'the veiled dawn', 'the house of woe' — and the recognition of the private griefs of '[s]on and brother and near of kin' and 'her / Who stayed within, the dowie day', wider claims are being advanced. McKenzie's are '[s]trong hands that struck for right' and he is being carried by '[s]trong hands that struck with his'. His chieftainship is a literary conceit, but appropriate to a new place; old forms are not discarded, they are rewritten. The 'clan' of which he is chief — '[a] wider clan than ever he knew' — is an imaginary rather than actual community. The term 'clan' is a metaphor conveying reassurance, locating the present in a romanticised past, coopting the terms of a premodern community to make sense of a new kind of society:
The clan went on with the pipes before All the way, all the way; A wider clan than ever he knew Followed him home that dowie day. And who were they of the wider clan? — The landless man and the No Man's man, The man that lacked and the man unlearned, The man that lived but as he earned; And the clan went mourning all the way.
Only in the final stanza is the physical location of McKenzie's clan revealed to be New Zealand, although alert readers may have noticed that the 'Holy Hill' where he is buried is a translation of the Maori, 'Puketapu', the location of a cairn erected in his memory. The translation is noted in an undated typescript of a selection of Mackay's poems in the Alexander Turnbull Library in a folder containing copies of Mackay's correspondence with
He found her [New Zealand] a land of many domains, Maiden forest and fallow plains: He left her a land of many homes, — The pearl of the world, where the sea wind roams …
Mackay's language here serves Turner's argument that one of the requirements of settlement is the ability to ignore the land's indigenous occupants, but does so with more complexity than he allows. The phrase 'many domains' covertly refers to the authority of another kind of chieftainship, that of Maori; but '[m]aiden forest' and 'fallow plains' evoke an empty and untouched land. There is thus an implicit separation of the indigenous inhabitants from the land they inhabit; despite its 'many domains', the land is found by the immigrants to be 'maiden' and 'fallow'. The transition from 'many domains' to 'a land of many homes' suggests the unifying power of settlement as well as the domesticisation of empire, whereby the values of the Victorian patriarchal family are sent abroad to civilise and harmonise the world. For a full discussion of this topic, see Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), especially ch. 6.
The irony of this last verse — indeed, the irony of McKenzie's apotheosis as Highland laird and benefactor — was his role as Minister of Lands in the 1890s in facilitating the sale of land still in Maori ownership. The establishment of a complex bureaucracy including the Validation Court and the Native Appellate Court (together with the winding up of the Native Department) saw the purchase of some 2,729,000 acres of Maori land by the government between 1892 and the year of McKenzie's death, with a further 423,184 bought on the open market. See Tom Brooking's entry on McKenzie in DNZB II, pp. 294–7.
Maoriland writing does not support Belich's contention that emigration subsumed regional affiliations into an overarching 'Britishness'. Belich, Making Peoples, pp. 313-37.
On the fifth of November, 1881, an unusual colonial military engagement took place in Taranaki on the west coast of the North Island. Shortly after dawn, an expeditionary force of constabulary and volunteers totalling over 2000 men, headed by the Native Minister, Echo reporter.Ask That Mountain: The Story of Parihaka (Auckland: Heinemann, 1975), p. 116.
The leaders of Parihaka, Scott, Ask That Mountain, p. 117.
In recording the events of the day, a variety of literary styles were called upon, all of them necessarily improvisational. Scott, Mana form Heaven: A Century of Maori Prophets in New Zealand (Auckland: Reed, 1989, reissued 1999), p. 219.Ask That Mountain, p. 116.
On the soldiers' side, narratives of heroism and empire were being written even as the events unfolded: many of the soldiers wrote letters and diary entries as they prepared to advance, mainly in a grimly testamentary style and, afterwards, in more expansive expressions of relief and self-justification. The historian, Scott, Scott, Ask That Mountain, p. 121.Ask That Mountain, p. 119.
The light must not only linger on the mountain top but be let in to the shady gullies and deepest recesses of our present surroundings from which for years has issued the oracular voice of one crying in the wilderness in tones too significant for future trouble to be lightly set aside, a voice which has so long kept back the progress of the Colony, drained its resources, strangled its credit, made weak the heart of many of our stalwart settlers, banished their feelings of security from their doors and tried to the utmost verge of endurance the patience of all classes of an industrious and hopeful people.
This light however is not the metaphor of the poet but the light which follows the clearing of a way through the forest, the macadamized road instead of the tortuous and rugged track, in other words the Queen's highway from which the traveller may hear the ring of the woodsman's axe and his eye brighten as it surveys on either side green pastures and happy homesteads.
Scott,
Ask That Mountain,p. 120–1.
These metaphors — of darkness and light, ancient and modern, Maori and settler, the primeval native forest versus clearance and progress — are standard in the literature of colonial justification, but the strangeness of the events at Parihaka has had an unsettling effect on the way they are employed. Newall's use of biblical language is oddly misapplied, Scott, Te Rangi Hiroa: the Life of Sir Peter Buck (Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1971), pp. 43–4.Ask That Mountain, p. 129.
Empire has its ceremonies, but they are most confidently enacted at the imperial centre. Enacted in colonial settler societies, these ceremonies, far from inspiring awe, risk the ridiculous, mixing the pompous with the carnivalesque. While Bryce articulated his civilising mission, the reporters of the Star, the Echo, and the Lyttelton Times compared him to Don Quixote. And his heroic narrative was satirically played back in the local press in
Yet a league, yet a league, Yet a league onward, Straight to the Maori pahMarched the Twelve Hundred. 'Forward the Volunteers! Is there a man who fears?' Over the ferny plain Marched the Twelve Hundred. 'Forward!' the Colonel said: Was there a man dismayed? No, for the heroes knew There was no danger.Theirs not to reckon why, Theirs not to bleed or die, Theirs but to trample by, Each dauntless ranger.
This poem was published in a newspaper soon after the event and also in Mackay's first book of poems, The Spirit of the Rangatira and other Ballads, published in 1889.The Spirit of the Rangatira and other Ballads (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1889), pp. 30–2.
Pressmen to right of them, Pressmen to left of them, Pressmen in front of them, Chuckled and wondered. Dreading their country's eyes, Long was the search and wise; Vain, for the pressman five Had, by a slight device, Foiled the Twelve Hundred. Gleamed all their muskets bare, Fright'ning the children there; Heroes to do and dare, Charging a village, while Maoridom wondered. Plunged in potato fields, Honour to hunger yields, Te Whiti and Tohu, Bearing not swords nor shields, Questioned nor wondered, Calmly before them sat, Faced the Twelve Hundred. Children to right of them, Children to left of them, Women in front of them, Saw them and wondered. Stormed at with jeer and groan, Foiled by the five alone, Never was trumpet blown O'er such a deed of arms. Back with their captives three, Taken so gallantly, Rode the Twelve Hundred. When can their glory fade?! Oh! the wild charge they made! New Zealand wondered Whether each doughty soul Paid for the pigs he stole, Noble Twelve Hundred!
Mackay's account is factually accurate. Presumably, she is following newspaper reports, hence the heroic role she gives to the reporters present ('the five alone'). Her account is informed by the radical liberalism of her Scottish background, with its sympathy for the victims of dispossession, and marked by the complicating effect this has on her position as, technically, one of the colonisers. As in 'The Burial of Sir John McKenzie', she is adapting a prior form to a new occasion, but her focus here is strictly satirical. She is not able, any more than are the soldiers present, to write an appropriate text for the occasion. She merely demonstrates the effect of playing it against the wrong text.
As the accounts of Parihaka show, literary rhetorics do not travel
Read me the Rune, for I faint with the mystery, — Rune of the mountain-world, subtle and pure, In the young land that has Love but for history; Crested with snow and sedate and secure. Not a man's life has she measured as yet: Wide is she, clear of the smoke and the fret.
Jessie Mackay , 'Phantom Ford',From the Maori Sea, p. 26.
'Rune', with its Celtic connotations, is the unknowable code of the 'mountain-world', 'the young land' without history or inhabitants that the poet seeks to read. The beauty of the landscape is, in the Romantic way, morally charged, and is contrasted with the old world of industrialisation and modernity, 'the smoke and the fret'. This world, the poem claims, has no inhabitants, no history. The poet's task in deciphering the code, reading the rune, writing in a place without precedents for such an undertaking, is a forbidding one. Mackay's contemporary, the poet
Here, aloof, I take my stand — Alien, iconoclast — Poet of a newer land, Confident, aggressive, lonely, Product of the present only Thinking nothing of the past.
Arthur Adams ,Maoriland and other Verses(Sydney: Bulletin Newspaper Company, 1899), p. 89.
Colonial writers find realism difficult, not because the landscape is alien, but because it is only tenuously real. Terry Eagleton writes that 'on the colonial edges the world is less easy to totalise in classical realist fashion, precisely because some of its central determinants lie elusively elsewhere, in the metropolitan country'.Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995), p. 299. In speaking of the relation between Ireland's colonial position and its writing, Eagleton cites Sean O'Faolain who, 'oppressed by his own sense of Ireland as a "'thin' society, stuff for the anthropologist rather than the man of letters", turned from realist fiction to short stories', p. 149.
Lays of the Maori and the Moa (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1884), p. 126.
Mackay's parents had been crofters in the northern Highlands. Her contemporary, the poet
The common Celtic bond of race, and damsel-errantry in bud, had made Ireland's wrong my wrong ever since a chance ballad — 'Mary Le More' — fired me in childhood. Prose as firey as its implications had been a magnet to me, and it was a labour of love to translate Irish history into New Zealand journalism for whomsoever cared to read.
Unpublished autobiography held by the family, quoted in
Jessie Mackay: A Woman Before her Time,eds.Margaret Chapman , Pauline O'Leary, Ginny Talbot,Brenda Lyon andJean Goodwin (Geraldine: PCCL Services for the Kakahu Women's Division of Federated Farmers, n.d., 1993?), n.p.
Common interests between Ireland and New Zealand on such matters as land reform, national autonomy and imperial federation were frequently argued, and were given force by a commonly held analogy between the Maori and the ancient Irish. The New Zealand poet, See Richard P. Davis, See Keith Jeffery, Bulletin, used the pseudonym 'Pat O'Maori'.Progress and Poverty (1879) compared systems of land tenure in both societies, and the Irish nationalist press compared Irish Issues in New Zealand Politics 1868–1922 (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1974). Davies notes An Irish Empire? Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 109.
But Bracken left Ireland as a child; Mackay visited Scotland and Ireland only once when she was nearly sixty. Both are aware of the invented nature of place, whether that place be the Highlands or Hokitika. Both allow language to concede its inadequacies. In 'The Ancient People' Mackay writes of her Celtic past in terms that are overtly archaic and unwieldy:
Lo and lo mine ancient people! Cairn and cromlech hold them sleeping; — Mine though the world divide! Mackay, 'The Ancient People',
From the Maori Sea,p. 17.
This poem contends with a past that is irretrievable — 'They who went, returning never / From the battle in the West!' — and a present location, New Zealand, which is as yet without historical narrative:
So the dreamy passion gathers, By the bright unstoried waters Where found their children room.
The poem ends not with nostalgia — Mackay is a New Zealand writer — but with the problem of belonging to a world as yet 'unstoried'. This looks forward to Mansfield's determination in 1915 to bring her 'undiscovered country' to the world's notice by way of her stories, Journal, 22 January 1915; quoted in The Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield: A Selection, ed.
as a location now lost:
Now it shall ever be The Other House of Death And Dreams and Memory.
Jessie Mackay , 'The Other House',Land of the Morning(Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1909), p. 104. In her biography of Mackay, Nellie Macleod identifies 'the other house' with the house owned byFrederick Hoare , the absentee English owner of Raincliff, the stationRobert Mackay managed. This identification strengthens the nostalgic imagery of the poem's reference to loss and colonial distance. SeeNellie F. H. Macleod ,A Voice on the Wind: The Story of Jessie Mackay(Wellington: A. H. and A. W. Reed, 1955), p. 22.
It is a location which, as 'The Valley of Rona' puts it, is beautiful but unobtainable and, finally, fixed and unproductive:
Not a daisy can pass; Not a blade of the grass; Not a bird ever dies, Nor outward it flies From Rona the charmed and the olden. Mackay, 'The Valley of Rona',
Land of the Morning,p. 113.
'[T]he charmed and the olden' are desirable but unusable. The 'trick of standing upright', which
But from the earth the ngaio parted Like a bitter thread; Like a comet upward darted Rona overhead. In the moon is Rona sitting, Never to be free; With the gourd she held in flitting, And the ngaio tree. Mackay, 'Rona in the Moon',
From the Maori Sea,p. 13.
The name 'Rona' has vague but not insistent Scottish overtones, but the gourd and the ngaio are of New Zealand. Holding tightly onto the symbols of the local, Rona is hoisted into the literary, and thereby changes it irrevocably.
In 'The Call of the Upland Yule', the local landscape is described: 'the river-bed track', 'the sister lakes', the toi, the kea, 'And, bronze and gray, the bluffs array / Shoulder to burly shoulder'. Far from being merely decorative, this language provides the poem's backbone, upsetting the traditional expectations of the Scottish term 'Yule'. The poet is aware that she cannot give it a conventional literary treatment: the literary language of the old world is not appropriate, in the same way that the Antipodean Christmas resists tradition:
(Tower not turret pleases you, Nor grove o' the white May-thorn, When comes the call of the upland Yule To the blood of the mountain-born)! Mackay, 'The Call of the Upland Yule',
From the Maori Sea,p. 25.
'Tower', 'turret' and 'white May-thorn' are here used to illustrate the often-observed problem that in the colonial situation words and their traditional denotations drift apart. By 1904, when the poem was written, English or Irish writers using words like 'tower' or 'turret' (Yeats, for example) were aware of the archaic tone, but could use such language self-consciously to lay claim to a particular sense of the past. Mackay makes the difficulty explicit in a way Yeats does not have to. Towers and turrets, for Mackay (and for others of 'the blood of the mountain born', that is, New Zealanders), are not located in physical space, or even in history, but in a kind of literary language which, as a New Zealand writer, she feels she cannot employ without acknowledging the problem.
Mackay, 'Song of the Drift Weed', From the Maori Sea, p. 7.The New Zealand Illustrated Magazine in 1901 stated:
… here in New Zealand we have infinite advantages over Australia in the way of material for … a national literature. Our country has a history; Australia has none — at any rate none that can equal our own in all those stirring elements which invest the past with a halo of romance, and make food for the poet, painter, and the novelist.
New Zealand Illustrated Magazine(December 1901); quoted inKeith Sinclair ,A Destiny Apart: New Zealand's Search for National Identity(Wellington: Allen and Unwin/Port Nicholson Press, 1986), p. 50.
