magazine appeared in two distinct volumes during 1932 and 1933, published by the Auckland University College Literary Society under the editorships respectively of James Bertram and R. A. K. Mason. Its importance lies not so much in its contents as in its bringing together a group of writers who came to occupy the critical and creative centre of New Zealand literature during the middle decades of the twentieth century. In addition to Bertram and Mason, its editorial committee included, among others, Allen Curnow, Blackwood Paul, Jean Alison, Hector Monro, and J. A. W. (Jack) Bennett. No less significant than this role as literary catalyst was the encouragement its production gave to some of our most celebrated printer-typographers—Robert Lowry (printer of ), Denis Glover, and Ronald Holloway.

The following article reproduces some rarely seen documents from the second year of ’s production, including an article by Eric Cook removed from the first number edited by Mason, Mason’s own account of the events which led to the closure of , and reproductions from two of the three surviving galley pages prepared for the unpublished fifth issue.

In addition to supplying an outlet for early work by Allen Curnow, Charles Brasch and others of their generation, also provided a unique venue for the previously neglected poetry of Ron Mason. Installed in the first issue as Elder Poet to his younger peers, Mason took over editorial control of the little magazine after Bertram’s selection as a Rhodes Scholar in late 1932. He immediately ran into strife with almost all those involved, becoming isolated from the majority of his editorial committee and then producing an issue which provoked outrage both within and beyond the College precincts. However, it was apparently not the Literary Society, the Students’ Association Executive, the College authorities, nor a censorious press which brought to a close, but the flight from Auckland of Bob Lowry, pursued by creditors and soon to be effectively declared persona non grata on the campuses of the University of New Zealand.

Mason gave his version of some of the more difficult moments of his editorship in a seven page note accompanying a parcel of -related material lodged with the Hocken Library in 1962. In the following transcription from pages two to five of Mason’s typescript, accidentals have been silently corrected. Clarifying matter is placed in square brackets.

Only a few copies of Cook’s article have survived. One was found inserted into Jean Bertram’s copy of volume two, number one, recently acquired by the Alexander Turnbull Library (qRPrNZ LOWR PHOE 1932) and is reproduced here in facsimile with the permission of the Librarian.

Even after the removal of the article—described by John Weir as ‘a peculiar and dense amalgam of economics, sociology and sexual psychology’(33)— still aroused the wrath of the College’s Professorial Board, especially for Rex Fairburn’s poem ‘’, which the Board regarded as ‘offend[ing] against the canons of decency and good taste’ (Minutes, 15 May 1933). The response of the popular press was equally condemning, a fact which served to further alienate Mason and Lowry from the bulk of their supposed constituency. The tabloid , whose banner headline provides the title for this present article, memorably described as comprising ‘sneers, jeers, bellicose blasphemies, red rantings and sex-saturated sophistries’ (1). (Other student magazines attacked in the article were Glover’s Caxton Club Press , produced at Canterbury University College, and , edited by Alfred Katz for the Victoria College Free Discussion Club. Both were suppressed by their respective College authorities.)

Although a further issue was produced, it too led to mostly negative reactions. The Students’ Association Executive challenged Mason’s position as editor on the grounds that he was not an enrolled student. An attempt by the committee to pay his fees failed and several committee members resigned. Attempts by John Mulgan and others to curtail Mason’s editorial control encouraged him to consider moving the magazine off campus. However, student politics were minor irritations compared to the growing problem of debt surrounding both and Bob Lowry. Bankruptcy was only avoided by the efforts of Blackwood Paul and other students. Paul negotiated with creditors, securing discounts and refunds sufficient to fully nullify the amount owed by . Lowry’s personal debt of £85 was offset by a loan from Paul of £50 and smaller contributions (effectively donations) from Allen Curnow, G. B. Bertram, Dorothea Mulgan, R. P. Anschutz, Sam Leatham and other supporters.

Mason’s disappointment at the failure of must have been particularly acute when he considered the three galley pages printed by Lowry for the fifth issue. Also deposited in the Hocken, these are reproduced in part here, with the permission of the Librarian. Being galley pages, their physical dimensions preclude full reproduction though it is hoped that the special nature of these unique documents will be clearly evident.