The sources for the manufacturing of this past were works of local ethnology such as Maning's Old New Zealand and Grey's Polynesian Mythology, but its tone and inflexion came from the texts of Irish and Scottish Celticism. The Study of Celtic Literature (1867), Le Poesie des Races Celtiques (1860), and History of Ireland (1878) had set out a theoretical and scholarly basis for the celebration of Celtic culture. But its literary manifestations, especially
Ossian answered the need of colonial writers to find a mode in which the colonised could be represented. An ethnographic interest in the authentic voice of the primitive was readily combined with the elegiac tones of Ossian, geographically and historically remote from the centre and the present. In nineteenth-century America, 'James Fenimore Cooper gave his Indians Ossianic traits and had them speak an Ossianic language. Longfellow, Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman were affected by it'. Mackay, Mackay, Mackay, Mackay, Mackay, This latter hero is, of course, Scandinavian, but comes to Mackay through the Celticism of Arnold, whose poem, 'Balder Dead' is her source. See Arnold, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture (London: Croom Helm, 1978), p. 47.From the Maori Sea, p. 32.The Spirit of the Rangatira, p. 93.The Spirit of the Rangatira, p. 1.From the Maori Sea, p. 5.The Spirit of the Rangatira, p. 55.Poetical Works, p. 95. In 'Sunset on the Kaikouras', the death of Balder is relocated to the Antipodes: 'Not the North shall wholly keep him; / Taniwha and Toa weep him', From the Maori Sea, p. 36.
A child of the Scottish Enlightenment by way of her parents' radicalism and her education, Mackay's writing exemplifies that strain of Celticism which Luke Gibbons characterises as sympathy. Luke Gibbons, 'This Sympathetic Bond: Ossian, Celticism and Colonialism', Gibbons, 'This Sympathetic Bond', p. 277.Celticism, ed. Terence Brown (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), pp. 273–91.The Genius of the Gael: A Study in Celtic Psychology and its Manifestations,The Genius of the Gael: A Study in Celtic Psychology and its Manifestations (London: Fisher Unwin, 1913).
Tiraha, Te Ra!I am Maui, — Maui the bantling, the darling; — Maui the fire-thief, the jester; — Maui the world's fisherman! I am Maui, man's champion! Thou art the Sun-God, Te Ra of the flaming hair. Heretofore man is thy moth. What is the life of man, Bound to thy rushing wings, Thou fire-bird of Rangi? A birth in a burning; A flash and a war-word; A failing, a falling Of ash to the ashes Of bottomless Po! I am Maui, — The great one, the little one, — A bird that could nest In the hand of a woman. I — I have vanquished The Timeless, the Ancients. The heavens cannot bind me, But I shall bind thee, Tiraha, Te Ra!Mackay, 'The Noosing of the Sun-God',
Land of the Morning, p. 49.
Certain adjustments, it is true, have to be made in adapting the Celt to the Maori. Scottish and Irish Celticists celebrated the heroes of a past to which, however spuriously conjured up and however spuriously owned, they could lay historical claim. Maoriland writers had to write in terms of a claim that was obviously, logically untrue, and acknowledged as untrue by the writers themselves. Bracken's poem 'The March of Te Rauparaha' says as much:
Rauparaha's war chant Rauparaha's fame song, Rauparaha's story Told on the harp strings, Pakeha harp cords Tuned by the stranger.
Thomas Bracken , 'The March of Te Rauparaha',Musings in Maoriland (Dunedin:Arthur T. Keirle, 1890), p. 42.
There is a strange tone here. In its chant-like repetition, Bracken's poem is suggesting that it possesses ethnographic authenticity, the authority of the 'primitive' voice; but the speaker is avowedly Pakeha, and his tone is elegiac, expressing regret for the necessity of the appropriation, even as it is taking place.
For Celtic movements such as the Irish Revival, the existence of the peasant in contemporary society was a sign of continuity with the past, though a past that was carefully purpose built. Geoff Park, 'Going between Goddesses', Celticism, ed. Terence Brown, p. 207.Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880–1980 (London: Faber, 1985), p. 37.Quicksands, p.189, traces the origin of this phrase to Dr Isaac Featherstone: 'Our plain duty, as good compassionate colonists, is to smooth down their dying pillow. Then history would have nothing to reproach us with', quoted by Supplement to 'The Birds of New Zealand' (London: Buller, 1905). A variation on the phrase is used of Aborigines in the Bulletin: 'The aboriginal race is moribund. All we can do now is give an opiate to the dying man, and when he expires bury him decently' cited in W. H. [Bill] Pearson, Henry Lawson Among Maoris (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1968), p. 15.Brown Bread from a Colonial Oven: Being Sketches of Up-country Life in New Zealand (London: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1912), p. 12.
This literary extinction is aestheticised and sentimentalised, as in Mackay's poem 'Te Whenua Kura':
Lost, lost, lost, lost, Lost is Te Whenua Kura, The curse is hurled, The blood is shed, And vain as mist the flowing! The robber stays, And I and mine Like summer snow are going.
Jessie Mackay , 'Maoriland: A Cycle of Six Songs', music byAlice Forrester , fMS-Papers-4715-21, ATL. Forrester was Mackay's sister-in-law. The MS is not dated, but internal evidence suggests that it was written soon after 1914.
See, for example, Mackay's 'The Sowing of Kiwa': 'And think you that a Maori ghost / Is on the Long Look Out? / And did a spectre Maori keel / Drive by us to the rout?', The Location of Culture (London and New York, 1994).Land of the Morning, p. 121.
Yeats's resort to myth is in part a method of writing himself into the Irish context. An Anglo-Irishman from a Protestant background, he has to displace the native religion from his narrative of Irish history because it excludes him. Maoriland writers have to displace race for similar reasons. Yeats's claim to affinity with the ancient Irish is factually dubious, but just tenable. For Maoriland writers, the association cannot be logically upheld; they are obviously, palpably not Maori. They 'own' these stories by right of colonial conquest, a fact of which Mackay is not unaware. Their right to the stories must be inferred: by absence (the Pakeha writer being the spokesperson for the now extinct Maori); by analogy; by association; by the power of sympathy; and by the fact that both ancient Maori and Pakeha settler inhabit the same natural settings. By being sensible to the Romantic sublime and by exhibiting respect for and sensitivity to landscape, the Maoriland writer claims that landscape's human inhabitants as literary ancestors. Mackay writing of the Southern Alps says:
… a dark gladness that is sweetly all but one with pain rises in the Northern heart when the mist wraps Ti-Marua suddenly by dawn or by day's decline. For the mist loves Ti-Marua and swoops upon it eagle like many and many a time. Then the steep sides of it take another aspect; the great water scarred slopes are like the face of a giant old Maori warrior, seamed with the sacred moko and gashed in many a long-past fight. A passion of Ossianic melancholy glorifies the Northern soul with a nameless romance. Ti-Marua broods over the past; the river sings loud of ancient things. What a foolish conceited fancy it is to disdain the virgin hills of New Zealand because, forsooth! they have no history — because no bard has woven them into undying song! We atoms of a day, do we think these great Presences loom between heaven and earth to honour our petty wars, our ever repeating Empire games of check and counter check? Ti-Marua knows better, smiling darkly through the mist; Ti-Marua is as
deep as the counsels of creation, as full of the primeval romance of earth and sun, cloud and rain, as Alp or Appenine. Ti-Marua has been loved of the storm wind, robed with the snow, crowned with the rainbow; can Ghaut or Grampian claim more?
Jessie Mackay ,Otago Witness,4 February 1903, p. 70.
The narrator, with a 'northern heart' and 'northern soul', 'a passion of Ossianic melancholy' and 'dark gladness', is the romanticised Celt. The Maori are only present by way of simile, the mountainside being configured as an old defeated warrior from a Goldie painting, See Roger Blackley's discussion of the painter Goldie (Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery/David Bateman, 1997), pp. 51, 118–19. Goldie's painting of
Obituary in Evans, At the time of her death in 1938, Mackay was considered New Zealand's pre-eminent poet, the first truly local writer. The Evening Post, Wellington, 3 September 1938, p. 26. See also the discussion of Mackay in his Literature and Authorship in New Zealand (Wellington: P.E.N. Books 1943), pp. 18–21.The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature, describes her (with no discernible biographical evidence) as 'Penguin History, pp. 33, 46, 48.
… local tradition represented by
Jessie Mackay and her like would have seemed a quaint and outmoded pre-war relic had they taken any notice of it. But there is little evidence that the students even recognised that there were older national writers to the south.Evans,
Penguin History, p. 77–8.
This is not true. Although Curnow did not include Mackay in A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923–45 he certainly knew about her, and, in his introduction, quotes approvingly Letters and Art in New Zealand (Wellington: Department of Internal Affairs, 1940), p.103. Quoted by A Book of New Zealand Verse (1945). See Look Back Harder, p. 46.
The poets who define the period of the present book are — at least in their notion of what a poem is, what it is for — more truly descended from
Reeves ,Adams andJessie Mackay , than from the altogether sentimental twilight which intervened.Curnow,
Look Back Harder, p. 47. Curnow's historical sense is perhaps a little self-serving here. All three poets named died in the 1930s: Mackay in 1938, Reeves in 1932 and Adams in 1936, and are thus not chronologically distinct from the writers Curnow is condemning.
However, by 1960, when he wrote the introduction to Curnow, Though McCormick sees in Curnow, The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, his attitude had changed. He no longer differentiates between the Maoriland and Kowhai Gold generations: 'Towards the end of [the nineteenth] century there were surges of "national" sentiment which, however, touched nobody at any level where good verse might have resulted.' Look Back Harder, p. 35.
Her poetry is 'schizoid writing', 'ghost poetry', 'husks without a past or a posterity'.Look Back Harder, p. 145–6.
Present-day historians, especially feminist historians writing at the 1990 centennial of the achievement of universal suffrage, treat See, for example, Curnow is undoubtedly thinking of Jessie Mackay: A Woman Before her Time, eds. Chapman et al.; and Mackay's entries in The Book of New Zealand Women/Ko Kui ma te Kaupapa, ed. DNZB II, pp. 292–4 (by Maoriland, An Epic of the South by T. L. Fern Grot',Heather and Fern: Songs of Scotland and Maoriland (Wellington: the Author, 1902). In the title poem Kelly writes: 'From the Land of the Moa and Maori / My thoughts to old Scotia will turn; / Thus the Heather is blent with the Kauri / And the Thistle entwined with the Fern'. Look Back Harder, p. 10. The piece is a review of Tomorrow vol. 4 no. 14 (May, 1938), p. 438–9.
The diamond dews begem the wings of morn; The sable tui's liquid notes are trilling; The myriad voices of the day awake; — (Susan, I guess that hog is fit for killing!) The broad-leaf bends above the murmurous creek, With silver ripples shining and receding; The marshy star unfolds its golden eye: — (That bed of onions wants a power of weeding!) Now mounts my soul on wings of light conceit To glacial heights where snowy billows harden! I scorn the plain and all its sordid care; — (Hi, there, you brute: — the calf is in the garden!) Yet stay. Who lingers in these silvan shades, More blest is he than Emperor or Kaiser: Hark, infant prattle floats upon the breeze; — (The imps are cutting gorse with my new razor!) The incense of the dewy clover mead Invites the happy roaming bee to suck it; The queenly rose is throned in verdant bower; — (Well, I must milk. Say, Susan, where's the bucket?)
Jessie Mackay , 'Poet and Farmer',The Sitter on the Rail(Christchurch: Lyttelton Times, 1891), p. 60.
The construction of place, whether silvan shades or gorse, is an important task of the colonial writer. Here the stagey echoes of Keats and Shakespeare serve the same sly purpose as in Collected Stories (Auckland: Auckland University Press/Oxford University Press, 1981).
In 1907, shortly before Mansfield eagerly departed for England, Mackay wrote, 'Colonial writers should stay in the colonies and shape their work on lines natural to their lives and their surroundings', contrasting the invigorating effect of such settings with the 'levelling melancholy and influences of London'.Otago Witness Christmas Annual, December 1907.
Where, indeed, could patriotism find a fitter shrine than the land that contains the majesty of the Sounds and the glory of Aorangi; the land that contains the wonders of Rotomahana and the tomb of Te Terata, marvellous even in its desolation?
Mackay, preface to
The Spirit of the Rangatira, n.p.
Mackay is conscious that New Zealand writing is in its infancy, and of the need to develop an audience as well as authorship. In the introduction to The Spirit of the Rangatira she sets out this agenda modestly:
[A]t least a few [of the poems] have a flavour of the colonial soil whence they sprang. Whether this colonial character will prove any recommendation to a large section of the public I can hardly say, but I am convinced that the heart of young New Zealand, in these days, beats with the free, untrammelled pulsation of enterprise — beats hopefully to the march of progress and intellect; and, side by side with this aspiration for culture goes
the dawning of a national spirit that will, we trust, brighten into the noonday of a nation's prosperity. Mackay, preface to
The Spirit of the Rangatira, n.p.
The enterprise and burgeoning prosperity of the new colony is seen here as a necessary condition for its writers. This is in marked contrast to the young See an address on this subject Mackay made to the National Council of Women in 1902, Mackay, letter to The Woman Question: Writings by Women who Won the Vote, selected by Canterbury Times, wrote a fortnightly column in the Otago Witness (which she described as 'floating verse and immature prose'),Time and Tide, Celtic Monthly, and the Lyceum, and contributed to the local suffrage journal, White Ribbon, as well as to similar British publications such as Jus Suffragii, Votes for Women and Common Cause. In the 1890s a family crisis forced her to return to teaching, rather than devote herself wholly to writing and journalism. She wrote to Bulletin:
When ruin overtook us four years ago, I had to take up a double sort of life — half woman's, half man's work. It is hard for even the most sympathetic man to understand how hard it is for a woman to obtain the conditions a man writer commands as a matter of course. Nobody's fault, you know, just the pains of transition.
Mackay, letter to Stephens, 10 May 1903, MS-Papers-0778/1, ATL.
Mackay's friendship with Stephens had begun when he published some of her poems in the 'Red Page', 'The Grey Company' and 'Spring Fires' had been published in The Bulletin in 1900. In 1903, however, Stephens devoted a page of poetry and commentary to Mackay and the women writers of Maoriland, 'The Red Page', The Bulletin, 23 May 1903.
They are healthy girls in Maoriland, and their verse is usually a regular and healthy secretion. On Sunday evening, after church, is a favourite composition time. Then you may see the plump and rosy maiden,
aet. 17 to 25, a little withdrawn from the massed family polishing off the idea that came when she wasn't listening to the sermon. The metre may be borrowed from the hymn-book; the matter fromThe Otago Witnessand Annie S. Swan; the noble and uninspiring sentiment is all the maiden's own. And the Muse of Comedy smiles, noting the shadow of knickerbockers on the paper. Next Saturday week, if one is fortunate there will be a small illumination of the poet's corner ofThe Canterbury TimesorThe Otago Witness; and 'Perdita' or 'Celia' will glow, and dream and wonder if He will see it, and what He would say if He knew, and whether —.After marriage the secretion ceases; but 'Celia' is faithful to
The Otago Witness, and presently a birth-notice illuminates another corner of the paper. Another 'Celia' is launched to write verse in the shadow of next generation knickerbockers; and … such is the idyll of Maoriland life. Literature, with its thrills and flushes and pangs, being necessarily another matter altogether.Anne B. [or Annie] Swan was the pseudonym of David Lyall, a popular romantic novelist and editor of
The Woman at Homemagazine. See Jonathan Rose,The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 141 and Kate Flint,The Woman Reader,1837–1914(Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), p. 307.
Mackay responded to Stephens's attention with surprising gratitude:
My father is so proud — my sisters too. And for myself I feel I have had my day whatever comes, and when the greater star comes, I shall remove my farthing candle with what grace is possible.
Mackay, letter to
A. G. Stephens , 1 June 1903, MS-Papers-0778/1, ATL.
Her only reservation was Stephens's disparagement of
It has become conventional critical practice to charge Curnow and the nationalist poets of the 1930s with a misogynistic disdain for women's writing, See, for example, the discussions in Whole Men: the Masculine Tradition in New Zealand Literature (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1996); and Opening the Book, ed. Triad in 1908 viewed her influence as essayist and critic with mock alarm:
Miss Mackay has written some good and charming verse, some harmless tripe, and some irreparable rubbish. Wherefore, she has now become a critic, and is (I pray you, men, tread softly!) literary adviser to the firm of Whitcombe and Tombs. I, who love and honour the sweet creature Woman, and am her meekest slave and tiniest poetaster in these seas, I imagine Miss Mackay … pouring vials of her maidenly contempt on the work of all wicked and virile creatures like myself.
The Triad, 15 no. 10 (January 1908), p. 10. See discussion inDennis McEldowney , 'Publishing, Patronage, Literary Magazines',OH, p. 640. Mackay was not in fact an advisor to Whitcombe and Tombs. She wrote an introduction to a collection of poems byJ. Maclennan whichThe Triaddisapproved of. The journal defended its position: 'To say that Miss Mackay is no critic is simply to declare her very woman. Shall she complain for that. [sic]'The Triad, 15 no. 11 (February 1908), p. 5.
Mackay seems aware of the ridicule women writers could attract, confessing her inadequacy for the role, 'an angular British [sic] spinster, rounding her 40th year, hair prematurely gray, etc — no poet could bear the shock a moment'. Mackay, letter to
Given the size of the New Zealand reading community at the turn of the century, Australia was of vital importance not only as a place for publication but also as a sympathetic but distinct critical arena. See chapter on Mansfield. Mackay letter to Mackay, letter to Mackay, letter to Mackay, letter to
Early in their relationship, Mackay asked Stephens's advice on publication in Australia, confessing, 'I am prepared for a long and weary task at best, that precludes the idea of trying English publishers; life is not long enough.' Mackay, letter to Bulletin author — apart from the 1903 attention given her, she published little there. She seems to have had reservations about the journal, though she was certainly a Bulletin reader, as were many New Zealanders. She wrote to Stephens:
We all read the 'Bulletin' in my country when it comes our way; we all laugh over it; we all specially revel in the Red Page. But one or two Maorilanders have taken a medieval vow not to write to it, I among them.
Mackay, letter to
A. G. Stephens , 3 January 1903, MS-Papers-0778/1, ATL.
She approved of his move to the Mackay, letter to Bookfellow, writing in 1907 that it was 'a Red Page without the unspeakable Bulletin tacked on'.Bulletin as a local literature distinct from 'any Bulletin "Australian school", [and] … the older, genteel pattern of New Zealand colonial writing'.Bulletin', The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, ed.
New Zealand verse differs from the semi-tropical and wholly Antipodean flower of Australian poesy. The former grafted itself on the good old Saxon stem; the latter 'just growed' like topsy. The New Zealand pioneer poet beached his boats; the Australian burnt his boats. Which did more wisely, time alone can show.
Jessie Mackay , introduction toNew Zealand Rhymes Old and New, ed.Jessie Mackay (Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1907), p. 4.
In making her selection for the 1907 collection, New Zealand Rhymes Old and New, published by Whitcombe and Tombs in London, she makes this affiliation to a literary centre clear:
[P]rominence has been given to the early links binding New Zealand art and sentiment to those of the beloved Motherland: and the aim has been throughout to dwell on those quiet but everlasting verities on which English poetry anchors. Wherever this booklet may travel, it will be among the children of Caedmon's, Chaucer's and Tennyson's readers —
'All taught to prize those English words, Faith, Freedom, Heaven and Home.' Mackay, introduction to
New Zealand Rhymes, pp. 4–5.
However, 'Motherland', and by implication empire, are here constructs, selectively drawn to enable a participation in a collective literary tradition — Caedmon, Chaucer, Tennyson, et al. Politics are quite another matter. To be a child of the literary empire does not problematise nationalism or conflict with the nostalgic demands of the Celtic Twilight and its radical agendas. At the same time, however, Mackay recognises that New Zealand literature may not make the return journey to Britain without difficulty:
[T]opical verse, however apt and bright, Maori themes, however novel and picturesque, and argot poetry, however forcible within its occult limits, could not be presented before outland readers without annotation wholly beyond our present scope.
Mackay, introduction to
New Zealand Rhymes, p. 4.
What she characterises as 'the strange new fire and Alp world, and the stranger old Maoridom' Mackay, introduction to Cited in New Zealand Rhymes, p. 4.Freelance.Katherine Mansfield's New Zealand (Auckland: Golden Press, 1974), p. 78. Mansfield never returned to New Zealand.
Tom L. Mills makes no mention of this visit in his retrospective sketch in Henry Lawson first visited New Zealand in November 1893 'as part of the flow of unemployed from depressed Sydney trying their luck on the strength of reports of returning prosperity in New Zealand'.William Satchell (New York: Twayne, 1968), p. 38–9.Aussie, where he describes Lawson's 'second visit to N.Z.' as that when Bertha accompanied him to 'Maungamanu' [sic], Aussie, 15 November 1922, p. 23.
Lawson published an optimistic poem, 'The Emigration to New Zealand', in Truth in 1893 to mark the occasion of his first visit to New Zealand:
I'm off to make inquiries as to when the next boat sails, I'm sick of all these colonies, but most of New South Wales, An' if you meet a friend of mine who wants to find my track, Say you, 'He's gone to Maoriland, and isn't coming back'…
Henry Lawson , 'The Emigration to New Zealand', first published inTruth, 1893,A Camp-Fire Yarn: Henry Lawson Complete Works 1885–1900, comp. and ed.Leonard Cronin (Sydney: Lansdowne, 1984), p. 335.
He describes the voyage in a sketch, 'Coming Across: A Study in the Steerage' (1893), on a ship which has been partitioned 'to meet the emigration from Australia to New Zealand'. Lawson, The Country I Come From, 1893, in A Camp-Fire Yarn, p. 338.A Camp-Fire Yarn, p. 337.While the Billy Boils, A Camp-Fire Yarn p. 359.
Maoriland writers could alternately render Maori in terms of the colonial sublime and dismiss them as cannibals or monkeys. Lawson represents different elements of the Maori stereotype for different publications. His representations of Maori range from light satire to exasperated polemic; he avoids the sublime. At times he enjoys jokes about Maori cannibalism, much as Domett does in his satirical squib, 'Recantation or an humble petition from the gentlemen and inhabitants of Nelson to the High & Mighty Prince Fizgig the First, one of the Kings of the Cannibal Islands', or In the Turnbull Library is a handwritten poem in broad satire on Maori, at odds with the romantic mode of Ranolf and Amohia (1844 [1854?]), Domett collection, qms-0617, ATL; 'Paddy Murphy's Budget: A Collection of Humorous 'Pomes, Tiligrams, an' Ipistols' by Paddy Murphy (Dunedin: Mackay, Bracken and Co, 1880), p. 57. See Jane Stafford, "'To Sing this Bryce and Bunkum Age": Colonial Poetry and Parihaka', Parihaka: The Art of Passive Resistance, eds. Pahiatua Herald, the name Pahiatua is translated as that happy state of nature in which 'man was a "savage" and nature was free'. Maori then existed in a state of nakedness and cannibalism, until the white man ran 'the fire through the bush and plough through the sods, / And altered the face of the Home of the Gods'. Now money becomes God, the Maori plenitude having been taken away.Pahiatua Herald, 1894, A Camp-Fire Yarn, p. 360.Worker. Here the noble defiance of a young chief in the face of death and defeat connects not only savage subject and white reader in a common sense of humanity but also the parts of Australasia in a single identity: 'And so, from the lips of a "savage", yet from the soul of a man, came the southern war-cry which is destined to ring on through the stormy future histories of the Australias —"We will fight on! For ever! For ever! For ever!"'A Camp-Fire Yarn, p. 368.
In 'Coming Across', the gap between hopeful expectation and likely realities is signalled at the close of the story when the steerage passengers, abandoning a depressed Australia, dubiously regard 'the Promised Land', and are brought 'face to face with the cursed question,"How to make a living?"' Lawson, A Camp-Fire Yarn, p. 341.Henry Lawson: Collected Verse, Volume One: 1885–1900, ed. Henry Lawson: Collected Verse, Volume One, p. 261.
This pattern underlies Lawson's experience of and response to New Zealand, the Maori people, and racial attitudes in New Zealand. The narrative of coming to New Zealand from a depressed Australia, seeking better opportunity and finding the same social misery is echoed at each level of his experience of the country. The abandonment of Australia, initially liberating, brings distress and longing, as in this sketch from 1894:
Things were awful bad in Maoriland just then, and in Wellington especially. There had been a lot of immigration from Australia, and the unemployed, mostly Australians, used to hang round the wharf, like lost souls, whenever there was a boat going to Sydney; and they'd watch the steamer swing off as if it was their last chance on earth slipping away from them.
Henry Lawson , 'A Respectable Young Man with a Portmanteau: A Tale of Steamboat Competition',Worker, 1894,A Camp-fire Yarn, p. 376.
Lawson arrived in Wellington just in time to see women vote for the first time. Yet such moments of optimism were held in check by the difficulties of making a living in New Zealand. In an 1894 sketch, 'The Windy Hills o' Wellington', the narrator meets an old mate from Sydney 'who'd drawn New Zealand blank'. Unemployment and drink have wrecked his health and brought him low. In the ironic coda he has recovered and made a fortune, now snubbing the narrator whose own luck has gone the other way. Lawson, 'The Windy Hills o' Wellington', New Zealand Times, 1894, A Camp-fire Yarn, p. 357.
Two 1894 stories, 'A Wild Irishman' and 'First Impressions of Pahiatua' explore the gap between image and actuality. The latter story shows a dry appreciation of the New Zealand concern with scenery, even where little is apparent. In the midst of the raw settler ugliness produced by development, Lawson wryly observes Maoriland's token preservationism at work alongside the colonial horticultural cringe:
Pahiatua will be a pretty park-like place by and by, when the ornamental trees have grown up and the homesteads are finished and surrounded by gardens, and the hills at the back of the 'Empire' are studded with villas. I'm glad to see that they are leaving clumps of native trees about in places like behind the racecourse; but there ought to be more trees saved, at least until better trees have time to grow.
Lawson, 'First Impressions of Pahiatua',
Pahiatua Herald, 1894,A Camp-fire Yarn, p. 366.
The tone towards New Zealand in the writings that derive from Lawson's first visit is variously admiring and mocking, enthusiastic and cynical, shifts that permanently marked his response to the country. Indeed, they are characteristic of Lawson's response to the world, but they take on a particular quality in New Zealand — usually affectionate but characteristically sceptical, even condescending — perhaps because Maoriland boosterism did not suit his pessimistic temper and laconic style. In a poem 'To Tom Bracken' published in Lawson, 'New Zealand from an Australian's Point of View', 1893, Tua Marina in 1894, he advises 'New Zealand's poet' to thank God 'That you are of New Zealan'!' and congratulates him on writing for 'a kinder sort' than Australians.Henry Lawson: Collected Verse, Volume One, p. 398.Bulletin piece of 'Democratic Maoriland, with its natural and geographical advantages over Australia'.Bulletin, 11 February 1899, p. 35; quoted in Pearson, Henry Lawson Among Maoris, p. 93.A Camp-fire Yarn, p. 346.
For Lawson, closer examination of Maoriland actualities demonstrates that its aspirations to lead the nations are deluded and that its patterns of development are unexceptional colonial ones clouded by romantic sentiment regarding Maori. Lawson had shown himself sceptical about the prevailing myths of Polynesia before his time at Mangamaunu. A poem, 'Coralisle', written in 1893 depicts the South Seas as the last home of 'Fairyland', the world of myth and monsters driven out by modernity:
But men grew wiser in the north And lost their faith in fairy lore, And all the fairies driven forth Were fain to seek a foreign shore. They left a northern harbour's mouth And sailed for many an ocean mile, Until they reached the sunny south, And made their home in 'Coralisle'. But now their hearts are ill at ease, They cannot keep their southern home, For steamships sail across the seas, And traders round their islands roam, And Progress — fatal to the bard — Is fatal to the fairy band. The world must roll, but yet 'tis hard That they must leave New Fairyland.
Henry Lawson , 'Coralisle', 1893, ACamp-fire Yarn,p. 314.
The tone of disappointment in Lawson's New Zealand writing is a function of the author's investment, at least partially, in what he recognises as the myth of Maoriland progressiveness. In 1897 when Lawson came with Bertha he had high expectations of the country and of his opportunities for literary productivity. Yet his third period in the colony produced a disillusion tinged with bitterness rather than the slightly superior irony of his first visit. Maoriland optimism could not for long appeal to the depressive Australian, who could lose faith in even his most cherished values. W. H. [Bill] Pearson in a 1968 study of Lawson's time in New Zealand notes that he observed to Worker: but you can take it from me, Jack, the Australian worker is a brute and nothing else.'Knocking Round (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1930), p. 33; quoted in Pearson, Henry Lawson Among Maoris, p. 28.
From the perspective of the G. B. Barton Collection, MS-Papers-2739, p. 5, ATL.Bulletin where, as Lawson himself notes, the term Maoriland originated, New Zealand writing in the 1890s looked comparatively serene, genteel and optimistic. There was a view that settlement had left fewer shadows in the consciousness of the settlers. Scenery in Maoriland writing was seen to evoke the sublime Maoriland and Other Verses (1899) in the Red Page of the Bulletin observes: 'There is no gloom, no shadow, no mystery in his view of life. The wild scenery of his native Maoriland has not left him full of haunting terrors, ghostly fancies, weird and [orphic] whisperings in the night-time….'White or Yellow: A Story of Race War in A.D. 1908, first serialised in the Boomerang in 1888, is the obverse of Vogel's 1889 imperial Utopia, Anno Domini 2000.
Optimism about the future was less observable in Australia where there was a fear that white settlement might yet fail in the Darwinian struggle among races to possess desirable land. Australia was still not completely settled and might be taken away by a more vigorous and harsh race. David Walker notes that '[i]nvasion narratives frequently drew close analogies between the fate of the Australian Aborigines and the fate of white Australia', and observes the fear that a rampant Asia might 'Aboriginalise' the Australian people. David Walker, See Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850-1939 (St Lucia: Queensland, 1999), p. 9.East by South: Australasian Representations of China and the Chinese, eds.
Where Maoriland did display invasion anxieties they were not, as in Australia, focused on Asia. 'Artemidorus' [A. A. Grace], Grace's solution is that John Bull should immediately spend £23 million on warships. He also favoured the territorial army. Five years earlier in New Zealand in the Next Great War — A Note of Warning. Blaming science and modernity for the expansion of armies and weapons of destruction in Europe, he considers the threat to the Empire and to its far-flung colony, New Zealand. The British Empire he considers invulnerable because of British command of the sea: 'The Ocean is the possession of the British nation, and … so long as we can hold our possession, we are perfectly safe.'New Zealand in the Next Great War — A Note of Warning (Nelson: Alfred G. Betts, 1894), pp. 2–4.Anno Domini 2000, p. 58.