The first facsimile image comprises the upper half of the galley headed ‘Phoenix Eight’, being part of an article by Jean Devanny reporting on her visit to the Soviet Union in 1931. The proof marks seen here are in Lowry’s hand; others on the lower part of the sheet (not reproduced) may have been added by Mason. (I am grateful to Peter Hughes for the attribution of these proof marks.) Devanny toured the Kazakhstan and Turkestan regions as a guest of the Communist Party after attending the World Congress of the Workers International Relief in Berlin. In her autobiography she recalls how ‘[i]n six weeks of almost perpetual motion, I took down almost 70,000 words in notes and, in addition, sent back to Australia some articles for the communist and trade union press’ (147).

The galley headed ‘Phoenix Nine’ contains a review by Jean Bell (the pseudonym of Jean Alison) of S. W. Scott’s . Alison was a significant supporter of from its earliest days, acting as secretary to the editorial committee and otherwise supporting its work. Her poem ‘’ opened the groundbreaking 1934 Caxton Club Press anthology , edited by Denis Glover and Ian Milner. Other items on the same galley include: a letter to the editor signed ‘E. J. Bror. C. Muller, (Hon. Sec. N.Z.P.U.A.)’, promoting the work of the New Zealand People’s Universities Association, described by Muller as a ‘system of residential rural adult colleges, commonly known as Folk Schools, which originated in Denmark’; a review by Geoffrey Fairburn of a translation of a novel by Karl Boree entitled (‘Faber & Faber, 7/-’); and the first part of a scathing review by Geoffrey Fairburn of the 1933 Brahms Centenary concerts and other musical events. After opening with some derisory comments on the need for such celebrations and giving qualified approval for a performance of an unspecified piano and cello sonata, he proceeds to condemn a concert of lieder and other songs in the following terms:

The concluding part of Fairburn’s review was printed on the third galley sheet, headed ‘Phoenix Ten’, and is reproduced here in full.

Other papers deposited by Mason indicate a shift in the proposed issue towards a broader cultural focus: they include a review of Nelle Scanlan’s by Hector Monro, offers by J. C. Beaglehole of several poems and ‘a little inoffensive essay in Marxian interpretation’, and items by Noel Pharazyn (later a major contributor to ) and Alfred Katz, editor of the suppressed Victoria University College radical magazine . The original objective of , as expressed in the first editorial of March 1932, ‘to try to establish something of dominion significance’, while it had begun to bear fruit from that very issue, would require a further fourteen years before being fully realised in the most significant and long-running of New Zealand’s little magazines, .

The section on the novel in is aimed at being as comprehensive as possible. The ambition was to include all full-length fiction before 1890 and all ‘serious’ novels since then. It is, of course, an impossible aim, complicated by boundary problems (what is a ‘serious’ novel?) and by the lack of a fully inclusive bibliography (James Burns’ does not even include all the New Zealand novels in the Turnbull and Hocken collections, and A.G. Bagnall’s , although more complete, still omits some novels). A further complication, acknowledged in the Second Edition of the (121), is the lack of any index of novels serialised in newspapers and magazines, many of which did not appear in book form (or appeared only in paperback editions which have totally disappeared). There are thus undoubtedly many New Zealand novels, especially nineteenth-century ones, that are not discussed in the . This note examines one of these that has recently come to light (in George Griffiths’ entry on the author in ), Thorpe Talbot’s , a copy of which is held in the Hocken Library.

Talbot appears only briefly in the , in a one-sentence description of her novella, (1991: 112-13; 1998: 124-25), which appeared in 1881 along with Vincent Pyke’s in a Christmas volume, . The story is a strange (not to say absurd) Gothic tragic melodrama in which Marion, the heroine, believing Gower, the man she loves, is engaged to someone else, marries the strange Linfield, then repents when she discovers she was misinformed concerning Gower’s engagement, attempts to leave the marriage, is imprisoned by Linfield, and is killed trying to escape. The Gothic element is in the character of Linfield, a South Otago run-holder who is deformed by a hump and horns (which he hides by always wearing a blue cap), caused by his mother having seen his father killed by a bull while she was pregnant with him.