The lack of external threat allowed Maoriland's imperial nationalism to develop without the need to establish an abrasive distance from the source culture captured in 'This was not a multi-cultural movement; but one that answered strictly Pakeha needs — an effort to provide instant history and mythology in a new and unlettered land', Phillips, 'Musings in Maoriland', p. 534.Joseph Furphy, ed. John Barnes (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981), p. xv.Maoriland and other Verses (Sydney: Bulletin Newspaper Company, 1899), p. 3; Barton cites this line in his review.
Pearson, 'The book will be mostly New Zealand character sketches, personal reflections, some old debts paid to one or two unfair critics, literary and otherwise, and scenery — with the Native School as a peg to hang on.' 'Two Australian scenes, called the Cinematograph … have dropped into the book, and read like a summary of all I have ever written or may write about Australia', letter to Lawson emigrated in 1897 seeking to escape the distractions and strife of Sydney life; like Domett, he seems also to have been looking for new experiences on which to base his writing. The cause of the disillusion that both men experienced in New Zealand can be attributed to a kind of negative epiphany about race. Domett's discovery of Maori Henry Lawson Among Maoris, pp. 137–55. Ranolf and Amohia. This is not the case with Lawson. For a time he planned a major work, to be called The Native School, which would represent 'quaint and queer' Maori life.Henry Lawson: Letters 1890–1922, ed. The Native School', Letters 1890-1922, p. 72.
Lawson was in Maoriland but not of it. In 'A Daughter of Maoriland' Lawson suggests a way of approaching the function of sentiment in racial representation in both countries. What makes this disquieting story worthy of attention is that Lawson's teacher-narrator — 'who was "green", "soft", and poetical'Henry Lawson: Short Stories and Sketches 1888–1922, Volume One of Collected Prose, ed. The Receding Wave: Henry Lawson's Prose (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1972), p. 2.
The experience of teaching at Mangamaunu, intended to remove the writer from dangerous Sydney influences and associations, progressively and profoundly unsettled Lawson. Deeply but narrowly sentimental himself, he came to feel that Maori had been the subjects of misplaced sentimentality. His initial optimism about writing an extended treatment of Maori life collapsed. In a letter to
At Mangamaunu Lawson found himself on a kind of vantage point from which he observed with increasing scepticism Maoriland attitudes towards race. From here he could also test those attitudes against those which he brought with him. But he did not expect the process of distancing and disillusion that followed. His third return to New Zealand was accompanied by hopes both for his marriage in a new place and for the literary prospects afforded by the engaging Maori race that are expressed in a poem, 'The Writer's Dream' (1897):
So he sailed away from the Streets of Strife, he travelled by land and sea, In search of a people who lived a life as life in the world should be. And he reached a spot where the scene was fair, with forest and field and wood … The lives of men from the wear of Change and the strife of the world were free…. And the last that were born of a noble race — when the page of the South was fair — The last of the conquered dwelt in peace with the last of the victors there. He saw their hearts with the author's eyes who had written their ancient lore, And he saw their lives as he dreamed of such — ah! many a year before. And 'I'll write a book of these simple folk ere I to the world return, And the cold who read shall be kind for these — and the wise who read shall learn'. The poem also conveys his hopes for his marriage: 'And the writer kissed his girlish wife, and he kissed her twice for pride: / "'Tis a book of love, though a book of life! and a book
you'llread!" he cried', 'The Writer's Dream' inHenry Lawson: Collected Verse, Volume One,pp. 343–5.
In fact, he went on to write not of harmony but of resentment, not of simplicity but of cunning and resistance. Lawson in some ways is the most shocking of late colonial writers on Maori, because his curiosity is complicated by an intense and exclusive class affiliation unusual in New Zealand — unlike most Maoriland writers, Lawson could draw directly on the values and experiences of very poor whites — and marked by a harshness of expression about race unusual in Maoriland writing Phillips notes that '[i]n the Bulletin itself there was a fascination with the Maori quite unlike the contempt for the Aborigine and this was expressed in the fact that early in the 1890s the term New Zealand died out in the magazine to be replaced by "Maoriland"', 'Musings in Maoriland', p. 527.
Lawson's reputation in New Zealand was considerable enough to secure support from journalists and government officials. Henry Lawson Among Maoris, p. 85.Bulletin, William Pember Reeves Collection, Letters Written by Men of Mark to
When Lawson went to teach in a small school near Kaikoura, it was not just the literary relations between the two countries that were to be tested; the school served a Maori community and Lawson planned to explore the Maori character. In a letter to the Sydney publisher, Angus and Robertson, dated 25 June 1897, two months after his arrival, he indicates that he has literary rather than strictly pedagogical intentions for his new charges: '… am well on with a connected Book called the "Native School" — descriptive, reminiscent, and personal matter — in an altogether new, style for me'. Pearson, Henry Lawson Among Maoris, p. 109.Henry Lawson Among Maoris, p. 109
The story, obviously autobiographical, tells of a writer's taking a job Pearson, Lawson, 'A Daughter of Maoriland', pp. 370, 373.Henry Lawson Among Maoris, p. xiii.
The teacher in the story is captivated not by his more likeable charges but by the increasingly morose August, whose behaviour progressively suggests to him that the positive signifiers of romantic ethnology have been misapplied to Maori. Lawson described to
[W]e are haunted just now by the eldest girl (16) a pure-blooded aborigine — if there ever was one — of the heavy negro type, whose father killed her mother eleven years ago (fit of jealousy) and on whose family (three or four sisters) there seems to be a brooding cloud. This girl, they say, would take to the bush, if the last teacher punished her, and climb a tree and sit there and brood for hours — for days, if they didn't find her and get her home. Poor girl — but I shouldn't care to punish her if there were knives handy.
Henry Lawson: Letters, 1890–1922, p. 69.
Lawson's story displays sympathy as well as growing antagonism and at times evokes a sense of threat occasioned by August's unreadable but volatile character.
The story notes in her both conventional literary characteristics of Maori — awkwardness, naivety, and sadnessbonhomie of the Native character runs a deep sentiment of sadness, every bit as genuine, though perhaps more lightly borne and more easily disposed of than that of their more civilized brethren', 'In the Studio: Mr C. F. Goldie's Work', New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, November 1901, p. 146.Illustrated London News and pasted it to the wall, announcing that she is in love with the czar of Russia, a story Lawson attributes to her original,
Lawson's teacher is preoccupied by the atavistic aspect of the girl. She is 'evidently a true Maori or savage', Lawson, 'A Daughter of Maoriland', p. 370. Lawson, 'A Daughter of Maoriland', p. 375.Letters, 1890–1922, p. 70.
The teacher's loss of faith in the romantic view of Maori leads to the narrator's rejection of universal brotherhood. Lawson clearly sympathises with this view and in one published version of the story the concluding insight is conveyed in stridently racist language:
And if this sketch, and others that will be written, do something towards knocking the sentimental rot out of current literature that teacher will not have lived, learned and been 'had' in vain. We rush off in imagination to coral isles and other places, and make heroes out of greasy, brown, loafing brutes, for no other reason, apparently, than that their fathers were even greasier and more brutal than their children, while thousands of brave, self-sacrificing white heroes, weeds for the most part, but heroic weeds, live, fight and die unnoticed in our cities and bush, all the year round.
For further information on the subject of this sketch, and for many profitable hours, the reader is confidently referred to
, by 'a Pakeha Maori' (Old New Zealand Maning ), one of the brightest and healthiest books ever written. The author, or the hero, lived this book, and was equal to the life.These paragraphs are cited by Pearson, who observes that they were 'later scrapped from the first version in the
Antipodeanof 1897',Henry Lawson Among Maoris,p. 141.
This stridency, however, indicates less an assured sense on the author's part of having discovered the key to understanding Maori than an attempt to reassert confidence in the sources of identity and affiliation whose fragility has been revealed. Lawson lacks the advantage of Domett's stable system of imperial valuing. Domett, like a host of writers of empire, establishes a distance from what is reported; his subject is how the other and their mythical accounts of reality are to be translated into terms known and familiar. In empire so much is known and what is experienced must be fitted into existing structures of knowledge. Lawson sets out to narrate Maori life from first-hand experience, yet in doing so he translates his subject into the unfamiliar. His Maori girl in 'A Daughter of Maoriland', unlike Domett's pliant Amohia, is subversive of the colonial education she receives. August seems tractable at first, but refuses to be improved and progressively undermines the teacher's benevolent project of rescue.
August is not resistant to education itself, she does her schoolwork with much brooding but 'fairly well'. Lawson, 'A Daughter of Maoriland', p. 370. Letter to Mr Habens, 10 May 1897, Pearson records the eagerness of Mangamaunu Maori to see their children educated, noting that less than two years after Lawson's father, Pete, applied in 1875 for the establishment of a new school at Eurunderee, K. Wiremu Kerei of Orau, near Kaikoura, 'petitioned for a school for Maori children to be built at Kaikoura, and offered to provide the land on which the teacher would live', Ranginui Walker, Pearson, Henry Lawson: Letters, 1890–1922, p. 68.Henry Lawson Among Maoris, p. 49.He Tipua: The Life and Times of Sir Apirana Ngata (Auckland: Viking, 2001), p. 58.Henry Lawson Among Maoris, pp. 46–9.
The Maoris gave us a big welcome. They appear to be most eager to have a school, still, I fear that this great desire will vanish as the smoke when the newness of the thing has worn off! & I am not yet sure that any good object is gained when you have educated the Maori. Every white man I have met in these isolated parts tells me that you can only make a Maori out of a Maori.
Charles W. Grace , letter toAlfred A. Grace , 30 October 1895, MS-Papers-1176, ATL.
Yet August gives a highly negative focus to the story's representation of the Maori response to education, in spite of the charm of other pupils. She undermines the narrator's faith in his project to use her as the basis of a romantic literary account of Maori life. She also, as he sees it, undermines his place within the small community, and he holds her responsible for the difficulties he encounters as a teacher.
Pearson argues that at Mangamaunu, misunderstanding Maori codes, Lawson found himself thrown back on the affiliations that bound him to the code of mateship — of being white. 'A Daughter of Maoriland' is also a story about a mind disintegrating under its own depressive impetus and generating paranoia in the process. In the story August's capacity to upset the teacher's favourable perceptions of the Maori race threaten his writing, his optimism, the basis of his sympathies, even the balance of his mind. He discovers plots against him, exaggerates small events, reads
The teacher put on his hat, and went up to the pa once more. He found August squatted in the midst of a circle of relations. She was entertaining them with one of a series of idealistic sketches of the teacher's domestic life, in which she showed a very vivid imagination, and exhibited an unaccountable savage sort of pessimism. Her intervals of absence had been occupied in this way from the first. The astounding slanders she had circulated concerning the teacher's private life came back, bit by bit, to his ears for a year afterwards…. She had cunningly, by straightforward and unscrupulous lying, prejudiced the principal mother and boss woman of the pa against the teacher and his wife.
Lawson, 'A Daughter of Maoriland', pp. 373–4.
By mocking the teacher August indicates her inclusion within the life of the pa and calls into doubt the teacher's view of her as damaged by parental and communal lack of care, hence in need of white rescue. She also indicates a possible source of discomfort Lawson himself experienced as a teacher at Mangamaunu: he was the butt of subversive Maori humour. Pearson recounts a joke played on a previous teacher at the school, in which the Maori painted the teacher's horse so he would not recognize it on going to the paddock. Pearson, Pearson, Lawson, 'A Daughter of Maoriland', p. 371.Henry Lawson Among Maoris, p. 71.Henry Lawson Among Maoris, p. 98.Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1983), p. 290.
The most disturbing moment in the story is the unpleasant conflation of author with narrator in a coda to the version of 'A Daughter of Maoriland', which appeared in the Antipodean: 'greasy, brown, loafing brutes'. Such direct asides to an audience certain to agree with him were the stuff in trade of Lawson's writing and were routine in those magazines and newspapers where he published. The lines attach the author to his constituency and assert affiliations of class, colour and attitude, but they do so at the expense of the unease and irresolution in the rest of the story. Part of its unsettling effect on the reader arises not simply because the teacher displays such exasperated misunderstanding of August but because he dimly and frustratedly recognises that she exists outside his ability to account for her actions. The closing intrusion of the author, present in this version of the story, seems to further close down August's side of the story. Yet the need to force home the message so unsubtly reinforces the impression that she has a story, which both the teacher and the author find it necessary to suppress.
Lawson's subject is the role of sentimentality in interpreting racial character. Matthews, Clark, The Receding Wave, p. 7.In Search of Henry Lawson, p. 16. Mansfield was also deeply influenced by
Lawson himself seems to have viewed the story as replacing conventionality with truth telling, misplaced optimism with trenchant realism. Yet there is a conflict between the writer's consciousness of the guardedness of the girl and any confidence that the dismissal of romanticism will solve her enigmas or those of her people. Lawson sees the limits of Maoriland representations of Maori people, but can only do so by assuming that there is an opposing and more truthful form of representation. Pearson, contributing to a critical re-evaluation of Australian nationalist writing as the blind spot of its racism was becoming apparent, The Australian response to Pearson's book indicates this shift in response to the literary nationalism of the 1890s. Leonard Bell, Bulletin observing that it threw 'a timely douche of cold water on to some of the hotter smoke of the Lawson myth', Keesing, 'Lawson as a Racist', Bulletin, 30 November 1968, p. 83. Scrapbook Two, Reviews of Henry Lawson among Maoris and Fretful Sleepers and Other Writings, MSZ-0456, ATL. Colin Roderick in The Age was unimpressed, charging Pearson with conflating literature and history: 'To regard "A Daughter of Maoriland" as a slander on the Maoris is no more valid than to regard "Hungerford" as a libel on New South Wales. At question is the validity of Dr Pearson's approach to the story for historical accuracy, reflection of social personality and biographically factual significance. To interpret the story as Dr Pearson has done is to reduce it to propaganda', The Age, 23 November 1968, MS-Papers-4343 -130, ATL. Writing in Australian journals, two Australian academics with New Zealand connections, A New Britannia (Ringwood: Penguin, 1986), The Australian Journal of Politics and History, 34 no. 3 (1968), pp. 320–32; David Walker, Anxious Nation; Phillip Raymond O'Neill, 'Unsettling the Empire: Postcolonialism and the Troubled Identities of Settler Nations', Ph.D. Diss., New York University, 1993.Colonial Constructs, argues that '[r]epresentations of Maori were never unproblematic, "faithful" transcriptions of the visible…. Conventions … inevitably affected how Maori were represented and what about them Europeans chose to represent'.Colonial Constructs (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1992), p. 2.
Lawson's realism is distorted by a bitter disappointment that seems to have derived from sources within himself rather than objective assessment of the other. His representation of Maori in the story is condescending and at times callous, as Pearson amply demonstrates, but this antagonism does not constitute his final view of the Mangamaunu, before, during or after his stay. Nor does it invalidate his critique of Maoriland representation. Moreover, in a story told by a narrator
Pearson argues that Lawson at Mangamaunu retreated into what he knew and where he felt safe. Lawson, as he sees it, is unable to separate art and authorial attitude in the story and falls at the end into mere assertion, the assertion that sympathy is wasted on Maori people because they don't correspond in actuality to their conventional picture. The notion of universal brotherhood is thus exposed as a sham. Lawson faced his own limits, this is true, but he also confronted those of the dominant romantic representations of Maori found in Australia as well as in New Zealand. As the poem recording his disillusion, 'The Writer's Dream', makes clear, he came to see his initial version of Maori simplicity and removal from human malice as a 'dreamland', locating by a word that recalls Domett's 'South-Sea Day-Dream', the weakness in Maoriland generally — its desire to confine Maori to an imaginary world. August is disillusioning not simply because she fails to correspond to the images of Maori maidens in the Bulletin or the New Zealand Illustrated Magazine. She breaks the spell of optimism which had accompanied his migration and his desire to write of a world without the taint he had known in Sydney's 'Streets of Strife'. She resists figuration within the readily available literary modes — pathos, sentiment or comedy — and turns the last of these back upon her interpreter.
A Daughter of Maoriland', with its sense that alterity is unknowable, does more than critique such representations; in the excess of baffled emotion it generates it also suggests a writer probing without fully understanding the ambivalences on which his own affiliations, as well as his aversions, rested. August, for Lawson, is what Maori become when the gloss of sentiment is removed. Why, then, the initial interest,
At Mangamaunu Lawson experienced homesickness prompted not simply by physical migration but by removal from his emotional grounding. Lawson characterises his blackest moods in a 1917 letter to a wounded soldier friend as not being at home in the world. Pearson quotes a passage:
there's such a thing as home home sicknessas well as the foreign kind or brand; and when the hero-welcome … is over, you'll feel in you[r] bowels that aweful, sinking, world-emptiness which is infinitely worse than any home-sickness abroad, because it is born of [the] hoary Grand-father of all disallusions.Quoted in Pearson,
Henry Lawson Among Maoris, p. 26.
Lawson's disillusion at Mangamaunu was undoubtedly a function of a depression with overlapping sources — the demands of marriage, his ill-suitedness to teaching, a longing for the familiar, a sense of displacement — and these contributed to his difficulties with August and her people. Did the failure to understand Maori codes recorded in 'A Daughter of Maoriland' indicate that Australian nationalism, centred on mateship and the convivial codes of the outback, was inadequate to the representation of Maori? Pearson argues that '[t]he moral of the story is that it is useless to extend mateship to a people who don't recognise the code' and that the story demonstrates 'failure, not only in Lawson but also in the philosophy he propagated'. Pearson, Vincent O'Sullivan, '"Finding the Pattern, Solving the Problem": Katherine Mansfield: The New Zealand European', Henry Lawson Among Maoris, pp. xiii, xiv.everywhere'.Katherine Mansfield: In from the Margins, ed. Roger Robinson (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), p. 13.
A possible key to Lawson's slip from attraction to aversion here is the erotic component of the conventional representations of Maori 'maidens'. Young Maori women were commonly eroticised in the stories that appeared in the The higher ranking granted to some indigenous peoples within the general template of Victorian racism extended to North American Indians, and were sometimes shared by those affected. Oronhyatekha (aka Dr Peter Martin 1841–1908) became the supreme chief ranger of the Independent Order of Foresters only after he repudiated an article in its constitution that limited membership to those of European origin. Communicating pride in his own people as well as a sense of superiority to Black North Americans, he explained that the only intent of the offending article was 'to exclude those who belonged to a race which was considered to be inferior to the white race' and his admission was approved 'because I belong to a race which was superior to the white race'. See Bulletin and even the xenophobic Lone Hand. Lawson does not merely avoid the erotic lure of Maoriland, he inverts it so that the beckoning maiden of the magazines becomes literally as well as figuratively impenetrable. In a sense he aboriginalises August, emphasising her savagery, her blackness and her otherness, dissolving the difference granted in both countries to the Maori as a superior and desirable native.Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2000), p. 42; Gerson is quoting Canadian Portraits: Brant, Crowfoot, Oronhyatekha: Famous Indians (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1960), p. 146.
The degree to which August is not sexualised is significant. Her being in the teacher's house is carefully accounted for. She is rescued by an act of altruism. Plucked from the rough treatment of her people into the teacher's civil household, she is invited in to be cared for not exploited. She enters into a domestic arrangement in which the teacher's loyalties to his wife are established. She is too ugly to attract colonial desire, and part of her ugliness is her blackness, her unalloyed aboriginality. She is precisely the opposite of the photographs of Maori maidens Lawson may have had in mind as a background to the story. Pearson notes that a photographic study, 'A Maori Belle', and another of two girls entitled 'Two Daughters of Maoriland' appeared in the 'The Latter End of Spring' published in the Pearson mentions that Lawson was said to have married a Maori woman during his first visit.Bulletin in 1897 and observes: 'it is clear that Henry Lawson Among Maoris, p. 140.Bulletin is a romantic ballad of a lover in Maoriland writing back to his beloved, presumably in Australia, promising to return. But he finds love with a 'brown-eyed girl', less likely Maori than A Camp-Fire Yarn, p. 371.Worker, has the refrain, 'She draws me back with her great brown eyes, over the leagues of sea'. The accompanying illustration shows a smiling Maori girl in traditional costume.A Camp-Fire Yarn, pp. 395–6.Bulletin photograph, also called 'Daughters of Maoriland', Lawson substitutes a girl so plain that desire is unthinkable.
Settler New Zealand in the late colonial period observed a disparity between the conventional romanticised portraits of Maori belles and actual Maori women. Reeves in Reeves, Robert Young, The Long White Cloud remarks that Maori women, 'even when young, are less attractive to the European eye' than the men.The Long White Cloud, p. 53.Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 143.Story of New Zealand by predicting that English colonisation will visit progressive improvement upon an amenable native population by its assimilation:
In all conquests, whether by the mind or the sword, which have terminated in good to the weaker party, the conquerors have invariably amalgamated with the conquered; and this is most necessary among the New Zealanders [that is, the Maori], as their rapid decrease is much aggravated by breeding in and in [sic]. It is therefore satisfactory to find that Caucasian blood already flows in the veins of two thousand of the native population.
Thomson quotes a The Story of New Zealand: Past and Present — Savage and Civilized, vol. II (London: John Murray, 1859), pp. 305, 307.Tussock Land: A Romance of New Zealand and the Commonwealth (1904) the fading Maori race gifts genetic advantage to the conquering European:
though [the Maori race] was not dying out, its impress upon history was destined to become fainter. Its destiny was intermarriage with the Pakeha — and though thus it would bestow on the New Zealand race of the future a physique and vitality that belong to primitive things, a gift that would carry the new race far — as a people the brown Maori must cease, submerged beneath the greater number of whites.
Arthur Adams ,Tussock Land, p. 31. See Lawless, 'The Sex Problem', p. 148.
What is striking here is the confidence with which some colonial apologists express their belief in the joining of different races to produce a positive fusion. Thomson assumes that amalgamation will mean the effective extinction of one partner in the pairing, but he is optimistic about the outcome.
Yet such tolerance of (even enthusiasm for) miscegenation was not extended to other coloured races, especially the Chinese. Tony Ballantyne has pointed out that the racialised formation of settler nationalism in late nineteenth-century New Zealand co-existed with a fierce racism directed at Chinese immigrants. See P. J. Gibbons, 'The Climate of Opinion', The Oxford History of New Zealand, 2nd ed., ed. Geoffrey W. Rice (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 310; see also Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, pp. 80–1.Long White Cloud:
certain colonial writers have exhausted their powers of ridicule — no very difficult task — upon what they inaccurately call Maori communism. But the system, in full working order, at least developed the finest race of savages the world has seen, and taught them barbaric virtues which have won from their White supplanters not only respect, but liking. The average colonist regards a Mongolian with repulsion, a Negro with contempt, and looks on an Australian black as very near to a wild beast; but he likes the Maoris, and is sorry that they are dying out.
Reeves,
The Long White Cloud, p. 57. Later editions of the book replaced the last phrase with the more positive, 'treats them in many respects as his equals', indicating consolidation of the myth of harmonious relations between Maori and Pakeha.
Maori, then, were an exception within the coloured base of a minutely graded system of racial declension, even within the racist Australian labour movement of the late nineteenth century. Lawson came to New Zealand mindful of that exceptionalism and of his own agreeable past relations with Maori. But at Mangamaunu he lost connection with his white tribes — the impoverished white farmers, the itinerants of the outback and the boozers of Sydney Bohemia — whose limitations he could observe without losing all sense of solidarity with them. Around the Native School there were no Pakeha neighbours with whom he could meet convivially. There were apparently swaggers, as August accuses them of stealing from the household, but the teacher fails to respond to them. Lawson quarrelled with the Pakeha who were available, considering them low class. The local Ngai Tahu community also, as Lawson saw it, 'Poor-Class' in their own Maori world, proved to be no exception to what he had come to escape. Cliquish, back-biting, disrespectful, mercenary — they were all too human. Despising the Pakeha and the Maori alike, Lawson was forced back onto a difficult domesticity and his own deepest doubts about the human race and its various categories of difference.
August is an intermediary between the teacher's domestic life and that of the community. She is taken into the household like the girl in Kipling's story, 'Lispeth', to be rescued from savagery yet, unlike Lispeth, she resists. Kipling, School geography book cited in Pearson, Plain Tales from the Hills, pp. 7–11.Henry Lawson Among Maoris, p. 7.
At Mangamaunu Lawson seems to have regressed to the world of his childhood where poor-class whites despised poor-class blacks. The story's dynamic is produced by a contest between loathing and sentiment, the latter representing the only means of holding intact a collapsing world of values, always fragile for the doubting Lawson. Given the failure of the Maori to live up to their reputation, Lawson found his sentimental affiliation with his elected white tribe — battlers with bush and bottle — both confirmed and problematicised. The white 'weeds' call forth his loyalty but only by carrying him back to the small bitter world in which he grew up, where failing whites faced dying blacks with mutual incomprehension.
By the standards of the contemporary education system as well those of his pupils and their community, Lawson failed as a teacher. made it clear that the duties of the Native School teachers extended beyond the schoolroom, the children and the lesson periods. The entire village was their school, their hours of duty were the whole day long. Steadily penetrating the fastnesses of Maoridom the Native School teachers and their wives were sent out as missionaries of a new social order. The children they taught in school; the older generation they influenced by their lives and conduct generally, by their neat, clean homes and tidy cultivated gardens, and by their ever-ready counsel and practical aid freely rendered to the Natives in times of sickness and in their various difficulties in adjusting themselves to the new order of things. A. G. Butchers,
The Education System: A Concise History of the New Zealand Education System (Auckland: National Printing Co., 1932), p. 87.
Such high-mindedness oppressed others among the Native School teachers than Lawson. The Toll of the Bush depicts a group of them as 'men with miscellaneous pasts, but of approved probity', discussing helplessly 'the encroachments of an experimental Government, who had made of them postmasters and dispensers of medicine and meteorologists and nurserymen, and studiously neglected
Lawson failed the requirements of the code he never wholeheartedly embraced: missionary purpose and exemplary pedagogy. Nevertheless, Lawson's desire to write up his experience of Maoriland should be judged at least partially successful. 'A Daughter of Maoriland', no magnum opus, serves as a critique of a prominent mode of representing Maori, that of romantic sentimentality which existed at a distance not only from Maori actuality but also from the practical efforts of the state to improve Maori education. By presenting his scepticism as the discovery of a trenchant and principled 'truth' Lawson exposed the limits of the code of mateship but he also exposed the limits of Maoriland sentimentality.
Butchers observes that the 'educability [of Maori children] was of a relatively high standard, and it needed only the acquisition of the necessary language medium to enable them to appropriate increasingly the new concepts for which their own tongue had no words', Butchers, State Policy Throughout the period covered in this book assumed that the Maori race was under threat of extinction and that measures to ensure its survival were necessary. Even the anti-humanitarian Domett held that the fierce application of colonial law to Maori was for their ultimate benefit as the only way the race might survive. This consciousness of imminent threat shaped educational policy, especially in respect of the Native Schools that aimed to equip Maori children with skills basic to survival not in their traditional society but in the modern one busily being manufactured in the colony. The sense of danger to Maori coexisted with a belief that they were, by savage standards, intelligent, adaptable and capable, if properly educated, of making the transition to modernity.The Education System, p. 87.pakeha would be at an end'.The Education System, p. 87.
There were, of course, much harsher views of Maori of the kind Independent from 1868, calling for Maori to be hunted down and slain.Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 162–3.
— though skies are fair above her,
Newer nations white press onward:
Her brown warriors' fight is over —
One by one they yield their place, Peace-slain chieftains of her race.
Arthur H. Adams ,Maoriland and Other Verses(Sydney: Bulletin Newspaper Company, 1899), p. 3.
By this time, with settlement securely founded in New Zealand, the notion of the dying race has acquired several meanings, roughly corresponding to the speaker's disposition towards the fate of those it signifies. The notion expresses the complacent assumption among white New Zealanders that Maori will fade as a living race to be replaced by a mythical version of their past, suitable for romantic art and tourist postcards. It conveys the mournful conviction that the ancient 'type' of the Maori is fading away and needs to be memorialised, as when 'In the Public Eye', 'In the Public Eye', p. 12. 'In the Public Eye', pp. 11–12.The New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, 5 no. 2 (November 1901), p. 147. New Zealand Illustrated Magazine reproduced two Maori portraits, one of 'the venerable rangitira', the other of New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, 1 no. 1 (October 1899), p. 11.Te Hokioi e RereAtu Na, and in 1884 had travelled to England with the Maori King
Patara was a very self-conscious 'savage'. A photograph of Goldie and Patara during the painting of the study is reproduced in the Sealy, 'In the Studio', p. 148.Illustrated Magazine. It shows the latter having a cup of tea with the painter, his boots and trousers showing beneath his cloak.Tales of a Dying Race (London: Chatto and Windus, 1901), pp. 169–70.
Survival as advocated by the Butchers, Illustrated Magazine sounds very like extinction from another point of view, but the belief in adaptation did not always mean loss of separate identity or of racial pride. Butchers observes that the Native Schools prepared their students 'for successful contact with the foreign social organization which was clearly destined in a very large measure, if not wholly, to supplant their own'. Yet he The Education System, p. 87.
The dying race concept also reflects what was felt to be demographic observation, which seemed to confirm that the once flourishing race was in fact declining. The task of the pakeha was to 'smooth the pillow of the dying race'. This observation was not supported by demographic fact as recorded in census data, but it had considerable purchase within settler culture. Ian Pool records a 'slow increase', around 0.6% per annum in Maori population between 1891 and 1901. The decade, then, marks the beginning of a period of recuperation after the rapid decline from 1840 to 1878 and the slower decline in the 1880s, Belich, Brantlinger, Te Iwi Maori: A New Zealand Population, Past, Present and Projected (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1991), p. 75.Making Peoples, p. 174.Dark Vanishings, pp. 159–60.
The dying race theme is also invoked by Ngata in a poem written in 1892 (see chapter 9) to describe the fading of customs and traditions as Maori struggled to adjust to the modern Pakeha world. Here also the meaning of the term is shifting and ambivalent: it may register the contemplation of irretrievable loss; it may indicate the prospect of successful adaptation to a new world, both alien and inescapable. See chapter 10.