Griffiths’ entry on Talbot casts some light on her career and identity. Based on a cache of clippings and notes that may have been Talbot’s own and which were found in a house in Dunedin and obtained by Griffiths c. 1992, that entry shows her to have been Frances Ellen Talbot, born in 1851 in Yorkshire, probably brought up in Victoria, and resident at least some of the time in New Zealand from probably the late 1870s. In 1882 she published a guide to the Rotorua district, the title page of which identifies her as the author not only of and but also of , of which there is no other record. was published by Ward Lock in London in 1883, but the Australian edition, from E.W. Cole Book Arcade in Melbourne, is undated and may have appeared in 1882 (since it is mentioned on the title page of the 1882 guide) and is identified on the cover as ‘The £100 Prize Tale’. Talbot may have been a professional journalist in these years, although the evidence is not clear. In 1887 she published in the a series of travel accounts about a visit to California, and there are also a few clippings of her poems and articles, with source and date unidentified, among the cache of papers. Morris Miller in his book on Australian literature lists her as ‘contributor of short stories and poems to “annuals” and miscellanies’ (II: 627). In her private life in these years, Talbot was said to have been the mistress of Judge Charles Dudley Ward, a District Judge in Dunedin, Oamaru and other South Island districts. At any rate, she married Ward in 1902 when she was 51 and he 74, six years after his wife’s death in 1896. Ward died in Dunedin in 1912 while Talbot lived on in Dunedin in straitened circumstances until her death in 1923.

is subtitled on the cover (but not on the title page) , is listed by Miller as an Australian novel (II: 627) and is not listed in Burns or Bagnall. However, as Miller notes, the novel also relates to New Zealand. It opens and closes in Victoria, but much of the middle part takes place in Dunedin and later in Canterbury, Otago and Southland during a musical tour, both sections revealing considerable local knowledge. The book is a strange mixture of modes and genres. It is primarily a bildungsroman, somewhat anticipating Edith Grossmann’s Hermione novels, (1893) and (1907), in tracing the life of the heroine, Philiberta Campbell, from her girlhood to her death, showing the development of a strongly independent personality that never finds a fulfilling role in life. As in Grossmann, the bildungsroman is crossed with tragic melodrama, but with rather more elements of the romance and the sensation novel and with less didactic intent. (Although there is plenty of material in Philiberta’s life that would bear a feminist interpretation, there is little of Grossmann’s overt feminism in Philiberta herself or in the omniscient commentary.) The novel is full of sensational events: the death of Philiberta’s mother during a bush fire, the violent death of her adoptive parents at the hands of Aborigines angry because their workers had poisoned members of the Aborigine group who were stealing food from the sheep station kitchen, Philiberta’s poisoning and near death in the Australian outback, her near-drowning in a shipwreck off the Otago Heads, her eventual death alone in the Australian desert. Much of the sensational action concerns her doomed romance with Edgar Paget, perhaps a dramatised projection of Talbot’s own relationship with Judge Ward. On a visit to Dunedin, Philiberta meets Paget, an older man also visiting from Australia, and falls in love with him, but on the eve of their planned marriage she discovers by accident, in good sensation novel fashion, that he is already married. Fleeing from Dunedin, she is caught up in the shipwreck, is assumed to be drowned, but is picked up by another ship, carried around the South Pacific, and finally returns to Australia where she has a series of adventures furthering her ‘strangely curious career’ (203). These adventures include her anonymously giving her money to save Paget from bankruptcy, and her establishing herself as a singer and actress and travelling with a theatrical troupe through the outback (where she nearly dies), before she settles for several years disguised as a man working on a sheep station. After another interval in New Zealand with a travelling musical troupe (in which she is a ‘male’ violinist), she returns to Australia, and, still disguised as a man, enters the employ of Paget where, unrecognised by him, she helps to care for his alcoholic wife (with echoes of as well as the Shakespearian romance tradition)—‘the strangest experience in that wholly strange life’ (300). When Paget’s wife finally commits suicide, the reader may expect the usual mort vivant of the sensation novel, with Philiberta revealing herself to Paget, returning from the dead to claim him (as his employee-confidante she had often heard him declaiming his love for the ‘dead’ Philiberta). Instead, she discovers he has now fallen in love with her actress friend (who is herself in love with Philiberta’s earliest suitor), and she takes herself off to the desert to die alone. Less than 400 pages long, the novel has enough sensation, romance, and melodrama to fill several three-deckers.

Yet the capacious, almost picaresque narrative also contains relatively unassimilated elements of naive realism and social observation. The Dunedin chapters have lengthy descriptions of Talbot’s favourite places, even including a chunk of Thomas Bracken’s poem on Nicholls Creek, and a semi-satirical presentation of a circle of Dunedin free-thinkers, the Free Thought Society, which reads as if it were pointing towards actual persons (the Society existed at the time and had among its members Sir Robert Stout and Vincent Pyke) and which includes as Philiberta’s friend and good hostess a Mrs Retlaw, whose name could possibly be the mirror-version of a real Mrs Walter. The middle Melbourne sequence has an eighteenth-century-style inset story about Philiberta’s actress friend and how her life has embittered her against men and respectable society, while the second South Island sequence has a long first-person account by a minor member of the travelling musical troupe that includes somewhat ironic tour-guide descriptions of Kaiapoi, Oamaru, Naseby, St Bathans, and other places, even referring us to Vincent Pyke’s description of Dunstan (Cromwell) Gorge in (Pyke 1873, 16), and also including an account of Judge Ward’s heroic actions in a fire in Timaru in 1878.

As in , the extreme shifts in tone and subject matter are to some extent covered over by a loquacious omniscient narrator who moves easily from irony and satire to highly rhetorical dramatic descriptions and expressions of emotion, and who overtly expresses opinions about such matters as Australian racism, fundamentalist religion, and smug New Zealand rationalism. As much as the work of George Chamier, Talbot’s novel shows how the colonial version of the Victorian popular novel could be a kind of gladstone bag containing everything from the odds and ends of journalism to the standard devices of melodrama. No undiscovered masterpiece, is nonetheless an interesting document in New Zealand literary and social history.

In addition to our given names, what we call ourselves and each other can say a lot about who we are, where we belong and what we do. The names which occur in large collections of spoken or written text produced by many individuals in a community can also reveal something of how that wider community sees itself. The Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English is a one-million-word collection of spoken texts of New Zealanders talking to and about each other in the early 1990s. This snapshot of spoken New Zealand English contains over 500 samples of transcribed speech, each sample containing about 2,000 words. The whole collection is intended to be a fairly representative sample from the total population. Three-quarters of the texts are of informal conversations, face-to-face or on the telephone.

References to individuals in the Wellington Corpus include many different personal names as well as terms of affection and abuse, and terms which name occupation, gender identity, religious affiliation, social position, level of skill (e.g. non-expert), or personal habits (e.g. non-smoker). There is also a strikingly diverse number of ways in the corpus by which the national, regional or ethnic identity of New Zealanders are referred to, and that is the focus of this note. The following table shows the number of times each of these terms is used in the corpus. The list is, of course, not exhaustive. It focuses on how the speakers in the texts, who clearly identify as New Zealanders, linguistically mark their ethnicity or background when talking with each other (e.g. I’m not an Asian, I’m a New Zealander). When words in the corpus such as Asian or English are not used to express identity in this way, they have not been included in the analysis.

Table: Occurrences in the corpus of certain terms used to refer to the ethnicity or national identity of New Zealanders Asian 15 Chinese 5 Dutch 1 English 25 Englishman 3 European 16 foreigner 8 immigrant 5 indigenous people 4 Irish 7 Islander 7 Kiwi 86 Local 119 Maori 705 migrant 2 minorities 1 newcomer 1 New Zealander 96 New Zealand born 3 old identity 1 Pacific Islander 5 Pakeha 92 Palagi 2 Pole 1 Polish 2 Polynesian 9 Pom 3 Pommy 1 Samoan 2 Scot 1 Scots 4 Scotsman 4 Scottish 10 settler 9 tangata whenua 1 Tongan 1 Vietnamese 3

The use of some of these terms reveals certain tensions, uncertainties, ambiguities, transitional identities, or simply non-assimilation or non-integration. For example:

It is worth noting that while New Zealand (837) is the most frequent name used in the corpus for the political entity, the/this/our country has 362 occurrences, and Aotearoa has 18. Godzone does not occur. The pronouns we, us, our(selves) were not counted, although they occur frequently to express national identity (e.g. our exporters, our side, we lost).

A corpus, however representative, can only be a snapshot of kaleidoscopic social processes. From the examples shown here, it seems clear that, in the salad bowl of national identity, New Zealanders have a number of options for talking about themselves. Some of these options focus on particular origins (and our attitudes to them), some are non-inclusive, and others suggest some semantic indeterminacy. Perhaps the speaker in the corpus who said “There’s no confusion in being both Maori and Pakeha” best expressed the potential of ambiguity.