I say that the objection to the ablest of the Maoris leaving New Zealand because their race is a declining one is sentimental … the race has declined largely because it gave up fighting …
your civilisation requires fighting with brains, it requires special equipment for the battles of life. It took more than half a century for some of the warrior tribes to accommodate themselves to the new conditions. They pine away, they die, largely because there is no fighting. Quoted in
Graham Butterworth ,Sir Apirana Ngata(Wellington: A. H. and A. W. Reed, 1968), p. 14.
The most telling literary use of the dying race theme is found in the stories and sketches of Tales of a Dying Race (1901). Alfred Augustus Grace as DNZB III, p. 184.
From 1887 Grace lived in Nelson, working as a journalist and writing stories and poems where Domett had made his mark as a journalist forty years earlier. An officer in the New Zealand Regiment of Field Artillery Volunteers, Grace was an enthusiastic subject of empire, he saw no conflict between colonial patriotism and British identity. In his introduction to the Poems of William Hodgson, published in Nelson in 1896, while celebrating the colonial poet he defines colonial nationalism:
Not a New Zealander by birth,
William Hodgson was a type of the Colonistpar excellence.His adopted country became his fatherland, and, 'forgetting any other home but this,' he never regarded the land of his birth with thoughts of regret. It is upon the resoluteness of such men asWilliam Hodgson , and their loftiness of purpose, that the greatness of Britain's colonial Empire has been founded.
Alfred A. Grace , introduction toPoems of William Hodgson(Nelson: Alfred G. Betts, 1896), p. 1.
Although Hodgson comes to see New Zealand as his home, this implies no severance of his ties to empire. Empire-building and learning to love the new place are coterminous. Empire plants colonies and the colonies take on their own character, not as mere replicas of the original but as offspring with their own organic life. As The New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, 'There comes a time in the history of every colony — at least every colony of British origin — when the new country ceases to be a mere appendage of the old. The offshoot sends down roots of its own into a soil of its own, and finding there sufficiency of nourishment, no longer draws the sap from the parent stock.'The New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, 1 no. 2 (1 November 1899), p. i.
This Colony which in point of natural resources is second to none of the British Colonies south of the line; costing our fathers endless toil to subdue it and cultivate it that we might enjoy the fruit of their labours; fertile to an extent that is incredible to the European; well stocked with cattle and sheep; … its forests abounding in splendid timber; in short, a country capable of supporting some ten millions of people, and actually containing upwards of 600,000.
Grace,
New Zealand in the Next Great War, p. 17. Grace's unabashed celebration of New Zealand's material riches looks forward toAlan Mulgan 'sPastoral New Zealand: Its Riches and its People: A Descriptive Survey of the Dominion's Farming(Wellington: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1946).
Grace complains about the inadequate size of the territorial forces but he indicates no anxiety about a continued threat to the colony from Maori. Two decades earlier, Domett's experience of Maori militancy in the Nelson region had prompted his vigorous campaign on behalf of settler rights and priorities against what he saw as imperial favouritism towards Maori. Grace evidently feels that such threats now lie in the past and his attitude toward Maori is consequently more relaxed and, within the limits of his colonial mentality, favourable. It is France, and Russia with its 'Tartar' cruelty, Grace, Grace, New Zealand in the Next Great War, p. 18.New Zealand in the Next Great War, pp. 14–25.
In 1895 Grace's A. A. Grace, Maoriland Stories appeared. A biographical note at the back of his Hone Tiki Dialogues (1910) recounts that the volume was well received by critics and the public and observes that this success prompted Grace to pursue the Maori theme: 'As the Maori tales in the book met with the heartiest welcome, the young author decided to give his attention to the unworked literary field which the Native race presented. He set himself two tasks: firstly, the portrayal of the contact of the white and brown races, and its resultant effects; secondly, the Maori as he was before the Pakeha influx.'Hone Tiki Dialogues (Wellington: Gordon and Gotch, [1910]), n.p.
Grace also returns to the precontact period by way of renditions of Maori myth and legend. 'All but four' of A. A. Grace, preface to Folk-Tales of the Maori (1907) 'treat of the Maori in his aboriginal state, and have been handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation'.Folk-Tales of the Maori (Wellington: Gordon and Gotch, 1907), n.p. This collection is dedicated to the British 'Folklorist and Mythologist' Folk-Tales belongs to a genre which supposedly gave access to ancient Maori ways and Grace recommends the stories as demonstrating that within a primitive race dwelt a capacity for feeling and thought akin to that of the ancient mythologists. Here he recalls Domett's position but, for Grace, the myths and tales do not merely preserve the living records of a dying race, they offer a kind of archaeological site in which the unspoiled aboriginal forms of racial consciousness may be discerned within the imperfect contemporary ones.
The purity and simplicity of the primitive mind are admirable qualities to contemplate in retrospect. They do not, however, allow those exchanges with the impure present which contribute to the liveliness of Grace's tales of adaptation. Grace's development of this line of representation was received with notable enthusiasm by editors, publishers and readers. He had found a theme of general interest and a suitable mode — combining pathos, erotic interest and subversive humour — in which to present it to a receptive audience.
A. A. Grace, Maoriland Stories includes 'Reta the Urukehu' set in the early contact period when Europeans have arrived but have not yet profoundly altered traditional ways of life. The beautiful Reta still belongs to a largely unspoiled Maori world full of both nobility and tragedy. However, the dilemma which leads to her self-sacrifice is provoked not only by the unchecked power of the traditionally minded chief, Te Heuheu, who pursues her but also by his resistance of the newly asserted Christian rules surrounding marriage. 'The Chief's Daughter', set somewhat later, opens with an artist, Craig, using the opportunity of a Native Land Court sitting in a picturesque spot by a lake to paint from Maori models. He has the whole range of types at his disposal: the tattooed warrior, the hag, the matron, the lithe youth and 'the beautifully rounded, graceful girl'.Maoriland Stories (Nelson: Alfred A. Betts, 1895), p. 5. Ranolf and Amohia as an interracial romance. Grace writes with greater economy than Domett and without the ponderous speculation, but in this story he does not move beyond the entrenched belief that Maori attractiveness is a function of their simplicity, their frank expression of desire, and their invitation to the passions — all associated with their traditional culture. What 'maidens' in particular have to offer is erotic charm, emotionality and pliancy towards the European male. Hinerau moves Craig to put aside his inhibitions, but he remains the superior European for whom Maori are part of nature, part of the grand scenery of Maoriland, albeit more responsive to him than the mountains that frame her story.
In 'Hira' Grace's representation of an affair between a white man and a young Maori woman substitutes gothic horror for bemused endorsement of the liberating effect of Maori maids on white men when the jilted lover takes her revenge by having the head of her white supplanter brought to her by a Maori suitor as a love token. Like 'The Chief's Daughter', the story deals with a Maori woman's obsession with a white man. By the excessive nature of this obsession Grace suggests Maori oscillation between desire for the outward advantages of Pakeha Grace, 'Hira', Grace, Maoriland Stories, p. 87.Maoriland Stories, p. 96.
Grace, Grace, Tales of a Dying Race is the work that most clearly expresses Grace's attitude toward the prospect of Maori extinction and, by implication, the attitude of the avid readers of the stories it contains. Domett in the 1870s had found Ranolf and Amohia hard to place with English publishers who approved the exotic Maori content but baulked at the poetry. Grace had no such difficulties placing his stories. He notes in his preface to Tales of a Dying Race that eleven of the stories had appeared in the Bulletin, two in the Triad, and one in the Dunedin Star.Tales of a Dying Race, p. vii.Bulletin, sought rights to publish them as a book. In fact, Tales of a Dying Race was published in London by Hone Tiki Dialogues details the enthusiastic response of the British reviewers, who responded both to Grace's depiction of 'the Maori's decadence' and to what the Daily Express termed the 'Responsibility of Empire'.Hone Tiki Dialogues, n.p.
Evidently, Grace's rather patronising treatment of Maori themes found favour at the time in Britain as well as on both sides of the Tasman. Does this indicate that there was a general view throughout the empire that Maori, like other indigenous races, were destined for extinction? If we mean by extinction the total disappearance of the race, Tales of a Dying Race despite its title makes an ambivalent case. Grace is interested in the 'decadence' of contemporary Maori, that is, their Tales of a Dying Race is also, like Tales is that of sexual openness, which the missionaries seek to suppress and which serves as a source of consolation for Pakeha men seeking to escape the trammels of their own civilisation. In other words, Grace's subject is not so much the 'responsibilities' as the opportunities of empire.
Grace lacks Kipling's effortless precision with dialect and, while Kipling's racial attitudes are harsher, the Anglo-Indian is still present to us because his stories are so much more complicated than the ideas and attitudes embedded in them. Kipling speaks for empire, but he registers the brutal underside of imperial practice and he gives voice both to its ethnic multiplicity and to the range of types from within the British class system caught up in it. Grace seems more sympathetic to Maori, but the sympathy is rooted in his own antagonism to the puritanism he grew up with and the seeming absence of it in Maori life. His Maori are literary vehicles of that antagonism.
Maori figure in Grace, 'Reremoa and the Pearly Nautilus', Grace, 'Why Castelard Took to the Blanket', Tales of a Dying Race as subversive improvers of Pakeha. Maori women relax inhibitions and invite to the sensual. They offer an attractive opposition not only to the cares of the time-bound world but also to the coldness of abstract thought. Grasping the maiden, Reremoa, the scientist Rossmatin, finds 'something better than his pearly nautilus, something more worth keeping'.Tales of a Dying Race, p. 10.pakeha.'Tales of a Dying Race, p. 72.
Wattie, 'Grace', p. 184. Grace, Grace, Tales of a Dying Race, p. 1.Tales cast Maori sexual tolerance into sharp relief with the inhibitions of Christianity. Miss Cornelia in 'Pirihira' is a portrait of a religious woman that looks forward to the caricatures of the type in Tales of a Dying Race, p. 95.
Not all the lady school teachers and missionaries are so ferociously depicted. 'School-Ma'am and Mormon Elder' is set in an Anglican school for Maori students. The school-ma'am in the story, Eliza, comes to display both a liberated attitude and a capacity for outwitting the censorious church authorities. She also shows a healthy instinct for wresting pecuniary advantage from seeming reversal when she points out to her American Mormon lover that 'there's the Government capitation grant, beside Church donations to the school'. Grace, Tales of a Dying Race, p. 107.
What A Pakeha Maori [Old New Zealand: A Tale of the Good Old Times (London: Smith Elder and Co, 1863), p. 52.
'Felton didn't go the whole hog all at once — he became Maorified bit by bit. It began by his going up the Whanganui River to Onepapa, Kohere's
kainga,where he met Hina, Kohere's niece, and the usual developments followed.'Grace, 'Under the Greenwood Tree',
Tales of a Dying Race, p. 121.
Lubricious Maori maidens are the subject of voyeuristic male attention in the 'The Korowhiti', Grace, Grace, 'Reremoana and the Pearly Nautilus', Grace, Tales. Mihamiha in 'The Korowhiti' blossoms into 'a luscious womanhood, which found her lissom though full of shape'.The Triad, 13 no. 4 (July 1905), p. 9.Tales of a Dying Race, p. 42.Tales of a Dying Race, p. 7.Tales of a Dying Race, p. 43.
Grace, however, does not simply oppose Maori lack of inhibition to European reserve. Harrington, disguised as a taniwha, rescues Miromiro from her misshapen tohunga suitor, thus demonstrating that Maori as well as European religion is an impediment to happiness. In 'The Tohunga and the Wai Tapu' the Catholic priest, Father Maloney, and the aged tohunga, Tuatara, battle with their spells and incantations for the souls of the tribe. In 'Karepa's Taipo' the convent education of Meri leads to her death when she crosses a dangerous river rather than remain alone at night with the white men. In this story the sexual propriety of Pakeha religion has a fatal impact on the Maori girl, but her father's superstitious belief that the visit of a taipo signals death is also condemned. For Grace, religion is a cross-cultural bane and he shows no favour in his depictions of its varieties of doctrine or ethnic allegiance. (Domett would agree here in respect of institutional religion.) If Grace's Pakeha society is weighted down by Christianity, his Maori are eager for new religions, fickle in their allegiances, shallow in their interest in doctrinal difference. They express eagerness to fit a 'noo religion' combining Mormonism and Anglicanism into their social calendar not so much as a deliberate act of cultural hybridity, as Grace, 'School-Ma'am and Mormon Elder', Grace, Tales of a Dying Race, p. 107.Tales of a Dying Race, p. 107.
The narrowness of Grace's cultural vision is signalled by the insistent eroticisation of Maori in his stories; even signs of cultural insight are expressed in a way that patronises those he approves: 'that love which comes only to the heathen in his blindness, blessed with an ideality of which the cultivated, artificial Grace, 'Pato-Pato and the Water-Nymphs', Grace, Grace, Grace, 'Pirihira', pakeha knows nothing.'Tales of a Dying Race, p. 90.Tales of a Dying Race, p. 116.Tales of a Dying Race, p. 80.Tales of a Dying Race, p. 94.Tales.
Grace inserts a rough historical template into the stories so that his depiction of Maori decline and the contrasts between ancient and contemporary Maori are given some context. 'King Potatau's Powder-Maker' is set during the wars of the 1860s. Its main character is Bagshaw, who makes powder for the rebels and is an unpleasant representative of the Pakeha-Maori, at odds with Maning's depiction of the earlier condition of this incipiently cross-cultural figure. Like Grace, 'King Potatau's Powder-Maker', aukati, or line of demarcation between the King Country and the pakeha's sphere of influence'.Tales of a Dying Race, p. 26. Old New Zealand.
Grace sees civilisation as a thin veneer superimposed on the savage self, which resurfaces at times of crisis. In 'A White Wahine' a Maori defending a Pakeha child against a war party from the Urewera finds that 'the savage in him came to the top'. Grace, Grace, 'Reremoa and the Pearly Nautilus', Grace, Tales of a Dying Race, p. 236.Tales of a Dying Race, p. 9A Passage to India (1924), which brilliantly anatomises the way empire misconstrues the other, never hesitates to observe the general characteristics of Orientals. Forster interprets Indians with benevolent intelligence, seeking always to grasp their thought and motivation without the distortion of European prejudice. Grace, however sympathetic he is at times, readily falls back on familiar expressions of Pakeha impatience: 'To drive a bargain with a Maori always takes hours, may take days, and has been known to take years.'Tales of a Dying Race, p. 48.Tales of a Dying Race, and its satirical lightness when discussing Maori qualities. Grace is conscious that the ancient ways of Maori life, which he sees as purer than those of the decadent present, cannot
In his preface to Grace, Tales Grace uses Tales of a Dying Race, p. vi.
When the white man arrived, he found the islands rent from end to end by internecine wars; but instead of seeing in him their common enemy, against whom it was expedient for them to unite, the Maoris welcomed the
pakeha, because he could supply them with powder and shot with which to exterminate each other. This they almost accomplished, and now the assimilation of a civilization they do not understand is finishing the work.Grace,
Tales of a Dying Race, p. vii.
Yet moving from the distant historical context to the vaguely contemporary one in which the stories are set, Grace's collection does not support this sense of inevitable extinction. His Maori subjects exhibit a subversive humour and the ability at times to upstage the whites who would take advantage of them.
In 'The Blind Eye of the Law' Tukutuku's father 'had assimilated Grace, pakeha notions in reference to land, and, forsaking his Maori communistic ideas, had procured through the Native Land Court a bona-fide title to ten thousand acres, his share of the tribal territory'.Tales of a Dying Race, p. 11.
Pirimona in the eponymous story is a 'pattern for all good Maori to copy — the "show" Christian of the Grace, kainga, the missionary's pet convert'.Tales of a Dying Race, p. 19.wahine-iti into the household to supplement the breeding programme. Success brings remonstration from the missionary, but Pirimona has found the best of both worlds. Pirimona also appears in 'Rawiri and the Four Evangelists' in which Maori are amusing and clownish but where Pirimona upstages the missionaries, inventing a story that makes gambling a perfectly tika — correct — Maori practice. The effect of this, however, is neither to assert the dominance of Christianity over Maori beliefs nor to suggest that Christianity has been successfully Maorified (the four evangelists of the Bible have been translated into Maori as Matiu, Maka, Ruka and Hoani). The two words exist in an untidy relation of struggle, mixture and antagonism, and characters like Pirimona move with relative ease between them.
The figure of the Pakeha-Maori, who could accomplish this transition between worlds in Maning's Grace, Grace, Grace, Old New Zealand, has suffered a decline in status and esteem. In 'King Potatau's Powder-Maker', the cartridges fired by the Maori 'rebels' on the battlefields of the New Zealand Wars are an ironic adaptation of that most pervasive sign of colonisation, writing, to the purposes of military resistance. '[M]ade of paper torn from printed books',Tales of a Dying Race, p. 21.Red Earth and Pouring Rain [1997] the Indian mutineers use shot made from printers' type.) Light armaments are manufactured by the Maori using sulphur from the geyser region and saltpetre and charcoal obtained directly from nature. The Pakeha-Maori, Bagshaw, is the overseer of this unrecorded pakeha-maori rose, and, cursing her, kicked her with his heavy blucher boot. The blow struck her on the thigh, and she limped as she went towards the raupo shed and commenced the filthy work. She was his wahine.'Tales of a Dying Race, p. 22.pakeha-maori'.Tales of a Dying Race, p. 109.
'Te Wiria's Potatoes', rather like Lawson's 'A Daughter of Maoriland', exposes the romantic illusions of a sentimental Pakeha farmer, Villiers, who is outwitted by 'the dispossessed lords of the soil'. Grace, Grace, Grace, Tales of a Dying Race, p. 84.Tales of a Dying Race, p. 85.protégés, Tohitapu their chief calls him his Pakeha, as if he is his protégé'.Fretful Sleepers and Other Essays (Auckland: Heinemann Educational, 1974), p. 50.Tales of a Dying Race, p. 103.
As Wattie points out, Grace often belittles his Maori characters by mocking their speech. Wattie, 'Grace', p.184. A. A. Grace, 'The Habit of Taihoa', Grace, Hone Tiki Dialogues which appeared as number two in the New Zealand Railway Library. In the tradition of Hone Tiki Dialogues, p. 3.Hone Tiki Dialogues, pp. 13–14.
Brantlinger, Brantlinger, Walker, See Brantlinger Argues That throughout the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries there was a 'massive and rarely questioned consensus' about the inevitable disappearance of primitive races.Dark Vanishings, p. 1.Dark Vanishings, p. 3.Hine Moa: The Maori Maiden, (London: He Tipua, p. 39.Kunapipi, forthcoming.
Debates about race in colonial New Zealand took place against a broad background of shifting imperial attitudes, influenced by events such as the American Civil War, slave revolts, emancipation, and the Indian Mutiny, all of which impinged directly or indirectly on New Zealand attitudes. At the same time, a whole literature on the 'South Seas' was being compiled, both as part of the imperial endeavour and at times in conflict with the idea of empire. In many respects racial attitudes in New Zealand confirmed and mimicked the larger imperial pattern, but there are significant departures and local inflections. In particular, the liberal-romantic perception of Maori remained forceful in New Zealand, and was assimilated into the pseudo-scientific racism that emerged in the late nineteenth century, which hardened racial attitudes elsewhere in the empire and in America.
In America, according to W. W. Wright quoted in Kinney, Amalgamation! Race, Sex, and Rhetoric in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), p. 151.Amalgamation!, p. 152.
the resulting discrimination and oppression in the 1890s and later evoked a literary response almost equal to the battle of the books over slavery, and that shared some important similarities with the earlier fray … Eventually, … interracial sex emerged as the central issue, just as it had for the abolitionists and the slavery apologists a half century before. Among whites, turn-of-the-century beliefs in the genetic racial inferiority and the hereditary disposition of blacks to disease, led inevitably to rabid fear of interracial sex.
Kinney,
Amalgamation!, p. 155.
In New Zealand, social Darwinism informed racial discussion in the late nineteenth century, in particular the ideas of the dying away of the Maori and the inevitability of the triumph of the stronger race in the struggle for survival. But racial attitudes moved away from the American and Australian horror of miscegenation, actively promoting the assimilation of the Maori into the dominant European race, and this is reflected in the literature and the ethnological writings of the period. Aryanism was a key intellectual component of this ideology.
The effect of the Aryanisation of Maori in late-colonial New Zealand is illustrated by Newman, 'A Study of the Causes', p. 463. Ibid.New Zealand Journal of History, 30 no. 2 (October 1996), p. 125. The following discussion of Newman's shifting position is indebted to Stenhouse.Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, 14 (1881), p. 477.New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, 48 (1884), p. 231.
Stenhouse notes that around 1905 Newman once more succumbed 'to the allure of grand theory', not scientific racism this time but the myth of the Aryan origins of the Maori. Stenhouse, 'A Disappearing Race', p. 139.Who Are the Maoris? Newman confesses to finding the Maori race 'splendid' and 'charming' and argues, citing Tregear, that they derive from Northern India. As part of the Aryan diaspora, Maori were related to the British and thus fit subjects for assimilation into a hybrid race that would discover something ancient in the process of making something new.Who Are the Maoris? (Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, [1912]), pp. 5–6.
Maoriland racism was focused on a declining but attractive indigenous other rather than a degraded black other as in America or a competitive and threatening Asian other, as in Australia. Yet the differences from Australia can easily be overstated. Ged Martin, 'New Zealand, Australian Federation and the "Plain Nonsense" Debate', Tales of a Dying Race appeared in the year that Federation passed in Australia. There had been some expectation in Australia that New Zealand would join, more, certainly, than there was in New Zealand itself. British Review of New Zealand Studies, no. 11 (December 1998), p. 68.New Zealand Illustrated Magazine in its first four numbers issued in 1899–1900 reveals no worried debate about how Maori might fare in a state which disenfranchised its indigenous people. The magazine does, however, provide evidence of disquiet about the Asianisation of Australia, echoing those in Australia itself:
Probable causes of future trouble and discord are involved in the occupation of the North of Australia. If that part of the Continent is to be colonised by aliens, and its industries carried on by means of Asiatic and coloured labour, … then Australia is laying up trouble for herself in the not very distant future, and it behoves us to consider whether we should involve ourselves in such matters in which we have no immediate concern.
G. M. Newton , 'The Australian Commonwealth and New Zealand', vol. 1 no. 1 (October 1899), p. 22. Newton argues against federation on the grounds of trade cost, and defence. In 'Australian Federation', in the next issue (vol. 1 no. 2 [1 November 1899]),H. J. Del Monte Mahon also notes the coloured (that is, Asian) problems but asserts that the unanimity of a United Australia by way of the exclusion of 'undesirable aliens … will prevent the possibility of a coloured difficulty similar to that which perplexes the United States', p. 94.
Reminiscences and Recollections, pp. 125, 127.
Beauchamp knew that public sentiment was against New Zealand's joining the federation. In his scrapbook is clipped a 'Stand Apart', clipping from the Editorial, Sunday Times article of 1901: 'A majority of the residents of the "Land of the Maori and the Moa" hold in their hearts the conviction that their country has a grand separate destiny to work out, and they will never abandon that grand prospective dignity for the smaller one of being one of seven Commonwealth States'.Sunday Times 24 March 1901, Harold Beauchamp Collection, Scrapbook, qMS-0147, vol. 1. p. 51, ATL.Illustrated Magazine by the quality reproductions of paintings of sublime landscapes and by an ubiquitous interest in things Maori. In outlining the magazine's intentions, the proprietors mention 'the preservation of Maori and Pioneer History, which would otherwise soon be lost to posterity'.New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, 1 no. 2 (1 November 1899), p. 11.
Grace's stories belong in a general effort to foreground those aspects of Maori culture judged amenable to the broad processes of economic, political, cultural and imaginative assimilation. Grace's Maori, as Wattie, 'Grace', p. 184.OH, p. 251
Grace was writing at a time when Maori leaders including D. Ian Pool, Grace, Brantlinger, The Maori Population of New Zealand, 1769–1971 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 27.Tales of a Dying Race Grace follows Maoriland myth by attributing the decline of Maori population less to the effects of colonisation (although he acknowledges its fatal impact) than to the Maori propensity for warfare, which colonisation merely exacerbated. He depicts pre-European Maori society as both Arcadian and murderous, the two existing in a state of oscillation: 'In times of peace the Maori enjoyed an Arcadian existence, into which no care intruded; in time of war he passed into the seventh heaven of rapturous excitement…. Tribe conquered and even exterminated tribe, but nothing could assuage the Maori's thirst for fighting'.Tales of a Dying Race, p. vi.Dark Vanishings, p. 3.
Did the refrain of Maori as a dying race mean that Maori were held to be on the point of extinction or that the old Maori ways, Maori traditionalism, were passing away forever as New Zealand modernised? There was no uniform settler position on this question, illustrated in the contradictory responses to be found in the record of the model pa constructed at the 1906–7 International Exhibition in Christchurch. The organisers of the Exhibition made clear that they believed that 'The Ethnological Section', p. 327.Official Record of the New Zealand International Exhibition of Arts and Industries held at Christchurch, 1906–7, p. 326.
I am glad to think that what has often been said — that the Maori race is fading away — is not true. It is the hope of every one in the great Empire to which you belong that the Maori race will increase. I wish you well. I hope that you may have happy days here.
'The Ethnological Section', p. 346.
The bland words of empire may be empty rhetoric, but those they addressed were not in fact dying or even fading. Nor were they about to be assimilated into colonial culture. Already underway was a movement of revival that would be called a 'renaissance',Journal of the Polynesian Society, 81 no. 2 (1972), pp. 160 ff.
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Cartoon of 'His Excellency the Governor, Lord Ranfurly, mounted on a grey and accompanied by a faithful Maori gillie, travers[ing] the wilds of Ruatoki'. Ranfurly Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, N.Z., MSY-4600.
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Most Biographical and critical accounts of
To consider Mansfield within Maoriland, then, involves a reversal of a familiar pattern, a reversal less easily justified than in Joyce's case. Joyce declined to write as part of the Irish Revival, but was thoroughly familiar with Irish writing. Mansfield's journals and letters show no such familiarity with contemporary New Zealand writing and she avoids the word Maoriland so common in that writing, although it does appear in an untraced poem, 'The Wonder of Maoriland', which the Polish writer, See, for example, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980), p. 100.James Joyce: The Years of Growth, 1882–1915: A Biography (London: Kyle Cathie, 1992).Landfall 43 no. 4 (December 1989), pp. 447–61; and 'The Only Free People in the Empire: Gender Differences in Colonial Discourse', De-Scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality, eds. Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) and Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000) both pay attention to the place of a colonial background in shaping her writing.
Maoriland attitudes and stylistic habits are evident in a sketch as early as 1903, entitled 'A True Tale':
Many, many miles from here, my little Saxons, many many years ago, there was a beautiful island. All round it lay the lovely laughing sea, and there were tall, green, 'smelly' [fragrant] woods, the like of which you have never seen, down to the water's edge.
There were no white people living there, but tall, stately, copper coloured men and women, who sailed all around their country in great, carved canoes, and hunted in the woods for game, and very often, I am afraid, human people, whom they killed with aké-akés. They were always having wars among themselves, and it is about one of these wars that I am going to tell you. Let us come closer to the fire, dear children, and be glad that you did not live in the time that Motorua did.
Scott,
Notebooks, I, p. 9.
The Maori markers here — aké-aké and Motorua The former phrase also appears as 'Ake, Ake, Aroha' at the head of some early poems among the Unbound Papers in Scott, Scott, The expression 'Saxon' was commonly used in this period, reflecting imperial assumptions about racial differentiation. The piece is among material headed 'Notebook 40' in Scott's The phrase was applied to her by the principal at Queen's College. See Claire Tomalin, Notebooks, I, p. 22.Notebooks, I, pp. 94, 148, 166. The Urewera Notebook, by Katherine Mansfield, ed. A Voice on the Wind, p. 114.Notebooks. It is not dated but is included among a group of prose exercises, at the top of which is the date '-/8/03', Notebooks, I, pp. 7–9. Mansfield's family sailed from Auckland for London on 29 January 1903.Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (London: Viking, 1987), p. 23.
Back in New Zealand in November 1906 after three years at Queen's College in London where she had fallen under the spell of 'the divine Oscar' and the Decadents, A seminal essay on the influence of Wilde is Vincent O'Sullivan's 'The Magnetic Chain: Notes and Approaches to KM.', See, for example, 'Books I have read', placed under the rubric 'Holiday Work and Reading' and dated 13 July 1904. The list includes Notebook entry, 13 July 1904, Scott, Scott, Landfall 29 no. 2 (June 1975), pp. 95–131. Kaplan also traces the theme in Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction, pp. 19–35ff.New Zealand Listener, 8 May 1976, p. 23.Notebooks, I, pp. 31–2, 110.Notebooks, I, p. 31.Notebooks, I, pp. 31–2, 110. A diary entry for 23 January 1908 suggests more catholic taste, listing Notebooks, I, p. 153.
Barnicoat, 'The Reading of the Colonial Girl', p. 941. Barnicoat, 'The Reading of the Colonial Girl', p. 944. Barnicoat, 'The Reading of the Colonial Girl', p. 943.Nineteenth Century and After, no. 358 (December 1906), p. 939.
In Wellington Mansfield had borrowing privileges at the General Assembly Library (originally organised in the early 1860s by Alfred Jones, Alpers, Beauchamp, Scholefield, 'Katherine Mansfield', p. 193. Letter to Beauchamp, Writers in Residence, p. 139.Life, p. 50.Reminiscences and Recollections (1937).Reminiscences and Recollections, pp. 194–5. We have been unable to trace Scholefield's original list.Bushido by Dr Inazo Nitobe, the English poets, Ibsen, Maeterlinck, and a book on the psychology of women which seems to have been included to indicate how advanced she was. Mansfield, Scholefield concludes, was 'exotic in New Zealand'.Reminiscences and Recollections, p. 195.Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, vol. 1, ed. The Story of a New Zealand Writer: Jane Mander (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 1998), p. 38. However, Mander, having lived much of her life in the far north, felt the absence of a sympathetic cultural milieu particularly acutely, just as Sargeson did a generation later in Hamilton. Reminiscences: 'There was no literary market in New Zealand, and it is no disparagement to a young country to say that there was little intellectual companionship or associations.Reminiscences and Recollections, p. 90.
Yet, as the career of OH, p. 639.as artists from the life of the colony.
Although eager on her return in 1906 for publication, Mansfield was under no financial pressure to compromise her artistic standards. See Jean E. Stone, Tom L. Mills, letter to Sir Harold was one of the most important financial figures in the New Zealand of his day, influential in sorting out the difficulties the Bank of New Zealand got into in the mid 1890s. A full list of his directorships is to be found in an appendix to Scott, Murry is here quoting Katherine Mansfield: Publications in Australia, 1907–09 (Sydney: Wentworth Books, 1977), p. 13.sell your stuff — don't give it away! She took my advice.'Fielding Star: 'The Star never published a story by K. M.' Presumably, the missing story is the one he told her to sell.Reminiscences and Recollections, taken from Who's Who, p. 223. Mansfield's lack of admiration for his success is expressed in the novel draft, 'Juliet', where the heroine finds herself caught between her attraction to 'the mode boheme — alluring, knowledge-bringing, full of work and sensation, full of impulse, pulsating with the cry of Youth Youth Youth' and 'the Suitable Appropriate Existence' urged on her by her father, who demands 'a sane healthy-minded girl'. Juliet smiles at his stilted, conventional way of speaking: 'an undeniable trade atmosphere', Scott, Notebooks, I, p. 67.Notebooks, I, p. 88.
There is, moreover, an element of mythologising going on in the See Sir Harold proudly records his membership of the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts and his gift to the nation of a house at 47 Fitzherbert Tce, valued at between £5000 and £6000 ('the home in which Mansfield had spent many happy years') to purchase pictures for a National Picture Gallery, 'Notes at Random', by TDH, On 1 October 1909 is 'A Day in Bed' published in Reminiscences. The myth Sir Harold needs to promulgate is that Mansfield's return to Europe was enabled by the sacrifice of a loving father, realistically aware that a daughter as brilliant as Katherine (or Kathleen, as her family knew her) needed a sympathetic atmosphere in which to realise her talents. In fact, the decision to allow her to return was caught up in more fractious areas of family relations which Sir Harold fails to mention. Various parental anxieties contributed to that decision to allow a nineteen-year-old to return alone to London.Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (London: Viking, 1987), pp. 16–17. In a letter written to her sister, Vera, in late March 1908, Mansfield writes: 'Mother has the plan of sending us to London to live together — we three in a flat on £300 a year', Collected Letters, p. 42.Reminiscences. By 1937 Sir Harold had become immensely proud of her achievements as a writer and keen to depict himself as a patron of the arts as well as an astute businessman.Reminiscences and Recollections, pp. 181–2.Dominion, 7 February 1923, Chaddie Pickthall Collection, MS-Papers-3964-04, ATL.The Lone Hand by Daily News 3 November 1909, with the word 'London' inked in with a flourish at either side. On the facing page is 'The Education of Audrey' from the Evening Post 30 January 1909 by
In 1907, however, the year he was appointed governor of the Bank of New Zealand, See G. N. Morris, letter to Tom Mills, 17 February 1937, Thomas Mills Collection, MS-Papers-4007, ATL. From a 1938 letter to Mills in which Sir Harold sympathises with his lack of luck in getting articles on Katherine published in Melbourne and Sydney and advises him: Tom L. Mills, letter to Scholefield, 'Katherine Mansfield', p. 197. Mills, letter to '[He] likes me far too much', Katherine Mansfield, Scholefield, 'Katherine Mansfield', p. 197. Mills recounts this meeting in his letter to Morris: 'I confirmed her own judgment that she could New Zealand Railways Magazine, 8 no. 5 (September 1933), pp. 6–7. In January 1923 Sir Harold wrote an appreciative letter to Mills from the Bannatyne office thanking him for a reference to his public services in an article in the Fielding Star and reminding him of his earlier services to Mansfield. 'In the very early stages of Kathleen's literary career, I have to recognize that you were her guide, philosopher and friend', not an admirer of Kath's work nor of the woman herself. She & I were flint and steel whenever we met.'my critical attitude towards K.M.'s sexy writings'.Letters, I, p. 45.write. I went even further & said she was a Genius. I had her own word for it, given with all the Beauchamp emphasis, that that was all that was expected from me: To answer the question — Can my daughter Kathleen write? I offended her beyond forgiveness by criticizing what she wrote',
Scholefield, 'Katherine Mansfield', p. 197. See McGregor, At any rate, the few New Zealand vehicles for literary publication — newspapers and magazines — generally preferred to run overseas stories and often did not pay local contributors (hence, Evening Post called 'sex problem fiction', The Story of a New Zealand River, The Story of a New Zealand Writer, pp. 73–4. Mander, as New Zealand Illustrated Magazine', 'Publishing, Patronage, Literary Magazines', OH, p. 639. In 2001 Hugh Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn, a source for Once Were Warriors, was still on the discretionary shelves in the Wellington City Library.The Butcher Shop, published in London, was banned in New Zealand. The Butcher's Shop was published by The Story of a New Zealand River was published in London and New York in 1920, having been written in New York in 1914–16. It was not published in New Zealand until 1938 when OH, p. 640. For an account of
Nevertheless, there was a market in 1907–8 as close as Australia for some of the work which Sir Harold sent to Mills. Mills in his letter to Mansfield was paid two pounds for 'Vignettes', which appeared in the October 1907 issue, and two pounds, seven and six for 'In a Cafe', published in the December number, Stone, Phillips observes that the amount of New Zealand material in the magazine progressively declined, 'Musings in Maoriland', p. 526. See McGregor, Native Companion in 1907–9, for which the author was well paid (Bulletin's rates of payment while in New Zealand).Katherine Mansfield: Publications in Australia, p. 54. The Native Companion: An Australian Magazine of Literature and Life appeared in two series, from January to May 1907, edited by Bulletin. Quoting from Pater's Appreciation, the editor reflected on the problems of genius and environment, praising the Australian ballad tradition but noting that bush literature, while a beginning, had not as yet produced a nationalist literature. New Zealand interest was not confined to Mansfield; Maori Life in Ao tea roa is mentioned and his essay 'Rhyme and Metre' appeared in vol. 1, no. 6, 29 June 1907, pp. 14–23. Stevens's tone is different from that of the editors of New Zealand Verse (1906), which is given high praise in vol. 1 no. 2, p. 24. Brady was not, however, anti-Bulletin. Tom Mills describes meeting Brady in the Bulletin office in his letter to Triad and the New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, and newspapers like the Otago Witness provided local outlets for literary writing, although not necessarily paying ones.Dominion in 1908. 'The Education of Audrey' appeared in the Evening Post in January 1909.A Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 106–8.Triad,Triad, vol. 16 no. 4 (1 July 1908), p. 35.Triad was 'the only thing that keeps me from preaching temperance, or making drafty garments for the superfluous heathen, or marrying a Sunday School teacher in this brain-benumbing, stimulus-stifling, sense-stultifying, soul-searing silence'.The Story of a New Zealand Writer, p. 34.Native Companion were decidedly fin desiècle in style and tone; for her, 'the Nineties' meant Bulletin's 'Red Page', which, according to
Triad in 1909 asking the editor to publish more of Wilde's poetry.Triad, 1909; quoted in McGregor, The Story of a New Zealand Writer, p. 34.Triad along with Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume I, 1903–1917, ed. Bulletin school arose in New Zealand, apart from the lack of Irishry, was the lack of a city big enough (Sydney in 1891 had 400,000 inhabitants) 'to spawn a bohemian sub-culture of intellectuals who, alienated from the respectable middle class, found an easy identification with the more disreputable culture of the outback'.
Among Mansfield's early works the most Wildean are the vignettes. For Mansfield, a vignette is not a finely crafted, minimalist slice of life, like the young Kipling's first collection of stories, Experiments with vignettes were not, however, confined to her time in New Zealand. See, for example, 'Vignette — Westminster Cathedral' in Scott, Lawson, 'New Zealand from an Australian's Point of View', Fair Play, Smith, Plain Tales from the Hills (1888). It is a symbolist experiment with prose style, establishing mood, and using different tones. The purpose of the elaborate and self-conscious style she developed in her early vignettes and stories is to exaggerate the author's distance from colonial life, not to close it, as in Kipling's or Lawson's stories.Notebooks, I, pp. 130-1, which seems to have been written in England. The vignette exercise immediately before this in Scott's edition of the notebooks, 'It is evening, and very cold', was written while at Queen's College and published as 'Silhouettes', The Native Companion, 1 November 1907. It is reprinted in Stone, Katherine Mansfield: Publications in Australia, pp. 32–3.Native Companion in 1907, is a study of mood in which a young woman is caught up with excitement walking through the Wellington public gardens, which Lawson had observed in 1893 were 'a relief after the painfully artificial gardens of Sydney'.A Camp-Fire Yarn, p. 345.Katherine Mansfield, p. 25. Katherine Mansfield: Publications in Australia, p. 42.
This shift concentrates the variety of impulses behind the story's negligible action. Although the interest in the bush seems reminiscent of Maoriland writing and the theme of the weird recalls Australian colonial writing,
The sense that sexual energy is the source of uncontrol indicates Diary entry, 1 June 1907, Scott, O'Sullivan, 'The Magnetic Chain', p. 121. The Notebooks, I, p. 101. Wilde's preface to The Portrait of Dorian Gray is also, perhaps, the source of Mansfield's stern insistence to The Portrait of Dorian Gray (London: Everyman, 1976), pp. 1–2.Reporter, the magazine of Wellington Girls' College in which Mansfield had published a story in 1899, printed in the issue for the third term of 1908 extracts from the Lady Principal's report which cite The Story of a New Zealand Writer, p. 44.
Katherine Mansfield and Other Literary Studies (London: Constable, 1959), p. 83
the first great stage in the progress was indubitably the writing of the first draft of
Prelude.The purification of her memory of New Zealand, the purging of all resentment from her soul until that island could emerge, as from the waters of its own Pacific, with all the bloom and brightness of a new creation, was the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace. To be worthy of her new vision of New Zealand was to be worthy in an absolute sense; it was to have achieved a new condition of being — to have recaptured the vision of Innocence.Murry,
Katherine Mansfield, p. 84.
The mistake in which New Zealand is described as one island is significant. Mansfield herself wrote in a letter to Letters, I, pp. 316–17.
New Zealand in 1907 was not a mental state and certainly not a potential spiritual condition. Nor was it Sir Harold's complete intellectual and literary vacancy. This was the year in which Letter to Stephens, 26 January 1907. For example: 'I am ashamed of young New Zealand, but what is to be done. All the firm fat framework of their brains must be demolished before they can begin to learn', letter to Scott, Collected Letters, I, p. 44.Writers in Residence, p. 285.Notebooks, I, p. 81.
The common view that Mansfield became a major modernist writer by staging a break from the provincial colonial culture of early 1900s New Zealand rests on a series of binaries — modernity versus tradition, province versus centre, national versus cosmopolitan, Victorian versus modernist — that ignore the continuities within Mansfield's writing from 1906 to her death seventeen years later. It also ignores the way Maoriland itself collapses those binaries — by its modernising energy and archaic nostalgia, by its imperial loyalty and resistance of provincial deference, by its smug patriotism and its openness to influence from Australia, the United States and India, and by the modernism latent in its writing.
Mansfield in 1907 was confronted by more choices than those of languishing in a culturally barren New Zealand or flowering artistically in London. She might have remained in New Zealand, as she contemplates in a 1906 letter to all my time to writing. There are great opportunities for a girl in New Zealand — she has so much time and quiet — and we have an ideal little "cottage by the sea" where I mean to spend a good deal of my time'.Letters, I, p.18.Women's Studies Journal, 4 no. 2 (December 1988), p. 6.Rhythm. Its closeness to colonial writing, especially the stories in Bush Studies which appeared first in the Bulletin in the 1890s, indicates literary self-consciousness, given its English readership. Always a deliberate writer, Mansfield is trying out a style that she knows has exotic currency, just as in New Zealand earlier she sent off her Wildean prose-poem, 'The Death of a Rose', to the Triad.
Mansfield's modernism was part of a reaction against the modern-isation that had made her father rich. It is rebellious, but dependent on the cheques from home. It is self-consciously international, but informed by local shapes, nostalgias and ambivalences. It is contemptuous of the smug provincialism of late colonial New Zealand, but does not wholly escape Maoriland. Might Mansfield have become a modernist while remaining within and writing about the colonial condition, as An increasing body of scholarship has built on Kaplan's case in reworked '90s artificialities of style into an early modernist piece full of elusiveness, indirection, and sexual innuendo. Many of the features of her later style are already in embryo, demonstrating that her emergence into 'modernism' was not derivative of other twentieth-century writers, but a function of her own synthesis and imaginative reworking of late nineteenth-century techniques and themes. Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). See, for example: Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield's Short Stories (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996); and Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: a Public of Two (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).
Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction, p. 47.
This judgement is substantially true, although 'synthesis and imaginative reworking' was a general feature of Victorian as well as modernist writing. However, Kaplan fails to allow sufficiently for the shaping influence of a specific colonial context on the process she describes in Mansfield's development. If 'Summer Idylle', with its 'elusiveness, indirection, and sexual innuendo', looks forward to the high modernism of 'Bliss' (1918), its use of Maoriland legend looks back to Victorian colonial writing.
Marina and Hinemoa, the heroines of 'Summer Idylle', belong in a cross-cultural fantasy, not unlike Domett's Ranolf and Amohia, but
They stretched out their arms & ran in without speaking, & then swam swiftly & strongly towards an island that lay like a great emerald embedded in the heart of a gigantic amethyst. Hinemoa fell back a little to see Marina. She loved to watch her complete harmony — it increased her enjoyment.
…
They reached the island & lay on a long smooth ledge of brown rock & rested. Above them the fern trees rose, & among the fern trees a rata rose like a pillar of flame.
'See the hanging beautiful arms of the fern trees' laughed Hinemoa.
'Not arms, not arms. All the other trees have arms — saving the rata with his tongues of flame — but the fern trees have beautiful green hair. See Hinemoa, it is hair, & know you not, should a warrior venture through the bush in the night they seize him & wrap him round in their hair & in the morning he is dead. They are cruel even as I might wish to be to thee, little Hinemoa.'
She looked at Hinemoa with half shut eyes, her upper lip drawn back showing her teeth, but Hinemoa caught her hand.
Scott,
Notebooks, I, p. 75.
Clearly, Mansfield was familiar with the legendary sources of Maoriland writing. It is difficult to credit that she could have read The Turnbull Library Record, 14 no. 2 (October 1981), p. 79. Fairy Tales and Folk Lore of New Zealand and the South Seas (Wellington: Lyon and Blair, 1891). Phillips observes that there were 12 poetic versions of the Hinemoa legend during the 1890s, 'Musings in Maoriland', p. 530.
Mansfield would have encountered colonial writing for children and popular versions of Maori legend at school. The McEldowney, 'Publishing Patronage, Literary Magazines', OH, pp. 636–7.Maoriland Fairytales (1913), became headmistress at Wellington Girls' College in 1914, where Mansfield was a pupil from 1898–1900. Howes was advanced for the time and a pioneer of sex education for children.